I recently saw a photo of a summer day at the beach from the 1920’s, and I was struck by the way those people were dressed. They were almost fully clothed as they waded in the water. There was very little skin showing. My first thought was, how much of a repressive time that must have been to live in when people could not simply wear a bathing suit to the beach. But then I wondered which time was more oppressive, then or now? The obvious answer would be, then. The picture was clear. Women weren’t allowed to wear bikinis at the beach or even a one-piece; and men wore long pants and weren’t allowed to go shirtless. Today, we live in a much more free and liberating time. But I wonder if we have become slaves of our own freedom.
In her book, Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, an expert on addiction, warns that we are all becoming addicts to a certain degree. The smartphone has become the “modern-day hypodermic needle” that we turn to it for quick hits of dopamine, from the images, the videos, the attention, the validation that we receive every time we swipe the screen. TikTok and Instagram are the biggest offenders. Some image or video pops on the screen for 5 to 10 seconds merely to give the viewers a quick dose of dopamine across their brains. That is not the way our brains were meant to work or at least it’s not the way that our brains work most productively.
You walk into a restaurant, and invariable see four people sitting around a table facing one another, with their heads down looking at their phones. Why are they engaged with their phones and not with the live people sitting across from them? They are not actually doing that by choice. Something inside them is compelling them to stare down at their phones, looking at some meaningless, nonsensical image on their screens, to take a bite of the eye candy their screen is offering rather than engage in a mature conversation with three of their friends. They needed that shot of dopamine into the pleasure centers of their brain that their screens trigger.
Have smartphones and computers been a net gain for humanity? The jury is still out on that. Sure, they have made many parts of our lives, much easier and more productive, but is that worth being turned into a brain dead, consumer of dopamine inducing images. And that will only get worse with the rise of artificial intelligence. The degradation of our political debates can easily be traced to the proliferation of social media. If you look back on the historic Lincoln-Douglas debates, they went on for an entire day. Each debater would speak for at least an hour on a topic, completely fleshing out the entire subject, thinking through every issue, in a very sober and reasonable manner. Now we have our political debates argued on social media. Our politicians are tweeting endlessly their hot takes on the issue of the day or some influencer comes on to give their 15 second sound bite on climate change or illegal immigration or gun control, and that replaces the thoughtful and nuanced debates of Lincoln and Douglas.
Today, a 14-year-old boy on his computer sees more sexualized images of women in one computer session than the average man living 100 years ago saw in his entire life. Our brains are not built to properly process the overwhelming number of images that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Children that age do not know how to process everything they are beings exposed to. People wonder why more and more kids are confused about their sexuality and their gender identity. I don’t. We flood these kids’ minds with images that they do not understand, and when their little minds do attempt to process these images, they stumble down these roads of alternative lifestyles. Has anyone considered that maybe these alternate lifestyle choices that have become so popular these days, are a result of children trying to process their sexualization before their cognitive ability has developed to the point where they would be able to do so productively?
When we decided to start talking to young kids about sex, in schools, it was universally agreed that there were only two genders. Now after decades of exposing young minds that have not developed enough to understand and process the complexity of sex and sexuality, we have 105 different genders. When sex discussions first occurred during puberty – the time of a person’s life when the body is becoming distinctly one sex or the other – the sexual binary was fully intact and agreed upon. It has only been when adults starting talking to kids about sex and gender identity prior to puberty, when their bodies have yet to develop the distinct secondary sexual characteristic that help define their biological sex for them, that we suddenly have a myriad of new genders.
It only makes sense. When your body is a blank page, it can go in all different directions. When children are encouraged or even compelled to forge their gender identity before their body had a chance to develop into its natural biologically sex, it is only logical that there could develop a disconnect between their mind and body, between their gender identity and biological sex. We are teaching children about the hard reality of sex, gender identity and sexual orientation at the time of their lives when they still believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, when their playtime is filled with make believe, and then we think it’s natural when their young impressionable minds buy into the gender dysphoria delusion.
Isn’t education supposed to help clarify issues in the minds of the students, not muddle and confuse them? And if the instruction is proving to confuse not clarify - as statistic show Radical Gender Ideology has been doing, maybe the students are not ready for that subject matter. But to the proponents of exposing kids to sexually explicit material at a young age, the agenda is to confuse, and not to clarify the subject matter for the kids. They think it is a positive when a young child claims to be trans or gender fluid, not the tragedy that it is. They call the child brave, and are celebrated.
In April, former first child, Chelsea Clinton, posted a tweet advocating for pornographic books with explicit gay porn scenes in them to be placed in elementary school libraries. She tweeted that these “books are a vital way that children, adolescents and adults learn about themselves and our world.” And banning such books “are nothing but harmful.” So, she believes that prepubescent children not being able to read gay pornography is what is harmful to them. If you do not believe that children are influenced by what they were exposed to, consider that this adult woman who is advocating for pornographic books in children’s libraries was raise by a sex addict. There is an old saying, ‘children learn what they live.’ So, on second thought, maybe it’s not a good idea to have a grown man dressed in women’s lingerie writhe and grind in front of a classroom of 6-year-olds.
I’m not claiming that every child who is taught Radical Gender Theory in schools or sees sexually explicit videos on Tik-Tok will automatically be led to these alternative lifestyles. But it most likely will lead some down that path who otherwise would not have traveled it. Not every person processes the same events and information the same way. But there is no reason for adults to be talking to children about sex. None. Nothing positive is gained and there is only the possibility of something negative coming from it. If they do not believe that teaching kids about sexuality and gender identity will influence them, then why are they so adamant about doing it? Why? I thought that’s why you teach – to teach and influence your students. So, they know they are influencing the children to their thinking, to their lifestyles; they are simply claiming they are not.
Maybe the people living a hundred years ago knew things that we don’t. Maybe they instinctively knew that sexualizing children leads to bad outcomes. They didn’t need a double-blind peer reviewed study to tell them that; they had something we lost about 20-30 years ago – common sense. Maybe the past generations were not oppressive, maybe they were intuitive. There were a lot of things about life in America 100 years ago that is not preferable to today, but those people instinctively understood the dangers of sexualization of the culture and especially of children. Maybe the freedom of the bikini and the speedo is not worth the damage that the speedo and bikini mindset has inflicted on the society, especially the children.
__________________________________________________________
Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.