Just recently, a 40-something friend confessed a fact about herself that blew me away: She hasn’t set foot inside a movie theater since she was three years old.

In her childhood, the family budget precluded jaunts to the theater. The introduction of videos, DVDs, and streaming services one by one afforded her plenty of film entertainment without the padded seats and popcorn. Moreover, the last couple of decades offered fewer movies that interested her, in part because she refuses to see films featuring sex and gore. “I guess I’m a prude,” she said.

My online Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines a prude as “a person who is excessively or priggishly attentive to propriety or decorum, especially: a woman who shows or affects extreme modesty.” The word is associated with prudence.

Synonyms from another online source include puritan, prig, killjoy, moralist, Mrs. Grundy, schoolmarm, and goody two-shoes. Mrs. Grundy derives from a late-18th century play in which an unseen character, Mrs. Grundy, stands for propriety. Goody two-shoes comes from another literary work of the same century, a children’s tale about a poor orphaned girl who’s proud of owning two shoes. Puritan, of course, descends from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, though Puritans were not particularly prudish.

My friend doesn’t really fit any of these boxes, though. She has a great sense of humor, laughs mostly at herself – and she laughs a lot – and takes an interest in other people rather than going on and on about herself. She does try to dress modestly and appropriately depending on the situation and rarely, if ever, curses.

She’s also a devout Christian who believes that watching movies drenched in obscenities, bloodshed, and sex damages the soul and offends God. Do those standards make her a prig, a killjoy, a prude?

If we contrast today’s movies to those available when my friend was three – and for that matter, contrast as well our literature, spoken language, and manners and morals – most of us might agree that our culture is coarser than at any other time in our history. Ironically, many of us pride ourselves on this transition, mocking the prudery of the past.

We also like to say that films just reflect our society, the way we are and the times we live in, but that is misleading. Movies do mirror the times, yet they also shape the times, transforming us and our behavior.

The same holds true for other cultural arenas. The erotic book “Fifty Shades of Grey,” for instance, created a bevy of copycat romances, as many have noted and as can be seen by the shelves of my public library. “50 Shades” and its imitators didn’t just reflect a female desire for soft porn, they helped create that desire and make it a part of culture.

Music and public performances work the same way. I didn’t watch either of this year’s Super Bowl halftime shows, but I would ask those who watched the Bad Bunny performance: Is this the best America has to offer? Is this the public face we want associated with our country?

Recently, while helping a friend recover from surgery, he suggested watching some television. With my daily work completed, I agreed. He selected a series, “Ozark,” which he’d seen but which was new to me. In the opening episode, the F-word abounded, one scene featured adultery, a Mexican cartel murdered four or five people, the corpse of another cartel victim was inexplicably thrown from a high rise apartment to the street, and the father of the American family we’re supposed to cheer for was laundering money for the cartel, making him as responsible for the deaths of hundreds as the drugs that killed them. There were no heroes in this show.

One episode was enough for me.

If my refusal to watch any more of that junk makes me a prude, then I proudly accept the titles of Mr. Grundy and Granddad Goody Two-shoes.

I wasn’t always so selective about the movies I watched or the books I read, and I still watch older shows that might cause my non-filmgoing friend to blush. For the most part, however, the culture and I called it quits a good while back.

Which brings up questions I ponder from time to time: How far down this rabbit hole of crudity will America fall? Is there a bottom? And how long can a culture stand on a foundation made of mud and swamp water?

We would all do well to ask those questions not only about America but also about our own lives.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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