The Pope Doesn’t Want to Netflix and Chill, Why Do You?
A ~300 word case for us to stop being slobs in our dating lives.
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On 26 September 2015, a fine Saturday, the pope was invited to Netflix and Chill at the University of Philadelphia. He did not attend. We wonder if this was because the pope got the connotation of the compound noun like many of us do, or because of something else entirely. In the same month, the streaming company cashed in on the Netflix and Chill phenomenon to market itself, unveiling, at the 2015 World Maker Faire in New York, a button that dimmed the lights, put your phone to DND and got your device streaming.
A Veritable Topos
With its folds and undulations SWGT is a jokes-aside study in the very topography of cloth as it could be, their garments an '-ology' all by themselves.
The month after this, Netflix and Chill became an FDA approved condom brand started by the entrepreneur and lampoonist Benjamin Sherman. Now all one needed to do to set the mood for a raunch was a button, a condom and a person; all but one branded Netflix.
Post the era where ‘Netflix and chill’ became a compound noun that didn’t require an antecedent verb phrase (“about to watch”) or gerund (“watching”) we feel that the weight of ‘going out,’ of being ‘wined and dined,’ has lost its force for good.
So for instance, in 2006, Joy Browne wrote in Dating For Dummies “The purpose of dating is simple: getting to know someone and letting that person get to know you so that you can decide whether you're interested in spending any more time together.”
Browne’s tip hardly seems up to date and more's the pity. Without being prudish, we’d wish today to take a page from Dummies and demand our dates to take us out to a good old movie, preferably a single screen. Where is there any joy in a mind numbing binge? Perhaps, just perhaps, the pope didn’t accept the invitation to Netflix and Chill not because the Roman Catholic Church requires him to be a celibate, but because he’d prefer to be treated to a good amount of Chardonnay before being bedded.
Yash Srivastava
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