I have a boy and a girl, 6 and 8, very good kids, and I was a very problematic kid myself. I'm very torn on saftey sorts of questions like climbing trees, free range of the neiborhood. I don't let my kids do things that I did, and enjoyed doing. But I'm not completely happy about it, I wish I could be a little braver.

The sexuality thing is different, but I'm not sure it will turn out badly. Possibly these kids will grow to see the childish vulgarity of ostentatious sexuality more clearly than people do who grew up with it as a big secret. Maybe these kids will grow out of it, the way older generations apparently never did--grown men making absolute fools of themselves, commiting obsessive criminal acts, over a little bit of sex.

I found it pretty grotesque at my daughter's school talent show to see so many kids doing these smooth sultry dating songs, but was not offended, just embarrassed by it. Kids tend to grow up, and want to leave their childishness behind them. They'll come to associate this sexy junk with us, as something we foisted onto them, not with themselves, I bet.

When I was a kid, sex was always some mysterious secret thing, and an odd result of that was that mature married women were eroticized for me--they were in the inner circle, the high preistesses of sex, had a cooler sexual demeanor than young girls trying to be sexy.

My problem with porn and other blatant eroticism is mainly that it sucks, is childish, and lame. And the pretensions, style, and pretexts of milder, more acceptable eroticism are probably worse than cruder stuff. Playboy is horrible with it's misted shopping-catalogue style, and "personality" profiles. What is nastier or more embarrassing than that?

I think I agree that what drives this stuff is marketing--another example of what goes wrong when things are produced for sale instead of for plain old use. But I'm not quite as pessimistic that we can't become principled consumers, and begin to counter-act the effects.

A revolution may only bring a new set of problems that we don't know how to deal with, the same way saftey measures after an accident have been found merely to introduce new unknown variables to produce new accidents. On the other hand if we'd just trust ourselves, from one generation to the next, we'd be better off learning how to deal, and try to pass that along as best we can. Can you trust a kid who is holding his crotch and dancing wildly?