A World Of Chaotic Confusion

In the early 1900s, a “respectable” woman wore an average of twenty-five pounds of clothing when she appeared in public. The sight of an ankle could cause scandal. Over the next hundred years the pendulum swung to the other extreme.

Today, scantily clad, hyper-eroticized images of the human body have become the cultural wallpaper; and graphic, hard-core pornography has become our main reference point for the “facts of life.” Is it any wonder in our post–sexual revolution world that our deepest, most painful wounds as human beings often center on our sexuality? And by “sexuality” I mean not only what we do with our genitals behind closed doors but also our very sense of ourselves as male and female. We live in a world of chaotic, widespread gender confusion, a world that seems intent on erasing the essential meaning of sexual difference from the individual and collective consciousness.