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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

A match made in Graceland
He wore white patent leather shoes and I still married him.
By Carol Ormandy
[01/18/00]

A Fisch by any other name
My last name is Fisch. My husband's last name is Flynn. Our son's last name is Flysch. No, it's not a spelling error.
By Audrey Fisch
[01/20/00]

Why should a baby get the father's last name?
Historians, scientists and legal scholars offer some explanation.
By Carol Lloyd
[01/20/00]

A new year and a new spouse
Forget losing weight. For 2000, a vast number of British couples resolved to lose something else.
By Shelley Emling
[01/21/00]

Southern governors declare war on divorce
But their methods ignore social science, solutions and their neediest constituents.
By Lisa Moricoli Latham
[01/24/00]

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The sordid vehicle, in the February issue of the mag, is a story called "The Sex Lives of Your Children." Raising the bar of tastelessness to dizzying heights, the magazine doesn't just vivisect the sex lives of the usual suspects -- Leo, Gwyneth and Donald. It gets into the pants of middle school students, most of them white, middle- to upper-middle-class kids. Now there's a new twist on the old sex story. Not Bob, Ted, Carol and Alice, but Sean, Mica, Tiffany and Kaitlin.

Well, sorry. It's not a new story. It's more of a threadbare tale guaranteed to satisfy adults who like to publicly bemoan the values of adolescents while privately drooling over the graphically described "real life" activities of underage sex addicts.

It's not a new story (or a news story) that kids experiment with sex. Any adult who has sex was once a kid who found out about sex through experimentation. (Check your Spock and Penny Leach for details.) It's not kids and sex that has changed; it's how adults choose to talk -- and write -- about kids and sex.

The Talk story is just one of many recent articles written by (and for) adults with an excessive preoccupation with the sex lives of young teenagers. This summer, the Washington Post ran a story called "Way Beyond Spin the Bottle" that included graphic descriptions of an oral sex ring and culminated with a description of a meeting in the school library during which parents and teachers sat around more or less asking one another if their kids swallowed and if so which kids. (One thing that has not changed is the sexual double standard; only the parents of girls were called to the meeting.)

This fall, Newsweek followed up with a paranoid cover story, filled with "Freudian fear and cooked statistics," that was supposed to show that early puberty equals early sex, but only showed that adults look at the developing bodies of children in a sexy way.

Now Lucinda Franks, a Talk special correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has established through "dozens" of interviews with real middle school teens that "child's play is not what it used to be."

In a show of real concern for this "problem," Talk chose to illustrate the article with a salacious (in this context) painting by Balthus of a sly schoolgirl, eyes closed, head turned away from the viewer, whose attention is immediately drawn to the girl's exposed panties in the center of the frame. How interesting that this illustration is prominently dated 1938, a sign, perhaps, that adults obsessed with the sex play of children have been around for a very long time.

I suppose that Tina Brown & Co. believed that Balthus would gild this peep show with high art. But it's not Balthus' art that draws the eye. This is a story about adults looking up children's dresses. This is the journalistic equivalent of drilling a hole in the changing room wall. It is pornography in an acceptable package (for the Talk set anyway) produced by and for the kind of people (aren't we all?) who are terrified of the creeping pedophilia we hear so much about. Talk editors seem to see no problem in providing plenty of reading material for said criminals.

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