David Brooks delivers another social commentary of note in the NYTimes this week. Despite all the sex we see everywhere, from the Janet Jackson boob tube to 'Fitty's rapping, American youth are heading the opposite direction toward greater restrictiveness in their sexual attitudes. I won't try to explain the gist of the piece beyond that, go read it yourself, link below. Here are a few solid grafs, though:


"The fact is, sex is more explicit everywhere - on "Desperate Housewives," on booty-quaking music videos, on the Internet - except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious ...

"Reports of an epidemic of teenage oral sex are also greatly exaggerated. There's very little evidence to suggest it is really happening. Meanwhile, teenagers' own attitudes about sex are turning more conservative. There's been a distinct rise in the number of teenagers who think casual sex is wrong. There's been an increase in the share of kids who think teenagers should wait until adulthood before getting skin to skin."


I have often confessed to lacking a solid ideological base on which to make judgments--even if I think my mind is made up, hard evidence and convincing anecdotes can often sway me. That, I think, is one reason why I feel the conservative crusade against explicit entertainment and culture is patronizing and invasive. There is an assumption that America's youth are going down the collective shitter, but across the board, violence and sex have been shown in recent years to be on a constant downward slope.

I tend to look at baggy pantsed, potty-mouthed youngsters (dear god, 21 makes you old) and cringe, but as Brooks writes, "When you actually look at the intimate life of America's youth, you find this heterodoxical pattern: people can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. ... In other words, American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair." I think American youth are smarter than conservatives give them credit for, but then again, what could you expect? To a rebellious youth, what exactly about conservative ideals holds any appeal whatsoever? This is why the old joke is about Democratic youth becoming Republicans in their old age, not vice versa.

Brooks makes a solid and necessary point about taking make-believe with a grain of salt when the story told by reality contradicts the theory of corruption and ruin.