Posted on 11/27/2001 7:36:03 AM PST by LibertyGirl77
As the War on Terrorism progresses, the news becomes more and more a single-issue update than a comprehensive look at the events that shape our lives. Any given moment spent viewing the news networks reveals new developments in Afghanistan, in the anthrax cases, and in the lives of those affected by the attacks of 9/11. C-Span, for a time, seemed to be "All Airport Security, All The Time", and CNN Headline News now includes a detailed weather map of Afghanistan alongside the maps of New England, the Southwest and other American regions on its 24-hour ticker.
What the news no longer seems to be covering is day-to-day reality for the 250 million or so Americans who don’t happen to be on an anthrax-infested mail route or on the ground in Afghanistan. The problems that plagued America before 9/11 have not evaporated like so much dust at Ground Zero. If anything, they have been made worse by the lack of attention paid them since the terrorist attacks.
Today, crime rates in the inner cities are still rising, teens are becoming pregnant at an alarming rate, and the divorce rate still exceeds 50%. All of these problems are worthy of their own columns, but they can all be traced to a common root: Modern Sex. Sex, of course, is nothing modern and certainly nothing new. But the Manhattan Institute has recently released a new book entitled Modern Sex—Liberation and its Discontents (edited by City Journal editor Myron Magnet) detailing the profound cultural effects of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s. The effects of that age are impossible to ignore. Though not openly visible in today’s headlines, those effects can be found behind the headlines: Behind the inner city shooting, the son of an utterly absent father. Behind the jump in the teen pregnancy statistics, lonely girls who give sex to gain the love of a child. These and more are the issues addressed by Modern Sex, and they are issues perhaps, in the long run, even more important to our society than the search for Osama Bin Laden.
Modern Sex is a compilation of a dozen revealing essays by some of conservatism’s top editorial talent, including (among others) Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, Wendy Shalit, and Harry Stein. All of the essays have appeared separately in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal at various times, but taken en masse, they paint a poignant and disturbing portrait of American sexuality at the start of the 21st century. The book is divided into several sections, each detailing a different aspect of American sexuality. After the book’s introduction, the editor gets right to the point with the first section, called "Sex Now." It this section that contains some of the best insights, including a brilliant assessment of the hit HBO comedy "Sex and the City" entitled "Sex, Sadness, and the City" by Wendy Shalit. With pinpoint accuracy, Shalit uncovers the truths woven throughout the series (which has been a hit with liberal media such as the New York Times). After quoting several of the star character’s defeated, depressed monologues (usually heard after yet another failed fling that began as a one night stand), Shalit declares:
"The publicists and pundits may not get it, but [show creator] Candace Bushnell and producer Darren Star of the "Sex and the City" TV show understand in their heart of hearts the failure of sexual liberation. That’s why all the story lines keep returning to the unhappiness of the players involved. The characters of "Sex and the City" accurately represent what the sexual revolution expects of women, and what the woman who looks for liberation through the bedroom can expect. The writers know that their four protagonists, for all their cool urbanity, experience feelings of loss and sadness and loneliness that are real and typical for women in the age of liberation."
Other topics covered under "Sex Now" include "The ‘L’ Word: Love as Taboo" (a great commentary on the overwhelmingly casual treatment of sex among young people today), and "How We Mate" (a scathing indictment of the common practice of cohabitation, otherwise known as ‘shacking up’).
By far the most shockingly informative segment of Modern Sex is the segment concerning the sexualizing of children. This set of three articles by Kay S. Hymowitz covers the sexual revolution’s effect on today’s kids, from grade school to age eighteen.
The essay called "Tweens: Ten Going On Sixteen" forever cemented this writer’s decision to home school any future offspring—or at the very least put them in the strictest private school available. "Tweens," or children between the ages of 8 and 12, are, according to Hymowitz’s extensive research, acting very much the same as juniors and seniors in high school did ten or even five years ago. Oral sex has become commonplace activity in middle schools (ages 11-14, mind you), with children apparently (thanks to Bill Clinton?) not considering it sex at all, but rather "just fooling around."
Hymowitz recounts a story of a seventh grade boy who had his first sexual experience when an eighth grade girl offered to perform oral sex on him. Not quite past puberty, the boy described the experience as not all that exciting but "sort of interesting." According to several school administrators quoted in the essay, this behavior often takes place on the playground (no doubt just yards away from the swings and tetherballs that the 12 year olds of yesteryear were contented with). Hymowitz goes on to expose the underlying causes of this unsettling trend—and what she has to say may surprise a lot of parents.
Other stellar essays include a series on the war between the sexes, and a section on the ideology of the sexual revolution. Of course, so many problems cannot be addressed without offering some sort of solution, and the last section of the book gives the reader just that. With common-sense logic and sterling erudition, Roger Scruton presents two essays advocating the resurgence of social stigma and the revival of traditional marriage and family.
Modern Sex should be required reading for policymakers, parents, educators, and anyone else seeking the causes and solutions for today’s prevailing social ills.
The Liberal ideology clearly underlies the sexual revolution. The Liberal ideology says that confining a woman to sex within a relationship (i.e. marriage) is oppressive to her natural sexuality. Consequently, Liberals would like to see women have sex freely and as often as they wish with many partners. The resultant offspring of these sexual encounters can simply be aborted or taken care of by Welfare, socialized daycare, and our public schools. Of course, we all know what the consequences of these things are on our society (lawless, violent kids who end up as "clients of our correctional facilities"), not to mention the impact that these shallow sexual flings have on young women today. I think the "Sex, Sadness, and the City" reference is very appropriate.
I find it interesting that, in my experience at least, liberals espouse these things for the "masses" (for whom they flatter themselves they are the obvious choice as leaders) but not for themselves.
Most liberals of my acquaintance are casual about SOME traditional values but not nearly to the extent they'd have you believe.
For example, WAAAAAY back in the mid-70s, when I was in high school, my then-girlfriend whose mother was a "liberated woman" herself, and I stayed over at her house one weekend.
Even though my girlfriend had insisted all along that the "fooling around" we did was approved by her mother, when it came to actual discussion, her mother let her and me know that there was to be NONE OF THAT while we were in her home, because...well, just because, that's why.
I've seen this over and over again with people of the liberal persuasion that I have known. They say one thing for public consumption but their own lives are quite different.
Thus you have the Jesse Jacksons and Billery Clintons of the world decrying any attempt at criticizing public schooling, but they send THEIR kids to the most exclusive private schools imaginable.
Yup, they do the same thing that this conservative writer did, except that SHE has no qualms about stating her reasons why. The Liberals are hypocrites.
i guess the liberals want it both ways...or was she mad because mr. prolific was ruining her chance at being the pres?
there will be none of that, because .... just because, that's why
there will be none of that because there is a commandment of god against that. liberals do sometimes understand the fallibility of their arguments sometimes, but cannot explain them in humanistic terms and refuse to bring god into the picture.
Because (unless you are wed) THAT leads to children with no fathers around to care for them and a whole s---load of social problems.
That's why.
Typically in my case it was because the girls' father would be a traditional Italian Catholic who had sentiments about such behavior best left to conjecture.
Had this been pursued I'm sure I would have experienced God's personal opinion far sooner than I'd hoped.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, 'Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.' Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enought for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.
Or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act -- that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. [Editor's note: isn't it interesting that Lewis felt that the audience he was addressing in this talk, back in the early 1940s, needed to have this explained to them?] Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the strip-tease act resulted not from sexual corruption but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if, in some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular, one of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have to look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than ever before, and public opinion is less hostile to illicit unhions and even to perversion than it has been since Pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of 'starvation' the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare. But perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I am sorrry to have to go into all these details but I must. The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last twenty years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts, and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not.
They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess. Modern people are always saying, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.' They may mean two things. They may mean ' There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.' If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body -- which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love peotry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of, ' they may mean 'the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of'.
If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect: and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance. God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult. It is easy to think that we want something when we do not really want it. A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realised that while his lips had been saying, 'Or Lord, make me chaste,' his heart has been secretly adding, 'But please don't do it just yet.' This may happen in prayers for other virtues too; but there are three reasons why it is now specially difficult for us to desire -- let along to achieve -- complete chastity.
To make a long story short, the three reasons that he gives and expounds on are as follows:
The chapter concludes as follows:
Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can that the centre of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell thaan a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
This was Lewis' take on the world's viewpoint on sex and sexuality some 60 years ago. I think if he were still alive today, he could give the same talk, virtually unchanged.
Which is, of course, why I included it here.
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