As news of the Roast Busters hideousness hit the media one middle-aged woman polled by a reporter in a shopping mall whined "Where do they get these ideas?" Good grief! When Willie Jackson and John Banks and John Tamihere and others of their generation or older, such as most MPs, educators and morality campaigners, were growing up sex ed was a hit and miss and, in retrospect almost benign, thing. There was the slightly vague and diagram-reliant school sex-ed, in my day done in sexually segregated sessions in the seeming belief that boys and girls would never do this sort of stuff in a mixed-gender setting (and, to be honest, for a minority of us that was almost true). There was information passed around the school grounds or between friends, generally inacurate and over-sensationalised. There was semi-sexualised language such as "fuck" and "tits" and "poofter." If you were lucky there were a few dog-eared copies of raunchy magazines and, if you were sufficiently precocious, there was a bit of fumbling going on behind the woodwork room or bike sheds. And in the home there was the likes of music video choreography which surrounded some (usually male) singers with lithe young women doing moves just one shade more saucy than linedancing. Timewarp to the reality of the Roast Busters generation who have grown up with Miley Cyrus and her ilk as their role models and taking in a diet of rap music and other genre videos and video games which are in the main deeply mysogynistic and homophobic. Where everything is sexualised and women are either nympho bitches or, like faggots, targets of derision and violence, frequently eroticised and where 'real men' are by turns self-centred, hyper-aggressive or emotionally frigid - and too often all of that at the same time. And then there's the internet. Last night I put myself into the mindset of a hormonal sixteen-year old boy, blending the sexual trash-talk of current popular culture with a youthful and rebellious yearing for excitement and titillation. I searched a grab-bag of words such as "bitches" and "porn" and "freaky" and "fuck" and "pussy" and "cunt" and "extreme" and "tits" and "video." Amongst the very first page of Google's literally millions of suggestions for my entertainment and education was a link to a grainy porno clip of a man repeatedly kicking a naked woman between the legs while she alternately simpered and whimpered. On a straight porn aggregator site, it was accompanied by a 'See more like this' link. I didn't have to prove my age. I didn't have to have a credit card or do anything underhand or sneaky to view it and the millions of other sex videos like it or almost like it. I could have been viewing it on my computer at home or my Android device anywhere and at any time. And I could have been a ten year-old showing it to my friends or my five-year old brother or sister. I lost all appetite to, as I had intended, replace a few of the search words with their homo equivalents, such as "faggots" instead of "bitches." But you might like to do that bit of homework for yourself. Everyone's, including kids', access to this sort of stuff has exploded in the last couple of decades. To the woman who asked "Where do they get these ideas?" the answer is: "Anywhere, any time, they want!" Where is the countering influence, that shows kids a more varied, respectful, healthily raunchy, human and humane aspect of gender, sex and sexuality? Practically nowhere. Most parents still veer away from the subject, leaving it up to schools to do their job for them. Some schools do a few basics, with only the concept of different sexualities added to the once over lightly approach of the past. Too many schools do bugger all. There isn't even a national curriculum provided by the Ministry of Education to ensure that at least the basics are decently covered. So, popular culture fills the vacuum, as it has always done. So, if the relatively and, retrospectively, fairly benign influences of the past produced the likes of Banks, Tamihere, Jackson, Mike King, Paul Henry and their like, is it any wonder that their emerging equivalents are more akin to the Roast Busters? There is an obvious lesson to be learned here and action needs to be taken before it is too late. There is also, in all this horrible business, a less obvious lesson. Jackson and Tamihere were seriously called to account by their cynical and exploitative employers, Radio Live, only after advertisers started closing their cheque books. Brutalising a young girl live on air was ok, provided they issued a half-arsed and glib apology and carried on. But anything which affected the station's bottom line wasn't ok. It's called bottom line morality and has nothing to do with public responsibility. But who pulled their advertising as Jackson, Banks and Tamihere facilitated the on-air brutalising of glbti folk year after year, egging their too-often deeply homophobic callers on and frequently setting us up as targets of derision and worse. Only one small gay-owned bar that we know of. And, on an even lesser scale, GayNZ.com Daily News long ago withdrew all cooperation with the Radio Live newsroom. There are wake-up calls here for everybody. - Jay Bennie Jay Bennie - 12th November 2013