Why I Don't Like Dance Clubs
I'm very anti-dance club. Not because I dislike dancing. It's actually one of the few things I'm absolutely no good at that I really enjoy. It's that, to be frank, dance clubs are such meat-markets that I find myself utterly unable to just enjoy the dancing, so consumed am I by the desperate sadness of the environment.
Tonight I went to a club in New Haven. (Which club isn't especially relevant - in my [rather limited] experience, they're all the same in most significant respects.) We were having a going-away party for a friend of mine, who splits time between being a law student at Yale and a graduate student at another (& obviously inferior) Ivy League school nearby. It was nice to see people, and to wish her good luck and goodbye, and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
Except me. I actually had fun at first, but as the evening progressed I just couldn't shake the overwhelming feeling that places like this club are ultimately the cream of a very diseased culture, a culture that treats sexual congress as just another article of commerce, to be marketed, discounted and traded for the best possible price. Everyone in that club is a real person, with aspirations, with ideals, with faults and with virtues. But in the club, none of that's relevant. They're just bodies, barely covered, subordinate to the all-powerful bass-line.
What's most frustrating (and painful) is that I'm not blind to the appeal of such things. Like most men, I can appreciate the beauty of the female form. Like most men raised in late 20th Century American culture, I understand, viscerally, the appeal of these implausibly built women wearing little more than nothing. And yet, as a Christian, I'm repelled by such feelings. I recoil. I'm disgusted by the objectification of women to which I'm tempted. By the culture thats submits women (and men) to this. By the fact that people seem to accept it without questioning.
I'm not a fool. I understand that young people, those seething cauldrons of sexual hormones, are likely going in all sorts of carnal goings-on. I just question whether we need to develop cultural organs, and indeed a whole culture, that promotes such things, that celebrates them as among its highest goods.
Tonight I went to a club in New Haven. (Which club isn't especially relevant - in my [rather limited] experience, they're all the same in most significant respects.) We were having a going-away party for a friend of mine, who splits time between being a law student at Yale and a graduate student at another (& obviously inferior) Ivy League school nearby. It was nice to see people, and to wish her good luck and goodbye, and everyone seemed to be having a good time.
Except me. I actually had fun at first, but as the evening progressed I just couldn't shake the overwhelming feeling that places like this club are ultimately the cream of a very diseased culture, a culture that treats sexual congress as just another article of commerce, to be marketed, discounted and traded for the best possible price. Everyone in that club is a real person, with aspirations, with ideals, with faults and with virtues. But in the club, none of that's relevant. They're just bodies, barely covered, subordinate to the all-powerful bass-line.
What's most frustrating (and painful) is that I'm not blind to the appeal of such things. Like most men, I can appreciate the beauty of the female form. Like most men raised in late 20th Century American culture, I understand, viscerally, the appeal of these implausibly built women wearing little more than nothing. And yet, as a Christian, I'm repelled by such feelings. I recoil. I'm disgusted by the objectification of women to which I'm tempted. By the culture thats submits women (and men) to this. By the fact that people seem to accept it without questioning.
I'm not a fool. I understand that young people, those seething cauldrons of sexual hormones, are likely going in all sorts of carnal goings-on. I just question whether we need to develop cultural organs, and indeed a whole culture, that promotes such things, that celebrates them as among its highest goods.
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