As a society, we can't protect children from pornography and keep it easily accessible for adults, but that's what we want to do. If anyone were to attempt to take the freedom to produce and view porn away from adults in this country, they would fight for their "right". At the same time they fight strongly against children and teenagers viewing it. How can this hypocrisy exist? It's simply, really. You see, it's not that they don't view porn as "dirty" and "wrong", but that they like it and want it all for themselves.

"Protect the children from exposure" makes porn sound rather like a contagious disease, but porn is merely an extension of what adults are really trying to protect children from: knowledge of sex. It's that parents want to postpone an inevitable thought process (thinking about sex) because they don't want to deal with it. It's not that children and especially teenagers aren't ready, but that the combination of sex and their kids makes them uncomfortable, especially for mothers and sons and for fathers and daughters. Most caucasian men have a great deal of sexual tension between themselves and their daughters. A father can't spend too long looking at his teenage daughter because, biologically, he finds her desirable and he doesn't want to think that way. When his daughter comes home pregnant and he inevitably flips out, it's all to easy to answer his question "What were you thinking?" with "He forced me." Of course, that would inevitably be followed by a father's vengeance. The same applies to a white mother and her son. Jealousy makes her not want to share her son with others. Thus, parents avoid discussing sex because it opens them to the awareness of the sexual tension between adults and youth. "Exposure" is no different for anyone who is viewing it for the first time. Anyone at any age can become used to something or be shocked by it. It depends upon how the person reacts to situations in his or her life and that never changes.

The problem is that adults see "kids" as their last moral hope. It's a false method of self-salvation. You see, if their children are extensions of themselves and children are innocent, then they can be sinners. They had wild sex and did drugs when they were teenagers, but their teens won't be like them. Their kids won't end up living the lives the adults live now. Even strippers, who say they're okay with their lifestyle, don't want their kids to do what they do and have done. Yet, children don't learn from the empty words of hypocrites. They learn by example.

The more corrupt and sinful our world becomes the more adults want to protect their children from that world. They want a better future for them. Those aren't bad intentions at all, but they try to force children into an imaginary world where nothing bad happens. One problem: Eventually the real world will begin creeping in, a world with death, war, pain, and sex. That's why parents hate puberty. It's inevitable and often comes before the parents are ready. "They don't understand that there are bad people out there that want to hurt them," a mother will say. "I know," her child responds. "They go to my school." Children are just little versions of adults. They are the same people as the adults they'll become. Protecting children from reality doesn't work. Reality has to change. And, yes, that may mean giving up sacred "adult only" pleasures. I know, after being told for years that you're "not ready", it's tempting to feel that you should be rewarded with the adult exclusive privileges you envied for so long, but perhaps my generation and the next won't feel that way if we stop the cycle now. Childhood and teenagehood is not an extension of infancy but a pathway to adulthood. If we think of it that way, we may finally realize just what we've prepared for our children. Either we accept adults and "children" (people under 18) viewing pornography or we don't accept children or adults viewing it.

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