On Wednesday, June 12, 2002, at 11:26 , tenchimasaki71 wrote:
> You could be 100% right; to that I'll admit. I guess I just don't want to
> believe that a company that mainly manufactures toys for children (yes, I
> know adults like Sanrio too; I'm one of them) also puts their star
> character on a vibe. As I said, I enjoy both the cute and the twisted,
> and a lot of the time I like it when they do the whole "you got your
> chocolate in my peanut butter" thing... but this just kind of creeps me
> out. And that's not an easy thing to do.
Maybe the people at Sanrio are just a little more open minded than most
Americans are. Around these parts 'religious' groups get up in arms if
school sex ed programs dare to teach about masturbation, but in Japan with
a totally different attitude it's a whole other matter. If they sell just
about everything else with HK on it, why not vibrators too? To me it's
the attitude on this side of the Pacific that's twisted. I mean, Mattell
used to make M-16 stocks. That's both twisted and funny.
Here selling violence to both children and adults is okay but anything
about sex that might be _seen_ by kids is seen as a very bad thing and the
discussion of preadolescent sexuality is a strongly taboo subject. It's
the kind of attitude that leads to sexual repression and more violence and
it's self-perpetuating from one generation to the next. In Japan young
people are exposed to more of both sex and violence at young ages and and
it's a much less violent society. I suspect that's more than just a
coincidental correlation.
--
Ixy - jaguar (at) bestweb (dot) net
"Child abuse is still sanctioned--indeed, held in high regard--in our
society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic
fact that parents beat their children in order to escape from
emotions stemming from how they were treated by their own parents."
-Alice Miller
Received on Wed Jun 12 2002 - 21:07:20 CDT