Posted on 05/02/2005 1:06:38 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
"Porn is just another form of entertainment now."
The speaker, an 18-year-old concession-stand worker named Ben Meredith, was explaining to a Los Angeles Times reporter why virtually no young people were trying to get in to see "Inside Deep Throat" at an Orange County, Calif., theater.
Given the rating (NC-17) and the subject matter (the making of the notorious 1972 movie "Deep Throat") one might expect to find some curious teens infiltrating the theater – or at least trying to. Instead, the Times reporter writes, the audience was "overwhelmingly middle-age" and "not a young person was in sight."
Which didn't surprise Ben, a freshman at the University of California-Irvine. "I mean, porn is really easy to get now. It's like, who cares?"
Those who do care may be wondering just how easy it is. Let's put it this way: It's quicker to list the places kids aren't at risk of exposure to porn.
As the April 23 Los Angeles Times article noted: "It's online, on cable, on cell-phone cameras, in chat rooms, in instant messages from freaks who go online and trawl children's Web journals, on cam-to-cam Web hookups, on TV screens at parties where teens walk past it as if it were wallpaper … and in health class, in movies, in hip-hop lyrics like the one blaring from the loudspeaker as they lined up for pizza and burritos."
You can see why one of the chapters of my new book, "Home Invasion," is titled "Sexualized Everything." There's no escaping the porn culture.
Small wonder that 70 percent of 15- to 17-year-olds has looked at pornography online, according to a study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
"Middle school students clandestinely trade copies of such adult-rated videogames as 'Playboy: The Mansion,'" the Times article says. "Teen advice columns offer wisdom on porn addiction. Online chat rooms for adolescents lapse in and out of graphic sex talk."
As 16-year-old Scott Timsit told the reporter, "Pornography is just part of the culture now. It's almost like it's not even, like, porn."
Except that it is. And being immersed, day-in and day-out, in a pornographic culture that encourages experimentation is hurting our teens.
The physical toll alone is stunning: My Heritage Foundation colleague Robert Rector notes that each year more than 3 million teens contract a sexually transmitted disease. According to a February 2004 report by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, almost half of new STD cases occur among people aged 15-24, and at least half of sexually active youth will have acquired an STD by age 25. Worse, Rector says, sexually active teens are three times more likely than their non-sexually active peers to become depressed and to attempt suicide.
Which makes it an odd time for a federal lawmaker to be trying to make it tougher for schools to teach abstinence. Yet that's exactly what Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., is doing, Rector says, via legislation that Baucus will introduce soon.
"The Baucus anti-abstinence plan would take federal funds that are devoted to teaching abstinence and turn them over to state public health bureaucracies to spend as they will," Rector wrote in a recent op-ed. "Since these bureaucracies have been wedded for decades to 'safe sex' and fiercely opposed to teaching abstinence, the implications of this change are obvious."
Why would Sen. Baucus want to do this? If anything, we need more emphasis on abstinence, not less. That's exactly what the vast majority of parents say: According to a Zogby poll, more than 90 percent say that society should teach kids to abstain from sex until they have at least finished high school, and almost nine in 10 want schools to teach youth to abstain from sex until they're married or in an adult relationship that's close to marriage.
The problem is that interest groups such as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS, carry a huge amount of weight with certain lawmakers. And because they push "the far boundaries of sexual permissiveness," as Rector puts it, they want to destroy abstinence. SIECUS, believe it or not, has published articles touting incest and prostitution, insisting that sex educators need to "advocate good sex for teens."
But the only "good sex for teens" is none at all. In a society awash in pornographic images and language, that's a difficult message for parents to insist on. But if they care about their kids, insist on it they must.
Decadence. Historically, decadent eras have been followed by religious eras. When the pendulum swings too far in one direction, it usually comes back with a crash.
Why should kids try to watch Deep Throat ? This is the Clinton inspired generation, Most of them are getting it done on them.
We can only hope and pray this happens.
Homosexuality is not about love, it is about hedonism.
Classic desensitization.
The long term health effects of STDs contracted in one's
youth havent even been felt by the culture just yet...
Living with an incurable low grade infection can
have devastating consequences as one approaches 40....
Precursors for all kinds of debilitating ailments...
Kids never could see down the road too far.....
Which is one thing the evil promoters of this filth count on.
The downgrading of Americas morality is not coming from porn movies, but sex education classes in school, filth in the reguler movies, and on television. I do not believe most children under 18 have that much access to what would be called hard core porn movies. They do watch TV commercials for erectional dysfunction and herpes cures.
Watch enough erectional dysfunction commercials and they start to believe walking around with a hard-on will get you anything you need in life. Look at Bob.
Ping.
BTTT
The downgrading of Americas morality is not coming from porn movies, but sex education classes in school, filth in the reguler movies, and on television. I do not believe most children under 18 have that much access to what would be called hard core porn movies. They do watch TV commercials for erectional dysfunction and herpes cures.
Watch enough erectional dysfunction commercials and they start to believe walking around with a hard-on will get you anything you need in life. Look at Bob.
Pretty much agreed. My parents solved the sex-ed problem pretty easily though. They instilled in us that sex should only be as an expression of love (and to have children) between a married husband and wife. They ALWAYS previewed the sex-ed material and it really did NOT affect us if we attended or if we didn't. None of my siblings nor I had premarital sex because of the values we were taught.
Oh puhleez.
Every generation thinks they invented sex.
And there are enough old farts who never got any to be their enablers in thinking that way.
I'm guessing you are old enough to remember all the way back to the 90s.
In any case, there is a difference between sex and porn. When I was a teen, you were supposed to at least pretend you cared about the girl. Now, as best as I can tell, they prefer it if you don't.
That is so true, it is exactly what I was thinking. It is also the reason why conservatism is on the rise and Liberal is now the bad word.
I plan to buy her book HOME INVASION. Porn dehumnizes men and women, it is prostitution with an audience.
BUMP
"Living with an incurable low grade infection can
have devastating consequences as one approaches 40.... "
When I was a young man, there were onlyl two venereal diseases and both were curable with penicillin.
What incurable-low-grade-infection nightmare do you mean? Something I never heard of, probably.
"As 16-year-old Scott Timsit told the reporter, "Pornography is just part of the culture now. It's almost like it's not even, like, porn."
In a sense he is right, it isn't porn anymore BUT becuse of heman nature SOMETHING must be "porn" and wait till you see THAT. "...the wine stronger and the music madder.."
Nah, the 70s.
More drugs, less lite bondage.
Most of human history is not as prudish as American Old-Fart-ism.
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