(no subject)

[aishabintjamil]

I haven't posted here in a while, due to lack of intelligent content I wanted to share. Today I have something.

A friend recently shared one of those memes on his facebook which asked why women are so upset by Trump's recently revealed sexual comments, but all ran out to buy 50 Shades of Grey? Let's set aside the questionable merits of 50 Shades of Grey as literature - that's been argued to death. What this pointed out to me is, I think, a broader cultural problem. Broader even than sex, which takes some doing.

We, as a society, are beginning to have trouble telling fiction apart from reality.

50 Shades of Grey is fiction. Maybe a lot of women DO fantasize about that kind of relationship, but there's a world of difference between spending a few hours indulging a fantasy and acting out that fantasy. Do you really want to live every book you read? Stephen King? Game of Thrones? Really?

We should have seen the warning signs when we started censoring our cartoons instead of using them to explain to our children at a very young age that things that work in stories very often don't work in reality. You can't run off a cliff and live through it. Or fly. Or draw a tunnel on the side of a mountain and have it be usable. This used to be our first exercise in critical thinking. Can people really do that? Or do it and not get hurt. Then we had that lesson to apply later in life.

Now instead of instilling judgment in our kids, and values that say something is beyond the pale, even if someone did do it in a book, instead we want to keep them from reading the book, BECAUSE WE DON"T THINK THEY CAN TELL THE DIFFERENCE. Why is that? I think it's because we failed them at a very young age when we should have been helping them develop that skill set. Now we have a whole generation of younger adults who are missing it.