Mom And The Lifetime Channel

When your son hits puberty, mothers need to stop watching the Lifetime Channel. There are some decent movies and it's definitely a great time-waster, but it sucks for the mother of any son. The prime example of this is “Cyber Seduction: His Other Life”, starring Jeremy Sumpter. It's a perfectly horrible movie; it is so horrible that it could set back male/female relations back several centuries if it was to be taken literally. The basic plot is a teenaged boy that gets so addicted to internet porn that he has problems relating to other teens. He manages to set up his ex-girlfriend's cell phone to get his fix, and another teenage boy calls him a pervert because of his addiction. When a teenaged boy calls you a pervert because of your interest in pornography, there is something wrong. At some point a woman tells the mother that she and her former husband got a divorce because she caught him looking at pornography. Once. And that was enough for them to get a divorce. (Makes you wonder what else was wrong in their marriage...)

But that's sort of the problem with the movie. It treats pornography as an evil unto itself, when it has a time and place; it does serve a useful purpose in our society. For teenage boys, it serves as the template of their future sexual relations, and what they hope to find. The good news is that they will grow past those small little dreams and they will eventually want a lot more to their relationships than a mere little romp, but they need to start somewhere. A little soft-core pornography goes a long way to jump-starting a boy's imagination, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It also demonstrates a healthy curiosity about sexuality, and that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as parents recognize that and help the boy make good decisions about it. Now, if he starts getting into the hard-core stuff...well, therapy would be a very good start.

There is the argument about the objectification of women, but it's interesting that women objectify men all the time and it's no problem. Just think of the male exotic dancers, Harlequin romances, and romcoms; all of these simplify the relationship with men down to how attractive the guy is, and that's essentially not better or worse than a girlie mag. At the very least you can't argue, successfully anyway, that you aren't looking at men in those media as more than just cardboard cut-outs compared to the real thing. Ultimately a little objectification is fine as long as you realize that it's just objectification.That is, we need to objectify some men and women, we need to render them down to an archetype, so that we better define people we meet in terms of those archetypes. How many men get described as just Clive Owen, as opposed to Clive Owen with the take-charge personality of Jeremy Straithern

However, I still think that the old solution is best; moms should shout outrage over finding them and then throw them away, while dads should wax nostalgic while throwing them away. It's all part of the game, but at least you should be happy that he's at least looking. Don't encourage him, but don't exactly discourage him, either.