Tuesday, November 13, 2018

"Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny"

I've been meaning to write this post for years, but somehow never got around to it.

About ten years ago, I discovered TV Tropes, and was a regular reader for a couple of years. Besides being hypnotically entertaining, it was educational. I learned how stories are put together, and began to see the discrete elements in the stories I consumed. This included the stories in Tanach.

I also occasionally came across tropes that perfectly described phenomena in the frum world. I cited one in a post back in 2009, Wild Mass Guessing. The title of this post is another.

This is from the Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny trope's page:

A character with this mindset is likely to think that at least some men are incapable of controlling their sexual urges, so women should expect them to commit sexual harassment or worse and be Crazy-Prepared in various ways, such as second-guess what these men might find attractive and then try her best to not look attractive, lest these men get their urges. Of course, since each individual man has his individual preferences (and also since the whole "oh no, I got aroused" thing is just an excuse anyway), even wearing Crocs would not be safe in this regard. Yet some particularly unsympathetic or tragic characters may take this attitude one step further, demanding the Double Think that we should all consider men to be some kind of monsters while still considering them to be the superior gender—morally and otherwise. This is done by blaming women for (by their appearance or mere existence) "tempting" men and thus making any sex-crimes against them their own fault. 

This is a perfect description of the attitudes towards sex I learned as a teenager immersed in the yeshivish world.

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