I have to say that I think "glamorizing" is pretty much what's happened. We, (by which I mean "western culture") have not only stripped the taboos from promiscuous sex, we've turned it into "the norm" - people who don't screw around are looked at as weirdos, kids feel pressure to start having sex by nineth grade and the standard defense is that "people are always going to have sex" - which is pretty humorous given the huge jump in unwed birth rates in the 70's and 80's - if they were always having sex, and now had access to abortion, why did the birth rates jump up?

Meanwhile, through music, TV and movies children are constantly being informed that cool, beautiful people have sex frequently. So much so that even 7 and 8 year olds refer to each other as "pimps" and "hos" without any understanding of how degrading those terms really are.

Sorry for getting off on a rant her, but it really frustrates me how hard I have to work to convince my daughter that there's more to look forward to in life than jiggling her ass on MTV.

I can have moral (spiritual) objections to promiscuity without remotely coming close to advocating criminalizing it, since the sole legitimate role of government is not to legislate morality but to protect life, liberty, and property. I shouldn't even have to write that, but nowadays every discussion of morality (holiness) gets turned into a discussion of legality if I don't preface my dogmatizing with such a disclaimer.

Promiscuity, and the Naturalist philosophy underlying it, is wrong because it involves a fundamental contradiction. Sex, by definition, is passion. How can you be casual about passion? Naturalism reduces sex to something far less than "it" (i.e., he and she, he and he, she and she) is. Contrary to what the Naturalists say, sex is "a big deal".

"Promiscuity is immoral, not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important."
-Ayn Rand (Playboy interview, 1964)

I hold that sex is the expression of one's deepest and highest values, of one's self.

"The kind and degree of one's sexuality reaches up into the very pinnacle of one's spirit."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

"The noble soul has reverence for itself."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I hold that sex is ultimately either sacrament or sacrilege. Sex is an act of worship, the passion of the Divine in one's self for the Divine in the other's self. The total passion for the total height. The Ego striving for the Infinite. Sex reaches its highest intensity, not in promiscuity, but in Romantic love, the love that finds its full expression in a vow of exclusive eternal fidelity, of total commitment.

That is where I stand. I can do no other. Polytheistic Godliness, Selfishness, Sexiness. Up With Beauty!

"Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn. I was willing to hold the huge estate of heaven and earth by any such feudal fantasy. It could not be wilder than the fact that I was allowe to hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of the rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind."
-G. K. Chesterton, "The Ethics of Elfland", Orthodoxy

Sex is not glamorized enough!

There's also a philosophical question. If glamorization causes some people to have sex, and if rap music causes some men to abuse women, what about the fact that many people are NOT so influenced?

I think it means that people allow THEMSELVES to be influenced, and may be seeking out these influences. If that is the case, then how fair is it to blame the influences themselves? Who buys and listens to rap music? Who purchases and is aroused by pornography? Isn't this a bit like blaming alcoholism on distilleries?

I think it means that people allow THEMSELVES to be influenced, and may be seeking out these influences.

You're thinking in terms of a mature mind; which is normal for someone who isn't around children all the time.

The problem (with rap, promiscuity, Tom Sawyer, Rush Limbaugh, everything, really) is that an adult mind is capable of making critical choices and informed decisions.

Hrm. I'm trying to figure out how to say this clearly and I'm not having a lot of luck, so let me jump straight to my point: what you are exposed to, as a child, is what you, as an adult, will consider normal. If, as a child, you world view is filled with men beating women - particularly men you admire - then you will see beating women as normal. If, as a child, you are constantly exposed to women who use their sexuality as their primary tool for surviving in the world then you will tend to believe that that is what women must do to get by.

Note that you allude to this in your "Bad grief" post - Americans are being taught to grieve over things that, in the past they wouldn't have been grief stricken over.

Well, if Americans can be taught to be neurotic, why can't they be taught to be promiscuous?

"Who purchases and is aroused by pornography?"

Mostly, people with no imagination.

"Who buys and listens to rap music?"

People with no taste.

I'm conservative. I don't believe that children should be exposed to sex at all. I'm very glad that I had never heard of sex when I was a child. As I said, sex is the deepest expression of one's self. Therefore, you must have time to have a self, to build a self, before you can have any true understanding of what sex is, of what sex means.

You wrote:
"MORE: There's something I touched on but didn't much discuss, but which I think is at least as relevant -- that attempts to discourage something can nonetheless glamorize it just as much attempts to discourage it. Many a social ill (and many a social good, for that matter) has been encouraged and spread by persecution, and by attempts to stamp it out. To the extent that there is a promiscuous sex "movement," I think it thrives as a result of the forces which claim devotion to stamping it out and to a "showdown" against it."

That is why sex needs prohibitions, taboos, mystery, the aura of the forbidden, to keep sex glamorous and sexy. The Gnostic needs the Jehovanist.