Media Literacy and Sex

"The distorted understanding of sex the culture portrays is a massacre of life. We have to make efforts to redesign the environment of this erroneous culture." These are the words of a researcher of culture writing in the Catholic Times. He continues: "Culture is a strong tool that subtly internalizes the prevailing values of a society, which then becomes, unconsciously for most of us, the foundation for our actions."

Our children and teenagers are being bombarded with sexual stimulants, giving them a distorted understanding of sex, crammed indiscriminately into the heads of our children by the culture we have made. An example: the 'literary youth' is now referred to as the 'erotic youth'; our culture is internalizing sex to the point where sexual relations have reached the threshold of normal behavior for the young. Even though they understand, he says, how wrong this emphasis on sex is, unconsciously they tolerate it.

As a professor in a university who heard stories of students who had abortions, he decided to devote full time to the study of the culture of life. These students were not juvenile delinquents or raised in families with problems, so why, he wondered, was it so easy for them to talk about their abortions?

To answer the question, he gave up his professorship, and without  permanent job security decided to devote himself to this work, researching and lecturing. Listening to his lectures enthusiastically, he noted, were mostly those in their 20s and 30s, who were having their eyes opened to another facet of sex that was being ignored by society and unfamiliar to many of them.

The professor does not talk only about the preciousness of life and what should be our attitude about life, but he wants his listeners to see what the media is doing by fantasizing sex and how this approach inculcates the culture of death.

He urges us to become media literate and be able to see what this unhealthy approach is doing to our society. We have to learn to see how cleverly and systematically the media has influenced the popular culture by using sex to sensationalize the way we see life.  Our efforts have to be directed to show, he says, the results of this sex culture on our society. One way of resisting this dangerous trend, he suggests, is by creating programs in the schools and churches that focus on improving our media literacy and raising our maturity in judging more effectively.