Porn Generation

How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future

Ben Shapiro

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781621571056
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Shapiro captures a generation through first-person reporting, interviews with refugees from the porn industry, conversations with psychologist, educators, and students, and a telling cultural critique.

CHAPTER ONE

A GENERATION LOST

“Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.”

JOHN LOCKE

I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. We have lost our faith. And we have lost ourselves.

As societal standards and traditional values have declined, and the crassest elements of sexual deviancy and pornography have taken over the public square, it is the youngest Americans who have paid the price. Never in our country’s history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged—and yet so empty.

This book is not written from the perspective of a parent, a sociologist, or a teacher—but of a peer. This is my generation: the porn generation. And for good or ill, we are America’s future.

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, the forces of moral relativism, radical feminism, and generational nihilism have gradually destroyed the foundation of our own greatness. Instead of adopting stronger moral standards, our society has embraced the lure of personal fulfillment.

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In a world where all values are equal, where everything is simply a matter of choice, narcissism rules the day. Our culture has bred hollow young men, obsessed with self-gratification. Young women are told to act like sex objects—and enjoy it. The revisionist historians have effectively labeled obscenity as a right that the Founding Fathers sought to protect. Society told the porn generation that final moral authority rests inside each of us—and in our vanity, we listened.

The mainstream acceptance of pornography has become a social fact. Order a movie. Walk past your local news shop. Log on to the Internet. It’s everywhere—in your Blockbuster, your newspaper, your inbox. We’ve replaced faith and family with a warped image of sex and self-satisfaction that ridicules the concept of purity and mangles the most sacred ideals of matrimony.

Traditional authority figures—parents, community leaders, even God—have been discarded. The new authority figures of the porn generation are many, and nearly all are members of a coarsened pop culture—one fed by the destructive malaise of the relativist world. Sex ed instructors, university professors, advertisers, Hollywood actors, MTV artists and assorted celebrities (A-, B-, and C-list) act as the new elders of a church of corrupt, shallow, and materialistic humanism.

The porn generation now inhabits a world where “empowerment” means sex with no strings attached. The old faith and traditional morality was too bourgeois, archaic, sexist, and close-minded for this brave new world. Our new god is Tolerance of all behavior, our new credo “live and let live.”

The real Charlotte Simmons

As children, members of the porn generation are presented with morally subversive sexual education programs at increasingly younger ages. Nine-year-olds are lectured about condom use. Twelve-year-olds are pushed to make decisions about their sexual orientation. Fifteen-year-olds are expected to have said goodbye to virginity.

In college, drug use, alcohol use, and sexual experimentation are the norm. As one Harvard girl told me, “We’re jaded, and it’s fun.” Fun to this girl meant trips to Amsterdam to smoke different types of marijuana. ¹ To others, fun means binge drinking or random sex.

According to a survey of college students conducted by Details magazine and Random House, 46 percent had had a one-night stand, 43 percent had cheated on a steady partner, 21 percent had tried to get someone drunk or high to get them in bed, and 32 percent had slept with someone knowing they would never call again. On average, respondents had had 6.4 sex partners in their lives; 14 percent had 6–9 sex partners, 7 percent had 10–14, 4 percent had 15–19, and 3 percent had 25 or more. Thirty-six percent of respondents had had sex with someone they didn’t like, and 28 percent had used pot during sex.²

The limitless sexual license of the porn generation is not without consequence. It leads to spiritual desensitization, emotional removal, and lack of commitment. The sad fact is that Tom Wolfe’s literary characterization of a young girl, Charlotte Simmons, carries enormous weight because it is so true.

Simmons starts her college experience as a leader, a fighter, a moralist at fictional Dupont University. Early on, she protests the “live and let live” morality that pervades the university:

At Dupont . . . everybody thinks you’re kind of—of—some kind of twisted . . . uptight . . . pathetic little goody-goody if you haven’t had sex. Girls will come right out and ask you—girls you hardly even know. They’ll come right out and ask you—in front of other girls—if you’re a V.C., a member of the Virgin’s Club, and if you’re stupid enough to say yes, it’s an admission, like you have some sort of terrible character defect. . . . There’s something perverted about that.³

Simmons realizes that without the safety net of family morality, she is in serious moral danger:

Right here was the point where she either cried out or she didn’t cry out. Momma, only you can help me! Who else do I have! Listen to me! Let me tell you the truth! Beverly doesn’t just return in the dead of the night and ‘go to bed really late’! She brings boys into bed—and they rut-rut-rut do it—barely four feet from my bed! She leads a wanton sex life! The whole place does! Girls sexile each other! Rich girls with 1500 SATs cry out “I need some ass!” “I’m gonna go out and get laid!”. . . Momma—what am I to do ... ⁴

But Charlotte doesn’t cry out to her family for help, and she doesn’t extract herself from the moral mire that surrounds her. By the end of the book, she has capitulated to peer pressure, lost her virginity, and given in to the values of her surrounding environment. She has undergone deep depression, and she has emerged a shallower person for her experiences.

There are thousands of Charlotte Simmonses in the porn generation. When you’re surrounded by encouragement leading you toward subjective morality, sexuality and hedonism, when you can’t retreat to a safe haven, it’s simply easier to capitulate than to fight.

The lure of sexual privacy is so strong that it tends to overwhelm even the most moral among us. Most of us carry the belief that no one else should be privy to knowledge about our sexual practices—a belief primarily based on the most basic principles of monogamy. Something inside us resonates to the words of Justice William O. Douglas in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case first creating the nonexistent Constitutional “right to privacy”: “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? . . . We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights—older than our political parties, older than our school system.”⁵

It is no accident that the social liberals chose sexuality as the starting point in their crusade against traditional morality. Purveyors of the new morality have been hard at work, “defining deviancy down,” as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained in 1993. He posited that “the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.” ⁶ This has meant encouraging all forms of sexual expression, among other things.

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out that alongside the movement to “define deviancy down,” there is a concurrent movement to “define deviancy up”: “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized,” Krauthammer wrote. “The normal must be found to be deviant.”⁷

Defining deviancy up has meant stigmatizing those who obey the dictates of traditional sexual morality as fools, ascetics, or latent homosexuals. It has also meant stigmatizing moralists as fascists and hypocrites—fascists, because we wish to impose our morality on others; hypocrites, because inevitably, some of us have not been completely pure.

We are not fascists—in fact, fascism’s Nietzschean ideals are antithetical to traditional morality. We are Republicans and Democrats. We have the right to vote for general societal morality as expressed by our duly elected lawmakers. Social liberals seek to impose their amorality, albeit far less democratically; they push their viewpoint through pop culture, the education system, the judiciary, and the media. As for hypocrisy, that too is a weak argument—it is always better to do the wrong thing but say the right thing than to both say and do the wrong thing.

Yet it is impossible for all but the most extreme liberals in our society to ignore the truth: that tolerance of every social behavior is now the norm. In the absence of community-promoted traditional standards, subjectivism reigns. Nothing is expected of anyone; everyone may make his own rules about what is best.

The “live and let live” societal model is a recipe for societal disaster. The myopic question posed by advocates of the new, “Tolerant,” morality is: “How does my immoral behavior hurt you?” But the overwhelming truth is that these are not individual acts, but inherently social acts with social consequences. And when society sanctions and encourages your immoral behavior, that does have an impact—it doesn’t just hurt me, but it hurts my future children as well.

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Truth and consequences

If millions of people accept the deviant as normal, that reshapes society in vastly destructive ways. Moral self-destruction may seem to have no consequences for an individual, but the destruction of societal standards always has consequences.

When the stigma left single motherhood, society felt the sting in rising rates of single motherhood and juvenile crime. When the stigma left sexual licentiousness, society felt the sting in rising rates of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, emotional emptiness, and nihilism. Your immoral personal behavior may not affect me, but exempting your immoral behavior from societal scrutiny certainly does. A society without standards is an unhappy, unhealthy society—a society with no future. And all of us have to live in that society.⁸

Nihilism, narcissism, and hedonism are natural results of the chaotic existential subjectivism popularized by the Left. If the hallmark of the baby boomers was rebellion, the hallmark of my generation is jadedness. Nothing really matters—we’re cosmically alone. As Dr. Eddie Jessup puts it in Paddy Chayefsky’s Altered States, “Ever since we dispensed with God, we’ve got nothing but ourselves to explain this meaningless horror of life.”⁹ Life is truly a horror when the only moral authority is ourselves, because escapism—hedonism—is the logical result.

No generation has ever had the benefits of convenience that my generation does, but instead of using our extra time to live, we seek to kill it. People eight to eighteen years old now spend an average of six hours and twenty-one minutes each day watching television, listening to the radio or to CDs, using the computer for non-school purposes, and playing video games. That’s as opposed to just over two hours per day spent hanging out with parents, only an hour and a half doing physical activity, and under an hour doing homework.¹⁰

Drug use is another form of escapism. Forty percent of twelfth graders have tried illegal drugs.¹¹ While only 18 percent of parents believe that their children have tried marijuana, 39 percent actually have; 60 percent of teens say their friends have tried it.¹² Smoking pot is so commonplace that Democratic presidential candidates are now expected to discuss their experiences with weed on MTV. When I told one of my classmates that I wouldn’t date girls who had tried drugs, he stated quite seriously, “Dude, that’s just unrealistic.”

Finally, there’s sex. Existentialism and subjectivism are lonely because narcissism is lonely. If you build the world to your own specifications, and everyone else does as well, social contact becomes nearly impossible. Love—the attempt to reach out to another person, to bring that person into your world—requires a faith to which the jaded can never aspire. It is becoming rarer and rarer to find true romantics. In an age of jadedness, the only human contact becomes solely physical, an outward expression of the nihilism that consumes the soul. As society accepts solely physical relationships as an inevitable outgrowth of the destruction of traditional morality, solely physical sex becomes more common.

After they helped toss out traditional sexual mores in the name of “Tolerance,” some in the media have recognized the disturbing social trends, and have given front-page coverage to the “shocking” rise of teen oral sex and promiscuity. And so we have Katie Couric stating that “Whether it’s the cover of your favorite magazine, the music videos your kids are watching, or primetime TV, sex is everywhere,”¹³ and noting that “No matter your child’s age, S-E-X either has or will come up at some point. I recently spent a weekend with twenty teens from all across the country between the ages of thirteen and seventeen for a revealing and sometimes shocking conversation.”¹⁴

But why should the mainstream media be shocked? After all, they’ve been promoting the breakdown of traditional morality for years. The social liberals in Hollywood, television, and the media are learning a difficult lesson: You can’t chop away at the foundations of sexual morality for decades and still expect the structure to stand.

Today, one in five adolescents says that they had sex before age fifteen. ¹⁵ Two-thirds of suburban and urban twelfth-graders have had sex; 43 percent of suburban and 39 percent of urban twelfth-graders have had sex outside of a “romantic relationship.”¹⁶ Each day, eight thousand teenagers in the United States contract a sexually transmitted disease.¹⁷

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Believe it or not, the number of young people who call themselves virgins is actually on the rise—but “virgin” often means that young people are having oral sex, rather than vaginal intercourse. One study, by Peter Bearman of Columbia University and Hanna Brockner of Yale, found th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• CHAPTER ONE - A GENERATION LOST
• CHAPTER TWO - FUN WITH BANANAS
• CHAPTER THREE - CAMPUS CARNALITY
• CHAPTER FOUR - POP TARTS
• CHAPTER FIVE - WHERE PIMPS AND HOS RUN FREE
• CHAPTER SIX - TEENYBOPPERS
• CHAPTER SEVEN - ABERCRAPPY & BITCH
• CHAPTER EIGHT - TV VS. VIRGINITY
• CHAPTER NINE - PORN AND POPCORN
• CHAPTER TEN - THE LOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY
• CHAPTER ELEVEN - TAKING A STAND
• CHAPTER TWELVE - ROUNDTABLE
• Acknowledgments
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page