A Body Is a Body Is a Body ... ?

Kathleen Parker is my new favorite op-ed columnist. Today's column in The Baltimore Sun, "Today's youthful indiscretions can come back to haunt you," captures my sentiments exactly.

Ms. Parker's topic is how recent college grads are being turned away as job applicants because they have posted stuff about themselves — nude pictures, etc. — in the Internet's "high-tech, freewheeling, sexually explicit environment where porn is the new risque and everybody's gone wild."

One female student who is part of the freewheeling set says, "A body is a body is a body, and I'm proud of my body, and why not show my body?" This person is co-founder of a "user-friendly porn" magazine at Boston University. Thinks she, "It's not going to keep me from having a job."

To which Ms. Parker says, "Famous last words, perhaps."


Part of the deal at "gossip and graphics" websites like AutoAdmit.com where college types like this student might go to schmooze is, Ms. Parker says as well, that "postings can be anonymous. And vicious."

Vice and viciousness go hand in hand in "today's uncivil society [where] the stakes are high and the rules are low." About which climate Ms. Parker comments, "Invite anonymity into the mix and hostility finds release in the vacuum created when shame went missing."

Thus, the fate of "the generation that was serenaded by Madonna and marinated in sexual imagery." This generation may be so far gone that Ms. Parker's advice — "If you can't imagine your mother or father doing something, you probably shouldn't do it either" — will probably fall on deaf ears.


We are a long way from the 1950s through the early 1970s, a golden age in which a good moral rule of thumb was, "If Ben Cartwright wouldn't do it, you shouldn't either." The patriarch of Bonanza's Ponderosa Ranch and the widower father of Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe, if he were real and alive today, would gasp with incomprehension at clueless pronouncements such as "a body is a body is a body." Not even the loutish rabble that weekly threatened order and civility in the Cartwrights' vicinity would ever have mouthed such balderdash.

You know exactly what I'm talking about when you consider this classic exchange from the series:

Adam: Let's go back to the Ponderosa, Pa. This isn't any of our affair.
Ben: We can't ignore the rest of the world. We're the only stabilizing influence in the country.

Or this:

Ben: You and your education ...
Adam: Education is progress! Now what have you got against it?
Ben: I don't have anything against education — as long as it doesn't interfere with your thinking!

If education is naught but "progress," then maybe that fact explains why we find "user-friendly porn" magazines at Boston University and elsewhere in academe today.


And maybe it explains why we seem to be having such trouble today with thinking and common sense — see Robert Hardi's kvetch, "Gimme That Old Can-Do-Spirit," in last Sunday's Washington Post. Hardi feels we've replaced self-reliance based on common sense — the Ben Cartwright ethic — with self-protection based on bureaucratic rule following. Dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and no one can blame you if things go wrong.

On the one hand, we're without shame in the sense of being shameless. On the other hand, we're without shame in the sense of being blameless. It's a killer combination.