On toddlers at nasty movies

Okay, so on Saturday, Doug and I went to see Clerks II. It was a blast, and our mother will be disgusted to know that we had a great time (which is as good a time as any to throw in a disclaimer - this post is not for the faint of heart and may contain material inappropriate for readers under the age of 17 or over the age of 40). As a matter of fact, one of the funniest moments of the evening was when the movie started and we discovered that the theatres had switched movies. We were watching You, Me & Dupree. Which meant that somewhere, in some other theatre, some young teen dragged her boyfriend to see Kate Hudson and Matt Dillon, and instead got a discussion of the hygiene involved in going ass-to-mouth.

Once the theatre got the films sorted out, our movie included:

- Jay in full-frontal Silence of the Lambs Buffalo Bill nudity
- a discussion about the size of a character's clitoris
- plenty of masturbation
- "Eat Pussy," spray-painted in eight-foot letters
- born-again drug dealers
- man-on-donkey sex
- sixteen uses of the aforementioned phrase "ass to mouth," particularly pertaining to that activity with seventeen-year-old girls
- the consumption of a soda with ice from a urinal
- a good five or six minutes exploring the broad available range of racial slurs for those of the black and Jewish persuasion.
- lots, and I mean lots, of f-bombs, including multiple repetitions of "pickle fucker" and extensive exposition on exactly how the nickname came to be
- other naughty, naughty language
- a toddler and a six-year-old

And yeah, those last two weren't in the movie. The toddler, at least, after pitching a screaming fit during the previews in the row right behind ours, fell asleep peacefully in her mama's lap. The six-year-old (or so; I'm assuming) boy, however, stayed wide awake throughout the entire R-rated movie, laughing loudly at parts I hoped to God he didn't understand and feared he did.

The question can be raised: How young does a child need to be before he learns about ass-to-mouth? At what age should come a child's first exposure to "interspecies erotica"? Is age six old enough to learn about eating pussy and the wide variety of clitoral sizes? Does a child of that age have the common sense not to go to school, drop the f-bomb, and then call his teacher a "porch monkey"?

Now, as an avowed liberal, I'm all for the existence of movies like Clerks, Clerks II, Dogma, and every other movie of slightly-off-color humor in the View Askiew pantheon. I think that, just like with violent video games and porn, there are people who are able to watch horrific violence, unconscionable objectification of women, and things done with the human body that human bodies were never intended to do, and come out of it recognizing that some things are done for shock/entertainment value and that such behaviors are not to be admired or emulated.

Six-year-olds generally lack that kind of self-awareness.

Get a babysitter, Mom.