More and more people are concerned about the pornification of America. Don Aucoin writes in the Boston Globe
Not too long ago, pornography was a furtive profession, its products created and consumed in the shadows. But it has steadily elbowed its way into the limelight, with an impact that can be measured not just by the Internet-fed ubiquity of pornography itself but by the way aspects of the porn sensibility now inform movies, music videos, fashion, magazines, and celebrity culture.
Caitlin Flanagan explores how nice young girls got so casual about oral sex in this month's Atlantic. Are You There God? It's Me, Monica (subscribers only).
Nowadays girls don't consider oral sex in the least exotic—nor do they even consider it to be sex. It's just "something to do."
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Somehow these girls have developed the indifferent attitude toward performing oral sex that one would associate with bitter, long-married women or streetwalkers. But they think of themselves as normal teenagers, version 2005
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We've made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood's response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy—which, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America's girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America's girls: on their knees.
When sex is completely despiritualized, girls and women become objects. It's even sadder when they become complicit in their own objectification. They have lost the mystery, the radiance, the incandescence of one of our greatest pleasures. How do we, our culture and society, step back from such desensitization that robs us of so much?
Maybe Pope Benedict XVI in his first encyclical tomorrow will shed some much needed light.
Posted by Jill Fallon at January 24, 2006 8:05 PM | Permalink