why rape is better than casual sex

The word "Rape" divides sex into two broad categories: consensual and non consensual.  And it does a good job of it.  The word means what it's supposed to mean: non consensual sex.  And the distinction it makes between consensual and non consensual sex perfectly addresses it's real concern.  What it really does is redefine what sex is.  We don't refer to incidences of rape as non consensual sex, because they aren't a kind of sex at all.  Sex is now, by definition, consensual.

The term "casual sex" is trying to do something similar.  It wants to divide consensual sex into two broad categories:  casual and non casual.  But it fails.  The word casual doesn't mean what it wants it to mean.  And the distinction in the definition doesn't address what it's actually concerned with.

words have meaning

 Casual can mean informal.  You and your wife can go to a casual dinner.  But when you sneak off to the bathroom for a quickie,  the khakis around your ankles do not change the "non casual" nature of it.  The black mass of satanism is formal in both attire and proceedings, but that doesn't make the orgy "non casual".

Casual can mean by chance.  You and your wife can have a casual encounter.  You can be at your separate jobs and happen to experience sudden and simultaneous arousal and happen to take your lunches at the same time and happen to go to the same restaurant which happens to be deserted and blessing the heavens for this chancest of chance encounters just happen to have the most casually "non casual" burger king bathroom sex ever.

Casual can mean indifferent, irregular or careless.  You can have a casual attitude while celebrating the 40'th anniversary of a marriage that's been devoid of passion for decades.  After the guests leave, and the lights are out, and the two of you have crawled onto the bed, you can mute the TV, give a sigh and a shrug and say, "you wanna?".  Lying there, she can stub out her cigarette with one hand, undo her robe with the other and say, "whatever".  But no matter how heart breakingly pleasureless the sex that follows is, it's still "non casual".  And no matter how unpredictable the timing of these unfortunate encounters are, they're still "non casual".  And no matter how long it's been since the last time you had sex, and no matter how much your wife confuses sex with love, and no matter how little you consider the fact that having sex with her again finally would send her the message that you love her again and get her hopes up unnecessarily and set her up for an inevitable disappointment that might lead to a murder-suicide, it's still "non casual".

you ain't got to lie

What casual absolutely does not mean is, "not involving a love relationship".  You can have irregular lunches with your daughter, when you bump into her by chance wearing informal clothing, during which you make careless remarks while playing games of checkers toward which you feel indifferent, all with a girl that you love so dearly that you worked a job you hate for 20 years just for the privilege of feeding, clothing, housing, medicating, and educating her.

"Sex not involving a love relationship", is not what casual sex means.  You can be married to some one that you don't love, but no matter how indifferent or even vengeful you are toward your spouse, the sex you have is "non casual".  You can also have casual sex with someone that you do love.  It could be a close friend and the two of you aren't interested in dating.  You can love your friend dearly.  You can have a deeper, closer, more intimate, more courageously vulnerable relationship than most couples dream of, but the sex you have is still "casual".


So maybe the definition should be, "sex outside of a dedicated partnership".  But what if you and your friend get married.  But you don't change your relationship at all.  You don't move in together.  You don't stop seeing other people.  You don't have a marriage relationship by any standard definition of the word.  The only thing that changes is the label on your relationship.  Magically, your sex isn't "casual" anymore.

The definition of casual sex ought to be something like, "sex outside of a relationship that is publicly labeled as a dedicated partnership".  You can call it marriage or civil union or domestic partnership or boyfriend and girlfriend or whatever.  What's important is the label, not the relationship.  It doesn't matter if you love each other, you just have to get it stamped.

final thoughts

I would like a word that does what casual sex fails to do.  I want a word that means "sex without intimacy".  I want a word that's so good that its mere existence redefines sex as "sex with intimacy".  Sex without it is just enhanced masturbation.  If you have no intimacy with your partner, then you're just using the person like a jelly sleeve or a video game.  There isn't anything necessarily wrong with it.  There's nothing wrong with masturbation.  But I want a word that makes it clear, as concisely and indisputably as "rape" makes its point clear, the stark contrast between sex as a celebration of mutual admiration and sex as an autistic hobby.  I invite your suggestions.

of mice and monsters part 1

Being home:  Not unambiguously awesome.  But three unambigously awesome things have happened so far:

1. puppet show with smart friend
2. christmas with best friend and
3. the following scenario

Rolling up to the library, we both felt a little nervous.  We had left her there.  We had told her we didn't know how long we would be.  We had told her that she should just come with us.  But she had decided to stay behind, and we had been longer than we knew she wanted to wait.

 "Betcha a buck she bitches."

I said to the driver.  Let's call her Ginger.  And it was more a release of tension than a serious offer, because we both knew how inevitable it was.  I took a deep breath as she threw herself into the backseat.

"What the hell took you guys so long!?"

The answer to that question is boring, so I'll spare you.  But Ginger gesticulated with justifications.  Had I had another accomplice to conspire with, I'd have said, "betcha a buck Ginger apologizes", but that would've been just as obvious.

"Yeah, but you guys took like two hours!"

Any other day, this would have exploded into a whole evening of bickering and sniveling.  But I spent the better part of those two hours anticipating this moment, which is why the ensuing conversation went thusly:

"Are you saying that we're irresponsible or that we're rude?"

"Both!"

"Do you honestly believe that we're so thoughtless that we would forget about you or so callous that we would neglect you on purpose?"

At which point she shut up.  Until Ginger tried to apologize again.  Then she told Ginger to shut up.  Then we rode in silence.

Then I got this great idea for a blog post where I would take this incident and extrapolate larger principles from it, but this is getting too long so I'll save the breakdown for next time.

breakfast at mussolini's

I was having breakfast my last weekend in Korea at an American style place called the Lazy Diner.  It was better than perfect.  Everything you could hope for and beer too.  The conversation was only tangentially about politics and I was a little proud of myself for that.  But in one of those sparse moments when talk did turn to the machinations of the state, one of my friends said, "you know, one thing you can say for fascism, the trains ran on time".  To my credit or my shame (I'm really not sure) I left it alone and let the talk flow away from it.  I get that it was a bit tongue in cheek.  He certainly doesn't want to usher in a new fascist state, and there's no point in mounting my high horse to accuse him of it.  He wouldn't support the elimination of civil liberties, the militarization of the police, or the rounding up of political dissidents.  He doesn't want to see waves of jackboots goosestepping on the faces of starving proles.  He's a decent guy who wants everybody to live as peacefully and prosperously as possible.

But,

That comment really does reveal his basic belief that there is some amount of aggressive violence that is acceptable for the economic benefit it supposedly produces.  I don't know that he would be opposed to the cartelization of industry that characterizes a fascist state.  In fact, he already supports the medical cartel known as the national health service:  A system that drives costs up and quality of service down and banishes people to months or years long waiting lists that inevitably spawns special privilege fast tracks for the politically connected.  Never mind that it's all paid for through the implied threat of murder for anybody who sufficiently resists the sticky fingers of civil "servants".  So when he starts suggesting that there may be silver linings to even the most egregious violations of human rights, it gives me pause.  Nobody needs to hear me explain yet again why it's not OK to threaten to murder people, no matter how many people vote for it, or how punctual the public transportation might become, so let me take a different track.

I don't know if fascist trains were more reliable than their more liberal contemporaries.  But even if we just assume that they were, it begs the question, "at what cost?".  How much did they spend to achieve it, and what else could they have spent that money on?  Would it have been better to sacrifice a little punctuality for more cancer research, or better policing strategies, or better water treatment facilities?  Nobody knows.  It's easy to see the good that governments seem to do when they spend other people's money, but it's hard to see the damage they cause by robbing society of what it would have had if they had left it alone.  And it's very easy to forget that government had to steal that money from other people.  Governments can't know how best to spend the money they confiscate, because they don't have the profit and loss signals that communicate the collective preferences of an entire society:  Only the free market can do that.  So they always create dead weight loss.

So,

If you have no conscience,  If you're the kind of state worshiping violence apologist willing to sacrifice any of your neighbors rights for the "greater good", just understand that every time you shove a gun in your neighbors face to demand he pay his "fair share", you always end up shooting yourself in the foot.