WIY:
I will disagree that the pizza shops are a “fire”. That is simply not true. Don’t think for a moment that I sanction these casual cross-gender relationships. There will always be a place for the yetzer horah, and without pizza shops, it will find its way into our community. Branding everything that is not perfect as extreme evil is unfair to ourselves. It eliminates the requisite prioritization that is needed for us to live normal, Torah lives. Rav Yaakov Kaminetzky ZT”L often stated that we need to always be “normal”. The overbanning mentality we have adopted is destructive, not because these things are good. They are not. Not the internet, not the hanging out, etc. But to give these things the status of the truly worst is untrue. I vote against internet access without filters. I’m not tolerant of pritzus. But we have slipped into a lifestyle of bans, whether decreed by Kol Korehs, letters, ads in the media, etc., without the desperately needed fires of kedusha to sustain us.
The approach of battling the yetzer horah begins with “yaasok baTorah, and is followed by “yikro Kriyas Shema”, and as a last resort “yazkir lo yom hamisah”. As noted earlier, the asei tov is bypassed, and we are preoccupied with making things assur. This may sound appropriate, but it misses the point. It does not work.