SEX. (Now that I have your attention…)

I had to go on a casting call for a client a week or so ago. We were casting for a female role in an online tutorial. Through a mis-communication with the talent agency, instead of 30- and 40-year-old women showing up for the call, we saw teenagers and 20-year-olds. Now understand, I’m a 40-something-year-old (very) married male. We saw model after model show up that looked as if they were in their 20’s. When I asked about their age and experience (auditions are possibly the only profession where you can legitimately ask a woman her age without violating a social taboo), I heard things like “Oh, I’m 17 years old, and I’ve been modeling for…oh…two months.”

Pause with me for a nanosecond.

With no insult intended for any of the females I went to high school with, they didn’t make girls that looked like that when I was in school. Seriously. I went back and looked at my yearbook pictures. Nothing. Nobody. Nowhere. I can remember, there was one girl, one time, who dared show the hint of cleavage. She was sent home. Skirts were to touch the knee, or they weren’t allowed. Belly buttons on a girl? Purely hypothetical, from a boy’s point of view. Bare skin was something we saw above the neck, below the knee, and on arms in the summer.

I bring this up, because I don’t think that having Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and the other Slut-puppy Barbies® as role and fashion models is a good idea.

Let’s look at this objectively. When a boy hits puberty, it hits back. Hard. Sociologists state that the average teen male thinks about sex roughly every 30 seconds. I’d put it higher than that. MUCH higher. With girls dressing like streetwalkers and every other TV spot pushing sexuality, it’s difficult to NOT think about sex.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against sex. Noooooo. Far from it. But I’d like to think that my kids can get through puberty and their teen years with at least a little innocence intact. When I was in high school, the thought of putting my arm around a girl could keep my fantasy life in high gear for hours. Kissing? Fahgetaboutit. That would have put me in overdrive. And that was…nice. It was nice to have something at that age that I DIDN’T know – something that I could have the joy of learning one step at a time. Sexuality ought to be something that you peel back, one layer at a time, like an onion, not exploded inside your brain like an M-80 firecracker. The “mysteries of sex” should be treated like a bestseller or a “whodunit,” where you read each chapter, in order, and read a little each night. Jumping to the last chapter too soon may give you immediate gratification, but it spoils the book. By allowing advertising and pop culture to incessently hammer sex into our brains, we are cheating our children of the chance to enjoy the process of discovering themselves, and their opposite sex over a period of time. In effect, we are destroying their innocence much too soon.

Wonder why our kids can’t walk from our house for a half-mile or so to the nearest convenience or grocery store without risking abduction, rape, murder, or any other violent crime? Wonder why so many kids turn up missing – or worse? Wonder why teen pregnancy is a crisis? Wonder no more. Just turn on your television, sit back and enjoy an evening of sexual indoctrination and sensory overload. Your kids are.