Two, three, four, stick around we'll tell you more

[austin_dern]

Included free with this month's Style magazine: a bikini! Comes in small, medium, or large, and in either green or black, possibly more colors. I've been so waiting for one. You have to expect it'll do better than Body magazine's giveaway this month of a small bottle of Vitamin C pills.

I appreciate the beauty of human bodies other than mine as much as anyone does, but could advertisers please find some other basic instinctive drive to sell to? It's getting boring, honestly, and the drive to hint ever more at nudity has lead to silly things like posters lining one of the MRT trains I rode today, advertising 50 Percent Off by showing men and women either Topless or Bottomless, with the various body parts replaced with huge pixel blurs. ``Look, two square centimeters of pink, isn't that exciting? Buy the clothes they're not wearing!''

The magazine covers are as you'd think, underfed white women wearing swimsuits or hip-hugger shorts that might as well just be painted on. Featured topics include sex, how to get more sex, are you getting enough sex, how to tell if your boyfriend's gay, and how to dress more sexy. It's not only magazines, of course; what fraction of the jokes on any average sitcom are based on sex as a punch line? How many TV shows in general try to save themselves from poor ratings by promising hotter babes and sexier storylines? I don't want to sound too much like a cardigan-wearing sitcom dad from 1958, and I'm sure there are those who find sex endlessly fascinating. It just feels to me like the pop culture has become a mind with one topic of conversation that he cares about, and who's worn that topic down to a terrible bore.

Diatribe over. In the meanwhile I've stocked up on books for my flight, and found a perfect gift to give my dad on his birthday. I'll share which it is after he's gotten it. Despite going to Borders with that coupon, I didn't get a fresh coupon for next month; that may be because they were holding a 15 percent off children's books sale, and didn't want to overlap too many discounts.

Trivia: During the U.S. Civil War the Union provided 40 percent of the wheat and flour imported into Great Britain. Source: The American Heritage New History of the Civil War, Bruce Catton.

Currently Reading: Capitalism and Arithmetic: The New Math of the 15th Century, Frank J. Swetz.

Comments

Sex.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't the presence of sex.

It's that none of it is deviant sex.

There's no variety, no exoticism, no intellectual or surrealist bent, nothing to say to me, "Yeah, you over in the corner, you're part of this orgy too." It's not even vanilla sex (sex with flavoring agents?) It's one particular choice flavor of sex. The same damn flavor of the month, every month. White male and white female exposing themselves in removing the same typical garments and going at it with the same motions. Where's the biting? The toys? The food? The fantasy? The friggin' glory? This is why I used to think sex was below my interest, because nobody had yet shown me that there was more to it than monochromatic pole-into-hole. There's not even the sort you can enjoy on your own; why the hell is that still considered something bad? Masturbation is sex with the person you love the most, plain and simple.

I have sex practically every day now, much of it with my spouse. It almost never involves anybody penetrating anything on anyone else. It involves all the things that truly titillate us, the real desires and true interests and unbranded love that hasn't been marketed to or spoken to in any way in popular media. It appeals to the reptile brain (the base need for some stylized version of procreative acts), the mammalian brain (the one that needs touch and feeling and care) and the human brain (the intelligent and analytical and creative.) It's full-spectrum engagement of the whole. I am convinced that this broader and more complete definition of sex has helped save me from being emotionally stunted in a culture that is still in the dark ages because they think it's all about the same Barbie doll with different hair-color preferences bumping up against the generic Ken. I want to get the word out. We are DEVO. We don't need to put up with this shit, and I'm here to ask you to stop worrying about the sex on television, and heal yourself by considering what sex is for you, because it's in there somewhere.

Forgive my rant. I should probably get my pills....

Re: Sex.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a good point that the sexuality that's gotten so boring is a repetitive, carefully generic average -- why else would all the magazine covers in Singapore, a country which is aggressively proud of its racial and cultural mixture, at the end of the Malay peninsula, which has been a meting point for Indian, Chinese, and Polynesian cultures for a millennium, be all pasty white folks?

I think the word you used that most rings, though, is intellectual. There isn't any effort to connect mentally. Granted that's the result first that a single picture has a hard time developing any sort of personality, and that it's easier to find someone who looks reasonably attractive to most people than it is to find someone who's personally engaging to them, but it is still a sort of cultural stagnation. I'm bored of thin women sitting in a big white fluffy (I hope fake) fur wrap on a blank white cover. If I'm supposed to be titillated, I want to see the advertiser making some effort to find me.