Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Banning Knowledge

But let's keep ignorance readily available.

Over at Pharyngula, PZ has a post about Albertson's, out west, banning Seventeen magazine because an issue included, inside I assume, "a labeled gynecological illustration of the female pelvis."

(http://pharyngula.org/)

Why ban this? To protect the innocence -- of the teenagers this magazine is aimed at. God forbid teenage girls know anything about their own anatomy.

This sort of thing happens here in the South with our buddy Wal-Mart all the time -- certain magazines get banned for having covers that some religious group or the other finds too naughty, or some book gets banned because it has some scene in it that's too shocking. Yet just last week, I'm in line trying to buy whatever it is I go to Wal-Mart to buy -- I don't go there much, but in the Fort there are, in fact, things you can only get at the Wall -- and the kid is with me and I look down and she's staring, horrified, at one of those stupid publications, the Globe or the Enquirer or whatever it was: ARMAGEDDON TWO YEARS AWAY!!! WORLD SCHEDULED TO END ON NOVEMBER 15 2008!!!

"Is that true?" she whispers to me. "Is the world really going to end?"

Now normally this would not be a problem, because normally the kid is smart and sensible and I can tell her no and explain how those stupid publications are stupid -- but she's been having issues lately, as you know.

So we have a three hour long thing over this stupid magazine.

They won't put sex ed on the shelves. But they will put that crap. Right at a seven-year-old's eye-level, too, I might add.

2 comments:

zelda1 said...

It killed me when I found out that my seven-year-old grandson was learning that all bad boys and girls were going to be punished by going to hell. I found out by the pictures he was drawing and there were all these stick people in this red fire. He, unfortunately, learned his from his father's church, but I quickly let him know that it was a myth like little red riding hood. When he sees stuff like that in the store, he reminds me that it's a myth and I say yes, all stories made up by people who have way too much time on their hands. How dare these fundies scare the children, what are they thinking and why put it on the shelves for children to see and be terriorized. What about the poor children who are not lucky enough to have parents or grandparents to tell them the truth? Nightmares, that's what. We have the most brutal culture when it comes to children than any culture that I have ever seen.

Jodie said...

My kid only noticed the "Bat Boy" or "Loch Ness Monster" covers on those things, which he found exciting in lieu of scary.

He's 16 now and wants to be a writer. Hopefully not for the National Enquirer, though.