Teenage sex and violence – just more of the same.

BEATING, GOOD – BEATING OFF, BAD

The Supreme Court ruled that violent video games be given 1st Amendment protection. It struck down a California law that banned minors from buying them. But minors are still banned from buying pornography.

Which means that two 17 year-olds can legally have sex, but can’t watch a movie of it. But two seventeen year-olds cannot rip someone’s arms off, but can play a game about it.

Consider further – a fifteen year old girl sending a topless picture of herself to her boyfriend, might be required to register as a sex offender for distributing child pornography, but a fifteen year old boy who makes a movie of himself thrusting an icepick into a mole’s head, might be penalized for the act, but will have his record expunged and will suffer no penalty for the video.

WHAT CAUSES VIOLENCE IN TEENS?

In the 1950s it was comic books, then it was movies and TV and now it is video games. But as the rate of violence among teens has been declined it seems that comic books have the strongest correlation with violence.

Perhaps violence is actually produced by something other than the media teenagers consume.

THE YOUTH OF TODAY

Meghan Cox Gurdon, children’s book critic for the WSJ, wrote an article ‘Darkness too visible’ bemoaning the dark nature of today’s young adult (YA) literature. She wonders if the wall-to-wall tales of rape, assault, cutting, eating disorders et al, will destroy “a child’s happiness, moral development and tenderness of heart”.

In her essay she points out that YA literature is only 40 years old and that the early books dealt with puberty, alcoholism, sexual aggression etc. in a more circumspect manner. But that is to miss the point. These books may be ‘tame’ to today’s reader, but at the time they were graphically shocking. They sparked the same kind of concern for the mental health of yesterday’s ‘youth of today’ that we have for today’s ‘youth of today’.

If you want to understand today’s teenagers at a minimum you must remember your own post-pubescent years. Teenagers today are no different than teenagers of any generation. It is the time of your life when you you discover that your parents don’t know much and that there is a lot of information to be discovered on the playground – whether the playground be literal, written, visual or web based.

WHAT DID WE READ BEFORE ‘YA’ LITERATURE?

Before the creation of ‘young adult’ literature what did we read after the Hardy Boys and before the newspaper? Catullus, Chaucer, ‘Fanny Hill’, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Sartre, ‘The Naked Lunch’, ‘Lord of the Flies’, ‘A Clockwork Orange’. If there wasn’t enough sex and nihilism in books then there was always the movies.

The movies became so risque in the 1920s that the ‘Hays Code’ was created. But that certainly didn’t didn’t stop the production of ‘stag films’ and later ‘snuff movies’ (perhaps mythic). Porn movies even became mainstream in the 1970s with ‘Deep Throat’ and ‘Behind the Green Door’. And who, of a certain generation, doesn’t have fond memories of discovering his father’s stash of Playboy magazines.

The complaint today is that yesterday’s stuff was ‘tame’ or ‘mainstream’ but today’s is too graphic or perverted. But the only thing that I feel bad about for today’s youth is that they have too much too soon and that mystery is gone and the journey too short. Today’s meal has no appetizer.

ARE TODAY’S YOUTH THE WORST EVER?

The answer is no. Not even close. If you want to pick the most shocking generation, there are two much more worthy candidates. The flappers of the 1920s and the flower children of the 1960s.

Can you imagine raising a ‘good girl’ only for her to turn into a cigarette-smoking, leg-revealing, illegal-cocktail-drinking, man-crazy sexpot. Or imagine raising a ‘good boy’ only to see him turn into a long-haired, unwashed, draft-dodging, public-sex loving, stoner.

But the flappers became our grand-mothers and the stoners became our doctors and lawyers. They also became some of the fiercest critics of today’s youth.