Lenore Skenazy of Free Range Kids, who last month regaled readers of The Wall Street Journal with the fascinating fact that not one case of a stranger poisoning kids on Halloween has ever been documented (“‘Stranger Danger’ and the Decline of Halloween“), has now shared with us another extreme tale of the wacky stuff grownups do to overprotect children:
What would you do if you got your kids’ yearbook and all the eyes had been blacked out with magic marker?
Ms. Skenazy credited The Daily Mail and Anorak News for this.
Personally, I’d try to wake up. But at a school in England, the principal is very much awake and behind this whole thing. Apparently, she was so worried someone might cut out the kids’ faces, paste them on child porn pictures and post them on the Internet — yes, that’s really her concern — that she ordered the teachers to manually black out all the children’ eyes.
Let’s pause for a second to consider how lovely an illustration this is of what I call “Worst-First” thinking. That is, thinking up the worst, most perverse explanation for something first, instead of assuming a less dramatic, but far more likely, rationale…
Yecch! The idea that a yearbook would be of interest to anyone other than the kids in it (and their parents), doesn’t seem to have occurred to this woman, who also outlawed the taking of photos or videos at school plays. She’s so worried about perverts, she doesn’t realize how perverted her thought process has become. To her, all kiddie pix are one step away from kiddie porn….
She insists that she’s not making this up, and I’ve never known Lenore to mislead us before, but blimey! That headmistress bird has gone spare! (I’m practicing my English slang for a trip to that country next month, so bear with me. I have a particular penchant for the anachronistic…)
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I say this at the risk of exacerbating her paranoia, but going by her picture in The Daily Mail, the headmistress is quite a lovely woman, with intelligent eyes.
I had figured she’d be a thick, glowering harridan…
It makes me wonder whether someone has taken HER face and pasted it into a porno. SOMETHING traumatic must have happened to her to lead to such extreme behavior.
So you remember Lenore now…
Well, sure I do. In fact, she’s commented here on the blog since that last time. So she could be reading this now. So don’t embarrass me…
That’s funny, but…
I actually think the headmistress having done this is MORE likely to cause a problem. Putting bars over eyes suggests something illicit, something shameful. Seems to me that makes the pictures FAR more likely to attract attention from pervs — especially after they’ve read coverage of this insanity — who otherwise would never have tried to look at the yearbook.
This is just crazy on so many levels. The fact that the woman could think of something so evil and perverse, and take such drastic measures to make everyone else aware that she’s had such thoughts, and make the children’s pictures the objects of her strange actions, seems the very most likely way to increase the probability of someone somewhere getting evil ideas connected with these picture.
She would say the pervs will have perverted ideas anyway. Yeah, probably. But probably not with regard, specifically, to these particular children whom she is charged with protecting — until she did this.
All well and good, until you get a perv with a Lone Ranger fetish,
Methinks the first sign something might be amiss was when the administrator in question banned the taking of photos or videos at school plays.
What parent – or school board, for that matter – would go along with such a policy?
If my own child is in a play, no headmistress type is going to tell me I can’t take a picture of him or her because of that individual’s irrational fear.
Your statement that this is crazy on so many levels couldn’t be any more accurate, Brad.
Also, if the parents paid for the yearbooks, it’s vandalism of private property.
Brad, the headmistress looks a little like Sean Young, and Sean Young was attractive. But she was also crazy as a loon.
Appearances can fool us.
Also, I just paid for my 6th graders yearbook: about $60.
If she did that to his book, she’d owe me some coin!
This is another example of how we worry about all the wrong things. Others include:
Flying is far safer than driving.
Too much fat and sugar is much more of a threat than salmonela poisoning.
Iraq posed us no risk while homegrown thugs murder thousands each year.
That is WILD that you said “Sean Young,” Greg…
I thought the same thing. I looked at that woman’s picture (and she really is quite lovely), I thought of Sean Young. In fact, I went so far as to call up “Sean Young” on Google Images, at which point I thought, “Nah, nobody else will see the resemblance,” so I didn’t mention it.
I think maybe it’s a matter of … nothing about her face or hair or anything really looks like the corresponding parts of Sean Young, yet she SUGGESTS her nonetheless. Maybe it’s her overall expression, or something as subtle as a particular gleam in her eye… A sort of gestalten impression…
Which in turn suggests a similarity of personality. And you’re right; Sean Young is/was bats. Quite beautiful, but bats…
That photo is just plain creepy.
All well and good, until you get a perv with a Lone Ranger fetish
LOL, literally.