Always the Wallflower at the Orgy
The sexualization of everything drives us relentlessly to the valuation of no one.
by Rod D. Martin
November 3, 2015
The following was originally an email to some of my pastor friends. I realized I needed to share it with the rest of you.
Gentlemen:
I’m sending you an article that — despite the fact that it makes me blush to send it to you — you need to read. It appeared last week in New York Magazine. It is called “I’m Always the Wallflower at the Orgy”.
You may get the reference, the 1970 short story collection by Nora Ephron (of When Harry Met Sally) entitled Wallflower at the Orgy. The age of that piece highlights the fact that, on a certain level, none of this is new. In fact, as you read the story, what will almost certainly hit you at some point is that “this must be how it was before the fall of Rome.” But that’s not why I’m sending it to you.
Hannah Arendt famously wrote of “the banality of evil,” and that is what this story is really about. The author of this story, Anna Pulley, is by no means evil in the Adolf Eichmann sense: indeed, her only real victim seems to be herself. But victim she certainly is, and despite great talent and success, her life as she describes it is nothing if not banal.
Ms. Pulley is a freelance writer in San Francisco, where she says that you can’t throw a rock without hitting a sex party (yes, an orgy, although she also describes “second base parties” at which she laments her failure to reach first base). The tagline for her article reads, “If you can’t get laid at a sex party, you really start to question your life choices.”
But she doesn’t. Not really.
She does, however, ramble on (not in an inartful way) quite a bit about her feelings. They are more than a bit melancholy. She goes to these parties quite a bit — this particular story is about a regular event called Girl Pile, which as you might expect is for lesbians — and does so “to support my girlfriend,” an artist who draws these happenings. She doesn’t describe her girlfriend’s additional activities, if any; however, as emotionally detached from the scene as she seems to be throughout, she is nevertheless a participant (and presumably so is her partner), albeit not enough to suit her. She doesn’t feel comfortable mingling, she never knows what to wear, conversation is awkward. And she clearly has very mixed emotions about the whole thing.
There is rejection, lots of it, by strangers who see her as meat. There are odd feelings about that, as she tries to fit these experiences into a framework that is infinitely far from that of two people — male and female — meeting each other’s physical and more important emotional needs in an ever-deepening relationship over a lifetime.
At the end, she writes:
I’ve tried being coy, being nonchalant, and being obvious. The latter led to a light spanking and the breeziest rejection I’ve ever experienced. She didn’t even say anything. She just shook her head slightly and walked away.
Still. I try. I do.
The thing about orgies is that they do not abide by any of the rules we’ve come to regard in standard courtship rituals. There is no prescribed order of things. There is no wait-three-days-to-call her, Facebook flirtation, coffee dates that you endlessly analyze with friends to determine if they were in fact “dates.” There is only flesh.
On one level, the story of one woman and her orgies is not really the point: the ubiquity she reports of it, the degree to which this is now normal for countless people, the presuppositions bound up in the culture it reflects — not the American culture broadly but the subculture of these specific, often wealthy and highly influential people and their utter alienation from anything we think of as American or Christian culture or people. And do not think it is limited to places like San Francisco: with apps like Tinder on every teenager's phone, it's just as likely down the street or even in your house.
But on another level, she is personally the point. She would not appreciate pity, and I do not say this in disrespect. But her story broke my heart. In living out feminist ideology she has utterly objectified herself. She thinks of herself as embracing “her power” but she has done so only in the sense that I show my “power” over my car by setting it on fire.
Gentlemen: this very intelligent, very successful young woman senses that much is amiss, but lives so many false “truths” that — just as Francis Schaefer predicted — she lacks the language to describe it, just as we lack the language to converse with her. It is an increasingly unbridgeable gap — at least by anyone but Christ alone — the other side of which is a hollowness that can only grow from here. And as I said at the outset, it is by her account the increasingly dominant mode of life in at least one of our most influential cities.
These people can no more understand the perspective of an Alabama Sunday School lady than I can understand Spock’s Kolinahr ritual on Vulcan. Or vice versa. And that’s tragic too, in many other significant ways.
The article contains one naughty picture, not naughty enough to count as pornography. I want you to take a moment to read it. If anyone is going to make this better, it is you personally, and others like you, who will have to. If you thought America needed a Great Awakening before, this will surely break your heart.
Sincerely,
Rod
P.S. Linked from that article is another one called “Why Sex That’s Consensual Can Still Be Bad.” It’s written by a pretty unhappy-seeming feminist named Rebecca Traister, and where Ms. Pulley speaks on a very personal level, Ms. Traister delves more into the limitations and failures of feminist theory. She is raunchier in her language which may make you more uncomfortable, but her perspective is quite valuable for understanding the thought processes back of Ms. Pulley’s “Wallflower” piece. I will, however, highlight one telling paragraph from Ms. Traister:
“A lot of sex feels like this,” Gattuso wrote in May, after her popular Crimson columns drew the attention of Feministing, a website at which she has since become a contributor. “Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, when we’re even into it, but where we fear … that if we did say no, or if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t count, because we don’t count.”
Yes, a lot of marriages are poor. Yes, a lot of men are insensitive (though feminists, obsessed with the issue of male power, gloss over their own capacity for this). Yes, monogamy has its imperfections. But none of this addresses whether, if everyone acted properly, a fulfilling outcome is possible at the end of one of these roads.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the sexualization of everything drives us relentlessly to the valuation of no one.
