i guess we all take for granted that children shouldn't see "glimpses of nudity" or hear curse words. Rarely is the question asked, what is so inherently bad about it that we should protect our children from it? Is it the residual christian shame of nudity and fear of sex? Curse words, after all, are merely words. If jimmy hears "fuck" on a show, and even starts saying it, so what? It's especially absurd that, by the time their children reach around the age 12, myabe 12, some parents believe that their children still don't know curse words or where babies come from or what a boob is, and feel the need to "protect" their progeny from whatever harmful effects seeing a tit may produce (i can't really think of any).

Your thoughts on these alleged harmful effects?

TinyBubbles,

There's a reason i didn't mention violence in my post, and that is because i think seeing people shot and all sorts of other things is probably a lot more harmful than seeing janet jackson's boob, or hearing someone use the word shit or fuck. I completely agree with you on your point about eliminating adult culture. I think it's pathetic that so many people are trying to make everything kid-friendly. It's selfish of them to think that they can have kids and then not be responsible for parenting them the way they want to. Even in the seminal indecency ruling on carlin's 7 dirty words, the supreme court said that from 10pm to 6am, or something like that, the media can broadcast adult content. I mean, obviously it's completely stupid that adult content has to be relegated to the shuttered privacy of your own home late at night, but still, there is time for adult material and not everything has to be kid-friendly.

As for protecting innocence, it's an especially uncompelling argument. If you start to think, for whose benefit are we protecting this alleged innocence? It's mostly the parents who want to idealize their children as innocent pure little sprites than for the children's own benefit. Children are, by nature, very inquisitive, "why? why? why?" They want to learn.

And the argument in relation to nudity is particularly wrong --- babies can look at their mommies' tits while breastfeeding for a long long time, and they spend the first few years of their lives naked a lot of time, but then it's time to "protect their innocence," protect them from their own bodies, and time to cover it all up, until a reemergence and rediscovery of their own and other's bodies when they start to have relationships. It's a twisted and very early-christian way of looking at the human body. the whole dynamic of shaming bodies and hiding them could prove to me more harmful than beneficial in the end.