Hieronymus
AAQC-winning posts:
User ID: 419
Hieronymus
20d ago
By way of example, because I guess this is what schools do now, or maybe just my daughter's old school, "Please walk away" was the prescribed phrase kids were told to use when another kid was bothering them. Sounds polite right? Your inner monologue reading that probably made it sound as nice as can be, yeah?
Not at all. My first impression is to read it as either a condescending sneer or a threat of violence, depending on the tone. It’s crazy that someone would offer that to children as a social script.
Hieronymus
26d ago
I think that we in the modern West struggle to understand these things because we have lost the understanding that intentionally tempting someone is a sin, and we have lost the ideas we need to discuss two people sinning against one another.
This can result in some unexpected and kind of weird Shiri’s scissors. Take the Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse: As the song is written, the male singer is trying to convince the female singer to stay the night by offering her a series of plausible excuses to do so; she kind of wants to but knows she shouldn’t, or at least that she’s expected not to. His tone is best described as playfully predatory.
That breaks people’s minds. Since there is no longer any socially acceptable category for culpable seduction, everyone tries to collapse the wave function into either “cute coming of age story” or “rape.” About ten years ago I heard a middle school choir (ages 11–14) perform the song with cigarettes and booze removed but sexual implications left altogether intact. On the other hand, people have been decrying the song’s radio play for years now on the grounds that it glorifies rape, which is the only moral category many people have for predatory sex.
Much of the yes-means-yes advocacy seemed to me to come from the same place. College girls had sex that they came to understand on some level was Not Okay. They (often correctly) accused college boys of exploiting them, and the boys (often correctly) pointed out that the sex was consensual. There is a natural temptation for everyone to claim innocence by projecting all the guilt onto the other party, but in this case the kids didn’t have a fighting chance: Their elders had robbed them of any moral categories outside “rape” and “not rape.”
So yes, I have known the Christian woman who sleeps with her boyfriend and, when asked, points out that this is what is expected of her to continue the relationship, and I acknowledge that this a real temptation placed upon her. I also know that she has a normal libido, and that on some level she was using the expectation as an excuse to do what she wanted to do. Her responsibility doesn’t render him innocent, and vice-versa.
I will certainly not claim to know how socially conservative secularists should navigate the current landscape. Both men and women have said that trying to do the right thing often feels like a sucker’s bet, and I believe them. I think that we in conservative churches can start by dating and marrying only sincere fellow believers, which we should be doing anyway. But that doesn’t address the underlying issue.
Hieronymus
26d ago
... I would probably mostly be worrying about holding [the baby] wrong and injuring it or something.
This is a normal feeling, but once you hold a baby or two for a while you get past it fairly quickly.
I suggest a Manhattan and a chrysanthemum. For the Manhattan, I find that Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth goes well with a high rye bourbon, while the more intense vermouths that are beloved of craft bartenders, like Carpano Antica, really want a rye whiskey; both ways are good. The chrysanthemum is delicious and lower proof as cocktails go, because its base “spirit” is dry vermouth, but you have to like the two or three dashes of absinthe to appreciate it.
More options
Context Copy link