Wow. People Who Have Sex Are The Barbarians At The GATE.

This, from Rod Dreher, I have to admit just made me laugh a little at first.

Once upon a time, it was thought that feminism would make men less rough. It appears to have made women more coarse. From the NYT:

At 11 on a weeknight earlier this year, her work finished, a slim, pretty junior at the University of Pennsylvania did what she often does when she has a little free time. She texted her regular hookup — the guy she is sleeping with but not dating. What was he up to? He texted back: Come over. So she did. They watched a little TV, had sex and went to sleep.

Their relationship, she noted, is not about the meeting of two souls.

(snip)

Good Lord. That’s monstrous. If I raise a daughter who thinks and behaves like this, I will have been a failure as a father. If I raise sons who think and behave like this, or who bring home women like this, I will have been a failure as a father.

The times are evil. 

Read the whole thing -- Rod quotes extensively from the NYTimes story which reveals the shocking, shocking truth that some women have sex outside of marriage, and even with guys they aren't madly in love with.  (I know! Right?)

This is apparently a revelation to Rod.  (What can you expect from someone whose parents were so tone-deaf as to name him Rod, I guess?)

As I said, at first it just cracked me up.  Because, wow.  Where have you been living, Rod?  A cave?  Do you really think people just started having sex-without-eternal love last week?  Or -- you know-- last millennia?

But then I thought longer, and it occurs to me that his outrage has a deeper meaning, a blind spot even. He's not just scandalized by the notion that people -- well, women, for all his hasty addition of "sons" in his penultimate sentence -- are having sex outside of marriage, and sex outside of love.  He's furious about it.  He calls them monsters.

In other words, from Rod's point of view (and a number of those in his comment stream agree), women who have sex without being in a long-term loving relationship -- outside of marriage, essentially, or the prelude to marriage -- are monsters.  Are Others.  Are evil.

That's a giant cultural difference, one I can't really bridge.

What I mean to say here, is I can't fathom what sort of mind looks at the act of having sex that way; or especially at those who have sex that way.

I mean, I'm in a long-term loving relationship, obviously; but I know lots of people who aren't, and who have sex outside those relationships.  They're not monsters.  They're people who have sex with other people in consensual ways.

You know who are monsters?  Rapists.  Child molesters.  People who deny other people their human rights.

Grown-up people having consensual sex with other grown-up people from time to time isn't monstrous -- that's just human behavior.  If we're smart, we use protection, and we try not to frighten to horses, but other than that, why the outrage?  I am mystified.

I kid, I kid.  I do understand why Rod's so overcome, really.  It's women having sex without being in bondage that's got him appalled.  How dare a woman act like she owns her body? How dare she go out and have sex with whoever she wants? No permission? No guilt?

Obviously we are in the End Times, people.