Well, okay, it’s no more evil than anything else in the world. I got your attention though, didn’t I?
But I was watching t.v. the other day and I noticed something…every kid on t.v. has a computer. Every one of those computers has internet connection. Every one of those computers is in the kid’s own room. Now that struck me odd because it seemed so crazy. Why the heck would you give a kid access to the internet in the privacy of their own bedrooms?!

Now I kinda already knew this but it’s one of those things that suddenly strike you as completely insane, you know? I hadn’t really thought about how common this was before then. So I asked my neighbors the next time I was chatting with them in the yard about their kid’s computer. Yup, he has it in his bedroom. I asked my step-son if his friends had their computers in their bedrooms. He had to think a bit but eventually pointed out that he talked to two of them on the phone about something on the internet and both times they were in their bedrooms looking at it on their computers, so it would seem so.

Odd to realize something you already kinda knew but never really realized. We’re probably the only folks we know with kids who have a family computer in the living room. Now I say “family computer” but my step-son mostly uses it. It’s really his computer in the living room. We have one of our own (this one, in fact) in our bedroom.

Now, why do we have his computer in the living room? I could point out the obvious but let me illustrate instead. This issue first came up way back many eons ago (last November) when I had won the rights to redecorate the house. The way I figured it, if I was going to be spending the most time in this house (renting properties doesn’t require a lot of “away time”) then I would be keeping the house up while he worked. It followed that, as the house is largely my responsibility, this afforded me significant leeway in such things as arranging furniture or the color of the walls. These sorts of things all have a direct impact on home maintenance.
By which, of course, I meant that men shouldn’t be allowed to keep house. They’re generally bad at it. No, not all of them of course. But most. Mine is, for sure. And besides all that, I’m female. I have a genetic predisposition towards nesting. It wouldn’t be logical for anyone else to keep this house in shape and deprive me of satisfying that impulse.
In the process of moving a few things around to where they so clearly should have been placed to begin with I naturally noticed the computer in the living room. When I made my case to my husband that the computer should be moved into his son’s room, since it was taking up room in the living room, he thought about it for a minute then sat down at that computer and showed me why.
(For those among you with an insatiable curiosity, here’s a homework assignment: go Google the word “rimjob”, something your average twelve year old might hear discussed at school, wonder as to the meaning of and decide to go research on the net. Now click any four randomly chosen links there on that first page. Once you’re finished vomiting in disgust and had a moment to collect yourself, I’ll point out that curiosity killed the cat.)

Now Matthew has a boss, a single mother, who constantly complains that her teenage son uses the computer to look at porn while she’s at work. Sometimes, he looks at it while she’s at home and she stumbles across him doing that. She loved to complain about Net Nanny and the various other programs she used to try to block that stuff from her son’s computer. Nothing seemed to work. He was constantly getting at it.
Matthew’s argument was the obvious one. He’s a teenage boy. Of course he’s going to get at it. You can’t stop any motivated human being from getting at anything they’re truly motivated to get at. This brings to mind the old saying (attributed to Lincoln, I think?) that all an assassin requires to succeed in assassination the president is a willingness to sacrifice his own life in the process. The truth of this being obvious: humans can achieve anything they are truly motivated to achieve. Teenage boys are extremely motivated to get at some porn.

The liberal thinking here is, as always, since you can’t stop them then help them do it properly. Matthew’s boss moved her son’s computer into the living room. He continued to view porn, even when she and her mother (the kid’s grandmother) were right there in the living room watching t.v.
Now, why did this not work? Well, as I’ve insinuated, she’s a liberal bonehead. She doesn’t spank her kid and can’t even bring herself to “ground” him. She bitches and whines and generally does nothing. So of course her teen son views porn with her right there in the room.

Now, why does this approach work for us so well and not for her? Because Matthew will spank his son if comes across something pornographic, even by accident, or even dares try to use that computer when someone else isn’t in the room. Consequently, his son is twelve and has never been caught looking at porn on the computer. I can’t even find any traces of his doing so on the sly when I look and he’s not nearly computer savvy enough to cover his tracks. It just doesn’t happen.
Yes, it’s true that you can’t stop people from doing anything they are truly motivated to do. You can, however, set the price for it just a tad higher than they are willing to pay. The reason why it requires the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life to assassinate the president is because all those folks who’s job it is to protect him have set that price just that high. Consequently, you rarely have anyone even try to assassinate the president despite that fact that any given president typically has a fairly good percentage of the populace who despise him enough to kill him.

Our son most probably has a strong desire to view porn. He is, after all, practically a teenage boy (he’s twelve). At the same time he knows exactly what pornography is, a tool to make money hand over fist by appealing to the single greatest weakness men have: sex. It’s a manipulation of the male sex drive that progressively and increasingly assaults their sexuality, until it utterly perverts it. Like drug abuse you have to have more and more, steadily increasing in perversity, until you reach your baseline level of perversion (usually somewhere around kiddie porn and rape fantasy). Sometimes you even get a serial killer who learns to appreciate the art of sexual torture and raping a woman to death.
Our son also knows his father will tan his hide if he catches even a hint that he’s been looking at such things. And he knows exactly how I feel about these things as well. To aid him in resisting this impulse, we put his computer in the living room where he can’t get at it with anything like privacy. Most of the time he has specific sites he goes to for homework research and games. If there’s anything else he needs to find, he never fails to grab one of us to help him look it up.
Consequently, he doesn’t look at porn on the net.

If you’re a parent and your kid has their own computer/internet set up in the privacy of their own bedroom…then you’re an idiot. Girl or boy, doesn’t matter. Have you seen “To Catch a Predator?” Hello? When exactly did you get so stupid?
Go protect your children. You didn’t have kids so that they can make you happy. You had kids so that you could raise them to be healthy, happy adults. This is your job. Go do it.