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Their long-term feelings are their responsibility, no? The idea that a man should refrain from enjoying a multi-year relationship with a woman, which she also enjoys at the time, because he somehow knows that she'll feel bad after, is rank paternalism.
If you really did somehow know... Then yeah. Build memories with others that they will cherish not memories they will regret. Intentionally exploiting the naive and shortsighted is rotten behavior.
But from everything I've seen in this thread it looks like Neil had every reason to believe he was building positive memories here. It brings to mind traumatic pains I myself have felt- the buyer's remorse of realizing that the things I did to bring other's happiness has brought them pain is just awful.
I'm just projecting here but- empathetically I imagine Gaiman as going through something similar. We have a duty to at least look back in post and imagine whether that pain might have been prevented. Might be preventable in the future.
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The actual social conservative response to this is yeschad.jpg. The idea that a resource as socially valuable as access to prime-age pussy should be under the absolute control of people as irresponsible as teenage girls is obviously silly if you start from the basic moral perspective of pre-liberal conservatism. Under herder* culture patriarchy, fooling around with a girl in a way which leaves her as damaged goods is treated as a property crime against her father or husband (which might be forgiven if the perp was sufficiently high-status relative to the victim). Under Christian patriarchy, it is treated as spoiliation of a community resource and (in times and places where the system of Church-led community justice worked as intended) the remedy was making the man clear up the mess through some or all of shotgun-marrying the girl, paying her "dowry" to bribe the village herb into marrying her, or acknowledging and supporting the bastards.
Feminists, like tradcons, are clear-eyed that a functioning society needs to stop lotharios manipulating silly girls into relationships which, while good for the lothario, are net-negative for society. They just have to take some extra steps in order to obfuscate the hate-fact that most prime dating-age women are silly girls.
* The mods have asked me not to call it goatfucker patriarchy, so I won't.
That's a rather straightforward example of apophasis you've got there.
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Obviously. But these women and their advocates aren't social conservatives and want it both ways; they don't want to be treated paternalistically, but they want to blame the men who didn't treat them paternalistically for not doing so.
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