Sex has become so detached from anything meaningful, personal, and private, that Playboy is no longer even bothering to print nude pictures anymore. People won’t pay for them because every sexual act imaginable can be freely viewed on the internet at any moment. Our most popular TV shows, from “Game of Thrones” to “Two and a Half Men,” are full of sex, either explicit or implied.
One generation…two generations, have grown up in a culture where sex means practically nothing on TV and media, and so they’ve actually embraced the idea that it means nothing in real life! They’ve heard the message and believed it: “Sex is no big deal.” They feel totally inadequate and unfulfilled if they aren’t having it.
And we have done such a good job teaching that message, that now 1 in 5 women who attend college for four years say they’ve been sexually assaulted. Or is it 1 in 7, like the authors of the study tried to clarify in Time Magazine? Am I supposed to feel better about 1 in 7, as opposed to 1 in 5? Is that supposed to comfort me?
Virtually every single major publication in our country, from Sports Illustrated to the New York Times, has written extensively on the dangerous places that college campuses have become for young women. The violence of sex has become so undeniably prevalent in our culture that now governments feel they must act, they must do something — ANYTHING — to teach young people the one truth about sex that should be the most common, basic, intuitive part: it should be CONSENSUAL.
Think about that for a moment. We have so RUINED our image of sex that we now have to PASS LAWS requiring teachers to explain to our children that they must be sure someone wants to have sex before they go through with it.
I have worked with youth for 16 years as a leader and a teacher. I have mentored youth and cried with them when their worlds have fallen apart on them. I have given them my money, my time, my vehicle, and my home at various points. And I can tell you this: in my experience, the number 1 reason why children leave their homes and wreck their lives is a desire for sex that our culture has SCREAMED that they must have.
And their parents see it and warn them and plead with them and try to help them — all to no avail in so many terrible cases, because if there’s anything the culture has screamed at children more than “SEX IS FOR YOU”, it’s “YOUR PARENTS ARE IDIOTS”.
Buried behind each act of rebellion is the personal belief that he or she knows better than the parents who have raised them from birth. These kids are convinced that they know more about life and sex than their moms and dads. They are bolstered by their familiarity with sex, a familiarity not based in actual reality, but based on what they’ve seen in movies, music, television, and the internet…what they’ve talked about it in school with their friends after health class.
They are tragically mistaken. They have overestimated their own wisdom. They have embraced an understanding of sex that is deliberately deceitful.
Deliberately deceitful. Adults know that sex is not REALLY like the movies or the TV or the music make it out to be. The adults that make their money off of selling sex KNOW that their version of it isn’t honest — not in it’s portrayal, and not in it’s consequences.
But those profiteering off of “selling sex” aren’t there to help pick up the pieces when they come home diseased, abused, traumatized, pregnant, or addicted. The culture isn’t there to help them after an abortion. It’s not there to help them as a single parent with a baby. “Here’s some food stamps and some government assistance. Good luck! Make sure you buy my next song on iTunes or watch my next show on HBO!”
The culture isn’t there to help them with child-support payments for the next 20 years, made to a young lady you don’t even know outside of a one-night stand. The culture isn’t there to help the young lady who never gets a child-support payment because the father doesn’t love her and could care less about being a real man.
The culture isn’t really “there” at all.
“Culture” is an abstract thing, an illusion that tells us how we should think and feel. It’s built through actors, actresses, singers, rappers, advertisements, porn-creators, and the like who glorify sex outside of marriage as if it’s some penultimate experience to achieve. And when the illusion is stripped away by the cold realities of life on the other side of these sexual experiences, these kids are left to try to piece together a life that’s been gutted by a society more concerned about the dangers of “censorship” than the dangers of the culture we’ve fostered.
And the proposed answer to all of these problems is: education.
“We just have to teach them about contraception. We just have to teach them safety. We just have to do a better job handing out condoms. We have to do a better job making abortions available. We have to increase social support programs. We have to come up with medication for the diseases and vaccines and protocols for treatment.”
It’s like running around with a garden hose trying to put out a fire that’s burning your entire house down.
We have ruined sex. We have taken what was sacred and made it casual, pretending that is won’t hurt us.
We ought to mourn what we’ve done, but instead, we glory in our own shame. We boast about the sexual revolution as if it were an accomplishment. We mock those who believe that it belongs only to marriage, where consent has been given and relationships rest in promised exclusivity. We laugh at the happily married couples who have never known another partner as if they somehow “missed out” on all the fun.
What fun? Step out of your little world and look at what this trivialization of sex is doing to our people!
Let me pose to you the same question that those kids came up with in San Francisco…a question, by the way, that no one’s ever asked in a porn scene: “You good?”
Sexual violence dominating college campuses: “You good?”
19 year-olds with three abortions: “You good?”
Pornographic websites becoming the main source of a child’s first sexual experience: “You good?”
Sex addiction being a real and tragic thing: “You good?”
No…I’m not good. Excuse me while I go throw up.
**This article originally appeared on ReggieOsborne.com.
About the Author: Reggie Osborne II is the Preaching Pastor at The First Baptist Church of New Paris (fbcnp.com). He and his wife, Allison, have five children, and together they are striving to offer all of themselves to God as servants of Jesus. He occasionally writes at his blog Things that don’t fit in sermons, which can be found at reggieosborne.com. He enjoys hearing from readers, answering their questions, and learning about what God is doing in their lives.