TROUBLESHOOTING. Julie Amero, a teacher at a school in Norwich, Connecticut faces up to 40 years in prison for exposing her students to some pop-up porn. The conventional wisdom about the case is that the exposure was accidental, but parents are quickly looking for someone to blame. In this culture of “protect the children,” parents routinely freak out about nudity (See: Janet Jackson‘s Super Bowl boob-flashing). They should take the pop-up incident as an opportunity to have a talk with their children, but not demand the school or the teacher is punished. Maybe they could lobby for some better pop-up-blocking software. But this is mostly just a case of hyper-reactionary parents.
There are studies that show a correlation between watching sex on television and earlier sexual activity, but as I learned in my social science classes, an indicator is not always a predictor. Perhaps the kids whose parents allow them to watch sexual content on television have different views that uber-protective parents with the V-chip.
—Kay Steiger