“That’s what parents are for!” This has become the one-size-fits-all answer to any complaint about further erosion of public standards of decency. The general tone behind it is, “We didn’t have kids (or don’t care about them), so let us party like we want and you stay home and protect them. If you didn’t want to do that then you shouldn’t have had kids.” I’m getting tired of it and the premise that somehow they are only my kids. They’re yours too. They are members of the next generation and they will be in power when your power is waning. Do you care yet?

I don’t perceive this same flavor of laizzes-faire when it comes to, say, the environment. Everyone knows that although it is certainly good to start at home, it will be worthless if it stops at home: if you’re the only person not polluting, who cares?

Same with diet. It’s important to post ingredient lists on foods so that people with particular sensitivities (e.g. a peanut allergy) can avoid otherwise harmless foods. We understand that at a friend’s house we might eat something we otherwise wouldn’t, say, the occasional bit of trans fat, in order to avoid disparaging their hospitality. But we don’t expect to have to search ingredient lists, on our own, for the presence of excrement, or interrogate our host to verify that our food is free of arsenic.

But as a culture we are dramatically less vigilant about our media. Let’s start with the local video store, shall we? As a grown, 40-year-old man who reads the news and has studied history and is thus no ingenue when it comes to sex, gore, and death, I am still amazed anew at just how many really hideous video covers exist, and what exactly they depict and suggest. I’m particularly distressed by how often sex, torture, and dismemberment are not simply lavishly illustrated but conflated in a way that seems like a calculated attempt to make me swear off sex forever. I stay away from the store for months for this reason, and then forget, and then, because my kids excitedly request it, I drop by to see what’s showing, and wonder…who is picking this up and taking it home? And how can I recognize them on the street?

The capper, of course, is that my kids are ingesting it. Not at my house, where I have to run a Little China in terms of locally imposed censorship. No, at friends’ houses. Which friends? Can I terminate the friendship, intervene? No. The reason is that nobody is going to tell me about it until months have passed. My kids won’t. Their friends won’t. Their friend’s parents won’t, if they even know. No, it comes out accidentally, much later, in a conversation like this:

Daughter: (after seeing a preview on TV for a horror movie) I really want to see that!
Me: Why?
Daughter: It’s cool! I like that kind of movie.
Me: Maybe it only looks cool on the preview.…How do you know it’s something you’d like?
Daughter: I’ve seen those kinds of movies before.
Me: What—where? Not here.
Daughter: (coyly) At friends’ houses.

Sure. This is what adolescents do, as they explore how tough and powerful they are becoming. They challenge each other to duels of endurance, of tolerance of pain, in order to establish ranking and to understand themselves. I know that. I did it too. But not with the kind of mentally radioactive sludge that my own kids are finding to play with. If there is any gap in the fence, they will crawl through it. I can’t prevent it all by myself. Nobody can.

I think this is one reason why child molesters are the designated monsters of this era. We define their act as the ultimate sin: the intentional stalking, cultivating, and exploitation of the innocent. And it is bad. But part of the purpose of this focus of all our fears and hate on this one crime is to distract us from the fact that our entire society is molesting our children all the time.

It’s like there’s a giant, diffuse conspiracy to goad our children into competing at being emotionally numb sex machines just as quickly as possible, to expect and anticipate violation and violence, before they can develop any natural aversion to it, before they even suspect the purpose for which they are being farmed.

Some time ago I ranted about the Middle East’s fetish for executions, public and private. Is that what this is about, in part? Do we conjure and promote these spectacles because we are robbed of the family entertainment of old, the public dismemberment of criminals and prisoners? Do we really need it? Or is it the itch of an old addiction that we can’t quite shake?