The Family Groomer Show
The Guardian has a piece by the author of “The Family Sex Show” saying it was right-wingers who objected to onstage porn for 5-year-olds.
The show is called The Family Sex Show. Its aim is to reimagine the way we think and talk about relationships and sex.
And it’s for children. What could possibly go wrong?
It doesn’t seem to have crossed Josie Dale-Jones’s mind that responsible parents don’t necessarily want Josie Dale-Jones “reimagining” the way we think and talk about relationships and sex onstage for an audience of their children. Who is Josie Dale-Jones? What’s her expertise? What does she know about child abuse, pedophilia, child groping, child grooming, child rape? Why is it up to her to reimagine such things for small children?
Making it was a process of collaboration with a diverse group of people who have varied life experiences.
There again – yes, and? Does that make “it” either harmless or good for small children? Do we want a group of random strangers explaining sex to small children in a theater?
The show is a fun and playful performance made up of songs, dances and personal stories. It is about bodies and how society views them. It also explores themes including gender, sexuality, pleasure and boundaries.
Again. Not automatically or obviously a good thing. To be more specific, the very fact that this fool thinks it would be a good thing is enough to make me think no children should go near it.
But really, the show is about care and mutual respect – and it exists in the hope that it can be a part of breaking down some of the systems of oppression alive today.
Let me guess. Like the systems of oppression that say men shouldn’t be guiding children’s hands onto their penises?
As a performance, The Family Sex Show is an invitation to experience something together as a family (whatever family means to you), encourage questioning and signpost places for audiences to figure out answers for themselves.
“Whatever family means to you” – so that can be the kid’s groomer then. Awesome.
As a guardian, the show is designed to help open conversations with your child about relationships and sex.
As a guardian? The show is a guardian? Who appointed it a guardian, and what inquiries were made? Maybe it’s not a good idea to “help open conversations” about sex with whatever random adult has brought a 5-year-old to see this play as the child’s “whatever family means to you” family.
The stupidity and cluelessness of this piece are breathtaking. The Guardian’s publication of it is a sour joke.
Then again, if the aim of the authors is manipulation and exploitation of children, they probably would not agree.
Compare then to now:
When I was a kid in the ’80s my mother (super-lefty, super-feministy, very progressive) gave my sister and me a big, glossy, brightly illustrated children’s book called The Body Book, written by Claire Rayner, who was a well-known humanist, nurse, writer and progressive political activist.
It explained and illustrated how human bodies work in a child-like but frank way: everything from breathing to bleeding to pooping, and even reproduction and dying. (And yes, there were illustrations of genitals.) I don’t remember exactly how young I was when I read it — I’d hazard about eight, maybe? Perhaps a tad young for the book’s reproduction part, but my mum was kind of striving to be progressiver-than-thou sometimes.
It was of course the reproduction part that was most memorable: even at [however young I was] I knew that part was The Big Adult Subject that was until then not to be discussed.
And I’ll bet that’s the primary reason my mum gave us the book and guided us through it: it was for the stuff about sex, not the stuff about how lungs and hearts and livers work. And countless other mums did the same for their children.
That seems to me to be a reasonable way for parents to introduce the birds and the bees to children: couch it in a broader explanation about how our whole bodies work. Material for young kids, apart from obviously explaining that sex is very much for adults only, should probably limit it to the context of biology: the role our biological vessels continually play in our existence, from birth, growing up, illness and health, reproduction and death.
Compare that to today’s progressiver-than-thous, like Josie Dale-Jones: she’s going out of her way to teach sex to kids as young as possible, and to make it as political as possible: it’s about “gender” and sexualities and diversity — things that are very much the adult part of sexuality. And it’s a massive red flag to be teaching kids to mix up sexuality with “gender”: this endangers kids because it seeds the idea that a child’s gender expression is also an expression of sexuality — which isn’t just teaching kids about sexuality, it’s telling them that in a way they’re already engaged in it.
I’ll bet she’s so absorbed in yammering about the politics and “pleasure” of sex, her show entirely neglects to even mention its primary function: that it’s the means of reproduction in our species.
Artymorty@2:
Absolutely. I would add that your mother’s approach of giving you a book on the topic to read on your own time and away from adults scrutinizing you, and specifically a book that she had already reviewed and approved of, removes any hint of strange adults possibly acting pervy to kids with their “reimagined” shows about sex. That was the same approach that my mother took with me and my sisters, too. I remember my parents asking me if I had any questions, which was sort of awkward to me at the time, but it would have been FAR more awkward to have strange adults acting out their ideas in a “show”, no matter how well intentioned they might have been.
When my son was nine, my sister was pregnant. That opened up the discussion of reproduction; he wasn’t interested in the sex part of it then. I explained in an age-appropriate manner, and he nodded, satisfied when I answered his questions about how babies got out of mommy. As he got older, I had to field ever more sophisticated questions…I was lucky because my biology background prepared me. For some people, they can’t comfortably discuss that with their kid, and I think comprehensive, age appropriate sex education in the schools can help a lot.
But teaching kindergarten kids how to masturbate? No, thanks. Not age appropriate.
Hooray! I figured it out. ‘Signpost’ is not a noun, not a modifier for ‘places’. It’s a verb! With the help of a whiteboard and an extra cup of coffee, I got there in the end: the show invites us to (1) experience something, (2) encourage questioning and (3) signpost places. Bad ideas about gender are bad, but bad Englishing is badder.
It’s a verb if it says it is! Are you denying its idenniny?! Are you nounverbphobic??
I hasten to say I’m not one to condemn verbing of nouns as a rule. No! That’s just how language languages. I’m happy to workshop, interface and dialogue till the cows come home (whereupon I could ‘milk’–rather than extract milk from–them). But in this particular case it’s confusing because it doesn’t make sense any way you look at it. The writer doesn’t really mean we’re invited to signpost, she means she or the play is signposting at us.
Heh. I am, a bit. At least, I have a visceral dislike of “impact” as a verb, which goes up to a thousand for “impactful.” But less stale pointless ones, like you, I find creative and/or amusing…except when they confuse.
I mean, like you I find them that way, not you like stale pointless ones. You not like those.