Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Norman Geras means I love you?

I have to admit that I find the idea of an Ivy League anti-sex blogger pretty intriguing, all the more so for being based out of notorious abstinence hotspot Princeton University.
Hi everyone and welcome to my first post as the Anti-Sex Blogger. Though it's often said that college students live in a culture of rampant sex, most undergrads have no intention of taking the great body of their relationships beyond a hand shake or a hug. So, I hope that as the Underside's new anti-sex blogger, my observations can be useful even to the most sexually active among us. Perhaps you can use my advice to deflect an unwanted advance, stay away from a harmful old flame or, you know, stop being a slut.
So far so good. Unfortunately, things go off the rails around paragraph four:
. . . there is no worse thing to give your lover than a book. Books, more than any other object, resemble platonic friends.
Not true. The secret is in the inscription. As long as there's something suggestive handwritten on the title page, you can give her a copy of Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind without sending the wrong message.

One caveat: don't give her an inscribed book if it's not a sure thing. I picked up a copy of Augustine's Confessions at a used bookstore in Berkeley that had some pretty embarrassing stuff on the inside front cover. (I won't say much, but it started off with "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.") If there's a chance that she'll sell the book, guard your words. You don't want to put the bookstore clerk in the awkward position of using a magic marker to black out your last name.

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