The Vulgarization of America
The entertainment industry is one of the worst offenders. Top-selling music artists have used the "n-word" and slang terms for prostitutes for decades now -- BORRRRRRING -- so the shock value that sells has to get more extreme. Albums and songs have titles with coarse words for male and female genitalia, and extol physiological responses to sexual stimuli in gutter language. When performing their big hits at awards shows, the artists simulate sexual acts of various types on stage.
Even small children are not protected. Drag Queen Story Hour has rapidly degenerated from men sporting garish makeup, wearing women's clothing and reading "Goodnight Moon" to toddlers, to men sporting garish makeup, wearing almost no clothing, twerking and mooning toddlers.
How very enlightened.
And then there are the so-called "Pride Events," where parents are taking their small children to go see grown-ups dressed in sadomasochism and bondage attire (and often little else), being led around on leashes with animal masks, and other fetishistic behavior.
Teachers and administrators in public and private schools are sexualizing the curriculum, placing pornographic books in the school libraries, and discussing their own sexual preferences and viewpoints in the classroom -- even with the youngest children.
Innocence is out; indoctrinating children to validate adults' impulses, feelings and experiences is "in."
Several trends have contributed to this decline. First, contemporary messaging suggests that the most important attributes of your identity are those associated with your sexuality. Second, academia, the media and the entertainment industry love to proclaim that vulgarity is synonymous with creativity. Third, multiple generations of Americans have been led to believe that feelings are a substitute for argument (or trump argument altogether).
These viewpoints are manifestly false. Individually, they can do plenty of damage. But together, they have formed a corrosive miasma that is eroding the very fabric of American culture.
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