Just when I thought Joe Jackson (Michael’s “father”) might be my poster boy for reprehensible parenting, you’ve come along to challenge him for the honor.  According to media reports, you tried to pick up your own daughter Tatum at Farrah Fawcett’s funeral, with the one-two punch, “You have a drink?  You have a car?”
 
You are quoted as telling Vanity Fair contributing editor Leslie Bennetts, “I’m a hopeless father. I don’t know why.  I don’t think I was supposed to be a father. Just look around at my work—they’re either in jail or they should be.”  You go on to say that you aren’t in touch with your children any longer and have “never been happier.”
 
Here’s a psychological newsflash:  Not recognizing your own daughter is the kind of thing that gets etched on your tombstone, under the heading SCUMBAG.  Trying to pick her up at Farrah’s funeral—or any woman’s—goes right underneath that entry.  And stating publicly that you’re happier not seeing or speaking to your own kids makes it a Trifecta.  You’re gonna keep some guy who etches letters in granite very busy.
 
No wonder Tatum was hooked on heroin and Redmond is in jail for a drug offense.  You obviously have a really bad habit of inflicting pain on people, and they turn to one or another intoxicant to try to relieve it. I mean, it’s one thing to try picking up your adult daughter, it’s another to do whatever you did to her as a little girl.  Exactly what was that, Ryan?
 
I know, you think I’m being a little hard on you, but I’m not. 
 
See, when I use the term “scumbag,” I mean it in the clinical sense, and with no hatred toward you, whatsoever.  I mean that something happened to you in your own personal development that led you to think so little of yourself and so little of others that you can’t see the beauty it is to bring a new life into this world and be able to nourish it.  You must question your own self-worth so deeply that now the only thing you can pay attention to is how to pump yourself up narcissistically and avoid the deeper questions you have about whether you’re worth anything at all—to yourself or anyone else.
 
You tell Ms. Bennetts that you’d “take back” your kids—as in, return them to their Maker; as in, kill them off.  Well, you came close, setting them up for their drug abuse.  But here’s the thing:  The real ambivalence you have at core isn’t about them at all.  It’s about you and whether you deserve to exist.  I don’t believe you could have been well-loved and turn out unable to love.  Your own family somehow made you wonder whether you deserved to be born, whether you were really a keeper.  How?
 
You did deserve to live. You were once an innocent child, full of human potential and the capacity to love yourself and others endlessly.  You were cheated of that potential, and I am sorry that happened to you.  Now, facing the particular traumas you lived through and feeling all the pain of having lived through them is the only way back to being fully human.
 
Life is an amazing journey and, even with you facing leukemia, the end isn’t written until a man’s last acts and final words.  You can still reclaim your humanity and capacity to love and offer it to the children you brought into this world.  And then very different words might mark your resting place and very different things may be said of you.
 
I have seen people resurrected by embracing the truth at 18, and at 48, and at 78.  It is never, ever too late. 

In the wake of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus posing in makeup and not much else for Vanity Fair, Hugh Hefner has stated that he would like to see Miley pose naked for Playboy—when she turns 18.
I believe Hefner’s offer, albeit cloaked in the disclaimer that Miley has to be legal to strip for him, may herald a challenge to the current age of sexual consent—which is between 16 and 18 in almost all states, lower only in South Carolina (and only when the sexual partners are both young).

What Hefner chose to do was to express being sexually attracted to an underage girl.  He knows that he is perceived as freeing American men to express their sexuality.  In this case, he is presumably leading the way in suggesting that men ought to feel free to direct their sexual fantasies toward 15-year-olds—bemoaning, perhaps, the fact that they will have to impatiently wait to get them out of their clothes.

I don’t know that Hefner would have felt restrained were Miley just 14.  Maybe even a fetching 13  After all, he wasn’t the one who suggested that Miley get almost-naked for Vanity Fair.  And she certainly didn’t look ill-at-ease with her sexuality in that magazine.  She looked seductive. 
Disney didn’t recoil in horror.  Miley is Money.  The show goes on, no matter how much she chooses to show.
That seeming comfort with sexuality—at 15, or less—is part of the issue here.  We know that many 15-year-olds are sexually active.  According to some data, one in three ninth graders has had sexual intercourse. 

The age of puberty has been steadily declining.

Hefner’s comment is, nonetheless, a kind of gauntlet thrown down to the legal age of consent:  He isn’t in ninth grade.  He’s an adult man.  He is openly attracted to an underage girl.  And he doesn’t seem worried about saying so.

This potential chapter in the story of the sexual revolution wasn’t written by Hefner, though.  Signs that Americans are rethinking age-appropriate sexual activity are everywhere. 

After all, the American public embraced, rather than shunned, Jamie Lynn Spears after her pregnancy.  Untold millions of magazines that showcase her new home and the birth of her daughter and her daughter’s first birthday will be sold. 

Will the fact that she is an unwed, pregnant 16-year-old with more media attention than ever suggest to young girls around America that they, too, can start their families sooner, rather than later?  Will they wonder what have they been waiting for?

Only time will tell.  But one thing is clear:  The time that was once allowed teenaged girls to slowly grow into being sensual, to play at adulthood without being treated by older men as adults, is under assault.  And you partly have the media to thank for that:  The unlikely and powerful alliance of Disney, Vanity Fair and Playboy.

Keith Ablow, M.D. is a psychiatrist, FOX News contributor and the founder of www.LivingtheTruth.com