| WARNING: NONSENSE IS DESTROYING AMERICA The Role of Popular Culture in America's Social Problems Vincent Ryan Ruggiero Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1994 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
|||
| ISBN 0-7679-0628-4 | 291p. | SC/BWI | $14.95 | |
Here I want to discuss two of Mr. Ruggiero's objections to current American popular culture in more detail. So you get two! [click] two! [click] two rants in one! 1
![[Rant Warning]](../../../../RantWarn.gif)
The promotion of self-esteem in American schools, and later in certain legislative bodies, was a prominent part of popular culture in the last century. Some years back, Gary Trudeau's wonderful comic strip Doonesbury lampooned its appearance in the California legislature. But its over-application in America's public schools, beginning in the 1960s, was nothing to laugh about.
Promotion of individual students' self-esteem began in reaction to the rote-learning and strict-discipline education of the 1950s; and that was fine. Rote learning has its place, and discipline (whether imposed from within or without) is essential. But it is also true that one style of teaching does not work well for every child, and pedagogical rigidity can stifle those whose imaginations (or cultural heritages) show them alternatives to the orthodox solutions.2
More specifically, nothing can block learning as effectively as an excessive lack of self-esteem in a child. In such cases, boosting self-esteem is vital. The problem was that boosting self-esteem became a fad. In many places, it replaced academic achievement as the measure of student performance. Few teachers, I am sure, de-emphasized their subject matter entirely. But the doctrine of the time was that self-esteem was more important than mastery of skills. If a boy couldn't spell common words correctly, or a girl had trouble doing sums, forcing them to get it right would damage their self-esteem. Keeping them behind their age cohort (flunking them in a class) would also do damage. Thus, they could advance through the grades without learning those skills.
The first problem with this so-called "social promotion" is that certain skills are vital for success at life in America. I advocate basic skills and knowledge in four areas, with the first three being essential and the fourth nearly so: English; arithmetic; history and civics; science and technology.
Today a large percentage of American students have trouble with arithmetic, struggle to produce grammatical English, and know little about history, geography, or science. So our children compare poorly in the aggregate with those of Europe or Japan. Politicians have been tweaking our education system for decades now, trying to improve its performance, without gaining much ground. The books written on the subject of what's wrong with our schools would fill a Barnes & Noble superstore. There is no simple answer on the institutional level. But on the societal level, there is, and I think Ruggiero has it. He calls for a return to respect for achievement, the abandonment of the doctrine that imparting self-esteem over-rides all other purposes of education. Let's make sure our children learn these skills in class, he says, and if they don't let's find out why and fix it.4 He's right about that. Where I think he goes wrong is in claiming too many bad outcomes (beating or raping children, in the example I quoted) are due to the perpetrators' having been coddled in the fad years of self-esteem. Those crimes have other causes.
...or something rike that.5
Another aspect of American popular culture that Mr. Ruggiero dislikes is its way with sexuality: too casual, too coarse, too common for his taste. He maintains that the prevalence of sex-related problems today — AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases; abortions; unwed mothers; homosexuality — can be laid largely to Dr. Alfred Kinsey and to Hugh M. Hefner, who was inspired by Kinsey's work to establish Playboy magazine with its hedonistic bent.
Historically, Christianity is known for its antipathy to healthy sexuality. Where the Church was in power, sexual repression was often the norm. True, the degree of repression varied from place to place and from era to era; but the pattern is clear. America in the 1950s was a time of repression, due not only to the Church but to societal norms generally. Divorce was uncommon. Children born out of wedlock were rare, and abortions almost never heard of. STDs existed, but were discussed only in private. Indeed, it is difficult to say much about the sexual behaviors of that period because of the taboo against discussing them openly. The pioneering work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, beginning in 1947, opened a window on these hidden problems. He is credited with legitimizing the scientific study of sexual behavior. But Ruggiero, drawing on work by Judith Reisman, a "communication specialist", portrays Dr. Kinsey's work as a tissue of lies. Here is how he describes her conclusions:
Kinsey, she concludes, was far from the objective scientific observer he is usually pictured as. Rather, he knowingly used biased samples and tolerated, perhaps encouraged, the sexual molestation of children for his scientific "studies." At least one-quarter of the sample in his study of male sexuality, Reisman alleges, were prisoners. Presumably, incarceration resulted in homosexual experience in prison for some of them. Further, most of not all of the high school boys Kinsey claims to have surveyed were from a group with an unusually high (if dubious) incidence of homosexual experience. During his research, she notes, Kinsey "appears to have directed experimental sex research on several hundred children aged 2 months to almost 15 years. These children were orally and manually stimulated to orgasm over periods as long as 24 hours by a group of nine sex offenders, some of whom were 'technically trained' ... These orgasm tests on children constituted Kinsey's experimental child sex research database." A number of pediatricians with whom Reisman consulted speculated that the children would not have submitted to such "experiments" unless they were held or strapped down. – pages 136-137 |
These paragraphs are an artful use of innuendo and not much more. Note the number of qualifiers, or "weasly words": "perhaps"; "Reisman alleges"; "Presumably"; "appears to have directed"; "A number of pediatricians ... speculated". And just what is "an unusually high (if dubious) incidence"? Are we supposed to believe that Kinsey carefully picked a group that would give him the data he wanted, but didn't notice that it was bogus? And there are few firm numbers here. I note that she alleges the children were stimulated for "periods as long as 24 hours". Would I be showing disdain if I call her conclusions up to 100 percent valid? You bet I would.
I've read the Kinsey report. Although it was some time ago, I recall nothing prurient about it. The report was shocking, true; but only because of its frank discussion of matters considered off limits until its publication. And if Kinsey's work was so scandalous, why haven't we heard about that before?6 Especially if, as Reisman charges, his child studies were conducted by "a group of nine sex offenders." I'd be willing to bet that what she found was that they broke some Indiana law by doing the studies — hence, "sex offenders."
The next paragraph in Ruggiero's book is more substantial. It cites Dr. Abraham Maslov, who questioned one aspect of Kinsey's study of female sexuality. Still, this is not very convincing. Reisman ends her condemnation of Kinsey by charging that he slanted his research to promote a personal agenda. Putting it as briefly as possible, she claims he wanted to show that what we call sexual perversions are in fact normal. My assessment of Reisman's work is that it's she who has the personal agenda. It's noteworthy that her book, like Ruggiero's, was published in the American southeast by a small publisher.7
But Reisman isn't finished. "Cognizant that Hugh Hefner had been strongly influenced by Kinsey," Ruggiero says, Reisman goes on to blast him and Playboy. "Celebrating a self-centered Eros," she says, "Playboy institutionalized the war between women and men, waging a forty year assault against marriage, the family, and heterosexual love." She bases this on her study of Playboy, in which she apparently tallied all the articles, jokes and cartoons that mentioned or portrayed anything other than chastity until marriage between a man and a woman and lumped them all together to support her contention that Hefner's magazine has undermined American family values. She also studied Playboy's competitors Penthouse and Hustler and, despite the fact that they were very different magazines run by different people, folded their objectionable content into her mixing bowl. If you'll forgive me running the cooking metaphor into the ground, it's a familiar recipe, but it doesn't yield fare that sticks to your ribs.
Ruggiero goes on to point out the relevance of this research:
The relevance of Dr. Reisman's research and conclusions is undeniable. The physical, sexual and psychological abuse of children is epidemic in America. Every day 7,300 cases of abuse are reported; every day four children die from that abuse. The great majority of abusers begin abusing others when they are teenagers, in some cases preteens, and many are never cured of this behavior. If Reisman is correct, the great increase in the number and character of child abuse cases cannot reasonably be attributed to better reporting or to the fact that the abusers were themselves abused. As with other sexual problems, the escalation of child abuse is in part traceable to the erroneous views Kinsey published and Hefner disseminated. The unparalleled impact of the "sexual revolution" in the span of less than fifty years is explained by its convergence with two other phenomena—the popularization of relativism, selfism, and the exaltation of feelings; and the explosion of the entertainment and communications media that give expression to all these views. This convergence is demonstrated in the U.S. Navy's Tailhook scandal and in sexual harassment in the workplace, in the increasing incidence of rape and other sexual violence, in the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, and in the divorce rate. It is most dramatically reflected in the controversy over abortion. – pages 139-140 |
Here, I submit, is Mr. Ruggeiro's agenda in the proverbial nutshell. It is to blame the sexual problems of modern society, so offensive to his Republican and Christian values, on the handiest targets. Dr. Kinsey is long dead. (Never mind that his work is still respected, or that his successors Masters and Johnson reached similar conclusions; he's the chosen villain here.) Hugh Hefner's hedonistic empire is fading as he ages and as Playboy's particular blend of material becomes much easier to publish via the Internet. Since this is so, if the Ruggiero-Reisman thesis is correct, the incidence of sexual problems should be declining as well. There's a simple test. Unfortunately, Ruggiero doesn't mention it. I submit that doesn't fit his plans.
Now let me tie these rants together and wind things up. Ruggiero overstates his case, and thereby weakens it, when writing about both types of problem — the educational and the sexual. That's too bad, because he has a number of worthwhile things to say about both. But in the end it seems to me that he's content to go for the scare tactics and the easy answer, the better to keep those lecture fees and book contracts flowing.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.