Monday, August 07, 2006
Do You Know Where The Kids Are?
Ms. Gordon was apparently speaking about Osama bin Laden, and the sense of disgust he developed toward western culture in general and American culture in particular. A disgust that Ms. Gordon shares to some degree with him.
She was speaking of the social mores in America at large, and decrying how so much in our culture seems on a downward spiral. Take, for instance, the state of our Feral Youth. As Ms. Gordon explains it....
"...There are some things in the world that disgust me to the point of despair...some of the things that kids will do on the Internet now. Somebody was telling me about young girls from very good schools who will photograph each other having sex, and put it on the Internet, so that people can, you know, see them having sex. Thirteen, fourteen year-old girls are doing that. And I see something like that, and it makes me despair. And I think there is something so wrong with this culture that, wipe it out. Start from - start from zero. It's too corrupt."
The first part of her statement had me on her side, but the more she spoke the more I felt an unpleasant tone creep into her voice. The lady finally protested so much that she gutted her own argument.
Methinks the heavy hand of nunneries is nigh.
Now American civilization may indeed be going to hell straightaway in a handbasket, but I am not sure that the sexual antics of thirteen-year-olds are going to be the proverbial last straw, as it were. You could read the kids as being like kids in any generation - ready to stick it in the eye of the older folk. Kids rebel.
Maybe what those teenaged girls are rebelling against is that they don't want to end up like mom and pop, at least in America, where married couples on average have a miniscule amount of sex every year. Not that playing a numbers game is any solution, but it may be fuelling some of this youthful behavior.
After all, these are the girls who will probably grow up to be better educated than the males in their lives, since that is what women are doing nowadays, they are surpassing men in all sorts of ways. Soon the gap between the sexes will be even wider, fewer people will be hooking up compatibly, marriage will continue to decline.
Hell, no one will probably be having sex. So, bring on the kiddies and their truncated version of Internet porn. Because this may be the only idea of sexuality that we get.
After all, most adults are telling kids pretty much non-stop, to NOT be rushing headlong into sexual connections. The kids obviously just tune them out.
Adults try any number of ways to separate kids from their sex organs. "It's better if you wait for that special Someone." Or, "It's better when you love the person." And if that doesn't work, then let's cut to the chase and just hammer them with, "You can catch diseases and die."
I find the Pleasure Argument especially insidious. To return to Ms. Gordon for a moment, she phrases it in terms of young people "having all sorts of sex that they can't possibly really connect to pleasure."
Of course they can't do that, but why should they? Finding the deep pleasure Ms. Gordon is talking about takes time, effort, luck, beyond just the basic compatibility of two people. But in the meantime, what's wrong with lusty, sweaty rolls in the hay? Do we need a heavenly choir going in the background every time we hit the sack? The kids don't think so, and good for them that they don't think so.
Is there a trace of envy in the grown-ups today as they view their offspring? So coddled, pampered and cocooned all their lives and into young adulthood. Do we wish we had lived childhoods where we were having sex more often, at least? Never mind about putting the pix on the Internet. We would be happy if we had the imagination - and the nerve - just to swap them among our friends, post them on our bedroom walls or try and sneak them into the class yearbook.
Kids have plenty of imagination still, and the fact it extends now into sexual realms that we did not experience in OUR growing up should not be a green light for us to beat them up for their behavior. Sorry, Mary, you are a good Catholic girl and a good person I'm sure. But your angst is misplaced.
After all, where there is libido, there is life. Keep your paws off my gonads, please. Now, where's the damned cameraman when you need him?
- - - - - -
Sexual experimentation is what we do when we're young until we figure out who we want to be. I'm not sure that having sex is going to ruin the country. Running out of oil, having Islamic fascists crash planes into our cities, letting the Republicans have their way forever, THAT's going to ruin the country.
I'm sure Republicans must have sex too. There are so many of them running about. But it must be through osmosis or something because they never seem to like talking about it. Well, I suppose they do in the sense they are always trying to suppress the conversation, that is a form of communication too, albeit a rather poor choice.
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