Reminds me of the time I was three years of age. My mother had brought me to a summer festival on the centre green in Leeds. Out on the open grassy field, two big dogs were happily engaged. My mother, a progressive even then, did not attempt to cover my eyes. She explained evenly to my attentive self that the dogs were “grooming each other for the festival.” “Oh,” I responded, “it looked like they were fucking.”

That acknowledged, here is the scenario: Great Britian institutes a China Wall approach to search and ISP censoring. Parents install well-configured software content-blockers on their kid’s computer. Craftier parent enables filtering in a hardware router installed between the cable-modem and the computer. Lo, their son will be free of the sin of self-help::  the ten year-old boy (ANY ten y.o.)casually proceeds to plug his computer directly into the modem, bypassing the router. He then boots the machine using a Live-CD, completely bypassing his father’s noble jazzing of the computer’s operating system. The lad then bypasses his ISP censoring altogether by setting a foreign non-censoring DNS in his network panel (for site name-lookups). For good measure, he then runs ALL his web-browsing through any free SSL proxy, all data then encrypted so no one monitoring his activities can see the content. Being a sly little prick, the ten year-old saves all of the downloaded booty to his encrypted USB thumb-drive. On machine shutdown, all traces, including those in hard RAM, dissolve into the aether.

Sex is shoved in the faces of young people every hour by unimaginative advertisers and hack writers. When some in authority attempts to limit this abuse, however small, the effort deserves more that the adolescent reaction we see in this report and in some of the above comments.

Not going to lie.  I went threw puberty in the late
90’s, early 2000’s.  If you think kids are no more
exposed to sex or think about sex in the same terms
you did as a Gen X member or older, think again.  By
the time I was in 6th grade, all my friends and I
spent hours and hours downloading porn on the
weekends.  And at parties, huge groups would show
each other the most perverse thing they could find.

I don’t really know how you regulate that, but as an
adult, I wonder how that affects my understanding of
sex.  I don’t really think it was that common for
young teens in the 70’s or even 80’s to see things
like 2 Girls 1 Cup easily.

If you don’t think horny young kids aren’t spending
hours every week looking at porn, you’re deluding
yourself about the power of the human sex drive.

How much porn do you watch?  Multiply it by 10 and
you’re probably closer to how much your teenage son
watches.

Gonna put the genie back in the bottle now,huh.Good luck with that one…

To begin with I grew up in the time of Howdy Doddy and married bedroom’s represented on tv by twin beds. When I was about 11 years old I spent an over-night with a school friend who talked excitedly about a girl he knew who put out to just about everyone, but used the alternate hole. No commercialization of sex, no representation of even approved sex. Who do they think they are kidding, if they think this will stop or limit sexual expression?

That said I am not hostile to the idea that some programing should be in the hours less likely to be viewed by pre-teens and very young children. I think that to have this should be negotiable.

The fact is Hester’s story was written at a time when people thought a glimpse of ankle was enough to send males off the trolley. People are inherently sexual, you can not derail it, but if you get too rigid about it you can cause untold misery by uninformed and unwise sexual practice. And, worse you can leave everyone feeling dirty and guilty about one of life’s better pleasures, when one knows how to do it properly.

And, in an aside, I remember the vapors caused by the idea that “The Damned” might be showed on evening tv. After much hysterics about the viewing of the movie they moved it to after 11 pm and yet they had so censored the movie that if you hadn’t seen it in a theater you would have not known what the story line or point was. The story line by the way was “Power corrupts, absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”. One would think that is a moral exploration that everyone could approve of.