Is Sex Eroding Moral Values
Moral can be defined loosely as "of good character". Values are "a belief, or standard". The question at hand is, has sex eroded moral values? Sex is everywhere. It is not limited to the bedroom anymore, but to the television, movies, billboards, office buildings and the White House. The open discussion and study of sex dates back only about a century, to the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that sexuality was innate, present in humans at birth. Freud lived at a time when sexuality was considered unsavory, and was avoided in all polite conversation and social interaction. His breakthrough thinking affected social practices as well as therapeutic ones. In Freud's own era, the "moral fog that had enshrouded sexuality for most of the nineteenth century did not begin to lift until after the First World War" (Janus, 11). Where do we get our morals and values? Character education was what took place in school and society in the past. It was sometimes heavy-handed and always liable to abuse, but it seemed to serve our culture well over a long period of time. But what we have now, for the most part, is the "decision-making approach" (Kilpatrick, 16). In one form or another, sometimes as a course in itself, s
Is sex eroding moral values? Absolutely. "The Day America Told the Truth," a 1990 survey of American beliefs and values, contains this scene from a California high school: "It's Friday afternoon and the students are leaving a class in 'social living. "The shift from character education to the decision-making model was begun with the best of intentions. Very young adults are living together without the benefit of marriage. Our present culture sends out confused and misleading messages about sex-messages that, in the long run, threaten our survival. Numerous studies have been conducted to determine the prevalence of a history of sexual abuse in eating disorders patients, and the findings have been controversial. Of these young women, 70% were unmarried, up from 30% only a decade earlier. Parents in their 40's and 50's and 60's are enjoying a new sexual style at the same time their teenage or young adult children are also experimenting with sex, and seeking loving relationships. Later, unable to get and hold jobs, they will drop out of the labor market as well, creating or perpetuating cycles of deep, depressing, unrelenting poverty as their children and grandchildren in turn become teenage, single, unemployable parents. "The new social and sexual changes in lifestyles have been adopted by many other participants. If that guarded approach applies anywhere, moral education would seem to be the place. But that figure only suggests one dimension of the problem.
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Acceptance Essays
