The New Prudishness

David Brooks leads the charge of the babushkas--- asking, when are we are going to stop screwing around and settle down with a nice girl? In his Op-Ed piece last Friday , he related the results of a University of Chicago study of sexual marketplaces, which found enormous diversity -- and ghettoization -- of sexual marketplaces in Chicago. Basically, people look for sex partners within their own ethnic and geographic group, and, "Opportunities in the sex market act as constraints on the marriage market". Brooks finds this very troubling, because "There is an overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that marriage correlates highly with happiness. Children raised in marriages tend to have more opportunities than children raised outside marriage...... " In other words, we can look forward to Brooks prostheletising how to get people out of the dating market and in to marriages. Sure, Brooks ignores the possibility that people get married for reasons -- oh, God, please let's hope -- other than to have their socks blown off on a regular basis, and that people are hooking up not to avoid marriage, but to replace the active sex lives they would have had if they chose marriage. An obvious question: what percentage of single people are constitutionally against marriage? Never answered in Brooksworld. It could be that people are hooking up for the same reason that more people are buying coffee in --- gracious! -- coffee houses rather than making it at home, as they would if they had someone to make it for them. It's out there, it's available, and they aren't getting it at home.
"We are replacing marriage, one of our most successful institutions, with hooking up. This is a deep structural problem, and very worrying." About as troubling as Starbucks, I think. Before we put Brooks in charge of anything, someone should sit him down and explain the difference between a symptom and a cause.

On Sunday, the NYTimes publishedan OpEd Piece by Columbia media business school media program director Jonathan A Knee who suggests a new means for censoring pornography, by making it illegal to pay or receive payment for a sex act (the article implies that nudity is a sex act -- so no nudie shots). What's spectacularly impressive about this article is its assumption that pornography absolutely should be censored out of existence, because of the psychological damage it does to those who view it. Oh, and Knee also states that 70 percent of men ages 18-34 have visit an internet porn site once a month (don't look at me, I'm 35). The article fails to connect the dots: if porn viewing produces axe murderers, then 70 percent of all men 18-34 are axe murders. If it gave people cancer, everyone would be dying of cancer.

Finally, Adam Cohen brings up the Federal Communications Commissions new rules regarding censorship, issued March 18 under Colin Powell's son Michael Powell [OpEd #3] which include: (1) broadcasters can now lose their licenses for "isolated or fleeting" swear words, as opposed to the previous rule which required repeated violations; (2) removes the previous requirement that offenses be "willful", now holding that a broadcaster's good-faith efforts to understand their rules are irrelevant; and (2) fails to state what profanity is, instead to decide "on a case-by-case basis" -- the very definition of arbitrary.

Look, it's not that I'm looking to curse up a storm while broadcasting across an internet porn site. But what we're seeing is actually quite a pile of New Prudishness -- a sudden cultural interest in altering social behaviors of others, motivated by personal moral codes. It's not unconstitutional; but it is the exclusive purview of conservatives to want to control the behavior of everyone, to conform to their moral views. The reason it's troubling is that people ignore them when it comes as advice and punditry. So they turn to the law, to make the US the kind of country they would want to live in -- such as we are now seeing with the FCC. It's "The Handmaid's Tale", and we're all the handmaids.