Susan Douglas, part deux

The reading of the "Where The Girls Are" book for today is on Ch. 3, Sex and the Single Teenager. One observation that Douglas makes is especially astute:

"The other culprit in promoting the Sexual Revolution was, according to the magazines, the mass media", which emphasized the "gratification of sexual drives as natural and glamorous." What's so rich about this is that publishers and editors were hardly above using sex whenever possible to sell magazines, yet they acted as if they were above and apart from the media system they decried."

I chuckled instantly as I read that, thinking, this is exactly what any writer needs to point out, the lack of candor of others, when (in this case, a magazine editor) launches a pontificating diatribe on a subject such as this. Obviously the context of the above quote was a not so distant point in the past, when editorials routinely ran that decried the moral ruin of the nation.

But then again, there is the current state of things, when the very notion of holding a moral ethic based on religious beliefs triggers derision, knowing looks and chuckles as if it were a hopeless, simplistic and idiotic set of principles. Speak of reason and clinical research and you stand on solid ground. Shift into a statement of belief, such as the subject of a recent funding cut proposal and you tread soft and dangerous ground, instantly becoming a dart-magnet for those that see that stance as dated and lacking in common sense.