{"id":160,"date":"2012-08-16T15:18:29","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T15:18:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/safeplacewithruthgraham\/?p=160"},"modified":"2012-08-16T15:18:29","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T15:18:29","slug":"sexual-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/safeplacewithruthgraham\/2012\/08\/sexual-revolution.html","title":{"rendered":"Sexual Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<aside>\n<div><small>I am posting a reprint of Cal Thomas&#8217; commentrary for the The Washington Examiner. While it is not my writing it is somehting to think about.<\/small><\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<div>\n<p>When women complain about men who can&#8217;t commit, they can thank &#8212; or blame &#8212; two people: Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner and the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurley Brown, who died this week at age 90.<\/p>\n<p>Brown was the flip side of Hefner, offering women permission, even encouragement, to embrace a female version of Hefner&#8217;s freewheeling &#8220;Playboy philosophy&#8221; of unrestrained sexual pleasure. Brown and Hefner offered one-way tickets to fantasyland, a journey supposedly without cost to a destination seemingly without consequence.<\/p>\n<p>I confess to pausing at the supermarket checkout each month to read Cosmo&#8217;s enticing headlines and to notice the cleavage of the &#8220;cover girl&#8221; &#8212; both Brown&#8217;s signature. It is something like slowing down to view a multicar pileup. Yet the &#8220;damage&#8221; Brown&#8217;s philosophy of sexual liberation caused (or reflected) is far more severe.<\/p>\n<p>A sampling of Cosmo headlines included: &#8220;75 Sex Tricks (Warning: They Are So Hot That This Magazine May Burst into Flames)&#8221;; &#8220;Surprising Stuff They Don&#8217;t Want From You in the Sack&#8221;; and &#8220;Guys&#8217; Sex Confessions.&#8221; There is also raunchier stuff not suitable for those with gentler sensibilities.<\/p>\n<p>In any revolution &#8212; political, or the sexual one championed by those like Hefner and Brown &#8212; there are casualties. No one wants to talk about the casualties of the sexual revolution because that wouldn&#8217;t sell magazines or seduce a new generation of young people. Sex sells, but it also brings misery when it&#8217;s misused.<\/p>\n<p>There was a time when words served a purpose. They were once used to discourage bad behavior that was thought to be harmful to individuals who practice it and to societies that tolerate it. &#8220;Fornicator&#8221; was one such word. We changed the word so as to appear less &#8220;judgmental,&#8221; but the behavior that word describes didn&#8217;t change. &#8220;Sexually active&#8221; is now the preferred phrase that describes what the word used to. It seems more tolerant &#8212; and that&#8217;s the problem.<\/p>\n<p>I recall reading an interview in the 1970s with Xaviera Hollander, who was promoting her memoir &#8220;The Happy Hooker.&#8221; As I remember it, the interviewer asked Hollander a penetrating question, the gist of which went something like this: What&#8217;s the difference between you and what used to be called a &#8220;tramp&#8221;? Hollander&#8217;s answer didn&#8217;t matter. The question answered itself. This was before &#8220;anything goes&#8221; replaced self-control as a worthy goal.<\/p>\n<p>Just as there are laws in nature that, if violated, bring repercussions, so too are there moral laws that, if violated, cause physical, emotional, social and spiritual consequences. It is one reason we have preachers to remind us of such things, but fewer of us listen to them and more suffer as a result.<\/p>\n<p>Katherine Kersten, chairwoman of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis and a commentator for National Public Radio&#8217;s &#8220;All Things Considered,&#8221; wrote about Brown&#8217;s &#8220;seductive philosophy&#8221; of unfettered freedom in 1997 for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. It has a catch: &#8220;For if &#8216;freedom&#8217; is women&#8217;s birthright, it is also men&#8217;s. And as the last inhibition bites the dust, women are finding they don&#8217;t much like some of the things men do when released from social constraints and expectations. The result? A new breed of &#8216;Thou shalt nots&#8217; &#8212; from sexual harassment policies in the workplace (&#8216;No compliments on hair or dress, if you know what&#8217;s good for you&#8217;), to the mandatory &#8216;date rape&#8217; seminars that greet unsuspecting college freshmen.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Having abandoned a code of conduct that has served humanity well for millennia, Brown and her followers were forced to write a new code to deal with the predictable result of bad male behavior that previous constraints had worked well to limit. Men wanted their cake &#8220;and Edith, too,&#8221; to paraphrase a country song, and women didn&#8217;t like the end result.<\/p>\n<p>Brown sowed the wind, to borrow a biblical phrase, and millions of women who ingested her poison continue to reap the whirlwind. What a legacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; I am posting a reprint of Cal Thomas&#8217; commentrary for the The Washington Examiner. While it is not my writing it is somehting to think about. When women complain about men who can&#8217;t commit, they can thank &#8212; or blame &#8212; two people: Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner and the former editor of Cosmopolitan&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Sexual Revolution - Safe Place with Ruth Graham<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/safeplacewithruthgraham\/2012\/08\/sexual-revolution.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sexual Revolution - Safe Place with Ruth Graham\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&nbsp; I am posting a reprint of Cal Thomas&#8217; commentrary for the The Washington Examiner. While it is not my writing it is somehting to think about. 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No stranger to heartache, she seeks to provide a Biblical perspective to her journey of faith. She is warm and talks openly about her own need for a safe place as she journeyed through her husband\u2019s infidelities, her subsequent depression, her divorces, her teenage daughter\u2019s two unplanned pregnancies, another daughter\u2019s bulimia, her son\u2019s battle with drugs, grandson's special needs and returning to school at age 40. Although born into the \"famous\" Graham family Ruth did not feel she had a safe place to unburden the secrets of her life. She felt she had to project and image and wear a mask that she \"had it all together\". She had to meet others' expectations of her. It was not until a mid-life crisis did that she fully discover the unconditional love and grace of God. Her life's passion is to connect people to that same grace and love she found, no matter who they are or what sin. Ruth is an experienced conference speaker and Bible teacher. She has appeared on a variety of radio and television shows including: Good Morning, America, The Hour of Power, Focus on the Family, Moody Broadcasting, Fox &amp; Friends, CBN, Life Today and CNN. She has worked in publishing for over 14 years and is the founder of the Ruth Graham &amp; Friends Ministry. Ruth has three grown children and nine grandchildren. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. 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