Especially for Parents
News and Commentary by Sharon Secor
July 2004
Modern Immaturity: It's All About Me
In a June 29, 2004 decision, Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, the Supreme Court refused to uphold the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), remanding the matter back to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to determine whether there is a "less restrictive" alternative to COPA. This is yet another triumph for the self-absorbed Me-Generation's culture of selfishness. Yet again, the Court has frustrated attempts to protect children from Internet pornography that has become increasingly difficult to avoid, reaffirming an immature "it's all about me" philosophy that puts an individual's perceived right to unfettered self-gratification above the needs of even society's most vulnerable members.
It was a 5-4 decision, and, according to a June 29 IDG News Service story by Grant Gross, "justices dissenting from the majority opinion argued that the law would simply require publishers of pornographic materials to hide their content behind age-verification screens." In other words, there was no threat to the availability of such materials to adults, just the addition of one small process that would reduce the number of children that are able to view pornographic material—which depicts "performers" (many in their teens) being raped and tortured and engaging in group sex, bestiality, portrayals of incest, deviant sexual behavior utilizing fecal matter and urine, and other perversions that simply defy civilized description.
Are we really to believe that it is unreasonable, even unconstitutional, to ask that an individual demonstrate that he is an adult before indulging in a computer game that—to borrow a phrase that Daniel Terdiman used in his June 28th Wired News article describing Sociolotron (a multi-player on-line role playing game in which players can participate in bondage and rape)—allows him to pursue "libido's dark side"? According to the Sociolotron site, aside from being able to blackmail and murder other players, participants are able to play at having sex, to "live out" through role playing their "darkest fetish fantasies" after confirming that they "are 21 years of age or older" and legally allowed "to read about interactive erotic role playing involving erotic text and erotic images" merely by clicking where it says "the above is true for me, let me in."
What does it say about our culture when the simple process of online age verification is deemed too burdensome to adults? When the protection of children means nothing when compared to the need for instant self-gratification? In the generations that came before the Baby Boomers' Me Generation, achieving maturity meant that you had reached the point where you were able to put the good of others before your own. Protecting and guiding youth was a part of that.
Looking at the popular representations of sex and sexuality in today's media and culture, maturity—or rather a lack thereof—seems to be an issue. Indeed, the licentious ways of those who have ushered in the era of the sexual revolution seem to have brought us a collective cultural devolution and the erosion of the most fundamental of social contracts, those which govern and protect the most basic element of society—the family.
Renowned psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan, who in 1948 assisted in the founding of the World Federation for Mental Health, understood that one of the vital developmental tasks of adolescence is the integration of intimacy and lust. It is only with the successful bringing together of these qualities that the mature, mutually satisfying heterosexual relationships that form the foundation of the family unit are able to occur. The ability to achieve intimacy is essential to the interpersonal commitment, or social contract, that results in parents caring for each other and their children over the long-term.
In an immature state, then, the experience of sexuality tends to be incomplete, limited to mere physical sensation. Devoid of emotional depth or intimacy, sexual expression tends to be instrumental or goal-oriented in nature, concerned primarily with the gratification of the self and its desires. There are few expressions of sexuality more devoid of intimacy than pornography. In fact, evidence is mounting that pornography may actually interfere with healthy sexual development of the sort that leads to the meaningful and satisfying relationships that bring long-term happiness and contribute significantly to mental and physical health.
Unfortunately, it is exactly this immature and adolescent version of sexuality that dominates our popular culture and drives such cultural trends as unwed motherhood, a lack of paternal participation in child rearing, and increased incidents and varieties of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as the filtering down of degrading and deviant sexual practices into today's youth culture.
We've been so inundated with tales of oral sex in classrooms and school buses, group sex in school bathrooms and the like that we can no longer count the number of times we've heard news stories like a recent one out of Scarsdale, New York. On June 25, the Journal News reported yet another teen sex tape surfaced in yet another suburban community. Circulated via the Internet, the 18-minute tape featured two partially nude local girls, high-schoolers, engaged in sexual behavior together before a group of raucously enthusiastic boys.
"It's not, like, really hard-core," said Jeremy Spicehandler, an 18-year old quoted in the article. "It got blown out of proportion because so many people had it, and so many people are talking about it, but I don't think the actual video was that big of a deal."
"You're nobody until you do something extreme," said Carl Garnier, who is an attorney local to that area, as he sought to explain recent sexual trends among young people to the reporter. "They are losing their innocence. They are vicious."
Vicious? Maybe under the right circumstances. Pornography, cognitive and social immaturity combine to be a potent factor in sexual crime, as has been demonstrated by an international increase in juvenile sexual crime in which pornography has been acknowledged to play a role. Australia, Canada and the United States are just a few of the countries that are now becoming aware, through statistics and solid research, of the relationship between the use of pornographic materials and sexual acting out.
And while these stories of extreme sexual behavior by youth become more and more common, let us not forget that it was not always like this. This is not normal teen experimentation, but behavior that is directly influenced by what is seen via our media culture. Sexual deviance has been found to be most often the result of learned behavior, according to recent studies, including a 2002 National Foundation for Family Research and Education study of the effects on both the individual and society of using pornography that was published in the scientific journal Mind, Medicine and Adolescence.
Yet, adults persist in fighting against controlling children's access to pornography. For the Me-Generation crowd at the helm of these policies, the small concession of on-line age verification is just too big a sacrifice to make. While pornography is clearly detrimental to the developmental processes of youth, for these people there is nothing, absolutely nothing, more important than complete unfettered access to pornography.
Comparing the recent COPA battle and other antics of the It's All About Me Generation with that generation of people that Tom Brokaw so aptly referred to as the "Greatest Generation"—a generation of people who, while still teens and young adults, exemplified mature, traditional values of delayed gratification, sacrifice and of putting the good of the whole before the desires of the individual—it would seem that our social policy is being determined by a bunch of selfish and immature teenagers. What a shame the Supreme Court once again failed to act its age.