At church one day (*sigh*, okay, one Sunday…), Alexis and I noticed that there were little notepads in the slotted holders in the back of the pews. The notepads looked like they were there for congregants to write down prayer requests or something like that.
Anyway, the notepads in OUR pew had far more juicy things written on them than mere prayers 
Read on…
The first page read thus:
So far so good… bemused, I wondered who wrote this and what they were writing about. Putting on my amateur sleuth hat (and pipe…), I deduced the following:
- At least two people involved, based on the differences in hand-writing and pencil pressure.
- Atrocious spelling of “tattoo”, but, *sigh*, then again this is America. The land of the freely misspelt.
- Initial conjecture: two people commenting on another person sitting somewhere up ahead with a tattoo. Could be two kids, or could be two adults, not enough info.
Things, however, took an interesting turn with a turn of the page:
Aha! Still within the realm of conjecture and gender-based assumptions, but at least the picture looks a little clearer: two persons, of indefinite gender, “checking out” a female person two rows up, with a tattoo.
The killer here is the damning verdict: the one NEXT to her is … better.
Maybe these were two “boys”, teenagers or younger, bored out of their skulls in church and looking for more exciting stimulation. Happens every Sunday. No big deal.
But… wow, imagine if the ones being “checked out” knew of this dialogue?
Have you ever been the one with the tattoo? The one that someone checks out, and then decides that someone NEXT to you is better?
I wonder about this curious sexual game that we people play - among young people it is overtly and clearly akin to mating rituals, with flirts, dress codes, and preening behavior quite openly displayed. However, even among, ahem, “adults”, this game continues - not only sexually but also in any myriad ways of subjective preferences.
Alexis recently started thinking about cutting her hair short, because she read in some magazine that women with “long and narrow faces” should not have long hair. I wondered why she thought being seen as having a “long and narrow” face was a bad thing? I have no doubt that in the same magazine, maybe even the same issue, there is an article somewhere that tells women with “short and round faces” to GROW their hair out to make their faces look “long and narrow”.
Scores of women with long hair suddenly start to worry about whether their hair is, you know, “too long”? Maybe, you know, like, their faces might be seen as “long and narrow”, you know? Ewww, that’s like SO unbeautiful! So they obsess and start trimming their hair while noticing, for the first time, the sexy perkiness of the short hair on the women all around them who all have wonderfully beautiful round faces instead of their own ugly narrow visages.
Meanwhile, scores of other women with SHORT hair, perhaps even the same women who just passed the long-haired bundle of misery on the street, are suddenly worrying about whether their hair is, you know, “too short”? Maybe, you know, like, their faces might be seen as “short and round”, you know? Ewww, that’s like SO unbeautiful! So they obsess and start growing their hair while noticing, for the first time, the sexy silkiness of the long hair on the women all around them who all have wonderfully beautiful long faces instead of their own ugly pudgy visages.
And this sort of thing is getting out of hand, folks - women are dressing more outrageously than ever, while men are trying so hard to be even cooler.
The word MILF got coined a few years ago - to those who don’t know (and to increase the R rating of this blog), it stands for:
Mother I’d Love to Fuck.
Ever since that became part of common lexicon, suddenly mothers everywhere are trying hard to be sexy MILFs. Mothers went from “wow, I guess I CAN be sexy as a mother!” to “wow, I guess I MUST become sexy, even if I’m a mother?” to “wow, does that cute guy see me as a fuckable mother?”
Suddenly moms everywhere are trying to find sexy clothes to go grocery shopping in, because they want to be seen as MILFs. A baby now qualifies as a sexy fashion accessory.
Mothers on TV shows are suddenly hot babes, and even babies are clean and attractive. Motherhood becomes a celebrity obsession, and tabloids abound with pictures of celebrities looking sexy IMMEDIATELY AFTER they have had their children. And we have the sheer idiotic spectacle of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears going on national TV to gush about the virtues of motherhood. Because what this country needs is more beautiful 16-year-olds rushing to get pregnant.
Motherhood??? So many cultures revere motherhood and provide services that help the mother take care of the child - the focus of motherhood is the mother-child relationship. Here in America we make housewives desperate and we fuck our mothers. Our focus is relentlessly on how sexy the mother should look, and the word “motherfucker” may soon become a compliment.
We have gone from empowering women to AGAIN enslaving them to being sex objects, by relentlessly forcing them to be SEXY by men’s standards even after they have had children. I’m not saying that mothers should not want to be sexy - I’m saying they are told they should want to be seen as potential MILFs, they are being told they should WANT to WANT to be fucked by random strangers. In other words, we are telling mothers that taking care of children is no excuse for getting back in fuckable shape after having a child.
The funny thing is - they think that’s cool and empowering.
After New York ex-governor Spitzer’s trysts with a high-priced call girl became oh-so-public, the identity of the call-girl was revealed and suddenly her MySpace page was THE hot page on the web. Her pictures were up for leering everywhere, and on various blogs and news sites the comments started pouring in. Many of them said something like this: “He paid thousands for HER? I wouldn’t pay more than a couple hundred!”
Shortly after that, the “news” shows started covering the “secret life” of high-priced call girls in New York and other cities. They were revealed to be ordinary young women, who had very exclusive clientele and lived the glamorous lifestyle of the moneyed mistress.
More than one “news” article had interviews with call girls who all said something along the line of: “hey, I get to make a LOT of money doing something I love, it’s a viable career choice.”
And then it comes out that the call-girl in the Spitzer case was on “Girls Gone Wild” - and suddenly a whole bunch of college girls want to go “wild”. Prostitution is suddenly cool - it’s now “empowering” for a woman to consider becoming a call-girl as a viable career, doing something they should love: having sex for money.
Everyone agrees that prostitution and trafficking in women (and children) is a bad thing for women (and children) “in that poor country over there somewhere”, but over here, in America, the home of the not-so-freely fucked, prosperous and empowered women (and mothers, and, yes, children) can CHOOSE to sell their bodies for money.
I’ve picked examples here of women being subtly manipulated into becoming anxious about their sexual self-image, but the same kind of thing goes on all the time with men as well. Ads for Viagra flood the tube, and screaming female orgasms are the norm even on primetime broadcast TV shows. Men are under increasing pressure to be sexual fiends, to make their women scream every single time - and for four hours at a stretch according to some ED ads. Nevermind if their women actually say “uhhhh, that’s too long for me.” No, men feel they must prove themselves sexually, that they must show off a well-hung package, strut their stuff, joke about how hard they are going to fuck that mother they just saw in the grocery store.
And this is not all about just sex either, folks - this same kind of pressure shows up in everyday life in other ways: from the car you drive to the clothes you wear to the kinds of causes you are supposed to espouse, there’s a constant pressure to be the one being “checked out” by others.
And why?
Just so someone, somewhere, can anonymously pass judgment on you by snickering to their neighbor: “the one next to her is better.”
We are such a bundle of insecurities…
July 19th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
I’m aware that those who know me might find it slightly surprising, and maybe shockingly offensive, how gratuitously I’ve used the “F-word” in this post. You could say I’m experimenting with academic freedom
No, but seriously, there is a strange hypocrisy afoot with the “F-bomb” in popular culture - it’s okay to hide it behind WTF and MILF, and it’s okay to say “freakin’” on TV instead of the “F-bomb”, but it’s not okay to say the F word even if everyone is being encouraged to act like fuckers. It’s okay to talk about sex-without-love in abstractly glorified terms, to abstract the sexual act away from all the emotions and passions involved, but it’s not okay to refer to it as “fucking” even when that’s how it’s portrayed by the dominantly accepted cultural influences in society.
On the flip side, truth be told, I do find it a crude word. I don’t particularly like how comedians use the F-word too gratuitously to generate crude humor: you should not have to resort to the F-word to get a few laughs.
So I’m trying something different - an accurate use of the word to really get at the passion and the sentiment associated with it. I do not want this to be a “PC” blog, and in areas that I feel very strongly about I do want to express my sentiments strongly. In many cases there is no better word that captures the fucking that is going on with our society by cultural influences that do not have our best interests at heart.
And, as budding cultural critic, I find strong language helpful in shocking people into awareness - even if it reduces my “capital” with them and even if it drives them away from the point I’m trying to make.
Yes, there are better ways of making my point, but I’m doing something different here from purely persuasive intellectual argumentation. I’m not trying to make my point effectively or objectively - I believe such a thing cannot be done - but rather I’m trying to say something about the state of affairs as I see them.
I find casual apologies for offensiveness to be themselves offensive - they usually go something like this: “I’m sorry if my actions offended you.” Such an apology actually is not an apology at all: it rather means to say “I’m sorry that you’re an idiot and misinterpreted my actions.”
So, instead, I say this: I use the F-word knowing full well that it WILL offend - but I do so NOT because I personally do not like you for being offended by it. In other words, if you are offended by my use of the word, I am NOT sorry for you (in the best sense of that phrase…), but I WOULD like to dialogue with you so that you know I am not personally attacking YOU with it.
July 25th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Ah Hari.
There will, indeed, be penalities, y’know? It’s one thing to talk all radical among academics whose primary interaction occurs in intellectual orgies (where each does their best to out masturbate each other, casting gratuitous strokes at those whose own fond musings stoke the juices). In the classroom though (harking back to your kind comment about my pedagogical experimentation) . . . sigh.
The sexiness will win you converts but only of a certain stripe. What then but another kind of preaching to the choir?
Asking students to really think outside the box means - shit, moving them out of comfort zones - and most of us (myself included, even though I like to believe that my zone is rather wide) really don’t like that. Still, you can play the game so that they go along with you (in general) and rate you highly enough that your administrators look the other way. Unless they don’t - which brings its own set of challenges, eh?
Then you’ve got to juggle your own degree of conformity to those very power structures (and don’t you think students can tell if we’re walking the talk or merely singing a sexy song?) Which means any administrator who is actually paying attention will also know you’re up to some nefarious form of “no good” for which they might get “in trouble,” and heaven forbid, we can’t have that. It might require creative thought and . . . ouch - some kind of ACTION that might invite more attention (of the wrong kind, of course) and . . . well, you can see why administrators prefer to have teachers who just go along with the rules EVEN IF they (being actually smart and usually fairly aware individuals themselves) realize the hypocrisy of the choice.
All I’m saying is, reckless doesn’t mean without care for consequences. It actually took me some time to learn this (ahem, only a few decades, cough), but if there is a spirit I could share, it would be to integrate that knowledge of time’s cyclicity (oh drunken fool!) into the strategies you bring to bear on the problems of human society in our world today.
Meanwhile, be prepared to screw up a lot and trust your basic intentionality will - regardless of, what was it, the measure of flow per second? - win out, in the end. (Or you will end, which in practical terms is roughly the same thing.)
ONWARD!