Bogey-man and Magic Wand Politics - The Conservative Assault on Sexuality

Imagine teaching your son or daughter to cross the road safely.  Having got them as far as the pavement it's fair to say that the first thing on your mind is to tell your child about all the terrible risks of being in the road, - the fast cars, the inattentive driver, the risk of injury or death - all of the possible dice we roll whenever we step out onto the tarmac.  Once your child understands this you might then begin to teach them how to look left, look right, and so on.  Taking the utmost care to make sure your child fully appreciates all of this, you content yourself in the knowledge that you have done well by your child, and have made them that much safer and responsible.  And even better than this - no one had to tell you to do it.

Fast forward a few years and your son or daughter may well be straying forth into other unknown territories of responsibility.  Whether it be drink, drugs or diet, your child will be needing the best information they can get in order to behave rationally and responsibly with their health, sanity, and general well-being.  And indeed it may be the case that you constantly remind your child of the consequences of drink and drugs, or a poor diet.  But there remains a subject that only just registers a pallid, weak response that barely registers above the din of the school playground, a subject that people know rather a lot about, but about which nobody speaks.

In a month of great success for mindless reactionism, sex is back on the agenda.  Cries of outrage at the latest pop performance on television, the implicit and explicit meanings of song lyrics, suggestive advertising, and Internet pornography are now fast becoming a daily occurrence.  Having realised that they can only bleat on for so long about the economy to justify their continued existence, the Government has found a new bogey-man, and indeed is grasping for a new magic wand.  Having identified society's enemy they now seek to destroy it, quickly and painlessly, and then you can be grateful.  Cliché can sometimes appear lazy, sometimes boorish, but often than not it is by its very nature quite apt.  Rarely was this more so than the proclamation that 'history has a habit of repeating itself'.

And so it is proved today with the latest outburst from Mike Stock, a man who by all means made plenty of money by writing songs palatable for a large audience.  But now the product is 'highly sexualised' on its "slow but unmistakable descent into pornography" and this he is not happy with it.  But he would do well to recall that we genuinely have 'been here before'.  At the very peak of his songwriting successes this very debate was being hacked out, not just in the press, but actually in the United States Senate, accosted by a group of Washington wives calling themselves the 'Parents Music Resource Center'.  To speak against the notion that pop and rock music in America needed either self-regulation, or Orwellian state legislation, music professionals such as Dee Snyder, Frank Zappa, and John Denver were invited in 1985 to present their case to the Senate.  The aforementioned (and other artists such as Tina Turner, Sheena Easton, Motley Crue, and Prince), were accused of a variety of ills ranging from corrupting the young, being responsible for the rise in incest amongst the population, teenage pregnancy, teenage suicide, and even the spread of HIV.  In fact, one edition of CNN's 'Crossfire', a political debate show, even carried the tag line "Does Rock and Roll Cause AIDS?".  The outcome of the entire sorry affront to liberty (not to mention the U.S. Constitution) were the "Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" labels that record companies now voluntarily attach to their releases.  But even though this debacle was put to bed around a quarter of a century ago in the States, it appears that we are hell-bent on repeating history in our very own British way.

Following neatly on from the Bailey Report, Mike Stock has effectively condemned the nation's broadcasters for putting such filth into our homes without permission (the similarity between the words of Tipper Gore and Mike Stock is uncanny), as well as denouncing the watershed as being largely meaningless.  But although the argument of corporate responsibility is an enticing and obvious one to address, the real nettle that both Reg Bailey and Mike Stock have comprehensively failed to grasp is why, if there is such an inexorable influx of 'pornography' into our, and our children's lives, is it actually a problem?  Try as they might, proponents of the 'fight' against the 'sexualisation of the young' are only able to muster a spluttering, indignant mumble about something called 'their day' and decency.  If you're really lucky, you might come across some bloated, red-faced parent who will repeat ill-informed nonsense about paedophiles with such frequency as to make any criminal psychologist weep at the futility of it all.

One thing is clearly a problem however - none of these moral crusaders are in any way, shape, or form, prepared to actually talk to their children.  As alluded to in my preamble, you simply would not allow your child to learn to cross the road by trial and error.  But in the case of sex, parents are more than willing, if not enthusiastic, at the prospect of burying their head in the sand and vainly hoping that their child gets it right.  Sex is largely off the table for discussion, but to read the Bailey report one could be fooled into thinking that the entire population is talking about graphic sex from the breakfast table to the dining room, in the schoolyards, on the television, and on the news.  But, perhaps disappointingly for our saviours, no such conversation is taking place.  Allusions are made, and suggestive imaging is surely used, but none of these outlets actually talk explicitly about sex or sexuality.  As Frank Zappa pointed out the first time around:

 "It's not sex, it's titillation.  Given the choice between broadcasting violence or graphic sex usually it is the violence that is opted for."

 What we really need in the West is not less sex, but more of it.  First impressions are priceless, and the first contact that a child has with any topic will lay the foundations for their interpretation of everything that succeeds it.  Information and education, not cotton wool, are the key to making better choices.  For when they finally unravel the swaddling the young will enjoy their freedom, but they will not be prepared for it. By submitting ourselves to a vow of silence on the matter we condemn ourselves to be forever battling against your child's first experience of anything sexual.  Suddenly we are no longer the authority, we are withholder of truths, and we will have to fight doubly hard to regain the trust of our children when the rest of the world (to them at any rate) has appeared so ostensibly candid and honest.  There the seeds of ignorance are sown and victims are created.  People's lives can be ruined by a misjudgement in their sex life.  People can spend their lives perpetually anxious and paranoid because of a reluctance to talk about their sexuality.  Sex is fun, but sex is also risky and traumatic.  So instead of allowing our children to stumble blindly into the wilderness, why not at least point them in the right direction?