1. Struggling with the Word "Adult"

The word "adult" means dirty. Adult bookstores, adult video, adult entertainment. Adult education probably means teaching you how to have sex.

No, there are those "adults only" signs. An adult can gamble and get drunk in bars. An adult can also buy cigarettes, sign contracts, get married, vote, go in the army, buy a gun, drive a car, travel abroad, act as a prostitute, make his own waffles in a motel and walk around an antique shop without his mother.

"Adultism," then, must be an addiction to those things. You can't stop smoking cigarettes and buying guns and gambling and making waffles and walking around antique shops.

No, adultism (trusting Wikipedia again) is "a predisposition towards adults." Adultists assume "that adults are better than young people, and entitled to act upon young people without agreement." They discriminate against them the way ageists discriminate against old people.

So the owner of an antique shop who puts up a sign that says "children must be accompanied by an adult" is an adultist.

Yes. He thinks that adults are better than young people at picking up vases. He discriminates.

And so, then, do the people who put the same kind of sign on a movie. Young people who want to watch adults having sex have to be accompanied by an adult. Adults must be better at watching adults having sex than young people.

No, young people aren't poor at watching people have sex. It's bad for them.

And good for an adult?

Well, not bad for them.

Do you know that?

No, I'm guessing. Like everybody else.

But you're not guessing when you say it's bad for a child.

No. But good-bad misses the point about those signs. It's a matter of danger. An adult is better at judging it. An adult is able to see that watching a sex scene will endanger a child. It's a vase he can't handle.

And it won't endanger an adult. He can handle it because he's reached "sexual maturity." That's puberty, right?

No, puberty is only biological maturity. Shakespeare's "great natural," the one who runs around hiding his "bauble" in every knothole, is mature in that sense. The only danger he faces is danger to his bauble. The danger here is to the psyche.

I see, a more precious vase. And to judge the dangers to it you have to be what, then...psychologically mature?

Psychologically, socially, culturally. Hard to find a word. Some would say "spiritually," though they would probably call the endangered thing "soul."

Hard to say what it is but not hard to say when it comes, since we let a birthday determine when somebody can watch sex scenes alone and when he has to have somebody else alongside him. That's an important date. One day I'm a child and have to be protected and the next day I'm an adult and can protect. And the protection is from....?

Exposure to the bad.

So those signs on movies are talking about good and bad. With them we put next to a child in a movie somebody who we assume knows enough about good and bad to protect the child from the bad. When the movie shows adults having sex the adult will know that though the scene doesn't harm him, an adult, and may harm the performing adults, and won't harm the child after his birthday, it will at this moment harm him. We post and are guided by those signs even though we aren't very sure who, in the most important sense, is an adult and who is a child. We could have Shakespeare's great natural protecting Thomas Aquinas, the great spiritual — because he was a little younger.

Well, that's the chance we take. But if there is something in the child worth protecting — psyche or whatever — we have to take it. Even if we don't know what it is or who still has it.

Yes, and worse, even if we don't know when the person who has it loses it. Some people, maybe most of us, just pop in and out of adulthood. Sometimes I can handle a bottle of whisky or a sex scene and sometimes I can't. Put me in a theater with a child and I'll be jumping in and out of my seat. And if he's like me he'll be jumping too. We could be changing seats through a whole movie — child, adult, child, adult. That's a tough call.

Yes, and when it gets tough enough for you, when it's wearing you out, I see what you'll do.

What's that?

What we're doing now: take a guess, set an age, and live with the results.