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Good morning.

‘Paddington Bear embroiled in sex row’. That seems to be about the raciest headline used so far to report on a minor spat between the British Board of Film Classification and the makers of a new film starring the famous marmalade-loving bear hailing from Peru. The scene which caught the Board’s eye apparently involves a security guard flirting with a man dressed as a woman. Parents were to be warned that there were ‘mild sex references’ in the film, but that has now been down graded to a warning about ‘innuendo’. I should stress, just in case his lawyers are listening, that Paddington Bear’s impeccable reputation remains wholly unsullied.

There is something curious about the delicacy of judgment and feeling expressed in the guidance provided to parents regarding films. In the general social context children are bombarded with highly sexual images and references from many other sources. ‘Innuendo’ is the least of it. More to the point, our children are not just accidental recipients of sexual images and references intended for an adult world, but are themselves targeted by messages which actually serve to sexualize them. Pop videos, to take just one example, seem to encourage ever younger girls to want to look and dress and behave in ‘age inappropriate ways’, as it might be put –although we could just say, in inappropriate ways. The British Board of Film Classification is busy protecting children’s innocence; quite a lot of popular culture seems to be taking pot shots at it.

Christians have a reputation for being stuffy about sex – or even against it. But that is not the point at all. On the contrary, it is just because Christianity recognizes the role which sexual attraction so very often has in the forming and sustaining of some of the most important and stable relationships of adult life, that it is troubled by the sexualisation of children. In our sexual relationships, our sense of security, well-being and self esteem are often bound up and placed on the line – and for that reason they are not, as the Prayer Book has it, ‘to be enterprised unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly’. Or to put it another way, children need a solid, reliable and settled sense of their own worth and values before they can safely negotiate the hazards and pitfalls which beset relationships even between grown ups.

Given what else is out there to trip them up, I doubt that we need to worry too much about our children seeing the Paddington bio-pic – we would be better to wonder how to inoculate them against the more general messages of popular culture, messages which seek to persuade girls in particular, that how they look is the most important aspect of who they are.

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