Table of Contents
To all members of my generation striving to maintain their dignity, honor, virtue, and innocence in a chaotic cultureand to their parents.
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 countrys history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privilegedand yet so empty.
This book is not written from the perspective of a parent, a sociologist, or a teacherbut of a peer. This is my generation: the porn generation. And for good or ill, we are Americas 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.
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 objectsand 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 usand 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. Its everywherein your Blockbuster, your newspaper, your inbox. Weve 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 figuresparents, community leaders, even Godhave been discarded. The new authority figures of the porn generation are many, and nearly all are members of a coarsened pop cultureone 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, Were jaded, and its fun. Fun to this girl meant trips to Amsterdam to smoke different types of marijuana. 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 69 sex partners, 7 percent had 1014, 4 percent had 1519, and 3 percent had 25 or more. Thirty-six percent of respondents had had sex with someone they didnt like, and 28 percent had used pot during sex.
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 Wolfes 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 youre kind ofofsome kind of twisted... uptight... pathetic little goody-goody if you havent had sex. Girls will come right out and ask yougirls you hardly even know. Theyll come right out and ask youin front of other girlsif youre a V.C., a member of the Virgins Club, and if youre stupid enough to say yes, its an admission, like you have some sort of terrible character defect.... Theres something perverted about that.
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 didnt cry out. Momma, only you can help me! Who else do I have! Listen to me! Let me tell you the truth! Beverly doesnt just return in the dead of the night and go to bed really late! She brings boys into bedand they rut-rut-rut do itbarely 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! Im gonna go out and get laid!... Mommawhat am I to do ...
But Charlotte doesnt cry out to her family for help, and she doesnt 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 youre surrounded by encouragement leading you toward subjective morality, sexuality and hedonism, when you cant retreat to a safe haven, its 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 practicesa 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 Rightsolder than our political parties, older than our school system.
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. This has meant encouraging all forms of sexual expression, among other things.
