Flotsam, jetsam and overblown bedlam

"Keep your laws off my body" was a good start, but it may be time to tack on "and keep your filters out of my cesspool."

Check out the latest of Mitt Romney's ads to wash ashore like (circle one) a rancid, bloated piece of marine carrion/a special little seashell:

"I'm deeply troubled about the culture that surrounds our kids today. Following the Columbine shootings, Peggy Noonan described our world as 'the ocean in which our children now swim.' She described a cesspool of violence, and sex, and drugs, and indolence, and perversions. She said that the boys who did the shooting had 'inhaled too deeply in the oceans in which they swam.' I'd like to see us clean up the water in which our kids are swimming. I'd like to keep pornography from coming up on their computers. I'd like to keep drugs off the streets. I'd like to see less violence and sex on TV and in video games and in movies. And if we get serious about this, we can actually do a great deal to clean up the water in which our kids and our grandkids are swimming."

Setting aside that unless kids have now sprouted gills, that's a fundamentally flawed metaphor, the AP reports Romney "has said he is not trying to tamp down on pornography per se, only the inadvertent viewing of it by children surfing the Internet or television."

Because quite plainly, that falls under the purview of limited, conservative, rational government. Not, you know, parents. (But while he's at it, maybe he can explain why it's so expensive to fund abstinence-only "education" when you're essentially teaching the absence of material.)

Culture is not a swirling black cesspool you can sanitize lest the innocent get unwittingly pulled under kicking and screaming their unsullied hearts out. It's in the air. It is the air. You simply can't avoid it if you're going to live in it, but you can develop a tolerance. Take a fresh example: I've seen entirely one of the "Harry Potter" movies and I've read none of the books, yet I still know enough of the mythology to formulate a coherent sense of what's going on and am at least curious how it ends. (By the way, is it a coincidence VP Cheney will be temporarily running the show Saturday while Pres. Bush gets a colonoscopy and millions of Americans are sleep-deprived, buried in their books and avoiding news spoilers?) And I don't feel particularly violated.

But don't tell that to the mainstream media, who are now backhandedly signaling the total moral decay and tart-ification of our nation by reporting on the alleged "backlash,"

what writer Wendy Shalit claims is a growing movement of "girls gone mild"—teens and young women who are rejecting promiscuous "bad girl" roles embodied by Britney Spears, Bratz Dolls and the nameless, shirtless thousands in "Girls Gone Wild" videos. Instead, these girls cover up, insist on enforced curfews on college campuses, bring their moms on their dates and pledge to stay virgins until married."

Whoa, back up the purity parade -- how does eschewing mini skirts and one-ply brassieres automatically land one in the same clause as chaperoned dates and militant chastity? And in the same article as references to Mormonism and the phrase "What Would Mary Wear?"

No matter. The real question is:

Is the new modesty truly a revolution, or is it merely an inevitable reaction to a culture of increased female sexual empowerment, similar to the backlash against flappers in the 1920s and second-wave feminists in the 1970s?

How about, if there is a backlash, maybe it's against bad visual taste? Against having no distinction between public and private? Against that increasingly visible segment of your gender who reduce themselves to vapid, disrespected caricatures to the collective detriment?

Looking trashy is not some grand statement on "sexual empowerment" -- it's an insecure, shrill but ultimately feeble cry for attention and superficial affirmation. Like all cultural raw sewage, it's offensive, but it's simply a fact of life. You look, you retch, you move on.

If instead you want to ensconce your children in pristine experiential bubbles of rainbows (not the gay kind, of course), puppies and butterflies, that's your business. Sweeping, puritanical censorship will not solve any practical problems for the rest of us.

For, contrary to Washington Post reports, a little cleavage never hurt anybody. Sometimes it just scars.

Kind of like being told by your mother that you look like (a presumably albino) Victoria Beckham after the blimey wench steals your haircut. Unclean, unclean...