Go ahead and Kiss The Girl, if you dare

I lived in beau­ti­ful Prince­ton, NJ, for almost exactly a quar­ter of a cen­tury. Except for fre­quently audit­ing classes and reg­u­larly attend­ing lec­tures and con­certs, I was not con­nected to the Uni­ver­sity, so I missed most of the polit­i­cally cor­rect angst going on on campus.

PC angst did, how­ever, echo through the town (most of the time back then it was the Bor­ough and the Town­ship — later the two merged), and increas­ingly per­me­ated a major­ity of atti­tudes. The Uni­ver­sity is the town’s largest landowner, employer, and sub­si­dizer of hous­ing. It would be a one-​employer town if it weren’t located in the Boston-​to-​Washington, DC mega­lopo­lis. PC angst some­times rules the day, some­times not.

I moved to Miami in 2014, which cer­tainly was a dras­tic change of scene, but I still keep in touch, since Prince­ton is the place where I have lived most of my life.

The lat­est news to come to my atten­tion involves a sad per­son named Noa Woll­stein, Prince­ton U sopho­more, who urges the men’s a cap­pella group, “
Dear Tiger­tones, please stop singing ‘Kiss The Girl’”

Even when gen­tly crooned by an ani­mated crab, the song “Kiss The Girl,” from the Dis­ney hit “The Lit­tle Mer­maid,” is more misog­y­nis­tic and dis­mis­sive of con­sent than cute. By per­form­ing the song mul­ti­ple times each semes­ter, the Tiger­tones ele­vate it to an offen­sive and vio­lat­ing ritual.

No mat­ter how “great the tra­di­tion,” this canon­i­cal Tiger­tones tune should be struck from their reper­toire. Its lyrics raise some seri­ous issues. The premise of the song, orig­i­nally sung in the Dis­ney film The Lit­tle Mer­maid, is that the male Prince Eric, on a date with the beau­ti­ful female Ariel, should kiss her with­out ask­ing for a sin­gle word to affirm her con­sent. Despite the fact that an evil sea-​witch cursed Ariel’s voice away, mak­ing ver­bal con­sent impos­si­ble, the song is clearly prob­lem­atic from the get-​go.

My ini­tial snarky reac­tion to such pathetic pif­fle is best not printed.

Here’s what Noa con­sid­ers an “offen­sive and vio­lat­ing ritual,”

There you see her
Sit­ting there across the way
She don’t got a lot to say
But there’s some­thing about her
And you don’t know why
But you’re dying to try
You wanna kiss girl
Yes, you want her
Look at her, you know you do
It’s pos­si­ble she wants you too
There’s one way to ask her
It don’t take a word, not a sin­gle word
Go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl
Sha la la la la la
My oh my
Looks like the boy’s too shy
Ain’t gonna kiss the girl
Sha la la la la la
Ain’t that sad
It’s such a shame, too bad
You’re gonna miss the girl
Go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl
Now’s your moment
Float­ing in a blue lagoon
Boy, you bet­ter do it soon
The time will be bet­ter
She don’t say a word
And she won’t say a word
Until you kiss that girl, kiss the girl
Sha la la la la la
My oh…

Now watch the video pay­ing close atten­tion to Ariel’s body language,

Ignor­ing that Ariel puck­ered up and con­sis­tently gave clear body lan­guage sig­nals, Noa has her panties in a bunch because

“The song launches a het­ero­nor­ma­tive attack on women’s right to oppose the roman­tic and sex­ual lib­er­ties taken by men, fur­ther inun­dat­ing the lis­tener with themes of toxic mas­culin­ity.”

since

The Tiger­tones has a tra­di­tion: At the end of each ren­di­tion of “Kiss the Girl” from “The Lit­tle Mer­maid” a woman is pulled up on stage and decides whether to allow a man from the audi­ence to kiss her, or she refuses to allow him to “kiss the girl.”

Never mind that the girl from the audi­ence is selected ahead of time and can say no to the kiss, the Uni­ver­sity folded like a cheap lawn chair and the Tiger­tones kissed the song good-​bye.

It angers me that a nat­ural impulse to kiss an attrac­tive mem­ber of the oppo­site sex is con­demned as “toxic mas­culin­ity,” a sopho­moric opin­ion com­ing from an actual sopho­more who, by doing so, is engag­ing in toxic fem­i­nism … with the sup­port of the University.

Most of all, I grieve over the sad bar­ren emo­tional lives of the young SJW gen­er­a­tion. Very, very few expe­ri­ences in life are as great as a wel­come pas­sion­ate kiss from the guy, espe­cially if it’s unex­pected. Deny­ing your­self a rich emo­tional expe­ri­ence under the guise of … what? … a neop­u­ri­tan­i­cal rejec­tion of “the roman­tic and sex­ual lib­er­ties taken by men” is not only what Ros­alynd Rus­sell must have had in mind when she said, ” Yes! Life is a ban­quet and most poor suck­ers are starv­ing to death!”

It is down­right disturbing.

An entire gen­er­a­tion deny­ing itself spon­tane­ity, romance, joy.

In exchange for what?

I leave you with a kiss,

Fausta Rodríguez Wertz writes on U.S. and Latin Amer­ica at Fausta’s Blog.

Update DTG: Insta­lanche, Wel­come folks, hope you like the new design for our 10^th anniver­sary of blog­ging, and it’s a great thing to have Fausta blog­ging again. If you like what you see check out the my reg­u­lar five tweets that are blog posts instead, thoughts on the anniver­sary of the blog a col­logue of Marc Lam­ont Hill who writes here weekly and a big thank you to all who came here last year on this date to help out and if you think this site is still worth sup­port­ing after 10 years please con­sider kick­ing in here:

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