>Have you looked at the stuff I'm talking about here?
>
>As to reasons, I agree with Neil Postman's theory: Sex (especially
>commercialized and commodified images of it) competes with juvenile
>personality development and academic skill acquisition. When it enters into
>kids' awareness at too young an age, it puts harmful pressure on kids and
>diverts attention from healthier pre-pubescent endeavors.
>
>This is not to say prudishness and shame are good things. It's simply a bad
>thing for 11-year-olds to watch drunken pre-orgies. Same goes for
>pornography of the harder variety. All that is fine and good for grown-ups,
>and perhaps that includes late teens. But childhood, as Postman argues, is
>an adult-managed arrangement, the quality of which matters greatly to us
>all. MTV is nothing but a disaster for kids. Watch it for a few days, and
>see if you can argue your way around this.
I watch MTV2 a lot, and I like it. You're asserting lots of things, with what evidence? Why is watching MTV any worse than other forms of entertainment? What's uniquely damaging about sexual content? If kids aren't ready for sexual stimulation, don't they just shrug it off? And once they are ready, they can't think of much else, as I recall sixth grade.
We're sorta back where we were when you joined the list. You think that people are manipulated by corporations into feeling desires that they wouldn't otherwise feel. I think things are a lot more complicated than that. People like gadgets and fashion, and they think about sex a lot. Kids are often very sexual creatures, though it makes adults nervous to think about that. If you'd like to criticize American culture for its simultaneous puritanism and prurience - two sides of the same coin, etc. - that's one thing. But that's a lot bigger than spring break on MTV.
Doug