David Simon refers to the “pornographication of America” as a real phenomenon. Sad to say, I think he’s correct. All of the imagery and ways of dressing in the 60’s and early 70’s is considered entirely mainstream today, in and out of the church. It’s very disturbing, and I can’t even see a way to right the ship, outside of something dramatic (miraculous?) occurring.Terry Gross [host], “The clothing is so…70’s, and one thing I have to say about the clothing…, I don’t mean to sound old-fashioned or anything, but I’ll just come out and say it. I was noticing Saturday night, as I was walking down a street with a lot of clubs on it, that all the young women were dressed as if they were in The Deuce. As if they were like the prostitutes on The Deuce, with the very short shorts, and the midriff tops and…I don’t mean to sound prudish or old-fashioned, but that kind of clothing is just what people wear now. You wouldn’t see somebody wearing that and go like, ‘oh, that must be a prostitute,’ as you might have in 1971.
David Simon [co-creator of ‘The Deuce’]: “And that’s something we also hope to address, both subliminally and I think there may be points where we can actually reference it. But I think mostly you’re going to have to get it looking in retrospective from today’s world. Which is this: that porn itself (even beyond the actual pornography, even beyond the actual dirty movies and the dirty pictures) it changed the way we look at ourselves, the way men look at women, the way women respond to the reality of what’s in men’s brains at this point. We don’t sell anything without using the tropes of pornography. We don’t sell beer or cars or blue jeans without, in some way, referencing a lot of what has become normalized imagery and normalized culture through the ubiquity of pornography over the last fifty years. It’s been a long time. It’s been half a century that this stuff has been in the ether. And in the same way that early pornography certainly took a lot of its tropes from mainstream film and played with them, it’s gone the other way. And now, I think, everything from fashion to music to regular cinema-the pornographication of America has been profound. Listen, you don’t have a multi-billion dollar industry operating every year and not have it transform the way we think about ourselves and each other. And I don’t think anyone’s got a good handle on the depth of that. I think it’s happened so fast, and it’s been so unexamined. I don’t think anyone has examined it with any degree of seriousness…that I’m not sure we know what we’ve built.”
The comparison is appropriate. We are social creatures after all. So the thinking should consider what if you can’t shut off the source like in a few environmental cases? Then what? Containment, berms, etc.?I see that the author is an environmental scientist/engineer, and he has drawn an interesting parallel between the toxicity of pollutants in the environment and what he calls sexual toxicity. We can clean the environment by reducing the release of toxic substances, but I’m not sure how to apply that model to the cleaning of society or the Church.
It’s one of the things we learn in sociology that it generally takes 30 years for the fruits good or bad, of a new phase of culture to be manifest in society.Funny, all these boomer types from the 60s who were all “free love, rock n roll, drugs” supporters, are now fiercely pro-life, anti drug, and staunchly conservative.
Yes, many are, especially the ones who came back to the Church, though I will say there are still those (in and out of the Church) who just will not let go of the destruction that lifestyle caused.Funny, all these boomer types from the 60s who were all “free love, rock n roll, drugs” supporters, are now fiercely pro-life, anti drug, and staunchly conservative.
Unless everyone is convinced that they ought to become staunch Catholics, how would all these things be eliminated. Even conservative Protestants don’t see anything wrong with using artificial contraception.The only way to reduce the toxicity is to reduce and eliminate its sources, including: sex outside of marriage including fornication, cohabitation, adultery, homosexual acts, and artificial contraception which enables the toxicity.
SeemsThe toxicity is clearly demonstrable and the toxic source is readily identifiable. So why is there doubt that the sexual toxicity of the 1960s has any relevance to today’s sexual ambivalence in the Church? It is clear that the resistance to this analysis rests on two factors: the unwillingness to identify the source of our current sexual toxicity and the reluctance to close off that source by teaching Christian sexual ethics persuasively and with confidence.
How the Sexual Toxicity of the 1960s Has Harmed the Church
ANDA world without premarital sex? That’ll never happen