Also worth checking out - a Savage Love letter revealing the difference between gay and straight "monogamish" - specifically, that threesomes involving men and women have the potential to produce children. This - the fact that sex can, indeed, make a baby - has always struck me as a bigger deal than Savage makes it out to be, when it comes to his suggestion that straight people open their marriages. His advice to straight people on this can seem implicitly geared to a world not only where contraception is infallible, but where no one's at a life stage where they might actually want children - impacting both how reliably whichever contraception is used, and how inclined a woman might be to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.
This is a big deal because one of the reasons he promotes monogamish for straights is as a way to have couples stay together for the sake of the kids, even if doing so means having a companionate marriage and a piece (or several pieces) on the side. But the fact that someone isn't a primary partner doesn't mean they can't, in turn, bring about a pregnancy. It's not, of course, that a child born to such an arrangement is doomed for life, but even by Savage's own framework, it's a non-optimal situation.
This is a big deal because one of the reasons he promotes monogamish for straights is as a way to have couples stay together for the sake of the kids, even if doing so means having a companionate marriage and a piece (or several pieces) on the side. But the fact that someone isn't a primary partner doesn't mean they can't, in turn, bring about a pregnancy. It's not, of course, that a child born to such an arrangement is doomed for life, but even by Savage's own framework, it's a non-optimal situation.
Why do you invite people to debate and then block anyone who disagrees with you? Despite your fancy education, you're ignorant and intellectually dishonest.
ReplyDeleteSophie,
ReplyDeleteThe invitation to debate, if I read you right, was my (sarcastic, but lacking the #sarcasm hashtag) tweet, which I wrote upon seeing the coming Twitter pile-on, in reference to all the people who'd skimmed the headline and believed I was arguing the opposite of what I actually was. That is, who believed I was saying that Jews are especially privileged, or that Holocaust victims (!) were privileged. But to spell this out: I did not actually wish to debate people with whom I have no disagreement, who'd merely misinterpreted what my article would be about, based on how they'd read the headline. I addressed all of this, and responded to some more substantive disagreement, in a follow-up article: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121498/jewish-privilege-doesnt-exist-jews-can-benefit-whiteness
As for the blocking, let me mention that while I was being inundated with responses from people under the (massively mistaken) impression that I'm some sort of anti-Semite or Holocaust denier, I was *also* dealing with a pile-on from white supremacists, likely because a white supremacist website was (is?) explicitly asking its readers to "troll" me. That pile-on included a photo of an oven. Need I spell out what message that sends?
If, while trying to stem the tide of these two concurrent forms of harassment, I ended up blocking someone who merely wanted to disagree on ideas, it wasn't my intention. But the notion that I'd have been able to work the past few days without using Twitter's block function is laughable.