Sex, Love, Lust – Page 4 – Maverick Philosopher

‘Nonconsensual Choking’

I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece:

I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002.

As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date and the girl consents to being choked, then it is morally acceptable? And what sort of girl wants to be choked? Next stop: erotic asphyxiation. Why not, if it is consensual? You might even try mutual erotic asphyxiation. That might not end well, however. David Carradine's auto-erotic adventure in auto-asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room proved to be his last.

From another source, I gather that the hitting mentioned in the quotation is punching a girl in the head against her will. So if she wants to be punched in the head, there is nothing wrong with it?

I'd say we are living in sick times if the consent of the done to is sufficient for the moral acceptability of the doer's deed.

I'll leave it to you to work out why.

UPDATE (9/16)

A reader expands our vocabulary of depravity with a link to donkey punch. Not for the easily shocked. But I think it is important to look human wretchedness hard in the face and realize what becomes of morality when it is untethered from a transcendent anchor. This is what is happening in the RCC under Bergoglio the Termite.

How to Make Your Penis Go Away in the Eyes of the Law: Identify as a Woman!

'Karen' White is a man sporting a healthy, nature-made penis. In 2003 and 2016 'she' put the organ in question to work in the rape of two different women. So of course 'she' ended up in a women's prison where — you guessed it — 'she' sexually assaulted women, not 'women,' women.

Rod Dreher reports and concludes, "The world has gone mad."

No, Rod, not the world, but 'liberals,' 'progressives,' 'leftists,' 'libtards,' whatever you want to call these willfully destructive shitheads who, here in the States, have come to dominate the Democrat Party.

The essence of the lunacy is the denial of reality, in this instance, biological reality.

Philosophy is often dismissed as utterly inconsequential. But the times they have a' changed. We now live in an age in which loony notions once only toyed with in ivory towers are now being implemented to the consequential detriment of real people.

I develop the thought of the last paragraph in When Politics Becomes Like Philosophy.

Why There Probably Won’t Be a Serious Inquiry into Priestly Pederasty

Steven Hayward:

Such an inquiry would require journalists to probe into matters that run afoul of liberal orthodoxy today. It is one thing to probe into bad behavior from unpopular and easily demonized cardinals. Blowing open a cover-up is standard Watergate Journalism 101. It’s another thing to open the door to uncomfortable questions about sexual morality in our anything-goes times. And that’s almost as great a moral failing as the bishops and cardinals who cover up the evil in the first place. The point is, while the media will gladly blast the most lurid and awful (but unproven) details of a grand jury report about what took place in Pennsylvania without question, they are unwilling to look deeper into the potential causes and enablers of this evil. That is nearly as contemptible as the cowardly behavior of the Church hierarchy.

Just as the Left cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of abortion, it cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of homosexual practices. Any raising of those questions would raise questions about their entire worldview. The Left subscribes to the 'wisdom' of that celebrity chef, 'foodie,' and gastro-tourist, Anthony Bourdain, for whom:

Man has no higher origin or higher destiny. The body is not the temple of the Holy Spirit or any sort of temple; it is a pleasure factory.

So what could possibly be wrong with consensual sodomy? But the Church condemns sodomy, consensual or not. Kierkegaard said that Christianity is "heterogeneity to the world." The same is true of the RCC. It is in the world but not of it. It is a rebuke to it and cannot be secularized without being destroyed.

To inquire seriously into the homosexual culture within the Church and to expose it as the root of the rot would involve touching on questions the Left would rather not touch on.

Gender is a Social Construct — Except When It’s Not

Heather Mac!

When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963. Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis. It was indeed a remarkable year. I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough so that I now remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain. What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way? Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Would Don Juan Approve of Bill Cosby?

Drugging a woman to have sex with her takes all the sport out of the chase.

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

When Physicists Get Physical: A Tale of Sex and Scientism

Allegedly, Lawrence Krauss is a sexual predator. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, his philosophical incompetence or his sexual predation. Both are forms of seduction, one cerebral, the other carnal.

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, sends this for our delectation:

PROSPERO (to FERDINAND)

Look thou be true. Do not give dalliance

Too much the rein. The strongest oaths are straw

To th' fire i' th' blood. Be more abstemious,

Or else, goodnight your vow.

The Tempest, Act 4, Sc. 1

Dave's emphasis.

Bob Seger expatiates on the theme in "The Fire Down Below." I shall resist the temptation to link to it.

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence. Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail. Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media – combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right? Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer. But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot.

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo.

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves.

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Word of the Day: Cack-Handed

British. 1. Left-handed; 2. clumsy, awkward. See here.

Example:

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or cack-handedly, is not – nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” said the letter published in the newspaper Le Monde.

I'm with Catherine Deneuve and Christina Hoff Sommers on this one. Real women know how to handle obnoxious men: with a stern warning or a slap across the face. They don't go crying to their feminist mommies. And real men accept the rebuke.

The Left has lost its collective mind (hive mind?) on this as on so many other issues. You are one stupid and/or vile leftist if you cannot or will not distinguish among: a bit of old-fashioned gallantry, a risqué joke, the use of an offensive term such as 'broad,' a pat on the derriere, a Frankenian ass grab, a Weinsteinian manipulation, a full-on Clintonian sexual assault, and rape.

To conflate all of these behaviors under the umbrella 'sexually inappriopriate' shows the typical liberal/left incapacity to draw necessary distinctions as well as an inappropriate use of 'inappropriate.'

A Liberal’s Notion of Self-Restraint

Tavis Smiley Too? ‘Inappropriate’ Sexual Conduct?

The witch hunt is on and the Left eats its own. PBS has suspended distribution of Smiley's late-night talk show. I don't think much of Smiley's opinions, you understand, but I fear that we may end up like the Soviet Union or China under the Cultural Revolution. Don't tell me it can't happen here; just look at the outrages that have already happened here. From the L. A. Times:

“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” Smiley said. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering six networks over 30 years.” [emphasis added]

If Smiley had exposed himself appropriately, then no problem?

By the way, what is it about liberals that makes them use 'inappropriately' inappropriately?

Whipping out your schlong in front of a female colleague is not inappropriate behavior but morally wrong behavior. Why can't you liberal boneheads say that? Too 'judgmental'? But that's what you are doing: you are making moral judgments. Did Bubba behave 'inappropriately' with Juanita Broderick? But if Clinton had shown up at a black-tie event in a swimsuit, then you could say, appropriately, that his behavior was inappropriate.

'Inappropriate' is far too weak a word for rape and sexual intimidation. On the other hand, 'reach out' is too strong a phrase for the uses to which it is put by contemporary language morons. If I hear that your wife has suddenly died, I may 'reach out' to you in sympathy and with an offer of assistance. But if I phone you to inform you that one of your tail lights is out, I haven't 'reached out' to you.

Finally, Smiley's 'tell their truth' is quite the howler. For his accusers are (at least) telling their truth. Truth is truth. There is no such thing as his or hers or their truth.