Thursday, August 03, 2006

WHAT?

Yesterday, I overheard a kid talking very knowledgably about a topic with which adults would have had problems understanding just 10 years ago. It was about an abnormal sexual fetish. The kid was explaining how it worked, and how the person got 'pleasure' from it. When I was a kid, there was very little in the way of 'adult' entertainment you could get your hands on. Unless you had a dad with a subscription, an older brother, or an older friend who'd loan it to ya (none of which I had), you had to deal with torn out pages from magazines that made the rounds or were lost by some other kid. Most knowledge of a sexual nature was passed by word of mouth, or from obscure library books that were mostly text, and very little, if any, illustration.

Not now. I guess things started to change when I was a teenager. VCRs started to become readily available to every household, and porn was soon to follow. Cassettes made the rounds. Still, even those were NOTHING compared to the plethora of sexual content currently made available by the 'net. I know I was more sexually aware than people of my parents' generation, but today's children are growing in sexual knowledge in more than an exponential fashion. It's like the dam broke, and all the illicit content has poured freely to whoever, whenever, wherever. It woulda been a wet dream for 12 year old Tonewah.

However, I'm scared of what this is doing to kids. I know being exposed to what little stuff I managed to scavenge when I was younger has affected me negatively. How much more will it affect the youth of today? I guess we won't know for a while.