The Fallout, 3

Yes, Social Darwinism. Don't leave home without it. I am thinking of a brief encounter in the small laundry room of the first apartment building I ever lived in. I think I was still sixteen and my recently divorced mother had just sold the house and there we were, Mom and I sharing a two bedroom. In the laundry room was a young woman, nineteen or so who knew me from around, as the teenage Jesus Freak who wanted to save the world. I liked her okay, even though we didn't really know each other. She was more part of my brother's circle. She mentioned that she was living here sharing an apartment with her boyfriend, who was my brother's best friend at the time. "We're living in SIN! she said with a sardonic, rather sour hiss. As though it would matter to me. It didn't. Regardless of my belief in marriage and sexuality, which then was very biblical, and still remains unchanged, except that I now accept same sex marriage as part of the dynamic, I really didn't care how she lived, with whom, or what they did in private so long as it remained, well, in private. I was actually remarkably nonjudgmental for a kid my age, and especially for a fervent evangelical Christian. But those details never mattered to me. Around that time I had also been friends with a young couple sharing a small suite in a vintage house in the West End. We would sit and chat for hours over tea. I didn't care that they were living common-law. I just liked them. They were nice people, very hospitable and they were my friends. But this young woman was in no position to hear this sort of thing and there was no point wasting our time. Her mind was already made up that my mind would be already made up and you just can't talk sense or logic to some people,. Even at sixteen I seemed to know that. More recently, I knew a bogus Salvadorian Anglican priest (so sue me, Enrique Aguilar!) who insisted that sex is a right and every man needed to get himself a partner, otherwise he was somehow not fully human. Utter crap, of course, and I was already aware of how he was judging me, based on cultural bias and personal projection, as an inferior human for being asexual and uninterested in anyone. now, I don't know the dynamics around how either of those young couples first met and got together, but they likely did very well together as couples. Do I think they should have got married? It's none of my business. I have long believed in monogamous marriage as a healthy norm, but people are going to do whatever the want or need to do, and I am not going to judge someone based on their sexual expression, as long as pets and children are safe. But this attitude of sexual gratification as an entitlement? That is part of the damage brought on from the Sexual Revolution, which by the way, needed to happen, but, oh, look at the fallout! As we all know, last Monday, a sexually-frustrated loner who couldn't get laid took his rage out on ten innocent people in Toronto whom he ran over and killed in his rented van. Another casualty of the Sexual Revolution, especially porn culture and all the misogyny that comes with the package. I just quickly looked up incels, or involuntary celibates online, and very briefly I got all I feel I need to know. At they're most innocuous they are socially maladroit men who simply don't have the skills to connect with women, nor, well, with anyone else. At their most dangerous, they are manifestations of rape culture who believe that they are owed as a right to get laid. Life supports for a penis, and not much else. And those are the ones who threaten and will become violent. What saddens me is what a product of Social Darwinism this all is, and of how we have become so pervasively sexualized as to believe, many of us, that our validity is in our sexuality: of how many partners we have, how often we get laid, how good we look, etc. It's all very shallow thinking of course, but when you add to this injury the insult that if you are not getting any then you must be a socially and evolutionarily flawed loser, then that just turns this all into one bitter and horrid mess. There appear to be no real supports for such people who fall through the cracks, not for being unattractive but for being such pathetic idiots who need validation and support. We also really need to reevaluate the exaggerated importance that is placed on sex and romantic pairings and come up with a new formula for what it means to be human: something that involves such adjectives as kind, compassionate, just, loving, and pick any one. We really need to get out from under this cruel shadow of Darwinist competitiveness. We need to learn how to be there for one another. We need to learn how to validate ourselves and one another in ways that are not completely concerned with sex. But the most successful among us, like the big trees in the Monteverde Cloud Forest that support the vines and other plants, also have to be prepared to offer their lives as support and ballast to those who are weaker. We are all interdependent, and no one should have to welter under the stigma of loneliness. We have to start supporting one another.