children accessing porn; adults turning off filterware

[Thomas W. Perrin]

Dear Brian

You wrote:
> 
>  When I was 13, I knew
> everything.

Well, I had to wait until I was 15.  What a glorious year. You couldn't
tell me anything.  It took a while, but even I eventually acquired a
small inkling of how much I don't know, along with an ability to change
my mindset from time to time.

I'm old enough to remember when Time magazine first accepted
advertisements which didn't airbrush out the navel on photographs of
women, when wearing a bikini on a public beach could get you arrested,
and pornographic pictures were any pictures of women that didn't have
pubic hair and nipples airbrushed out.    I also know that hard as it is
to reverse 350 years of Puritan ancestry, I was never harmed by looking
at pictures of naked women, or of naked men, at any age, in any place. 
As for benefits, consider a better body image, appreciation of the nude
as an art form, unconditional positive regard for my fellow human
beings, etc, etc. 

You probably wouldn't want to let your child go to Europe and watch
television, where the commercials have had full frontal nudity for some
twenty years, or watch the soaps here in the United States, or go to a
clothing optional beach anywhere, or go to the Museum of Modern Art or
the Metropolitan Museum of Art (or any other place which collects art). 
But that doesn't give you, or anyone else, a right to prohibit such
activities by others.

> Is there a safe
> and proper use of pornography?
> 
Given enough time and motivation to do a dissertation, I could probably
come up with one or more arguments in favor of pornography, to say
nothing of the erotic.  But your fear, I think, is the inappropriate
eroticization of children. It is always inappropriate to eroticize
children.  It is questionable, however, whether the viewing of naked
bodies, in person or by photographic proxy, does that. I suspect that
more damage is done by saying how awful it is.  I would rather take the
curiosity out of the situation by pointing out alternatives to
pornography that aren't quite so boring (as the porn).

The appropriate solution, it seems to me, is to select good sites for
kids, and inundate them with the good stuff.

>  If your solution prevails and libraries offer
> totally unrestricted access to the internet, then I want adults
> monitoring what kids see. 

If you substitute the word "parents" for the word "adults" in the above,
I don't think you would have any argument from any of the anti-filter
and pro-full access forces (Among which I count myself).  On the
contrary, it seems to me that having parents accompany their kids to the
library fosters family values.(The family that reads together stays
together?)  But just think what happens when parents dump their kids at
the library, and take off to the local tavern (or worse, don't dump
their kids at the library, but take them to the tavern). So if full
unrestricted internet access brings parents into the library, why should
I complain?

The New York Public Library's internet access policy says it all very
succinctly: http://www.nypl.org/admin/pro/pubuse.html  It puts the
responsibility directly where it lies - with the parents. The public
library cannot, and should not, take the place of the parents.

Tom Perrin