Culture in the 21st century: Part 2

As a follow up to my last post where I ranted a bit about how the images we see have influences on us all, especially when we were younger – I neglected to add in there comments about the music we listen to influencing us to some degree … probably a good thing I didn’t, considering tonight as I was making a CD of favorite older songs from an online "jukebox" I have, three songs I downloaded were Bell Biv DeVoe’s "Do Me", Prince’s "Darling Nikki", and Sly Fox’s "Let’s Go All The Way" emoticon 

Seriously, I really dug those songs – but they didn’t influence me to be promiscuous. In fact, I wasn’t promiscious then nor have I ever been.  So to expand on my prior post about culture, I should add that I know that a lot of what we were influenced by when we were younger had to do with how we were raised and what impact our parents teachings had on us.  But even at that, there were influences that were outside the control of our parents because your parents couldn’t and can’t shelter you 24-7.  I think society today (including governmental policies, that date back decades) enables and encourages youth that single motherhood is ok, and the prevalent attitude still is "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  It pushes that sex outside of marriage is ok, as long as you wear protection, and that intimacy outside of the actual consumation of the act is not considered sex – just ‘sexual relations’ (thanks, Bubba!).  It also pushes the idea that older female/teenage male relationships are ok but older male/teenage female relationships are reprehensible (the classic double standard).

Sometimes I wonder if I am overblowing all this because, as I said in my last post, I feel like I am turning into my mother – who used to worry about the exact same things, and I in turn blew off those concerns as no big deal.  And that was 20 years ago.  Has our society changed much since then?

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