Porn Generation

by Ben Shapiro

  The Chicago Sun-Times termed oral sex the “new third base,” while quoting sixteen-year-old John, who goes to private high school and won’t have “real sex,” but began having oral sex at age fourteen: “It happens mostly at parties or after school, sometimes when the girls are a little bit drunk. And these days, even the grade 7s are doing it.” “People don’t even think about it as bad anymore . . . It’s cool if you do it,” concurred thirteen-year-old Elissa.66

  As for the parents, they’re most likely upstairs watching Sex and the City, at least according to an NBC/People poll from 2004. Teens ages thirteen to sixteen were asked about places they received information about sex and sexual relationships; 70 percent of teens said they received either a lot or some information about sex from their parents. Yet 54 percent of the teens felt that a teenager who has oral sex is still a virgin; 57 percent felt it was okay for teens who are seventeen or eighteen to have oral sex. While only 15 percent of surveyed parents believed that their teens had gone beyond kissing, 27 percent of teens reported being with someone in an intimate or sexual way.67

  Psychologist Dr. Wayne Warren told the New York Times, “I see girls, seventh and eight graders, even sixth graders, who tell me they’re virgins, and they’re going to wait to have intercourse until they meet the man they’ll marry. But then they’ve had oral sex fifty to sixty times. It’s like a goodnight kiss to them, how they say goodbye after a date.”68 Goodnight blowjobs? Clinton may like this world he helped build, but it’s revolting for those of us with any moral standards at all.

  Here’s the bottom line: Without the Lewinsky scandal, millions of children would not have had to hear about this issue until reaching maturity. Instead, oral sex and masturbation with cigars became topics of conversation in classrooms and around dinner tables throughout the country. Agonized mother of four Elizabeth Avery Shelton expressed it well in her letter to the editor of the Seattle Times: “I would like it to be known (before her movie and book deal comes out) that I want an apology from [Lewinsky] for being solely responsible for me having to explain oral sex to my four children, ages twelve to eight.” Clinton and his media cronies owe parents an apology as well. Unfortunately, an apology just won’t cut it at this point. The ship has left the dock.

  Parental abdication

  Comprehensive sex education has taken power out of the hands of parents. The current system has the schools teaching amoral permissiveness and forcing parents with standards to un-teach their own children. And parents have become too lazy to do anything about it. Instead of opting their kids out of sex ed, it’s easier for them to avoid the messy birds-and-bees conversation. Leave it to the government employees to teach the kids about standards of morality.

  The social liberals who have promulgated this anti-parent system are pleased with the result. Their goal was never to allow parents the authority to teach their children; it was to shill for the god of Tolerance. Government is the most easily available tool to use toward this end—and it is certainly the most powerful. As Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders put it, “We taught them what to do in the front seat of a car. Now it’s time to teach them what to do in the back seat.”69

  The callousness here is unmistakable. If government usurpation of parental authority means sacrificing some kids to the consequences of emotionally barren sex, venereal disease, and abortion, so be it. The social liberals are creating a utopian “live and let live” society, and you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

  Social liberals can’t get away with stating their goals out loud, so they hide behind the screen of youth “autonomy.” They’re just giving kids respect, they say. They’re just providing full information. It is this perverse view of child autonomy that has led to widespread abortion “rights” for children: the kids were old enough and smart enough to have sex, and now they’re old enough and smart enough to get an abortion without parental notification. Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois explains this view: “[O]fficials at the state and federal levels are trying to take away young people’s rights to reproductive-health services, including access to contraceptives, family planning, and abortion.”70 This grants children just enough rope to hang themselves and their fetuses—autonomy in the form of a suicide pill.

  The combination of parental abdication and social liberalism in our schools means that kids are easy targets for nihilism and moral subjectivism. Ironically, by destroying parental authority with regard to morality, social liberals got more than they bargained for: rampant drug, alcohol, and tobacco use. Almost three-quarters of suburban twelfth graders and 71 percent of urban twelfth graders have tried alcohol more than two or three times. Forty percent of twelfth graders in both urban and suburban schools have used illegal drugs. More than 60 percent of suburban twelfth graders have tried cigarettes, as have 54 percent of urban twelfth graders.71

  We’re now at the crisis point, and parents are beginning to wake up. A poll released in February 2003 by Zogby International showed strong support for abstinence education, and a remarkable antipathy toward the liberal social messages taught in comprehensive sex ed. For example, 71 percent of parents disapproved of teaching a middle-school child (ages twelve to fifteen) to unroll a condom and place it on a finger, banana, or wooden model of a penis. Another 71 percent disapproved of telling children (ages nine to twelve) that “Homosexual love relationships can be as satisfying as heterosexual love relationships.” A plurality—46 percent to 39 percent—disapproved of telling fourteen to eighteen year-olds that “Teenagers can obtain birth control pills from family planning clinics and doctors without permission from a parent.” And 70 percent disapproved of schools handing out contraception without their permission.

  A full 69 percent of parents believed that nine to twelve year-olds should be taught “Sexual or physical intimacy should occur between two people involved in a lifelong, mutually faithful, marriage commitment.” And 74 percent believed that fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds should be taught that they need not worry about pregnancy or STDs if they are abstinent.72

  These parents have a reason to be angry. They’ve been cut out of the loop, and these explicit and ill-thought public school courses have become the primary source for their children’s views about sex. After feeling the consequences of social liberalism, parents are waking up. To preserve the innocence of their children and equip them with a moral worldview, it’s up to these parents to stand up for their kids, accept their responsibilities and start acting like . . . well . . . parents.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CAMPUS CARNALITY

  “Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.”

  H.L. MENCKEN

  College life for the porn generation is the social liberal’s dream. In an environment dominated by secular humanism and political correctness, no one ever makes judgments about sexual activity. And the dirty little secret of the matter is: That’s the way the universities want it.

  Today it’s the universities promoting co-ed dorms, “tolerant” speech codes, and sexual experimentation. It’s the tenured hippies and their capitulating compatriots from the 1960s running the universities now. The ones who used to want a revolution are now the institution.

  When they first enter college, students are thrust into an uncertain world, usually without friends or family to guide them. So they seek guidance from administrators, professors, and peer—each source worse than the last. With parents out of the picture, the universities’ objections to traditional morality create a values vacuum for students.

  In the context of that vacuum, the “tolerant,” “live and let live” attitude of the institutional leaders filters down to the students. The common feeling is, as Elliott Davis, Cornell University class of 2004 expresses it, “People do what they want to do. It doesn’t bother me.”1 And so students feel free to do what they want to do, knowing that there’s no danger of stigma or condemnation.

  Janie, a twenty-two-year-old UCLA student, embo
dies these notions. “I do whatever I want, and I’ve never thought twice about it,” Janie told me. Janie has sex “if I’ve been dating a guy for a while and we say we love each other.” Couldn’t a guy just lie? “I’ve had guys say they loved me before, but I know they don’t mean it. It’s intuition.” According to Janie, she’s not a slut: “I’ve been having sex since I was fifteen, right? And I’m twenty-one now, so that’s six years, and yet I’ve only had five partners. You know, that’s pretty good compared to other people who started having sex when they were fifteen.”2

  With values like these, and the prevailing societal attitude of tolerance for such values, is it any wonder that 49 percent of women aged eighteen to nineteen had sex with at least two partners in the year 2002, and 81 percent of women aged twenty to twenty-four in 2002 had become sexually active before age twenty?3

  Not only do colleges induct students into the fancy-free world of “if it feels good, do it,” they subvert all opposing authorities, particularly parents. Parents drop their kids off, telling them to “find themselves.” When the kids return, they haven’t found themselves; they’ve found a substitute for the familial safety net in professors, peers, and random sex. Everyone needs a philosophical framework to justify their existence, and if parents won’t provide it, the universities certainly will—and so they fill the values vacuum with a moral framework based on narcissism and hedonism. As columnist Suzanne Fields writes, “Where morality is ‘dumbed down’ it takes nerve to protest the tyranny of ‘the student bodies.’”4

  Sex over poker

  It’s Wednesday night, and a group of friends and classmates from Harvard Law are gathered around a poker table. We’re in one of the dorm complexes, I’m down about $10, and everyone has had a beer or two. We’ve been playing for about an hour, and the conversation has revolved completely around two topics: rock music and sex. In between discussion of the best cover song ever for a rock album, A.J.5 tells the group that he’s found a sex partner online.

  “She’s into spanking, and I figured that sounds like it’s worth a try,” he says.

  “Dude, that’s a good way to get yourself beaten up by eight guys, meeting a girl for sex online,” Jimmy6 answers.

  “I heard a story from one of my friends about a guy he knew who liked to get rough with his girlfriend,” volunteers Jason.7 “So one time they were having sex, and he just pulled out and punched her right in the crotch.”

  Others groan. Jimmy offers, “One time a guy I knew, his girlfriend kept asking him to hurt her, over and over, so he just grabbed a toaster and smacked her in the head with it.”

  “So, A.J.,” Jason asks, “did you end up going out with your best friend’s friend?”

  “Yeah,” A.J. answers, “but it wasn’t really a date.”

  “Did you try to get some from her?”

  “Nah.”

  “Good move.”

  The conversation continues like this for hours. Sex, class, rock music. Sex, rock music, sex. Sex, sex, sex.

  An hour before the game, I had attended a reception for Harvard Law 1Ls (first-years) held by a major New York law firm. I was standing around with a few of the fellows from the class. “So did you hear about what happened to Adam?”8 Jimmy asked me. “No,” I said.

  “Well,” Jimmy explains, “Adam was in Costa Rica with a bunch of other people from our class, and they went to a bar. Some random girl approached him, and he went in the bathroom with her. She gave him a blowjob in a stall.”

  I make a disapproving face. “Ben, that isn’t the bad part,” Jimmy says.

  “Oh.”

  “So later,” Jimmy continues, “the group sees this girl being tossed out of the bar. So they ask the bartender what’s going on. ‘Oh, that’s some guy who goes around giving people blowjobs, and we have to toss him every night,’ the bartender tells them. Turns out that the girl was a transvestite.”

  Ugh. “It’s probably not the best idea in the world to go around taking oral sex from random people anyway, if only for STD reasons,” I state.

  Another guy, Alan,9 chimes in. “Well, I’ll tell you, I’m usually good about making sure the girl doesn’t have anything,” he says. “But when a girl starts to go down on me, I’m not going to stop her.”

  It’s worth noting that few of the people I talked to that night could be described as politically liberal. Jason is a libertarian. Jimmy is a Midwestern guy with a conservative streak on crime and economics, and a slightly conservative tinge on social issues. Still, none of these escapades triggered any moral consternation. None of these people could be described as stupid or ignorant, either. Each is a student at the top law school in the country. Yet free sex, sex that ignores both possible consequences and emotional involvement, is commonplace.

  And it’s not just at Harvard. “This girl who’s a freshman at my school, she said she had sex with five guys in one week,” 2004 American University graduate Marty Beckerman told me. “That’s an extreme example, but that kind of anonymous quick, totally emotionless stuff, I don’t know how many times in college I heard somebody say they had no idea the name of the guy or girl they had sex with last night.”

  Beckerman tells another story emphasizing his point: “I had this friend who was a seventeen-year-old junior in high school, and he was hanging out with us, and he was like ‘I have to go to your college, I really wanna have sex with a college girl.’ I wasn’t really hot on the idea. But he was insistent. So he comes to the campus, and we’re hanging out, and it’s late, and we’re in a friend’s room, and a girl comes in who’s f—ing trashed. Really, really drunk. So we’re like, ‘Ashley, this is our friend, he’s a junior too.’ Of course, he was a junior in high school, and she was a junior in college. But she didn’t know that. And she’s like ‘Ohhhh.’ Within two minutes of introducing these two to each other, they were in her room having oral sex.”10

  Check your morals at the dorm

  Consider a world made up entirely of eighteen-year-old men and women, hormones raging, walk around in towels and pajamas like sisters and brothers, often sharing bathrooms and sometimes bedrooms—and, much of the time, beds. Welcome to dorm life for the porn generation.

  The social situation makes for its own unique and bizarre rules and practices. Roommates are “sexiled” when their roommates are getting busy in the dorm room. Lucia,11 a twenty-three-year-old 2004 alum of New York University, explains the basic principle of “sexiling”: “I suppose at its most impolite, it is when the roommate returns home (usually late at night) and has been locked out of his/her room (whether physically by a door lock or emotionally by the potential visual of what’s going on inside) because their roommate is hooking up with someone. It often happens as a stated agreement between roommates too, though. I was more than happy to vacate the room so my roommate could have it on Valentine’s Day with her boyfriend.”12

  Typically, people from the same dorm don’t hook up or date; that’s known as “dormcest.” According to Lucia, “dormcest” often leads to “sweatpant romance, which is kind of a funny concept. It’s not really dating because you don’t get dressed and go out of the building, you just stop by in your sweatpants and get laid or whatever, kind of the lazy man’s dating. I had a friend who called off a hooking-up relationship purely out of her distaste for the label of ‘sweatpant romance.’”13

  The average college student is getting plenty of “action”: an Independent Women’s Forum study found that 40 percent of college women had “hooked up,” and 10 percent had “hooked up” more than six times. Hooking up, for the non-porn generation readers, is “any sexual contact—ranging from kissing to sexual intercourse—in which the participants expected no further contact.” Elizabeth Marquardt, who led the research team, stated that in the study, “co-ed dorms kept coming up in a negative way. They have reduced the mystery [of male-female relationships] while facilitating joined-at-the-hip relationships.”14

  Wendy Shalit, author of A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, accu
rately describes the situation: “[W]hen the dorms are co-ed, and even the bathrooms are co-ed, and we’re all thrown together. . . there’s no [escape] from the culture of immodesty. When everything is integrated . . . there’s no mystery, and there’s no separation, and there’s no reverence between the sexes.”15

  Rick Gabriele, a student at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, unwittingly seconds the motion: “[Co-ed] is great . . . You get used to being around the opposite sex. I walk into the bathroom, and there’ll be a girl brushing her teeth, and then I’ll jump in the shower.”16 Talk about the death of romance.

  With sex readily available at every turn, it’s no wonder only 38 percent of college guys are in a serious relationship.17 “Dates and, for the most part, love affairs, are passé,” writes 2001 Princeton grad Laura Vanderkam. “Why bother asking someone to dinner when you can meet at a party, down a few drinks and go home together?”18 Princeton class of ’04 Justin Johnson sums it up: “No one dates.”19

  It’s not as though college administrators didn’t realize that the natural result of close proximity between hormonal teenagers would lead to sex. In fact, many dorms have taken precautions to provide the students with easy access to contraceptives. At Oberlin College in Ohio, dorm bulletins announce the popular weekly Safe Sex night at the dance hall.20 Doug, a recent NYU grad, told me, “Either the RAs [residence assistants] or Health Services would hand out condoms”—a situation that is common to many universities.21