I begin this email with a NSFW warning. The content and images below are not suitable for work and, most likely, you may find them inappropriate and offensive. Of course, Princeton’s University Health Services finds them valid and reasonable and worthy of campus-wide distribution. Read on to catch a glimpse of the social environment students must navigate in order to obtain a leading education in American.
To celebrate Veteran’s Day in 2021 with William Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives is to regain the sense of community and shared humanity that was once taken for granted in the decades of mid-twentieth century America. This is the cultural period when the great films of the Golden Age were created in Hollywood. What we have lost, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out in The Happiness Hypothesis is that “I believe that we have indeed lost something important–a richly textured common ethos with widely shared virtues and values. Just watch movies from the 1930s and the 1940s and you’ll see people moving around in a dense web of moral fibers.”
Strategic dating is on the rise (or so we’re told by the Guardian), with women especially intent on setting boundaries in a world where dating can range from a coffee to a dinner, from casually seeing multiple people to being totally exclusive with another person – and may or may not include sex. Near-universal discontent with our society’s (bad) dating habits has spawned a plethora of groups dedicated to “dating strategies” broadly defined. Among these is the subreddit /r/Female Dating Strategy. Though it encourages women to establish boundaries and to be clear about their desires in dating, it does so by caricaturing men as inferior to women. How did this bitterness reach such a fever pitch, and what can we do to humanize the world of dating? Such strategies, along with others like /r/PickUpArtist, massively overcorrect for a lack of dating norms by denigrating or objectifying the opposite sex, promoting the use of others for personal pleasure, and neglecting the self-sacrifice required by true love. However, their chief failure consists in treating dating as an end in itself, rather than a means toward the end of marriage.
At the beginning of a new relationship, the future can seem limitless and full of promise. Nothing can dampen your feelings for your beloved, and it feels like you’re walking on sunshine. But as soon as the concrete, sometimes inconvenient truths about yourself and your beloved seep through that initial idealism, a relationship meets the first of many great tests that can transform it into something more stable and lasting. Anyone can imagine how adversity might ruin a relationship, but longtime married couples can attest to the reality that radical commitment to the right person is the key to a successful marriage. Whether you’re in the middle of discerning a relationship or persevering in marriage, gratitude and receptivity are crucial qualities to cultivate.
As students returned to campus this fall, many of them sat through orientation weeks with presentations that included guidance on safe sex practices. Foregrounded by concepts such as “consent” and “sex positivity,” there is often little to no vision of what healthy relationships look like, and no question as to whether physical intimacy should be a part of that picture. Universities continue to pursue this type of programming even as Gen Z becomes increasingly aware that concepts like “consent” and “sex positivity,” however much they comport with the progressive policies they support, have little to offer when it comes to finding real love.
In a recent Atlantic article, a woman who met and moved in with a man during COVID lockdowns in Spain emerged from quarantine only to discover she barely recognized the person with whom she had lived and shared daily intimacy. This is just one example of many COVID couples who experienced “all seclusion, no inclusion” throughout their brief relationships and are only now discovering hidden aspects of their partners through other social interactions.
We hope you tuned in to EWTN recently for a chance to hear Onalee McGraw, founder of the Educational Guidance Institute (EGI), speak about natural law and the impact of the Production Code on classic film. If you did not, and you’re wondering what “natural law” and “Production Code” mean, take a look at our extended interview with Onalee. Here she talks EGI’s founding, natural law, the Golden Age of Hollywood, censorship, and more.
Recently, we spoke in-depth with Onalee McGraw, founder of the Educational Guidance Institute, about her work on classic film and education in virtue. As a former researcher on education at the Heritage Foundation and guest on the Phil Donahue Show and Turner Classic Movies, Onalee has seen how classic films from the Golden Age of Hollywood can transform the minds and hearts of high school and college students by helping them contemplate the “large existential questions of life” – relationships, community, civic participation, and more. When we asked her why movies like It’s A Wonderful Life and The Shop Around the Corner are vital for us to see as 21st-century advocates of family, marriage, and sexual integrity, she offered the following response…
Reading Abigail Shrier’s recent New York Times piece, “To Be Young and Pessimistic in America,” is a stark reminder that each generation must face new kinds of adversity. Today’s youngest generation, Gen Z, is simultaneously contending with the contemporary technological landscape and its impact on our society while helping to shape the future in how they choose to integrate the two. And they should be good at this – after all, Gen Z is the first generation to grow up fully immersed in the online environment, and arguably best equipped to navigate its ever-evolving landscapes.
On May 3, The Daily Princetonian published a visual essay called “What I wish we were taught about sex and intimacy,” where a student described a freshman year experience with sex and intimacy. Entering Princeton with an ex-boyfriend behind her, she remembers calling a high school friend attending another school. Though the author had initially been swept up by a variety of exciting campus activities, she felt “pretty miserable and lonely.” Her experiences seemed to pale in comparison with those of her friend, who met “all these new people” and had a new hookup every weekend.