Porn Generation

by Ben Shapiro

  This is the “witty,” horny stuff that goes over as romance on teen television. Teens buy into it big time, and the kids on The O.C. and Buffy and Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill set trends both sexual and ridiculous. When Seth, a lead character on The O.C., started wearing an old-school “Members Only” jacket on the show, demand for the product among teens skyrocketed.

  Real-life teens wish they could live like the teens Hollywood promotes. Everyone has sex, and relationships are deep and meaningful, even if they only last a couple episodes. There are never any consequences to any action, except for experiencing the angst of teenage life alongside the characters. When a generation becomes desensitized to the ramifications of the culture around them, it’s natural to seek out any sort of feeling, even angst.

  Uncontrollable

  With the proliferation of cable channels, it becomes harder and harder for parents to monitor what is on the tube. Democrat Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts expressed the problem well at a February 1997 congressional hearing: “We have moved from the era of Leave It to Beaver to the era of Beavis and Butthead. We have 8 million latchkey children in the United States. We have 18 million single moms. Mom is not home any longer with a peanut butter sandwich and glass of milk for Joey or Susie at noontime. Mom is working now. She’s not home in most homes in America. The TV set plays the role of babysitter. That’s America of the 1990s.”70

  Yet the media hates anyone who does attempt to direct television to a track that is more socially responsible. Anyone who inhibits freedom of porn is an enemy, especially cultural conservatives like Michael Powell, the former chairman of the FCC. The New York Times editorial board spoke for many other papers when it dragged Powell over the coals after his resignation: “Mr. Powell’s disappointing reign will be remembered for the extremes to which he went to punish what he called indecency. . . The broadcasts that were targeted have too often been innocuous, such as the singer Bono’s use of a single expletive after he won a Golden Globe award, and the fines excessive, most notably the $550,000 imposed on Viacom for Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at last year’s Super Bowl. Media companies and artists have complained, with good reason, that the commission’s indecency standards are so vague that they are being discouraged from engaging in constitutionally protected speech.”71 Surely in any other context the Times would never call a punitive damage award of $550,000 excessive for a corporation that earns billions of dollars a year in profits. Yet obscenity on television is apparently a holy cause at the Times.

  Powell is hardly the first politician to face such reaction. On May 19, 1992, in San Francisco, Vice President Dan Quayle spoke on the topic of the Los Angeles riots. He discussed the problems of illegitimacy and poverty, and he saved his strongest words for societal glamorization of single motherhood. “Bearing babies irresponsibly is simply wrong,” he averred. “Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong and we must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it another lifestyle choice.”72

  The mainstream media immediately jumped on the vice president for his statements about Murphy Brown. “It was a tried and true conservative tactic: when in doubt, attack the liberals,” complained Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times.73 “It isn’t moral values that people laugh at, of course—it’s Mr. Quayle himself, and it isn’t the elite who do the laughing,” sneered Garrison Keillor in the pages of the Times.74 Eleanor Clift of Newsweek launched into Quayle, snidely commenting: “Vice President Dan Quayle went nuts . . . The ’50s fantasy of mom and dad and 2.2 kids went the way of phonograph records and circle pins.”75

  “[I]t is certain that television alone—or even in combination with magazines and movies—is not to blame for the decline in family values,” wrote Kenneth Woodward of Newsweek. “Symptom it may be of deeper cultural confusions and contradictions. But as even Quayle must know, it is not the cause.”76 Of course, Quayle never claimed that television was the cause of moral decay—he merely claimed it was a cause. But straw men are easier to knock down than real arguments.

  “The Murphy Brown reference was included because it was a grabby cultural thing that would illustrate the point,” Quayle’s speechwriter, Lisa Schiffer, told me on February 16, 2005. “This was a primetime network show. This was in its time at least as influential as Sex and the City became a decade later in defining the way young women thought about work norms and social norms.”77

  Both Quayle and Schiffer were correct. Television was promoting new, cutting-edge, anti-traditional values. A 1992 survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs revealed that while 81 percent of the country as a whole felt that adultery was wrong, only 49 percent of Hollywood did. While only 4 percent of the country outside of Hollywood had no religious affiliation, 45 percent of Hollywood was areligious. While 76 percent of Americans believed that homosexual acts were wrong, only 20 percent of Hollywood did; while 59 percent of the American public was pro-choice, 97 percent of Hollywood was. As Schiffer stated, “We’re talking about those who by self-selection and ambition run the institutions of popular culture—in contrast to a traditional cultural elite defined by erudition, wisdom, and taste.”78

  By 1998, the validity of Quayle’s point was so obvious that even Candice Bergen, the actress who played Murphy Brown, felt compelled to acknowledge it. According to Bergen, Quayle’s speech was “the right theme to hammer home . . . family values . . . and I agreed with all of it, except his reference to the show, which he had not seen . . . It was an arrogant, uninformed posture, but the body of the speech was completely sound.”79

  Schiffer noted in the New York Times that since “Murphy Brown,” television has only gotten worse. “It’s clearly been one long downhill path as far as the sexualization of the culture,” Schiffer says. “What’s shown on TV now, you wouldn’t have been able to get past anybody in 1992. The reality shows, all these teen dramas, there’s nothing that shocks anybody anymore . . . This is a race to the bottom for ratings.”80

  The race to the bottom is having an effect on the porn generation viewers. A study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in September 2004 found that “adolescents [twelve to seventeen years old] who viewed more sexual content at baseline were more likely to initiate intercourse and progress to more advanced non-coital sexual activities during the subsequent year, controlling for respondent characteristics that might otherwise explain these relationships.”

  Viewing sex on television was also likely to change children’s worldviews about sex and morality: “This high-dose exposure to portrayals of sex may affect adolescents’ developing beliefs about cultural norms. . . . Social learning theory predicts that teens who see characters having casual sex without experiencing negative consequences will be more likely to adopt the behaviors portrayed. Although televised sexual portrayals can theoretically inhibit sexual activity when they include depictions of sexual risks (such as the possibility of contracting an STD or becoming pregnant), abstinence, or the need for sexual safety, this type of depiction occurs in only 15 percent of shows with sexual content. In other words, only one of every seven TV shows that include sexual content includes any safe sex messages, and nearly two-thirds of these instances (63 percent) are minor or inconsequential in their degree of emphasis within the scene. As a result, sexual content on TV is far more likely to promote sexual activity among U.S. adolescents than it is to discourage it.”81

  In the end, the proliferation of channels means that kids feel something approaching obligation about watching television. When you have three hundred channels at home, there’s always got to be something on. Bored with homework? Grab the remote. Almost two-thirds of teens have a TV in their bedrooms, 64 percent of teens have their own TVs, and 70 percent of teenage boys have their own TVs.82 When you’re a nihilistic teen or pre-teen,
the people on TV have lives much more fulfilling than your own. Why not watch? And if their lives are so much more fulfilling than your own, why not try what they’re doing?

  CHAPTER NINE

  PORN AND POPCORN

  “If motion pictures present stories that will affect lives for the better, they can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind”

  HAYS MOTION PICTURE CODE, 19301

  Anne Hathaway is one of the rising young stars in Hollywood. Born in 1982, her pure acting talent and charm have already drawn comparisons to Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland, and she’s headlined major PG-rated films for the teenage set—including Ella Enchanted, The Other Side of Heaven, and the enormously successful Princess Diaries films. These films cater to pre-teens without crossing the boundaries of juvenile humor—and if they have any sexual messages, they are decent and restrained.

  In the 2005 film Havoc, Hathaway’s character sent an entirely different kind of message. She has sex on-screen with gang members as well as with female co-star Bijou Phillips;2 she also goes topless.3 Hathaway explained that she just wanted out of her clean image: “I think this whole princess thing is very much a moment in my career,” she told the Boston Globe. “I’m kind of ready to hang up the tiara . . . I don’t have anything to prove, to be perfectly honest. I’m not out there to stick my middle finger up at anybody and say, ‘You were wrong about me.’ I just want to act, to play roles I consider interesting . . . Yeah, I think [Havoc] will change people’s perception of me.” She did have questions about “whether it was right for me to do the nudity,” but “I realized it was the only way to make my [seventeen-year-old] character honest . . . I realized it was important to show she was so detached from herself that she has no problem going topless in front of guys she barely knows and exploiting her own sexuality to manipulate people . . . I realized that if I want to be true to the message I thought the film had, then I needed to go all the way with it.”4

  As for all of those Princess-loving little girls? Who cares what message you get—being true to art sometimes means not caring about your audience.

  It’s impossible to overestimate the amount of oversexed content coming out of Hollywood over the past decade. But it’s not just the explosion in nudity among stars or the weakening of standards that have had an impact on the porn generation. There’s a deeper message behind the moaning and the groaning, the games of hide-and-seek beneath the sheets, the face-licking, the half-naked groping—as Hollywood has embraced the graphic elements of pornography, the moral relativism behind these themes has become an implicit message in nearly every major mass-market film. For films targeted at youth, these messages are often explicit.

  The modern Hollywood directors don’t actually need to include such images or scenes for the sake of story, of course. When Ingrid Bergman goes up to Humphrey Bogart’s room in Casablanca, you don’t need full-frontal nudity to realize that they’re about to sleep together. When Clark Gable carries Vivien Leigh up the stairs in Gone With the Wind, you don’t need to be a mind-reader to figure out what’s going on. The audience isn’t quite as stupid as Hollywood believes they are. Hollywood may think, as H. L. Mencken said, that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” but try telling that to the producers of Showgirls.

  Somehow, filmmakers got along without topless women during the golden years of Hollywood. The greatest films ever made originate largely in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s—a period when Hollywood worked under the “heavy hand” of the Hays Production Code.

  The code encouraged subtlety, especially in sexual matters. It banned explicit depiction of adultery, scenes of passion unnecessary to the plot, excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, and suggestive postures and gestures, noting, “In general passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element.” Seduction and rape were not to be shown or suggested unless relevant to the plot, and “sex perversion” was banned. Obscenity and vulgarity were forbidden, as were profanity and nudity. Since it was written in 1930, the code does have some incredibly dated and inappropriate elements—but overall, the code fulfilled its stated goal: “No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it.”5

  After nearly half a century, it’s easy to forget that the Hays Code was not some outside limitation imposed by the government. It was a content standard imposed by motion picture companies voluntarily. Although the code was written in 1930 in response to rising public criticism, it wasn’t actually implemented until 1934. In 1933, Mae West truly provoked the implementation with her Hollywood debuts in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel.6 Her sizzling presence caused an immense public outcry, culminating in a movement led by the Catholic Legion of Decency. The Legion warned audiences of movie content, rating movies on an A-1 (“morally unobjectionable”) to C (“condemned”) scale. Catholics were urged not to attend any movie with a C rating.7 During the Great Depression, moviegoers no longer had the money to support motion pictures, and those who did have the money didn’t have the stomach for uncensored movies. By the end of 1932, weekly attendance figures were down 40 percent from 1929, and almost 20 percent of the movie houses in the country had closed down.8 Hollywood had no choice but to go moral.

  That doesn’t mean the moviemakers were happy with the transition. Charlie Chaplin hated the Hays Code so much that he hung a pennant over the men’s toilet in his studio reading: “Welcome, WILL HAYS.”9 But the code was good for movies in general, a fact that seems more and more obvious in retrospect. Many of today’s critics, as open as they are about sexuality, seem to be getting that message. Steve Sailer, movie reviewer for United Press International, wrote after seeing Brian De Palma’s gutter movie Femme Fatale, which includes a lesbian sex scene as well as graphic violence: “With the possible exception of Paul Verhoeven and Joe Esterhaz of Basic Instinct and Showgirls notoriety, no auteur would benefit more from the re-imposition of the old Hays Code censorship regime than De Palma . . . De Palma’s tragedy has been that he was born too late to have to use subtlety and artistry to communicate.”10

  Neil Minow of the Chicago Tribune similarly penned, “The Hays Code said, ‘The MORAL IMPORTANCE of entertainment is something which has been universally recognized. It enters intimately into the lives of men and women and affects them closely; it occupies their minds and affections during leisure hours; and ultimately touches the whole of their lives. A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as by the standard of his work.’ Maybe that’s not as outdated and quaint as we thought.”11

  With the death of the Hays Code, Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America quickly moved to allow more and more obscene material into films. As Valenti writes on the MPAA webpage, “From the very first day of my own succession to the MPAA president’s office, I had sniffed the Production Code constructed by the Hays Office. There was about this stern, forbidding catalogue of ‘Dos and Don’ts’ the odious smell of censorship. I determined to junk it at the first opportune moment.”12 And junk it he did. The new ratings system is looser than Jenna Jameson after a few drinks.

  It’s hard for the MPAA to ruin the “General Audiences—All Ages Admitted” (G) rating, since it’s restricted largely to kids’ movies. But the “Parental Guidance Suggested. Some Material May Not Be Suitable for Children” (PG) rating may include “profanity” and/or “violence or brief nudity.” In fact, “[t]he theme of a PG-rated film may itself call for parental guidance.” As the MPAA sensitively notes, “[i]n our pluralistic society it is not easy to make judgments without incurring some disagreement. So long as parents know they must exercise parental responsibility, the rating serves as a meaningful guide and as a warning.”13 The PG-13 rating (“Parents Strongly Cautioned. Some Material May Be Inappropriate for Children under 13”) is likewise loose with language and sex, and may also include “drug use.” The Ratings Board is required to rate a film R if the film includes more than one �
�of the harsher sexually derived words,” but “[t]hese films can be rated less severely, however, if by a special vote, the Rating Board feels that a lesser rating would more responsibly reflect the opinion of American parents.”14

  The ratings are decided by a board of members with no particularly special qualifications, except that they “must have a shared parenthood experience, must be possessed of an intelligent maturity, and most of all, have the capacity to put themselves in the role of most American parents so they can view a film and apply a rating that most parents would find suitable and helpful in aiding their decisions about their children’s moviegoing.”15 A “shared parenthood experience”? For all the garbage they allow under the PG-13 rating, perhaps that “shared parenthood experience” is visiting their child in San Quentin.

  There is no question that the Ratings Board is more socially liberal than the parenting community at large—their members are drawn entirely from the San Fernando Valley in California and its surrounding area, where you’ll find a staunchly liberal population. In fact, the Valley itself serves as the home base of the pornography industry.

  The MPAA refuses to release the identities of the people who compose the board. Valenti loves the fact that the system is “subjective”: “We’re dealing in imprecise boundaries here . . . What would you rather have? This crazy, weird, mixed-up rating system? Or some federally enforced one with $10,000 fines for people who would disobey it?”16 There’s a third option: how about bringing back a slightly updated version of the Hays Code, one that could help stop the slide toward hardcore sex in major motion pictures?

  Over the decades since the introduction of the modern ratings system, the standards for each ratings category have slipped deeper into the mire of amorality. Bernard Weinraub noted the decline of strict family fare as early as July 1997. “The traditional family film . . . is quietly dying,” Weinraub wrote, arguing that this was due to evolving moral standards. Today’s youngsters are just more “sophisticated” than they used to be. And according to studio executives, Weinraub explained, “the film industry is, in many ways, lagging behind the tastes of children and their parents, whose appetite for more sophisticated and even violent movies has surprised even Hollywood.”