The Sanctification Of Im Offended
In a few months, the celebrity names and teen-panics-du-jour will change in America's bizarro politician, institution, church, and media-figure sexca-pades. As celebrity basher Chelsea Handler declared after a particularly scandal-laden week in which more big icons bungeed off the infidelity cliff, "The hits just keep on coming."
Still, even toughened up by America's certifiable craziness about sex—or maybe jealous that I am apparently having less fun than evangelicals exhibiting hot new versions of "holy roller"—I was unprepared for a long, front-page me-column in the Los Angeles Times. "I've covered murders, grisly accidents, airplanes falling out of the sky and, occasionally, dirty politics," reporter Catherine Saillant's opening sentence vented. "But in nearly two decades of journalism, nothing has made my insides churn like seeing what my 13-year-old daughter and her friends are up to on MySpace.com."47
Really? What horror could her daughter and MySpace friends be perpetrating that was worse than people dying? It turned out that Saillant had uncovered some girls' crudities and bathing suit posings. Mom's account ofthe shattering trauma she suffered was deemed worthy of front-page placement by editors of one of the nation's premier newspapers. It won overwhelming praise from readers' posts and launched a speaking and media tour. It is widely reposted and cited by Internet critics.
I puzzled to comprehend what the apparently widespread middle-class outrage tapped by this column could be about. It clearly was not the usual paranoia about Internet predators; Saillant admits none beckoned in the months of her MySpace saga. It was not about real rape or violence or even mild threats. It surely was not about protecting her daughter's privacy; that ship sailed after Saillant revealed her daughter's name and a wealth of incidents and details of her private life on the front page of a major newspaper. It could not have been the bad words. Saillant proudly affirmed she is no prude.
As near as I can fathom from this article and the reaction, the overriding issue blotting out all others is that Saillant was offended in a deeply visceral way—not at any tangible harm but merely at the realization that her own daughter sometimes talked dirty and posted a picture giving the finger while using a fearsome, new Internet technology (as opposed to talking dirty using gym locker rooms, telephones, and post-it notes). No one had to demonstrate any real catastrophe—like people getting maimed and dying, that is. The biggest catastrophe in all the universe is: I'm offended.
Clearly many conservatives and liberals alike are deeply offended by the increasing sexual explicitness of popular culture and the intrusion of new technologies that deliver it. Many, from Family Research Council conservatives to Media Education Foundation liberals, translate their personal offense into remarkably similar insistence—based on remarkably little evidence—that pop-culture must be corrupting young people into greater promiscuity, sexual violence, and related ills. Look at how offensive it is!
There are gradations to the degree of offense at modern popular culture, of course. There are those who condemn the presentation of irresponsible sex, violent sex, and more explicit sex in newer television shows, music, films, games, and other media, including depictions of teenage sex that were not rit-ually followed by punishing lessons. Then there are the growing numbers of absolute puritans such as the Kaiser Family Foundation, Rand Corporation, Heritage Foundation, and authors such as M. Gigi Durham who insist that any mention of sex at all, even the mildest innuendo other than in approved educational regimens, damages young people. Durham, for example, branded a harmless television scene of three swimsuited teens in a hot tub as "casual sex" and a "threesome." Rand trumped up baseless "studies" to insist even mildly sexy shows like Friends and That 70s Show impel millions of teen pregnancies. Censorware marketed to libraries and parents promised to keep teens from any site about sex (including, in one case, the Middlesex, Connecticut, city Web site).
Meanwhile, just about any serious media insinuations of sex by anyone under age 20 as legitimate, normative, and even pleasurable draw outrage from Americans of all stripes. When Susan Wilson of Planned Parenthood of Northern New Jersey suggested a school curriculum that included the normality ofteenage sexuality, virulent condemnation quickly ensued—including in liberal media, led again by Atlantic Magazine. Prominent teenagers such as Cyrus, who revealed enjoyment of the Sex and the City series, were loudly castigated merely for admitting they think about sex at all. Those who contend today's neopuritans, even liberal ones, embrace any notion of healthy teenage sexuality should look at what they actually say.
Behind the neo-puritanism toward youth lies uglier sentiments. Every once in a while, American agencies let the shield slip and provide a glimpse of the raw hostility behind their attacks on young people, particularly ones with the temerity to have sex. At a conference in San Diego in 2000, when I served on The California Wellness Foundation's teen pregnancy advisory board,
I grilled a National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy consultant about the organization's utterly repulsive (even for it) "Scarlet Letter" ads. These featured "CHEAP," "DIRTY," "REJECT," "USELESS," "PRICK," and the like in big red letters superimposed over pictures ofteenagers, with a small "sex has consequences" caption. My question concerned when the National Campaign would be running ads with similarly harsh epithets over the pictures of Bill Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Dick Morris, Henry Hyde, Geraldo Rivera, and other prominent sluts—who, after all, influence the climate by which teenagers come to understand sexual morality. Her answer (my paraphrasing): We would never stigmatize powerful politicians that way; just young people who cannot fight back.
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