What’s a 20-something single girl to do for Valentine’s Day?  Perhaps a current chick flick and some M&M’s with a girlfriend?  But this season as movie-goers and critics yawn through Hollywood’s latest shot at romantic comedy, Because I said So, and critics call the movie a 100-minute commercial for Restoration Hardware, I have to ask what happened to romance?!  Love doesn’t seem to be in the air on or off the screen.

I am not the only one noticing that tinsel town has lost its love story mojo.  Hugh Grant, the notorious Brit charmer and star of Valentine’s Day romantic comedy, Music and Lyrics, muses in a recent Los Angeles Times interview that scripts that “work” in his genre are rare:

“Romantic comedies have become very difficult to do since the sexual revolution in the 60’s…are they going to shag?  If they don’t, it’s weird, and once they do, all that delicious preamble…what’s that delicious word?... all that banter…before you could still feel this electricity through wicked dialogues.” 

Might Grant be alluding to the all but forgotten notion of courtship?  The sexual tension and emotional suspense that make a juicy story dry up when sex is a foregone conclusion.  The fact is that in our culture where sex is omnipresent and demystified the sizzle of romance seems to be sputtering out.  

Why are love stories on the silver screen so boring?  Maybe it has something to do with “reality entertainment.”  Shows like Real World turn sex into an act as regular as a Metamucil user (and equally intriguing).  The Newlyweds (Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson) was one of many shows that let America eavesdrop on the ins and outs of celebrity marriages (all of which have since dissolved). 

The boundaries between entertainment and reality are blurry; the mystery behind entertainment love stories is obliterated by the bright lights exposing the “cellulite of glamorous romances.”  With the affairs, break-ups and sex tapes of the Brangelina, and Paris Hiltons in plain view, how is on-screen fictional love supposed to compete and muster spark?  Sex is just not that big of a deal anymore.

Film historian Molly Haskell reflects, “Sex is so easy you can’t pretend it’s the Holy Grail.  The condition that made for the sparkle and sexiness of the old films was the fact that there wasn’t any sex.   You could easily keep two people apart for and hour and a half.  Now the ways of keeping them apart are increasingly strained.” 

Gone with the wind are the days of love stories to swoon over, cast with the classics—Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Gregory Peck.  These films capture romantic spark that seems inimitable today.  There wasn’t anything ideal about these stars’ real-life sagas for the most part…it’s just that they didn’t star in reality TV—their lives weren't on “train-wreck television.”

That brings me to Anna Nicole Smith, the larger-than-life public spectacle.  America spent countless hours watching the antics of the over-sexualized glamour façade painted onto a desperate Texas girl.  Her celebrity exploded and her life grew into a sideshow.  She was always ridiculous and good for a cheap laugh.  With her death comes a sobering remembrance that somewhere in the Anna Nicole act was a human being—with a soul.

Not only is Anna Nicole’s story unromantic; it is dehumanizing.  She herself said that her breasts were the only two reasons she had any of the celebrity that became her life.  What we see on tabloid covers are not human beings with dignity—just sex, scandal and meltdowns. 

This anti-romance, dehumanizing epidemic is not quarantined to the Osbournes and the glitterati—it overflows into the lives of “normal people” as most of us (perhaps unwittingly) take cues from the pop culture we are saturated in. 

Carrie Bradshaw (the main character in the HBO series, Sex and the City) has enormous influence over the way many young women approach relationships.  I have to admit that I passed many an evening in college lounging with the girls watching the sexual escapades of Carrie and her friends… miss the show and you might as well count yourself out of dinner conversation for a week.  I have heard multiple girls ask in earnest attempt to navigate romance: “What would Carrie Do?”  The answer is always the same: go for sexual fulfillment—as much as you can get!

How does Hollywood’s love advice play out for the romance-hungry?  A study by the Independent Women’s Forum entitled “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mister Right—College Women on Mating and Dating Today” discovered that about 90 percent of college women report marriage as an important goal.  The study also unearthed the dominant form of “romantic interlude” on college campuses today—the hook-up.  Hooking up can be anything from kissing to sex, and often implies tipsy-to-trashed escapades.

According to the IWF 40 percent of women report having hooked-up, and 61 percent of these admit to feeling ‘awkward’.  There is a problem with this picture: the objectives at hand for many young women (and a surprisingly large portion of young men) are lasting love and marriage.  The tactic employed is hooking up.  Lo and behold we don’t find what we are searching for.  We long for Casablanca but act like Animal House, and are sincerely stymied about how to make a course correction.

We often turn to surrounding “authorities” for help making sense of sex, love and desire.  But they fail us.  I have seen the crestfallen face of many a friend who has slept around in search of romantic connection, and woken up the next day with a painful sense that “this is not how it was supposed to feel.”  What does our culture have to say to them?  “As long as you used a condom and don’t have an STD, you had fun, he had fun, it felt good—what more do you want?”

Many public forums have let materialism draw the boundaries of “legitimate” knowledge and conversation.  From the standpoint of secular materialism, there is nothing beyond the physical realm, so sex becomes only a physical act—a mammalian procreative mechanism, and means to pleasurable sensations.  The implied advice to the heartsick girl is: there is no supernatural, meaningful aspect of sex.  Your empty, used-up feeling is not based on anything real.  There is no reason you should hold out for more in love or life…because there is no such thing as “more.” 

This is a lie!  Most people experience profound love in their lives.  But so long as secularism and materialism dominate public conversation, this lie will keep being told.  Those who believe the lie will discover that there is more to love than senseless sensation the hard way…through the heartache, the knot in the pit of their stomachs and burning tears that they can’t explain away.

In his article “The End of Courtship,” Leon Kass observes that for a long time “young people were groomed for marriage, and the paths leading to it were culturally well set out…today there are no socially-prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony…for the great majority the way to the altar is uncharted territory.”

In her book, Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity, Lauren Winner suggests that the key to fulfilling relationships has to do with modesty—can’t you just see the movie deals lining up for that one?  Modesty in women has a way of evoking chivalry in men—inspiring the inclination to seek the good of the other over his own primal desires.  Ultimately a woman’s restraint, and the man’s resulting respect make a woman feel safe—secured to promise to forsake all others in order to nurture and love one man and his children.  This perpetuates the man’s confidence, strength and motivation to protect and provide for “his own.”

While modesty and chastity lack “sexiness,” the fact is that lasting love is nourished by dailiness and ordinariness.  If we don’t want lasting love in real life to go the way of Titanic our first order of business is to jettison Hollywood’s fast, free and over-exposed version of love. 

Happy Valentine’s Day to all you true romantics.

Controversy is sparked by a Ph.D. granted by University of Rhode Island to a paleontologist who is also a young earth creationist

Monday's New York Times features a front page article on a paleontologist/ creationist who believes that the earth is "at most 10,000 years old."

"There is nothing unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island," Cornelia Dean writes.

"His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago," the article continues. "The work is 'impeccable,' said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Dr. Ross's dissertation adviser."

"But Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist," Dean writes. "He is a 'young earth creationist' -- he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old."

The article continues, "Today he teaches earth science at Liberty University, the conservative Christian institution founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell where, Dr. Ross said, he uses a conventional scientific text."

"We also discuss the intersection of those sorts of ideas with Christianity," Ross tells the Times. "I don’t require my students to say or write their assent to one idea or another any more than I was required."

According to a biography found online by RAW STORY, Ross "is greatly interested in issues surrounding the creation-evolution controversy and the intersection of geology with the Biblical events of creation and Noah's Flood."

Raw Story

'Deal reached' at N Korea talks

A tentative deal to curtail North Korea's nuclear programme has been reached at six-party talks in Beijing. US envoy Christopher Hill said intense negotiations had produced "an excellent draft" outlining various steps forward.

The deal is thought to focus on promises of energy aid to North Korea, in return for it beginning to disarm.

But the agreement still needs approval from each of the six nations involved, and Japan has already voiced doubts of it sticking.

BBC News

Wandering Toward the Altar

In 1997, Leon Kass published an essay called "The End of Courtship" in a quarterly journal devoted principally to matters of domestic public policy. Kass was not suggesting new federal guidelines on dating, but was describing a social condition which laws and policies addressing marriage and divorce had failed to reckon with. The article made the argument that, growing up in contemporary society, young people are by and large not given any guidance about how to prepare for married life. As Kass wrote, "Courtship provided rituals of growing up, for making clear the meaning of one's own human sexual nature, and for entering into the ceremonial and customary world of ritual and sanctification. Courtship disciplined sexual desire and romantic attraction, provided opportunities for mutual learning about one another's character, fostered salutary illusions that inspired admiration and devotion, and, by locating wooer and wooed in their familial settings, taught the inter-generational meaning of erotic activity. It pointed the way to the answers to life's biggest questions: Where are you going? Who is going with you? How--in what manner--are you both going to go?"

Mars Hill Audio

A Fresh Voice on a timeless topic:

An Interview with Lauren Winner-author of Real Sex

The Other Journal: Both you and Wendell Berry discuss the idea of sex outside of marriage as merely a distorted imitation of sex. When intercourse is portrayed in movies, T.V., or other media such as pornography, it becomes only what an artist, director, or screenwriter interprets it to be. So often, then, media defines for the rest of us what is erotic. Can you help to describe erotic and also what happens when the erotic becomes a commodity? Have we turned “erotic” into an idea about individual pleasure and therefore don’t have a healthy view of what erotic is?

Lauren Winner: Yes – yes, we’ve done just that. Think of how many movies depict sex, and then think of how many movies depict sex between married couples – most depict sex between unmarried people, or between people who are married to other people. Pop culture gives us very few pictures of what sex looks like between a couple that has been married for 5 years, or 15 years, or 35 years.

So the pictures and scripts we have in our head are of decidedly unordinary sex. We learn from these images to equate eroticism with newness.

TOJ: In your book, you discuss the idea of chastity being more than merely saving sex for marriage. Can you discuss this and include in this discussion the idea that one of the churches only resources to discourage premarital sex, and sin, to be guilt. The result being, that when one doesn’t feel guilty, they continue to have sex or indulge in sins of their choice. What resources should the Church or communities be using to encourage chastity?

LW: For starters, we don’t always feel guilty when we sin. Our feelings are broken and fallen, distorted by sin, and thus not consistently in touch with what is really real – hence, sometimes we do something that is sinful, that is bad for us, and we don’t feel bad. So, for that reason (as well as other reasons) guilt trips are not great ways to keep people on the straight and narrow.

Further, Jesus did not run around guilt tripping people. He described for them the kingdom of God and invited them into it. And he also described the consequences of saying no to that invitation. I think we can model all of our discipleship—not just discussions of sex and chastity—on that – start with a positive presentation of what is good and true about the Christian story of sex – talk about how this is good news – and then also discuss what the ‘no’ to this good news looks like. When I speak to college students about sex, for example, I always include a discussion of the ways my years of premarital sex misshaped how I understand sex. I still, two years into my marriage, have to unlearn the idea that something has to be new and uncertain to be sexy; I am still learning what it looks like for stability and real intimacy to be sexy. But I also always discuss the promises of forgiveness and repentance. To talk about the effect of sinful behavior without proclaiming loudly that God forgives sin is patently unbiblical. Further, it is, in my view, always important to underscore that virginity is not the litmus test of sexual sinlessness. Though I certainly believe that one who, like me, marries after having sex has something to mourn, it is also important to recall that by Jesus’ standard – the standard of lust – everyone of us has sexual sin and sexual brokenness to deal with.

The Other Journal

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