With the media joining our families ever more intimately, it has become a common source of children’s sexual education. But how early should this education begin? Age 12? 11? 10? And how explicitly? In a recent article,
we learn about a mother’s dilemma over a music video on YouTube whose
lyrics go: “I got passion in my pants, and I ain’t afraid to show it,
show it; I’m sexy and I know it.” The mom’s younger sister shows it to
her children: a girl aged 7, and a boy, 10. The sister thinks this video
is funny, not educational at all, and the kids laugh along—it’s only their mother who thinks it’s not funny.
The
mother watches the video as a singer in the rock group shimmies around
in a gold lace G-string, belting out the dicey lyrics. Fuming and
flummoxed, she explores the Internet to discover that the world around
her is crazy over this song: hundreds of YouTube videos feature kids
under 10 dancing to these lyrics, while their parents record their gyrations and giggle behind their cameras.
Still, she is concerned this isn’t funny and way too suggestive. How
to respond? First, she considers banning the song from her home but
quickly anticipates that her kids will get upset with her, and they will
only end up quarreling. Besides, they’ll find the video all the more
enticing and go look for it elsewhere. Her next thought is to speak
openly with her kids about its sexual content. But this tactic elicits
blank stares, and, feeling embarrassed, she hesitates. At last, she
gives up, deciding to ignore the incident and move on, but she’s still
perplexed by the issue. What’s the right thing to do?
Perplexed
myself, I too researched YouTube. On one site, I discovered the band
performing on stage in underpants, with silly tongues protruding from
comic mouths on their crotches. In another, a paunchy young man cavorts
in underwear, sporting what seems a hard-on. In others, kids dance to
the tune as their amused parents record it all. In one a baby in diapers
rocks and rolls—I wondered, do diapers give a different meaning to
“passion in my pants”? In still others, teen girls pantomime the hit in
their bedrooms. In a pathetic rendition, very obese adults wriggle their
flab and make light of the “sexy and I know it” lyric, as well as the
later-appearing line, “I work out.”
In another twist, well-known animated figures dance and mouth the lyrics: Alvin and the Chipmunks, Homer Simpson, Peter from Family Guy,
Sonic the Hedgehog, a few Sesame Street characters, and others. Now I
could see more clearly why the mother was so confused: to the whole
world, the song is a joke.
Slowly I perceived that humor was the central point. To the two kids, the image seemed goofy, silly, the stuff of comedy. When Peter in Family Guy
does his thing to the lyrics, and Homer Simpson, drinking beer in
underpants, lunges his torso, while SpongeBob Squarepants joins in with a
few of his pals, and all the other comic figures thrust their pelvises
to the beat, they elicit giggles and mirth. But is sex that humorous?
Laughter disarms us, but it also desensitizes us to the words: here sexual exhibitionism
becomes a laugh. The daughter is only 7, and she’s learning about
sex—only now, it’s funny. Since the mom doesn’t want to be a prude, she
drops it, but her kids are imbedding sexually explicit words and
gestures in their memory banks, even if they’re not sure what they’re saying or enacting.
George Drinka, M.D. is on the clinical faculty of the Oregon Health Sciences University.
Love,
Abby
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