I wish people picked their battles based on severity of the issue rather than their personal levels of irritation.

All too often, I hear people protest and attack certain aspects of our collective culture even when they have little to no merit for their objections.

Recently, a friend of mine brought up her objections to the baseball metaphor for sex, and how it is competitive, sexist and even homophobic.

This was brought up in relation to a TED talk filmed a few years ago mentioning the metaphor and its problems as well as offering a more ridiculous metaphor in its place.

My friend was very passionate about her protest toward this metaphor, taking it extremely literally. She argued in baseball, someone is always on the offense and defense with a winner and a loser, which makes the sport  too competitive to compare to something like sex, which should be a cooperative effort between the two, or maybe even more, partners.

This is one of those examples where problems are created into something bigger than needed, when there are larger problems at hand. In a society with so many social issues– how women are seen in the media, for example– battles should not be picked against small things like the baseball metaphor used to describe sex, and if they are they should be used in tangent with other, larger efforts, to bring about real change.

Using this baseball metaphor as an example, I feel arguing over trivial-sounding things slows down the solutions to problems that need to be solved now. Should we refer to sex as pizza or as baseball?

Whether I’m telling my friends I had “pepperoni” last night or got to second base, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

This metaphor is being used to avoid a more “crude” way of describing what one person might have done with a partner.

Why are people picking fights with things like this metaphor that in the end have no effect on a person’s views such as sex, when we should be giving them a clear, direct message that views on sex still need changing.

If this metaphor was to be used less or not at all, I would assume a person’s view of sex would not change.

These types of objections slow or at least confuse the progression legitimate arguments and issues, like inappropriate views of what sex is.

Identify the real source of the problem instead of fabricating them and loosely relating them to the grand point.

Jarad Jarmon is senior journalism major.  He can be reached at [email protected].