Double standards

My last blog entry on role models made me think of double standards, especially in the US (if only because I happen to reside in the US, and am more familiar with everyday life here than elsewhere).

Here is another double standard for you – related, I think, to the double standard that allows Jerry Brookheimer to make TV in which I am subjected to a grisly murder (with lots of food colouring and Karo syrup) in the first three seconds before I can even reach the remote to shut the TV off – but in which it is offensive to women to have a plucky female character tied to the buzzsaw.

Some of you may be familiar with Philip Pullman’s sort-of children’s book series called His Dark Materials. The first book of the three was published in the UK as Northern Lights and in the US as The Golden Compass (also the title of the movie they made of it). The books are a little controversial because the author is a self-avowed atheist, and the books are seen as anti-religion in general and anti-Catholic in particular. I have my problems with some aspects of the books – having read the first one – not because he is anti-religion, more because his hostility to organized religion is so adolescent, so fundamentally trivial for all the gussying up.

But I digress. Small parts of the last book in the series were censored in the US because of references to the central character’s (a girl on the edge of puberty) emerging sexuality. Now, before we go all gangbusters on an anti-censorship rant, let’s admit that free speech has some limit, even if the right is very broad. We don’t want graphic porn in the hands of little kids, for example (well, I don’t).

But Pullman is hardly porn. So even though I really disagree with this particular example of censorship, it’s on the lack of merit of this case, rather than a general (and empty) platitude of “censorship is wrong.”

Now at the same time, this being close to Hallowe’en, one can go to any mall in my area and find specialty seasonal stores selling costumes and props for Hallowe’en for kiddies and grownups. Have you seen what they make for little kids these days? I don’t mean 18 yr olds, or even 13 year olds. I mean have you seen what they are selling for 6 year olds? Let’s just say things that in my view are highly age-inappropriate. Stuff with the same creepy tinge as the sort of outfits you’d find in very disturbing JonBenet kiddie beauty pageants.

So let me get this straight: it’s OK to dress up my first grader like a whore from the Emerald City of Oz, but it’s not ok to let my adolescent daughter read something true and accurate about her first sexual feelings. Right. And I am weird for liking damsels in distress?