The one that also assumes that "growing up" is a synonym for sex. And that "being mature" is. And that eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or playing scrabble is. But that's another rant.
Hee! So very, tragically true.
Our society is obsessed with sexuality as self-fulfillment, and this is especially unfortunate when modern people are reading books and essays from time periods where sex was not considered to be the be-all and end-all. All kinds of odd perspectives and interpretations tend to emerge when we try to impose a contemporary attitude to sex onto our predecessors. I bet Lewis would have been positively flabbergasted to hear that anybody thought "nylons and lipstick and invitations" was a euphemism for sex, just as Tolkien was astonished by how many people were convinced that the Ring was a metaphor for the atomic bomb...
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Date: 2005-08-30 05:45 pm (UTC)Hee! So very, tragically true.
Our society is obsessed with sexuality as self-fulfillment, and this is especially unfortunate when modern people are reading books and essays from time periods where sex was not considered to be the be-all and end-all. All kinds of odd perspectives and interpretations tend to emerge when we try to impose a contemporary attitude to sex onto our predecessors. I bet Lewis would have been positively flabbergasted to hear that anybody thought "nylons and lipstick and invitations" was a euphemism for sex, just as Tolkien was astonished by how many people were convinced that the Ring was a metaphor for the atomic bomb...