“I don’t care if you mix your peas and corn. Just don’t call it porn.”
-comic strip from the early 2000s
“Ooooh, this one! It has pictures of babies.” That’s a fairly innocuous outburst from a baby-doll mad little girl rifling through books. Little Free Libraries, those whimsical birdhouse-like boxes stuffed with cast-off books, always yield the unexpected. The children tend to grumble about the dearth of kiddie reading material. This day, there was great excitement to discover a book about babies.
But was it about babies? Out of the corner of a mother’s wary eye the title screamed. “Porn for New Moms.” What diabolical invention is this? The encroaching presence of pornographic material cannot possibly have coopted a book about babies. Can it?
A frantic flipping through the pages yielded relief. The title was meant in jest. The pictures were all harmless. Mostly men in ‘90s silk shirts with funny lines imagining a world of over-involved and super sophisticated dads “If I promise to do all the laundry and diaper changes for the next few years, can we have another?” “This is how mommy likes her duck l’orange.” There was cause for a chuckle.
After relief followed quiet disappointment. Why was there “porn” in the Little Free Library? Ah, yes, so puritanical to ask such a question. And yet, to behold innocent children undefiled by influences beyond their years is to witness a miracle. Protecting that world is a good and worthy goal. One that is difficult to achieve if even the box of books in the next neighborhood might have material that cannot be trusted.
More than disappointment, perhaps, the title prompts a sense of realism. However happily innocent any child within 100 yards of a personal computer or smartphone may be, it’s a matter of when not if the child will encounter actual graphic material. If a young reader doesn’t yet know the word “porn,” it’s high time she learned it, as well as an action plan for the first time it assaults the eyes from a screen somewhere, an event likely on the horizon for most of us.
The question remains: Why “Porn for New Moms”?
Humor is, in its most elemental approximation, putting together experiences or ideas in an unexpected way. The incongruity of such pairings lights up our brains and tickles our fancy. Pulling together children’s entertainment and adult material, then, can be rather humorous. It’s also cheap.
Like putting curse words in cross-stitch patterns (which are apparently widely available), pairing children’s entertainment with sexual themes seems edgy. If it’s increasingly common and widely practiced, however, it ceases to be edgy.
Watching old movies (say, made before the 1960s), one can be positively scandalized by events and conversations. But only as an adult. The plot and character development in full are inscrutable to children who don’t have context for the carefully crafted revelations. That’s classy.
Taking children’s toys and cartoons, books aimed at moms with babies, and simply slapping the word “porn” on it can be very funny. But it’s also a strong indicator of where we are headed. We certainly could do with more humor, not less, and policing jokes is a sure indicator of societal decline. Better “porn” in the Little Free Library than no jokes at all? That’s a sad state of affairs.
In sum, choose to be classy. Tell your kids what porn is before they find it in the library, of one kind or another. And find some really good jokes, because you will need them!
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