This is our legacy to our children? A "porn generation"? I was talking with a sweet young 14-year-old girl the other day. She was depressed. "All the boys I've been friends with at school, really friends with, they're now acting so inappropriately."
No, she wasn't hurt by anyone. But, she says, "I have to slap them and it's really upsetting. I know they're watching pornography," she adds. "That's where they get all that stuff from. And it hurts, also because they are ruining their own lives." She chokes back the tears.
Don't expect Dr. Phil or any other television maven to reveal pornography for what it is - a major erototoxic virus infecting most exposed. The virus was released into society December 1953 when Hugh Hefner used it to emasculate Joe College. Rendered impotent without fantasy sex, millions of men over time - crossing every political, racial, religious, educational and socioeconomic boundaries - lost the virility and virtue needed to protect their wives and children from the current porn deluge. And when men are emasculated, popping Viagra while lusting after tragic centerfold paper and celluloid and computer dollies, women turn away from home and embrace "work" that may be empty but is reliable.
Benjamin Shapiro, a strapping young 21-year-old author, columnist, survivor of UCLA and current Harvard Law School warrior, has written the book for parents and youths - Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future (published by Regnery, a Human Events sister company). Shapiro's Judeo-Christian advocacy is sane, compassionate, documented and easy to take, although he has drawn the wrath of many suffering the pains of amorality.
Shapiro tells "the baby boomers and liberals who make up the current leadership in this country" that they need to take responsibility for "what they've done to American society."
Shapiro observes that if children infected with venereal disease from oral sodomy "at age 12" are not seen as "a broken nation," we "aren't looking hard enough." The baby boomers and "grown- up flower children" became the mass media and education authorities who have corrupted society, writes Shapiro.
Of course, I find this young man especially wise in his awareness of the role of Alfred Kinsey in normalizing the porn generation. Describing Kinsey's impact he says, "Kinsey claimed that Americans were secret perverts and sex maniacs." By lying about our parents and grandparents, Kinsey invalidated morality as a "social ideal." Then, using the old bait and switch trick, says Shapiro, Kinsey pulls out the tattered "hypocrisy" charge.
"The only way to alleviate guilt became abdication of moral sexual standards," he says. "And when the chief goal is erasing guilt, even for immoral actions, all that remains is narcissism."
Shapiro argues, with strong support, that discarding traditional morality gave our children over to social liberals, who control our culture through music, film, television and other mass media so that the normal is now considered deviant. He says the effects upon his generation are "disastrous."
I do not think Shapiro exaggerates. "Like it or not, the porn generation is the future of this country," says Shapiro. Think of that and consider what decisions will be made by future judges, juries, legislators, prosecutors and Presidents who are pornography addicts.
It is not a good era for parents to rear their young. They try to restrict the erotically laced videos, rap, adverts and Internet porn. Now they are faced with Rainbow Party, a Simon Pulse book (a division of Simon & Schuster) by Paul Ruditis that has little girls pick out different lipstick colors to practice for some boy-girl oral sex orgies. The "me generation" led to "Gen X" that logically has produced the X-Rated Porn Generation.
Shapiro's writing is crisp and right on target. And take a deep breath folks, because the young man is pointing his finger at most of adult society, for children now are paying with their lives for the adult selfishness and abandonment of strong moral standards.
Most parents are not nearly "in the know" enough about the problems their children face in trying to survive their toxic porn environment. Shapiro's is a critical wake-up call for parents and it is a book that can give them the knowledge necessary to begin to turn around the amorality that is destroying their children.
"I am a member of a lost generation," Shapiro writes. "Never in our country's history has a generation been so empowered, so wealthy, so privileged-and yet so empty."
Shapiro is a great spokesman for youth and for this nation. Pornography will grow in violence and degradation. Its causal role in child sexual abuse, incest and rape is real and all too well documented. It is increasingly taking the littlest ones, the most innocent. Pornography will not go away unless we treat it like an environmental toxin.
Pornography was never about sex. It was always about emasculating men and neuro-chemically linking sexual lust with shame, fear, violence and degradation.