Duality In American Society

Throughout my childhood, my dad shared many stories with me, and although many came and went from my mind by the time he was done telling them, there is one story that has always struck a chord with me. At the age of fourteen, my dad was patrolling the halls as a hall monitor at Nightingale Middle School in Los Angeles. Though his usual days consisted of the exhilarating task of doing nothing all day, this particular day took an interesting turn when found a girl, sitting alone in a corner and in tears. When he asked her what was wrong, she confessed that she had kissed a boy, which according to her mom, meant she was pregnant! Of course, after calming her down, my dad told her that she was not in fact pregnant and directed her to the library

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A notable one is the dualistic nature of thought common within our society. According to Douglas C. Bowman, author of Beyond The Modern Mind: The Spiritual and Ethical Challenge of the Environmental Crisis, Dualism “means simply that we view our world in a twofold manner. We think our way into distinctions, not relationships. We split the world into good-bad, right-wrong, true-false… Always dividing by two, we think we have arrived at a measure of understanding when we say ‘It is this, not that’” (Bowman, 7-8). In Bowman’s eyes, our society runs on a dualistic thought process and if a This idea that there are only two options presented a dilemma when it comes to the issue of sex as it leads it with only the characterizations of “good” or “bad” with no room for a middle ground. In my case, my encounter with the idea of sex through pornography that proved to be a bit traumatic to younger me to classify sex as a whole as something bad rather than just pornography which is far from a true representation for sex. At least at my church, I had always been taught that any form of sexual act whether it be masturbation or trying to conceive a child constituted a form of sin with no buts about it. The combination of