Nobody should watch HBO’s Euphoria.  It started out as a coming-of-age show about petty high schoolers experimenting with substances and indecent behaviors, and it was inappropriate then. Season 3, which came out in early April (and pulled in some 8.5 million viewers) tells the tale of the protagonists’ “of age” era as they try to make it big in Los Angeles, whether by running drugs, holding down a job, or doing risqué things in front of a camera for the sake of a few extra bucks. As you can imagine, this season has been particularly abominable. One is tempted to wonder whether streaming companies looked over the fence at PornHub, saw that the monetary grass was quite a bit greener, and decided that they too could produce that kind of content. As long as some kind of loose storyline holds everything together, people will be happy to call it a television show. It helps, of course, that the show stars Sydney Sweeney (who somehow became a right-wing heartthrob over a jeans advertisement) and Zendaya. (READ MORE: The Sydney Sweeney Ads Aren’t the Epitome of Conservatism) Unfortunately (and unsurprisingly), it’s been incredibly successful.  The moral of this story could easily be that our culture has become so incredibly degraded that this is what passes for entertainment. We could be producing great art and stories designed to inspire us to achieve greater virtue, but instead media companies shove this kind of stuff into our living rooms and, because it appeals to our basest passions, we just kind of accept it. Except, we haven’t. In one of its better moments, the internet seems to have discovered that it is still capable of being shocked by the inappropriate. I won’t go into the details of what exactly incited this reaction, but suffice it to say that Euphoria hasn’t quite gotten plaudits all the way around. And, to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt, it seems quite possible that this is precisely the point. (READ MORE: The Lost Art of Film Advertising — and Film Making) As Suzy Weiss pointed out at the Free Press, “It’s basically designed to shock ‘normal people,’ … with something that they don’t see every day; to confront them with what’s going on around them, all the time.” In other words, the message the show conveys (at least according to Weiss) is that we live in a grossly decadent society. These issues — especially pornography — are incredibly real problems that afflict a larger portion of society than we would like to admit. Back in 2018, a study found that 91.5 percent of men and 60.2 percent of women had consumed pornography in just the month prior. Those kinds of numbers should be mind-boggling.  The best-case scenario might be that HBO’s depiction of Sydney Sweeney as a porn star was meant to shock its audience enough to galvanize some kind of change — although their methods seem somewhat questionable, given that they’re conveniently making money on Sweeney’s behavior. Regardless of the intent, the show will probably be unsuccessful as a means of curing society of pornography by exposing society to just how disgusting and dehumanizing lust can be. In fact, it’s far more likely to move the Overton Window in precisely the wrong direction. It’s rarely the case that exposing a large audience to a shocking vice works as a way of persuading that audience that the vice ought to be expunged from anyone’s personal life. While it’s true that we might be disgusted the first time we see such debauchery, it’s hardly shocking by the third or fourth time. Eventually, it will even seem commonplace. If we’re serious about persuading our society to conquer vice, we need to move the cultural Overton Window in precisely the opposite direction. Wholesome stories and themes should be the norm. The more we excise inappropriate behaviors in our shows, films, and art, the more shocking it will be when we come across even mild depictions of them.  After all, who doesn’t want to live in a society where chastity is the public norm? READ MORE by Aubrey Harris: Medicaid Wasn’t Built For Man. Ohio Fraud Proves It.