Kind of a tasteless question to ask right now: How Young Is Too Young?

BurtWorm

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Thu Oct-01-09 02:35 PM
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Kind of a tasteless question to ask right now: How Young Is Too Young?

Edited on Thu Oct-01-09 02:37 PM by BurtWorm

I'm not particularly squeamish or prudish when it comes to sex or philosophical discussions. I think healthy societies should be strong enough to endure any kind of free thought or speech. So I don't want to mislead anyone into thinking I'm going to advocate censorship with this post. Let me make that clear immediately. And I apologize to my fellow DUers for starting what will seem to be another Polanski thread. I'm not interested in debating his guilt or innocence, or the justice of his arrest. I do want to raise questions about the responsibilities of free media over a case like this, and about the health of a society whose media cover a case like this the way our media do.

Today there�s a post on The Daily Beast (a blog I love to hate�all Tina Brown�s doing) by a male Barnard professor who uses the Polanski case to challenge age of consent laws. Personally, I think it�s a point worth discussing in a free press (though, being the father of a 13-year-old myself, I most probably disagree with it), but using this "hot news story" as an opportunity to discuss age of consent seems to me to be just plain poor taste and judgment. It�s kind of like using Jeffrey Dahmer as an opportunity to discuss anti-sodomy laws. It�s worse than that, actually, because most people simply aren�t ready to consider that 13 year olds have the tools necessary to consent or not to having sex with 40-year-olds. This case--with its addition of alcohol and drugs into the mix--isn�t going to warm them up to the idea. This isn't the environment in which to calmly or even passionately debate the wisdom/hypocrisy/puritanism of our consent laws.

Should articles like this be banned? Absolutely not. Should writers know better than to write articles like this at moments like this? Who knows? Not me.

Now, should editors know better than to publish shit like this at moments like this? I think they *should* know better. I think it says something about how broken American society is that editors like Tina Brown simply don�t know better--or don�t *care*--to use restraint at a moment like this. Do I think Tina Brown should be punished for publishing an article like this? No. I really am a first amendment absolutist. It's her right and prerogative to publish what she wants. But I think it's a sign of dysfunction in a free society when the media lose all power to censor themselves, according to certain standards of judgment and taste, and publish just anything at all because it's just anything at all. It would be one thing if it were only Tina Brown who shows no standards as far as taste goes. But this inability and unwillingness to self-censor is not the exception, it's the rule.

I might not have been moved to make this observation if the DB article didn't reek of opportunism. The author seems eager to exploit the Polanski case even if it offers a very poor example for his argument that 13 might be old enough for consent. This piece doesn't seem concerned about what 13 year olds want and are old enough to decide. It's all about how young is too young to fuck and not get in trouble with the law.

I suppose I sound like a conservative, complaining about how anything goes in this day and age. But I think the same thing that disinhibits Tina Brown from publishing an article like this at this moment is what disinhibits the right wing from calling for Obama�s assassination or deposition by the military. A society that can't discern and discriminate intellectually is going to wind up making nothing but a lot of noise.