While driving to and from the barbershop, I pass a different kind of bar. It’s billed as a place where the waitresses dress in bikinis. As if that’s not enticing enough, a hand written sign on the street disgustingly announces that the place offers “eye candy.”
One day, as we passed by, I commented to Sherry that I was puzzled by the bar’s apparent success. I couldn’t understand why those who would go there for a limited amount of “candy” wouldn’t simply go to a strip joint instead. After all, considering the intent, why waste money on a sample when one can glut on “eye candy”?
Knowing the appeal of both places, I began to see a possible correlation between those who frequent them and certain youths in our neighborhood. They have repeatedly written a certain four-letter word on a guardrail on our street. I guess it’s their “candy.” It, too, feeds an immature sex appetite. Both are part of a serious social ill – an obsession with sex.
We see convincing evidence of a serious problem, in the growing number of adult (infantile) video stores; and in the proliferation of sexually oriented movies, magazines and books. And then there’s the Internet.
Thankfully, I was reared in a generation that thought you had to have a pornograph to view pornography. If a kid asked his parents where he came from, they likely told him, “From Philadelphia” (or some other city). A parent who fully explained the birds and the bees to his teenager was about as rare as one who sided with his/her child against a teacher.
Parents who now educate their children regarding sex represent change long overdue. Yet, why must so many adults act as if the present generation invented sex? And, why is there so little shame and such gross immaturity in otherwise grown people? More important, how are these attitudes affecting individuals and society?
I’m not smart enough to answer the first two questions. Norman Cousins, in the Saturday Review gave a very troubling answer to the third one: “The trouble with this wide open pornography…is not that it corrupts, but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is proclaimed, but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.”
BARBER-OSOPHY: Freedom without restraint is the most insidious form of slavery.
Copyright 2004, Sumerlin Enterprises
Permission is granted to reprint this article as long as a link to www.barber-osophy.com is included.
Terry L. Sumerlin, known as the Barber-osopher, is the author of "Barber-osophy," and is a columnist for the San Antonio Business Journal. He speaks nationally as a humorist/motivational speaker. Visit his website at www.Barber-osophy.com.