Question 2:
Most of you seem to agree that child sexuality is natural and normal on its own, but becomes problematic in the context of our culture. Do late-twentieth-century images (e.g. Calvin Klein ads, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Barbie, etc.), books (most famously, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Forever and other books by Judy Blume), and films (Kids, the new Lolita, PG-rated movies with sex and nudity) involving child/adolescent sexuality promote or encourage kids to become sexually active before their time? Do they influence the rates of teen pregnancy and STDs, and the age at which kids lose their virginity today? Or, could it be argued that they promote positive sexual identities, comfort with one's own changing body, better gender/sexual relations and a freedom to ask questions?

At the risk of schoolmarmishness, I repeat that I disagree that child sexuality is "natural or normal" and "becomes problematic in the context of our culture." Sexuality exists only in the

context of culture. And part of any culture is its representations of sex.
     History gives the lie to the idea that we live in a world of unprecedented sexual speech. In 1700, a pamphlet called "Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes" warned, "It is impossible to prevent every thing that is capable of sullying the imagination." It read, "Dogs in the Streets and Bulls in the Fields may do mischief to Debauch's Fancy's, and it is possible that either Sex may be put in mind of Lascivious Thoughts, by their own Poultry." In the 1890s the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children fretted about the Museums of the City, whose advertisements were "like magnets to curious children" and whose entertainments featured "depravity, stabbing, shooting, and blood-shedding." And in 1934, a writer on adolescent sexuality deplored the "world of . . . lurid movies, automobiles, speed, jazz . . . literature tinged with pornography, the theatre presenting problems of perversion . . ."
     Neil Postman dates the "disappearance of childhood" to the invention of the telegraph, which spurred a mass media that availed all people at all ages of all sexual secrets.
     But the secret's been out longer than that.
     Why are we so worried about sexual representations now? Because pictures and words have attained unprecedented cultural centrality. Our marketplace produces no products but digitized ideas. The boundary between the symbolic and the real is disappearing. Kids play baseball on Apples, not sandlots; they have cybersex before they have their first real kiss.
     The media do not make kids sexual. But they offer kids ideas about sexuality. Judy Blume's romance Forever does not send the same message as Calvin Klein, nor Klein as Lolita. The problem is not sex per se, but the predominance of a narrow range of sexist, ageist, violent images of what's sexy. Yes, the media reflect reality, sadly, but only part of reality.
     The answer is not less speech but more -- more varied images of feelings and bodies, more information on sexual health, more permission for kids to talk about it all.

Question 1
A. M. Homes
James Kincaid
Judith Levine
Michael Medved
Stephen Schiff
Celine Texier-Rose
Naomi Wolf

Question 2
A. M. Homes
James Kincaid
Judith Levine
Michael Medved
Stephen Schiff
Celine Texier-Rose
Naomi Wolf

Question 3
A. M. Homes
James Kincaid
Judith Levine
Michael Medved
Stephen Schiff
Celine Texier-Rose
Sally Mann

Question 4
A. M. Homes
James Kincaid
Judith Levine
Michael Medved
Stephen Schiff
Celine Texier-Rose