Jeff Jacoby's Essay 'A Desensitized Society'

The essay ‘A Desensitized Society’ by Jeff Jacoby starts off explaining how, when he was seventeen, Jacoby decided to go out and sees an explicit movie. Little to his surprise, the movie horrified him, “what I saw on the screen I’d never seen—I’d never even Imagined—before.” He said earlier in the essay that he “burned with curiosity” because he wanted to see it, but later stated that “This wasn’t arousing, it was repellant. I was shocked, more than that: I was ashamed.” He states that “I was an innocent at seventeen. I was naïve and inexperienced, shy with girls, the product of a parochial-school education and a strict upbringing.” Jacoby goes on to discuss how society today is way more desensitized to explicit things now, than when he was …show more content…
We grow jaded. Depravity becomes more and more tolerable because less and less scandalizes us.” Jacoby uses an array of different personal and factual evidence to effectively appeal to the people’s emotions. He gives a personal example at the start of the story that discusses how old he was and how he felt when he first saw that X-rated movie, “like any seventeen-year-old boy whose sex life is mostly theoretical—I burned with curiosity… I paid, I endured, I watched. For about twenty minutes… What I saw on the screen I’d never seen—I’d never even imagined—before.” He uses this personal example to draw more people in and explain to them how this whole concept of explicit movies was foreign to him. Now, however, he states that “Today another sex scene is just another sex scene.” Jacoby provides factual evidence such as stating that “Central park joggers get raped and beaten into comas” and “Los Angeles rioters burn down their neighborhood and murder dozens of their neighbors.” He also states that “Lorena Bobbitt mutilates her husband in his sleep…Pro-life fanatics open fire on abortion clinics... The U.S. Naval Academy fills up with cheaters” and last he states how “the teen suicide rate goes through the roof.” The factual evidence serves to prove just how desensitized people are becoming especially through the sentence directly following these examples: “And we get used to it all. We don’t blush.” Another thing Jacoby does is he brings up a question that forces people to take a second and think about. He says “And if a decade and a half of being exposed to this stuff can leave me jaded—with my background, my religious schooling, my disciplined