On my LSN podcast recently, I spoke with Katy Faust, author of the must-read book Them Before Us: Why We Need A Global Children’s Rights Movement. A key aspect of the Sexual Revolution, she noted, is that it created a culture in which the sexual and romantic desires of adults are constantly placed ahead of the needs of children. Thus, despite a pandemic of porn addiction that for many children begins in elementary school, virtually nothing is done; in the public sphere, Pride Parades and other displays showcase sexual behaviors regardless of whether children are present.
A perfect example of this mindset in action can be found in a recent story out of the Netherlands. The city of Assen hosted a Pride Photo exhibition ironically titled “Celebrating the Unseen,” which is an amusing tagline for a series about sex acts that the culture collectively celebrates for an entire month each year. The photo exhibition — which featured life-sized pornographic images of men engaged in group sexual acts — attracted the ire of horrified parents, who placed a large cardboard banner with the warning “not suitable for our children” over them.
Considering the content of these photographs, that is hardly a controversial observation, and city officials decided to move the “art installation” to The Brink, a green space further from the city centre — although the Drents Museum, which regularly hosts school field trips, is nearby. The director of the exhibition, Hein-Jan Keijzer, stated that although he understood the city’s decision, the objections of parents were “not only a slap in the face for the organization but especially painful for the people in the photos.”
Apparently, the “people in the photos”— who had obviously consented to being photographed engaging in sexual activities and having those photographs displayed publicly — might find it “painful” that the public might not wish their children to see their various grapplings and semi-nude bodies. That parents might find it painful that city officials sanctioned a pornographic display in spaces funded by their tax dollars is of lesser consequence; that such images are detrimental to childhood innocence was clearly not considered at all — or, if it was, the destruction of this innocence may have been seen as a feature rather than a bug.