If you’re looking for signals and signposts showing how mixed up many people are about the subject of sex, one good place to look is ABC’s “Are You Hot? The Search for America’s Sexiest People,” which is one of the seven zillion newest surreal “reality” shows to light up our TV screens.
About halfway through the series’ opening episode, we hear an amazing statement from Lorenzo Lamas. We’re told that he’s one of the show’s “celebrity judges,” even though none of us can quite remember exactly what it is that makes him a celebrity; but he takes his job seriously, as we can tell from the earnest question he poses to one of the show’s contestants: “Can I take another look at your rear end, please?”
At least he was polite; but was his question, which was mildly entertaining, I suppose, anywhere near tasteful? More importantly, is it possible to consider such things as taste when we’re talking about reality shows and other media creations that derive much of their energy from stretching or obliterating our conceptions of sexual morality?
Pushing the Boundaries
Another signpost comes to us from the people at Pony, who want to sell us more athletic shoes and clothing. The company’s marketing execs thought they could achieve that end and bolster their maverick corporate image by hiring porn star Jenna Jameson to star in their new ads. Stuart Elliott, The New York Times‘ advertising columnist, examined the new Pony campaign in his Feb. 24 column: “What’s next in advertising after cat-fighting women wrestling in wet concrete, football fans offering beery paeans to full-figured twins, and streakers shilling shoes with their nether regions pixilated? Would you believe stars of pornographic films doubling as models in print ads for a shoe company?”
Sex has played an important role in entertainment and advertising for centuries, but does it ever seem the boundary lines between what’s acceptable and what’s not are being pushed to the breaking point? Some people have been feeling that way for decades. In fact, efforts to restrain rampant sexuality have been at the heart of the Christian family values movement throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
Waging War
Asked when the battle began, most people point to the so-called sexual revolution of the ’60s, when chemistry (the birth control pill) and ideology (free love) campaigned to liberate sex from the grasp of Victorian prudes and make it available to any two people (or more) with functioning sex organs and desire. As a public service to loyal readers of this journal, we can let you in on a secret: The sexual revolution really started 50 years ago this year!
Two major developments in 1953 helped give birth to a new sense of sexual liberation. One was the publication of researcher Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, which shocked the world by revealing not only that women enjoyed sex but also were wilder than most people previously recognized. (Kinsey had reached similar conclusions about men in 1948, but everyone knew that men were animals.)
While Kinsey gave readers dry, boring statistics, a man named Hugh Hefner gave them naked breasts, luxuriantly presented in living color. The first issue of Playboy appeared in the fall of 1953, complete with a cheesecake photo of Marilyn Monroe. Hefner said Playboy was designed to take nudity and sexuality out of gritty adult bookstores and make it an accepted part of a more mainstream understanding of the “good life.” He also hoped the magazine would “thumb its nose at all the phony puritan values of the world in which [he] had grown up.”
By 1969, the editors at Penthouse decided Hefner was a prude, and they began bringing female genital nudity to newsstands nationwide. Of course, by the ’90s, the Internet was delivering all manner of digital images to anyone with a computer and a modem.
Looking back at the first five decades of this modern sexual revolution, we can venture two tentative conclusions: 1) The cat is out of the bag; 2) but campaigns designed to promote specific goals, such as “True Love Waits” and other virginity efforts, can have a powerful influence on significant numbers of people, even if they never will succeed in turning back the clock and restoring older, widely held notions about sexual morality.
Choosing a Different Path
So what does the average, harried, overworked and underpaid youth worker do during the small amount of time you spend with your kids, who are constantly bombarded by reality shows, porn stars and other messages all week long?
Deconstruct ads and commercials. This might be particularly helpful for young women who feel bombarded by images that proclaim them unworthy unless they look like Victoria’s Secret models and mate like rabbits.
Invite loving, married couples to your group to talk about their joys and struggles.
How about thinking of your youth group as a sexual counterculture? (You may not want to advertise it as such in the church bulletin, though.) During your time together as a group, everyone would agree to abide by a shared set of sexual values. For example, your group may decide: 1) People will be respected as people and not exploited as sexual objects, which might mean the “pretty” people aren’t treated better than everyone else and that males and females get to share equally in group benefits and responsibilities. 2) Sex will be treated as a sacred and mysterious gift of God, which might mean anything that cheapens sex—whether it’s ads using sex to sell us beer or shoes, or relationships that demean the gift of sex—will be condemned.
Finally, take opportunities to teach about human sexuality when your curricula or Bible studies present them. The Bible is full of wisdom about human sexuality (as well as plenty of troubling passages about foreskins and “unclean” women). The urgent goal is to make this wisdom accessible to young people who’ve grown up in a culture inwhich the very concept of biblically based, universally applicable moral teaching on sex is considered absurd.
I’ll never forget the sermon I heard in an evangelical church in southern California. The pastor said he was going to be preaching on a passage from the Song of Songs; but when he read the passage, he edited out the verses dealing with breasts (which entails a lot of editing). This well-meaning man of God missed a golden opportunity to show his congregation that sex was one of God’s good gifts and that sexual pleasure is something the biblical writers considered worthy of addressing.
