Andrea Dworkin died. A self described radical feminist, Dworkin’s ideas were a bit too far out there for me. She wrote that heterosexual sex was abusive. She also was anti-pornography, which clashed with my hard-line free speech beliefs. When liberal ideas collide. Ampersand quotes a Guardian article which tries to graciously remember her.
Amy Sullivan and Matt Ygelsias are going head to head about whether Democrats should be critiquing pop culture. Sullivan maintains that the average voters don’t think that Democrats get their concerns. Democrats can talk about the problems in pop culture without advocating censorship or shilling for the Christian Right.
As a father of a son with Downs syndrome, Michael Berube fights against the idea that liberals automatically advocate aborting fetuses with disabilities.
Hubby and I are still laughing about the Man Date article.
Apt. 11d 
You have to pardon my language, Laura, but what the hell is wrong with those guys in the ‘Man date’ article? Those dudes have some serious issues with their sexual self images, or something. Afraid to go into a restaurant that has actual table cloths with another guy? Lame.
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I’m a little out of it – Andrea Dworkin, whoa. Missed that. I read so much of her stuff, felt like I knew her. And yes, was just writing about the man date thing.
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So Laura, just curious … if you are a hard-core believer in free speech, and also a parent, then where do you fall on the issue of media and its (potential) impact on kids?
As an aside, I find it interesting that most liberals in my circle respond to media by turning it off. The crunchy parents in my neighborhood regularly boast about how their kids watch no TV. But my Utah in-laws leave their kids in front of the TV for hours on end. Isn’t this the exact opposite of how it should be, based on all the media bashing you hear from the right? What’s going on?
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I completely don’t get the man-date thing. Everybody’s talking about it, but it’s so utterly foreign to my experience I can’t get a handle on what the issue is. Does that mean I’m supremely confident of my sexual orientation, or too out of it to notice?
My take on the Sullivan/Yglesias thing.
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Andrea Dworkin, R.I.P.
Andrea Dworkin was part of the coming-of-age of many women of my generation. With her death, much else has…
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Jen – I let my kids watch a little TV so they aren’t social misfits in school and so I can cook dinner, but I keep the time in front of the TV to a minimum. I just recently let my five year old watch the cartoon network because he didn’t know what the other kids were talking about in school. He got a half hour or so around dinner time. But he couldn’t handle it. He started getting nightmares about mummies and vampires. My little sensitve, new age guy couldn’t take it, so it is back to the Disney channel for him.
I don’t really worry too much about the evils of mass media right now, because my kids are young and I’m pretty much in control of what they’re getting. It must be harder for parents of older kids.
I sympathize with Sullivan’s position. She isn’t advocating for censorship or anything. She just wants liberals to recognize the pressures that parents are under. It’s impossible for Yglesias, who is 14 or something, to get it. I think we can have a discussion about the difficulties and worries that the average parent faces without yanking Eminem off the shelves.
Thanks for the link to your post, Russell. I’m off to read it.
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I sympathize with Sullivan’s position also. But I tend to think that Yglesias is pushing her in exactly the way she deserves to be pushed–if we’re going to say that liberals need to recognize the real moral and cultural concerns of parents (and we should, because they do!), then we’re going to have to also explain why those concerns trump the anything-goes, let-the-market-decide neutrality that a guy like Yglesias endorses. That is, we’re going to have to be willing to say what consitutes good parenting, and what its needs are, not just vaguely gesture in the direction of parental needs in general. Of course that needn’t mean yanking Eminem off the shelves. But it might mean, say, making it easier for parents to shut his music out of their kids’ worlds, if they so choose.
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Russell writes: But it might mean, say, making it easier for parents to shut his music out of their kids’ worlds, if they so choose.
Okay, so here’s when I start to swing closer to Matt. When we talk about policy solutions, I’m not sure what should be done to make it easier for parents to monitor their kids’ access to crap. Or maybe it isn’t crap, but excellent stuff that they just aren’t ready for.
See, I like Eminem. i think he’s fantastic. I wouldn’t want a 12 year old kid listening to it, but I don’t want to prevent more mature ears from appreciating it. The world doesn’t have to be kid friendly.
My solution would be not to increase kid-friendly spaces. God, the horror. Nothing but Applebee’s and Disney World. Shudder.
My solution would be to have parents around more to help shape their kids, rather than outsiders. The workplace, rather than Hollywood, has to bend. It wouldn’t hurt to also have parents better educated about parenting skills, as well.
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I totally agree with Laura re: the workplace being the area that needs to bend. The very same Utah in-laws whose kids watch hours of Disney movies are doing this because they need to sleep. The mom works nights at Wal-Mart and the only sleep she gets is in the La-Z-Boy while her kids watch Aladdin one more time. Is this really a media problem?
However, however … I also dislike the idea that kids and adults live in separate spheres, and that making things kid-friendly equates with Applebee’s. Proctor & Gamble would like you to believe that, but that don’t make it so. We as a country are already so fragmented! Liberals live in the city, conservatives in the exurbs and the country. Old people live in retirement high-rises or Florida/Arizona, singles live in the city. Small children live in the suburbs. Is this really good for us as a country? Have we completely lost our ability to understand the needs of other interest groups, and compromise?
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It helps when parents consume children’s culture along with the kids–not as a kind of condescending uber-parent middle-class Jane Brody thing, as monitors, but on the same plane as the kids. My dad used to watch a bit of the bad monster movies with us on Saturday afternoons when he was done gardening or what have you, and kibitz along with us. (No wonder I loved Mystery Science Theatre 3000 so much). I watch stuff all the time with Emma, and we talk about what we’re seeing as co-viewers, not as “Daddy wants to explain to you why Wonder Woman is a creation of patriarchal values” sort of thing.
Now I grant you if you have no liking for that sort of culture yourself, you’re not going to be able to fake it for your kids–I think it’s also ok to say, “That’s really not my thing, honey, so I’m going to go over here and read a book”. It’s obviously easier for me given that I have a personal and professional engagement with children’s media. But I think it’s never been a *better* time since 1950 for this overlap to happen, given that many kid’s shows and films are now also very friendly to adults. In some ways, we’re back in the kind of media universe that radio presented, where adults and children alike might listen to and enjoy “The Shadow” or many other programs.
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On the man-date article, I frankly kind of disbelieved it. Ok, maybe the people interviewed are real, but I don’t believe that the behavior it describes is common or a trend. It just seemed completely alien to me. Bogus, even.
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“The workplace, rather than Hollywood, has to bend.”
I completely agree, Laura. I don’t think the battle is solely, or even primarily, a cultural one; it’s a socio-economic one. That culture needs to be part of that matrix can’t be denied (and to pretend it isn’t is to lose the whole point of such social reform); but to make it all about Hollywood and not at all about the workplace is to make you, well, into a Republican, not a progressive who happens to care about raising good kids.
“It wouldn’t hurt to also have parents better educated about parenting skills, as well.”
Well, this brings us back around to the importance of occasionally being willing to get relatively specific in regards to at least some of the values which our polity ought to affirm.
Ditto everything Burke says about parents and children sharing in the same media. I love the fact that Pixar and others have helped to revive–after a very long absence–the true “family movie,” one that can be enjoyed simultaneously by young and old alike.
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I’m with Timothy on the man date story. I thought it was hilarious when I saw the cover and the caption, and grew increasingly disappointed with the writer’s need to treat it so damn seriously. It’s been several days since I read it, but didn’t s/he talk to a shrink about this “phenomenon”? And a shrink, incidentally, is who most of the guys in that story should be seeing, rather than obsessing about whether the waiter thinks they’re gay. Ugh.
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The English have no problems or complexes regarding the “man date” thing.
From long experience with my English husband and lots of Limey relatives, I am familiar with what they call it over there.
Drinking.
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heh. drinking. heh. Add video games to it, and my husband is in man date heaven.
Ah, too bad we all can’t make a living watching Saturday morning cartoons with our kids, like Tim. Actually, Mo watches TV for a living, also. So deeply jealous of you both, right now.
Russell, I think I can be specific about the values that I want my kids to have without generalizing those values to the polity as a whole. All I was recommending was tips on how to get your kid to sleep early and eating vegetables and all.
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“All I was recommending was tips on how to get your kid to sleep early and eating vegetables and all.”
But at some point even that invariably crosses some kind of cultural/moral line, doesn’t it Laura? “My kids don’t get enough sleep; they watch TV until all hours.” “So, turn off the TV.” “I can’t; they have it in their bedroom.” “Why do you let them have a TV in their bedroom?” “They bought it with their allowance; what right to I have to control how they spend their money?” “But you’re the parent; you’re expected to know better than they.” And so on and so forth.
Of course, inseparably connected to such arguments over authority and values are social and economic factors–if you’re a parent working two jobs, because the no-good spouse ran off and is a deadbeat with child support, your kids may have already had to learn sufficiently how to fend for themselves that they’re not going to listen to you anyway, and maybe you’re just to damn tired to fight it. I do think it’s important that we be willing, sometimes, to talk about basic value choices as a polity; but if the money isn’t there to make it possible for anyone to hear and respond to that talk, then any such talk will be mostly (if not entirely) meaningless.
There’s a way in which this connects with your inspection post, I think. Social workers and other representatives of the “caring” bureaucracy essentially exercise a kind of values-based authority in their work–that is, they’re looking to see if you’re a “good parent,” and that kind of judgment is demeaning in such an arbitrary context. Maybe those bureaucracies–and “moralistic politicians” in general–wouldn’t come off as so intrusive if their judgment occured in a context that of locally appreciated and shared values. (Which leads around to Bush’s faith-based initiatives, and how depressing–if not surprising–it is to have learned as the years have gone by how little support the Bush administration appears to have ever given its own best idea.)
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Where to draw the line between the privacy of family life and state protections of child well-being? Tricky. Tricky.
Yes, of course, there has to be some common values/rules/what have you regarding children’s well being. Children should not be abused, malnurished, denied an education, yadda, yadda. The state should monitor those who are suspected (with real evidence) of stepping over those lines. In some cases, the children should be removed from the home.
There ought to be classes avalable to parents or potential parents about how to best care for their kids, because I think that we’ve lost a lot of collective wisdom on that front.
But do I want the polity telling me exactly how much TV my kids should watch, what they should be eating for dinner, whether I should let them go out past 8:00? No way. Some people do a bad job raising their kids and even if they had classes to help them out, they would still screw it up. But that’s life.
Coming up with our own rules and systems is what makes parenting fun. Parenting is an art rather than a science, and the individual quirks that each family has shouldn’t be messed with.
I’m not certain that there are any locally appreciated and shared values. We do things very differently from the other families on our block.
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Pop culture, family values, and politics
Via 11d, I found this interesting debate between Amy Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias about whether it’s appropriate for politicians — especially liberal politicians — to speak out about the ways that pop culture coarsens our society and presents consta…
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I guess I’m different then.
The approach my wife and I have taken with our two daughters (4 and 7) has always been to be completely open with them. This includes talking openly about anything that comes up on tv, in their minds, in their lives, or in the news. Topics include death, rape, sex, intercene wars, pedaresty, and all the other countless horrible things that we can visit upon each other.
Honesty and openness trumps all else. My kids are learning to have open eyes from an early age, and will learn from us that they have no reason to be afraid of anything, but every reason to be cautious, to trust their judgement over their eyes and ears.
We hug them 100 times a day and hold them close and tell them how much we love them. Each of them holds our hearts in their hands, but we hide nothing from them. In that, there would be trajedy.
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