What Does It Mean You Be Truly Liberated?

Mixed Messages
What does it mean to be truly liberated? “Liberation implies freedom to do what you have already been doing or have meant to do. It unbars what is native to you, free in cost and freely your possession, and removes the iron weight of social interdiction” (Greif), says Michael Greif author of “Afternoon of the Sex Children”. He suggests that I live without limits, and disregard the judgments that will be made if I live this way. Unfortunately, society doesn’t make it that easy. Everywhere I go, I’m influenced by the standards society holds through the media. Currently, the media is one huge contradiction. It urges this idea of doing whatever I want, but then also pushes me to conform to the standards of society.
During my freshman year of high school, I had to take a sexual education class, and like some high school freshman, I was uncomfortable and weirded out by the topic. I did not want to hear an old man talk about sexually transmitted diseases and contraception methods. Sex was the farthest thing from my mind at that age. While I was growing up, my parents didn’t allow to me watch all the newest TV shows and music videos, so at the time, I wasn’t influenced by the media as compared to my peers who were already exposed to people like Trey Songz, who only ever sings about sex. It was apparent that they had a completely different perspective on sex than I did. Greif briefly mentions how the media subliminally teaches children to become sex children in his essay. In it he states, “The representatives of the sex child in our entertainment culture are often 18 to 21—legal adults. The root of their significance is that their sexual value points backward, to the status of the child, and not forward to the adult. So ...

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... Witherspoon, and are labeled as old - fashioned and prudes by the media. The views of the media, parallels how society places its standards.
As a society, I believe we’ve been liberalized but not truly liberated. Compared to a few decades ago, society has come a long way in terms of accepting sexuality as part of our culture. It’s acceptable for people to engage in premarital sex, but society is not as free as it should be. During the sixties and seventies, society started to make a move towards liberation during the sexual revolution and then suddenly made a swing back in the opposite direction. I’m not sure why this occurred, but our society is right back in the mindset that sex and sexuality is okay but it is not acceptable to freely discuss it. Technically, I am free to do as I please, but the intense scrutiny that I would receive limits how think and behave.