Tumblr is banning all pornographic content. Some people are upset, but parents should be happy. Especially considering a new report published this week which reveals some terrifying things about the effects of pornography on children. Also, a man tried to legally change his age. Finally, The Little Mermaid is now offensive. Date: 12-04-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Today on the show, Tumblr is banning all pornographic content. | |
| People are upset, but parents should be happy, especially considering a new report published this week, which reveals some terrifying things about the effects of pornography on children. | |
| We're going to talk about that. | |
| Also, a man is trying to legally change his age from 69 to 45. | |
| He wasn't allowed to, but I think he makes a pretty good case for himself. | |
| And finally, the Little Mermaid encourages sexual assault, according to the left. | |
| But I think they're missing the real hidden message in The Little Mermaid, and we'll talk about all that today on the Matt Waltz Show. | |
| Yesterday I wore this, my beloved reindeer cardigan, as you can see. | |
| I wore it while I was doing the show, and I have to say that the response to my sweater was really hurtful and traumatizing. | |
| People mocked it relentlessly. | |
| They said that it's an old man's sweater. | |
| They said it makes me look uglier than usual. | |
| They said it looks like something an 85-year-old woman stitched together during rec time at the nursing home. | |
| Someone said my sweater should be deported to Jupiter and me along with it. | |
| Let me tell you, you bullies, something, all right? | |
| This sweater was made by my great-grandmother in Ireland, and she gave it to my grandfather before he immigrated here. | |
| And he gave it to me two years before he died. | |
| So you didn't just mock my sweater, you mocked my family. | |
| So I want you to think about it. | |
| Actually, I just made that up. | |
| My wife got this from Target, I think, last year. | |
| But the point still stands. | |
| So in retaliation for the hateful mockery of my sweater, I am wearing the sweater again. | |
| And if the comments continue and the insults continue, I will wear it every day until Christmas. | |
| I will keep wearing the sweater until you all learn some manners. | |
| And by the time that I'm done with this sweater, you're going to be seeing these reindeers and these weird shapes. | |
| I don't even know what this is supposed to be. | |
| You're going to be seeing them in your nightmares. | |
| That's how often I'm going to wear this sweater. | |
| Now, I know it's kind of weird, I guess, to wear a Christmas cardigan out of spite, in retaliation, but that's what I'm going to do. | |
| So, I've really been left with no choice. | |
| Alright. | |
| Tumblr, the popular blogging platform, says that it will delete and ban all pornographic content starting this month. | |
| According to Forbes, on Monday, Tumblr announced in a blog post that adult content will no longer be allowed here, including explicit sexual content and most cases of nudity. | |
| Starting in two weeks, on December 17th, any explicit posts on the platform will be flagged and deleted by algorithms, according to the company. | |
| The new adult content guidelines outlined by Tumblr say that the kind of content it's looking to ban primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples And any content including photos, videos, gifs, and illustrations that depict sex acts. | |
| Yes, female presenting nipples. | |
| I can't say female nipples because that insinuates that there's some sort of biological... | |
| component to sexuality, which of course they couldn't possibly ever suggest that. | |
| So female presenting nipples. | |
| Forbes goes on, in the decade or so since its founding, Tumblr has served as a major hub for users and communities wishing to share adult content via social media despite periodic pressure to rein in its content. | |
| And now it finally will rein in the content. | |
| Now, this has been met with outrage by many Tumblr users, apparently. | |
| Who are upset either that they won't be able to access pornography on Tumblr now or they won't be able to share it. | |
| This is all news to me. | |
| I didn't know that Tumblr was porn central. | |
| I honestly don't even know what Tumblr is. | |
| Tumblr confuses me and I guess that's a sign that I'm getting old when I'm wearing cardigans and getting confused by Tumblr. | |
| Really, in all seriousness, this just shows the problem I think that parents face, because how in the world do you keep up with this? | |
| How do you keep track as a parent of where your kids are going, where kids in general are going to access this kind of content? | |
| Now, my kids are five years old, they don't have access to the internet, so it's not a concern for me yet, but it is a concern for a lot of parents. | |
| It's a huge concern. | |
| How do you control this? | |
| How do you stop your kids from being exposed to this kind of stuff? | |
| And what makes this situation even more difficult is that we, as this generation of parents, we're kind of the guinea pigs, right? | |
| There isn't a lot of history of parents having to deal with this problem. | |
| This dynamic Where kids from a young age are carrying around in their pockets these little devices that can give them access to everything, any information, any image, any video, and can allow them to communicate with anyone. | |
| And even if our kids aren't carrying around that device, likely some of their friends will be carrying around that device. | |
| So this is all very new. | |
| We can't go back and see how past parental generations dealt with it because they didn't really have to deal with it. | |
| My parents' generation, I guess we're the first, that had to confront this problem, sort of, when the internet became a household item. | |
| But for me and my generation, you know, we didn't have the internet until I was in middle school, and smartphones didn't exist. | |
| So you had the internet on one computer in the house, and, you know, you could put the computer somewhere where it was visible and everything, and it was relatively easy to parentally lock this and that, and kind of control things that way. | |
| But this is just a whole new ballgame. | |
| And we need to figure it out, even though we're the first ones to have to do that. | |
| Because the stakes are very high. | |
| And to highlight just how high the stakes are... | |
| I want to call your attention to this. | |
| A local news channel in Kansas City, KSHB, has a story on their site today. | |
| And the story begins, Children's Mercy Hospital says they're seeing a disturbing trend in child sexual assault cases. | |
| Children are abusing children. | |
| Heidi Olson, the sexual assault nurse examiner, SANE, is the acronym, coordinator, says, I think that was kind of shocking to us as we were collecting the data that almost half of our perpetrators are minors. | |
| Almost half of the perpetrators are minors. | |
| The SANE program's data shows perpetrators are likely to be between 11 and 15 years old. | |
| You have 11-year-olds who are Jennifer Hanson, a child abuse pediatrician at the hospital, says another thing we're noticing is a lot of these sexual assaults are violent sexual assaults. | |
| So they include physical violence in addition to sexual violence. | |
| Last year, Children's Mercy saw 444 kids who were sexually abused within the last five days. | |
| That number rounds out to around a thousand a year. | |
| When they include the children who report sexual assault after five days, victims are most likely to be girls around four to eight years old. | |
| The story goes on, Hanson and Olson say they're noticing kids are being exposed to porn at very young ages, around four or five years old. | |
| They say a child can develop unrealistic and dangerous ideas about intimate relationships by being exposed to violent, graphic porn. | |
| Hanson says, we know that it's probably multifactorial. | |
| I think there are lots of things that contribute to this, but that is the question. | |
| How are we as a society failing in such a way that we have 11, 12, and 14-year-old boys committing violent sexual assaults? | |
| Another person at the hospital says, what we're seeing is more and more kids have sexual behavior problems, and more and more kids at the same time have access to porn. | |
| Pornography is different today than it used to be, so 80% of the 15 most viewed films portray women being hit, spit on, kicked, called degrading names, etc. | |
| The kinds of behaviors we wouldn't want our children or anyone to engage in. | |
| Alright, I mean, I think it's clear that early exposure to pornography is very harmful for kids. | |
| These are people who have no concept of human sexuality. | |
| So, I mean, four or five years old. | |
| If a child is somehow being exposed to hardcore pornography at the age of four or five, which at that young of an age, if that's happening, then that is just pure parental neglect. | |
| I mean, at four or five years old, you should be able to control what your kid is looking at at that young of an age. | |
| And so if they're developing a porn habit at that age, then that's just horrible, terrible parenting. | |
| Now as kids get older, it's going to be more difficult, especially these days. | |
| And if the kid goes to school, it's more difficult once you get to be 12, 13, 14 years old. | |
| But at that young of an age, And whatever leads to it, you've got a kid that young being exposed to this kind of stuff, what chance do they have at that point to become a well-rounded, healthy individual? | |
| What chance does a kid have at the age of four? | |
| If a kid at the age of four is being exposed to pornography, what chance does he have to become a healthy, normal person? | |
| If you have an 11-year-old who's committing sexual assault and they've been looking at porn since the age of four, how can you even... I don't even know what to say about it. | |
| It's just so horrific. | |
| Kids at that age, they don't have any defenses against this stuff. | |
| They can't filter what they're seeing. | |
| So they're learning about sex and love and romance and all of that stuff from porn. | |
| That is now, for a lot of these kids, their first exposure to sexuality and to the very concept of it, the idea of it, is through hardcore pornography. | |
| I don't think we can even barely wrap our heads around the full impact that that's having on our kids. | |
| I mean, we're seeing this now. | |
| We're seeing, if you have kids being exposed to this from very young ages, we see what happens when they're 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old. | |
| But fast forward the clock, when they're 30, there's probably, I'm 32, there's probably not anyone my age, or there's gonna be very few people my age, who were being exposed to hardcore pornography when they were four or five. | |
| Because the internet hardly existed back then. | |
| But you take this generation and then we see them now, what's it going to be like when they're grown adult men? | |
| What's it going to be like when they're 30, 35 years old? | |
| It warps the mind in ways that we're only now beginning to understand. | |
| So what can we do about it? | |
| You know, unfortunately, I don't think that there isn't one single thing there isn't there isn't a magic switch that we can flip. | |
| But I do know that I think parents have to confront this problem. | |
| And the first thing that we should do as parents is, you know, keep our kids off of the internet for as long as humanly possible. | |
| You know, there shouldn't be any concern that, oh, I need to make sure my kid has a smartphone because all of his friends have smartphones, and if he doesn't have one, he's going to be weird. | |
| Like, that should not be our concern at all, that our kids won't have this gadget that everyone else has, and they'll be left out. | |
| That is a very small price to pay. | |
| If taking that simple measure can in any way protect our kids from this kind of stuff, And from the long-term effects that it has, then it's a small price to pay. | |
| So we just, I mean, keep your kids off of the Internet as much as you can. | |
| There's just no reason why a child needs to have a smartphone with Internet access. | |
| And as I said, I know that even if you take that step, and they're going to school, and their kids have, and their friends have smartphones with Internet access, or they're going to their friend's house and there's a laptop or whatever, you know, that's the fact that they don't have a smartphone isn't | |
| going to stop them from being exposed to something on a different device. But that at least is one | |
| simple step that we can take. And I cannot think of any reason. I mean, these parents who, you know, | |
| their nine and 10 year old kids have smartphones with internet access. What's the point? Look at | |
| whatever you think your kid's going to gain from that, whatever advantage your kid is | |
| going to gain, measure that against the enormous downsides and tell me which what outweighs | |
| what there. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Bye bye. | |
| Bye bye. | |
| I know parents will say, well, you know, my kid needs a phone because, uh, if they need to get ahold of me, there's an emergency or something. | |
| Well, then fine. | |
| You can still, did you know, you could still go to the cell phone store and you could buy a flip phone with no internet. | |
| You can find it. | |
| You can still buy an old fashioned flip phone. | |
| They're more durable too, on top of it. | |
| So they're not as likely to break when the kid drops it. | |
| Get him one of those phones. | |
| Why does he need a phone that gives him, potentially gives him access to this whole river of filth? | |
| That's what I don't understand. | |
| This is something as parents that we need to start taking seriously. | |
| Okay, another story I wanted to mention. | |
| A 69-year-old man from the Netherlands was told by a court that he could not legally lower his age by 20 years. | |
| He could not. | |
| Emile Rattlebon told the Washington Post that his feeling about his body and his mind is that he's about 40 or 45, despite being born on March 11, 1949. | |
| He also claims that he received a checkup from a doctor who told him that his biological age is 45 years. | |
| Rattlebon said, we can make our own decisions if we want to change our name, if we want to change our gender, so I want to change my age. | |
| Only he was not allowed to do that. | |
| I think he's got a pretty airtight case. | |
| Based on the modern-day standards, he's got a pretty airtight case. | |
| If gender is fluid, why not age? | |
| In fact, your age... Here's the thing. | |
| Your age is much more fluid than your gender. | |
| It's not just that your age is also... No, your age actually is, in a certain sense, Fluid. | |
| Your age is, it changes for one thing. | |
| Your age actually does change. | |
| And not only that, but time itself is relative. | |
| Just ask Einstein. | |
| Think about that movie. | |
| Think about the movie with Matthew McConaughey, where he went into space. | |
| What was that? | |
| Interstellar, right? | |
| The movie was massively overrated, I thought, or it didn't live up to the hype. | |
| I was really looking forward to it, but I was kind of disappointed. | |
| My problem with that movie is that they spent, it was like a five-hour movie, and four of the hours were spent on Earth. | |
| And then they went into space and they were back in 22 seconds. | |
| And so it just was... Anyway. | |
| But if you think about that movie, Matthew McConaughey, there's that scene where he goes to another planet and... | |
| The planet with the really big waves and they're down on the planet for just a few minutes, but then they come back and they go back home and they hook up with the space station and he finds that his daughter is now an 80 year old woman. | |
| So even though he aged only a few days, his daughter aged like 50 or 60 years. | |
| So, um, Mr. Rattleban could easily make the case that he is only 69 years old on Earth with our gravity and with the speed that our planet happens to be moving around the sun, etc. | |
| If he were to have been born on a different planet, or if he was born and then he had moved to a different planet for a few years, his age would be completely different. | |
| So that's—age is actually relative. | |
| It is a fluid, relative concept. | |
| Not only that, but it's also true that we age at different rates biologically. | |
| So there is some truth to saying that a 69-year-old man might be biologically 45 in the sense that his age hasn't taken the physical toll on him that it has for most people who were born around the time that he was. | |
| And also, it's true that Mr. Rattlebon, while he isn't now 45, he was 45 once. | |
| So he has at least experienced, he has had the experience of being 45. | |
| The significance of that is he knows what 45 feels like because he was 45. | |
| So when he says, I feel like I'm 45, he has a frame of reference. | |
| He has something to compare it to. | |
| He can, he can think back to when he was 45 and he could say, yeah, I feel like that. | |
| You know, my feelings have, I have that feeling of being 45. | |
| So there is some sense to that. | |
| Like it does make a certain amount of sense. | |
| All of these cases, all of these points rather, I think make the case for the fluidity of gender much stronger than the fluidity of gender, or I'm sorry, the fluidity of age, the case for the fluidity of age is much stronger than the case for the fluidity of gender. | |
| Your gender, your sex, is a fixed thing. | |
| So if you're a man, You've always been a man, and you would be a man anywhere in the universe. | |
| It doesn't matter where you go. | |
| You can go to the Matthew McConaughey planet with the big waves, and you would still be a man. | |
| Anywhere you go, at any point, you're a man. | |
| Whereas that's not the case with age. | |
| So, we may look at something like this, a case like this, and we say, oh, it's a slippery slope. | |
| We've accepted this idea of gender being fluid. | |
| And now the next step is people are going to say that age is fluid and race is fluid and so on and so forth. | |
| No, that's see, that's not exactly right. | |
| Because when it comes to making things fluid, and if we're on a slope, right, actually, you know, gender, the fluidity of gender is down here on the slope. | |
| But age and race, they're up there further up on the slope. | |
| So, another way of putting it is, to say that race is fluid or age is fluid, that isn't crazier than saying that gender is fluid. | |
| That's actually a little bit less crazy. | |
| So, the point I always make about the slippery slope is that it's not actually a slope. | |
| It's more like we just, as a culture, we went into free fall. | |
| And there was no slope at all. | |
| We just plunged into the abyss of insanity. | |
| And along the way, we actually skipped over a few steps. | |
| If we were following a logical slope, If we were following sort of a logical cultural regression, we would have began by saying, oh, race is fluid. | |
| You can be whatever race you want. | |
| And then we would have said, oh, you know what? | |
| Actually, age is fluid too. | |
| And then, after years, we would have said, oh, maybe gender is fluid also. | |
| But we skipped ahead to the craziest thing, and now we're just backtracking and covering all the bases we skipped over. | |
| Because even something like race, yet again, race actually, you can be multiple different races. | |
| You know, that's possible. | |
| Race actually is a fluid thing. | |
| There's probably, there is not one single person on earth who's just one race, and that's it. | |
| We're all a mixture of various different things. | |
| So even that, again, that makes more sense. | |
| Um, then just to say that gender is fluid or that you can change your gender, we, we skipped ahead to the, to the, to the, to the craziest thing. | |
| That's what we did. | |
| And that's what we do with, that's what we've been doing in general in our cultures. | |
| We have been, um, you know, the left, I think that tells you something about the, the, the victories that the left has achieved where they have not gone slowly and incrementally. | |
| They went right for the gold, as far as they're concerned. | |
| They weren't interested in any kind of incremental steps to get them where they wanted to be. | |
| They went right for, let's make gender fluid. | |
| And they achieved it. | |
| And now that they have, there's just no way to argue with someone who says, yeah, you know what? | |
| I'm 69 technically, but I feel like I'm 45, so I'm going to be 45. | |
| There's just no way to argue with them. | |
| Speaking of crazy, and then there's this. | |
| An all-male a cappella group at Princeton will no longer perform the song Kiss the Girl from the Little Mermaid because the song delivers a problematic message about consent. | |
| Now, this concern was first raised by an editorial in the school's newspaper, the Daily Princetonian. | |
| The article Now, just before I read some of this, this article is not... I don't think this article is satire. | |
| This is totally serious, okay? | |
| The article says, even when gently crooned by an animated crab, the song Kiss the Girl from the Disney hit The Little Mermaid is more misogynistic and dismissive of a consent than it is cute. | |
| By performing the song multiple times each semester, the tiger tones elevate it to an offensive and violating ritual. | |
| No matter how great the tradition, this canonical Tiger Tones tune should be struck from their repertoire. | |
| Its lyrics raise some serious issues. | |
| The premise of the song, originally sung in the Disney film The Little Mermaid, is that the male Prince Eric, on a date with the beautiful female Ariel, should kiss her without asking for a single word to affirm her consent. | |
| Despite the fact that an evil sea witch cursed Ariel's voice, taking it away, making verbal consent impossible, the song is clearly problematic from the get-go. | |
| Removed from its cushioning context of mermaid's magic and PG ratings, the message comes across as even more jarring. | |
| Lyrics such as, it's possible she wants you to, there's one way to ask her, don't take a word, not a single word, go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl. | |
| And, she won't say a word until you kiss that girl. | |
| Unambiguously encouraging men to make physical advances on women without obtaining clear consent. | |
| The song launches a heteronormative attack on women's rights to oppose the romantic and sexual liberties taken by men, further inundating the listener with themes of toxic masculinity. | |
| In trying to motivate Eric to kiss Ariel, the crab Sebastian makes use of lines such as, looks like the boy's too shy, don't be scared, and it's such a shame, too bad, you're gonna miss the girl. | |
| Such expressions imply that not using aggressive physical action to secure Arielle's sexual submission makes Eric weak, an irrefutable scaredy cat. | |
| This is like something that I would write as satire, only it's way better. | |
| And this is what makes satire impossible now, because I couldn't write anything funny. | |
| I don't think anyone could write anything funnier than that. | |
| If you wanted to make fun of the left's hyper-politically correct point of view, you couldn't write anything more hilarious than what I just read. | |
| Only that's completely real. | |
| And it doesn't even make any sense, because from what I remember of that scene, The crab is on Ariel's side, right? | |
| The crab is kind of speaking for Ariel and trying to entice the man to kiss her. | |
| So actually, look, I agree that the song, and indeed the movie, Raise serious concerns about consent. | |
| But it isn't Ariel's consent being violated. | |
| Think about it. | |
| Ariel is a half-human ocean creature. | |
| She uses a magic spell to become human so that she can seduce this hapless, innocent prince who has no idea what's going on. | |
| She never once informs him that she's a sea creature. | |
| She never gives him the opportunity to consent to being in this bestial relationship. | |
| And uninformed consent is not consent. | |
| And I submit that a man has the right to know if he is romantically involved with a squid. | |
| Okay? | |
| He has the right... No, this is serious. | |
| I'm not... This is not a laughing matter. | |
| Put yourself in Eric's position. | |
| You know, imagine that you just met a woman, and things are going well, and they're getting serious, and you're contemplating marriage, and then one Saturday afternoon, you say to this woman, who you just found wandering on a beach randomly, and that never occurred to you to think there was anything strange about that, but it doesn't matter. | |
| And so one Saturday afternoon, you say to her, hey, let's go for a date at the aquarium. | |
| And she's a little bit hesitant, and you don't understand why, but she says, OK, let's go. | |
| And then you're walking by the dolphin exhibit, and suddenly she goes, oh, hi, Mom and Dad. | |
| And you say, what? | |
| Your parents are aquatic animals? | |
| You didn't mention that on your Match.com profile. | |
| And then she goes on to explain that she really lives in the ocean, and she's actually a fish, and an evil octopus cast a spell so that she could come on land and coerce you into bestiality. | |
| How would that make you feel? | |
| So who's the real victim here? | |
| Whose consent is actually being violated? | |
| That's my question. | |
| You know, if we're gonna be offended by this song, we should be offended in the right way. | |
| And when you think about it in this way, this song and the whole movie is terrifying. | |
| It is all about a deceitful sea monster trying to seduce a human man and lure him into the depths of the ocean to engage in all manner of debauchery. | |
| It's pretty chilling, actually, when you think about it. | |
| So I think that Princeton is on to something here, but they're looking at it from the wrong angle, in my opinion. | |
| All right. | |
| We'll leave it there. | |
| Thanks for watching, everybody. | |
| Thanks for listening. |