Grandmother would be under an oxygen tent just from hearing the word "kinderwhore"

The other day, a person who had just become a columnist for a scientific journal wrote to ask me how I avoided repeating myself in this column. I was tempted to reply, a la Groucho Marx, that I would never consider giving advice to anybody who was stupid enough to ask it from me. I don't know whether he thought that I had some brilliant amazing information-retrieval system which allowed me to discover instantly whether I had used the same anecdote for the same issue back in 1993. All I could say, rather feebly, was that I try to avoid doing it too much.

But in what we absurdly refer to as "real life", I don't think I make the same effort. In response to the same stimulus, I can be relied on to make the same comment, the same joke, tell the same anecdote. Every time I see anything shocking, I don't actually get shocked, I just exclaim: "What would my grandmother have thought?" By this, I sometimes mean my Swedish grandmother who died ten years ago after a long, quiet, pious and respectable life lived in provincial Sweden.

On the other hand, my English grandmother was shocked by the Beatles, and this was as they were in 1963 when they had matching suits and moptops. She thought they were scruffy and disrespectful and noisy. What would she have thought of Kurt Cobain? Or of Ice Cube? I was recently browsing through a new dictionary of female culture whose entry for Courtney Love described her as a pioneer of the "kinderwhore" style, as if it were just another neutral fashion style like Victorian or flapper. I pictured myself trying to explain to my grandmother exactly what "kinderwhore" meant - that it's not a psychological disorder but a fashion statement. I'd probably have to explain the controversies about child abuse and child pornography over the past ten or 15 years and that the kinderwhore fashion is a sort of ironically transgressive response to all of that. That's right, isn't it? Except that either of my grandmothers would already be under an oxygen tent just from hearing the word "kinderwhore".

This week I saw a video of the Todd Solondz movie, Happiness. This is a deliberately shocking story of a dysfunctional middle-class American family. The film features masturbation, stalking, obscene phone calls, rape, child abuse, murder and mutilation, and much other general nastiness. What would my Swedish grandmother have thought of a film whose climactic farcical scene - and if your stomach is easily turned, then look away now - involves a mother unknowingly licking the semen of her 12-year-old son off the tongue of the family Alsatian?

Hedy Lamarr died last week alone in her Hollywood home. She'll be remembered for two things. Her appearance with Victor Mature in the biblical epic, Samson and Delilah. Or, rather, not exactly the appearance, but Groucho Marx's refusal to see it, because, in his words: "I'm not going to see any movie in which the hero's tits are bigger than the heroine's." Before that, she had achieved worldwide notoriety for the scene in the 1932 Czech film, Ecstasy, in which she scampered naked through a forest. Yet when the film came out on video a couple of years ago, it had a mere PG rating.

The curious thing is that people's exposure to horrible sights used to be far greater. People saw dead bodies, horrible illnesses, public executions, extremes of poverty and starvation. All this has receded, yet the visual imagery we see on advertising billboards is the sort of stuff that the surrealists used to put in obscure galleries in order to shock the bourgeoisie. My Swedish grandmother might have approved of campaigns designed to stop children growing up into drug addicts, but what would she have thought of the new Barnardo's poster, showing a baby clutching a syringe and tightening a tourniquet around its upper arm? The Advertising Standards Authority tried, unsuccessfully, to stop newspapers running it, but it's an image we can all read easily enough. Addicts are created by what happened to them when they were little children. But it used to be enough just to show a child who just looked a bit sad and poor and hungry.

I'm not sure that I mind this all that much - except, perhaps, the dense, sexualised imagery that children are now exposed to as they grow up - but I do wonder what my grandchildren will be referring to in 70 years or so when they say: "Well, I don't find it that shocking, but if my grandfather were alive, it would kill him."

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