I have had the privilege of seeing a healthy, functional, devout Mormon extended family in joyful motion. There is something thrillingly aesthetic about the pattern they all fit into together, and it’s so pretty that I can see how someone would understand it to be a moral rather than an aesthetic pleasure to enact or observe the script. They match, they fit.
All the other Mormon families I know (including those related to this one by marriage) have flaws in their execution or are hampered from the get-go by intrusive circumstance, and the one I’m talking about might be imperfect too, beneath the surface—but insofar as they perform their dance happily and in sync, it has a loveliness to it.
I want to point back to the “it works fine if everyone’s sex-positive” part, but I suppose that’s like saying “gosh, that’s a beautiful oil painting, but why didn’t you do it in charcoal?”—you may well get a thing of beauty, but it’s a wholly different thing.
Which makes me wonder how much inter-cultural conflict can be reified in terms of individual cultures optimizing into local maxima and incremental movement in the direction of another culture looking like a destructive slide into a valley.
I think at least a chunk of this can be explained away by different levels of focus on sex as a Major Life Thing, a sine qua non for excellent living. There are all kinds of folks, and some of them aren’t going to share your opinion on the importance of sex positivity, just like some of them aren’t going to share my opinion on the importance of eschewing cake mix.
I have had the privilege of seeing a healthy, functional, devout Mormon extended family in joyful motion. There is something thrillingly aesthetic about the pattern they all fit into together, and it’s so pretty that I can see how someone would understand it to be a moral rather than an aesthetic pleasure to enact or observe the script. They match, they fit.
All the other Mormon families I know (including those related to this one by marriage) have flaws in their execution or are hampered from the get-go by intrusive circumstance, and the one I’m talking about might be imperfect too, beneath the surface—but insofar as they perform their dance happily and in sync, it has a loveliness to it.
I want to point back to the “it works fine if everyone’s sex-positive” part, but I suppose that’s like saying “gosh, that’s a beautiful oil painting, but why didn’t you do it in charcoal?”—you may well get a thing of beauty, but it’s a wholly different thing.
Which makes me wonder how much inter-cultural conflict can be reified in terms of individual cultures optimizing into local maxima and incremental movement in the direction of another culture looking like a destructive slide into a valley.
I think at least a chunk of this can be explained away by different levels of focus on sex as a Major Life Thing, a sine qua non for excellent living. There are all kinds of folks, and some of them aren’t going to share your opinion on the importance of sex positivity, just like some of them aren’t going to share my opinion on the importance of eschewing cake mix.