October 15, 2008

On righteous anger

By: David Polansky

Once in a while, usually when I’m pretty seriously procrastinating, I’ll find myself reading Dan Savage over at the Onion. His “Savage Love” generally manages to provide some low-grade entertainment, but I realized when reading this column (NSFW) that the most interesting part isn’t the parade of fetishists, but those times when he unleashes his self-righteousness on some hapless schmuck (not necessarily his correspondent).

This happens fairly frequently, I think, when he feels that his rules of conduct for libertines have been violated — and he’s not unique in this regard. I’ve often witnessed folks who’ve otherwise suspended nearly all traditional decorum react with surprising fury when one of their few remaining senses of right and wrong has been violated.

And there’s certainly no question that his target in the above-linked column has it coming; has in fact behaved like a total bastard, and time was would have been on the receiving end of something like this — and not just for the specific behavior that earned him Dan Savage’s ire.

But, at the risk of being a mere pragmatist, it does occur to me that certain mores that he would gladly do away with — have in fact already been done away with — did have the benefit of keeping young women away from young men like that. And however fiercely Dan Savage and those like him fight to defend their own brand of sexual ethics, it seems rather like rearguard action.

Or, to put it another way, it’s like upholding all the principles behind preventing the crossing of the Rubicon, if by Rubicon you mean the Tiber.