Dean - assuming you had a daughter instead of a son, I definitely would recommend that you not get her a subscription to Ms Magazine.
Well, if you were to look at women in academia nowadays, the "kremlinist" model of feminism still holds. It is a kind of worldview, where they seem to assume that all women are all naturally lesbians, and all men are nothing but uncivilized rapists, just looking for opportunities to victimise women. Sad but tyur. These academic feminists are shrill, angry, vicious, and are really good at ganging up to do harm to those who dont buy into their worldview, and their dogma. Read the author Christina Hoff Sommers, and camille Paglia, and you'all will realise who to a lot of people these days, the word 'feminism" conjures up negative thoughts
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!"
Replace "the kremlinists" with "anybody" and you have the recipe for happiness. To mangle Twain: never try to make a man change. It wastes your time and annoys the man.
I suspect Shell knows of what she speaks. It makes sense to me, says in all seriousness the guy who will have a baby daughter arriving in the next several weeks.
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!"
What Jerry said about happiness.
I went through a stage where I actually listened to a ton of crap in trying to be an enlightened guy, and took a bit longer than one might expect to realize I was being played ... part of the problem is the women didn't know they were playing me -- they just thought they were raising my consciousness. I don't like to be lectured, so I changed some of my friends.
Now my attitude is much like yours, Dean. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Sex for One is a great idea. I got tears in my eyes - imagining how my life might have been different if someone had given that to me when I was an adolescent!
Just to strike a bit of a discordant note here...I think that you'll need to dig a bit deeper on the whole crime/violence/porn thing. I remember an experiment that I did for my Master's in Psych where we measured performance in a bunch of different ways on a task. I went to present the paper and got my legs cut out from under me by someone who simply asked "What about error rates?" Had to do the @#%@%$ experiment ALL over again....
So, what about error rates? Is crime down because incarceration is up? Is teenage pregnancy down because boys are (ahem) blowing off steam with porn - but are growing up emotionally unable to relate to real women? Just askin'...
With respect to pornography, the images you linked to are obviously (obvious to me anyway!) wonderful examples of nude photography. And not just "artsy" stuff - sexy women tastefully photographed. And, yes, that's Playboy in the 1980's. It's *easy* to see the stupidity in calling these "sick and degrading."
Would you feel as comfortable making the same argument while linking to images showing doped up teenagers with bruises spread-eagled for the camera in various "sexy" (?) poses? And, no, I don't mean child porn - that's an easy out. I hate to burst your bubble, but there *is* such a thing as "sick and degrading" pornography and there is a very real problem with sex trafficing (especially in the former Eastern Bloc countries).
What there *isn't* is any intelligent debate. Proponents of porn see no cause for limiting the production of porn ("who decides?" being a shallow echo of real thinking) and taking refuge in beautiful works such as Michaelangelo (or Body in Mind). Most opponents scratch around for some firm footing and, finding none, just pound on the Bible or screech some wild Po-Mo theory of penile oppression.
Those who do think seriously on the issue can gain no audience because it is all too easy to shove them into the same category as the Fundamentalists and the Po-Mos and make fun of them. Sorta like you just did...
By focusing on an either-or, one of course excludes the middle. And the middle is where things get interesting.
When my son—then about 13—started using the internet to find "interesting" pictures, his mother and I had to start figuring out what was "good" porn v. "bad" porn. And then explain why. Sex with animals: not normal. Homosexual sex: not mainstream, but not bad per se. S&M or B/D: some people need play acting to find individual fulfillment.
When it comes to the bedroom, about my only rule is no major blood loss, unintentional scarring, and death. But I not a young teen, either.
And while I'm sure a resilient young mind can survive the accidental slip into weird sexual sites, I don't particularly want to have that mind colored by the extemes.
If you can recall for yourself, I don't think you—as a young teen—were particularly interested in talking about sex (of any kind) with your parents. And it wasn't only because they may have been fundamentalists. Teens just hate doing it.
I liked what Wild Monk said. Hopefully he'll comment more.
"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". (Dean)
By the time you choose to buy your son...whatever at age 13 or 14, he will have had the equivalency of at least a BA in said proposed materials independent of family.
Children live in their own world and are influenced by the positive influences around them and all the other environmental factors whether negative or positive that they encounter.
Parents have a limited window of opportunity to influence their children's character. Teach them well while they are young. Those are the lessons that will sustain them.
Monk and Hatcher: Clearly correlation is not causation. That's one of the fundamental rules of science that most people overlook, yes? Jimmy Carter In Office = Bad Economy. Ronald Reagan In Office = Good Economy. George H.W. Bush in office = Bad Economy. Bill Clinton In Office = Good Economy. That's all just juvenile, right?
Nevertheless, if you cannot establish a correlation in the first place, you've got a problem with any hypothesis.
We can say, without fear, that an increase in media sexuality and violence has not corresponded with an increase in social violence and promiscuity. Face it, it simply hasn't. Indeed, I'll let you in on a little secret: I watched the Quentin Tarantino movie Kill Bill Volume One with my 7 year old son, and he giggled and laughed all the way through it with me. Many parents would disapprove of this, yet I assert to you that if you met my son, you would find him a polite, engaging, and extremely gentle and caring child. Mind you, like all children his age, he has a savage streak that needs watching. Yet honestly, most people remark upon how well-mannered and nice he is. Indeed, he was able to giggle uproariously at watching a movie scene where people's heads were getting cut off and blood was spurting everywhere--yet cried like crazy watching a Pokemon movie where the hero nearly died, and there were no broken bones or spatterings of blood at all.
I do not suggest that greater exposure to media violence and sex is healthy. That would overreach to be sure. But the notion that it correlates with greater depravity seems, to me, to also be highly questionable.
Actually I'd like to add to this: in observing my 7 year old, it is quite obvious that overexposure to violent video games makes him more excitable and more violent. We have often had to curtail his exposure to such materials for such reasons.
Nevertheless it remains, in my view, utterly unproven that media violence, by itself, leads to an increase in violent crime. I assume that the difference all lies in parenting and guidance and the mileau the child finds himself in on a daily basis. But that's just my best guess, going on my gut.
This Instapundit link goes to some articles on how youth violence in Japan has increased along with a massive increase in violence and sex in pop culture.
It might have something to do with the fact that I play video games myself, Lindsey.
Although now that I think of it: the empirical evidence shows that increased video game playing has correlated with increased violence in Japan, but decreased violence in the U.S. Which makes the cause/effect hypothesis rather questionable to my eyes.
There are also, by the way, studies showing that kids who play video games are more intelligent, have better hand-eye coordination, and other positive effects. So on the whole I'm not worried about it much.
Video games promote good eye-hand coordination, problem solving skills, critical thinking and competition. There is always competition in a video game, whether it be against the computer, another player or your own self. Competition is healthy in urging us to do our best and succeed. Critical thinking skills are important in school as are problem solving skills. Video games are also beneficial in introducing children to computers.
A lot Jake's earlier behavior problem was that he mimicked the wrestling/fighting moves from some of his games. The moves are fine on a game but can be painful when applied to other children. Also, boys tend to be more aggressive at a young age and if you let it go unchecked and throw in some video games - serious issues can happen. Jake has been playing video games and using the computer since he was probably 2 and a half. He is really smart, he gets excellent report cards, always on the honor roll and he is called a model student by all of his teachers. He also reads our blogs but before he does he asks me if he can, just in case there is something that he shouldn't see.
Every kid is different. What works for Jake may not work for another kid and vice-versa.
In your claim that the societal move toward more overt sexuality has caused no unintended consequences, you've overlooked some important trends. Births to unmarried women accounted for less than 4% of births in 1940 then rose to more than 30% of births in 1998. The number of children who never know their father, and the number of people who never marry, have dramatically risen as well. To comprehend the effect these changes have on children, I recommend reading "Fatherless America" by David Blankenhorn. It is an excellent introduction to this field of sociology.
As to the drawback of porn, besides coming in many forms that are clearly evil, degrading and mysogynistic (thanks to Monk for his excellent thoughts), pornography effects a man's sexual and emotional attraction to his wife. Sex with one person who sometimes gets sick or cranky, can never live up to the sexual fantasyland of pornography. So yes, men like to fantasize about naked women, but the corresponding effect of make-believe is the diminished appeal of reality.
I'm also curious about your opinion of open marriages: beneficial (people who choose open marriages apparently want them) or detrimental to society?
Playboy has fallen in quality, and started booking models with more silicone, to try to keep up with the Joneses.
I'd recommend something more along the lines of Perfect 10. Or, if you'd rather stay online, Domai.com, or met-art.com. All three feature beautiful women photographed beautifully.
To an extent, we are getting into two different issues...pornography vs. video games and other sometimes violent media. I have no problem with video games and, indeed, have played the Age of Empires / Age of Kings games with my boys for years. While there are limits, we generally do not shield them from the more violent games (such as Splinter Cell or Wolfenstein) or movies (such as Braveheart) either.
Why? Well, boys (especially but not exclusively) are *going* to grow up with aggressive impulses. It is pure fantasy to posit that we can shortcut this aggression by simply removing all violent images and toys.
Contrary to the reigning orthodoxy of the academic left - that humans are mere reflections of their environment and can be "built" without aggression by simply eliminating all traces of aggression from our culture - we are surely wired for aggression to our very bones (see Stephen Pinker's 'The Blank Slate' for more). Contrary to the desire of paleo-conservatives who believe we can build virtue through public policy, there is simply not enough room to fit both virtue-by-policy and freedom in the same political sphere.
Thus, I think it pretty clear that our task, as parents, is to train children in understanding this impulse, how it interacts with the world around them and how to control it. As long as children are given guidance and the dose is reasonable, video games and movies can play a role in this process.
This same process can occur - and may well already be occurring - with respect to the flood of sexualized images in our culture. But pornography is different if only because there are enormous economic incentives for women (especially) to participate in the creation of pornography. This incentive simply doesn't exist with violent video games and movies.
In sum, I have little issue with the kinds of issues you display and think they can even be a point around which people can build a positive appreciation of the human form. However, the more common "sex for money" images not only build a shallow idea of human sexuality, they have an enormously destructive effect on many of the women who are drawn to the money. You need only review the death and disease rates among prostitutes to see that there is indeed an enormous human cost to working in the sex industry.
More ephemerally, what ideal of romantic love survives an 18 year-old woman's encounter with men who photograph her genitalia in macro-zoom view - implicitly validating it as her most important part? What prospects for building a long-term committed relationship are these porn "stars" left with when a prospective competitor for a new relationship can waive photos of extreme sex in the face of the person who she (or he) would love to love? Simply answering that a more liberal culture would give her nothing to be ashamed of echoes the same liberal canard discarded above: jealousy and an ideal of commitment are both built into our very nature. No amount of "liberalization" will ever create a human society where a sex industry worker is treated that same as any other prospective mate.
Perfect 10 is a beautiful magazine, my son gets that one. I don't know about magazines for young women. I was never very visual. I think a trip to the appropriate device store would be much more rewarding. That and an instruction manual. I'm not kidding. It's amazing how young and old alike don't know how their bodies do and don't work. They should. The "you can't love someone else until you can love yourself" works in this arena too, I think.
You're being absurd - of course the ready availability of gratiutous sex and violence has had its ill effect. To say otherwise is to be willfully blind to basic common sense.
Corporate America spends probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually on advertisement - and our corporations, error prone as they are, don't routinely and forever make hundred billion dollar mistakes. They advertise because it works. The endless repetition of lowest-common-denominator messages has its effect - not on everyone, heck, on relatively hardly anyone; but its that small percentage it does have an effect upon which makes all the advertising dollars worthwhile.
Our popular culture is largely just one gigantic advertisement - all of it pitched at the very lowest common denominator. High brow elements in our culture can't account for even one percent of the dollars spent; the overwhelming bulk is simple and if at all possible, sensationalistic. We didn't wake up one morning and decide "hey, I want to watch/listen to/read crap"; we were advertised into wanting crap.
As I've said, most people will bear no ill effects from this relentless advertising - we'll watch/listen to/read the crap and still go about completely normal and able to maintain our intellectual rigor for the real world - but there is a small subset of the population which will buy the crap hook, line and sinker - and therein we get the people who will, say, take some rifles to school and shoot up their chums just for the shits and giggles of it all.
I know that I am absolutely right about this: As evidence, I present the indisputable fact that prior to the time when gratituous violence was relentlessly advertised as both cool and value-neutral, we never had kids taking their (at the time) much more easily accesible rifles to school to shoot their friends.
Violence, etc is down overall; but this is part of a broader trend of increased social conservatism in the United States - it is the rear-guard effect of rediscovered morality which is acting out a counterweight to the relentless anti-social propaganda of our popular culture. But the popular culture is still out there - and as long as it is as it is, it will continue to seduce a small number of people - and we'll continue to have fatherless children, sexually dysfunctional young adults, violent teens.
We'll have this until we finally start to act as adults and say - "hey, a picture of a naked human being is all fine and dandy, but a gratituous sex act on camera is not what American patriots died to defend".
Matt and Monk: You might be surprised that we agree more than we disagree. For example, I think it's undeniable that the trend toward fatherlesness has been a wide-scale social disaster. With the exception of abusive situations, most kids are better off with a bad father at home than no father at all. Then again, stepfatherhood is generally a bad thing (and before someone gives me grief about saying that, let me just say I have a stepfather whom I love, and not all stepfathers are bad).
Nevertheless I believe that social conservatives are barking up the wrong tree when they look to media imagery of sex and violence as anything more than a peripheral contributor to negative social trends. The widespread availability of reliable, cheap birth control for the first time in human history, coupled with the "let it all hang out" mentality popularized in the '60s and '70s, created a social climate that was devastating to children. We as a society are still coming to grips with that. Other than idealizing promiscuity and single motherhood, which was somewhat popular in movies at one time (but is no longer), I don't think the media has played more than a tertiary role in all this.
I recall reading on at least two different occasions about a study done in the 1950s which revealed the shocking fact that about a third of children were not related to the man listed on the birth certificate as the child's father. I may need to do some digging on that but it sounds about right. An adulterous woman getting pregnant, or an unwed woman getting pregnant and then finding another man to "legitimize" her child, was quite a bit more common than most people realize.
I also think it's important that we separate the issue of violence from the issue of sexual licentiousness. While the two are in some ways related they are mostly different phenomena. Both underwent a horrible spike in the 1970s, but the causes and solutions to that were manifold. Yet on the whole the trend on crime has been downward for quite some time, and we are massively less violent as a society than we we were 30 years ago. Despite some people's belief that we are getting more violent and more promiscuous as a society, the truth is the exact opposite: we are quite a bit safer, and quite a bit less crime-ridden, and quite a bit less promiscuous than we once were.
I think that all of the issues that you raise about unrealistic body images, unrealistic fantasies, and so on are worth discussing, Matt. And Monk, I think that while there are some women who thrive in the sex industry, the gritty reality is that the overwhelming majority of women involved in that trade are psychologically crippled by it. Porn stars, hookers, and strippers mostly--with a few exceptions here and there--are not happy, healthy people. There is also a dark side of addiction (yes, addiction) to porn by some men who develop unhealthy obsessions and unrealistic attitudes about sex from it.
But then again: a lot of women enjoy watching pornography, and indeed take joy in sharing it with their husbands, using it to enhance their own monogamous, married sex lives. Though I think more of them should think about the destruction wrought on those who actually make the porn, I'm not convinced that the viewing of porn is necessarily destructive.
I also try not to be hard on social conservatives who harp on the media. Not too long ago, society was coming badly unglued in several important areas at once, and if social conservatives sometimes went after the wrong things (movies, video games), they were more often right than they were wrong.
Still, we have in the last decade and a half seen two undeniable trends: crime and sexual licentiousness have been on a downward trend even as our entertainment media have gotten more explicit and more extreme. Indeed, if you look at what would have been considered a shockingly violent or sexually explicit movie in 1974, it would be considered tame today. Yet crime is down, promiscuity is down, attendance to religious services is up--in short, most people realized there was a problem, and social attitudes changed.
This is all complicated stuff, and there are many things worth discussing and thinking about. Yet I assert rather boldly that a child is not harmed by seeing images of naked adults, and is not harmed by playing a violent video game, if he's got parents who are careful to monitor what he's seeing and to talk to him about the differences between fantasy and reality.
In short: My attitude is that looking at a picture of a beautiful naked woman does not harm a 15 year old boy. Becoming obsessed with graphic porn and developing unrealistic attitudes about sex does. Playing a fast shoot'em-up video game doesn't turn a kid violent either, if he's got parents who talk to him and guide him. We had to curtail Jake's access to certain video games and cartoons at one point because they got him too excited and he tried to act out some of what he was seeing in those games. But cutting him back on them, talking to him about it, and carefully guiding him, cured that problem. As I've said, he is actually a remarkably gentle and kind child, and I don't say that as a blinkered parent who just loves his kid.
Parenting makes all the difference, it really does.
Mark: Nonsense. Even during the year that Harris and Klebold shot up that school in Columbine--which was 5 years ago by the way--school violence was way down from what it had been 20 years earlier. A single incident does not a social trend make.
There was an incident in Michigan in the 1930s where a couple of kids blew up a bomb in a public school with the express intent of killing their fellow students. There was also the notorious case of Leopold and Loeb, who were quite as famous in their era as Harris and Klebold.
What goes 'round comes 'round, Mark, and there is no new thing under the sun. Well, except for the widespread availability of cheap, reliable birth control anyway. Sometimes you social conservatives are guilty of the same thing you accuse liberals of: thinking we can have Heaven here on Earth, if only the government would push the right buttons.
If I were to make a Christian argument, I'd say that sin is the basic flaw of all mankind, and cannot be done away with. The notion that society was once much better and is now descending into rack and ruin is common but mistaken. Indeed, such a notion seems to be rampant on both left and right; Michael Moore seems to think that society was much better 40 years ago than it is today, as does Cal Thomas, and both of them are wrong.
At one point I had to ask my college-age niece to please not click on spam links to porn. I offered to send her some more female-friendly stuff. She appreciated it, but hasn't taken me up on the offer.
I definitely think there should be a massager around the house that can go missing without any awkward questions being asked . . . that's a good thing. (The plug-in kind, though--not battery-powered. A Hitachi Magic Wand is perfect.)
And I think there's some sexy material out there that's female-friendly: there's a nice comic book with a female protagonist, as I recall. My Secret Garden is still a classic, and useful for showing how silly some of our fantasies are. As far as the more-visual stuff is concerned, I'd keep it low-key in the beginning: we just aren't the visual sex when it comes to sex.
Oh, to answer Matt's specific question on open marriages: I'm not sure society would be wise to openly embrace and celebrate such relationships, although I'm sure that, as with polygamy, they work out okay in some cases.
You bring forth the evidence of a vague bombing and the infamous case of a couple over-indulged kids who got bored and did nasty things for kicks....and then only go on to Klebold and Harris and then say "see, same/same"...hardly; Leopold and Loeb were monsters in their day because it was so bizarre to have kids doing that...Klebold and Harris, lets face the facts, didn't really shock any of us.
Come on; fess up - you know when you heard the news it didn't really cause too much of a blip in your day...just another in a long line of sick outrages you'd seen over a twenty year period. The first time I was exposed to kids shooting up their schools was in the late 1970's in San Diego...by the time Klebold and Harris came along, the only thing that surprised me is that God apparantly choose to spare us a judicial circus by convincing the boys to shoot themselves before they could be captured.
You're only a few years younger than me - we both remember when Playboy was waaaaay out there...now its almost respectable enough, in comparison, to be in the elementary school library...parents hope that the worst thing they find in the kid's gym bag is a copy of Playboy. Remember: back when you and I were stealing a glance from the old man's copy, it came in a plain, brown wrapper in order to thwart obscenity laws.
I don't look for some heaven on Earth - indeed, the very concept is anethema to conservatives. But I know that if you expose a population to relentless sex and violence, you will get an effect and it wont be a good one. The important step is to realise that we've got a problem - and then it flows naturally that if we'd just act like adults and demand better, we'd get it.
Sorry, slightly OT, but after reading about Leopold and Loeb...
How can anyone justify releasing a murderer on parole, when the murderer killed for the thrill of it. This is why I can't be against the death penalty unequivocally - if the alternative is life imprisonment, then they should rot in that cell until they die or if they're proven to be innocent. We don't put murderers in prison to reform them, we put them there to keep them away from the population, and foremost to punish them for their act. Someone who takes an innocent life for shits and giggles has forfeited the right to his own, and only because we cannot be 100% sure that every executed criminal was not innocent do (sane) people oppose the death penalty.
Darrow's speech is a morally repugnant screed worthy only of contempt, but oddly enough it ties into this sex and violence theme: he actually dreams up 'shell shock by proxy', meaning that the murderers can be pardoned because they read about WWI casualties in the paper, therefore thinking that human life is trivial.
We read of killing one hundred thousand men in a day. We read about it and we rejoiced in it-if it was the other fellows who were killed. We were fed on flesh and drank blood. Even down to the prattling babe. I need not tell you how many upright, honorable young boys have come into this court charged with murder, some saved and some sent to their death, boys who fought in this war and learned to place a cheap value on human life. You know it and I know it. These boys were brought up in it. The tales of death were in their homes, their playgrounds, their schools; they were in the newspapers that they read; it was a part of the common frenzy-what was a life? It was nothing. It was the least sacred thing in existence and these boys were trained to this cruelty.
Incredible. The frickin' Chewbacca defense is less of a non sequitur.
I have been sorry, and I am sorry for the bereavement of Mr. And Mrs. Frank, for those broken ties that cannot be healed. All I can hope and wish is that some good may come from it all. But as compared with the families of Leopold and Loeb, the Franks are to be envied-and everyone knows it.
Yes, but compared to the parents of Pol Pot, the Leopold and Loeb families don't even register.
Have they any rights? Is there any reason, your Honor, why their proud names and all the future generations that bear them shall have this bar sinister written across them?
Yes, for chrissakes, their children coldly and calculatedly killed a person for their own amusement! Their rugrats wrote the 'bar sinister' on their 'proud' names when they took a human life. The fact that they were later executed would be a tiny footnote in how history remembers these two degenerates.
It is bad enough as it is, God knows. It is bad enough, however it is. But it’s not yet death on the scaffold. It’s not that. And I ask your Honor, in addition to all that I have said to save two honorable families from a disgrace that never ends, and which could be of no avail to help any human being that lives.
Their kids murdering someone in cold blood is bad enough for the families' reputation as it is, but let's not make it REALLY bad for them by PUNISHING the two. Unbef***inlievable.
The judge actually bought this vile apology of evil? Ugh.
I think the biggest single factor, as far as directly effective influences go, has to be parenting, and the role models intertwined with this.
Good parents (plural) make a big difference. I think the only reason my nephew's turning out as well as he is so far is because he effectively has 3-5 parents and 4+ role-models (parents being my sister, my parents who live next door and take care of him a lot, and my grandparents, who take care of him less often but are also convenient. Role models adds myself and my uncle to total four males worth looking up to, the + is for any of the women he may have added as role models.)
Parents and role models serve as the most direct group for what we 'normalize' ourselves after. Those who grow up around gang violence don't always end up punks, but the more interlocked their home lives are with it, the more likely it is. Same with abusers of all types.
The media are both engine and mirror, they show us our dark side, but sometimes their relentless efforts to do so 'neutrally' drives society towards considering that dark side 'normal'. I don't think their influence is trivial, nor do I think it's overwhelming.
*grin* As one who distrusts the Mainstream Media, I'm tempted to say that any 'rise in violence', etc, is due mostly to the herd effect of 'someone did a story on this at station X! We'd all better do fifty dozen (incompetent) stories on it to fill up our time!', people see so much emphasis on it, and thus look harder for it in their own lives... and some of those people report it to the media, feeding the news cycle.
"Matt and Monk: You might be surprised that we agree more than we disagree."
Dean, I'm not surprised...I've been visiting your site as time permits for almost two years. Having no time for WildMonk.net, this is one of my favorite places for discussing topics like this!
Actually, I think that you and Matt have a sort of consensus building in some ways. Society is "agile" in its adaptation to social trends. When porn and violence began to be widely available in the 1970s, it had the effect that everyone would predict using simple common sense: crime and out-of-wedlock births exploded. What people did not necessarily see was that human societies *adapt*. Of course, we know this abstractly, but the specific mechanisms whereby real families began training their children to discount these influences (including the advertising that Mark discusses) appear to have been surprisingly effective. Crime rates and out-of-wedlock births have indeed gone down.
It appears that the primary criticism we are left with is that, compared to a society where you do not have the freedom to produce these materials, there are more people in jail and more women being victimized by pornographers (yes, yes, realizing that *some* women don't ever feel victimized and many at least don't feel that way at first). There *are* effects but the wholesale dissolution of the social fabric is not among them - at least not in 20th century Western democracies.
One last thing...you mention how Jake got out of hand a bit at one point and you had to rein him in. The same thing happened with my youngest son. Only, for him, it was with the Three Stooges! It was funny in a way but he became Curly after watching one set of videos over and over. He was constantly acting out the physical humor the "nyuk-nyuk-nyuk", etc. It was almost a shame to have to take it away but other parents were starting to complain...
Mark: Sorry bud I'm not buying. The Klebold &Harris incident got national attention precisely because it was so unusual. Most school violence comes in the form of gang violence in high-crime communities (mostly black, white, and hispanic communities). Even still, statistically speaking school has long been the safest place most kids could be.
And the long term trend remains the same: we're getting less and less violent all the time as a society.
Susan B: That's a good piece on Hef. I've long thought of him as a fairly sad character. That said, I think the article gives him too much credit for creating social change. Once cheap and easy birth control met with high standards of living and mass media, sexual imagery was going to become ubiquitous sooner or later.
The thing is that when you look at any of the old Playboys, there's nothing much offensive in them. They had a right to call most of their photography artistic, for it was that. I also frankly think that if anyone thinks the old statues and paintings of nudes in centuries past thinks these were merely pure "art" and not titillating is just fooling himself. That may be the influence of "the Playboy philosophy" on me, but I don't think so. I think it's honest to what the human animal is.
All that said, I do think that Christians such as yourself, along with others, are right to speak up about the problems inherent in the sex industry, and the need for greater awareness of this.
I'm 36. I want to enthusiastically agree with what Dean says about growing up in the 80's. Boys and young men were things to be feared by women (of all ages, oddly enough).
Unfortunately, some of the stigma continues to this day. Kids have been trained to avoid men without children. I'm not a particularly menacing-looking person, but kids will consistently shrink into their mother's skirts/pants when they see me walking by.
My wife and I decided a while ago that we were choosing not to have children. Our families have resigned themselves to the fact that we aren't going to be producing grandchildren, and are generally supportive. However, society at large doesn't know how to handle it.
Sad but true - to the majority of kids out there I am someone to fear. Luckily for me, I have some friends who don't mind introducing their kids to us, and I love them to pieces. Of course, these are also some of the most well-behaved kids I've ever seen - there's gotta be a link somehow.
I agree that there is a sometimes very fine line between art and pr0n. And it is hard to discern that line sometimes. But there is a line, nonetheless. BTW, the CT version of that article is condensed somewhat. Here is a longer and more scathing version of that same article.
"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."
Apparently Playboy will work here, too. I subscribe, and Amy always nabs my copy before I get to it, and looks at the pictures (although sometimes it's just to make catty remarks about them). I, on the other hand, at least read the articles first.
Also, Dave Barry once wrote about men having magazines to look at with pictures of naked women. He went on to write that women had similar magazines, but they also had pictures of naked women, because the woman's body is a work of art, but a man's body is hairy, lumpy, and shouldn't be seen in the light of day.
This is yet another extremely interesting thread. I agree that parental influence goes a long way. I'm glad I had the Mama and Dad I had and I wish more children had parents like Dean and Rosemary. But, eventually, each of us has to grow up and take responsibility for our own actions. If I screw up, I can't blame Mommy and Daddy.
I agree with Mark Noonan that ideas and images, advertising, propaganda, pornography, art, preaching, have tremendous influence on our thoughts and actions. This influence cannot be overestimated. That has been the conservative argument for censorship since the execution of Socrates, i.e., that society, the church, the state, must suppress blasphemous, subversive, or other dangerous or pernicious ideas. If I were a censor, I would start with banning Communist and Nazi propaganda and then all the anti-sex propaganda that permeates our culture today.
But I'm not a censor and I'd better not ever want to be or else I'll become the enemy I'm fighting. Here I'm a liberal in the old-fashioned definition of the word. I believe that the way to counter bad ideas is with good ideas. For every Holocaust denier, there should be a real historian refuting his lies. For every Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, or Catharine MacKinnon, the Gods raise up an Ayn Rand, an E. Merrill Root, a Camille Paglia. For every Michael Moore, we must have a Dean Esmay (and the Queen). In the face of all the vile propaganda that trivializes or damns sex, I must exalt and consecrate sex.
Yes, I would certainly die to defend those pictures of beautiful women (and of manly men) that Dean has so nobly given to us, and for which I am so grateful. I would gladly die to defend this lovely picture of holy Lesbian love and my many other sacred images of pulchritudinous women. I would gladly die to defend this book, filled as it is with pictures of the most exquisitely beautiful women, glorifying the body, the temple of the Most High Goddess.
Just as a thought, you might think of dance lessons for a girl instead of magazines. Trust me, certain types of dance (not ballet) are very sensual, and would probably work better for a girl who was tactile instead of visual. (You ever learned a tango? Full-body contact down the right side from chest to knee.)
A post I tried to make yesterday seems to have gone into the ozone. Rather than try to repeat it, I'd like to draw your attention to two books, one of which Monk cites:
I urge every parent and teacher—as well as those who would make public policy—to read these. What we're finding out about the importance of genes v. parental influence is pretty damn shocking.
On the other hand, I'd stand in as censor at the drop of a hat (have to remember to bribe Dean to destroy this bit if I ever run for office...).
Were we unfree back in the days when The Who's Who Are You? had the word "fuck" bleeped out, and are we really freer today when, this very evening, I heard a DJ call someone an asshole on the radio? The answer to both questions is "no". But we are cruder today, and were more civil in the past. We've lost something.
I was delighted with that Brady Bunch movie they made a few years back - a huge bunch of good gags and a trip down memory lane to when we thought that the Brady kids were cool. But it also got me thinking, that juxtaposition of early 70's Brady's and mid-90's society: are we better off today for having shed our past innocence? Admittedly, RuPaul as the guidance counselor advising Marsha to come back when she was pregnant was hilarious - but a good chuckle is not, I think, worth what it took for us to get to the moment when such a gag is acceptable.
The problem, of course, is not just a coarsening of our society, but the social pathologies which come along with it. I'll admit that I just don't like living in a society where the convenience store clerk as to wrestle with the moral dillema of deciding whether or not to sell condoms to the 13 year old girl who asks for them (I saw this a couple years back when I was at a convenience store - the clerk eventually decided to sell); I'm sure that a whole bunch of people reading this will go "at least she had protection"...protection from what? is what I ask. A 13 year old who is buying condoms isn't protected - she's been tossed to the wolves and we are all 100% hopeful that she'll get on ok in life...but we don't take that extra step and realise that we've failed utterly as humans by the very fact of such an event.
I'm sorry but I can't agree that easy access to pornography, freely profane language on TV and a blase' attitude about bad manners is worth, say, a 14 year old unwed mother, a 17 year in jail for rape, a 25 year old addict having her fourth child. I can't get us to a society which will have none of these, but I will continue to work for a society where we at least don't encourage such things.
Beautiful suggestion about dancing. I must say that arouses me just thinking of it.
Hatcher and Wild Monk:
You are right that many of our tendencies are inborn, inherent in our very nature. I have more and more come to that conclusion. Differences between the sexes, sexual preferences, individual differences in temperament, etc., all of these are innate. And emotions like anger and jealousy. Environmental influences, inborn tendencies, and our own free choices -- all three.
Mark:
You raise a very good point about our cultural decline, the coarsening and trivializing of everything, especially sex. I myself would not, pun intended, arrest the decline by calling in the police, much less the "feds", though I have no objection whatever to local time, place, and manner restrictions on the display and distribution of erotica. Those are entirely consistent with the First Amendment. What we need more than anything is a spiritual re-awakening, a revival of a high sense of values, a philosophical and aesthetic counter-revolution. Men dressed as they did in the 1940s, not because they feared they'd be locked up if they didn't, but because they possessed a superior sense of _style_. I proudly DARE to be SQUARE.
Sex, to be sexy to me, must be mysterious, surrounded by taboo, enhanced with the aura of the forbidden, suggestive (I love that word!) rather than too explicit. In other words, leave something to the imagination. I despise the banal, blase attitude so prevalent today. In my ideal world, sex would never even be spoken of save in the holy of holies. (Today, however, we are at War, so I must speak of it.) As I told a friend, I would prefer an "oppressive conservatism" over a "dull liberalism".
About this Big Lie of "objectification", here's something I wrote over a year ago:
I'd like to strangle the person who first started using that ugly term "sex object", at least the way it's used today by the sex-haters. I know that its original derivation is from grammar, "subject-verb-object", as "I [subject] love [verb] you [object].", which is what sex is all about. Nothing (excuse the pun) objectionable there. But "object" also has, and is intended to have by the sex-haters, the connotation of something inanimate and faceless, to imply that sex, sexual desire, reduces someone (usually a woman) to becoming an "object" in that sense. It is ugly and is intended to be ugly, to make sex seem ugly. I note that they have no objection (pardon the pun again) to women or others being "objects" of pity -- their idea of "love" -- so it is not really "objectification" that they hate but sex, sexual desire, sexual passion, sexual love, beauty. I say again: Up With Beauty!
True; its the remembrance of the thrill of that girl one had a crush on turning just the right way in high school so you got a shot down her blouse - I imagine that kids these days don't get much of that, everything being out in the open and, if not, internet porn is just a mouseclick away.
I read a couple years back how in Vienna they still have a properly done "coming out" party for the young adults - the men and women get dressed up in their formal wear and instead of the absurdity of then dancing to the latest hip-hop, they dance a waltz, played by a full orchestra. I envy the kids their experience, something which was denied to me as a youth. There is a time and a place for everything, but we've made it so that everything happens all at once, so our society takes on the look and feel of a dog's breakfast.
If I were made that mythical censor, its good to keep in mind that you'd be able to watch uncut R and NC-17 rated movies on TV - but only between 10pm and 4am; I'd leave it up to parents to not be so stupid as to have their kids watching TV at that time - the restrictions to be placed should be designed to (a) leave a bit of mystery as to what being an adult is and (b) set the understanding that there are proper and improper things to do...for instance, because the old man's Playboy (strictly speaking, my be friend's old man) arrived in a brown wrapper, I knew it wasn't an actually proper view of women; that while there is a place for the beauty of a nude female form, women are not summed up by how they look naked.
I'd be for censorship then -- with you as censor. And I'd be for Arnold Harris's lock-down martial law against terrorists -- as long as Arnold is in charge of it. Few others would I trust for either job.
I am an old Army man, and when I caught my grandson outside in the sunshine and fresh air, I immediately shouted: GET BACK INSIDE ON THAT X-BOX, your coutry needs MECHWARRIORS! By the time he turns 18 there is sure to be an MOS for "Robotic Cavalry Battle-control Specialist".
Not entirely kidding.
8.19.2004 4:17pm
Commenting on Dean's World is a privilege, not a right. Dean is your host, you are his guest, and you should behave in that fashion. Dean is not your babysitter, nor is he your punching bag. Please remember this. In general, you are free to disagree with anyone on any subject you wish, but abusive behavior will not be tolerated.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.
I'd buy one Playgirl, actually. If he likes it, then scarf up the $$ for the subscription. Better yet, Freshmen
Well, if you were to look at women in academia nowadays, the "kremlinist" model of feminism still holds. It is a kind of worldview, where they seem to assume that all women are all naturally lesbians, and all men are nothing but uncivilized rapists, just looking for opportunities to victimise women. Sad but tyur. These academic feminists are shrill, angry, vicious, and are really good at ganging up to do harm to those who dont buy into their worldview, and their dogma. Read the author Christina Hoff Sommers, and camille Paglia, and you'all will realise who to a lot of people these days, the word 'feminism" conjures up negative thoughts
Dude! I popped a woody lookin at those chicks!
Replace "the kremlinists" with "anybody" and you have the recipe for happiness. To mangle Twain: never try to make a man change. It wastes your time and annoys the man.
Beautiful. Pulchritudinous. Glorious. Splendiferous. Powerful. Profound. Holy. Holy. Holy. Holy.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
You are terrific. Thank you.
What Jerry said about happiness.
I went through a stage where I actually listened to a ton of crap in trying to be an enlightened guy, and took a bit longer than one might expect to realize I was being played ... part of the problem is the women didn't know they were playing me -- they just thought they were raising my consciousness. I don't like to be lectured, so I changed some of my friends.
Now my attitude is much like yours, Dean. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
In fact, "pop a woody" sounds more like something that went horribly wrong with an erection than an erection itself.
Stop it.
And a vibrator. Yes. Yes. Yes!! :)
Yes, I'm kidding. About the sexist part. But I'd still like some beefcake. ;)
So, what about error rates? Is crime down because incarceration is up? Is teenage pregnancy down because boys are (ahem) blowing off steam with porn - but are growing up emotionally unable to relate to real women? Just askin'...
With respect to pornography, the images you linked to are obviously (obvious to me anyway!) wonderful examples of nude photography. And not just "artsy" stuff - sexy women tastefully photographed. And, yes, that's Playboy in the 1980's. It's *easy* to see the stupidity in calling these "sick and degrading."
Would you feel as comfortable making the same argument while linking to images showing doped up teenagers with bruises spread-eagled for the camera in various "sexy" (?) poses? And, no, I don't mean child porn - that's an easy out. I hate to burst your bubble, but there *is* such a thing as "sick and degrading" pornography and there is a very real problem with sex trafficing (especially in the former Eastern Bloc countries).
What there *isn't* is any intelligent debate. Proponents of porn see no cause for limiting the production of porn ("who decides?" being a shallow echo of real thinking) and taking refuge in beautiful works such as Michaelangelo (or Body in Mind). Most opponents scratch around for some firm footing and, finding none, just pound on the Bible or screech some wild Po-Mo theory of penile oppression.
Those who do think seriously on the issue can gain no audience because it is all too easy to shove them into the same category as the Fundamentalists and the Po-Mos and make fun of them. Sorta like you just did...
By focusing on an either-or, one of course excludes the middle. And the middle is where things get interesting.
When my son—then about 13—started using the internet to find "interesting" pictures, his mother and I had to start figuring out what was "good" porn v. "bad" porn. And then explain why. Sex with animals: not normal. Homosexual sex: not mainstream, but not bad per se. S&M or B/D: some people need play acting to find individual fulfillment.
When it comes to the bedroom, about my only rule is no major blood loss, unintentional scarring, and death. But I not a young teen, either.
And while I'm sure a resilient young mind can survive the accidental slip into weird sexual sites, I don't particularly want to have that mind colored by the extemes.
If you can recall for yourself, I don't think you—as a young teen—were particularly interested in talking about sex (of any kind) with your parents. And it wasn't only because they may have been fundamentalists. Teens just hate doing it.
Dean linked the testicularly challenged "David", didn't you see it?
And as a separate thought, with all the violence in the Arab world, one might think their culture is infused with violent movies and video games.
It is not.
"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". (Dean)
By the time you choose to buy your son...whatever at age 13 or 14, he will have had the equivalency of at least a BA in said proposed materials independent of family.
Children live in their own world and are influenced by the positive influences around them and all the other environmental factors whether negative or positive that they encounter.
Parents have a limited window of opportunity to influence their children's character. Teach them well while they are young. Those are the lessons that will sustain them.
Nevertheless, if you cannot establish a correlation in the first place, you've got a problem with any hypothesis.
We can say, without fear, that an increase in media sexuality and violence has not corresponded with an increase in social violence and promiscuity. Face it, it simply hasn't. Indeed, I'll let you in on a little secret: I watched the Quentin Tarantino movie Kill Bill Volume One with my 7 year old son, and he giggled and laughed all the way through it with me. Many parents would disapprove of this, yet I assert to you that if you met my son, you would find him a polite, engaging, and extremely gentle and caring child. Mind you, like all children his age, he has a savage streak that needs watching. Yet honestly, most people remark upon how well-mannered and nice he is. Indeed, he was able to giggle uproariously at watching a movie scene where people's heads were getting cut off and blood was spurting everywhere--yet cried like crazy watching a Pokemon movie where the hero nearly died, and there were no broken bones or spatterings of blood at all.
I do not suggest that greater exposure to media violence and sex is healthy. That would overreach to be sure. But the notion that it correlates with greater depravity seems, to me, to also be highly questionable.
Nevertheless it remains, in my view, utterly unproven that media violence, by itself, leads to an increase in violent crime. I assume that the difference all lies in parenting and guidance and the mileau the child finds himself in on a daily basis. But that's just my best guess, going on my gut.
It's probably, mostly, having an evil mother!! :-)
This Instapundit link goes to some articles on how youth violence in Japan has increased along with a massive increase in violence and sex in pop culture.
Although now that I think of it: the empirical evidence shows that increased video game playing has correlated with increased violence in Japan, but decreased violence in the U.S. Which makes the cause/effect hypothesis rather questionable to my eyes.
There are also, by the way, studies showing that kids who play video games are more intelligent, have better hand-eye coordination, and other positive effects. So on the whole I'm not worried about it much.
A lot Jake's earlier behavior problem was that he mimicked the wrestling/fighting moves from some of his games. The moves are fine on a game but can be painful when applied to other children. Also, boys tend to be more aggressive at a young age and if you let it go unchecked and throw in some video games - serious issues can happen. Jake has been playing video games and using the computer since he was probably 2 and a half. He is really smart, he gets excellent report cards, always on the honor roll and he is called a model student by all of his teachers. He also reads our blogs but before he does he asks me if he can, just in case there is something that he shouldn't see.
Every kid is different. What works for Jake may not work for another kid and vice-versa.
In your claim that the societal move toward more overt sexuality has caused no unintended consequences, you've overlooked some important trends. Births to unmarried women accounted for less than 4% of births in 1940 then rose to more than 30% of births in 1998. The number of children who never know their father, and the number of people who never marry, have dramatically risen as well. To comprehend the effect these changes have on children, I recommend reading "Fatherless America" by David Blankenhorn. It is an excellent introduction to this field of sociology.
As to the drawback of porn, besides coming in many forms that are clearly evil, degrading and mysogynistic (thanks to Monk for his excellent thoughts), pornography effects a man's sexual and emotional attraction to his wife. Sex with one person who sometimes gets sick or cranky, can never live up to the sexual fantasyland of pornography. So yes, men like to fantasize about naked women, but the corresponding effect of make-believe is the diminished appeal of reality.
I'm also curious about your opinion of open marriages: beneficial (people who choose open marriages apparently want them) or detrimental to society?
Sex Without Partners.
I'd recommend something more along the lines of Perfect 10. Or, if you'd rather stay online, Domai.com, or met-art.com. All three feature beautiful women photographed beautifully.
Why? Well, boys (especially but not exclusively) are *going* to grow up with aggressive impulses. It is pure fantasy to posit that we can shortcut this aggression by simply removing all violent images and toys.
Contrary to the reigning orthodoxy of the academic left - that humans are mere reflections of their environment and can be "built" without aggression by simply eliminating all traces of aggression from our culture - we are surely wired for aggression to our very bones (see Stephen Pinker's 'The Blank Slate' for more). Contrary to the desire of paleo-conservatives who believe we can build virtue through public policy, there is simply not enough room to fit both virtue-by-policy and freedom in the same political sphere.
Thus, I think it pretty clear that our task, as parents, is to train children in understanding this impulse, how it interacts with the world around them and how to control it. As long as children are given guidance and the dose is reasonable, video games and movies can play a role in this process.
This same process can occur - and may well already be occurring - with respect to the flood of sexualized images in our culture. But pornography is different if only because there are enormous economic incentives for women (especially) to participate in the creation of pornography. This incentive simply doesn't exist with violent video games and movies.
In sum, I have little issue with the kinds of issues you display and think they can even be a point around which people can build a positive appreciation of the human form. However, the more common "sex for money" images not only build a shallow idea of human sexuality, they have an enormously destructive effect on many of the women who are drawn to the money. You need only review the death and disease rates among prostitutes to see that there is indeed an enormous human cost to working in the sex industry.
More ephemerally, what ideal of romantic love survives an 18 year-old woman's encounter with men who photograph her genitalia in macro-zoom view - implicitly validating it as her most important part? What prospects for building a long-term committed relationship are these porn "stars" left with when a prospective competitor for a new relationship can waive photos of extreme sex in the face of the person who she (or he) would love to love? Simply answering that a more liberal culture would give her nothing to be ashamed of echoes the same liberal canard discarded above: jealousy and an ideal of commitment are both built into our very nature. No amount of "liberalization" will ever create a human society where a sex industry worker is treated that same as any other prospective mate.
You're being absurd - of course the ready availability of gratiutous sex and violence has had its ill effect. To say otherwise is to be willfully blind to basic common sense.
Corporate America spends probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually on advertisement - and our corporations, error prone as they are, don't routinely and forever make hundred billion dollar mistakes. They advertise because it works. The endless repetition of lowest-common-denominator messages has its effect - not on everyone, heck, on relatively hardly anyone; but its that small percentage it does have an effect upon which makes all the advertising dollars worthwhile.
Our popular culture is largely just one gigantic advertisement - all of it pitched at the very lowest common denominator. High brow elements in our culture can't account for even one percent of the dollars spent; the overwhelming bulk is simple and if at all possible, sensationalistic. We didn't wake up one morning and decide "hey, I want to watch/listen to/read crap"; we were advertised into wanting crap.
As I've said, most people will bear no ill effects from this relentless advertising - we'll watch/listen to/read the crap and still go about completely normal and able to maintain our intellectual rigor for the real world - but there is a small subset of the population which will buy the crap hook, line and sinker - and therein we get the people who will, say, take some rifles to school and shoot up their chums just for the shits and giggles of it all.
I know that I am absolutely right about this: As evidence, I present the indisputable fact that prior to the time when gratituous violence was relentlessly advertised as both cool and value-neutral, we never had kids taking their (at the time) much more easily accesible rifles to school to shoot their friends.
Violence, etc is down overall; but this is part of a broader trend of increased social conservatism in the United States - it is the rear-guard effect of rediscovered morality which is acting out a counterweight to the relentless anti-social propaganda of our popular culture. But the popular culture is still out there - and as long as it is as it is, it will continue to seduce a small number of people - and we'll continue to have fatherless children, sexually dysfunctional young adults, violent teens.
We'll have this until we finally start to act as adults and say - "hey, a picture of a naked human being is all fine and dandy, but a gratituous sex act on camera is not what American patriots died to defend".
Nevertheless I believe that social conservatives are barking up the wrong tree when they look to media imagery of sex and violence as anything more than a peripheral contributor to negative social trends. The widespread availability of reliable, cheap birth control for the first time in human history, coupled with the "let it all hang out" mentality popularized in the '60s and '70s, created a social climate that was devastating to children. We as a society are still coming to grips with that. Other than idealizing promiscuity and single motherhood, which was somewhat popular in movies at one time (but is no longer), I don't think the media has played more than a tertiary role in all this.
I recall reading on at least two different occasions about a study done in the 1950s which revealed the shocking fact that about a third of children were not related to the man listed on the birth certificate as the child's father. I may need to do some digging on that but it sounds about right. An adulterous woman getting pregnant, or an unwed woman getting pregnant and then finding another man to "legitimize" her child, was quite a bit more common than most people realize.
I also think it's important that we separate the issue of violence from the issue of sexual licentiousness. While the two are in some ways related they are mostly different phenomena. Both underwent a horrible spike in the 1970s, but the causes and solutions to that were manifold. Yet on the whole the trend on crime has been downward for quite some time, and we are massively less violent as a society than we we were 30 years ago. Despite some people's belief that we are getting more violent and more promiscuous as a society, the truth is the exact opposite: we are quite a bit safer, and quite a bit less crime-ridden, and quite a bit less promiscuous than we once were.
I think that all of the issues that you raise about unrealistic body images, unrealistic fantasies, and so on are worth discussing, Matt. And Monk, I think that while there are some women who thrive in the sex industry, the gritty reality is that the overwhelming majority of women involved in that trade are psychologically crippled by it. Porn stars, hookers, and strippers mostly--with a few exceptions here and there--are not happy, healthy people. There is also a dark side of addiction (yes, addiction) to porn by some men who develop unhealthy obsessions and unrealistic attitudes about sex from it.
But then again: a lot of women enjoy watching pornography, and indeed take joy in sharing it with their husbands, using it to enhance their own monogamous, married sex lives. Though I think more of them should think about the destruction wrought on those who actually make the porn, I'm not convinced that the viewing of porn is necessarily destructive.
I also try not to be hard on social conservatives who harp on the media. Not too long ago, society was coming badly unglued in several important areas at once, and if social conservatives sometimes went after the wrong things (movies, video games), they were more often right than they were wrong.
Still, we have in the last decade and a half seen two undeniable trends: crime and sexual licentiousness have been on a downward trend even as our entertainment media have gotten more explicit and more extreme. Indeed, if you look at what would have been considered a shockingly violent or sexually explicit movie in 1974, it would be considered tame today. Yet crime is down, promiscuity is down, attendance to religious services is up--in short, most people realized there was a problem, and social attitudes changed.
This is all complicated stuff, and there are many things worth discussing and thinking about. Yet I assert rather boldly that a child is not harmed by seeing images of naked adults, and is not harmed by playing a violent video game, if he's got parents who are careful to monitor what he's seeing and to talk to him about the differences between fantasy and reality.
In short: My attitude is that looking at a picture of a beautiful naked woman does not harm a 15 year old boy. Becoming obsessed with graphic porn and developing unrealistic attitudes about sex does. Playing a fast shoot'em-up video game doesn't turn a kid violent either, if he's got parents who talk to him and guide him. We had to curtail Jake's access to certain video games and cartoons at one point because they got him too excited and he tried to act out some of what he was seeing in those games. But cutting him back on them, talking to him about it, and carefully guiding him, cured that problem. As I've said, he is actually a remarkably gentle and kind child, and I don't say that as a blinkered parent who just loves his kid.
Parenting makes all the difference, it really does.
There was an incident in Michigan in the 1930s where a couple of kids blew up a bomb in a public school with the express intent of killing their fellow students. There was also the notorious case of Leopold and Loeb, who were quite as famous in their era as Harris and Klebold.
What goes 'round comes 'round, Mark, and there is no new thing under the sun. Well, except for the widespread availability of cheap, reliable birth control anyway. Sometimes you social conservatives are guilty of the same thing you accuse liberals of: thinking we can have Heaven here on Earth, if only the government would push the right buttons.
If I were to make a Christian argument, I'd say that sin is the basic flaw of all mankind, and cannot be done away with. The notion that society was once much better and is now descending into rack and ruin is common but mistaken. Indeed, such a notion seems to be rampant on both left and right; Michael Moore seems to think that society was much better 40 years ago than it is today, as does Cal Thomas, and both of them are wrong.
I definitely think there should be a massager around the house that can go missing without any awkward questions being asked . . . that's a good thing. (The plug-in kind, though--not battery-powered. A Hitachi Magic Wand is perfect.)
And I think there's some sexy material out there that's female-friendly: there's a nice comic book with a female protagonist, as I recall. My Secret Garden is still a classic, and useful for showing how silly some of our fantasies are. As far as the more-visual stuff is concerned, I'd keep it low-key in the beginning: we just aren't the visual sex when it comes to sex.
You bring forth the evidence of a vague bombing and the infamous case of a couple over-indulged kids who got bored and did nasty things for kicks....and then only go on to Klebold and Harris and then say "see, same/same"...hardly; Leopold and Loeb were monsters in their day because it was so bizarre to have kids doing that...Klebold and Harris, lets face the facts, didn't really shock any of us.
Come on; fess up - you know when you heard the news it didn't really cause too much of a blip in your day...just another in a long line of sick outrages you'd seen over a twenty year period. The first time I was exposed to kids shooting up their schools was in the late 1970's in San Diego...by the time Klebold and Harris came along, the only thing that surprised me is that God apparantly choose to spare us a judicial circus by convincing the boys to shoot themselves before they could be captured.
You're only a few years younger than me - we both remember when Playboy was waaaaay out there...now its almost respectable enough, in comparison, to be in the elementary school library...parents hope that the worst thing they find in the kid's gym bag is a copy of Playboy. Remember: back when you and I were stealing a glance from the old man's copy, it came in a plain, brown wrapper in order to thwart obscenity laws.
I don't look for some heaven on Earth - indeed, the very concept is anethema to conservatives. But I know that if you expose a population to relentless sex and violence, you will get an effect and it wont be a good one. The important step is to realise that we've got a problem - and then it flows naturally that if we'd just act like adults and demand better, we'd get it.
Probably Bill Clinton.
I mean, he may have been a sexual predator, but he was so dreamy....
How can anyone justify releasing a murderer on parole, when the murderer killed for the thrill of it. This is why I can't be against the death penalty unequivocally - if the alternative is life imprisonment, then they should rot in that cell until they die or if they're proven to be innocent. We don't put murderers in prison to reform them, we put them there to keep them away from the population, and foremost to punish them for their act. Someone who takes an innocent life for shits and giggles has forfeited the right to his own, and only because we cannot be 100% sure that every executed criminal was not innocent do (sane) people oppose the death penalty.
Darrow's speech is a morally repugnant screed worthy only of contempt, but oddly enough it ties into this sex and violence theme: he actually dreams up 'shell shock by proxy', meaning that the murderers can be pardoned because they read about WWI casualties in the paper, therefore thinking that human life is trivial.
Incredible. The frickin' Chewbacca defense is less of a non sequitur.
Yes, but compared to the parents of Pol Pot, the Leopold and Loeb families don't even register.
Yes, for chrissakes, their children coldly and calculatedly killed a person for their own amusement! Their rugrats wrote the 'bar sinister' on their 'proud' names when they took a human life. The fact that they were later executed would be a tiny footnote in how history remembers these two degenerates.
Their kids murdering someone in cold blood is bad enough for the families' reputation as it is, but let's not make it REALLY bad for them by PUNISHING the two. Unbef***inlievable.
The judge actually bought this vile apology of evil? Ugh.
Good parents (plural) make a big difference. I think the only reason my nephew's turning out as well as he is so far is because he effectively has 3-5 parents and 4+ role-models (parents being my sister, my parents who live next door and take care of him a lot, and my grandparents, who take care of him less often but are also convenient. Role models adds myself and my uncle to total four males worth looking up to, the + is for any of the women he may have added as role models.)
Parents and role models serve as the most direct group for what we 'normalize' ourselves after. Those who grow up around gang violence don't always end up punks, but the more interlocked their home lives are with it, the more likely it is. Same with abusers of all types.
The media are both engine and mirror, they show us our dark side, but sometimes their relentless efforts to do so 'neutrally' drives society towards considering that dark side 'normal'. I don't think their influence is trivial, nor do I think it's overwhelming.
*grin* As one who distrusts the Mainstream Media, I'm tempted to say that any 'rise in violence', etc, is due mostly to the herd effect of 'someone did a story on this at station X! We'd all better do fifty dozen (incompetent) stories on it to fill up our time!', people see so much emphasis on it, and thus look harder for it in their own lives... and some of those people report it to the media, feeding the news cycle.
When this subject comes up, I like to simply link this article. It says things much better than I can.
Dean, I'm not surprised...I've been visiting your site as time permits for almost two years. Having no time for WildMonk.net, this is one of my favorite places for discussing topics like this!
Actually, I think that you and Matt have a sort of consensus building in some ways. Society is "agile" in its adaptation to social trends. When porn and violence began to be widely available in the 1970s, it had the effect that everyone would predict using simple common sense: crime and out-of-wedlock births exploded. What people did not necessarily see was that human societies *adapt*. Of course, we know this abstractly, but the specific mechanisms whereby real families began training their children to discount these influences (including the advertising that Mark discusses) appear to have been surprisingly effective. Crime rates and out-of-wedlock births have indeed gone down.
It appears that the primary criticism we are left with is that, compared to a society where you do not have the freedom to produce these materials, there are more people in jail and more women being victimized by pornographers (yes, yes, realizing that *some* women don't ever feel victimized and many at least don't feel that way at first). There *are* effects but the wholesale dissolution of the social fabric is not among them - at least not in 20th century Western democracies.
And the long term trend remains the same: we're getting less and less violent all the time as a society.
Susan B: That's a good piece on Hef. I've long thought of him as a fairly sad character. That said, I think the article gives him too much credit for creating social change. Once cheap and easy birth control met with high standards of living and mass media, sexual imagery was going to become ubiquitous sooner or later.
The thing is that when you look at any of the old Playboys, there's nothing much offensive in them. They had a right to call most of their photography artistic, for it was that. I also frankly think that if anyone thinks the old statues and paintings of nudes in centuries past thinks these were merely pure "art" and not titillating is just fooling himself. That may be the influence of "the Playboy philosophy" on me, but I don't think so. I think it's honest to what the human animal is.
All that said, I do think that Christians such as yourself, along with others, are right to speak up about the problems inherent in the sex industry, and the need for greater awareness of this.
Unfortunately, some of the stigma continues to this day. Kids have been trained to avoid men without children. I'm not a particularly menacing-looking person, but kids will consistently shrink into their mother's skirts/pants when they see me walking by.
My wife and I decided a while ago that we were choosing not to have children. Our families have resigned themselves to the fact that we aren't going to be producing grandchildren, and are generally supportive. However, society at large doesn't know how to handle it.
Sad but true - to the majority of kids out there I am someone to fear. Luckily for me, I have some friends who don't mind introducing their kids to us, and I love them to pieces. Of course, these are also some of the most well-behaved kids I've ever seen - there's gotta be a link somehow.
I agree that there is a sometimes very fine line between art and pr0n. And it is hard to discern that line sometimes. But there is a line, nonetheless. BTW, the CT version of that article is condensed somewhat. Here is a longer and more scathing version of that same article.
Apparently Playboy will work here, too. I subscribe, and Amy always nabs my copy before I get to it, and looks at the pictures (although sometimes it's just to make catty remarks about them). I, on the other hand, at least read the articles first.
Also, Dave Barry once wrote about men having magazines to look at with pictures of naked women. He went on to write that women had similar magazines, but they also had pictures of naked women, because the woman's body is a work of art, but a man's body is hairy, lumpy, and shouldn't be seen in the light of day.
I agree with Mark Noonan that ideas and images, advertising, propaganda, pornography, art, preaching, have tremendous influence on our thoughts and actions. This influence cannot be overestimated. That has been the conservative argument for censorship since the execution of Socrates, i.e., that society, the church, the state, must suppress blasphemous, subversive, or other dangerous or pernicious ideas. If I were a censor, I would start with banning Communist and Nazi propaganda and then all the anti-sex propaganda that permeates our culture today.
But I'm not a censor and I'd better not ever want to be or else I'll become the enemy I'm fighting. Here I'm a liberal in the old-fashioned definition of the word. I believe that the way to counter bad ideas is with good ideas. For every Holocaust denier, there should be a real historian refuting his lies. For every Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, or Catharine MacKinnon, the Gods raise up an Ayn Rand, an E. Merrill Root, a Camille Paglia. For every Michael Moore, we must have a Dean Esmay (and the Queen). In the face of all the vile propaganda that trivializes or damns sex, I must exalt and consecrate sex.
Yes, I would certainly die to defend those pictures of beautiful women (and of manly men) that Dean has so nobly given to us, and for which I am so grateful. I would gladly die to defend this lovely picture of holy Lesbian love and my many other sacred images of pulchritudinous women. I would gladly die to defend this book, filled as it is with pictures of the most exquisitely beautiful women, glorifying the body, the temple of the Most High Goddess.
That is where I stand. Again, thank you, Dean.
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker
Nature via Nurture, Matt Ridley
I urge every parent and teacher—as well as those who would make public policy—to read these. What we're finding out about the importance of genes v. parental influence is pretty damn shocking.
On the other hand, I'd stand in as censor at the drop of a hat (have to remember to bribe Dean to destroy this bit if I ever run for office...).
Were we unfree back in the days when The Who's Who Are You? had the word "fuck" bleeped out, and are we really freer today when, this very evening, I heard a DJ call someone an asshole on the radio? The answer to both questions is "no". But we are cruder today, and were more civil in the past. We've lost something.
I was delighted with that Brady Bunch movie they made a few years back - a huge bunch of good gags and a trip down memory lane to when we thought that the Brady kids were cool. But it also got me thinking, that juxtaposition of early 70's Brady's and mid-90's society: are we better off today for having shed our past innocence? Admittedly, RuPaul as the guidance counselor advising Marsha to come back when she was pregnant was hilarious - but a good chuckle is not, I think, worth what it took for us to get to the moment when such a gag is acceptable.
The problem, of course, is not just a coarsening of our society, but the social pathologies which come along with it. I'll admit that I just don't like living in a society where the convenience store clerk as to wrestle with the moral dillema of deciding whether or not to sell condoms to the 13 year old girl who asks for them (I saw this a couple years back when I was at a convenience store - the clerk eventually decided to sell); I'm sure that a whole bunch of people reading this will go "at least she had protection"...protection from what? is what I ask. A 13 year old who is buying condoms isn't protected - she's been tossed to the wolves and we are all 100% hopeful that she'll get on ok in life...but we don't take that extra step and realise that we've failed utterly as humans by the very fact of such an event.
I'm sorry but I can't agree that easy access to pornography, freely profane language on TV and a blase' attitude about bad manners is worth, say, a 14 year old unwed mother, a 17 year in jail for rape, a 25 year old addict having her fourth child. I can't get us to a society which will have none of these, but I will continue to work for a society where we at least don't encourage such things.
Beautiful suggestion about dancing. I must say that arouses me just thinking of it.
Hatcher and Wild Monk:
You are right that many of our tendencies are inborn, inherent in our very nature. I have more and more come to that conclusion. Differences between the sexes, sexual preferences, individual differences in temperament, etc., all of these are innate. And emotions like anger and jealousy. Environmental influences, inborn tendencies, and our own free choices -- all three.
Mark:
You raise a very good point about our cultural decline, the coarsening and trivializing of everything, especially sex. I myself would not, pun intended, arrest the decline by calling in the police, much less the "feds", though I have no objection whatever to local time, place, and manner restrictions on the display and distribution of erotica. Those are entirely consistent with the First Amendment. What we need more than anything is a spiritual re-awakening, a revival of a high sense of values, a philosophical and aesthetic counter-revolution. Men dressed as they did in the 1940s, not because they feared they'd be locked up if they didn't, but because they possessed a superior sense of _style_. I proudly DARE to be SQUARE.
Sex, to be sexy to me, must be mysterious, surrounded by taboo, enhanced with the aura of the forbidden, suggestive (I love that word!) rather than too explicit. In other words, leave something to the imagination. I despise the banal, blase attitude so prevalent today. In my ideal world, sex would never even be spoken of save in the holy of holies. (Today, however, we are at War, so I must speak of it.) As I told a friend, I would prefer an "oppressive conservatism" over a "dull liberalism".
About this Big Lie of "objectification", here's something I wrote over a year ago:
I'd like to strangle the person who first started using that ugly term "sex object", at least the way it's used today by the sex-haters. I know that its original derivation is from grammar, "subject-verb-object", as "I [subject] love [verb] you [object].", which is what sex is all about. Nothing (excuse the pun) objectionable there. But "object" also has, and is intended to have by the sex-haters, the connotation of something inanimate and faceless, to imply that sex, sexual desire, reduces someone (usually a woman) to becoming an "object" in that sense. It is ugly and is intended to be ugly, to make sex seem ugly. I note that they have no objection (pardon the pun again) to women or others being "objects" of pity -- their idea of "love" -- so it is not really "objectification" that they hate but sex, sexual desire, sexual passion, sexual love, beauty. I say again: Up With Beauty!
True; its the remembrance of the thrill of that girl one had a crush on turning just the right way in high school so you got a shot down her blouse - I imagine that kids these days don't get much of that, everything being out in the open and, if not, internet porn is just a mouseclick away.
I read a couple years back how in Vienna they still have a properly done "coming out" party for the young adults - the men and women get dressed up in their formal wear and instead of the absurdity of then dancing to the latest hip-hop, they dance a waltz, played by a full orchestra. I envy the kids their experience, something which was denied to me as a youth. There is a time and a place for everything, but we've made it so that everything happens all at once, so our society takes on the look and feel of a dog's breakfast.
If I were made that mythical censor, its good to keep in mind that you'd be able to watch uncut R and NC-17 rated movies on TV - but only between 10pm and 4am; I'd leave it up to parents to not be so stupid as to have their kids watching TV at that time - the restrictions to be placed should be designed to (a) leave a bit of mystery as to what being an adult is and (b) set the understanding that there are proper and improper things to do...for instance, because the old man's Playboy (strictly speaking, my be friend's old man) arrived in a brown wrapper, I knew it wasn't an actually proper view of women; that while there is a place for the beauty of a nude female form, women are not summed up by how they look naked.
I'd be for censorship then -- with you as censor. And I'd be for Arnold Harris's lock-down martial law against terrorists -- as long as Arnold is in charge of it. Few others would I trust for either job.
Not entirely kidding.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.