IDBillzFan Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 I thought the same thing as I read this. However, having a son will bring it's own set of problems, namely preventing him from being on the receiving end of this scenario at 11 or 12 years old. This new dad thing is awesome, but reading the accounts from some of the more experienced parents here sure can be scary. 249887[/snapback] I agree, but that falls on us. It's our responsibility to do whatever we can to keep our son from being the kind of 10-year-old who finds himself breaking up with his girlfriend because she won't bob his knob. Maybe I'm being a bit unrealistic, but right now I believe the onus is on us. Knowing and caring enough to realize we don't want that kind of child seems to me a good start. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fan in Chicago Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Considering I just posted a couple of weeks ago about letting my 10 year old daughter go out without parental supervision, this is the last thing I needed to here. Do any parents actually raise children anymore or do they just bring them into the world and turn them loose. http://www.stadiumwall.com/index.php?showtopic=17511 249821[/snapback] Seems more of the latter than the former type exist. One family we know hardly interact with their kids. They both work and have a nanny.The wife doesn't work long hours but the hours he is at home she prefers to 'relax and give herself a break' as she cannot be bothered with her kids. Most of the vacations they take are just for the two of them with kids at home with nanny or relatives. I really really wonder why they brought the kids into this world. It made me both happy and sad when their daughter told mine ' you are lucky to spend time with your parents. I hardly get a chance to even speak to them'. She is only 9. As others have said, giving a sh*t is half the battle and a significant other part of the battle is doing something about it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin in Va Beach Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 It's all MTV's fault. 249850[/snapback] There's truth in that statement... MTV What about the cable channel that positions itself as champion of today's teens and pre-teens – champions of their music, their rebellious free spirit, and their genuine, if ever-changing, notions of what is "cool"? Whatever else MTV might be, at least it's interested in kids, right? Sure, just like the lion is interested in the gazelle. "Everything on MTV is a commercial," explains McChesney. "That's all that MTV is. Sometimes it's an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product. Sometimes it's going to be a video for a music company there to sell music. Sometimes it's going to be the set that's filled with trendy clothes and stuff there to sell a look that will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio, though you don't know it, to hype a movie that's coming out from Hollywood. But everything's an infomercial. There is no non-commercial part of MTV." Rushkoff illustrates how the machine works by using the example of Sprite. What was once a struggling, second-string soft-drink company pulled off a brilliant marketing coup by underwriting major hip-hop music events and positioning itself as the cool soft drink for the vast MTV-generation market. Connecting the dots between Sprite, MTV, rap musicians and other cross-promotion participants, Rushkoff lays out the behind-the-scenes game plan: "Sprite rents out the Roseland Ballroom and pays kids 50 bucks a pop to fill it up and look cool. The rap artists who perform for this paid audience get a plug on MTV's show, 'Direct Effects,' for which Sprite is a sponsor. MTV gobbles up the cheap programming, promoting the music of the record companies who advertise on their channel. Everybody's happy." So what, you say? What's wrong with that? Aren't MTV and rappers and clothing companies and others just giving kids what they want? That's what they say. But it's not what they do. In reality, the companies are creating new and lower and more shocking – that's your key-word, shocking – marketing campaigns, disguised as genuine, authentic expressions of youthful searching for identity and belonging, for the sole purpose of profiting financially from America's children. They hold focus groups, and they send out "culture spies" (which they call "correspondents") to pretend to befriend and care about teens, so they can study them – what they like, don't like, what's in, what's out, what's cool and what's no longer cool. They engage in "buzz marketing" (where undercover agents disguised as "one of the crowd" talk up a new product). They hire shills to interact with young people in Internet chat rooms, and "street snitches" (a roving group loudly talking up a band or other product in public to raise interest). They bring the entire machinery of modern market research and consumer psychology to bear on studying this gold mine of a market – to anticipate the next, and always weirder and more shocking, incarnation of "cool." This would be bad enough – if corporate America were just following and marketing the basest instincts of confused, unsupervised teenagers. But they are not following, they are leading – downward. Exhibits A and B: the "mook" and the "midriff," two creations of this corporate youth-marketing consortium. The "mook" is a marketing caricature of the wild, uninhibited, outrageous and amoral male sex-maniac. "Take Howard Stern," says Rushkoff, "perhaps the original and still king of all mooks. Look how Viacom leverages him across their properties. He is syndicated on 50 of Viacom's Infinity radio stations. His weekly TV show is broadcast on Viacom's CBS. His number one best-selling autobiography was published by Viacom's Simon and Shuster, then released as a major motion picture by Viacom's Paramount Pictures, grossing $40 million domestically and millions more on videos sold at Viacom's Blockbuster video." He adds: "There is no mook in nature. He is a creation designed to capitalize on the testosterone-driven madness of adolescence. He grabs them below the belt and then reaches for their wallets." A great deal of MTV's programming features and markets to the "mook" in America's boys. For instance, a major venue of the mook is professional wrestling – the most-watched type of television among adolescent boys in America today. OK, what about the "midriff"? Girls, says Rushkoff, "get dragged down there right along with boys. The media machine has spit out a second caricature. … The midriff is no more true to life than the mook. If he is arrested in adolescence, she is prematurely adult. If he doesn't care what people think of him, she is consumed by appearances. If his thing is crudeness, hers is sex. The midriff is really just a collection of the same old sexual cliches, but repackaged as a new kind of female empowerment. 'I am midriff, hear me roar. I am a sexual object, but I'm proud of it.'" And what is the purpose of these debauched role models for America's future, fashioned out of market research compiled by "culture spies" hired by corporations to predict what the likely next step down – the next shock wave disguised as authentic "cool" – will be for the MTV generation? Why, to sell kids more stuff, of course. "When corporate revenues depend on being ahead of the curve, you have to listen, you have to know exactly what they want and exactly what they're thinking so that you can give them what you want them to have," explains NYU's Crispin-Miller. However, he adds, "the MTV machine doesn't listen to the young so it can make the young happier. … The MTV machine tunes in so it can figure out how to pitch what Viacom has to sell." And how do they manage to bond kids – imprint them – with the next round of musical, clothing, and lifestyle choices they should be buying into? "Kids are invited to participate in sexual contests on stage or are followed by MTV cameras through their week of debauchery," says Rushkoff. "Sure, some kids have always acted wild, but never have these antics been so celebrated on TV. So of course kids take it as a cue, like here on the strip in Panama Beach, Florida, where high schoolers carry on in public as if they were on some MTV sound stage. Who is mirroring whom? Real life and TV life have begun to blur. Is the media really reflecting the world of kids, or is it the other way around? The answer is increasingly hard to make out." Then the really devilish part of the marketers' modus operandi comes into view, as host Rushkoff relives his own epiphany: I'll never forget the moment that 13-year-old Barbara and her friends spotted our crew during a party between their auditions. They appeared to be dancing for us, for our camera, as if to sell back to us, the media, what we had sold to them. And that's when it hit me: It's a giant feedback loop. The media watches kids and then sells them an image of themselves. Then kids watch those images and aspire to be that mook or midriff in the TV set. And the media is there watching them do that in order to craft new images for them, and so on. "Is there any way to escape the feedback loop?" Rushkoff asks. Only in the kids' minds, he reveals, noting that "cool"-seeking youths continually reach downward to a new, raunchier, more outrageous expression – something, anything, as long as it hasn't been exploited and ripped off by the corporate world. That said, Rushkoff rolls tape of a large, demonic-looking group of teens, faces painted, chanting and screaming obscenities in downtown Detroit on Halloween night, and explains: A few thousand mostly white young men have gathered to hear a concert by their favorite hometown band, Insane Clown Posse. ICP helped found a musical genre called rap metal or rage rock, which has created a stir across the country for its shock lyrics and ridicule of women and gays. … Rock music has always channeled rebellion, but where it used to be directed against parents, teachers or the government, today it is directed against slick commercialism itself, against MTV. These fans feel loyalty to this band and this music because they experience it as their own. It hasn't been processed by corporations, digested into popular culture and sold back to them at the mall. A member of Insane Clown Posse explains the group's attraction: "Everybody that likes our music feels a super connection. That's why all those juggaloes here, they feel so connected to it because it's – it's exclusively theirs. See, when something's on the radio, it's for everybody, you know what I mean? It's everybody's song. 'Oh, this is my song.' That ain't your song. It's on the radio. It's everybody's song. But to listen to ICP, you feel like you're the only one that knows about it." "These are the extremes," intones Rushkoff, "to which teens are willing to go to ensure the authenticity of their own scene. It's the front line of teen cultural resistance: Become so crude, so intolerable, and break so many rules that you become indigestible." (To complete the mood, in the background Insane Clown Posse is rapping "B word, you's a ho. And ho, you's a B word. Come on!" and other uplifting lyrics.) Then comes the betrayal: "Merchants of Cool" shows how Insane Clown Posse and other "authentic" groups – untouched by commercialism – are ultimately bought off by the marketing "machine," packaged and sold back to the youth market. Of course, when the shock value wears off, and the mantle of "cool" – untouched and uncorrupted by corporate America – moves downward to the next, even more outrageous level of depravity – MTV, Viacom, and the other corporate giants will be there to package it and sell it, once again, to our children. Oh, but don't bother trying to tell your kids about this fiendish game. You see, says Crispin-Miller, "it's part of the official rock video world view, it's part of the official advertising world view, that your parents are creeps, teachers are nerds and idiots, authority figures are laughable, nobody can really understand kids except the corporate sponsor." OK, so is that it? America's teens are in the grip of a malignant marketing campaign by big, greedy, uncaring corporations? – and hopefully the kids will grow out of it and become normal sometime? End of story? Not quite. To be sure, millions of youths are in the grip of something destructive, but the corporate aspect is just the visible part. Behind both the corporate manipulators and the youths caught in their selfish and shameful influence lurks another, much more formidable and all-pervasive "marketing campaign" – a malevolent dimension that has no one's best interests at heart, and which is programmed to devour all in its path, from the highest to the lowest. Selling Sex and Corruption to Your Kids Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
erynthered Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Yeah, you only have to worry about one penis. Guys with daughters have to worry about all of them. 249870[/snapback] Man, I'm glad I read this post Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stuckincincy Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 There's truth in that statement...Selling Sex and Corruption to Your Kids 249897[/snapback] Scroll through these points. Items 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 31, 38, 40, 41 and 42 are notable. Communist Goals - from the 1963 Congressional Record. http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
30dive Posted February 23, 2005 Author Share Posted February 23, 2005 Update....The wife has spoken with the teacher.....The teacher is very supportive and has gone to the principle, the principle is calling the other childs parents for a conference to discuss this issue (not with us) So now I thank God...these parents are either going to thank us or they are gonna hate us...we'll be watching. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IDBillzFan Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Update....The wife has spoken with the teacher.....The teacher is very supportive and has gone to the principle, the principle is calling the other childs parents for a conference to discuss this issue (not with us) So now I thank God...these parents are either going to thank us or they are gonna hate us...we'll be watching. 249979[/snapback] Is the teacher hot? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
30dive Posted February 23, 2005 Author Share Posted February 23, 2005 She's got a great personality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John from Riverside Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Update....The wife has spoken with the teacher.....The teacher is very supportive and has gone to the principle, the principle is calling the other childs parents for a conference to discuss this issue (not with us) So now I thank God...these parents are either going to thank us or they are gonna hate us...we'll be watching. 249979[/snapback] I can bet there will be a whole lot more parents thankful then the ones who are angry....and the ones that are angry will just have to get over it I have a 10 year old daugher...AND a 13 year old son....and I am very vocal at my kids schools Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fan in San Diego Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Sorry about what it is doing to your daughter's innocence. But this could also be a blessing in disguise for the girl who is doing the talking - a FOURTH GRADER? She may well be a victim of child abuse or incest and is using this chat time as a cry for help. Be sure to follow up with the school so someone can dig further into this issue. 249781[/snapback] Good point ! I agree, this little girl who is talking about oral sex is way too young to have any such knowledge. I hope child protective services gets involved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alaska Darin Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Good point ! I agree, this little girl who is talking about oral sex is way too young to have any such knowledge. I hope child protective services gets involved. 250126[/snapback] Yeah, that'll certainly solve the problem. They're uber successful at putting kids in a position to succeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dib Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 This (oral sex) is more common in schools than you would like to believe. The thinking is, that it's not really 'sex' per se since their isnt any penetration. (Sound familiar Bill?) On the other hand it isnt uncommon to see girls on school grounds that are 8-9 months pregnant. The schools however are not allowed to teach birth control. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gavin in Va Beach Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 The schools however are not allowed to teach birth control. 250131[/snapback] Parents are still allowed to teach their children about birth control, last I heard... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alaska Darin Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Parents are still allowed to teach their children about birth control, last I heard... 250140[/snapback] There's a novel concept. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dib Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Yeah, you only have to worry about one penis. Guys with daughters have to worry about all of them. I have a 17 year old daughter. I have a shotgun. They have to worry about their own penises. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alaska Darin Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 I have a 17 year old daughter. I have a shotgun. They have to worry about their own penises. 250151[/snapback] That stop you when you were a teenager? Yeah, didn't think so. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Jack Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Man, where were these girls when I was in elementary school? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alaska Darin Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 Man, where were these girls when I was in elementary school? 250222[/snapback] They weren't born yet, ya pervert. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Just Jack Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 They weren't born yet, ya pervert. 250224[/snapback] Oh yea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick in RaChaCha Posted February 23, 2005 Share Posted February 23, 2005 For what it's worth, I spent the last 41 years convinced I didn't want to bring children into this world, and I've spent the last 12 weeks with my newborn son kicking myself in the ass for not doing this sooner. The world won't get better on its own. It's up to us to make it better. The people in this world who would and could raise the best, most productive children should not be scared off by the butt-reaming morons who have children but ignore personal accountability. Like I said, for what it's worth... 249805[/snapback] Amen bro! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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