Once upon a time, in a country half a century away, obscenity laws were enforced, parents forbade their kids (especially girls) to date until they were 16, sex was an intimate and private matter, schools emphasized academics and good manners, modesty and humility were virtues, and children were protected from disturbing and violent materials.
Not anymore. The only kinds of safeguards afforded to modern youth are protection from (a) parents, (b) religious morality, (c) fast food and “trans-fats,” and (d) global warming … or cooling, whichever.
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Some 19 news articles in the past two weeks alone decry the dangers of sex-saturation — in entertainment, “educational” programs, fashion and technology. The exponential growth of Internet pornography is particularly troubling, as it becomes difficult to filter it out even with sophisticated software.
Warnings have abounded for years, of course. The late neoconservative writer, Irving Kristol predicted that normalization of practices long regarded as aberrant, would do “for rape and sadomasochism” what porn has done for film and print. He expressed surprise that pornography is considered harmless by the same people who criticize cigarette ads for having a “powerful impact on behavior.”
Obscenity is defined as graphic material that focuses on sex or sexual violence, including lewd exhibitions of genitals, close-ups of sex acts and deviant activities such as group sex, bestiality, and incest.
Once a child has seen this stuff, one can’t just “take it back.” It’s the equivalent of “shock and awe” to the brain. The results may not become obvious for years — meaning that “harm” is not provable in the legal sense and pornographers can build their empires without fear of lawsuit.
Now that nearly everybody, including children, uses the computer daily, pornographers have been able to inundate the Web with ghastly images and perverse literature, managing even to divert the unwary to a pornographic site or game unintentionally. We’re not talking about “girlie pictures” here. The images, games and ads range from brutal and painful depictions, to grossly unnatural, antisocial acts that fall into the category of abuse.
Now that the prurient approach to sex is pervasive and unavoidable, schools in Massachusetts’ Cape Cod district are emboldened to churn out even more offensive programs, the latest being free condoms to grade-schoolers (without parental consent), thus in effect “contributing to the delinquency of minors.” Governor Deval Patrick balked, but a precedent had already been set in the District of Columbia, where free condoms (in attractive packages with lubricants) had been in place for a year.
Washington is a city with one of the highest rates of AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in the country. So, it embarked on a program to distribute thousands of Durex condoms and signed a $225,000 contract with a marketing firm to launch a “social marketing campaign” which would convince youngsters that not having an STDs is “hip.” Another objective, says Shannon L. Hader, head of the D.C. HIV/AIDS Administration, was to “reduce the ridiculous stigma” associated with what are, in fact, highly contagious, disgusting maladies.
But surprise! Even though the city was providing “safe sex” materials for free, the promiscuous didn’t “buy.” So, why would liberal do-gooders in Massachusetts believe its grade-school children can benefit from a similar project?
Because the issue is not about prevention of AIDS and STDs, any more than graphic sex education was ever about understanding the reproductive system. In both cases, the goal is to undercut character and morals, destroy rationality and eradicate what few “community standards of decency” are left — the same old leftist ploy that has played out in one format or another for 45 years. A Parade magazine celebrity question crystallizes the matter for readers: “I’ve begun hearing certain words on my soap opera that I didn’t think were allowed on daytime TV. Has the FCC changed its regulations?” The response was “no,” with the caveat that “enforcement of rules against indecency is measured by contemporary community standards, which may evolve over time.” So, who says whether, or how much, standards have evolved? With a left-leaning media forever pushing the envelope, the “community,” as Americans once knew it, in effect doesn’t exist.
Just how many children seek out ever-more-graphic “stimulation” is impossible to calculate. But the ABC News website last Friday gives a pretty good indication: “ ‘Choking Game’ More Popular With Kids: Study finds rise in dangerous sexual behavior among adolescents,” screamed a combination video-article headline. And: “How Could People Watch Rape ‘Like an Exhibit’?” asked another. Which begs the question: Where do youngsters discover this stuff?
News at the Security and Exchange Commission this spring and at the National Science Foundation last fall was enlightening as well: Employees at both agencies were caught spending much of their working hours gawking (and more) at pornographic websites. No wonder the SEC dropped the ball on the emerging financial crisis , and the NSF couldn’t sort out the junk science in global warming from the real science of cyclical climate changes!
Nobody “dates”; they just “hook up” — meaning casual sex. Impressionable tweens and teens feel betrayed, but still they are compelled to compete. Some “sext” lewd self-photos; others dress provocatively to get attention.
Worse, many wind up dead. Take Taylor Behl, the 17-year-old college freshman from Vienna, Virginia, who had moved to Richmond in August 2005 to attend Virginia Commonwealth University. Two weeks later, her body was found in a ravine. Benjamin Fawley, a guy who (according to Taylor’s mother) she had “only” had sex with “once out of curiosity,” as if that were perfectly okay, claimed that the girl died accidentally while they were performing a consensual, kinky-sex act (thought to be erotic asphyxiation, or choking). Fawley said he panicked and dumped her body. Behl and Fawley were captured on surveillance footage leaving Taylor’s dorm together, apparently amicably, after she went to her room to get some things earlier that night. But amicable or not, Fawley was much older (38) with a rap sheet that included 16 counts of child pornography, attempting “indecent liberties with children,” and “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (much of it based on the annual Uniform Crime Report) disseminates misleading figures, leading folks to believe that sexual assaults have declined in recent years. But sex crimes actually fall into several categories: among them, cybercrime (child pornography over the Internet), violent sexual assault (rape plus other injuries related force), attacks reported to police too long after-the-fact to be provable, simple sexual assault (“taking indecent liberties”), stalking and human trafficking. There are no statistics on spreading STDs, which can be debilitating or fatal, and few covering classic obscenity. Little wonder, then, that experts fail to link something like aggressive hawking of obscene websites to children (which should, at the very least, fall under “contributing to the delinquency of a minor”) with, say, the kidnapping, rape and impregnation of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard between June 1991 and her rescue in August 2010, acts that fall under sexual slavery and human trafficking. Thus, any tally of “sex crimes” offers but a piece of the overall picture.
Ben Fawley, Taylor Behl’s murderer, was a disaster waiting to happen, yet he was out on the street and trolling the Internet. Psychologists bear some responsibility for this: Had Taylor’s oh-so-tolerant mother been a parent in the 1940s, her daughter would probably not have experienced sex at age 17, Fawley would probably have been in jail, and the college wouldn’t have allowed girls to meander outside the dormitory late at night.
But Behl’s mother came of age during the sexual revolution, when every Boomer was showered nonstop with psychobabble from “experts” pushing nudity, diminishing TV standards, free-love, feminist theology and birth control for single people.
Some neurologists, like Dr. David Hilton, say they can now prove that pornography is addicting. Others notice that graphic sexual images can shock some youngsters so completely that they never exhibit any interest in sex.
Dr. Melvin Anchell, the eminent Los Angeles-based author of the 1983 watershed tome, Sex and Insanity, who has repeatedly been called upon by the government in court cases involving sex crimes, explains how early sexuality bypasses the well-established “latency period” of childhood development, when sensual pleasures normally are repressed and children are predisposed to learn compassion, between the ages of six and 12. Compassion for one’s fellow man, Anchell writes, is a “relatively weak instinct [and] marks a notable step forward in removing civilized man from the savage.” This instinct is jeopardized, says Anchell, by introducing sexually stimulating materials to children in latency and by presenting sexual feelings as something other than private.
The now-ubiquitous in-your-face sex chatter that spouts endlessly from prime-time TV and the Internet attests to the fact that sex has been separated from tenderness, romance and compassion. The pornographic culture affects males, too; many find themselves unable to adjust to normal, married family relationships.
Meanwhile, the $100 billion spent annually on pornography would put a serious dent in the national debt. This is not just the stuff of a Hugh Heffner (Playboy) or Larry Flynt (Hustler), which launched entire spinoff industries. Viacom, the communications giant that owns child-friendly stations like Nickelodeon, and its colleague-in-mischief, MTV, entertains kiddies with profanity and perversion, then diverts their attention to an eye-popping array of violent and obscene “game” sites.
The U.S. Justice Department has had its share of complaints from the public concerning the avalanche of pornographic come-ons. But one response was particularly strange during Attorney General Janet Reno’s tenure. When this author was an employee there, several e-mails from the public were forwarded (perhaps by mistake) to the Civil Rights Office in 2000-2001 by other Bureaus within the Department. All alleged that a toll-free line had collected their information concerning obscene websites and a computerized voice had promised to get back to the complainant. Except no one did. Thus the e-mails. After a bit of sleuthing, it turned out nobody was assigned the job, and the calls went nowhere.
Yet, goofy complaints by porn workers are taken seriously: Continuing pressure by porn “stars” for collective bargaining rights; labor complaints filed by an AIDS advocacy group in Los Angeles “against nine porn talent agencies for promoting actors…willing to have unprotected sex on camera”; and an investigation of the Adult Industry Medical (AIM) Health Care Foundation by the feds for allegedly releasing porn stars’ “private” STD records.
In former FBI veteran Cleon Skousen’s iconic 1958 text, The Naked Communist, he sets out a list of Communist Goals that were a composite of carefully documented objectives sanctioned under Russian-Communist leaders Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin. Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev — all of whom knew their adventurism in the service of world socialism depended, eventually, upon subduing the West, especially the United States. Inasmuch as the Atomic Age was fraught with the threat of nuclear retaliation, engaging the West directly with physical armaments was risky. That left internal subversion. Even if a reader is unwilling to concede that Skousen’s work represents a verbatim Soviet to-do list, one look in retrospect lends credibility: Not one of the 45 entries had at that time seen daylight (especially communications technology); yet, nearly all are done deeds today. Three goals, in particular, bear repeating here:
• Eliminate laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
• Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV.
• Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
Our grandparents would have been shocked to learn a sitting President had just skipped the National Day of Prayer, and instead endorsed same-sex family benefits, hailed “two fathers” at a Father’s Day proclamation, and honored something called Gay Pride Month. Does anyone really imagine Barack Obama will argue for strengthening obscenity laws, prosecuting sexual predators and cleaning up television?
If you do, realtors have an igloo in Houston to sell you.
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Beverly K. Eakman is a former educator and retired federal employee who served as speechwriter for the heads of three government agencies as well as editor-in-chief of NASA’s newspaper (Johnson Space Center). Today, she is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer and columnist, the author of five books, and a frequent keynote speaker on the lecture circuit. Her most recent book is Walking Targets: How Our Psychologized Classrooms Are Producing a Nation of Sitting Ducks (Midnight Whistler Publishers).
