Sex, violence, drugs, profanity, and gambling—in a word, smut. People know to a lesser or greater degree that we'd be better off without smut, but they also enjoy it—or at least, they enjoy media depictions of it. And so whereas children are expected or even legally required to avoid such influences, adults are usually permitted to indulge in them. Now, how exactly does the first discrepancy give rise to the second? The standard argument is that children can't handle smut whereas adults can. But this argument is supported neither by logic nor by empirical evidence. While there is reason to believe that children can be harmed more, at least in some cases, adults are hardly immune to these dangers. It's naive to think that adults won't be swayed by media violence or that adults can make good decisions about drug use. There are even cases where children are safer than adults. For example, young children typically have negative attitudes towards smoking that only begin to erode in adolescence. Never mind the fact that individual differences in susceptibility to smut are invariably much greater than age-group differences.
I would explain the impulse to protect children but not adults in terms of vicarious restraint. See, the people who get to decide what's safe for which age groups are without exception adults. When they, for example, characterize pornography as "adult content", they're placing no restrictions on their own behavior. Yet they still get to experience the virtuous feeling of preventing smut from doing harm. Vicarious restraint comforts them about their (ultimately legitimate) fears without making them control themselves or actually reducing the danger. Although it isn't quite hypocritical, this perverse sort of double-dipping is a close cousin of how some famous televangelists have condemned licentiousness while patronizing whores. A better analogy is double sexual standards for men and women.
You can argue about whether vicarious restraint is motivated more by the desire to actually do good or by the desire to appear to do good. In most cases, I think, good intentions play a large role. In other cases, I'm more cynical:
http://www.prwatch.org/node/9873
That vicarious restraint can protect us is an illusion we cherish at our own peril. Children don't respect double standards any more than adults do. And given how many adults drink or gamble their lives away, grown-ups are at least as deserving of protection.
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"Now I will have less distraction." —Euler, upon going blind in one eye
Well, yeah. I mostly agree here. But I don't think it's so much that children can't and adults can handle smut, as that children don't (usually) and adults do (or should) have the ability to make decisions for themselves involving it. Clearly adults can't always handle smut, as we're calling it, but they should be able to form their own, independent decisions about whether or not to engage in something that they maybe can't handle.
I don't research children, so I can't provide any empirical evidence that children aren't independent thinkers who make decisions independently. Nor can anyone really say adults do either. But they're supposed to, and probably do, to a greater extent than children, which is why it tends to be illegal to have sex with kids or coerce them into other bad behavior.
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Stopped reading as soon as you equated "sex" with "smut."
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Seth: What are you making?
Evan: I'm just drilling holes. Last two weeks, **** it.
BUM: I'll buy the idea that adults are on average better at decision-making than children, but I'm explicitly challenging the idea that this is sufficient justification for double standards. I mean, suppose that it were the case that white people were on average better at decision-making than black people. (This actually could be the case, even though race is effectively no more than a social construct, because people of different races are treated differently.) Would this justify double standards divided according to race? Of course not.
AMan: Aw, don't get hung up on vocabulary. I just needed a word with which to lump together sex, violence, drugs, profanity, and gambling, five things which in reality have little in common other than the perception that they're bad for children. Let's call them something else… say… "sexcitement". Yes, I deem that sufficiently silly. So try reading the first post while mentally substituting "sexcitement" in place of "smut".
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"Now I will have less distraction." —Euler, upon going blind in one eye
I actually also feel better about "sexcitement" but otherwise I don't think you're wrong. I forget who I was talking with and about what, but the question of why children particularly shouldn't be exposed to sexual situations (i.e. watching Seinfeld; not having sex with children, which you plainly shouldn't do) and I realized that I had no nonmetaphysical arguments.
Although (and I realize this is just being a fly in the ointment) I think I've read that alcohol consumption at a very young age causes developmental issues, so the actual drug abuse ones do sort of make sense from an empirical perspective (if that thing I kind of remember reading does in fact exist and was in fact accurate).
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
I think what you remember reading does exist and is accurate. Could it be used to justify restricting alcohol to a certain empirically determined minimum age? I'll allow this: such an age restriction would be a lot better than the completely arbitrary age of twenty-one years that the federal government now demands. Public policy shouldn't be guided by numerology!
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"Now I will have less distraction." —Euler, upon going blind in one eye
Sex, violence, drugs, profanity, and gambling—all this and more when you come live in the off-world colonies!
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1]
Yeah, 'cause there ain't enough sexcitement here on Earth.
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"Now I will have less distraction." —Euler, upon going blind in one eye
Well maybe not numerology, but what about arbitrary round numbers? They make doing math easier!
And anyway, at some point in the discussion, I suspect the placement of the age at 21 was about all the room for individual variation in human development. Like not when they actually decided the age, but that is a thing that someone at some point told someone to take into account before they made a muddle of it all, and perhaps this is the trouble wish such broad-reading legislation: that it can't possibly account for everyone equitably.
I do not propose a counter-solution. I guess time machines?
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir