April 18, 2005
Exactly wrong
Andrew discusses a David Brooks column that says that despite the growing presence of sexuality in the media - to the point that it's downright pornographic - the lives of families and young people are improving. Andrew, of course, argues for the further mainstreaming of homosexuality.
They're both dead wrong. And this is why. People are having less sex, not because of some resurgance of virtue or morality, but because we're drowning in it.
Porn - and the culture of rampant sexuality in which we live - isn't empowering. It's emasculating. Young people haven't "left [the war] behind", we're casualties. This stuff has been and continues to be a problem for just about every guy I know, married or not.
As an aside, Andrew has a lot of good things to say about the homosexuality debate, but the one part that i've never, ever bought is his idea that gays are just championing their right to be like everyone else. That may be true for him - I've never met him, so I can't say - but the anonymous promiscuity without responsibility seems to be far more the order of the day than being a well-adjusted, stable member of society. Plato was right about one thing - gay sex does produce a lot fewer kids than straight sex. So as gay and lesbian activity becomes more and more mainstream, a drop in teen and otherwise unplanned pregnancies would seem to follow logically, no biologically, as a result.
Hear, hear, as far as sexuality in the media. I'm all for eliminating pointless taboos--but sometomes overexposure is a really bad way to do that.
Although I disagree with you on the "gay agenda." If you really believe that the majority of gays and lesbians aim for anything more than equal rights, then you're just buying into substanceless spin of the Religious Right. And I know you're better than that.
Posted by: Tyler Grisham at April 18, 2005 04:52 PMI never said anything about a "gay agenda". I just haven't heard that long-term stable relationships are the norm in the gay community. More like the exception. And historically, not much effort has been spent on the civil rights angle. That's been a fairly recent development. Plenty of arguments about Puritanism, hypocrisy, repressed sexual urges, free love, and all sex being a beautiful thing, but not a lot about serious desire for monogamous relationship. That's recent. And, in my view, pretty disingenuous.
This is also not really the point of my post. The second-to-last paragraph is. Regardless of one's view of homosexuality, the increasing saturation of society's cognitive space with sex has led to less healthy relationships, not better ones, and youth (such as you and I) are affected by this in negative ways, not positive ones.
Posted by: ryan at April 18, 2005 06:01 PMRyan, if drowning in sexuality in the media et al is causing a decrease in sex among young people, why then the problem? Unless of course you think more sexual activity would be preferable. Since I grew up during a time of sexual promiscuity all around me, during the 60s and 70s, I have to agree that open affection or sexual behavior doesn't seem apparent as it did then. But I have a feeling that sex is still in play privately.
Posted by: Bailes at April 19, 2005 12:32 AMApparently you didn't read the article I linked to. The author suggests that such is not the case.
Posted by: ryan at April 19, 2005 06:57 AM