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

Right, but they're still talking about Babe and what it is and isn't doing. I could certainly be wrong, but I don't think those same articles would be published if it were the NYT or even something like the Daily Beast. (And a lot of that is that I don't think this piece would have run in those publications to begin with.)

Babe, obviously, is viewed as having some sort of implicit task of helping advance that movement. Jezebel, maybe. Buzzfeed? But I don't think those pieces get written about mainstream pubs.

 

Good point ... I hope*


*Said the father of a soon-to-be-24YO daughter and a soon-to-be-21YO son ...

 

When @SpeedTchr and @doctorquant were young adults, David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant were having sex that would make Aziz Ansari's head spin. And make no mistake, Ansari is the David Bowie-level celebrity of today with 23-year-olds.

 

Ansari wishes he could do things out of the blue.

 

Sometimes even with each other; not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

One thing we don't know is how the texting and talking relationship between Ansari and Grace proceeded in the days before the date. Maybe there was a lot of sexual innuendo preceding the date that established expectations.

 

Dancin' in the sheets.

 

Yup. Maybe Aziz and Ron Swanson had some good times together.

 

Indeed, perhaps she should release some of those texts to see how it all led up to the white wine and oral sex dinner date.

 

Shrug. OK.

You appear to know very little about actual Christianity, FWIW. Right-wing, Republican culture war Christianity - of which I want no part and have never had any part - embraced that deluded nonsense in response to the 1960s and 1970s.

Actual Christianity does indeed stand behind sexual ethics that say to save sex for marriage - for men and women.

But consider how progressive that actually is.

If men, in theory, didn't see women as pre-marriage sex objects to collect and count, would the world be more or less hostile toward women? If most Americans didn't view the world through the twin "enlightened" prisms of sex and money, but instead looked at people as created beings from an all-powerful God, do you think we'd treat each other better or worse?

And I'll cop to this again: That I believe men who seem progressive generally aren't, but are instead affecting a posture that impresses and manipulates the women around them. Because the underlying cultural currency - sex, money - hasn't changed.

Cran, all of our education, enlightenment and supposed development brought us to elect the dumbest, vilest, most corrupt president we've ever had. 63 million people stood behind that oaf. What more proof do you need? America a picked a known devil to lead it. Instead of playing the secular moralist and shaming the majority of those millions, like they were infected with the shitty gene or something, I've sought to, instead, consider the cultural factors that brought America to electing a tinpot fool celebrity who's lied, cheated and sexually abused his way through life.

Then you have the MeToo movement, in which we're learning about all of the ways - all of the ways - women have been disrespected, harassed and mistreated over the years. And I'd assume men are learning things such as, oh, all that progress we thought we made wasn't really progress at all.

The most disturbing thing to me in the Ansari piece were, in a sense, his intentions within seconds of getting in his apartment. Because those kinds of intentions, while inherent in any man, are nevertheless developed to kick in that efficiently. In other words, he'd done it enough - with enough women who were down with it - to simply presume it. Grace wasn't the first Grace. Before this Grace there was another Grace who almost certainly had given an "enthusiastic yes" to be "fucked" where she wanted - that she'd given big, happy yesses to all it - what's that say about her? What's that say about him? That, in a few hours of spending time together, the only thing these two could think of doing was heading back to his place for a token lay?

To quote Flannery O'Connor's last line in A Good Man is Hard to Find: "It's no real pleasure in life."

In a sense, my perspective is much more radical - and dangerous - to the American patriarchy. When women collectively don't define themselves by their sexual rights - which, as the massive traffic toward free porn and Instagram models tell you, clearly happens - that's revolutionary. NO is a great word. NO has power. To not equip women with NO and replace it with "consistent, enthusiastic yes every five minutes for each escalating emotional and confusing event" is a liberal linguistic trick in search of non-profit grant funding, social media validation or Internet traffic.

 

Should prostitution be legal?

 

I don't know if you read him much, but National Review's David French has been working similar corners for awhile, decrying what he calls a "consent morality" ...

The Claims Against Aziz Ansari Reveal the Defects of Modern Sexual Morality