Don't Let the Gooners Get You Down

Desire Digest 0013: the post-Olympics sexual response and the rebranding of cheating as "ethical discretion"

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

It’s too easy to look upon the world and despair. And by “the world,” I might as well mean “the Internet.” And by “the Internet,” I might as well mean “X, formerly known as Twitter.”

Here you will be told a vision of society so cruel, abject, perverse, superficial, unthinking that you genuinely wonder if coexistence with other people is possible. This often relates to the realm of sexuality, wherein people lay bare their most depraved views with a moxy that might really make you contemplate ending things.

Well, that’s exactly what they want from you.

Surely, some new reason for thinking this way emerges almost daily. I am now a bit late on this, but I am nevertheless still thinking about how the Olympics were one such source of this misery, particularly around ice skating gold medalist Alyssa Liu. From the moment she hit the rink, complete freaks and losers saw an opportunity to transform the narrative of a happy and talented young woman into one of voyeuristic depravity. As she posed holding her gold, making a silly face, one person wrote “So we’re just not supposed to call this goonbait?” Their suggestion is that Liu is intentionally trying to appease the chronic masturbators, that she wants them all to jack off to her and is indulging them accordingly.