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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.

I think the resolution here is that sex simply has a greater range of possible 'significance' than most activities - which is to say that I don't think there a reason one could not argue that some consensual 'transactional' sex is not vastly different to a game of tennis, where in other contexts (be that positive or negative) it can carry greater meaning. A potential analogy here is alcohol consumption - my going to the pub carries almost no significance, but if an employer forced a Muslim employee to drink that would clearly be unacceptable in a manner far more serious than compulsory tennis - we all accept that in different contexts the activity can carry different weight.

You smuggled in the argument that "sex is sacred" and therefore not at all like tennis. But then tennis people should just say it: sex absolutely is like tennis and it should be okay for children to have sex with adults was it not for all those pesky people who wrongly think that sex is sacred. But don't worry, as soon as we work a little bit on that opposition we will gladly accept child sex as new normal and embrace groomer as proud moniker.

Maybe the argument is that they will obviously not do that for political and strategic reasons. Something the NYT article gloats about: haha, we lied about gays being born that way to fool conservatives into accepting new laws. Now when we have majority and conservatives are eating dust, we can finally say what we wanted all along. And by the way trust us, the sexual liberation will definitely stop before full acceptance of Minor Attracted Persons (wink, wink hahaha).

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