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Show Acting Alone Page 8 Promiscuous, casual sex, such as is practiced by young women Shannon's age, is a sin because it sets up a whole different social hierarchy. It allows certain people to see right through certain other people at a glance. And, unfortunately - no, fortunately - the transparent people are the ones with unsatisfactory sex lives, the twitchy mockable ones with the extra sublimated frustration and energy that allow them to set up social orders, to define what sin will be. Almost 2000 years ago the Great Harlot of Babylon stood sneering knowingly at Saint John the Divine. She knew at a glance that the prophet was a jackoff. She could've mimicked his walk and mannerisms to a tee, could've done so with excruciating accuracy without ever having seen the man. All she would've needed to peg his sexuality with humiliating accuracy would've been a second-hand description of the scraggly beard, the baggy old clothes, the unpolished sandals. But, really, on second thought, sweet little Shannon was not the Whore of Babylon, no she wasn't. She was not scarlet and gold and purple; she was sweet and little and all light brown. It was just Sam's ill-considered, facile 1980's misogyny that made the image of the Whore of Babylon spring momentarily to his mind, that's all. (Though, something from the New Testament would be a nice image for someone so nicely Catholic and Irish as Shanny. Sam had even heard that Shanny and her big sister comprised the renegade portion of an otherwise virulently Old Testament-style midwestern Protestant clan.) So they drove some more, through so-called "mountains" - more like piles of dirt, at least compared to the first mighty upsurges, in the glass- |
