Porn Generation

by Ben Shapiro

  Young girls are the primary victims of the new society. For girls, sex is unquestionably more precious than it is for boys; according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 77 percent of sexually experienced teenage girls wish they had waited to have sex.20 Girls are now mutilating their own bodies, either through worries about their weight leading to anorexia and bulimia, or through actual self-mutilation, which entails using “knives, razor blades, or even safety pins to deliberately harm one’s own body.”21

  But both boys and girls are damaged most by the desensitization they suffer as a result of an oversexed society. As 2001 Princeton University grad Laura Vanderkam stated in USA Today, “Hookups do satisfy biology, but the emotional detachment doesn’t satisfy the soul. And that’s the real problem—not the promiscuity, but the lack of meaning.”22 Dr. Marsha Levy-Warren sees the same problem with children buying into the sex culture: “Developmentally, they just aren’t ready,” she told the New York Times. “They’re trying to figure out who they are, and unlike adults who obsess first and then act, kids do the opposite—they act and then obsess. They jump into this, and are left with intense feelings they’re unable to sort out.” Levy-Warren notes the rise of what she calls “body-part sex”: “The kids don’t even look at each other. It’s mechanical, dehumanizing. The fallout is that later in life they have trouble forming relationships. They’re jaded.”23

  Sexual licentiousness was the aphrodisiac that blinded us to the dangers of discarding traditional morality; now it is supposed to be our reward for discarding traditional morality. And yet we, as a society, are not happier. The liberal’s favorite value—tolerance—excuses our cultural immorality and is our societal undoing. As columnist James Hitchcock writes:Tolerance fails as a virtue, first of all, because it is in some ways demeaning to people. It is much better to speak of “respect” or “empathy.” But that is precisely the problem—common sense tells us that there are people who cannot and ought not to command our respect or empathy. We regard what they stand for as stupid, crazy, evil, or all three. To be respectful of them would be to abandon all moral sense, so that a completely tolerant person would be totally passive, without a moral center. Thus we fall back on “tolerance,” which merely means conceding to people the right to be who they are, while withholding our respect. But the determined advocates of tolerance are not content with that and keep slipping back into making tolerance imply the necessity of respect . . . Thus the obligation of tolerance leads inexorably to intolerance, turning the claim to be tolerant into a tautology, a statement that merely repeats itself—“I am tolerant except about those things of which I am intolerant.”24

  This book is meant to force us to reexamine the true consequences of tolerating immorality and the oversexed society in which we live. If we see clearly the moral pit which we have dug for ourselves, maybe we can stop digging—and maybe, just maybe, restore the standards that have served American society well in the past.

  It is also an attempt to reach out to my peers. Yes, sex is fun, and good, and in the right context, healthy. But let’s keep it in the right context. Let’s think about our prospective children. Do we want our kids growing up in the over-sexualized world that we do? Let’s learn from history. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of our parents’ generation.

  The baby boomers and liberals who make up the current leadership in this country need to take a good, hard look at what they’ve done to American society. If they don’t feel that the children giving blowjobs at age twelve are the products of a broken nation, they aren’t looking hard enough. It is the baby boomers and the grown-up flower children who began the trend of oversexed culture. They produced the television shows, made the movies, bought the albums, corrupted the school system, and ushered in a new era of “tolerance.” They tore down the traditional moral system in the name of youthful rebellion.

  It is not right that children be dunked headfirst into the vat of garbage we call popular culture. Ten-year-old girls should not have anorexia, and ten-year-old boys should not have to question their sexuality. It is the responsibility of parents to teach their children about sex, not the schools’. It is the responsibility of parents to teach their children values.

  In the end, if prior generations aren’t willing to condemn the consequences of their misguided passions, my generation must do it for them. If parents continue to ignore the truth or won’t take the responsibility to act, we are required take this responsibility on ourselves. The baby boomers told their parents to take a hike back in the 1960s and 1970s—my generation can and must do the same. We must start the long journey back to an America that honors virtue and the foundational moral principles that make this country great.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FUN WITH BANANAS

  “In public school systems across the country, they’re indoctrinating kids to be ‘sexual’ under the guise of protecting them, when you know that’s not true. I think it is indoctrination for left-wing agendas.”

  DR. LAURA SCHLESSINGER1

  “I was nine years old in fourth grade,” says Katie, a cute twenty-two-year-old suburban girl from the Northeast.2 She’s a brilliant Harvard Law student and a relatively happy person. At her upper-middle-class elementary school, she had her first brush with sex ed, porn generation style.

  “One day, they told us they were going to teach us about ‘Family Life.’ They didn’t separate us or anything. They said that people could engage in oral, anal, and regular sex, but didn’t explain what the terms meant. I can’t remember any moral judgments being made. They gave us booklets with line drawings of what happens as puberty progresses. They also told us that sex can get you pregnant, and that it can give you diseases. There was a lot of focus on HIV. They said that the only way to be 100 percent safe was abstinence. Then they sent all the girls to the nurse, who told us that if we bled we weren’t dying, and handed out maxi pads and tampons.”

  Katie’s parents were given the option to opt out of this explicit instruction for their nine-year-old, but they didn’t. In fact, no one opted out in fourth grade, and only one person opted out in the following years of sex ed. According to Katie, she got sex ed nine times over, every year from fourth to twelfth grade: “The classes were co-ed all the way through. In seventh grade, they were showing condoms—we made balloons out of them. They had a goody box full of birth control implements: condoms, diaphragms.

  “In seventh grade, someone said that their friend in eighth grade was already having sex, but that wasn’t common. If I had to guess, I’d say that by the end of high school, about 15 percent of the kids in the class were having sex, and they were all the popular kids. But I was in the advanced class, where no one was really doing anything.”

  Katie believes that sex ed is a good thing for kids to hear. “The disease and pregnancy stuff was good because it scared people off—they realized there were consequences to sex. There should be education about it so that there are less half-truths and complete lies floating around and people can make an informed decision. Because sooner or later they will do it, and the more info they have, the better they are equipped to determine when they will do it.” She also believes that parental inactivity makes taxpayer-funded sex education more vital, citing her own parents as an example: “My parents wouldn’t have talked to me about this if I hadn’t had sex ed in school. By now, at our house if they start something, it’s like ‘Chill, I’m not fifteen anymore.’”

  Katie isn’t a virgin, and she isn’t ashamed of it. She became sexually active at age nineteen and has had three sexual partners. “There’s nothing wrong with premarital sex,” she tells me. “I got over that idea. I feel I can make rational decisions armed with what I learned in nine years of the same class repeating . . . Sex is appropriate when the person is mentally ready to have sex, and when it’s not a result of pressure to fit in, and when she’s mature enough not to have any regrets.”

  Still, Katie doesn’t want her parents to know about her sexual history because “the
y still think it’s wrong, and I don’t want to open that can of worms.”3 For that reason, her name has been changed to protect her privacy.

  Katie is an above-average girl, and would be considered in this day and age a sexually well-adjusted citizen. Her views on sex education and sex in general are shared by many of her peers. Premarital sex isn’t seen as wrong, as long as you’re ready for it, and sex education is supposed to prepare you for it.

  With this kind of logic, it’s not hard to see why kids are being sexualized at younger and younger ages. The younger the kids are when sex ed begins, the more they know at a younger age. The more they know, the more prepared they are. The more prepared they are, the more societal approval they will receive when they do have sex. And societal approval means societal encouragement.

  The “have sex as soon as you’re ready” logic also means that having sex becomes a mark of maturity. Those who are more mature and mentally prepared will have sex younger. Those who wait until marriage to have sex, conversely, must be immature social outcasts or for some reason unprepared.

  The truth is that knowledge and information aren’t cure-alls. In fact, they can do serious damage to children. What supporters of the full-frontal version of sex ed don’t understand is that knowledge is power only when the person armed with the knowledge is capable of making a fully rational and informed decision. Children are not capable of such a rational decision, and treating them as adults does them no favors. Kay Hymowitz, author of Ready or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children as Small Adults, argues that the “anticulturalists”—people who believe that childhood sexuality, left on its own, free of social interference, will flourish and grow in healthy ways—have overestimated the choosing power of children.

  Drained of all feeling but physical pleasure, rationalized into Filofax personal organizer entries, the sex given to us by this ministry is little more than techno-fantasy.” They do not see the alternately insecure and grandiose, idealistic and crude, perpetually glandular teenager most of us know. Their teenager, like that of so many other experts, is rational, self-aware, and autonomous. Information is all these kids need, they say. Information and some deprogramming to counteract society’s continuing efforts to pervert their healthy sexual natures. So now we have a nation of teenagers who are information rich but knowledge poor. They—and their ten-year-old brothers and sisters, for that matter—may be adults when it comes to technical information; certainly their putative sophistication about sexual matters is the subject of endless head shaking by parents and the media. But as they approach graduation in the anticultural school of self-sufficiency, they remain predictably illiterate when it comes to real human connection.4

  In the view of the social liberals, children are fully capable of making informed decisions about sex. With that premise in mind, liberals are constantly harping about the right-wing sex education agenda of “scaring kids.” “Scaring kids” means abstinence-only education, telling them that the only way to ensure prevention of STDs and pregnancy is abstinence. “These programs are completely out of control,” rages William Smith, director of public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). “They’re using millions of taxpayer dollars to provide medical misinformation to use fear and shame-based messages in an effort to convince young people to change their behavior.”5 Dr. Drew Pinsky, host of “Loveline,” agrees: “[A]s a pure program, the sort of scare tactics that are used with abstinence-only educations really don’t seem to work.”6

  Yes, using scare tactics is wrong in most situations. But when the subject cannot comprehend the harmful consequences of an action not yet taken, then fear is an appropriate motivator to inhibit such an action. It’s always comical to watch a parent engage a two-year-old child in a Socratic dialogue about why the kid can’t cross the street without an adult present. A two-year-old child can’t understand the concept of death, just as a ten-year-old child can’t understand the crucial emotional loss and desensitization suffered as a result of sex without rules. Fear of consequences, whether those consequences are spiritual or physical, is a critical component to teaching restraint.

  Social liberals also argue, as Katie does, that kids will have sex “sooner or later,” so it’s better to prepare them for it while they’re young. This kind of cynical resignation has less to do with realism than with promoting a certain political agenda.

  In reality, social liberals abandon determinism whenever it conflicts with their moral outlook. They say that educating kids about cigarette use means telling them to say no under all circumstances, instead of teaching them that if they do decide to smoke, they should use filters to minimize the health risks. Apparently, kids won’t smoke “sooner or later” if we tell them no. Social liberals want to prevent children from knowing anything about gun use, instead of training children to use firearms responsibly. Apparently, kids won’t use guns “sooner or later” if we tell them no. For liberals, premarital sex is less morally repugnant than smoking or hunting.

  Many social liberals would prefer that kids be sexualized younger, so that they can become more “tolerant” of deviant lifestyles and what everyone used to acknowledge as immoral choices. The liberal sexual agenda underlies the teaching of sex education. As David Campos, author of Sex, Youth, and Sex Education: A Reference Handbook, proclaims: “To achieve a sexually healthy lifestyle, youth must acquire a positive and comfortable attitude about sex. Frank and fact-based discussions about topics once considered taboo are essential. Abortions, condoms, masturbation, oral sex, and homosexuality are among the topics to be found in comprehensive sex education programs.”7

  Katie’s statement that she “can’t remember any moral judgments being made” sums up today’s sex education. Debra W. Haffner, former president of SIECUS, writes that the goals of sex education should be: “to provide young people with accurate information about sexuality, to give them an opportunity to develop their values and increase self-esteem, to help them develop interpersonal skills and to help them exercise responsibility in their relationships.”8 Develop their values, increase their self-esteem. This is subjectivism, and it is forcing kids without capabilities into choices with serious consequences.

  As April Cornell9, a twenty-three-year-old black woman from Harvard Law, explained to me, “Being a teenager sucks. Teenagers have way more choice today than they had 50 years ago; I have way more choice than my parents did when they were 15 or 16. It never would have occurred to my mom not to decide not to have sex or decide not to use drugs. There are decisions that I had to make, as opposed to ‘this is the way it is.’ I think kids are being forced into choices they’re not ready to handle.”10

  April’s classmate, Michelle McCaughey11, concurs: “I think there’s a lot more pressure because so many things are accepted. There’s already enough pressure on teenagers to be cool and social, and when you get rid of any moral constraints that would weigh upon them, it makes life a lot harder.”12

  Because social liberals would prefer that kids gain “tolerance” rather than maintaining their innocence, they scorn abstinence itself. This is a textbook example of defining deviancy up to include normal, healthy, even moral behavior. The NARAL (formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League, now just NARAL) Pro-Choice America website contains a Pennsylvania campaign mocking chastity. It urges viewers to send the following letter to President Bush: “I am writing today as a supporter of NARAL Pro-Choice America to order a chastity belt. You might wonder why I am asking you for a chastity belt. Well, in your latest budget proposal to Congress, you ask for more funding for abstinence-only until marriage programs but do not provide any more funding for the Federal Family Planning Program.... Until you give us real choices, please rush me the only thing that you seem to want to provide to protect my reproductive health: a chastity belt. My address appears below.”13

  The choice not to have sex is, apparently, not a “real choice.” A real choice is whether to use a condom, or whether to get
an abortion after having unprotected sex.

  Sex in the classroom

  It’s easy enough to find anecdotal evidence regarding the dangers of comprehensive sex ed: young teens being taught about the benefits of oral sex, masturbation, and homosexual activity, all without parental notification;14 the Massachusetts Department of Public Health creating a video in 1989 explaining what to do before, during, and after sex;15 “Focus on Kids,” an organization promoted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling kids to embark on “condom hunt[s]” at local stores;16 the “Be Proud! Be Responsible!” program encouraging bisexuality and homosexuality; 17 the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States’ (SIECUS) and the Centers for Disease Control’s “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sex Education” telling children “homosexual love relationships can be as satisfying as heterosexual relationships.”18

  But anecdotes don’t tell the full story. Today’s sex education is systemically different than it was when it first began, in the early twentieth century. Sex education first arose for public health reasons; “sex hygiene” was the phrase of the day. Such teaching of “sex hygiene” was largely—and correctly—couched in moral terms. “The only way to cure the sexual evils thoroughly, the only way to dig them up by the roots, [according to sex hygiene pioneer Prince Morrow] was to prescribe the same standard of morality for man as for woman . . . Men must be as chaste as women.”19