Why Are Parents So Hung Up Over Sex — Instead of Violence?
Alice Greczyn
by Beth Greenfield
“Violence has been normalized in entertainment, and parents have grown up with those images and think, ‘Well, I haven’t killed anyone,’” Diane Levin, professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston and an expert on the effects of media on children, explains to Yahoo Parenting. “It’s easy to tell your kid that the violence is just pretend and to say, ‘Violence is bad. We have to find other ways to solve problems, OK?’ But talking about sex is much harder — it’s blurrier and more complicated,” she says. And because parents are afraid that their kids will get involved with sex too soon if they see it onscreen, she adds, they often choose to simply ban or avoid it.
Janis Joplin topless
I can still remember the major fights I had with my mom in adolescence over two movies she forbade me to see: Porky’s, the raunchy sex comedy, and the now iconic Flashdance, both from the early ’80s. It seemed that everyone else in the entire school was allowed to see both movies, and I screamed and cried and begged to join them — and even snuck in glimpses of Porky’s, sound down low, when it ran at crack-of-dawn times on our newly purchased Cinemax service. But I never managed to make it to the good parts before my sleepy-eyed, keen-eared mother appeared in the room.
Suki Waterhouse