Things you find when you Google the words “ceteris paribus” (meaning “all things being equal”) with “oral sex!”

For instance I found a lovely polymath blogger at a lovely theologically-inclined site called Noli Irritare Leones

At the moment her most recent post (containing neither the terms ceteris parabus or oral sex) is a riff on an Evelyn Waugh quote about sex and golf.

The article’s interesting to me because I’ve often wondered why we can’t be as casual about sex as we are about, well, my example is tennis or singing duets but the counterexample could as easily be golf.

She answers the question in ways I’ll have to think about. I still disagree but I can’t dismiss it. Here’s her second point on the morality of talking someone into sex when they’re really not interested. This is a point with which I can sympathize.

Second, bad sex is a whole lot worse than bad golf. Bad sex is really, really, really bad, intrusive, invasive, quite possibly physically painful, and worth passing up a lot of good sex to avoid. Bad golf, on the other hand? Bad golf is being really slow and having the people behind you yell at you for holding them up. I’ve done bad sex, and I’ve done bad golf, and I know that I’d do bad golf a hundred more times before I’d do bad sex even one more time.

The moral conclusion I draw from this difference is that it’s OK to talk someone into golf when they weren’t all that interested in playing, but sex is an area where people really need to respect each other’s reserve.

Read the whole thing here.