Dennis Miller described the difference between Playboy and Hustler magazines in personal terms. When he was a teenager, he said, he and his friends used to hide Playboys where they could sneak out and take a peek.
They were titillating for sure, he said, but when he saw a Hustler it scared him.
Miller, he of successful Saturday Night Live and unsuccessful Monday Night Football fame, was talking to Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler.
Flynt may now be better known for his long battle for free speech rights than for Hustler. Some people who would not know Flynt or Hustler in any other way heard of both through the 1996 movie “People vs. Larry Flynt.” It is R-rated for strong sexual material, nudity, language and drug abuse. There is also a pretty graphic suicide, as I remember.
The movie’s tagline is “free speech has its price.” The unstated theme is that “scary” sex magazines are expressions of free speech.
In any case, Larry Flynt now has a lifetime of experience and is an expert in publishing raunchy sex magazines and fighting the necessary battles to get them protected under the heading for free speech.
That expertise brought him to Dennis Miller’s talk-news-entertainment show last week. Well, that and a recent Supreme Court decision to reject a chance to create legal protections between children and their access to pornography.
Miller asked Flynt if there isn’t some line we can draw between free speech rights on one hand and having highly sexual material available to children on the other.
As I recall, Flynt didn’t actually answer the question. Rather, he said he was pleased about the Supreme Court decision. Perfectly predictable.
And then he added several times that it is time that parents take on their responsibility. Flynt’s repetitive statement that parents have to be parents seemed, to me self-righteous, rather pompous and preachy.
Flynt and his archnemesis, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, have become like each other. Round faced, moralistic, judgmental; so radically different from each other on the surface that they are now identical in their approach. Flynt advises some of the same things that Falwell used to … something about the importance of parenting.
His proclamations are, of course, self-serving, like saying, “If your children are hurt by what I do, it is your fault for not protecting them from me.”
But self-serving attitudes and similarities aside, parents would be wise to heed Flynt’s warning. Parts of a ravenous media-and-commercial-driven community do lie in deliberate predatory wait for young prey not actively protected by parents.
That is unfortunate. I believe we must work toward making the general community more child- and family-friendly.
But parents of young children have a more immediate challenge. They must sort out how to raise children in an environment that overflows with socially toxic waste.
Even more, they must know how to help their children take advantage of the many assets that are mixed in and among the dangers. Nowhere are the dangers and assets more intertwined than on television and the Internet.
I think parents with immediate concerns about managing their children’s exposure to television and the Internet will find the book “Parenting Well in a Media Age” helpful. The book is by Gloria DeGaetano.
Many of those parents may already grasp that their children’s exposure to television floods their everyday life. The flood is both direct and indirect, from watching TV and hanging with others who do.
Those parents may want to skip directly to the helpful ideas DeGaetano presents after years of studying the media, its influences, and the relationships between TV, family life and child development.
A small word of warning, though. It is more work than parents might think to manage their children’s TV lives. It means parents must also manage their own.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bsjf@gte.net.
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