“If you’re quiet in the woods long enough, you’ll hear something die. Then it’s quiet again. There’s no outrage about injustice, or even mourning. One animal’s death is another’s dinner; that’s just the way it is. What remains will go to the earth, yesterday’s bones sinking into today’s dirt, the only bit of life left where a mouse nibbled, leaving tiny indentations that say there was once something of worth here.”

–Mindy McGinnis in Be Not Far From Me

This is Joann Wypijewski, writing in about 1996, when the “women are only prey, men only predators” narrative was just getting started, right when prudishness was beginning to ramp up again:

But what did they see in him? The question, overt or indirect, has riveted reporters and TV presenters. It’s funny how the opposite question—what did he see in them?—is never asked, only implicitly answered in the assumption that he was “looking for victims” and they were easy “prey.” There’s more than a touch of racism behind the media prurience, since, except that so many of them are white, the young women in this case mostly swam in the same stream of trouble as Williams. It would have been stranger if they hadn’t found each other.

This is from the book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo: Essays on Sex, Authority and the Mess of Life.

I think it’d be interesting if we let the “feminists” succeed and make the age of majority for women to 30 or 35 as they seem to wish. That’d have very fun-to-observe societal implications. I’m kind of for that just to see what happens.

The denial of of pleasure is one of the things that makes liberalism so bloodless, so blind. Of course the racists love racism, and the liberals in their denial can’t grapple with it. For them everything is ignorance, like oxford & Harvard haven’t nurtured a million genocidaires

— Adrian Fernandez Baumann (@AdBaumann) July 25, 2020

Denialism of pleasure. Huh, that’s a good point. I had not considered that about modern liberalism and its prudish puritanism trend lately. I think this commenter is on to something!

You can see this proclivity in the “everyone who doesn’t stay inside for years is evil” opinionating. You can see it in the “live in the pod and eat bugs” malarkey; in the “no woman could possibly enjoy the (rather tame) sexual things I don’t enjoy” claptrap; in the idea that you should only date people just like you and no more than two years apart if you are a man (Yeah, I understand that math can’t work. Liberals don’t.); in the belief that even outside the pandemic, people should not travel and definitely should not enjoy it if they do; in the denial of the idea that drinking alcohol and using drugs is pleasurable; in the general idea that no one should ever do anything that is at all risky.

Liberals just plain dislike pleasure. Sure, not all of them, but enough of them and strongly enough that it leads to what you’re seeing. I wonder, is the huge prudishness emergent from that or vice versa? I lack evidence enough to answer.

I’d written before about the antonian asceticism of liberals, but I’d never really connected to it to the above. This new insight helps me to understand it a lot better.

The liberal denial of pleasure means the movement has grave problems it probably can’t overcome. I’ve been done with it for a long time, but this means it’ll fall of its own accord.

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we don’t go out because we’re hungry. We go out because we’re lonely.

Speak for yourself. I think this is why online restaurant reviews don’t work for me. Most people review for ambiance and how the restaurant made them feel.

All I care about is the food. I don’t give a fuckkkkkkkkkk about the ambiance. The place could be inside a literal dumpster and if the food was great, I’d go back again and again. I’m just not social, and it shows.