@ kryptogal

BUT, the fact of the matter is that your daughters are really just making a rational calculation based on what they see around them. If they follow your advice and become, say, a scientist, they will get to live an average middle class life and probably marry a similar guy. And they'll have to work really hard to do that. If, on the other hand, they became a successful model, they would live a life of fabulous riches, fabulous travel, fabulous men, and lots and lots of POWER. Without having to do virtually any work. Is it really so shocking they would go for the latter? People aren't saints. They will usually strive to obtain the most power for the least effort.

This is, as you say, sad but true, and it's a reason why some parents homeschool. My reasons were a bit different, but I'm well aware that our lives would be less pleasant if we didn't spend more time with like-minded people or on activities we enjoy than we do absorbing pop culture. I unplugged the cable a long time ago. Everyone is much happier.

It's hard to do, though, because it means giving up the rewards of pop culture for yourself, too. Not watching TV means being left out of a lot of conversations. Thankfully, it also gets you into a lot, and I like those better, but I'm well aware that there's a sacrifice or two to be made. There always is. A.K.A. Smith is right. Most parents don't unplug the cable because they can't live without it.

My parents also unplugged the TV when I was a kid, and although it made school even worse than it might have been, as an adult, I'm glad. They did me a huge favor, one I'm passing on to the next generation.

@ dick dworkin

I suspect that anonymous2s son is less thrilled with the asexual world they are living in than she is or that she thinks he is

Not at all. First of all, he's in his early teens, not his late teens. Sex would be premature at his age, no matter where he was getting his education. In a few years things will change, but right now, he'd still rather play Mario Kart.

He also has a stepbrother a bit older than he is, and gets a ringside seat to high school social games. He wants none of it. He's still at an age where he bathes reluctantly with soap and water. Bathing in Axe so as to compete with every other boy who's bathing in Axe isn't his idea of fun.

You seemed to have missed a crucial piece of my description of him: he's a computer nerd in desperate need of orthodontic work. If you think he would be popular in school, you have another think coming.

Every so often, I ask him if he'd like to go to school. We have some good ones here, and he even has friends in a few of them. Every time, he says no.

Now ironically, you also said this: Isn't it just possible that people would have a better chance to develop all of their abilities in a balanced way if instead of fighting a war against sex and sexuality everyone involved, parents and kids, could acknowledge reality.

This is, actually, why I homeschool. I have a kid with exceptional talent in an unpopular area and low-average talent in a more popular one. I pulled him specifically so that he could develop in his own way, without having to scale back on his strengths or over-push on his weaknesses in order to meet the latest educational trends.

As an added plus, he's also developing outside of the adolescent sexual-social hierarchies that develop in larger, unrestricted schools, which we're seeing here can be extremely damaging to both sexes.

A boy in his early teens who's a computer geek who will spend his entire teen years either with severely crooked teeth or braces is not being picked on by other boys or ignored by girls, and you have a problem with this? You think he's stifled or unhappy?

As the boy himself would say, ROFL.

I'll bet most women against pornography/prostitution are e.g. also pro-lifers.

I'd like to know the answer to that too, it certainly seems like it isn't true, or at least hasn't been true in the past, of the high profile public speakers on the subject. It's true that that isn't necessarily a good guide to who thinks what.

As someone who spends way too much time around hard-line Right-wingers, I can say that it's probably true that most of the devoted anti-porn and anti-prostitution folks are on the Right. They want to save sex not just for marriage, but for heterosexual marriage sans birth control. Anything else is unacceptable.

It sounds like a joke, but they're quite serious about it and have been doing a lot of quiet but effective work behind the scenes for years.

I would define 'porn' as any material (written, visual, aural, etc.) meant to stimulate sexually for recreational purposes. And I'm afraid some feminists are on record as suggesting that porn is either always based on the exploitation of porn stars, or then intrinsically demeaning and exploitive to women--that was Wendy McElroy's claim in her book XXX, at least. If I understand correctly MacKinnon's arguments in her Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance, pornography is by its own nature a violation of women's civil rights, and any person who felt wronged by it was entitled to sue either the provider (e.g. the sex shop) or the author of the offending material. This because the definition of 'violent' or 'demeaning' was sufficiently abstract to encompass a very wide range of porn, some of which being, from a liberal viewpiont, perfectly legitimate.

I agree that this was a minority view--and as you well point out, AKA Smith, feminism itself stopped this view. I think we could all agree that coertion and violence should be also punished in porn--so people who are forced to work in porn, or whose work in porn is stolen and sold without their consent, etc. should be protected by law. But 'violence in porn' is sometimes seen as including e.g. BDSM and D/s porn, which in principle is also legitimate--after all, it's just a form of sexuality (one I actually enjoy myself). The discussion often gets difficult and muddled here.

(To Dick Dworkin--I don't think anybody is saying feminists could, or should, have destroyed pornography if they had united. The arguments would still be the same, and the decision would still be in the hands of judges who, especially in the 80's, were not really feminists. I think it would again be more religious right and conservative views winning, if it had happened--your cousin Dworkin and MacKinnon did have to forge an alliance with them, as I recall.)

I don't know for sure about Max Hardcore--I never watched any of his movies (I am not turned on by women who pretend to be under the age of consent, and he looked like the kind of guy I don't really like, in life or in porn), and I don't know the case (obscenithy, it seems? what's the current legal definition of obscenity?)