Explicit Culture

Is there anywhere suitable for children these days? I wondered this during the recent “No King’s” rally as I drove under overpass after overpass draped with giant signs that read “[expletive] Trump.” I was thankful my kids weren’t in the car that day to read them. But no doubt countless other kids did.

Airplanes. Sporting events. Libraries. They all seem to have been transformed into spaces only suitable for adults—adults who are comfortable with raunchy, explicit, and violent content, at that.

Take airplanes. It seems travelers are free to watch whatever content they want, often courtesy of the airline. It’s been almost three years, and my daughter still talks about the expletive-filled subtitles featured in the movie the man sitting next to her was watching on a transatlantic flight. She tried to look away, but it upset her. She was 11.  

I’ve seen nudity on people’s screens on airplanes and know people who have been subjected to someone else’s graphically violent television show in their line of sight. Why should entertainment that features expletives, graphic violence, or softcore pornography be allowed on airplanes where children are present? Seriously—why?

We never agreed to make exposing children (or anyone else) to explicit content a prerequisite for stepping foot outside our house.

And why are sporting events increasingly treated like showcases for freak sexual content? I had the instinct not to allow my kids to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Thank goodness, as even I did not expect to see drag queens reenacting a mashup of the Last Supper and a bacchanalia. 

But what about the kids whose dads took them to the L.A. Dodger’s game only to see nuns being mocked by men in drag?  Or the millions of kids who will watch Bad Bunny, who wears dresses and routinely features occult content, perform at this year’s Super Bowl? Even newspapers are hardly appropriate anymore; we frequently must hide ours from our 13-year-old who likes to read the news. I don’t need her reading about Jeffrey Epstein or Diddy.

But even content geared towards children in public libraries is no longer age appropriate. If I even bring my children into a library, I first do a sweep of the children’s section for material, almost always on display, featuring gender ideology, some of it with explicit content. It’s in public schools already, spaces teeming with millions of innocent eyes, and my own public school district fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the power to force children to read it, even against the express wishes and religious beliefs of parents. Thankfully, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of parental rights in that case. 

When did we decide as a society that children no longer have a right to their innocence? Even if we don’t allow screens, we still have to take our children places where giant bus ads display half naked women or other weird sexual content like the so-called “Naked Attraction” displays in London, or the New York bus ads for the “Museum of Sex.”  

I don’t think we ever really decided that making the public square an R-rated nightmare for families to navigate was acceptable. We slid into it and let corporate priorities and base adult consumer demand take the wheel. Is it any surprise that sporting events, for example, which have become exorbitantly expensive and cost prohibitive for families, would increasingly cater to adults? The Dodgers could afford to offend families because what family can afford to take their kids to an MLB game these days, anyway?  

It’s never too late to begin taking public forums back for families.

Even if you don’t bring your kids to a sporting event, they are still so expensive that they—like so much else in the entertainment industry—cater to people with no children at all. Five years ago, I attended a Coldplay concert. I didn't have earth-shattering seats, and I was still stunned by the cost. I was seated behind a family who had brought three children not much older than my three oldest. I would have loved to bring my kids, but Chris Martin's endless profanity makes that a future no-go. Don’t get me started on the explicit content in Taylor Swift’s latest album. 

But it’s never too late to begin taking back public forums for families. Turning Point USA’s decision to host a family-friendly alternative to the Super Bowl is one example of being creative and positive in an attempt to make fun things like sporting events and concerts inclusive for families in general. We can’t just gripe, like I am here. We should do something.  

It starts with stepping back and deciding that we never agreed to make exposing children (or anyone else) to explicit content a prerequisite for stepping foot outside our house. Because we didn’t, and it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Ashley E. McGuire is a Contributing Editor at the Institute for Family Studies and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female (Regnery, 2017).