A child went to dentist with his mother and found the waiting room crowded with people. They somehow managed to find just one seat. The mother took the seat and the child was left standing beside her. The room was noisy and the chatter was uncontrolled ,hence forcing them to talk above their usual volume.
In his happy go lucky mood, in his loud volume asked his mother, "Mom, what is sex?".The deluge of conversations around them stopped instantly and all eyes were pinned on the mother with an expectant look. The mother conscious of every word she is uttering said, "Son, sex is male and female".-Anonymous.It's the moment every urban child dreads when his father walks up to him only to say he found out about the pornographic sites the teenage son was viewing in the history of the browser. The awkwardness of the moment is almost unbearable to the father and the son.
The thin red line which is almost indistinguishable, unfortunately, has to be discerned when people are forced into the most precarious and delicate of situations because that one silly remark or this one silly repartee makes all the difference.Such is the result of the utterance of the blasphemed word- an awkward silence and the same silence leaves people groping in the dark and crashing into the most obvious objects in the most expected of moments. It's the classical situation which screams that the absence of darkness is not light, that the absence of stupidity is not intelligence and that the absence of ignorance is not knowledge.
Its, but, just a zero.The curiosity of an adolescent coupled with that awkward silence of society has paved way for pornography. Pornography is a paradox. It's a goddess and a demon or maybe its just a demon in disguise. The contemporary society faces moral crises. a paranoia of confusion, a great divide-does pornography help or hinder??.
Every urban teenager lives through this dilemma, searches for a guide but finds none and since he's living in an age of technology, he tries the tool which as never failed before-the Internet. Pornography is a choice, usually chosen by teenage kids at that point of age. But the problem is that pornography educates but by the wrong standards, illustrates but with the wrong examples and talks but the wrong language.Sex, in its contemporary sense is considered taboo in almost every society of the world.
Its like when a child reaches the stage of an adolescent his parents ask him to avoid members of the other sex. They usually manifest it in their actions- expressly or implicitly. The girl child is forbidden to play with the same boy living two blocks away and it was okay till yesterday.Parents condemn it all along, its easy for them to do it because they don't understand the peer pressure, because they have lived through that same confusion all their teenage life with no one to turn to but they are fine now, aren't they? In sociology, it's held that a man becomes a replica of the society he's living in the first twenty years. But only later he realises the treachery time plays on them. By the time they are groomed in their "society ", "society" changes, the moment they are off their 20 mark and while they think they are all right with their judgments about society they are all wrong because society is not what they think it is.
Similarly, parents end up thinking since they are okay now even though they have lived through that confusion even their kids will be fine too. But what they fail to realize is that the society then is not the society now. Their generation was groping with the idea of "modern" itself and hell, look at us we are living in the era of post-modernity. They, most of the times don't realize how fast their kids grow up and have no idea how much of peer pressure one has to face not to be glorified of something but just to be accepted.The change in society is only becoming faster and the rate is just increasing meaning that a change which would a take a 10 years earlier is only taking a few months now and so according to sociology the generation gap we youngsters are facing right now will be nothing compared to when we ll be in the other side. The generation gap will only widen and will the great divide.
But what if pornography was censored in the country?? I mean, our parents sure didn't have access to pornography and they are pretty fine now, aren't they so hell, why even this raging debate, why not just censor it? If the generation next wouldn't know about it then even the generation next wouldn't know about it then it would pretty much solve the problem right?.Wrong.Its like this article I read in Readers Digest once about a young girl and her father playing around the dining table and her father had tied a piece a cloth at the four ends of the table to keep her from getting hurt. If he had a chance, he would have smoothened up all the rough edges she would encounter in life. But that's not possible, is it?.
By censoring pornography, we would keep kids groping in the dark for reality. While we think we are protecting them, we end doing the exact opposite- handicapping them. Because someday they are going to find out and wouldn't understand how to deal with it and would eventually blow issues outta proportion. And besides there are other complications to consider- what if the rules change and they actually get to view pornography after they are completely grown up? What if its hacked? The hacker would become like a black market trader and nobody would be able to regulate it because it is illegal.The only possible solution is creating awareness amongst teenagers so that they can come in grips with reality.
Parents and teachers, most important of all, should be well equipped to talk to teenagers explaining to them what is "normal". Tell them about their hormonal growth and address their emotional crisis so that teenagers could actually look to adults for help and not shy away from them. In most simple and straight forward words- parents and teachers should tell them the truth.Does pornography increase or decrease prostitution? Does pornography exploit the bodies of a porn star or does it give them a living? Well, that is another story for another day.
.Im a law student from India who loves writing.By: Ramana Reddy
