[Hemingway's Ghost]

Reintroducing modesty and shame into American society is a good goal, but how?

Actually, I think it's a lousy idea. Sex, sexuality, and sexual expression is not shameful at all. Treating it as such only adds fuel to the fire. You want to know how to pick out American tourists overseas? Stand outside a typical Amsterdam sex shop---one that's not even in the Red Light district. The people who walk by it and gawk and point and giggle at it like 13-year-old boys are the Americans. The people who don't give it a second glance are the Europeans.

This whole thing is a uniquely American hang-up---that is, if you don't consider the Arabs. It's not some global "good vs. evil" battle.

[Chemist_Geek]

Actually, I think it's a lousy idea. Sex, sexuality, and sexual expression is not shameful at all. Treating it as such only adds fuel to the fire. You want to know how to pick out American tourists overseas? Stand outside a typical Amsterdam sex shop---one that's not even in the Red Light district. The people who walk by it and gawk and point and giggle at it like 13-year-old boys are the Americans. The people who don't give it a second glance are the Europeans.

Yeah, but isn't one of the points of the original piece that pornography makes people blase about sexuality, which is supposed to be a special gift from God, or something like that?

I do not believe that increasing the blase-ness...Wait a minute. What is the problem here that we are trying to solve?

[djreece]

Actually if you could get beyond the Amsterdam sex shops and travel throughout the regions of Europe, Latin America, and other areas (where the real people live not the tourist strips), you will find plenty of other cultures who are as "hung up" on modesty and sexual restraint as are many Americans. It's called cultural survival. Degenerate societies throughout history have self-destructed.

Sorry, but I don't have an inferiority complex when it comes to Europeans so your pseudosophisticated, peer-pressure argument doesn't carry much weight with me.