A New Twist On the Oldest Profession

The god of our age is on display on eBay. Actually, I don’t know where the auction is being conducted, but wherever it is, it’s generating a lot of interest. As the media constantly bombards us with reports of severe economic hardships, this auction is bucking the trend by drawing bids in excess of $3.7 million. That’s a lot of money in good economic times, much less the supposed “crisis” times we’re living in.

What is the object being auctioned? The medically certified virginity of a 22-year old California girl named Natalie Dylan. Natalie isn’t your stereotypical prostitute. She has an undergraduate degree in Women’s Studies (whatever that is) and is pursuing a masters degree in—get this—Family and Marriage Therapy. She got the sex-auction idea from her big sister, Avia. Being a good role model, 23 year-old Avia paid for her degree by working as a prostitute for three weeks. Instead of “working” for three weeks, Natalie is only offering a one-night stand.

Frankly, this astounds me on so many levels, I am having trouble articulating my thoughts. But I really shouldn’t be so astounded, because the god of this age has been manifesting itself in similar ways for years. In his book, Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance, Dr. Albert Mohler quotes historian Christopher Dawson from the 1930s:

Western civilization at the present day is passing through a crisis which is essentially different from anything that has previously been experienced. Other societies in the past have changed their social institutions or their religious beliefs under the influence of external forces or the slow development of internal growth. But none, like our own, has ever consciously faced the prospect of a fundamental alteration of the beliefs and institutions on which the whole fabric of social life rests.

What Dr. Dawson presciently wrote in the 1930s has come to fruition before our eyes. The fact that Ms. Dylan is selling her virginity is shocking, but prostitution has been a fact of life for all of recorded history. What seems unprecedented is the nearly unanimous gleeful support she is receiving. Those who oppose her actions are considered crazy, puritanically prudish fundamentalists. The reaction to Ms. Dylan’s auction is a bellwether of the moral putridity which is rapidly oozing to the surface in this generation. Dr. Mohler puts it well:

The very habits of human life—the customs and traditions on which civilization is grounded—are now being reversed, marginalized, and discarded in an effort to eliminate all norms by normalizing the abnormal. For those whose agenda is to undermine Judeo-Christian morality and to disconnect Western civilization from biblical norms, there is no better strategy than to subvert marriage, family, and sexuality, unleashing on society an age and culture of polymorphous perversity [Sigmund Freud’s coined terminology for a completely unrestrained, infantile stage of pure animal sexuality].

Ephesians 4:19-20