The epidemic of our sexually permissive culture...
Bill Bennett links from his website to an interesting piece by Harvey C. Mansfield, a Harvard Professor, on the aura of sexual permissiveness or indifference on our campuses and the impact that it has.
Mansfield makes the case that in abandoning some of the isolation of the sexes, we have also lost the mystery of the different genders, leading to casual or even anonymous sex, in modern parlance "hooking-up". This phenomena even extends to very young people, with stories telling of boys and girls at ages 13 and 14 "hooking-up" at parties (all the more reason that 13 year olds should not be running around totally unsupervised. Being a teen is not a license for parents to abdicate all responsibility). Mr. Mansfiled writes that while it is perhaps good that girls no longer sit by the phone waiting for a call from a boy,not all is well...
>>>What is not so good is the loss of romance. Less formality means less romance?—less courting, less tension, less excitement. Relations between women and men are rather unerotic. The hormones are there; so too the attractions of youthful bodies and the permission to experiment. The result is lots of sex (or so I hear): recreational sex, loveless sex, hook-ups. There is more consummation and less yearning.
Is more sex more fun? Perhaps, but it is a man's game that women today insist on playing. Women are giving out many more free samples than they used to. Men are less spirited than they were in my day, when we lived in relative isolation from women. Men today are always in the presence of women, hence always in fear of making fools of themselves before women. College men have become premature husbands.<<<
I remember back in the day living in dorms at Ohio State and being amazed at the utter debauchery going on. Not everyone was involved, but many were and almost universally alcohol was in the mix. On more than one occasion I remeber high school girls visiting friends, staying overnight, getting liquored up and bad things happening.
Three of the most abhorrent crimes (outside of murder of course) to my mind are child molestation, hitting a woman (a cowardly act) and rape. As horrific as rape is, if you go out and get loaded up, go home with a guy and have sex with them, regretting it the next day does not mean you were raped. Others are assaulted after passing out, but we don't need to combat this with increased permissiveness. As a culture, as parents we need to teach our young women to respect their bodies and not get into dangerous situations. Besides the damage to your psyche, it can lead to pregnancy which in turn leads to either an unwed motherhood or the horror of murdering your child. Not only that, it can kill you via AIDS. In the throes of drunken passion, the much vaunted safe sex gets thrown out the window. Conversely we need to teach our young men that women are not playthings, to be used and cast aside without a second thought. Unfortunately, these are not popular teachings these days and we as parents face the unpleasant prospect of fighting to stem the tide of immorality coming at us in the culture.
Tough though the fight may be, it is one we CANNOT afford to lose, or we risk losing our culture as a whole. The Roman Empire probably assumed it was invincible, without military peer, but it learned the errors of that ideal, and we must too or we will end up the same way.
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