Rambling Essay On Sex, Violence, Manners, and Western Civilization
by Dean
Some of the following links will not be "workplace appropriate." Just so you know.
Kathy Kinsley, whom I adore, recently made fun of me. I linked some mildly sexual material, and warned people that it might not be "workplace safe." I hereby needle her back and note that concerns over such things have often had to do with the work of a group of people whose name rhymes with "kremlinist."
What inspired this? Well, Glenn Reynolds has a rather interesting piece up on Tech Central Station, with a rather evocative title: Porn and Violence: Good for America's Children? In it he makes a rather mundane but, to some people, startling observation: the incidence of violence and sexual inuendo in movies, television, and video games has gone up very sharply in the last decade, and during that very same time period, violent crime, promiscuity, teen pregnancy, illegitimacy, and even divorce have all been on the decline.
Social conservatives don't like hearing this, but it's quite true. Our kids are seeing more violence, seeing more naked boobies and peepees, are living in an increasingly permissive culture--and are turning less violent, less promiscuous, and less irresponsible. It's been going on for well over a decade.
Check the FBI or the Census Bureau's statistics if you don't believe this. Crime is not up, it's down. Illegitimacy is not up, it's down. Sexually transmitted diseases are down, not up. Teen pregnancy is down, not up. Violent crime is way down. Marriage is fashionable, not a joke, and even if easy divorce is still legal, most people have a problem with it morally.
Oh yeah, and deadbeat dads and neglectful moms are socially frowned upon by practically everybody.
Yet, astoundingly, this is all happening during a time when music, video games, movies, and other popular entertainment have become more violent, more sexual, and more thrill-oriented.
Is there a cause-and-effect relationship? Well I'm not sure. But when I became a teenager in the 1980s, to be honest, feminists were a bunch of jerks. They were. Boys could not do anything--AN-NEE-THING--right. If we were hot and horny, it was because we were "immature" and "viewed women as objects." If we were polite and respectful and called them ladies, it was because we were "demeaning" them and "putting them in their place." If we were sexually aggressive we were brutes and neanderthals. If we were respectful and decent, we were wimps.
Do you think I exaggerate? Just talk to men aged 30-45 today, and most of them--those who aren't self-flagellating wimps--will tell you that women were fucking EVIL back in the '80s. All men were potential rapists, and anything we did was taken as a sign of our "male chauvinism." If we were polite we were condescending. If we were rude we were oppressive. If we were aggressive we were domineering. If we were kind we were wimps. Honest to God, women who called themselves "feminists" twisted everyone with a Y chromosome into a pretzel, then either laughed at us or scorned us when we didn't measure up.
Worst of all, they demonized us for objecting to any of this.
Do you think I'm whining? I'm not. I'm telling you the way it was. Indeed, I don't really care what you think of me. A whole lot of us guys born between 1960 and 1980 finally got married, settled down, had kids---and didn't get happy until we decided to ignore what the kremlinists told us and started saying, "fuck you, this is me, this is who I am and what I like, and if you don't like it, you can stick it!"
Aside from Reynolds' interesting column, you know what made me think about all this? Recently a friend sent me a link to a site for men called "Body In Mind." I looked at it, and I began to laugh. Mind you, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and bookmarked it instantly. But I also laughed. Why?
Because it consists of nothing but photographs of naked, youngish women, just exactly like the surreptitiously-viewed Playboy Magazine "pornography" that I looked at as a teenager.
Seriously, just looking through it brought a whole lot back in a flash to me. Because I thought, "Wow. This is what we used to call porn!"
Oh, how I remember what the Kremlinists used to tell me about Playboy. It "objectified women." Or worse, it "made a man look at a woman like a piece of meat." (To which my response is, "Yeah lady, like I ever wanted to have sex with a piece of meat. TRY AGAIN!")
So now I'm a man almost 40 years old, and I am finally able to just bluntly say it: you religious right kooks and feminist leftists actually used to make me feel bad for looking at stuff like this!
Yes, none of the above is "work-safe." Yet I remember, vividly, being a 15 year old boy, looking at surreptitious copies of Playboy Magazine, and looking at images like the above and being taught that this was porn. This was "degrading and objectifying women." Indeed, just looking at stuff like this made me depraved and/or immoral and/or an oppressor of women.
I do not exaggerate. If you think I do, ask any man my age.
Now, mind you, I would agree that there is room in our culture for discussing such images and asking ourselves if we over-value youth, thin-ness, unrealistic body images, and so on. On the other hand, I have to ask if images like the above are, relatively speaking, more horrific and oppressive than images like this one
I don't know that I have a conclusion necessarily, except to note this: when I grew up a teenaged boy in the 1980s, I was taught by Christian Rightists and Feminist Leftists that just looking at images like the above made me a pervert, an oppressor, an immoral lecher, and a fiend. Because I was looking at porn
God Forbid I should pop a woody from looking at any of it, either.
Sometimes my conservative friends give me grief about all of the above. And, even more frequently, my "feminist" friends are outraged.
But I tell you true: this was what I was taught when I was a teenager: that all of the above was porn, and all of it sick and degrading and oppressive.
Yet here's a dirty little secret: some time around age 13 or 14, I plan to buy my son a subscription to Playboy Magazine, so he can look at images just like these in the privacy of his bedroom. Furthermore, I do not plan on asking him what he's doing while he's looking at them.
But I do have one last question: out of curiosity, if I had a daughter that age, is there anything I ought to be buying her a subscription to? Just curious.
