5. SOPHISTICATED BABIES

What’s going to happen to the children
When there aren’t any more grown-ups?

—NOEL COWARD1

 

When we talk about how “sophisticated” twenty-first-century children are—and we often do—we are describing youngsters with “a wisdom beyond their years,” a knowingness that renders kid stuff, from Peter Pan collars to curfews, inadequate and inappropriate, sometimes insultingly so. This strangely touchy state of juvenile sophistication—if sophistication it is—is not to be confused with erudition, proficiency, or even, in most cases, experience. It is chiefly a condition of exposure to behaviors and tastes once relegated to the adult world—and often to its darkest corners.

How this came to be Adolescent’s Fate is the story of our evolution from a mainly preliterate past, in which childhood didn’t exist, to an increasingly postliterate future, in which childhood will cease to exist. In betweeen, of course, childhood has flourished, entering its golden age between 1850 and 1950. As a phase distinct from adulthood, childhood developed much earlier. Neil Postman argues convincingly that it was Johannes Gutenberg, who, in the middle of the fifteenth century, “with the aid of an old winepress, gave birth to childhood.”2 Prior to the development of literate adulthood, he writes, there existed no childhood; that is, no significant gap between old lives and young lives that physical growth alone wouldn’t ultimately and effortlessly bridge. That’s mainly because in the medieval world, “everyone shared the same information environment”—not to mention the same room—“and therefore lived in the same social and intellectual world.”3 Indeed, what we refer to as a “child” (in the Middle Ages, the word could also denote kinship, not age) entered adulthood at age seven, which, as Postman points out, is the age at which children have command over speech. In that preliterate time, no further command of language, of knowledge, was required.

But as the printing press played out its hand it became obvious that a new kind of adulthood had been invented. From print onward, adulthood had to be earned. It became a symbolic, not biological, achievement. From print onward, the young would have to become adults, and they would have to do it by learning to read, by entering the world of typography. And in order to accomplish that they would require education. Therefore, European civilization reinvented schools. And by so doing, it made childhood a necessity.4

Today, as the Age of Gutenberg has given way, rapidly and successively, to the Age of Television and the Age of Internet, the dynamic has changed again. It has reverted, albeit on a highly technological level, to a communal information environment more medieval than modern. Once again, children are privy to what Postman calls the “rapid and egalitarian disclosure of the total content of the adult world,” this time disseminated through various electronic media. And once again, grown-up sanctums are increasingly turned over to the kids, as dining room tables give way to trampolines, and coffee tables lose precedence to dollhouses. More than two decades ago, Postman pointed out that “the six-year-old and the sixty-year-old are equally qualified to experience what television has to offer.”5 Today, more media only offer more experience.

Or, rather, more media to experience. Much of what “sophisticates” our kids is far removed from experience, or even reality—unless, that is, experience and reality exist within a cathode-ray-lit screen of glass, a studio-recorded song, a choreographed MTV video, or a special-effects-filled movie. Fashion megamogul Tommy Hilfiger’s assessment of the contemporary juvenile condition is typical: “They are so much more sophisticated than when I was growing up—they’re computer literate, they carry portable phones, they’re bombarded with cool media from MTV to Beverly Hills 90210.”6

“Bombarded” is right; but “cool”? “Sophisticated”? To be sure, MTV sets the pace of adolescence, with a massive young audience that includes 73 percent of all boys and 78 percent of all girls between the ages of twelve and nineteen. And what do they see? You think you know, but you probably don’t. Over spring break in 2004, a conservative watchdog group called the Parents Television Council (PTC) monitored the music video channel for 171 long hours. The report dutifully tallied up 1,548 sexual scenes. These included 3,056 depictions of sex or nudity, and 2,881 verbal sexual references. The PTC went on to crunch the numbers: “That means that children watching MTV are viewing an average of 9 sexual scenes an hour with approximately 18 sexual depictions and 17 instances of sexual dialogue and innuendo.” Behind the sterility of the statistics lies much muck: a boy and a girl searching sheets for semen stains; boys discussing the benefits of detachable underwear; boys and girls making “human sundaes,” with boys eating cherries and whipped cream from girls’ bodies … and that still leaves 3,053 more “depictions” to go.7

In those same 171 MTV hours, not too surprisingly, PTC analysts also recorded 1,518 uses of unedited foul language and an additional 3,127 bleeped profanities. Running the numbers, “that means young children watching MTV are subjected to roughly 8.9 unbleeped profanities per hour, and an additional 18.3 profanities per hour.” This sort of decimal-point precision might provoke a hoot of Saturday Night Live–style derision, but the reality is way beyond satire. Song lyric example: “[Bleeped ‘Fuck’] you, you [bleeped ‘ho’]. Another: “And love to get her [bleeped ‘pussy’] licked by another [bleeped ‘bitch].”

Whether such filth passes for “cool” aside, “sophisticated” is hardly the word for Hilfiger’s child—if, by “sophisticated,” we mean the twentieth-century connotation, as delineated by Roget’s, of being “chic, disillusioned, tasteful, ungullible, worldly-wise.” Chic? Tasteful? Please: Think assorted piercings and assorted American Pies. Disillusioned? These systematically demystified juveniles harbor few illusions to be dissed. Ungullible? Worldly wise? Not girls who believe performing oral sex ushers in a happy adolescence; and not boys who believe mommies should give them wake-up calls—in college. Hilfiger’s “so much more sophisticated” child is, in fact, society’s so much more exposed child—exposed to a numbing inundation of imagery and information once either unimagined entirely, or strictly withheld from public view.

Childhood as we have known it isn’t compatible with such exposure. Postman explains why.

One might say that one of the main differences between an adult and a child is that the adult knows certain facts about certain facets of life—its mysteries, its contradictions, its violence, its tragedies—that are not considered suitable for children to know; that are, indeed, shameful to reveal to them indiscriminately. In the modern world, as children move toward adulthood, we reveal these secrets to them, in what we believe to be a psychologically assimilable way. But such an idea is only possible in a culture in which there is a sharp distinction between the adult world and the child’s world, and where there are institutions that express that difference.8

That sharp distinction, dulled by the time Postman was writing, is all but imperceptible now as our various and sundry institutions express no difference. They offer pedicures to preschoolers; they sell “pimp” and “ho” costumes for trick-or-treaters. They dispense condoms to fifth-graders (that’s ten-year-olds)9; they eroticize preteen girls to advertise jeans. Postman points to a turning point in the law when, in 1981, the New York State Court of Appeals erased the distinction between adults and children in judging whether a film was pornographic.10 In other words, the court saw no reason to distinguish between obscenity cases involving adults and those involving children. If a filmed sex act was deemed obscene, it was obscene. If a filmed sex act was not deemed obscene, it was not obscene. Big deal, the court in effect said, if it involved prepubescent “actors.” The U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately strike down this appeals court ruling. But the 1981 ruling is significant nonetheless, indicating that in an important sector of American legal thinking on the regulation of pornography, the adult world and the child world were becoming one.

Once upon a medieval time, the lack of privacy in society—its absence both as an imagined concept and even as an achievable physical condition—made separate spheres for children and adults impossible. Today, a new lack of privateness—and a new lack of concern—has blurred the lines between the two domains. “The old adage that ‘children should be seen and not heard’ has been replaced with the presence of children in almost every previously adult-only situation,” writes psychologist Mary S. Foote. She lists the workplace, exclusive restaurants, even decision-making processes as places the young are now routinely found. “An example is the five-year-old I know whose parents let him decide which preschool to attend,” Foote writes, explaining: “Children who are allowed too much decision-making power too soon often suffer from high anxiety. This is because young children profit from the safety and security of knowing their parents are in full charge of their welfare.”11

But maybe the notion of what it means to be in charge of a child’s welfare has changed. Children attend R-rated movies—with their parents in charge (or with a parentally approved “R-card” that allows children in sans adult).12 Children sit on sex education advisory committees—also with their parents in charge. One such committee in Montgomery County, Maryland, included among its advisers an eleven-year-old girl, someone still eligible to order from a kiddie menu (the controversial course it devised was ultimately ditched in 2005 under parental and legal pressure).13 Society takes it on itself to rule out garlic and cayenne as being too spicy for her years (think: kids’ menus), but not birth control methodology and polymorphous sexual experimentation.

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, child advocates have found themselves a sad, new cause: child actors in so-called risky roles that dramatize pedophilia, kidnapping, rape, voyeurism, and all manner of violence and menace. Almost invariably, their stage mothers and fathers bar their budding Barrymores from a “risky” movie’s final cut—not buying, apparently, assurances from the likes of Nicole Kidman that her ten-year-old costar in Birth didn’t understand his lines referring to sexual intercourse, or why he was crawling naked into the bathtub with her.14 Such parental discretion after the filmed fact, however, hasn’t checked the spread of a new form of depression afflicting certain child thespians in Beverly Hills.15 Nor does it check the flow of other people’s children into “risky” movie audiences. And that includes movies rated PG-13, which, despite what parents tell themselves to believe, routinely depict head-busting, throating-slitting violence and even torture, and include fluent, frequent references to sex and oral sex. They even feature lap dancing, pole dancing, and so much profanity (from “shit” to “fuck,” from “bitch” to “slut,” from “shit hole” to “asshole”) that the Washington Post’s Liza Mundy, who made an in-depth study of the genre in 2003, wrote “it seems fair to say that kids will hear more bad language, and more forms of bad language, in PG-13 movies than they will in Rs.” In Mundy’s account, Nell Minow, whose father Newton Minow was an FCC commissioner, “says that her father always marveled at how parents will let Hollywood say things to their children that they would have an ordinary person on the street arrested for saying.”16

But how do we get off the street? Where do we go for what is stultifyingly, if reassuringly, known as “decent family fare”? In a 2004 New York Times Magazine article about casual sex among young teens, writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis agreed to interview a fifteen-year-old boy at Hooters, the chain restaurant famous for waitresses who take orders from behind cascades of cleavage. Worried that he might be “aiding and abetting the delinquency of a minor,” the writer phoned the restaurant to inquire whether there’s an age requirement to dine at Hooters. “The woman who picks up seems annoyed I would even ask,” he writes. “‘No, we’re a family restaurant,’ she says.” But of course. And the Hooters bunny and her Hooters bosom are just another part of the family: “Welcome to the facets of adult life—and would you like fries with that?”17

Except for the part about violence—or, rather, meticulously staged depictions of violence—Postman’s practically Tolstoyan list of adult experience (mysteries, contradictions, violence, and tragedies) is not at all what children are encountering in formerly adult venues. Instead, they enter a world of sensation in which a chaotic creed of abandon supercedes all civilizing sermons of restraint. It is a creed born of our mother motto of modern behavior—sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—and it continues to whet our appetites for the hedonism they promise.

And not just juvenile appetites. The world of sensation engulfs grown-up and child alike. And just as we have erased the boundaries that once defined the domain of traditional childhood, we have also erased the boundaries that once regulated the patterns of average adulthood. Such boundaries—long established according to religious commandments, the law, and related conventions of self-restraint—largely vanished from the courts and the culture by the end of the 1960s.

After a century in and out of the courts of law and public opinion, the civil libertarians of the Free Speech Movement, which author Rochelle Gurstein in her landmark study, The Repeal of Reticence, calls “the party of exposure,” saw pretty much all forms of censorship outlawed. Finally, the law protected Ulysses; huzzahs in the academy. Of course, if the law protected Ulysses, the law also protected—to take rather less literary but no less victorious plaintiffs—Trim, MANual, and Grecian Guild Pictorial. Such porno magazines might not have received three cheers in the faculty lounge, but, along with such salacious, if unread novels as Fanny Hill, they did receive precisely the same protections as Ulysses from the Supreme Court.

These victories represented something new: not a new taste for pornography, which, as vaults at the Vatican reveal, is ancient; but rather an unprecedented respectability for pornography born of “going legit,” of operating a newly lawful booth in Ye Olde Public Square. Remember Screw pornographer Al Goldstein’s kvelling delight: “I never dreamed we’d be in the Javits Center. It is such a class place.” After the courts had done their work, “class places” were increasingly X-rated accessible. As Walter Berns wrote in 1971, “the Supreme Court made pornography a growth industry by giving it a license to operate in the accessible and legitimate market, thereby bringing buyer and seller together.”18 The sluice gates had opened, and the once-filtered mainstream was instantly awash in fetid waters. Rochelle Gurstein describes the immediate and curious impact.

The brazen appearance of pornography in places where it had not been seen before—in over-the-counter books and magazines, on movie screens, on the stage, and on the streets—was so outrageous and its crass commerical spirit so different from that of early targets of censorship that even some of the most distinguished free-speech advocates began to ponder the wisdom of their lifelong commitment. In 1964, Donald Friede, publisher of suppressed novels such as Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy voiced second thoughts: “When I see some of the books published today, I cannot … but wonder if our fight against censorship in the twenties was really wise.… Fanny Hill in paper! And Naked Lunch in any form! But I suppose there are some people still willing to play the piano in the literary brothel. Certainly the pay is good.”19

Morris Ernst, one of the twentieth century’s foremost foes of censorship who had mounted a winning defense of Ulysses in 1933, also fell prey to a nasty bout of second thoughts, which he passed onto readers of The New York Times in early 1970. Having spent a lifetime striking, pushing, eroding the legal limits on utter freedom, Ernst suddenly looked around and declared, on the record, that he would “not choose to live in a society without limits to freedom.” He was shocked, he told the paper, by the spread of “four-letter words out of context,” and by “the performance of sodomy on the stage and masturbation in the public area.” He continued: “I deeply resent the idea that the lowest common denominator, the most tawdry magazine, pandering for profit … should be able to compete in the marketplace with no restraints.”20 His admission was equal parts baffling and infuriating. Having done his yeoman bit to create that marketplace with no restraints, Ernst had decided he wanted no part of it—and, worse, no responsibility for it. Walter Berns summed up Ernst’s absurd argument this way: “‘Ulysses,’ yes, said Morris Ernst, but ‘sodomy on the stage or masturbation in the public area,’ no!”21

Having it both ways hadn’t happened. How could it have? The arguments that destroyed the legal and moral bases for censorship of obscenity and pornography apply to trash as well as to art. By the time the courts, in effect, declared obscenity was dead, they had killed something vital to a healthy society: the faculty of judgment that attempts to distinguish between what is obscene and what is not obscene—the avowedly “grown-up” sensibility of an outmoded authority figure who had long relied on a proven hierarchy of taste and knowledge until it was quite suddenly leveled. From this leveling came another casualty: society’s capacity, society’s willingness, to make even basic distinctions between trash and art.

The lack of vision in Ernst and others on such crucial points blinded them to the inevitable toxic fallout of their culture wars. And in the end, what did they win? Ernst’s beloved but impenetrable Ulysses remains the purview of a tiny elite; four-letter words are the language of the masses and elites alike; and on network television, masturbation is a laugh track punch line. To wit: Reporting from the primetime trenches, Brent Bozell describes a scene in a 2004 episode of ABC’s lowercase (and lower-life) teen series, life as we know it. Teenaged Jonathan is in the bathroom when his mother knocks on the door. His father calls out, “God, Mary, give the kid a break. He’s probably masturbating.”22

Let freedom ring. “Having begun by exempting the work of art from the censorship laws,” Walter Berns explained, “we have effectively arrived at the civil libertarian’s destination: the case where the Supreme Court throws up its hands and concludes that there is no such thing as obscenity.”23 This conclusion has had massive, largely unintended consequences. Once the law balked at recognizing obscenity, the populace began to doubt the very basis for shame. With no legal, institutional support for consensus, little wonder the bottom fell out from under morality.

The resulting quagmire of nonjudgmentalism has marked a major turning point—a major reversal, to be more precise—in “the civilizing process.” This phrase is the title of a groundbreaking 1939 book by Norbert Elias that identifies a connection between the development of shame—of sexual shame and embarassment, in particular—and the evolution of civilized society. Very compellingly, Elias sketches shame’s primary role since the Middle Ages in very slowly fostering the kind of self-control that became a hallmark of Western civilization, and may have reached its apotheosis in the popular imagination in the character of the British military man as played by such American movie stars as Gary Cooper in Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) or Beau Geste (1939). From the seventeenth century onward, “only very gradually…,” Elias writes, “does a stronger association of sexuality with shame and embarassment, and a corresponding restraint of behavior, spread more or less evenly over the whole of society.”24

By the twenty-first century, shame and embarassment have zero association with sexuality—or so we are endlessly, numbingly instructed—and, correspondingly, an infantile lack of behavioral restraint may be observed in everything from freak dancing, to “super-size” eating, to McMansion-building. Without the concept of obscenity, without reason for shame, the “self” in self-control sees no greater, larger, socially significant point in holding back.

This helps explain a lot of things, from the exponential rise in crime over the past half century, to the ever-rising flood of obscenity, to the breakdown of the family. But shamelessness also sheds light on why it is that American matrons are more likely to host sex-toy parties than Tupperware parties; why the Major Leagues showcase Viagra ads at home plate; why a presidential fund-raiser for GOP candidates includes a well-endowing—that is, contributing—porn star and pornographer; and why at grocery store checkouts shoppers can check out “hot sex tips” along with a loaf of bread. We have all learned—or, at least we have all been taught—that the mental blush is superceded by the genital tingle.

The paradox is that less restraint doesn’t necessarily deliver greater freedom. That is, our sexual freedom—licentiousness—is greater, but other freedoms may actually be at risk. That’s because while personal restraint once curtailed public displays of sexuality, it also made democratic society workable in the first place. Already, we recognize and accommodate a more sexually unruly populace every time we don’t let our kids play in the woods behind the park, or walk home from school alone. And already, we recognize and accommodate a more sexually unruly populace every time we sanction and enable the sexual promiscuity of these same kids with a line about how “they’re going to do it anyway.” Meanwhile, in a Dada-esque, if governmentally official, expression of this same mind-set, state Medicaid programs were buying Viagra for convicted rapists and other high-risk sex offenders in New York, Florida, Texas, and eleven other states until the federal government intervened in 2005. But there is more to it than that.

In a shameless culture—one that speaks trippingly of condoms, semen, and more—self-restraint is continually undermined, and in its absence there is political peril. As Walter Berns wrote,

To speak in a manner that is more obviously political, there is a connection between self-restraint and shame, and therefore a connection between shame and self-government or democracy. There is, therefore, a political danger in promoting shamelessness and the fullest self-expression or indulgence. To live together requires rules and a governing of the passions, and those who are without shame will be unruly and unrulable; having lost the ability to restrain themselves by observing the rules they collectively give themselves, they will have to be ruled by others.25

Berns made his case against pornography in 1971, a time when it was still new to the public square. A quarter century later, Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon could comment on its now-familiar presence. In a short essay for First Things magazine, Glendon was addressing, with Tocquevillian echoes, “the decline of the democratic elements in our republican experiment”—namely, judicial usurpation of powers belonging to the political process; and the ceding of powers belonging to individuals to the government. In the process, she reintroduced the subject of pornography and democracy in a newly chilling light. The sexual shamelessness and unconstrained passions that Berns said would make democracy unworkable had become what Glendon called “the democratization of vice,” and she saw it as a way of pacifying the charges of the nanny state.

When regime-threatening questions might come to mind, the oligarchs have authorized a modern form of bread and circuses, an array of new sexual freedoms to compensate for the loss of the most basic civil right of all—the right of self-government. With the democratization of vice, the man in the street can enjoy exotic pastimes once reserved to Roman emperors.26

This isn’t to suggest that individuals don’t still recognize obscenity, or that individuals don’t still feel shame. But culturally speaking, obscenity is all but legally obsolete, and shame is a kind of secular sin—a symptom of “hang-ups,” of repression, of inhibition, of liberty lost. This point of view, by now consensus, also sees little division between public life and private life. After all, any definition of obscenity depends on an understanding that some things belong in public and some things belong in private. “Activities that were once confined to the private scene—the ‘ob-scene,’ to make an etymological assumption—are now presented for our delectation and emulation on center stage,” Berns wrote, three decades before the voyeuristic mania for so-called reality shows. “Nothing that is appropriate to one place is inappropriate to any other place. No act, we are to infer, no human possibility, no possible physical combination or connection, is shameful.”27

And so, the question that defines our age becomes: When anything goes, why shouldn’t anything go? There is a compelling reason why not. “Repeated exposure to indecency,” Rochelle Gurstein writes, “ultimately inures people and threatens to make all of society shameless, in the precise sense that it considers nothing sacred.”28

Nothing sacred. This condition sounds unnervingly like the one in which the average twenty-first-century youngster is raised. Nothing is sacred when preteen pop concerts feature gyrating, crotch-thrusting boy bands who, as The New York Times reported, “tantalized the small girls who shimmied alongside their amused mothers, some of whom could see the attraction in the beefcake.”29

Nothing is sacred when a media executive packs off his eight-year-old to a midnight premiere of R-rated Matrix Reloaded. Nothing is sacred, when, in the comfort of their parents’ homes, teens turn into the raunchiest voyeurs this side of a raincoat by watching MTV. Nothing is sacred when, also in the comfort of their parents’ homes, teens can start a syphilis epidemic, as in an upscale Georgia suburb where public health officials treated no fewer than two hundred teenagers as young as thirteen who had been leading orgiastic lives after school (thanks to the Playboy cable TV channel, paid for by Mom and Dad) before their parents came home. The public health investigation revealed that a number of the children had upward of fifty partners.30

And what about cell phones and the Internet? These hyperconnecting, yet depersonalizing modes of communication give “users”—the term itself is devoid of humanity—an effectively brazen anonymity, again, courtesy parental bill-payers. Teenagers “hang out online, asking questions they might not dare to in real life,” says The New York Times Magazine in its report on the “underage sexual revolution,” a revolution noted as much for its promiscuity as for its detachment. As one sixteen-year-old from New England put it, “Being in a relationship just complicates everything. When you’re a friend with benefits”—that smarmy term for sexual favors—“you go over, hook up, then play video games or something. It rocks.”

And if it doesn’t, as another teenaged boy put it to reporter Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?” In a world without obscenity, in a world without shame, in a world without self-restraint, that’s a good question. But is it really “sophisticated”?31

In Montgomery County, Maryland, a teenage girl came to some measure of local prominence in 2005 as the anonymous “star” of a sex education video. It was for tenth-graders and it was produced by the county school board. The video, along with a new sex-ed curriculum, was ultimately scrapped in the controversy that ensued after it came to parental attention via the Internet. I watched the sex-ed girl online, as well, with her casual attire, her long hair and long fingernails, her too-many-ringed fingers, as she chirpily instructed viewers, in modified Val-gal speak, on the proper way to don a condom. “Oral, anal, and vaginal sex,” she said, grasping her demo cucumber, looking straight into the camera—quite shamelessly—all require a condom, she explained. But what else do they require? Deviant behavior? Promiscuity? A superstash of sulfa drugs in case of “breakage”? An appalling lack of self-respect? Equal parts self-deception? Sadomasochistic tendencies? Stupidity? A pattern of duplicity? A scalding hot bath?

But what else besides condoms could they require? replies the education establishment that, of course, has charge of most children. A modicum of humanity would be welcome, although that doesn’t come with the systematic demystification of human intimacy to which we purposefully subject the young of the species. “When sex is a public spectacle, a human relationship has been debased into a mere animal connection,” Irving Kristol wrote in 1971.32 And when sex education is a public spectacle, the human relationship has been debased into a mere mechanical connection. Stripped of the privacy it needs to flourish, human intimacy loses not just the intimacy but also the humanness, becoming a subhuman, degrading exercise.

But that’s not all. As Gurstein notes, our very understanding of and sensitivity to matters of taste and judgment are lost as well. Instead of regarding moral and aesthetic questions as matters suited for public deliberation, we tend to exempt them as matters of “lifestyle choice,” or, more often, confine them to “legal disputes, in which courts balance and weigh the relative rights of the individual against those of society.” This recourse to the law, Gurstein maintains, “has made it impossible to address many vital issues that fall outside its narrow precincts.” And this has led us to a distressing point in the course of our civilization: a point at which, as Gurstein puts it, “urgent differences over political, moral, and aesthetic matters are all but impossible to articulate.”

By now, it seems, not even our thoughts stray beyond such strictures. Consider the great pseudo-obscenity cases of our day—the S&M snapshots by Robert Mapplethorpe, Piss Christ, “Dung Virgin,” and the like. Rather than triggering debates over what belongs in the public square, and the relationship between art and the polity, they all devolved into unseemly squabbles over what is appropriate to spend public money on. Gurstein would likely label this “the balance-sheet approach,” which omits all mention of the coarsening, contaminating impact of obscenity on the polity. Writing about this soulless debate over Robert Mapplethorpe’s arty porno pics, Robert Bork highlighted the lack of moral courage: “To complain about the source of the dollars is to cheapen a moral position. The photographs would be just as offensive if their display was financed by a scatterbrained billionaire. We seem too timid to state that Mapplethorpe’s and Serrano’s pictures should not be shown in public, whoever pays for them. We are going to have to overcome that timidity if our culture is not to decline still further.”33

I agree with Judge Bork, and would apply his argument to sundry works of piss and dung, I mean art, that have triggered similarly narrow debate. But in light of Cartoon Rage 2006, the cultural nuke set off by an Islamic chain reaction to twelve cartoons of Muhammad appearing in a Danish newspaper, I must digress for a moment to distinguish between arguing against the public display of various Excrement Icons of Christianity (or anything else, sacred or profane) as a matter of public abasement, and upholding the right to caricature or critique religion, Islam and Muhammad included, as a matter of press freedom.

While lumped together for purposes of public discourse, the two examples—Excrement Icons and Cartoon Muhammads—turn on different issues and here’s why: Christianity and Islam are not interchangeable belief systems inspired by a generic divinity. One relevant distinction is the way they operate in relation to their societies. By modern times, Christianity had largely vacated the political sphere, abiding, de facto or de jure, by a deepening separation of church and state; Islam has never known any separation whatsoever. As a result, the theological teachings of Islam as revealed by Muhammad, which form the basis of the Islamic law (sharia) that drives Islamic societies, necessarily belong to the political sphere in a way that Christianity does not.

This is not to say that Christianity should be, or has been, off the table. Indeed, all the ink (not blood) spilled over assorted “artistic” assaults on Christ and his holy family have only enhanced their value, not to mention the reputations of their artists (using the word loosely). But the all-encompassing nature of Islam underscores a special need for open, critical examination of the Koran and Muhammad as political, and politically violent, forces that roil our times. Such examination should include analysis, commentary, and editorial cartoons. But it doesn’t. (I explain why in chapter 9.)

Meanwhile, the kids are watching, learning, absorbing, like the little sponges they are, modern life’s lesson: Nothing is sacred—except maybe taxpayer money and Muhammad. The law may still proscribe certain behaviors, but the morality has no bite.

Taking the example of the Montgomery County Public Schools sex education course a little further, it’s true that under parental pressure the offending course was scrapped, cucumber and all, but mainly because it was so flagrantly in violation of the First Amendment. The curriculum went so far as to promote certain religions to the exclusion of other religions based on their teachings regarding homosexuality. In touting “the moral rightness of the homosexual lifestyle,” the judge wrote, the curriculum suggested that “the Baptist Church’s position on homosexuality is theologically flawed,” as well as reminiscent of the racial prejudice of the segregation era. (At the same time, the curriculum applauded Reform Jews, Unitarians, and Quakers for their stands on the issue.) But since when did public schools weigh in, favorably or unfavorably, on religious doctrine? The answer is never. And that’s what the court ruled.

The question is, if the school board had been smart enough to reel in those First Amendment red flags on which this particular sex-ed course was hung out to dry—religious favoritism—would Cucumber Girl be teaching Montgomery County teens how to make better choices regarding anal, oral, and vaginal sex? In this hypersexualized culture of ours, the answer is very probably yes.

But it’s an answer that demands rethinking. Kudos to the parents in Montgomery County who banded together to stop this sex-ed train on its way out of the station. But after it has retooled, the same basic train will chug away again. Do we like where it’s going, and, if not, how do we get off? Cases like this one should remind us there remains a spectrum of vital issues having to do with morality, modesty, privacy, taste, and judgment that schools are incapable of teaching and the law is incapable of recognizing. But neither, it seems, is anyone else. Such issues are never even articulated, let alone discussed. It’s as if we have exchanged one “conspiracy of silence” about sexuality, as Gurstein writes, for another one about everything else—morality, modesty, privacy, taste, and judgment. One big difference: Past “conspirators” consciously or unconciously understood the power and importance of their mysteries; today’s silence reflects the limitation of the modern mind that thinks only in terms of those pathetic dichotomies. Hip or square. Hot or frigid. Promiscuous or prudish. Safe or sorry.

When the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1930 that sex education material could no longer be considered illicit, Judge Augustus Hand added an explanatory note: “It also may be reasonably thought that accurate information, rather than mystery and curiosity, is better in the long view and is less likely to occasion lascivious thoughts than ignorance and anxiety.” That might have sounded logical in 1930, but in the intervening decades “accurate information” has done more (and less) than merely remedy “ignorance and anxiety.” For one thing, “ignorance and anxiety” are only a small part of the human condition. “Equally important,” Gurstein writes, “were considerations of the inherent fragility of intimate life, the tone of public conversation, standards of taste and morality, and reverence owed to mysteries. These defining characteristics of the reticent sensibility had been lost.”34 Also lost, it is crucial to recognize, is our ability to recognize, understand, discuss, and impart them.

Which is why, in the end, we have all these “sophisticated” children running around, tube-topped, buttocks-limned, birth-controlled, glossed, pierced, thonged—exposed. By now, it should be apparent that “sophisticated” is just a high-sounding euphemism for “sexualized.” When this becomes clear, Tommy Hilfiger’s line makes perfect sense: They are so much more sexualized than when I was growing up—they’re computer literate (Internet porn), they carry portable phones (hookup available), they’re bombarded with cool media like MTV (one spring break sexual depiction every 6.6 minutes). They are pornography’s children.

In 1971, Irving Kristol made a courageously unapologetic and eminently sensible (if also universally dismissed) case for a kind of “liberal censorship” that would regulate, rather than repress, obscenity, much the way alcohol, drugs, and tobacco are regulated—along with their advertising, for example. The examples of “liberal censorship” he cited—the old British practice of staging plays judged to be obscene in “serious” theater clubs, and the old American practice of limiting access to “adult” material in public libaries—were practices made workable by a “grown-up” understanding of the need to cordon off obscenity from the public square. Of course, grown-ups are only human, and any system of controlled access is prone to the kind of error artists and art lovers deplore: namely, when a bona fide work of art suffers at the heavy hands of a censor. Kristol called this the price one has to pay for censorship—even liberal censorship. He went on point out—and quite persuasively, I would add—that liberal or not, the long-term impact of censorship on the arts had, in fact, been negligible.

If you look at the history of American or English literature, there is precious little damage you can point to as a consequence of the censorship that prevailed throughout most of that history. Very few works of literature—of real literary merit, I mean—ever were suppressed; and those that were, were not suppressed for long. Nor have I noticed, now that censorship of the written word has to all intents and purposes ceased in this country, that hitherto suppressed or repressed masterpieces are flooding the market. Yes, we can now read Fanny Hill and the Marquis de Sade. Or, to be more exact, we can now openly purchase them, since many people were able to read them even though they were publicly banned, which is as it should be under a liberal censorship. So how much have literature and the arts gained from the fact that we can all now buy them over the counter, that, indeed, we are all now encouraged to buy them over the counter? They have not gained much that I can see.35

The rest of society, meanwhile, has verily lost its soul. Kristol recognized in pornography and obscenity the power to annul civilization as we have known it—to obliterate the culture of restraint, which, Norbert Elias argued, had developed in tandem with sexual shame and increasingly distinct spheres of childhood and adulthood. It was on that basis that he made his “liberal censorship” case.

The basic psychological fact about pornography and obscenity is that it appeals to and provokes a kind of sexual regression. The sexual pleasure one gets from pornography and obscenity is autoerotic and infantile; put bluntly, it is a masturbatory exercise of the imagination, when it is not masturbation pure and simple. Now, people who masturbate do not get bored with masturbation, just as sadists don’t get bored with sadism, and voyeurs don’t get bored with voyeurism.

In other words, infantile sexuality is not only a permanent temptation for the adolescent, or even the adult—it can quite easily become a permanent, self-reinforcing neurosis. It is because of an awareness of this possibility of regression toward the infantile condition, a regression which is always open to us, that all the codes of sexual conduct ever devised by the human race take such a dim view of autoerotic activities and try to discourage autoerotic fantasies. Masturbation is indeed a perfectly natural autoerotic activity, as so many sexologists blandly assure us today. And it is precisely because it is so perfectly natural that it can be so dangerous to the mature or maturing person, if it is not controlled or sublimated in some way.…

It is true that, in our time, some quite brilliant minds have come to the conclusion that a reversion to infantile sexuality is the ultimate mission and secret destiny of the human race. I am thinking in particular of Norman O. Brown, for whose writings I have the deepest respect. One of the reasons I respect them so deeply is that Mr. Brown is a serious thinker who is unafraid to face up to the radical consequences of his radical theories. Thus, Mr. Brown knows and says that for his kind of salvation to be achieved, humanity must annul the civilization it has created—not merely the civilization we have today, but all civilization—so as to be able to make the long descent backward into animal innocence.

And that is the point. What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less.36

Thirty-five years later, it is fair to say that Kristol’s fear—“this possibility of regression toward the infantile condition”—is our reality. It is hard to ignore—or repress, even—the signs of regression, sexual and otherwise, that mark our civilization and our humanity. Frankly, though, a state of “animal innocence” doesn’t sound so bad next to the bestial decadence that a shameless culture has spawned, for children as well as adults. A popular singer raps: “He can get the bitch fucked, but how many can get the dick sucked”;37 a venerable publishing house, Simon & Schuster, brings out Rainbow Party, a book for young adults (read: twelve and up) whose premise rests on a teen party where girls prepare to leave a spectrum of lipstick rings on boys’ penises; and schoolgirls, including Catholic schoolgirls, as young as eleven play a babyish but sex-charged game with schoolboys using cheap rubber bracelets—black for sexual intercourse, blue for oral sex, red for a lap dance, white for a homosexual kiss, green for sex outside, light green for using sex toys.38 The very sad fact is, purity and innocence, sublimation and restraint, sensitivity and taste can neither be experienced nor learned among such “sophisticating” influences. Neither can childhood.

As early as 1969, The New York Times, one of those stalwart liberal champions of anticensorship, found itself quaking over the brave new world of “utter freedom” it had journalistically labored to bring into existence. In an extraordinary editorial, it turned in a practically reactionary fury on those who would sully the “great principle of civil liberties” by engaging in explicit portrayals of sexual intercourse on stage—“peep-show activity,” as the Times called “the sodomy and other sexual abberations” in the theater that year.

The fact that the legally enforceable standards of public decency have been interpreted away by the courts almost to the point of no return does not absolve artists, producers or publishers from all responsibility or restraint in pandering to the lowest possible public taste in quest of the largest possible monetary reward.… Far from providing a measure of cultural emancipation, such descents into degeneracy represent caricatures of art, deserving no exemption from the laws of common decency merely because they masquerade as drama or literature.39

Of course, those erstwhile “legally enforceable standards of public decency” that were “interpreted away by the courts”—to the hearty approval of The New York Times and its acolytes—turn out to have been the very last line of defense for the all-too-fragile “laws of common decency.” Without one (the law), the other (decency) cannot prevail. Neither can the adult. Responsibility and restraint are not only bedrock virtues of liberal civilization, they are also hallmarks of the grown-up. Without them, civilization becomes anarchic, and the grown-up slips and regresses.

Going completely bitter, The Times forecast a dismal resolution: “The insensate pursuit of the urge to shock, carried from one excess to a more abysmal one, is bound to achieve its own antidote in total boredom. When there is no lower depth to descend to, ennui will erase the problem.”40

Ennui may well do for the old, run-of-the-mill porn queen, or the odd syphilitic poet, but it’s neither a condition of the state of nature nor a benchmark of civilization for the rest of us. Nor, I would add, is it anything like a state of grace for the young.