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Counter Balance, Queer Fishes, those North Americans

North Americans are not able to handle with sexuality, especially not if it concerns children or teenagers. A pick out of the news items.
We don't mention the many reports telling about parents who have made photos of their child in the tube or on the beach, and who were accused of making child porn, this committing sexual abuse. [...]
North Americans cannot accept a child's nudeness. It seems that children are born there with jeans.

Kincaid, James R., Is this child pornography? American photo labs are arresting parents as child pornographers for taking pictures of their kids in the bath; salonmagazine.com, Jan. 31, 2000

Picture this: A photo of a boy and girl -- unmistakably naked, posed and giggling -- holding two very large sausages (Italian?). The boy is maybe 8, the girl maybe 6. They are not touching each another, nor does the camera seem especially interested in their genitals. What catches the eye are those sausages, but not that they are involved in anything you or I would call, right off, sexual: They are not being licked, stroked or inserted. They are more atmospheric, I guess you could say.

Is this child pornography? Well, if you are a photo lab manager in Burbank, Calif., you follow the in-store policy and ask the store manager. The store manager, noticing the nudity and the meat, follows what he takes to be the law and calls the Burbank police. The police send two undercover cops out with instructions to nab the photographer. The cops then order the photo lab manager to phone the customer, tell him his prints are ready and instruct him to come pick them up right away.

[...] Even though the number of arrests is not large and the circumstances seem ridiculous, this photo lab idiocy is a serious matter: It puts all of us at risk, and it significantly erodes free speech protection by insisting that a photograph of a child is tantamount to molestation. Since it is what is outside the frame (the intention of the photographer, the reaction of the viewer) that counts legally, we are actually encouraged to fantasize an action in order to determine whether or not this is child pornography.

Schoenmann, Joe,  Zero tolerance strikes again; Clark County School District: Expel first, questions later, Las Vegas Weekly, June 28, 2001

[...] "I said, 'It's people like you who get on the Columbine lists,'" he recalls. His reference was to the now-infamous April 1999 killing of 13 at Columbine High School in Colorado by students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.
He had no idea that the school-shooting reference would stir police to action. [...]
"This was leading up to the Columbine time," Young said, referring to April 20, the two-year anniversary of the Colorado shooting. "So any type of rumor, any kinds of threats of joking, jestering or kidding, we were following up on. This was one of those cases. If the kid makes any type of threat with a weapon, and he has access, whether (it) belongs to the parent in the home or not, they are automatically taken into custody." [...]

"Secret sex lives of kids", March 2001 Ladies Home Journal

'One in twelve children is no longer a virgin by his or her thirteenth birthday, and 21 percent of ninth-graders have slept with four or more partners. An alarming report every parent must read.'

The entire American school system needs to be reexamined; Comment, March 2001, source unknown

The entire American school system needs to be stringently reexamined from primary grades through college. If high school has turned into a seething arena of boredom and competitive tension erupting in mayhem, it's partly because modern schools have become dungeons for active young men at their most hormonally driven period of life.

The joy of not having sex - yet, 26th January 2001, USA, source unknown

Just as every generation of teenagers acts as if it is the first to discover sex, every generation of middle-aged adults acts as if it is the first to discover that teenagers are having sex. Certainly the current generation of middle-aged American adults is acting that way, since teen sex has become something of a cultural preoccupation here.
The Washington Post ran a front-page story a year or two ago that chronicled the sexual activities of a bunch of upper-middle-class 13-year-olds and reported that a bacchanal of blow jobs was taking place behind the bike sheds. [...]
The report actually revealed that true love waits only for a little while - teenagers who take the virginity pledge postpone sexual relations for, on average, a few months longer than those who don't.
Taking the pledge had the biggest effect on teenagers aged between 15 and 17; while 18-year-old pledgers ended up having sex around the same time as their non-pledging peers. And pledgers, when they did eventually give it up, were less likely to engage in safe sex.

Young, Michael & Geroge, Danny, Predictors of virginity and recent sexual involvement among rural adolescents, [USA, Abstract of a] lecture, given at the 15th World Congress of Sexology, World association of Sexology, June 2001, Paris

The purpose of the study was to identify the role of educational aspirations, self-esteem, and religion in early sexual involvement. To develop programs that are effective in helping young people postpone sexual involvement, it is important to identify the antecedents of such involvement.

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