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?