Reading the superb blog on the sexualisation of children and parental responsibility, by Shaista Gohir (http://shaistagohir.com/) has prompted me to repeat part of my blog of 20th August entitled Insane Country Part 2.
In it I questioned how parents in Britain today are abdicating their responsibility, and contributing toward the problems we seem to have with our children, and teenagers, offering the following argument:
"How many families sit as a group and eat together, discuss issues together? Too many parents leave their kids for hours in their bedrooms with their computers, mobile phones and know little of what they get up to. Many kids are literally bringing themselves up, and there is a well developed sub-culture that is dominated by media and pop imagery that, to be frank I do not feel is at all healthy. Kids, as a result have become addicted to FB, BBM, Twitter and SMS as confirmed in an OFCOM report this week.
As for parents, we have a society happy to slag off working mothers, sack pregnant women, attack maternity rights and payments. Add that to a low wage economy, and you have parents having to work all hours to make ends meet.
Sadly because of the technology, family bonding has been replaced with TVs and computers which have now become a prerequisite for every child, whilst parents don’t do anything to understand the technology they supply their kids with, simply leaving them with uncontrolled access to the internet and social network sites which exposes them to a range of potentially harmful things such as porn. This is a damn awful lack of parental responsibility.
What sort of society ends up with over 50% of kids between the age of 10 and 14 viewing porn on the internet?
Appalling!
Even the huge number of safety software out there to prevent access to such sites and offer protection when kids are on FB etc is not being used."
I stand by these words, and as any of my friends will tell you, I have been spouting out this opinion to anyone prepared to listen, in my local most Fridays!
But what really gets me is the state of a society that is quite blind, and happy being so, to the music industry and so-called beauty industry's acceptance and promoting of attitudes to which only the porn industry previously subscribed.
Popular culture is now nothing more than the pimping of the female gender, irrespective of age, for the sexual gratification of all. Women are being marketed as being nothing more than the some total of their bodies, and available as sexual objects.
Take a look at any of the pop music channels transmitting pop videos, most of which are actually soft porn. Worse still, do so remembering that this is all mainly aimed at an audience with an age group of 10 to 25 years of age.
As for the so-called 'beauty industry' not much else can be said of that either.
Now we have the age of hairless female bodies and the need for women to at least trim their pubic hair if not wax it away altogether. (Don’t use that, men are also doing it argument as an excuse!) Now women are being told that not to do so is unhygienic and a sign of bad grooming.
We also have the sickening acceptance by society that women pumping silicone into their breasts and other body parts is a sign of beauty and improvement of the female body! We even have school children expressing disatisfaction with their pubescent bodies, and being co-erced into wanting 'boob jobs'!
Now all this has been promoted by the porn industry, and now by mainstream beauty industry as one further way of enslaving women into the belief that their natural bodies are not good enough, and need to be 'modified' according to the latest fascist ( fashion) industry's dictates.
Given that such ‘hairless regime’ is being promoted on mainstream TV, in music videos, and in the high street (Mine even has a salon advertising 'intimate waxing available for men and women'); one could forgive some poor unsuspecting male coming across a woman not conforming to such ‘body waxing’ pressures, as having some form of disease on finding she has not shaved or waxed away her pubic hair!
Add further, the legal mutilation of the female body via cosmetic surgery, along with the current fad for tattoos amongst teenage girls; and you have complete control of women’s ‘body image’ to mould anyway you please!
I might point out that I say female body, and not woman's body simply because the industry is even promoting this evil crap to teenage girls.
Quite frankly, parents allowing this and their kids as young as 15 to have breast implants, and botox, and other such modifications are simply unfit parents placing their children in danger, both physically and morally!
The excuse given of course is that, 'What is wrong in being ones best?' Well nothing actually! The difference here is that women are being told that they are not making the best of themselves unless they modify their bodies and looks a certain way as determined by men and the mysoginystic fascist (fashion) industry.
Now I hear many people shouting that I am talking bollocks, have a chip on my shoulder, and have a weird way of seeing reality. They also ask, "What the hell has this to do with kids?"
Precisely is my reply, what has it to do with kids?
So why on earth is it all being pushed to kids via pop culture in the form of magazines, videos and in the high street with the sale of padded bras, thongs, and sexually sloganised t-shirts. And I haven’t even mentioned computer and video games yet!
Until parents, politicians and business leaders in this country wake up, take some responsibility, and develop the ability to see all of this 'in the round' as the deluge of the senses it is; driving UK society down the one way road of 'hedonism' and 'moral bankruptcy', absolutely nothing will change!
Given we have in the UK, the greatest number of teenage pregnancies in the whole of Europe, some of the worlds biggest paedophiles rings, sexual grooming and trafficking of school girls, and an appallingly high rate of sexual abuse and domestic violence along with a disgraceful rate of conviction; our society is indeed morally bankrupt and not a pleasant place to bring up our children.
So tell me now that pop and celebrity culture, fashion, the media and our demand for instant gratification which encompasses all we see, all we do, and all we aspire to be; has nothing to do with, in part, creating this environment within the UK!
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