Fast Food Fun

I was having dinner with my two young children recently at a fast food restaurant when about six college aged young men and two college aged young women came in and sat down at the table closest to us.

As I was eating my fast food dinner, feeling slightly guilty that I was, while making a grocery shopping list in my head and listening to my older daughter talk about how the mcnugget is "real chicken, you know" snippets of the conversation from the next table filtered through the air to my ears.

"It's a yellow shower and you would not believe how much she loved it" one of the boys said. Some of the others laughed. I looked at their table. Some of the boys did not laugh. But they did not say anything either. The girls stayed silent. Oblivious to any discord among the group the talker continued on to relate scenes from a porn movie. If I had been two or three tables away I might have looked over and interpreted the scene as a bunch of college kids having a nice time. They were dressed nicely, appeared clean cut. They looked like a nice group of kids.

One of the boys looked at me and made complete eye contact. He changed the subject at the table. He noticed my children. He did the right thing.

One of the girls got up and moved to another table and talked to two others.

When I was in college the topic was real sex, not porn. While I am sure that my friends and I engaged in chatty girl talk that sometimes involved sex conversations, I honestly don't ever remember porn being part of the equation. We were the cool group and we certainly weren't prudish. We partied and had fun, were smart and active and thought we were terrific and knew everything. But we didn't get into porn. We had boyfriends and premarital sex. We were most scared about getting pregnant and AIDS didn't exist. I had never seen a porn movie and I don't think I ever thought about porn at all.

I had to wonder, watching those kids whether some younger people now with the proliferation of porn addiction, computer chat rooms, constant text messaging, cell phones, etc miss out on so much of what goes on in a community spirit of college. Or if it has just changed so much that I can no longer relate to their generation's experience.

What will become of these young people who get hooked on porn?

Seconds before the one young man looked at me and changed the subject, my mind had been racing as to how to handle the situation for my own children. They seemed to not take much notice of the conversation of these college kids, but in their own youthful way were also completely enthralled by watching "big kids" having dinner together. I considered that I could either move to another table or go over and say something to them. I'm glad I didn't have to.