Malone sides with Mary Whitehouse
I don’t know what’s happening to me.
I’m turning into some sort of Mary Whitehouse. I’m ranting and writing letters of complaint. One was to my child’s school asking whether it was appropriate to be putting on a school disco for five year olds. Surely we should be encouraging them to be children, not teenagers, for as long as possible?
The second letter was to a well known online store, asking why, if I typed ‘stepdad’ into their search engine, I was shown many e-books with thonged females and sick titles? Yet if I typed ‘dad’ into their search engine they wouldn’t allow these kind of sexual ideas to pop up!
“There was something deeply disturbing about the video”
What if your 11 year old was trying to find her stepdad a mug /keyring saying ‘stepdad’ and saw ‘Tiffany gets revenge with mum!’ I emailed the company asking why this sexual content was so easy to find as kids might see it. They said the literature is kept fairly discreet… er, how?!
Then online I watched an MC’s music video. A girl is stalked to her doorstep (shot in POV), with aggressive lyrics about sexually ‘owning all of her’. The girl in the video is obviously distressed. Well I am no prude, but there was something deeply unnerving about the video, she was the victim being hunted. I wrote another rant asking ‘where is the creative responsibility here?’
Everyone is responsible for keeping our mothers, daughters and sisters safe by helping ideas about what is right and wrong be communicated to our circles of society. We are watching the values of society being chipped away rather than putting moral bricks back up and saying ‘no’ to ideas undermining healthy ways of thinking. Sure, we think an infamous MC making a video has no effect, but all these ideas get soaked up until they become accepted in the mainstream. We now accept ‘pop videos’ that would have been banned as pornography 30 years ago.
I won’t let my child watch MTV as five year olds like copying and I’m sure sexual dance moves would be picked up. I was worried my child would come home from the school disco dancing like the children who do watch pop videos at home. But my letter resulted in a nice chat with the organiser, apparently there will be an entertainer and games, so it’s not a normal disco. I just think there’s going to be a lifetime of adult music and not many years being content with musical statues and singing “head, shoulders, knees and toes”. I hope this isn’t me getting old…
