Even The Wolf likely can't clean up Harvey Weinstein's pending troubles

Just the opposite. It leads to sexually illiterate and frequently miserable marriages. Every time I had sex with my then-wife was one of those pressured-consent situations, and I had no idea just how fucked up that was because I was young and listened to my dumbass parents about not having sex until marriages, so I lacked the context to evaluate it.

 

I prefer to have sex with a fellow consenting adult while not necessarily having to be married to do it.

*takes a look at life*

Woo-hoo!

 

You do you, bud. Or her. Whatever. Just don't whine when it's your turn in the court of public opinion.

 

If this is too personal, tell me to get lost, but if I'm reading this right—your wife was the first person you had sex with?

 

If a natural consequence of going on a date and considering having sex with them is that someone gets to stick their fingers down your throat when you don't want them to, then maybe we should address that instead of just saying "Well, what could we do? It's the natural consequence."

 

Bully for you, stud. Just don't whine when it's your turn in the court of public opinion.

 

Correct. It was a toxic, codependent relationship that I think I would have had a better shot avoiding if my parents hadn't been hyperpuritan about my dating experience when I was younger.

 

This paragraph in the Atlantic piece by Caitlin Flanagan is pretty offensive, no? I don't remember getting any of this out of the Babe.net piece. Again, I would not, as an editor or writer, permit an unnamed accuser to accuse a named accuser. That said, the "clinical detail" was actually refreshing, as compared to the puritanical avoidance of important details that often frustrate these pieces. (My issue, remember, with the NYT's original Louis C.K. piece.)

Was Grace frozen, terrified, stuck? No. She tells us that she wanted something from Ansari and that she was trying to figure out how to get it. She wanted affection, kindness, attention. Perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man’s girlfriend. He wasn’t interested. What she felt afterward—rejected yet another time, by yet another man—was regret. And what she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn. The clinical detail in which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari. Together, the two women may have destroyed Ansari’s career, which is now the punishment for every kind of male sexual misconduct, from the grotesque to the disappointing.

 

I was not remotely impressed with that piece, but it's mostly not my place to argue with her. I've been enjoying seeing prominent women take it down pretty hard on the internet today.

 

How does marriage eliminate the possibility of sexual assault? I don’t get that line of thinking.

 

Yeah, I mean, one of the sub-discussions of all this stuff—"sex" is a generic term for a wide variety of behaviours. Different people like different things—radically different things—that still fall under the umbrella of sex. Not having sex before marriage, you wouldn't have had the foggiest idea whether you and your then-wife were sexually compatible. Marriage isn't just about sex, but sex is definitely part of the equation. You mismatch there, that can lead to problems elsewhere.

Not having sex before marriage is a little like deciding what you want to be when you grow up when you're 14 and never being allowed to change your mind. You kind of need to experience the world to know what you like and don't like.

I know you know this. I'm just using your experience as a jumping-off point into the larger topic of the sexual spectrum.

 

That is a really good point.