.
Fashion megamogul Tommy Hilfiger’s assessment of the contemporary juvenile condition is typical: “They are so much more sophisticated than when I was growing up — they’re computer literate, they carry portable phones, they’re bombarded with cool media from MTV to Beverly Hills 90210” [6].
“Bombarded” is right; but “cool”? “Sophisticated”? To be sure, MTV sets the pace of adolescence, with a massive young audience that includes 73 percent of all boys and 78 percent of all girls between the ages of twelve and nineteen. And what do they see? You think you know, but you probably don’t. Over spring break in 2004, a conservative watchdog group called the Parents Television Council (PTC) monitored the music video channel for 171 long hours. The report dutifully tallied up 1548 sexual scenes. These included 3056 depictions of sex or nudity, and 2881 verbal sexual references. The PTC went on to crunch the numbers: “That means that children watching MTV are viewing an average of 9 sexual scenes an hour with approximately 18 sexual depictions and 17 instances of sexual dialogue and innuendo” [7] …
In those same 171 MTV hours, not too surprisingly, PTC analysts also recorded 1518 uses of unedited foul language and an additional 3127 bleeped profanities. Running the numbers, “that means young children watching MTV are subjected to roughly 8.9 unbleeped profanities per hour, and an additional 18.3 profanities per hour.” This sort of decimal-point precision might provoke a hoot of Saturday Night Live-style derision, but the reality is way beyond satire…
Whether such filth passes for “cool” aside, “sophisticated” is hardly the word for Hilfiger’s child — if by “sophisticated,” we mean the twentieth-century connotations, as delineated by Roget’s, of being “chic, disillusioned, tasteful, ungullible, worldly-wise.” Chic? Tasteful? Please: Think assorted piercings and assorted American Pies. Disillusioned? These systematically demystified juveniles harbor few illusions to be dissed. Ungullible? Worldly wise? Not girls who believe performing oral sex ushers in a happy adolescence; and not boys who believe mommies should give them wake-up calls — in college. Hilfiger’s “so much more sophisticated” child is, in fact, society’s so much more exposed child — exposed to a numbing innundation of imagery and information once either unimagined entirely, or strictly withheld from public view.
Childhood as we have known it isn’t compatible with such exposure. Neil Postman explains why:
One might say that one of the main differences between an adult and a child is that the adult knows certain facts about certain facets of life — its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies — that are not considered suitable for children to know; that are, indeed, shameful to reveal to them indiscriminately. In the modern world, as children move toward adulthood, we reveal these secrets to them, in what we believe to be a psychologically assimilable way. But such an idea is only possible in a culture in which there is a sharp distinction between the adult world and the child’s world, and where there are institutions that express that difference. [8]
That sharp distinction, dulled by the time Postman was writing, is all but imperceptible now as our various and sundry institutions express no difference.
[6] Plum Sykes, “Child’s Play,” Vogue, March 1998, 244.
[7] Casey Williams, “MTV Smut Peddlers: Targeting Kids with Sex, Drugs and Alcohol,” Parents Television Council, http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/publications/reports/mtv2005/main.asp
[8] Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982), 15.
Diana West
“5. Sophisticated Babies”
The Death of the Grown-Up
