SPANK YOU VERY MUCH
( REPRODUCED ARTICLE )
Maybe you saw our cover last week. It was our Valentine’s issue. We had a lead
story about love and loss and philandering, a sexy poem, and, out front, a
cartoon of a woman with a small whip and a man across her knee in spanking
position. His pants were down, his cartoony butt was depicted. And if you
answered my phone, you would have thought we had a photo of the Pope being
sodomized by insurance salesmen.
It was my idea. Most Valentine’s art is insipid. We didn’t want to be insipid. And since I reasoned that a big part of this holiday was men doing things because women expect them to — being spanked, if you will — the cover seemed appropriate. We did a version with his pants up, but it was listless, and we wondered whether anyone would get it.
The first call came from a woman who said she was phoning on behalf of the Southcentral Foundation. She said our cover was disgusting.
“Why?” I said.
You would’ve thought I bit her. “Why!? ... Because it’s sick ... Children will see that.”
“And why is that a problem?”
She hung up.
Then another woman called and said she was with the same organization, and we went through roughly the same litany, until we got to the same sticking point and she put me on hold. When she didn’t return after several minutes, I hung up.
It wasn’t until several days later that I had a caller who was more forthcoming. Over the weekend we’d put up some posters that were identical to the cover. She said she’d seen one while out walking with her nine-year-old daughter. “The picture isn’t a picture children should be looking at,” she told me. It constituted “passive sexual abuse,” she said.
The term was new to me, but I was pretty sure what was coming. And I was outraged.
“Passive sexual abuse,” she explained, at my urging, occurs “when something is seen or implied... that causes a loss of innocence.”
Which would mean that all children are constantly being passively sexually abused. Which is another way of saying they grow up.
“I would like you to open up your mind,” she said, “to accept that it takes all of us to raise our children, whether they’re ours or not.”
The old it-takes-a-village routine.
I never said I’d baby-sit. They’re not my kids. And having been one, I find it difficult to believe that a child old enough to read is innocent or presexual, or whatever the fashionable pseudo-scientific term is. Kids are observers and spies in the larger world we inhabit — the one that they’ll inherit. To want to keep them innocent is tantamount to deprivation.
A child seeing our cartoon would see a spanking, something most kids can relate to. It takes an adult to infer overt sex-play. As for the bared cartoon derièrre, I can only surmise that the danger is that a child will realize many mammals have buttocks.
Since I don’t believe our conduct threatens children in any way, I don’t see a problem. What I see instead is incipient fascism cloaked in public-health gobbledygook. I believe the real problem isn’t what kids might think, but the adult fear of knowledge that all but the dullest children quickly come to possess. Along the way, they ask questions. Good questions. And some adults are embarrassed because they must either lie or say, yes, this is our world. It’s often strange and puzzling, and none of us can fully comprehend it.
You could do a lot worse.
Towards the end of our conversation, I asked the “passive sexual abuse” caller what her daughter thought of the poster.
She said the little girl asked her what it was.
“And what did you say?” I asked.
She was candid to a fault. She said she responded by ripping it down. Later that day, she said, she went back out and “confiscated” all the other Press posters she could find.
Because they weren’t healthy. Because she needs help parenting. And the best she could come up with was removing anything that might cause her, the parent, pain.
Here’s a parable that ought to help. Nicholas, the last Russian Czar, and his wife, Alexandra, had a son afflicted with hemophilia, a condition whereby the blood fails to properly clot. Fearing that the slightest scrape could end in tragedy, they did what surely seemed sensible to them: They had serfs bandage every tree and shrub in the palace garden.
Not long after that, they were murdered, and it was a long time before anyone openly wept for their demise.
........ Robert Meyerowitz , anchoragepress.com , Feb. 18-24, 1999 / Vol. 8, Ed. 7
