One of those insidious little things I notice sometimes is how much the window of ‘appropriate for children’ content has shrunk within the past 20 years. The range of things it is socially acceptable to show a 10-year-old has never been more limited, and it’s happened incredibly quickly.
Take, for instance, Star Trek: TNG. I grew up watching TNG. I was a little young for it as it was airing, but it got syndicated almost immediately and they would show an episode most weekday evenings on the Space Channel, and I’d watch it with my lifelong Trekkie mom. This was a very common thing. I was by no means unusual for watching Star Trek as a child.
Star Trek: TNG has lots of sex in it! It’s never explicit (unless you have a particularly niche interpretation of some of the borg stuff) but on many an occasion you’ll have a few characters doing a bit of making out followed by a closing door or fade to black, and then they wake up in bed together. If you know what sex is, you know that is what is being implied here. Even my 8-year-old self, whose understanding of the subject mostly came from books of ancient mythology that used words like 'ravish’ and 'the pleasures of the couch’ a whole bunch, could tell that what was happening was sex.
And I am not bringing this up as a 'see, I watched all this inappropriate stuff and I turned out just fine!’. I’m bringing it up to argue that TNG’s level of sexual content is not inappropriate for children (I’m not using the legalese 'minors’, because I think that lumping children and teenagers together in this conversation would make it nonsense. Star Trek is obviously appropriate for teenagers. Don’t use 'minors’ when you mean either children or teens, it just muddies the waters).
The point is that Star Trek: TNG was very obviously designed to be watched by children and teenagers. There’s a whole character in the main cast whose role in the show is to be an audience insert for children and teenagers. The moral tone of TNG, its occasional dips into 'don’t do drugs, kids’ type messaging, and its general avoidance of graphic violence all scream 'we are designing this with an audience of children - but not just children - in mind’. It’s a family show. It’s supposed to be watched by the whole family.
Which means that, until at least the end of the 90s, this amount of sexual content was generally considered appropriate for kids to see. It’s not pornographic - it’s not even graphic. Maybe the very most conservative parents wouldn’t let their kids watch TNG, but that might have had more to do with all the socialism and atheism.
So, why did that change? Why do we now have such a strong bullwark between 'things kids are allowed to know about’ and 'things for GROWN UPS ONLY 18+ Minors DNI’, and why have we relegated even the most discreet references to sex to the second category only?
And the next time you find yourself experiencing that knee-jerk 'think of the children’ reaction, consider: would what you’re looking at have been ok on Star Trek: TNG in the 90s?
So many important points in here.
Plus of course, the diminishing faith in Innuendo That Goes Over Kids’ Heads.
It used to be considered pretty okay to make references to sex things– even things that most people agreed kids “shouldn’t know about,” and even in very family friendly media– simply because it was assumed that kids didn’t know about them, and therefore couldn’t be harmed by the reference because it wouldn’t mean anything to them.
And I think the only thing that’s changed there, is that children are more likely to have access to some source of info whereby they might find out what The Innuendo means– and thus might not let it breeze on past them in total blank obliviousness when they see it on TV or in a movie– but might instead respond to it as if they sorta understand it and maybe even realize it’s kinda naughty.
Horrors.
…Which of course has absolutely nothing to do with whatever media may be showing the Innuendo in the first place, because that isn’t where they learned it.
But that’s still what gets blamed.
Eyeroll.