Is sex a sport, a game, a leisure-time activity? According to a recent news article, this is the message now being received by our children--in music videos, at pop concerts, in pervasive media coverage of the personal, primarily sexual, lives of celebrities.

Children most at risk have working parents who are not able to give their children the attention they need. When midterm exams are over and  parents are at work, surfing the web for porn and throwing sex parties in the homes become popular pastimes. The current view of sex of many young people can perhaps be best appreciated, the article points out, by the answer of a young girl when asked what sex means to her. "It's good for the complexion," she said. With this frivolous understanding of sex--not too surprising considering the widespread debasing of sex in our society--it is only natural that our children are eager for their first sexual experience.

While many observers interested in cultural matters have noted this growing irresponsible sexual activity among the young, teachers in many of the youth centers in Korea  have often expressed astonishment at the behavior of young people, primarily because of the coarseness of their language and their shallow, reckless understanding of sex. These same observers single out the music video industry as deserving a big part of the blame.

In one popular music video, a young girl meets a man at a night club and then goes to a motel with him. On the way there, the camera focuses on the girl, who looks directly into the camera with a quizzical look in her eyes, as the video ends. Why is the girl looking directly at the viewers? When adults are asked this question, the writer of the article reports that it take them about 30 minutes to come up with the right answer, high-school students 10 minutes, and grammar school children 1 minute. The correct answer?  "Do what I am doing."

The grammar school children, the writer goes on to say, are so accustomed to seeing porn on the internet the answer was obvious to them. In many cases the actresses will gaze into the  camera repeatedly, in effect inviting the viewer, with its subliminal message: "Do what I am doing. you have no idea how great this is."

Some music videos are so sexually explicit a grammar school student of years past would probably not have been capable of imagining its content, nor would many even have been interested; that is clearly no longer the case.Today's grammar school children have knowledge of areas of life that should not be a part of their education. Sadly, this is the way society is programing our young. Unless society takes steps to address this ominous trend, we are likely to see greater harm inflicted on our children. And what price will society have to pay in the future, we need to ask ourselves, for allowing this rampant permissiveness to continue?