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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.politics
Date:         Tue, 8 Sep 1992 17:04:00 EDT
From:         GRACZ1@ITHACA.BITNET
Subject:      Re: democratic platform/homosexuality

>Your observation is correct.  Sexual morality is, indeed, going out
>the window, in large part because *we* as a nation threw it there.
>We said, okay, we know that *no one* could possibly be sexually
>moral, since some people are already immoral, so let's just tell
>them that.  "Kids," we said, "We know you know sex is fun, and
>we know you don't respect any adult enough to listen to us when
>we tell you to wait until you are married, so here's how you do
>sex, here's better ways to do it, here are some films of people
>doing it to give you a better idea of what it's like, and here
>are some condoms that *might* keep you from dying *when* you *do*
>have sex (no ifs here).  But we wish you wouldn't."
>  Then, just to make sure they got the message, we told them, every
>single day of their lives, 50,000 times a day, "don't forget, if
>you drink the right beer, wear the right clothes, drive the right
>car, and use the right toothpaste, wildly attractive people of the
>opposite gender (or not) will throw themselves at you in their
>eagerness to have sex with you.  And if you don't, you will be a
>miserable dweeb with no friends, and no one will ever have sex
>with you.  PS:  If you don't have sex before you get married, you
>will be socially undesirable, sexually retarded, and alone.  If
>you do (just in case you forgot), you will be able to have great
>beer, great clothes, great cars, white teeth, and plenty of
>practical sexual experience that will enable you to better
>please your partener--who will, of course, also have all these
>wonderful things, because this is America."

     I agree that promiscuity has become a commercial value.  However,
    I'm not so sure that people were that sexually moral before the
    commercial era.  They were just better at hiding it.  Look at the
    nineteenth century.  Syphilus killed huge numbers of people (as it
    had for centuries before).  In Victorian England, people held up
    pretenses of purity and then went nuts behind closed doors.  The
    Marquis du Sade and Don Juan were not of this century.  If you look
    closely, "sexual morality" has never really been the norm.  The
    fact is, humans have a natural urge to boff each other.  Education
    serves to protect young people when their urges take over.  Nobody
    has to tell teen-agers how to have sex, that comes naturally.  They
    must be told, however, how to protect themselves as much as possible.
    Of course we should teach abstinence, but even if someone is never
    exposed to sex in the media, they are likely to let their urges take
    over.  I would say that, since you say (and I agree) that
    our commercial culture makes teenage sex more prevalent, we should
    educate even more, so the only messages are not simply  "don't do
    it" and "do it as much as you want", but they can also choose
    "if you must do it, be responsible".


>---Missy P 2 B

    --G. Racz
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