Tag: love

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One of the more mystifying things about sex is we expect 13 year olds to make the right decisions when 40 year old adults are still making bad decisions about sex.

I came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis. At the time, getting HIV was a death sentence. I knew it. I knew I needed to take precautions if I wanted to have sex. I also remember that sometimes I screwed up and had unsafe sex anyway. I was in my early 30’s at the time. Way to old to being making a mistake like that, but I still, embarrassingly, did.

Everyone, and I do mean everyone here, makes mistakes. It is a normal part of life. Some of these mistakes, say lending a friend a hundred dollars who promises to pay you back on pay day, are sad lessons but not particularly life altering. Pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are.

Given the siren call of sex, making a mistake about sex is pretty much par for the course for most people. Sex is mighty tempting and the chances that you will make the right decision 100% of the time is fairly remote. People make mistakes.

Which leads me to this idea that allowing a young woman to have birth control is giving her permission to have sex. Maybe. The trouble is she doesn’t need your permission to have sex. The decision to have or not have sex is in her hands. The idea that she will never give into temptation is wishful thinking at best.

Christian doctrine will save her. Probably not. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years. I heard the word of God on a fairly regular basis and I still wanted to have sex. I wanted it so badly that any rational precautions I could have taken, weren’t taken — mostly because I was too terrified to ask the pharmacists for condoms. Think about that I was more afraid of the pharmacist than the wrath of God. This is a challenging theological problem for Christians.

So pontificate all you want on how giving Birth Control to young women is giving them permission to have sex. But it is cruel to expect young women to never error and crueler still to saddle her with a 18 year project of raising a child for making a mistake.

What is irritating me most about this stand is that the good Christians here are more interested in punishing the young woman for her mistake than giving her assistance to sort through the tumultuous time of raging hormones and sexual temptation. Expecting her to make mistakes should be a given, and this why birth control is a God send.

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I was watching Mad Men. Near the end of one episode, I thought I heard the lyrics, “He Hit Me (and it Felt Like a Kiss).” At first, I thought I must be wrong. What a terrible thing to say?

So I googled it, and much to my horror, I learned that there was indeed a song with that title. Even more disturbing, this paean to masochism was written by the husband and wife song writing duo Gerry Goffin and Carole King. You heard that right two of the most successful song writers of the 1960’s wrote the damn thing and, to boot, a woman was involved in the process. Not surprisingly, Phil Spector, a known wife beater, produced the original Crystals version.

What struck me most was how much has changed since 1961 when the song was written. Here is a woman realizing that her man loves her because he cares enough to hit her when she is untrue so much so that when he strikes her she feels a kiss. So 65 or so short years ago, a group of people in the music business though enough of a song about physical abuse to produce it and try to sell it to the public.

So whenever some idiot wants to talk about the good old days, you might sing a few line from the song below.

He Hit Me (and it Felt Like a Kiss)

He hit me
And it felt like a kiss
He hit me
But it didn’t hurt me

He couldn’t stand to hear me say
That I’d been with someone new
And when I told him I had been untrue

He hit me
And it felt like a kiss
He hit me
And I knew he loved me

If he didn’t care for me
I could have never made him mad
But he hit me
And I was glad

Yes, he hit me
And it felt like a kiss
He hit me
And I knew I loved him
And then he took me in his arms
With all the tenderness there is
And when he kissed me
He made me his

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The other night I got reacquainted to Patty Griffin’s song Let Him Fly. It is a song about a woman breaking up with a man who isn’t ready, if he ever would be, to settle down. He isn’t a bad man just a wandering man, he honestly tells her this and she had some hopes of keeping him even though he told her so but she now realizes it is hopeless so she surrenders to her fate and lets him go.

Her lyrics are filled with sadness but absent of anger which carry the heavy weight in most break up songs. There is none of this you are a rotten son of bitch and I don’t know why I put up with you so long which consume most break up songs. It is sad without being vindictive. She loves him but she needs something more than he is willing to give. Two mismatched people instead of one good one and one evil one.

The song is spare — just a guitar and Griffin singing in her clear strong voice. At times you can barely hear her guitar, it follows her singing but does not direct it. I could imagine her singing this song a cappella.

Even though her album cover is for more than one song, it really fits the mood of “Let Him Fly.” It looks like someone crumpled up photograph of Griffin and then, having second thoughts, retrieved it from the trash bin because he decided he wanted to keep it. It certainly captures the spirit of the song.

I highly recommend Patty Griffin’s “Let Him Fly.”