Micheal Jackson Can Sleep With Kids, But Men Can't Sit Next to Them on a Plane?

Yeah, I'm not comfy dealing with kids (and there's hordes of 'em in my complex) due to this kind of crap.

I like kids (for the most part), and before I moved myself to the opposite side of the country I was known as a pretty damned cool uncle. Their friends were always impressed that their uncle had a cool car AND could play video games some degree.

A few months back some friends and I went to this event where we were given these light-up yoyos. Somehow-or-other a bunch of them ended up getting given to me. I thought I'd mail 'em to my nephews and nieces, then realized it wasn't worth shipping them.

I now had some cool toys. But if I gave 'em to the neighbor kids, it'd be "Mama, look what I got!" Then after a few back-and-forths, "Next time that gringo walks by, you point him out to me."

So I was walking by the steps one day, these two kids are talking to each other. I walked up behind them and they didn't notice me. So I slipped a couple of yo-yos onto the steps behind 'em and walked away without a word. They probably noticed 'em five minutes later. The older brother said "hello" to me the next day. It was cool to be able to give 'em to someone who'd enjoy 'em without being presumed a molestor type. But that's where America is at right now.

Oh, and tell your hubby it's even WORSE when you're a single guy.

Is it just me, or is there an awful lot of sexual panic in the U.S.?

When I was a kid, everybody was up in arms about Satanic cults raping and murdering millions of babies per year.

When I was in college, male professors were refusing to meet with female students without leaving their office door open - or without a female faculty member coming in their office to observe, even - because of the frenzy over sexual harassment.

Today people are freaking out about stuff like this, or sexual predators on MySpace, or whatever.

It's fine to take potential threats seriously, but when it comes to potential sexual threats - no matter how small - everybody's reason and restraint just seem to fly out the window. It's sad.

It used to be just America - but clearly the cancer of ignorance has made it's way across the Atlantic.

I have a friend - a neighbor - whose daughters had a 5 year old playmate over and were playing together. He was there by himself, his wife was running some errands. The young neighbor went into the bathroom and was there for a while, so he went to check on her. After knocking he heard her crying and opened the door to find her standing nude in the bathroom. She had gotten her clothing all wet and was clearly upset about it. Rather than help her, we walked out of the house and went and STOOD IN THE YARD, and asked his 7 year old daughter to bring the little girl outside while he called her mother on his cell phone. He felt, as much as he wanted to help this little girl, he could not jeopardize his family and all the he had worked for by being accused of molesting this little girl.

That is some sick fucking shit, but I understood exactly what he was talking about. When I was on faculty at the university, I never met with a female advisee in my office if I could avoid it - I met with the in the office lobby. If it was a really confidential matter, I would meet them in my office, but I never closed the door.

I take my daughter to the play ground every day and when she is playing and a child falls, or is in danger of falling or whatever, I do not act on my instinct to help, because I am a male, and I am sensitive to how it would be perceived.

Child molestation charges are a guilty until proven innocent charge. If I was charged, they would take my computer and find my membership to SG, where I have the option of looking at the delightful nakedness of some women as young as 18 (I am 53) (even though, sadly, I spend far more time on the boards than I do looked at nakedness - which is a sickness in itself I guess) and immediately conclude that I was a pedophile and guilty of whatever charge was made - even though pedophilia is a disorder characterized by an attraction to pre pubescent children.

We have a shortage of volunteers at the Library in my town because - if you are going to be a volunteer in the library, where you might pass a child in the stacks - you have to have a criminal background check and the volunteers - who are mostly in their 60's and 70's refuse - out of indignation - and the library cannot afford the additional cost of of the checks.

It is a sick fucking world - and the saddest thing is that, proportionately, there are no more child predators than there ever were, child abduction, while both rare and tragic is no more frequent than it ever was and child molestation is no more frequent than it ever was. In short, nothing has changed in this world except the hysteria over this kind of behavior.

I blame it on the baby "I am ohhh so fucking special and unique and my children are gifts to the universe" boomers, whose sense of entitlement and general narcissism is off the fucking charts.

But that could be too simplistic. What ever it is, it is high time we stepped back from the edge of the abyss here and got a grip on ourselves.

Finally! Fear, paranoia, irrationality, and suspicion of everything that takes people out of their idiotic comfort bubbles, are paying off for me on airplanes. I just want to make sure that men can enforce this rule as well, by demanding that children are kept away from them on planes.

Well, yes, there is an upside to everything.

I know, this place is almost certainly subsidized by satan--there are naked girls everywhere, but the bulk of my time is spend perusing the various words. It's like we're paying for the "I was just reading the articles, mom/honey/whoever" lie that generations of people used by actually reading the articles.

"Excuse me miss, I'm a single man--do you suppose you could move this child? I'm afraid an urge to engage in molestation may grip me in midair."

And bring me a vodka and orange juice while you're at it. NO! It's for me, not the KID!!

Yes, this sort of thing was also common among male professors when I was in college. You know who complained the most about it? Not the professors, but the female students. Why? Because male students could regularly visit male professors in their offices, or even at their homes (I went to a small college), or could see them socially, and nobody thought anything of it. (One of my professors gave me rides back from the airport, invited me to meet his family, etc. - he was a remarkable teacher, and took me under his wing in many ways.) But the male professor-female student relationship was automatically viewed with deep suspicion. Women complained that this was depriving them of contact and discussion with their professors, which limited not only their educational opportunities, but also - if they intended to pursue an academic career - their future professional opportunites. And you know what? They were right.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not for a second trying to downplay or dismiss the seriousness of sexual harassment (or molestation, or pedophilia, or any of the other pathologies that are under discussion in this thread). But unreasoning panic and hysteria over such issues does no one any good.

Unfortunately, I think you're probably right about this.

You (and they) are absolutely correct. And they are not the only one. The soccer coach who can't give his female players a pat on the back, the kindergarten teacher (male or female) who cannot give her students a hug when they are clearly upset and a simple hug would solve so much of the problem. The list goes on and on and on. Humans need to be touched, we thrive on touch, you can see the brain light up in a PET scan when a person is hugged.

But no more. Hysteria has replaced reason; safety, rationality; and sterility, humane interaction.

It is a sick fucking world.

Man, I am depressing myself. I think I will go hug my daughter (I think that is still legal.)

People on these boards jump to those kinds of conclusions all the time. We (human beings) seem to have a great capacity for self-deception, and an amazing ability to correlate facts that don't necessarily go together. I had a great example of this last night at dinner when my mom insisted that because I like ketchup with my turkey I would surely like cranberry sauce--after all, they're both red.

Thank you, that is exactly the point that NickFaust and I were making.

All this talk of Avoiding Contact for the sake of Societal Security makes me think of that scene in Demolition Man where Rob Schneider and a Large Man whos name I cant remember did this high five where they stopped short and did this little "Wax on, Wax off" move..... is THAT where we're heading? THAT"S JUST LAME!!!!....

I'll relate a story that ties in:

At one time, I worked in a day care, in the infant room. I am good with infants, and children in general. I had a good working relationship with all the mothers, but one of the fathers took a dislike to me. He was a machismo type who felt that men didn't belong in day cares, and any who worked in a child care capacity HAD to be sick. So, he anonymously sent a message to the child protective services, claiming that I might be improperly touching one of the children. Of course, CPS investigated, took me aside, filled out reports, interrogated me multiple times. Eventually, they just removed me from the infant room and had me work with afterschoolers instead, to try to nip the issue for good.

The funny thing is, it ended 100% a week after that. The wife of the person who reported me not only came to me and let me know what had happened, but she went to CPS and told them the entire story. The CPS agents apologized profusely to me, and the case was closed completely. But I never went back to working with infants, because of the chance that something like this would happen again.

This really opened my eyes to the general paranoia that can infect parents.

That is really sad. It saddens me that men are turning away from caring professions and especially teaching because of this kind of discrimination. Boys and girls need male teachers. My three favourite teachers at school (and the only ones that I respected enough to actually learn from) were all men.

insightful discussion

I missed one thing,
where does all this fucking (mile high club) and molesting and the such go on on airplanes?
I am always claustrophobic on planes to say the least!

I am a young looking 40 with a 19 year old daughter, when we go out she may hold my arm in crowds (shes shy, I raised her w/o mom) and the looks we get are funny...people including you and me are far too quick to judge. Saftey on airplanes is getting to the point that is the security is a bigger threat than the bad guys.

I raised my two girls mostly on my own, changing diapers, going trick or treating, school events, dance practice, overnight birthdays with 8 screaming little girls and so on. Does this make me bad?

I have no tolerance for this hysteria yet indeed it is a sypmton of a sick society.