(via kottke.org)

The very first thing my precious little girl had the crocodile do is eat a baby! I stifled an involuntary chuckle at this unexpectedly violent plot twist so early in the story. My daughter went on to tell a gruesome tale (which would surely make international headlines if it were true) of this crocodile hunting and eating baby after baby after baby. I lost count of the babies who ended up down his gullet. The crocodile apparently didn’t like the taste of diapers so it looked for naked babies. It also preferred dead babies. Luckily for him, he found one in a trash can. With each baby ingested, the crocodile got bigger and bigger until finally fell over in torpid, satisfied exhaustion. The story ended with the crocodile playing with a ball as if this was just another day.

I wasn’t horrified so much as shocked that my four-year-old child had come up with such a cruel story. In trying to find the seeds of this story, I’ve thought of two candidates: the story of Abiyoyo, a giant who eats people, and Spirited Away where one character swallows other characters and gets bigger and bigger.

Some parents would reflexively ban these stories from their household. They obviously taught my daughter violence. Instead it made me think about the horrifying things that happen in fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother swallowed whole by a wolf, the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters pecked out by birds, Snow White’s stepmother forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes at her daughter’s wedding until she dies. These brutal tales were the stuff of childhood not so long ago.

Is the lack of violence in our modern children’s stories a sign of our enlightenment or of our separation from the brutal facts of reality? Life is an act of violence. Each living thing exists at the expense of some other living thing. Each life ends in death.

Yet we try our best to hide from these facts. Gone are the days when we slaughtered our own animals, or sat with the corpse of our recently dead in our own homes. The violence that we see in our entertainment is idealized, pornographic violence. The problem with what we watch isn’t that it is too realistic, but that it isn’t real enough. It obfuscates the realities of death so that it can be more appetizing and entertaining to our paradoxically effete yet brutal tastes.

Are we doing our children a favor by isolating them from death and violence, and therefore from life? Obviously overexposure would also be bad, but there must be some middle ground where children can come to terms with death and violence from the safety of their beds under the supervision of loving parents. It seems that children are more prepared to deal with death than we may imagine.

As chance would have it, I heard on the radio yesterday that this television program caused a man to commit suicide.

Louis William Conradt Jr., of Terrell, Texas, a Dallas suburb, was suspected of being one of those men, except he didn’t show up at the house. That didn’t stop the TV producers and police from showing up at his, though, and as officers knocked on his door and a camera crew waited in the street, Conradt shot and killed himself. (Associated Press)

The radio hosts, the kind that are paid to act like brain-damaged teenagers, related this story, basically said good riddance, and danced on his grave. Their callousness elicited my compassion. Wouldn’t someone mourn for this destroyed life?

I’ll openly admit that I have ephebophilic tendencies. I gather from the term “jailbait” and popular humor that I’m not alone in the adult male population.

I and most of those who are similar to me choose to abstain from acting on any attraction we feel. We know it’s wrong to prey on an adolescent’s inexperience. We shrug off the attraction and go on with life. I don’t lose sleep over it because I’m not ashamed. I chalk it up to being a human being and forge ahead.

There is so much hatred and fear surrounding sexual predators these days. It sells an awful lot of commercial airtime. Sometimes it’s easy to forget who sexual predators are. They are not some alien species. They are our neighbors, our friends, our brothers, our husbands, our fathers… our sisters, our wives, and our mothers. They are us. We are them. They are human beings who cross a perilously thin line. Are the rest of us so different?

We seem to be afraid to acknowledge that pedophilia (for example) is one aspect of human nature—an aberrant and harmful one—but human nonetheless. Whatever it is that separates a pedophile from a non-pedophile is uncomfortably thin. We prefer to think of them as aliens rather than see their humanity, rather than acknowledge the thin ice below us. There but for the grace of Fortune go I.

As I watched the news crew publicly shame those men, I allowed myself to see something that I hadn’t noticed before. I watched as their hopes and dreams died. The weight of what the future held for them made some weep, some get physically ill, and some just sit dumb with shock. These were weak, stupid people, not inhuman monsters. The show put a human face on sexual predators.

I want to protect my children above all else, but I am not insensible to the suffering of these men and the tragedy of human frailty.