Notes on Scandal 3, "Deserving it" 2

My friend Jason will beat the crap out of me in a game; like any parlor game such as trivia questions, pool, poker, gin rummy, and board games; and then he has the audacity to make me feel bad about it.

This momentary interaction has brought out the worst in me in the past.

This realization should be no small admission: how often can we point out when we are at our worst?

Finally I stopped playing with the kid.

He asked me to tell him a story about when I failed at palmistry. I told him that one time I read palms for a beautiful woman; who's name I won't mention here; and that I ended up hooking up with her.



Now this is a true story for all of us. Lately I have been bragging to my friends about being able to talk to beautiful women. Maybe I'm trying to Lord over my friends with this garbage like Jason tried to Lord over me with the trivial games.

And I declare: Some of the same ways that Jason finds peace are found in his grades and his work ethic. He is competitive and razor sharp; he gets perfect grades. His successes are many.


It took me a long time to realize that I had to stand up to the kid by not playing the games with him. It did not take any discussion or debate with the person, I just had to decide that I did not want to be told I was stupid or slow for being lousy at board games.


Two:


This is a cool story because it shows what my friend Rick was trying to tell me the other day: there has to be a time when the vulgar meets the learned (re: the other two Notes on Scandal entries of this web blog; I've been using Berkeley's famous statement "We have to speak with the vulgar and think with the Learned" to comment on the intersection of moral ideals and social pragmatism.) We have to set up a guideline of morality that accounts for the real world.


My three feminist Duke University friends got into heated debates about the Duke University Lacrosse Scandal: what did it all mean?

On one occasion, I said to one of them that wearing revealing clothing is genuinely a way to invite sex. I mean, on commonsense intuition: isn't it? I was specifically talking about cleavage. Perhaps needless to say, the feminist yelled at me.

She said that no one invites rape, and that rape is never warranted.

In this blog, I said in Notes on Scandal 2 (I think), that one of the groups that I visited at North Carolina Central University, one of the group leaders said that a woman should be able to walk down the street in the middle of the night in a dark alley and not get raped.

This is because rape is wrong.


So my friend Rick said that this is correct, but we should still account for the problems of what's going on. Feminists account for this too (I've written a little bit in this blog on Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, a call to self-responsibility of women).

If a woman is naked and says, "Let's have sex," to a man, and then regrets it because he's ugly, that's not really rape in the same way as the one that everyone is thinking of.

Which is what happened with the Duke University scandal; which is what happened with the Hofstra scandal a couple of weeks ago. (I know the woman didn't have sex in the Duke scandal, but I'm trying to make a certain point here).


We have to speak with the vulgar and think with the learned. The intersection of morality and realism I think in this case is that we have to account for reality in all possible ways.

Think with the learned: That is, we certainly can affirm the fact that rape is a terrible thing, that you should not judge a woman as promiscuous because of what she wears (nor conclude anything prejudiced because of the way someone looks); nor should you deem that rape is a wonderful occurrence when it is in fact a crime.

Speak with the vulgar: We have to be as realistic as possible in our prescriptions for people (ourselves). We have to warn people that going naked in dark alleys in the middle of gang-riddled Durham is a dangerous thing. We have to take into account all possible real facts and conceptual facts.

I think that is an okay conclusion for now.


Two Postscript:


I've been thinking about making a stand, too. William Salatan's science blog talks about how people are getting cosmetic surgery to fit in.

At what point should a person who is short say, okay now society has to fit in to me, and not the other way around?

Is it the naked woman in the alley? But this is such a strange way to make that case.

Is it the hippy-scientist; or the Black President; or the short-cool person?

But more on this later.....