Commentary: Bad Is The New Good For Girls!

Sexual Immorality
#1323c
Martin G. Collins
Given 21-May-16; 12 minutes

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released research, commissioned two years earlier, that documented just how difficult the transition to womanhood has become for American girls. The culture of the marketplace teaches girls to value themselves in terms of how sexy they are, not in their own eyes but in the eyes of boys.

Articles in magazines for young girls emphasize the value of exercise, for example, not in terms of health benefits but because exercise will—the articles assert—make the girl look sexier for the guys. This way of valuing girls is not only destructive to girls’ self-esteem—even super-models are often dissatisfied with their appearance—but it is also widely out of sync with the demands of the real world, the adult world. Unless she’s an actress or a super-model, a woman’s success in the world is less a function of her appearance than it is of her competence.

What you can do ultimately matters more than how you look. A woman might look like a super-model, but if she shows up for work three hours late, doesn’t answer her phone calls, and can’t do the work she’s assigned to do, then she won’t be successful no matter how good she looks.

God has designed single woman to desire to be attractive to single men, and women want to feel valued. They want to be worth something. But Satan has perverted this society’s value of women and he uses women’s desire for romance to drive them to take his destructive course of action to acquire value and romance.

The same longing for romance experienced by single women is expressed by teenage girls themselves. Taylor Swift has a net worth of over $300 million and made a commanding $80 million in 2015 as the world's highest paid celebrity. She has enjoyed all the world has to offer.

Dr. Leonard Sax, a psychologist and physician, wrote a book titled, Girls on the Edge, in which he argues that many girls today have a brittle sense of self. They may look confident and strong on the outside, but they’re fragile within. He writes,

Taylor Swift was the best-selling vocal artist of 2008, with combined sales of more than four million albums that year. She was then 18 years old. Her song, "Love Story," was the most successful track on her second album, "Fearless," which became the second-best-selling album of 2009. (Michael Jackson, after his death, gained the number-one spot.)

“Love Story” is romantic fantasy, pure and simple. In the song, Swift imagines a traditional romance with a young man who will be the “prince” while she is the “princess.” She even imagines the young man seeking her father’s permission to marry her.

How politically incorrect can you get? Doesn’t Taylor Swift know that the idea of a young woman asking a father’s permission to marry the daughter is an absolute no-no?

Any feminist can tell you how that ritual endorsed the Original Sin of the patriarchy, the idea that a young woman should be subservient first to her father, then to her husband. The central message of Swift’s song is a longing for romantic gender roles that no longer exist; yet girls are buying this song and downloading the accompanying video by the millions.

Fifty years ago, the lines were clearly drawn. “Good girls” didn’t have sex before marriage . . .

Today a girl may commonly have her first sexual experience (including oral sex), at 13, 14 or 15 years of age, but she may not marry until her late 20s, if she marries at all. That means she may have a decade or more where she is a sexual agent outside the context of a lifelong commitment.

“Getting married to a guy without having sex with him first would be like buying a dress without trying it on first,” a college woman told me. There has never previously been a culture in which young women have had so many years of unconstrained sexuality.

In the long perspective of the past 4,000 years of recorded human history, this is unprecedented. . . . Girls today have more freedom and more choices, but less guidance from adults, than any generation of girls in history. Most girls are not getting the guidance they need to navigate this uncharted territory. Many don’t have any applicable moral compass.

It’s no longer clear to girls today what it means to be a “good girl” or even whether a girl would want to be “good.” Consider the most basic question of teenage behavior: Have you ever had sex?

Back in 1950, nearly two-thirds of boys reported having sex either with the few “bad girls” their age or with older women, some of whom may have been paid sex workers. The proportion of boys getting some action actually declined slightly between 1950 and 1999. The proportion of girls roughly quadrupled.

But the changes go even deeper than these numbers might suggest. Fifty years ago, girls were the gatekeepers for sexual activity. The boys had at least to pretend they liked the girl in order to get physical.

Today, girls often engage in sexual activity with boys, particularly oral sex, without any promise of relationship. Being hip, being cool, means not insisting on a romantic commitment prior to sexual intimacy. Being hip means being a guy as far as sex is concerned: sex with no strings attached . . ..

Fifty years ago, the dividing line between good girls and bad girls was clear. Good girls didn’t have sex before marriage. Bad girls did.

In that era, it was good to be a good girl, and bad to be a bad girl. Today, BAD is the new Good.

Let me interject a comment here: Remember Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” It says "woe" to them, meaning there is a severe penalty for living that way.

The culture of 50 years ago encouraged romance without sex. Today’s culture encourages sex without romance. For many girls, the result is profoundly depressing, literally.

Pediatrician Meg Meeker has suggested that girls who engage in sex in their early teenage years are at higher risk for depression compared with girls in their peer group who don’t. Dr. Meeker has gone so far as to assert that depression in teenage girls may often be a “sexually transmitted disease,” by which she means that having sex causes some girls to become depressed.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have reported evidence that supports her idea. They found that girls who engage in sex are indeed more likely subsequently to become depressed . . ..

As journalist and author Laura Sessions Stepp observed, for girls,

"Losing your virginity is closing the door on childhood and stepping into adulthood. If you’re not ready for it and do it anyway, it can feel ‘like death,’" as one young woman put it. "You just want to put it behind you, except that you can’t."

Stepp has also observed that today’s hookup culture, free of commitment, is “gravy for guys.” So, she asks, “How much have woman really won?”

There’s the irony. In an era that preaches gender equity, the guys have been awarded a windfall prize without lifting a finger. They can have sex not merely without marriage, but without any sort of romantic relationship.

Most cultures in most times and most places have frowned on premarital intercourse. Our culture now expects it. Indeed, teenage girls today are often ashamed to admit that they are virgins, in much the same way that girls 50 years ago would have been ashamed to admit that they were NOT virgins.

That's all that I am going to read from that. It is quite hard-hitting, quite disgusting, quite sad, to say the least.

To conclude this commentary: What does God have to say about sexual immorality?

I Corinthians 10:5-8 But with most of them [the ancient Israelites] God was not well pleased, for their bodies were scattered in the wilderness. Now these things became our examples, to the intent that we should not lust after evil things as they also lusted. And do not become idolaters as were some of them. As it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play." Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell;

Sexual immorality precedes the death penalty. God’s judgement will come on these individuals if there is not repentance.

I Thessalonians 4:3 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality;

Revelation 2:21-23 has both a physical and spiritual application. The principle here includes both:

Revelation 2:21-23 And I gave her time to repent of her sexual immorality, and she did not repent. Indeed I will cast her into a sickbed, and those who commit adultery with her into great tribulation, unless they repent of their deeds. I will kill her children with death, and all the churches shall know that I am He who searches the minds and hearts. And I will give to each one of you according to your works.

The penalty for both kinds of sexual immorality is the same. Each person will receive blessing or curse according to one’s thoughts and actions, which when combined biblically are called “works.”

Proverbs 31:10-12 Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her; so he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life [including prior to marriage].

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