SOCIETY TODAY
Zdicine and morality
Fox on sex on the box
John Linklater Modern teaching method makes Wide use of television or video-tape, largely because instruction absorbed simultaneously both by eye and ear tends to be retained in the memory more readily than instruction which is merely either seen or heard. Well documented case histories of patients who have lost part of their brain through accident or disease are confirmed by numerous controlled, research studies on animals. These show that visual memory is stored in well-defined areas at the back of the brain, while auditory memory is stored at the side. When these two regions of the brain reinforce each Other, assimilation is made easier, and retention is prolonged. It is also known that instruction, being equal, method, other factors ue Ling equal, is retained more easily °Y Young people whose brain cells are more numerous and whose cerebral circuits are less fully programmed than when they grow Older. The ethological and evolutionary correlates of this argument at; e, of course, the findings that onmature mammals and preadolescent humans tend readily to accept as normal whatever they regularly experience. A sevenYear-old child who constantly sees Men killed on television, therefore gradually and inevitably comes to accept violent death as normal. He may know, intellectually, that it is ?'Trong to kill but he has so often identified himself with a killer that killing can no longer shock him as it Would do in the absence of the television image. It. is all a question of proportion. Ari intelligent child who is fortunate enough to have a widely based, traditional education and who occasionally sees reckless violence television might be able to grasp that such violence is portrayed as Part of the convention of the
screen: no great harm would be done. But a child who spends many hours each day absorbing violence from television, and most of whose experience of the world is derived through the media, will become brainwashed. A recent survey * showed that one child in every three under the age of seven is still watching television nightly at nine o'clock.
When Dr Fox, who is employed as a psychiatrist at Severalls hospital in Colchester, draws attention to the causal relationship between television programmes and juvenile delinquency, most of us would agree wholeheartedly. When he goes on to argue, however, that no similar accusation can be brought against sexuality on the screen, especially in the form of sex instruction, the mind boggles at the logic. Does the physiology of the brain then alter according to the programme on the box? Or does Dr Fox seriously imagine that no harm is caused by assaulting children in their latency, by inflicting sexual knowledge upon them willy nilly? Or does he imagine that most parents can always effectively control which television programmes their children see? In what other circumstances would he condone indecent exposure?
A child who has been brainwashed into accepting violence as normal, will tend to put violence into practice. A child who has been orientated towards sex will tend to become promiscuous. One proof of the rising promiscuity rate is, of course, the soaring incidence of veneral or sexually transmitted disease, as shown in the annual returns to the Registrar General, but a recent Gallup Poll conducted by Doctor, a weekly newspaper ftir general practitioners, interestingly confirms that seventy-six per cent of family doctors assess that young, un-married girls among their patients are, in fact, more promiscuous than they were ten years ago, and forty per cent of these doctors attribute the rising promiscuity specifically to exploitation of sex by the mass media.
Even the notorious Dr Spock has now taken heed of tradition and common sense, having presumably worked through his own emotional adolescence. Spock now states that "unless parents inhibit . . . their children's sexuality" to some
Parents and Children BBC-1 January 20. extent, the children will not mature intellectually, physically or spiritually as well as they might.
Neither Spock nor Fox, nor any other of the advocates of the widespread sex education, so prevalent in this age of collective adolescence, seem able to grasp that the latency period of man actually leads to the principal intellectual difference between man and the other mammals. When the lower mammals mature physically, they have also acquired about as much skill as they need to survive. The human brain takes much longer to programme, however, and it is during the critical pre-adolescent years that most of the higher values, ethics and morals are acquired, by sublimation. It is then that the child should be thinking of almost anything but sex.
By as much as we prostitute our best modern teaching methods to tout overt sex in every home, and thus force sexuality down the throats of our children, so we will continue to destroy their very childhood and convert them prematurely into resentful, irreverent, anxiety-ridden, uninformed adults. If violence on the box breeds violent behaviour, then sex on the box breeds sexuality. A pattern of self-indulgence encouraged in one field of activity will lead to generalised self-indulgence. Fox should think again.
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