Never begin a sentence with the words “In my day.” It’s the slipperiest slope in existence. Before you know it, you’ll be using the phrase “kids today” in the pejorative sense, meaning that kids in your day were better than the brand they make now, which is demonstrably not true. They certainly weren’t better-looking, and I have the class photos to prove it. As for me, I was one beady-eyed alarming-looking baby.

My oldest friend is 90 and my youngest friend is six. It’s odd how they both talk to me with the same gentle air of tolerance, as if I could go off at any minute.

I have great gaggles of teenagers walking past my house each day and I have never encountered such polite — okay, patronizing — young people. They look terrific, which may be why teenagers are so despised; they’re effortlessly attractive.

Preteen girls walk past my house with the sound of joy that is “rivers of laughter.” Like the directionless shrieking and spontaneously joyful singing of the kids in the daycare on their way to the playground, the sound signals that the kids are all right.

But that’s not what you hear from the media. I don’t mean the fact that a million Canadian children go to bed hungry — as Mel Hurtig has pointed out with anger and precision, that is our fault — but the allegation that modern life has caused something faulty in the new generation’s wiring. They’re “one giant violent sexed-up sum-snapping body-pierced eating-disorder STD-ready freak show,” as San Francisco columnist Mark Morford sarcastically puts it.

That’s why Maclean’s asks rhetorically why our daughters dress “like skanks” (this is another word for slut and it’s a sign of Maclean’s 1950s ethos that I sense they would have preferred to stick with the vicious misogynistic words of that era).

That’s why, at this very moment, adults are not shaking their heads over the gang rape of an unconscious young Toronto high school girl but over the fact that the attack was filmed on cellphones.

I have news for those adults. Young girls are raped frequently. They always have been. The difference is that before, the girl crawled away in horror and shame. She would have been unable to get a morning-after pill, the police would likely not have believed her story and she might well have felt unable to approach her parents for help. It would have been impossible to get a safe abortion. Her life would have been over.

But from what I read today, the other students at her school are beyond horrified. They’re full of sympathy for the victim. The great disadvantage of the cellphone display is that so many others will have watched the girl’s torture, and even worse, the already shattered, heartbroken girl will eventually be asked by the police to watch her own rape. There are advantages and disadvantages to modern technology but the act of rape has not changed. It never will.

But the other students, the ones not involved in the crime, will be deeply scarred, because they’re human. They’re not unfeeling just because they’re young, despite what the geezers will say.

Pedophiles, spanking and complicated discomfort

The great Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy has just written a new Ruth Rendell-ish novel called Helpless, about the abduction of a nine-year-old girl during an electrical blackout in Toronto. But the girl is not helpless. Rachel is smart. In a characterization that I have been told has offended some, her pedophile kidnapper is not smart. He is a Lewis Carroll type, taking the form of an obese Cabbagetown vacuum-cleaner repairman, and he is trying very hard not to rape the child who so arouses him.

In real life, all such kidnappers rape the child because that is what they enjoy, and kill the child out of pleasure and practicality.

Gowdy once wrote a short story, a very good one, about a baby being decapitated by a ceiling fan, but I suspect she understood there were limits here. She makes every character as complicated as they would be in life, a combination of good and bad, cunning and foolish, in varying measures.

The New York writer Daphne Merkin once wrote an essay on the sexual nature of spanking. It caused an uproar in the States, where people lie to themselves about such things, and a yawn in Britain, where spanking is by definition a sexual act. Merkin is still the only writer who has explained this odd sprig of sexuality and she did it in a very few words.

Complicit and yet not complicit, Merkin could instantly leap over the intellectual part of herself “and land on the other side of sexual pleasure, at a place where the body takes over and the mind leaves off.” It’s like hang-gliding, she says.

In the same way, Gowdy describes in brief, wonderful phrases the beauty of children’s bodies in a way familiar to parents: “the insectlike hinge of her elbows, her prancing step, the shapely bulb of her head, her small square shoulders bearing the burden of her backpack.”

Children are so perfect that parents think they’re not worthy to be trusted with them. Imagine leaving a baby with an idiot like me! “Why doesn’t somebody stop me?” parents think with bewilderment.

The media is the message

The British journalist John Simpson, in his 2005 memoir of growing up in Britain in the late 1940s, says there were just as many abductions and murders of children then as there are now, but in those days, the media did not discuss them.

But now? We discuss everything. There are almost no secrets left. And the young are as easily hurt now as they were in centuries past, but we demonize them more openly now. There was a furor recently as some nations in Europe set up safe, warm drop-off stations for infants who would normally be tossed by the roadside. Appalling, the right-wing critics cried. Teenage baby-bearing skanks today don’t value life.

But those critics don’t read. If they did, they would have known that foundling hospitals in 14th-century Tuscany maintained revolving windows so that infants could be safely abandoned. Medieval teenagers were just as scared as 21st-century ones. In some ways, the teenaged mothers were treated better then.

We screech such disapproval of the young and think that morality is deteriorating. Perhaps we see a moral slide in ourselves (isn’t that inevitable as we try to survive in the workplace?) and attribute worse to them.

‘Twas ever thus.

This week

I am reading Suite Française by the late novelist Irène Némirovsky in the French edition because it includes the commentary on Némirovsky’s supposed anti-Semitism. I’m also reading it because I feel a great injustice has been done. Némirovsky was a novelist. Some of her characters, some Jewish, were unattractive. She is now being attacked for anti-Semitism.

It isn’t just that novelists shouldn’t be blamed for the vileness of their characters. It’s that Némirovsky was Jewish. She escaped the Cossacks in Russia, went to France, became a famous novelist and was blithely handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy government. She died in Auschwitz.

Can we give this woman a break?

As for the rest of the week, I have been without Bell Sympatico Internet service. It’s unsettling to discover how life shuts down without online access. What a blank awful place it is. As for my spotty and unreliable Sympatico, I have no words.