What are you looking at?

I'm getting sick of being treated as an aging paedophile. I'm tired of being viewed with suspicion whenever I talk to someone’s kids. I am tired of having to think carefully before I tell people about  my attitude to kids. In a society obsessed with child abuse,  I am know I am not the problem.  Am I overreacting? Perhaps.  In the supermarket queue the other day, the woman in front had her stroller turned around so the child, a young boy or girl - not sure which - was facing me. I began chatting to the child, pulling a few faces, doing my acclaimed Donald Duck impersonation and getting a grin out of the kid. The mother turned round, glared at me and quickly turned the stroller away. Made me feel grubby.
Recently I found a child, obviously lost, in the shopping centre and stood nearby just keeping an eye out. When the parents arrived, wild-eyed and frantic, I attempted to engage in a reassuring chat to say the kid was not harmed but suddenly felt I was being viewed as somehow involved in the child's absence. Down at the beach on the weekend, when the kids line up for Nippers - or Nipples, as my daughter thought it was called - people taking photographs of their kids are viewed with some concern. A non-parent is ostracised.
For me, it looks like the slippery slope towards the sort of thinking that brings us organisations like the Taliban. We really need to sort out what is going on and be a little less censorious. Look at the statistics. The catch-cry of Stranger Danger is misleading. The stats show that most child abuse occurs in the home and the offender is known to the victim. Acts by random strangers are rare, although when they occur they are horrendous.
But does it help to make your child scared rigid of strangers? Does it help if parents are so paranoid they turn strollers around in supermarkets? What happens if they do get into trouble and could be helped if they approached a stranger? From my experience, most people in the world are good people and who hasn't been blown away by the random kindness of strangers? There is a climate of hostility directed at old blokes like me who just like interacting with kids passing by. They make me laugh.
I love going each year to The Australian Ballet's pre-Christmas offering. We choose the matinee because, and this is where it gets difficult, I love watching the little girls in the audience. They arrive with their mothers in tow. It is pretty obvious they attend ballet school. They have spent many hours preparing their hair and clothes. They stand in second position and are in thrall of the occasion. Occasionally you catch their faces while the ballet is on and the concentration and adoration is wonderful. During interval, they practise the dance steps and movements they’ve seen on stage. 

It is a chance to look through a window into the innocence and wonder of young people untroubled by the crap we have going around in our heads. It is a magical experience for them and it appeals to me because I love seeing something that I love being appreciated by others.
I felt the same with one of my sons when he played sport. It was before he became a teenager. He and his mates had approached the game with passion and seriousness, even though they were all technically pretty hopeless.
Now I don't know why I am telling you this. It feels funny to say these days. I had to think a long time before I wrote this. I had only told a few people about the enjoyment of the ballet and the enjoyment of watching the kids in the audience. I expect an intervention from Hetty Johnston at Bravehearts any moment.
It's not people like me we should be worrying about. Rather, it is the corporatisation of our children.
When I was a kid, we were allowed to be kids. No one marketed stuff at us. There was an understanding that parents were marketed to and they decided what their kids would have. Now that bond is broken and, like the omelette, is never going to be turned back into an egg.
But we have to understand and push back against the pernicious marketing that goes on and the sneaky sexualisation of our children. In the same shopping centres where I am viewed with suspicion, I am surrounded by posters for children’s clothing. The models have been made to look older than they are. They strike poses that are not the poses of children. It is all about rushing children through childhood into consumerist nirvana. So pre-pubescent girls are encouraged to buy training bras and high heels.
On pay television at the moment is a show called Toddlers and Tiaras, an American excrescence featuring beauty contests for mostly little girls but which is now attracting young boys as well. Of course corporate sponsorship dollars back the program.
The organisers made a foray into Australia recently. They were met with some stern resistance from appalled parents but nevertheless Australian mothers (mostly) fronted up with their daughters dressed in provocative outfits and made up heavily.
During my research I came across this: “The mother of the 3-year-old girl dressed as a prostitute on Toddlers and Tiaras tells TMZ she's a good mom - and insists ‘no harm was done to my child’ by dressing her as a hooker.
There's something wrong here and I don't think it is me.
Not wanting to start up the debate again, but the Bill Henson pictures which were hanging in a Paddington gallery created an astonishing storm of what I saw as confected outrage. I thought there was artistic merit in the pictures. But I was in a minority, even at home. The moral champions in the commentariat were as one about this obscenity. I thought of Henson when I was in a gallery of mediaeval religious art in Valencia. There was the Virgin Mary breast feeding the naked baby Jesus. But instead of having the teat in his mouth, she was holding the large breast and spraying milk over the crowd, some of whom were catching it in containers. Should this be taken down? Do we agree with the puritans who roamed round Europe with hammers during the Reformation knocking the genitals off male statues? Where does it end?
I am not seeing the same outrage about these exploratory Toddlers and Tiaras forays into Australia - or indeed the showing of this on cable television - as Henson copped in the commentariat jihad against his work.
We are so confused about sexuality we are suspicious of all the wrong things.This show operates under a cloak of respectability laid on it by corporate dollars.
Is this what we have become as a society? We know the price of everything and the value of nothing (thanks, Oscar).