Not in Front of the Children

Dear Katha,

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That Heins' book is indeed a little arid is proven by the fact that your last dispatch was so much more full of life and social context than anything I read there. But the question of why we are so concerned about smut when there are real problems to worry about--problems like poverty and terrible schools and ignorant math teachers--is a false choice. There's no bar to anyone's concerning herself with both, and there's no proof (though there is something of an operating assumption) that those who want to ban Judy Blume from their libraries are any less concerned about the lack of universal health care than those who give their daughters copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I think the posing of this false choice is too often liberalism's exasperated evasion of something that genuinely concerns a lot of parents; it certainly concerns me.

Not that I have a good answer for why 65 percent of kids between the ages of 8 and 18 have their own televisions in their rooms--a truly shocking statistic. But I would hazard a guess that not many of those kids are the same ones whose parents are working to ban Harry Potter at school.

I don't think we have any real disagreements about censorship, which we understand to be both unworkable and too costly to other values. But the great flaw of Heins' book--as of much anti-censorship writing--is to work backward from there to dismissive conclusions about the motives of those who try to censor. You and I both believe that withholding information about birth control is a nutty way to go about protecting kids from unintended pregnancies. But the anxiety that underlies that strategy isn't necessarily silly or contemptible; it's just human, and it contains a kernel of rational fear about the difficulty of watching the people you love best in the world navigate the passage to adulthood in a world that holds out a warped and insistent vision of sexuality and danger.

This is why I feel so strongly that Heins' book is a missed opportunity. It's not enough (and it's not a good strategy) for progressives to prove that censorship is wrong and then look down at those who feel otherwise. Heins can't be faulted for not writing a book on a different subject, I guess. But she can be faulted for simply asserting, without arguing, that anxiety over what is psychologically healthy or safe for children to experience is just wrong-headed and foolish.

This anxiety is, of course, why politicians of all stripes jumped on the FTC report last summer about the marketing of R-rated films to children. It was stupid political theater, but they were making an argument with which I'm basically sympathetic. Do I want my government to censor such movies? No. But neither am I sorry to see them cuff around a studio that works to pack the house with 12-year-olds. Which is another way of saying that there is some worthwhile political conversation to be had about popular culture. Some of this conversation is going to be tendentious and opportunistic, but some might hearten the only parent in a given seventh grade who's put her foot down over whether her kid can see Hannibal.

I guess my conclusion is that you dismiss too breezily the difficulty of making one's separate peace with popular culture. Because my kids are 8 and 5, I'm still at the opening end of this funnel. But I'm noticing how deftly and early the pop culture nominally directed at older kids gets worked into the stuff directed at kids as young as mine: a Britney Spears song on the soundtrack of a Pokémon movie, a Back Street Boys figurine at the fast-food joint. It's not as if you get streets signs along the way, where you get to make affirmative decisions about what you do and don't think is age-appropriate. It's more that if you aren't paying perfect attention at all times (and who among us does?), you're already tumbling pleasantly down the slope, knowing that scrambling back up again will be much harder than if you'd known ahead of time that you needed to think through whether you really wanted your preschooler learning to lip-synch a song about keeping her virginity.

(Even the scary public service announcements that labor to counteract the peer culture are being siphoned down to younger kids. I noticed mine the other day sitting, slack-jawed with wonder, in front of one of those really sonorous, menacing ads about how drugs can ruin their lives. It was on right at the end of Pokémon, I swear, and my son is the only 8-year-old on the planet who doesn't think he's too old for Pokémon.)

I think I've said my piece. I'll close more generously by noting one element I did like, which is Heins' appreciation of the strange, smooth way that the targets of censorship have shifted--or perhaps I mean expanded--to include supposedly progressive concerns about male violence and the objectification of women and so on. I loved her anecdote about how the American Family Association found its Web site getting disappeared by one of the sorts of filtering programs it espouses, on the grounds of intolerance toward gays. This may not represent a victory against censorship, but it is the kind of irony we're allowed to enjoy.

Thanks as always, Katha, for your thoughtful response.

Cheers,
Marjorie

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers examine Marjorie Heins' Not in Front of the Children, a history of indecency laws and other forms of censorship aimed at protecting children from offensive material. Click here for a word on our format and here to buy the book.

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