America’s New Generation More Proper, More Conservative

A NEW decency is at play in American popular culture - and it coincides with the rise of a new generation that is more conservative than their rebellious Sixties-era parents.

The outcry over Janet Jackson's breast-baring stunt is one vivid aspect of a new American primness, ephemeral or not, and it has also defined decency as one wedge issue in the elections.

Post-Janet, the annual Victoria's Secret lingerie show was cancelled on national television.

Then, certain 'live' broadcasts such as the Oscars were aired only after safe five-minute video delays.

Amusingly, a recent New York Times headline declared: Sex Doesn't Sell: Miss Prim Is In.

American fashion designers like Oscar de la Renta were subverting the runways with Peter Pan collars and prim coats, and to be uptight was 'edgy', the report said.

The Federal Communications Commission made the most of this Victorian moment in the national mood by punishing Clear Channel for radio shock-jock Howard Stern's on-air comments on anal sex.

Clear Channel agreed last month to pay US $1.75 million (S$3 million) in fines.

All this while, radical Madonna, always ahead of trends, has been penning children's books, dressing demurely in Laura Ashley florals, and exalting motherhood.

Indeed, the quarterly City Magazine, which is mined by policymakers and the media for ideas and trends, highlighted America's cultural pendulum swing in its Spring 2004 edition: 'Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with 'alternative values'.

'During the last 10 years, most of the miserable trends in crime, divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like that we saw in the decades after 1965 either turned around or stalled.

'What is emerging is a vital, optimistic, family-centred, entrepreneurial, and yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.'

Mr Phillip Longman, who researches demographics and public policy, linked the Janet Jackson backlash to a magnified parental protectiveness and moderate cultural currents.

'Culturally, the US is beginning to know a brand-new generation that is more modest sexually and more committed to family,' the New America Foundation senior fellow said.

'Their parents typically wanted them really badly. They invested unprecedented amounts of attention and money on their kids, who are highly protected. People objected to Janet Jackson because their children are so precious.'

These young people belong to the new Millennial Generation of 70 million young Americans, a populous cohort born after 1980....