Always the Wallflower at the Orgy

The sexualization of everything drives us relentlessly to the valuation of no one.

by Rod D. Martin
November 3, 2015

The following was originally an email to some of my pastor friends. I realized I needed to share it with the rest of you.

Gentlemen:

I’m sending you an article that — despite the fact that it makes me blush to send it to you — you need to read. It appeared last week in New York Magazine. It is called “I’m Always the Wallflower at the Orgy”.

You may get the reference, the 1970 short story collection by Nora Ephron (of When Harry Met Sally) entitled Wallflower at the Orgy. The age of that piece highlights the fact that, on a certain level, none of this is new. In fact, as you read the story, what will almost certainly hit you at some point is that “this must be how it was before the fall of Rome.” But that’s not why I’m sending it to you.

Hannah Arendt famously wrote of “the banality of evil,” and that is what this story is really about. The author of this story, Anna Pulley, is by no means evil in the Adolf Eichmann sense: indeed, her only real victim seems …