Wall Street Journal Online WENDY SHALIT
Ariel Levy attended Wesleyan University in the 1990s, and she doesn’t feel the better for it. It was a place where “group sex, to say nothing of casual sex, was de rigueur.” It was a place where they had “coed showers, on principle.” When Ms. Levy suggested to a department head that it would be nice to have at least one course in the traditional literary canon, she was dismissed with icy contempt. Yet elsewhere on campus a professor of the humanities taught a course on pornography featuring, um, detailed textual analysis.
It was all supposed to be so liberating. But it wasn’t, as Ms. Levy argues forcefully in “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” It was merely the academic groundwork for what she calls “raunch culture,” now so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. Young women wear shirts emblazoned with “Porn Star” across the chest. Teen stores sell “Cat in the Hat” thong underwear. Parents treat their daughters’ friends to “cardio striptease” classes for birthday parties. This is liberation?
There IS a housing bubble. It’s the one we’re living in.
It might be a bit presumptuous, but it seems that people throughout most of history were reminded of their mortality on a fairly regular basis and they suffered few illusions about the brevity of life.
Today it is not so. In our postmodern world we are little gods and can satisfy (or think we are satisfying) any urge that may arise.
Perhaps if there were disruptions such as hunger, plague or war we might be brought back to an understanding of our spiritual needs and recalibrate ourselves and our priorites.