Violence and Sex

Ever since becoming a Mom, I have been more sensitive to the amount of violence on television. Especially during football season, when my husband is glued to the set and the kids are playing around the house, I am frustrated with the allowable amount of violent visuals in commercials. The biggest offender is CBS promoting episodes of CSI during the day on Sundays. Why must they show actors pointing guns or screaming in fear? Recently, we let our son watch Star Wars. BIG can of worms. All he wants to watch now is Star Wars and other kids on the street all talk about it and want to act out the light saber fights. The other Moms and I finally had enough and told them no more light saber fights. (I'm lucky to live in a neighborhood where the other families are as interested in their kids' actions as we are.)

This has made me think more about how our society accepts violence as "OK" to mimic, yet parents freak out if kids are "playing doctor". I remember as a little kids--maybe 5 years old--I was playing "house" with a neighbor girl. Since I was older, I was mommy and she was baby. She insisted that I change her "diaper". I remember feeling uncomfortable about it, but she took her underwear off and said to put it on like a diaper. As I was doing so, her mother called her to come inside and told me I had to go home. I had an inkling of what happened at that time, but there was no explanation. Just that I never was allowed to play with her again.

These illustrate the point I see that as a society, if we see two kids pretending to make love to each other, we'd be all over them telling them that it is not OK. But two kids pretending to kill each other is acceptable. Now that I have kids of my own, I do my best to tell them why we don't allow certain actions. I'm not going to advocate that children pretend to have sex in my back yard, but I am disturbed by what the messages boil down to: mimicking action that creates life is BAD, mimicking action that causes death is GOOD. Twisted.