David Brooks has a good column about sex – playfully published on the least sexy day – and its simultaneous expansion in public and significant shrinkage (pun and allusion intended) in private:
You could get the impression that America’s young people are leading lives of Caligulan hedonism. You could give credence to all those parental scare stories about oral sex parties at bar mitzvahs and junior high school dances. You could worry about hookups, friends with benefits, and the rampant spread of casual, transactional sexuality.
But it turns out you’d be wrong.
He notes teen pregnancy and abortion rates are way down; tweens and freshmen are more abstinent; and 50 percent of high school boys profess virginity. We just talk the sex talk to avoid the dreaded “prude” label:
There are Ivy League sex columnists who don’t want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed Maxim readers terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he’s really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.
Perhaps the most encouraging sign is that young people seem less vested in the culture war than anyone thought:
But today’s young people appear not to have taken a side in this war; they’ve just left it behind. For them, the personal is not political. Sex isn’t a battleground in a clash of moralities.
They seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right.
On a similar theme, young blogger/independent filmmaker Jeremiah Lewis has an amusing column on the sudden disappearance of clothing in early April, and our best efforts to ignore it:
You’re either a woman yourself and somehow unaware that these colorful and nearly nonexistent fabrics fashion designers call (and charge small countries’ GDP’s for) clothes, are actually being used in quantum physics experiments to see just how small particles can be reduced to; or, you are a woman-respecting, sexually-healthy, avert-mine-eyes-oh-Lord kind of guy who appears to be reading a magazine about Luxembourg trade politics when a gaggle (or is it a google?) of college women traipse by in the most skin-baring outfits they can dig out of their fabric-shrinking closets. …
At what point in my looking have I stepped over the line from Song of Solomon Romanticism into raging, flesh-obsessed, sex machine? Where does acknowledgement of the beauty of the female form end and the desire to “get it on” begin? Honestly, I have no friggin’ clue.
He’s surely correct that “God gave man college campuses as universal epicenters for the proliferation of female hotness.” That’s why we tolerate the fringe political discourse, right?
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.