In an impressive expansion of the term “pornographic,” a Northville, Michigan woman, Gail Horalek asked that Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) be removed from the school’s curriculum because: “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading. It’s inappropriate for a teacher to be giving this material out to the kids when its really the parents’ job to give the students this information.” The passages that she’s dubbed “pornographic” are actually more anatomical, given that they discuss Frank attempting to learn more about her own body, than they are “designed to arouse lust,” the conventional meaning of pornographic.

But rather than quibble over the definition, in rendering a verdict on Horalek’s complaint, Robert Behnke, the assistant superintendent for Instructional Services in Northville, stood by the inclusion of the edition of the book in the seventh-grade curriculum on the grounds of its relevance to the unit on courage in which it was taught. And he reminded Horalek that existing school regulations mean she can get pretty much what she wanted. The full email he sent to parents, posted by one of them on a message board, reminds the community:

The committee also suggested the district take steps to further communicate information about the units of study within the middle school literature courses, and where possible, provide booklists to parents with the notation that reading selections can always be reviewed by parents prior to making a literature selection. As always, in the event that a concern surfaces during a unit and is brought to the teacher’s attention, adjustments can be made to move the student to another literature selection and/or an alternative assignments can be discussed.

A communication regarding the seventh grade English Language Arts units of study and booklists is being created and will be shared with parents in the near future. Communication on units of study and booklists from other grades also will be forthcoming.

At Northville Public Schools we are proud of the partnerships we have forged with parents in the best interest of all students. Keeping in mind that families within the Northville community have varying perspectives, and that our students have varying levels of sensitivity and maturity — which are often best accommodated by their parents — the district strives to provide choices for parents and students where appropriate and possible when it comes to programming and courses. As a school district, we also encourage parents to use supplemental learning activities and books that reflect their own family’s values and perspectives to support reading and literature analysis taking place in the classroom.

If Horalek wants to be the person responsible for introducing her daughter to issues of sexuality, the Northville Public Schools give her every right to do so. If she’d Googled the book when her daughter’s syllabus came out, she would have found references to the removal of the Definitive Edition from the curriculum in the Culpeper County, Virginia school system on some of the same grounds she complained about. If she’d searched the text of the diary on either Google Books or through Amazon, she would have seen the passages that made her uncomfortable before her daughter even started reading the book. Maybe Horalek couldn’t have predicted what might have made her daughter uncomfortable in a classroom setting, but if she thinks there are certain subjects that should be reserved for parental instruction, there were any number of ways Horalek could have checked the book to see if it threw up red flags for her.

I’m not opposed to the idea that parents should play a role in their children’s education, or that parents have some sense of what makes their children comfortable or uncomfortable—though I don’t think that knowledge is complete. But it seems to serve the interests of the most people to give those parents and those children appropriate exits from the mainstream curriculum, and resources to help them supplement the curriculum they want to opt out of.

Before last night’s episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit aired, NBC was promoting the episodes by teasing that the headlines it would be ripping its storyline from were the ones made by former Rep. Todd Akin last year, when he claimed that women who were survivors of so-called “legitimate rape” couldn’t become pregnant. The episode did that, recasting Akin as a former Congressman and discredited obstetrician. But rather than stopping there, SVU did something even more effective and important, illustrating the consequences of “legitimate rape” claims not just for policymakers, but for survivors—particularly for what they mean for rapists’ ability to seek custody of the children born to women they’ve attacked.

The case Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) was investigating involved Avery, a sports reporter who brought rape charges against her cameraman, Rick (Homeland‘s David Marciano). When she became pregnant, Rick, who was defending himself, brought to the stand as an expert witness a former Congressman and practicing obstetrician who testified that “Many of my medical colleagues won’t admit it, but in my experience, it’s nearly impossible for a victim of legitimate rape to become pregnant.” The show used the character to illustrate the true insensitivity of that position from both a lawmaker and a doctor’s perspective: when Rick asked the Congressman what he’d do if a rape survivor came to him for medical treatment, the Congressman said, on the stand, “I would tell her, honey, if you need to lie to yourself or your family, okay. But don’t lie to Doc Showalter. Or the Lord.”

That’s not exactly subtle, but SVU did something smart with the episode, showing how Rick used the Congressman’s testimony to try to retcon not just consensual sex between himself and Avery, but a relationship with her. When Rick had Avery on the stand, he suggested that their conversations on the road as coworkers, her asking him for help with her bags, and the fact that she undressed after she thought he’d left the apartment were all evidence that she had somehow seduced him or consented. “I gave you the child you always wanted,” Rick told Avery in the courtroom, using the fact that she kept the baby because of prior difficulties getting pregnant as evidence of her emotional attachment to him. “How often have you seen an actual rape victim become pregnant and decide to keep the baby?” Rick asked Olivia when he was cross-examining her. Ultimately he’d be acquitted because one member of the jury believed the “legitimate rape” argument, a potent testimonial to the damage that even the limited spread of an idea like this can do.
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If it takes three instances to make a trend, then Admission, the romantic comedy starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd that opened this weekend, makes it official: Fey may take on a great many subjects in her movies and television work, but her great emerging theme is what happens when professional women in their late thirties are confronted with their own maternal urges. Admission, which flips the script on efforts concerned with fertility like Baby Mama and 30 Rock, could have been a fresh take for Fey, a look at a character who genuinely doesn’t want to have children. But unfortunately, it’s her weakest stab at the subject yet, a movie that’s unwilling to grapple with the reasons other than simply being busy that a woman might have put off childbearing—or why a woman might not want children at all.

In Admission, unlike her previous characters, who have had trouble conceiving, Portia Nathan, Fey’s rigid Princeton admissions officer character, got pregnant in college. Rather than raise the child, Portia gave up the baby for adoption, and buried all thoughts of having a family so deep that they don’t resurface until 16 years later, when they’re forcibly unearthed by a classmate, John Pressman (Paul Rudd), who believes one of the students at the alternative school that he runs is Portia’s son. What follows is Portia’s quest to get the boy, Jeremiah (Nat Wolff) into Princeton, hoping that his love of learning and exceptionally high test scores will offset his extremely poor grades and lack of activities.

But while all of her efforts, including getting Jeremiah a chance to stay on campus, setting up an interview with an eccentric professor of philosophy, and trying to juice his ventriloquism hobby into a legitimate side pursuit, are mildly amusing, they also serve to allow Admission to avoid larger, and much more interesting, questions. We learn that Portia’s college boyfriend broke up with her before she found out she was pregnant, but the movie never asks whether she would have kept her child had they stayed together. When, before Portia meets Jeremiah, her long-term boyfriend Mark (Michael Sheen, who played one of Liz Lemon’s most irritating boyfriends on 30 Rock), an English professor, leaves her for a Virginia Woolf scholar he’s gotten pregnant with twins, Admission focuses more on the fact that the other woman is more glamorous than Portia, rather than interrogating the idea that Portia’s stated lack of interest in children might have made her less desirable to a man who feels the pull of a more conventional family structure, even though he hates kids. And while Portia clearly feels that she didn’t do right by Jeremiah, Admission never makes remotely clear what, other than getting him into Princeton, she wants to do with her adopted son. Does she want to support him financially? Have a friendship with him? Of course the discovery of a specific child raises specific questions, but Admission spends more time poking fun at Portia’s fiercely feminist mother Susannah (Lily Tomlin) than it does at actually exploring what Portia would do differently in raising her own child, or why she might genuinely not have wanted children at all, given her upbringing. And the movie never even really resolves the question of whether Portia doesn’t want to be a parent, or whether the trauma of her unwanted pregnancy caused her to bury her maternal urges, preferring instead to throw in a silly montage in place of character development.
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Given that efforts are continuing to pin blame for gun violence on violent media culture, the content industries are responding proactively with a new and voluntary campaign to help parents understand the tools that already exist to help them keep their children from consuming media they find disturbing:

In the news release on Wednesday, representatives for the industries said they would “make a positive contribution to the national conversation on violent behavior by launching a national educational campaign through communications channels including television public service announcements, educational and informational websites, in-theater advertising, and other media.”

The industry representatives include the lobbying groups for filmmakers, theater owners, broadcasters, and cable operators. They said the public service ads would appear on television and on the Web in the months to come. The ads will remind parents about the existing television and film ratings systems and the parental controls that are built into most television sets. Ads about the film ratings system will also be shown in movie theaters.

As someone who was very effectively kept away from violent movies, television, and video games as a child—though not from an extremely violent graphic novel version of Frankenstein, which gave me nightmares for months—I’m genuinely curious as to what options the parents in the audience wish they had to regulate their children’s media useage that aren’t available to them now. I totally understand that it can be jarring to have advertising for violent or sexual content come on during or in front of programming that itself is rated for general audiences. And I imagine trying to prevent content creep both at school as children get older and have more autonomy over how they spend their time, and as kids visit other people’s houses where video games are more widely available or certain channels are unblocked, must be a constant source of frustration.

The first problem is one that could be fixed by voluntary self-regulation on the part of movie theaters and television broadcasters, in coordination with movie studios and video game manufacturers. The second is harder, and involves lots of conversations with your children about what hard, scary things mean, and what makes you uncomfortable, and what makes them uncomfortable. And the latter probably involves some limits-testing and kids encountering things that upset them, and that they decide they’re not ready for. That’s a risk I think some parents don’t particularly want to take, but it seems to me to be a fairly necessary part of children and young adults developing their own internal set of limits, which are likely to be more effective than simply asking them to abide by parentally-determined ones.

But beyond those ongoing efforts and voluntary regulation by the industry, and excluding the idea of bans on certain kinds of content on the grounds that censorship is neither desirable nor implementable, what are the resources you wish you had? Better channel-blocking and web-monitoring software? Guides to talking about certain kinds of images, like gun violence or sexual assault? Or are you all set?

This post discusses plot points from the February 12 episode of Justified.

The last two episodes of Justified have been full of advancements in the search for Drew Thompson, the vanished man who holds the key to the arrival of cocaine in Harlan County. But I have to admit, I haven’t been particularly engaged by this season of the show’s central mystery. Instead, my favorite parts of Justified this season have involved an evolving juxtaposition between U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens (Tim Olyphant) and his oldest friend and enemy, Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins). The show’s always played with the marginal differences between the two men, contrasting Raylan’s competence with Boyd’s charisma. But now the show is playing with the sense of who’s the good man and who’s the bad one by contrasting their relationships with the women in their lives, Winona, who is pregnant with Raylan’s child, but determined that they can’t make a go of it as a couple, and Ava, who is newly-engaged to Boyd.

In last week’s episode, Raylan simultaneously tried to prove that he could be a responsible figure in Winona and their child’s life, while simultaneously undermining the impression that he was capable of living up to his obligations. When he found out Winona had found a job, Raylan insisted “You don’t have to do that. I’ve been picking up some extra money doing side jobs.” But the side jobs he was doing were under the table, rather than sanctioned by the Marshal Service, and based on events earlier in the season, it’s not exactly clear that Raylan’s going to be able to hold on the money he picks up working on the side, given the general lawlessness of Harlan. Trying to be cute, Raylan told the child “Hey little one, you got to lose the tail. Come out and read about your daddy in the paper.” Winona couldn’t resist pointing out that “this baby lost its tail a little while ago, just so you know.” Raylan tried to defend himself, insisting “I’m a little behind on my homework, but the point is, I’m going to be here for you and the baby.” But it was an idea he immediately proved he can’t live up to, heading off as soon as he got a call from the office, and leaving Winona to her appointment.

Much of what defines Raylan as a Marshal is his competence: he’s cool in a standoff, knows how to shoot out an airbag to distract a suspect, has a good sense of what pressure points to put on a teenage girl run wild. But knowing how to fire a gun and being possessed of the confidence to insist on the correctness of your decisions isn’t the same thing as being a partner or a father. Raylan’s pulled to a sphere where his knowledge is useful and his decision-making is central, where his partners largely defer to him, and he’s familiar with the processes that arbitrate his decisions that are judged to be bad. Parenthood and relationship-building offer him none of those consolations or escape hatches—they’re roles that require compromise, sitting around and listening, accepting that someone else’s experiences and interpretations of events take precedence over your own.
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It’s less amazing to me that Elizabeth Hurley pitched these bikinis as appropriate for girls as young as age 8 than it is that there are enough parents who would put their kids in the suits to make them marketable:

As of this writing, Hurley’s site supporting her swimwear line appears to be down, presumably crashed by the volume of response to these and other items in the line. But according to Huffington Post, the copy for the pink swimsuit described it as “for girls [ages 8-13] who want to look grown up.” But the thing about little girls who play dress-up is that the way they go about it often emphasizes their lack of sexual maturity (and to a certain extent, the artifice of womanhood), be it the hilariously ill-fitting shoes they purloin from their mother’s closets or lipstick that wanders far outside the boundaries of their lips. These swimsuits are cut to fit—and to reveal—these girls’ bodies. They’re less for girls who want to feel grown-up, than for parents who think it’s amusing or cute to dress their kids like adults, even if that means sexualizing their children far beyond their years. Parents are supposed to moderate their children’s impulses, not expose them to all the consequences of them.

If last year was the he-cession television season, with a series of unsuccessful shows about the struggles of men to stay financially solvent in the downturn, this is the year of the stay-at home father figure. On Fox, Ben & Kate, and on NBC, Guys With Kids and The New Normal are all, with varying degrees of success, exploring what fatherhood means.

The best of the pilots for these shows I’ve seen is that for Ben & Kate, created by Dana Fox, who was an adviser on New Girl, and this year is out on her own. In that show, Ben Fox, who is based closely on Fox’s real-life brother, is a shiftless man who ends up moving home to live with his sister Kate and her daughter. Kate is a single mother, and Ben ends up deciding to take over her daughter’s care, an idea that both frees Kate up to get her life back on track, and spurs Ben on a road to maturity he’s thoroughly avoided. When I asked Fox at her panel how she would avoid falling into the cliche of treating men with small children as if they were inherently hilarious, she said she hoped to create a specific dynamic that would avoid that trap.

“Growing up he got into so much trouble,” Fox said of her brother. “He’s a really, really smart guy who intentionally does incredibly dumb things all the time and would get us into so much trouble…And the thing that I noticed was that he was “the” world’s greatest father, and I sort of thought, like, in a million years, if you had met my brother when he was younger, you would never think that he could have kept two children alive, much less actually kept them happy and well adjusted…I realized that, you know, this character who was so sort of inherently goofy himself and so young at heart himself could talk on the same level to this kid. And when they talk, it’s like two grown ups talking. He doesn’t talk down to her. He really thinks that…they’re kind of best friends.”

That’s a terrific dynamic for a showrunner to articulate, specific and fully realized, and the Ben & Kate pilot really captures the relationship Fox described. If only Guys With Kids and The New Normal, which play out the dudes-with-babies-are-riotous dynamic inflected alternately by heterosexuality and homosexuality, had the same level of insight.

Guys With Kids is neatly encapsulated by what Jimmy Fallon, who created the show, described as his inspiration for it in his session yesterday. “[He and his producing partner] were just talking about all the guys that we were seeing around New York City and Time Square, like with the Baby Bjorns and the babies on the backs of their bikes, and I was saying, like, these are like young good looking guys,” he told the audience. “They’re just embracing the role of dad, and we both said at the same time ‘DILFs.’” That phrase became the working title for the pitch, and while it may be a new (and deeply unnecessary) turn of phrase, the show that’s resulted from it, about a group of young fathers who live in the same New York apartment building, feels like a refugee from 1995. All the humor is predicated on the idea that men wearing baby bjorns, or in fact, spending time with their children during the work day, is such a strange and comical juxtaposition that it will inherently produce laughs. The premise might have worked if the show presented itself as a broader version of NBC’s Up All Night that ditched the extremely wealthy parents of the title and simply taken the fact that men take care of children as a matter of course, exploring the specific relationships they have with their children instead. But the story is a long way from that happier medium.

The New Normal, by contrast, perhaps could only be made in 2012, but that hardly makes it free from cliches, some of which undermine the show’s entire message. In this sitcom, from Glee and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy, a gay couple, played by Girls’ Andrew Rannells’ and Justin Bartha, decide they want to have a child together and choose as their surrogate a single mother who hopes to use the money from surrogacy to go back to law school. It’s not a bad premise, but it gets off on an extremely sour note: the couple begins thinking surrogacy because Rannells’ character falls in love with a baby in a department store who is wearing an adorable sweater. It’s a sequence that confirms all the worst stereotypes about gay men as materialistic, selfish, shallow, even seeking instant gratification, and it’s done extremely effectively.

“My partner and I have been having conversations about surrogacy and meeting with people and talking about it,” Murphy said. “We’re really writing hopefully a great depth to this couple, and it’s not hard to be it’s not easy to be a gay couple having a child. We deal with those issues. For me, obviously as somebody who very much does have that dream, I don’t feel that way. I would never feel that way.” That may be his hope, but the gaps between Murphy’s emotions and his execution is clear throughout The New Normal.

I think Ben & Kate stands a chance of being excellent, Guys With Kids could develop into a sold if unmemorable show, and The New Normal may be simply too bounded by Murphy’s private obsessions, including Real Housewife Nene Leakes, to reconcile its ambitions and what it actually offers to the world. But the show demonstrates the challenge of trying to do shows about men taking up their share of childcare. We live in a world where for some people, that’s a new normal, and for others, it’s unfathomable to the point of hilarity.

I was on CBC yesterday discussing the ethics of allowing young children to participate or star in reality television programming, and one of the things I’d considered raising as a point is that we’ve generally agreed that 13 is the age at which it makes sense to allow children sign up for social media networks and start crafting their public personas. And then I got into the office to discover that Facebook is contemplating ways to get children younger than 13 on the site through accounts linked to their parents’ profiles.

I can see a model of this that would work to protect children’s privacy if Facebook could meet a couple of conditions. First, I think they’d need a fine-grained opt-in system that parents would have to complete in full before activating a child’s account. The problem with most parental controls is that you can access the service without enforcing the controls. TVs and computers come equipped with V chips, but you don’t have to either opt out of using yours or turn it on and set it in order to use the internet or cable, and I’d imagine a lot of people who intend to use them never get around to it. Facebook’s access for children under 13 might only continue giving them access to applications, rather than giving them the option to build profiles and start broadcasting information about themselves. But in either case, Facebook should build in as much parental involvement as possible.

I also wonder if this move could spark a conversation about a two-tiered social environment. I’d imagine at least some parents would recoil from the idea of letting Facebook and other sites collect user information about their children. If Facebook wants to get them in as customers, they might have to reach a compromise where parents pay for their children to access apps as an alternative to monetizing children’s use by collecting data on it. I don’t know exactly what the model might look like, but I can see a social web that works that way and not just for children, with ad experiences getting increasingly customized for non-paying users.