Yesterday we went to the birthday party of the charming Anneliese Mackintosh, who I had inadvertently offended earlier in the week by forgetting the subject of her short story (fortunately, YouTube has since come to the rescue). She had invited us to the Corinthian on Ingram Street, a devastatingly grand building whose beauty is undermined by the absence of a dress code (one man looked for all the world like a Berlin rent boy). I apologised for the perceived slight, but explained that I am neither a writer nor a reviewer, merely a diarist condemned to oafish honesty.
Towards the end of the evening, when I was effectively pickled in Merlot, I spoke to a PhD student about the efficacy of tolerating prostitution. She stated the accepted liberal dogma that increased toleration produces better working conditions, whereas I wondered whether that safety didn’t come at the cost of making it acceptable. I was adapting Zizek’s argument about how discussing torture of supposed terrorists sullies discourse and is evidence of societal regression. We know these things happen, but we can’t accept them in rational discourse. We are taught to believe that hypocrisy and propriety are automatically bad things, but don’t they also provide boundaries of accepted behaviour?
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