Anti-porn campaign's seductive appeal comes too late

• Source: Global Times
• [20:40 January 31 2010]
• Comments

By Barry Cunningham

 My daughters were ages nine and seven, bickering over some childish nonsense, when the older sister passed a note to the younger one over the dinner table: "You are a hore."

I grabbed the note and went into a father-knows-best routine.

"First of all," I said, unable to avoid sounding like a teacher, "'hore' is spelled with a 'w.' Second, I don't want to hear you call anyone by that word again, and especially not your own sister!"

The little one looked up at me with wide-eyed innocence. "What's a whore?"

There was no way to duck the question, so I gave her a straight-forward answer: "A low-class woman who sells her body to men for money."

She blinked in confusion. "Well, what part of her body does she sell?"

Ah, the joys of innocence. Unfortunately, the Internet revolution doesn't give kids much time to be kids either in China or the US.

Two years later, my precious daughters were peeking at porn.

This time they were bickering over a borrowed T-shirt, when the younger one turned tattle-tale, blurting out in a song-song voice:

"Alexandra is peeking at porn, lalala."

Actually, I already knew this without spying on them because kids can't keep a secret.

They had dashed out of the house one afternoon to buy popsicles from an ice cream truck, leaving hard-core sex pictures on our home computer screen. I was stunned because I had set parental controls on the PC, installed cyber-sitter software, and repeatedly warned them about child sexual predators prowling the Internet.

Getting around all the porn filters is an easy challenge for children of the Information Age. They are natural born computer wizards. When they can't find a way to download sex scenes directly, they link up with their cyber pals on MySpace or Facebook and share stuff so vulgar it would make a sailor blush.

Upset at the time, I remember wishing there was a button I could push that would censor all pornography from the Web.

Right now, China has such a button and the government has pushed it.

But the Great Firewall simply can't keep up with the cleverness and ingenuity of kids who are naturally inquisitive about sex.

China's anti-porn crackdown has blocked thousands of websites, tightened up domain names, monitored text messages and offered cash rewards to people who squeal on their porno-loving friends.

But as I learned from my daughters, it's too late.

Censorship has not prevented an astounding amount of smut being available in China.

So what is a parent to do when the cat is out of the bag? I decided to talk openly to my daughters about sex, using porn as a negative example.

Admittedly it is hard for moms and dads to talk about sex in China, where parents have a stock answer to a child's age-old question, "Where did I come from?"

I can't believe Chinese parents actually say, "We found you in the garbage," but let's save that one for the cultural differences file.

My experiment with openness began as a one-way conversation, but pretty soon my daughters surprised me by saying they found porn vulgar and "uck-y"

"Porno queens," they said, were "skanky 'ho's."

My older daughter, by that time in middle school, went on to talk about sex as a beautiful expression of love and marriage, and how much she wanted a child of her own some day.

When the subject of dating came up, I had a half-joking response, borrowed from a friend: "You can date when you're sixteen and have sex when I'm dead."

"Dad," my younger daughter sighed. "Sex is no big deal to us."

Ouch! Blame it on Google, blame it on the schools, blame it on modern society, but parents really shouldn't blame themselves if their kids are growing up too fast.

As my daughter says, "The world is shifting," and I guess parents have to roll with the punches.

The hardest part about being a dad on the information superhighway is letting your kids learn from their own mistakes.

The author, an Emmy Award-winning TV news correspondent, is a copy editor with the Global Times. barrycunningham@ globaltimes.com.cn