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As a former Marysville middle-school boy, I paid particular attention to the case of a teacher lady who lived in Marysville (but worked in nearby Mukilteo).
Second-grade teacher Susan Lemery, 37, was arrested in late June. She was charged with having sex with one 14-year-old boy and fondling another. Both alleged partners are friends of her own teenage son.
I can assure you I had no specific private fantasies about any of my instructors during my years of tender budding manhood. But it’s easy to imagine that I could have, given the right circumstances and the right instructor. Cross-generational desire (in both directions, and among all gender-persuasions) is one of the perfectly natural sexual occurrances. Countless adolescents have dreamed of the experienced awakener who would gently guide them toward intimate awakening. Countless grownups have yearned for the fresh-faced plaything who would help them recapture their lost youth.
But once reality sets in, there are all sorts of power and control games going on; particularly if the boy or girl is emotionally malleable and manipulable (as so many boys and girls that age are).
Even harsher power and control games begin once a relationship of this sort becomes public knowledge, as a community’s well-meaning adults rush in to proclaim their outrage and cry for strict punishment and social control mechanisms to prevent any future such abuses of power.
And thus it will always be in America, unless by some miracle American adults learn to be more grown up.
By that, I mean that we collectively accept that all these desires exist and learn to exist with them; concocting wholesome and supportive ways for these fantasies to be addressed, without turning any real-life kids into commodities or stunting their emotional growth.
And no, I don’t know what that would be. But it would start with the acceptance and understanding of human nature, not its inhibition or suppression.
Now we know why Playboy TV reinvented itself with raunch-talk and porn-queen celebrity profiles, as noted in the previous item.
Turns out the channel’s been clobbered in subscription enrollment and cable-system carriage, first by the censored hardcore porn of the Spice Channel (which Playboy bought) and then by the more minimally censored hardcore porn of the Hot Network (which Playboy chose not to take over at the time of the Spice acquisition, but is buying now). When it comes to costly and unsatisfying 2-D substitutes for actual sex, the lonely-guy audience of America prefers the lewd ‘n’ crude over the comparatively soft and feminine.
Then there’s the phallus factor. AT&T Broadband can get away with charging $2 more for a Hot Network pay-per-view feature than for the slightly more discreet edit of the same production on Playboy or Spice. That’s because enough officially-hetero men crave the sight of other men’s parts in action.
A year or two ago I thought this portended some great change in men’s attitudes toward other men’s bodies, and might eventually lead to a more gender-equitable, less homophobic society. Now I don’t know if it means anything.
Saw a day’s worth of Playboy TV the other week, for the first time since ’94.
Back then, the channel presented a hermetically-sealed fantasy world built around the parent magazine’s carefully-crafted Playmate stock character–slickly “beautiful,” bereft of imperfection or personality, a supremely non-threatening ideal for post-adolescent readers lacking in sexual self-confidence. The magazine’s cable operation carried over this fleshless flesh and passionless eroticism, as best as its budget allowed, with a low-key, “friedly” lineup of centerfold videos and softcore movies.
That’s all changed. The channel now apparently wants to be as raunchy as possible without unduly tarnishing the Playboy brand image or jeopardizing its relationship with the cable companies that carry it. So it now carries “celebrity profiles” of porn stars (complete with lightly censored scenes from their works), travelogues to lap-dance clubs, and call-in shows in which the male callers talk lewd-‘n’-crude to nude female hosts showing off what they coyly call their “meat wallets.” Even the centerfold videos, which used to strictly show the models cavorting alone in pastoral settings, now feature them in soft-focus fake sex scenes.
Today’s Playboy TV is as dumb as yesterday’s, but in different ways. The old Playboy TV was almost numbingly bland. The new Playboy TV is a hackneyed visualization of some of shock-talk radio’s worst cliches, especially in the overabundance of capital-A Attitude.
But it’s also got an energy the old Playboy TV never had, an enthusiasm about itself and its primary topic. The fantasy world depicted by the new Playboy TV is one in which everybody (with the possible exception of you) is having outrageous, consensual, mutually gratifying, sweat-inducing sex just about all the time; sex that never, ever leads to STDs, unwanted pregnancies, or emotional relationship turmoil.
It’s a fantasy based on a different ideal of sexiness–not the soft-smiling, reassuring traditional Playmate image but the sassy, perky strip-club or porn-video goddess, a woman who might superficially look like a bimbo but who’s clearly focused and determined, bearing an unstoppable drive to sell, sell, sell.
A perfect sex-symbol depiction for the age of hyper-marketing.
Seattle’s annual Gay Pride Parade (officially, the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March, and Freedom Rally”) long ago ceased to be a niche-subculture celebration.
Today it has only slightly more specifically-gay meaning than the modern St. Patrick’s Day has specifically-Irish meaning.
It’s become the day when everybody claims or pretends to be, if not a proud queer, at least a proud friend of proud queers.
The floats, performance troups, and marching units of actual lesbians and gays (and their support groups) are heavily interspersed with those of officially gay-friendly corporations (Microsoft), marketers (KUBE-FM, Starbucks, lots of beer companies), and politicians major and minor.
Why, even petty-tyrant-wannabe mayoral candidate Mark Sidran showed up to aggressively shake everyone’s hands, whether folks wanted their hands shook or not. (Sidran was accompanied by a small entourage holding up yard signs, whose logo bore a loud rightward-pointing arrow).
Some gays might consider this mainstreaming as a sign that gays and gay rights are increasingly accepted in American society, yea even among the power brokers of business and politics.
But other gay activists, who’d dreamed their liberation movement would lead to a larger public questioning of the so-called “dominant culture,” have branded such mainstreamed celebrations with such terms as “assimilationist.”
They allege that the organizers of rituals such as Seattle’s Pride Parade are helping destroy not just the larger queer-lib political agenda but the distinct GLBT subculture.
I can leave such distinctions to those within the community.
But I can say that the overall trend in this country is for more subcultures and social niches, not fewer. Even within LGBT there are subgroups (gay men, lesbians, bis, M2F trannies, F2M trannies, cross-dressers, etc.) and sub-subgroups (bears, leather, butch, femme, etc.) and sub-sub-subgroups (too numerous to even sample).
That’s one of the aspects of the Pride Parade’s smiling, family-friendly homosexuality that helps make it so appealing to so many straights.
Thousands of Americans who’ve never been erotically attracted to someone of the same gender wish they could belong to a subculture like GLBT; though preferably without the job-discrimination and general bigotries so many real GLBTs face.
And I don’t just mean those urban-hipster straight women who think it’s cool to pretend to be bi, or those college-town straight men who wish they could be as sanctimonious as radical lesbians.
We’re all “queer” in one way or another, in the older and larger definition of the term. We’re all different, from one another and from any dictated vision of “normality.”
And we all have a sexuality; and many of us wish (at least secretly) that we could be part of a culture in which we could proudly proclaim our sexual selves, without fear of being branded as sluts or chauvanist pigs or unfit parents.
Postscript: The night before the parade, Showtime ran Sex With Strangers, a documentary by Joe and Harry Gantz about three couples (two from Olympia), and the bi-female “friend” of one of them, who are all in the swingers’ lifestyle. The closing “where are they now” titles revealed that three of the seven individual protagonists had lost their jobs after their nonmonogamies became known. (The other four were either self-employed or were now on “extended vacations.”) The lesson: You don’t have to be gay to need the more progressive social attitudes gay-lib promotes.
Post-postscript: The loneliest-looking entry in the Pride Parade was the car sponsored by the Capitol Hill Alano Club, with its plain signage, few passengers, and fewer attending marchers. The 12-Step group was almost directly followed by a succession of beer-company vans and trucks (even a delivery semi rig).
Went to the Fremont Fair. The unauthorized naked bicyclists were out in force once again, beloved by paradegoers of all ages and detested (but unarrested) by cops.
This year, the baring bikers all had elaborate body-paint designs, and almost all were female. Both factors helped make the experience more of a display and less of a statement.
Mind you, I do eternally adore the work of heavenly creation that is the adult female body. And I have nothing less than total admiration for those women who selflessly share the sight of their physical beauty with the world.
It’s just that the Fremont Fair’s bike brigade has been a situation in which adults of all genders could appreciate this beauty, and in which children of all ages could glimpse adult bodies presented as something neither disgusting nor overtly sexual. It’s been a proclamation of freedom, in which the bikers invited the audience to share the spirit of wholesome naturist body-love and innocent norm-breaking.
I’d like to see that continue.
IN RELATED NEWS: The Gun Street Girls, those lusciously costumed neo-burlesque dancing dames, are apparently splitting into two new troupes, neither of which will be Seattle-based. One will be in New Orleans; the other in Portland. Let’s hope both will still visit often, for either separate or combined shows.
I OFTEN GET EMAILS from folk who run other websites, asking for plugs for their sites on mine. And on rare occasions, sites are even recommended to me by people other than the sites’ own creators.
Today, a look at some.
Creating Your Own Funeral: Site creator Stephanie West Allen calls her site an info-repository for creating your own funeral or memorial service.”
It’s a basic links page to basic, relatively cheery how-to pieces (some by Allen) about “designing your end-of-life event, regardless of your age or state of health.” One thing you can say: It’s one artistic creation where you won’t care about the audience response.
Xiao Xiao: Described by the correspondent who recommended it to me as “deranged but weirdly hypnotic stick-men homage to Jackie Chan, The Matrix, and Crouching Tiger, etc. etc.”
It turns out to be a cute, albeit morbid, Flash animation of simply-rendered figures in various monochromatic colors, engaged in violent karate and knife fights in a setting reminiscent of ’80s video games.
Cranky Media Guy: Site runner Bob Pagani thinks I should put in a good word for his online narrative about a friend, Tom Kraemer, who (according to Pagani) “is in love with an imaginary woman.”
As Pagani explains, “Back in February, I loaned him my Mac and a copy of the imaging program SuperGoo. With them he made the face of a ‘woman….’ Now he says he is in love with the woman he created and wants to find her real-life counterpart. While I realize this is pretty odd, he is my friend and I do want him to be happy so I have put the picture of Tom’s ‘dream girl’ and the entire story
on my website… so that Tom can find his ‘dream girl’ and have a happy life.”
The Art of Kissing: Reader John R. Nicholson recommended this online posting of a 1936 how-to manual by one Hugh Morris.
This simple, one-page, all-text work is elegantly and tastefully written, even as it discusses such topics as “Why Kissing Is Pleasant” and “How to Kiss Girls with Different Sizes of Mouths.” While some readers might chafe at Morris’s insistence upon traditional gender roles (“He must be able to sweep her into his strong arms, and tower over her, and look down into her eyes, and cup her chin in his fingers and then, bend over her face and plant his eager, virile lips on her moist, slightly parted, inviting ones”), I believe all of you will enjoy the way he expresses his convictions.
Written long before the first computer, this is clearly the best site of today’s reviewed batch.
NEXT: Just a little more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
A Symphony Between the Sheets
by guest columnist Christopher DeLaurenti
It’s the moment that always freezes my heart.
I’m at her place; the lights are low, and maybe we’re entangled on the couch, or perilously swaying next to a glass table. Soon we’re in the bedroom.
She smiles, nods to the other stereo–this one smothered with candles or books–and offers “Music?”
For a moment, I lose my butterflies and a dead weight drops into my guts.
What do I say? I say nothing.
We wouldn’t be this far if we didn’t appreciate each other’s taste in music and whatever else, but I like the stereo silent. Some want to hide their sex lives from children, neighbors, and roommates, but I prefer the challenge of sinking my teeth into the pillow instead of grunting behind the sussurating camouflage of some radio station.
Forget it, I say “sure” and pray that the music isn’t crap, or worse, inspires me with some sort of brilliant yet distracting insight that within a few minutes evaporates–along with our mood–into nothing.
As a musician, I find the standard choices of lust-inducing music ill-suited to sex. For me, a potentially epic erotic offering like The Rite of Spring conjures the image of giant spaceships careening into battle and molting their metal carapaces.
Slow, moody jazz from the ’50s and ’60s will pad the room with a pillowy intimacy, but what do you play when you need to go faster? Hard bop just doesn’t cut it.
Judging by the LP jackets from the ’70s, Bolero should be a sure-fire aphrodisiac; but it has the same effect on me as rock, pop, or uptempo jazz, whose beat seems better suited to robots than to lovers abed in rhythmic flux.
Deftly-made mix CDs or tapes might help, but I can’t touch the mastery of club DJs who can subtly elongate an ever-accelerating tempo for an hour or more.
So where is my lust-inducing music?
While I like music that uses the sounds of sex, such as Luc Ferrari’s Unheimlich Schoen or Hafler Trio’s Masturbatorium, my favorite erotic music lurks between the sheets.
Alongside the sweaty clasping and slithering contorted penetration, fucking can be quite musical, not only with the steady press of skin, but in the ebb and flow of bodies moving in concert, the swoosh and ruffle of sheets, and maybe that tell-tale creak of a bed rasping like a violin strung with springs.
Fucking transforms language too; meaning as much or more than any words, the embedded yelps, coos, sighs, and grunts restore speech to music’s embrace.
Best of all, the sounds, like the love you make, are yours.
NEXT: The heroism of America’s TV critics (or at least one of ’em).
(NOTE: Today’s installment concerns a topic some readers might find completely icky. Reader discretion is advised.)
THE NATION RECENTLY RAN a fairly long piece by Marc Cromer about the LA corporate-porn video industry and a new set of guidelines issued by some of its biggest producers, discouraging or banning images or situations that could be perceived as violent or excessively kinky.
Cromer’s premise: Nobody knows yet how much more censorous a good-old-boy Republican president will be than a good-old-boy Democratic president. But just in case, the biggest porn makers are reining in their directors, sacrificing freedom of expression on the altar of political expediency.
That’s not quite what’s going on.
The adult entertainment business has always been a business first, tailoring its offerings to what it believes the market, as well as the political climate, will bear.
Certainly, the thousands of lo-budget, lo-creativity XXX videos churned out by the industry’s majors (some 200 different titles every week) don’t attest to sexual or directorial imaginativeness but to assembly-line production, rote formulas, and ever more narrowly-defined market niches.
(Any real couple whose sex life was as unvarying (or as loveless) as the couples in LA porn would be a good candidate for counseling.)
Under corporate porn’s new self-imposed rules, the formula will get (and has already gotten) even duller.
But politics isn’t the chief reason for the new rules.
What happenned was a new set of distribution channels, which have made hardcore product more widely available but, at the same time, have obligated that product’s makers to adjust their content accordingly.
This story begins with the Spice Channel, a cable network owned by some big LA porn-video people. It ran their wares with all phallic and hardcore shots edited out. Then it began Spice Hot, which left in some things but not everything. Playboy bought Spice but not Spice Hot, which became the Hot Network and now appears as a pay-per-view option on assorted cable systems and in thousands of hotel rooms.
It soon became a major new revenue stream for the big LA porn producers. So much so that they started shaping their output to meet the perceived tastes of this more mainstream market.
“Money shot” ejaculation scenes could easily be cut for Hot Network showings but retained for home video. Other types of material, though, had to be rethought from the ground up, lest there be too little Hot Network-appropriate footage in a production to warrant a full pay-per-view retail price.
Hence, the new list of verboten topics Cromer recounts in his story, ranging from wax-dripping and food fetishism to black men with white women.
It doesn’t mean you can’t see these in porn videos anymore. It just means you won’t see them in the videos from the big LA porn factories with contracts to supply shows to the Hot Network. These big companies put out so many darned titles as part of a strategy to crowd smaller producers off the store shelves. The smaller smutmongers, with a whole range of material now theirs alone, might have just been given a new lease on fiscal life.
Unless, of course, there really is a renewed political censorship scare.
IN OTHER NEWS: The next MISCmedia print mag will be a combo March-April, out in a couple of weeks.
NEXT: Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race at this early date.
AS PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN HERE, I used to hate Valentine’s Day.
Now, I llluuuuuvvv it.
And it’s not just because (at least as of the time of this writing) I’m in head-over-heels infatuation with someone bright and down-to-earth (which I am).
It’s because I’m now convinced that human connection, in all its forms (including sex and romance) is one of the keys to moving human society beyond its current power-and-money obsessions and toward something healthier and more stable.
Things I’ve learned during the process:
By that I don’t mean masturbation, and I don’t mean obsessive self-absorption, and I don’t mean that “be your own best friend” self-help junk. I just mean treat yourself the way you’d like a lover to treat you, with honest respect and kind appreciation.
And since it’s the lovers’ day, give yourself a present. Maybe a handsome little decorative tchotchke; maybe some dark chocolate and raspberry truffles; maybe even a day-spa massage or a couch dance if that’s what moves ya.
Again, this doesn’t refer to salacious solicitations; (i.e., don’t sue me if you come on rudely to some stranger in a bar and responds with a punch in the nose. Indeed, that kind of unsubtlety is the mark of a selfish wolf, not of a lover.
No, I mean spreading as much of all the kinds of love (familias, agape, eros, etc.) in the appropriate form to the appropriate recipients. This is hard for many of us repressed-Calvinist northern Caucasians; damn hard for some. But it’s worth it.
So lots of huggs, kisses, and/or kind words to you and yours, this little-over-midway point between solstice and equinox, when the world is just starting to come back to life.
NEXT: Re-editing Star Wars was one thing, but re-editing Red Dwarf is a potential abomination!
YESTERDAY, we began to ponder a vision of sexual liberation for a post-corporate era.
For better or for worse, sex gets redefined in every generation. So let’s imagine what an early-century, post-NASDAQ-crash vision of sex might be:
Sterile modern office buildings, barren strip-mall landscapes, flavorless cuisine, unsatisfying mass entertainment, socially isolating subdivisions. Virtually everything wrong with American culture can be described with adjectives of sexual dysfunction.
Hot jazz, early rock n’ roll, western swing, blues–it’s all sex, the joys and sorrows and confusions of sex. Passion and lust-for-life are also eminently visible in the late-19th-to-mid-20th-century era’s gleaming art-deco skyscrapers, churning industrial plants, streaming railroads, gaudy Broadway spectacles, teeming downtowns, and fruited plains.
A pro-sex worldview is the needed antithesis to a worldview centered around the cold passions of power and money.
It won’t solve all the world’s problems (many of which have to do with the side effects of too-successful procreation), and can eventually lead to new problems (some of history’s most militaristic cultures (cf. Rome, Japan, precolonial India) made some of the world’s greatest erotic art).
But a neo-sexual revolution is still needed. I don’t mean the ’60s free-love schtick that got so quickly exploited by fashion marketers and predatory hustlers. And I don’t mean the dependency-building, intermediating commercial sex-biz that offers little more than loveless porn to men and masturbation toys to women.
I mean something forward-looking.
Something incorporating current sexual subcultures (suburban swingers, middle-class fetishists, gays and lesbians, etc. etc.).
Something that treats orgasms not as a merely pleasurable experience but as a way to get to know people. A way to build couples and friendships, to form virtual families as well as biological ones.
So have some great sex tonight. (If you don’t have someone to have sex with, keep looking and don’t ever stop.)
Don’t have it just for yourself. Have it to help save the world.
NEXT: Is it time to remember the ’90s yet?
YESTERDAY, we discussed what’s wrong withPlayboy these days. It’s bland, corporate, materialistic to a festishist extent, and not particularly sexy.
Today, we begin to ponder an alternate vision-in-text of what sex is and can be in this new century.
And I don’t mean that now-passe ’90s vision, expressed in Wired magazine and elsewhere, of advanced masturbation helpers such as holographic pornos and “dildonic” sensor-fitted suits. Even at the time those things were being hyped, I believed sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart in their lonely individual fantasy realms.
The world doesn’t need more fake sex. It needs more real (albeit safe) sex. Sex is great. Most people should have more.
This means I think coitus (in whatever gender-combo you prefer) is preferable to solo sex; but, more importantly, that any (respectful) sexual expression is preferable to the squeaky-clean unreality promoted by the religious right and those high-school purity pledges.
Chastity is good, at least for periods of time, for (1) those adults who’ve chosen it as part of a spiritual discipline; (2) those young people who aren’t yet ready for the emotional turmoil of intimate relationships (or for the discipline of contraception); (3) those in monogamous relationships who choose to forego alternatives during periods of separation; (4) those older and/or widowed people who’ve chosen to retire their sex lives; and (5) those in dysfunctional life patterns who need to take time out from intimacy while working to heal themselves.
But for the vast rest of the citizenry, more sex is, generally, mo’ better.
It’s not the answer to everything (and it’s certainly not the only answer to an otherwise failing relationship).
But when it’s done right, it can bring you to a greater awareness of yourself, your partner, and even to the continuum of life.
(It’s also a great way to relieve nervous tension, invigorate your metabolism, and spot potential cancer warning signs.)
And the answer to bad sex, i most cases, isn’t no sex but good sex–a healthy attitude towards one’s body and its cravings, combined with enough guilt-free respect to avoid or resist abusive situations.
You don’t prevent kids from getting exploited by keeping them ignorant and “innocent,” but by teaching them to respect their sexualities and themselves. You don’t prevent the spread of STDs by telling people they have to stay alone in shame and frustration, but by helping them learn to love safely and consciously.
SHOWTIME RAN ONE of those Playboy self-congratulatory videos this month.
The magazine’s video division has put out at least three or four of these tapes in recent years. All of them gush on and on about how the magazine singlehandedly started the Sexual Revolution, conquered the bad ol’ American Puritan double standards, allowed people to feel good about their bodies, and taught folk to view the mating act as fun and even wholesome.
And its founder Hugh M. Hefner is always depicted by his hired video documentarians as the ultimate cool dude, a great party host and a tireless supporter of all righteous causes. By the time one of these videos is over, a viewer might feel a cult-O-personality trip going on, despite the claims to the publisher’s self-effacing humility.
None of these hype jobs or related PR efforts have daunted the magazine’s longtime critics, who’ve leveled the same charges against it all these years–charges that imagine the magazine to be as singularly influential as it claims to be, but in the wrong direction.
Not only is this single monthly rag blamed for the objectivication of women among males and unhealthy body-image obsessions among young females, but some accusers have even blamed it for rape and domestic violence.
In my opinion, that’s a crock. Neither Playboy nor, I presume, anyone working for it wants anybody to get hurt. Nor, at least in their own minds, do they mean to demean womanhood. They think they’re honoring, even celebrating female humanity by offering what they claim to be “The World’s Most Beautiful Women” and asking readers to worship these women as perfect, unattainable fantasy topics.
That’s what I think they think they’re doing. What I think they’re really doing is different, both from that explanation and the critics’ diatribes.
Playboy is really a relic of the grey-flannel-suit era of marketing and advertising it claims to have originally been a rebellious statement against. It’s corporate and bland. It treats sex as just another consumer-leisure activity, no more or less involving than shopping or tourism.
And the girlie pictures are like ads for an unavailable “product,” utilizing every graphic advance in lighting and digital retouching to portray their subjects as “flatteringly” as ad photographers try to “humanize” the newest cars and detergents.
Today’s Playmate characterizations (and, remember, the models themselves might not really be anything like the roles they’re playing) are neither alluring temptresses nor friendly girls-next-door. They’re L.A. starlets, model/actress/whatevers all done up with bleach and silicone. They exist only in a Hollywood make-believe realm (and in the cut-rate versions of that realm that are North America’s lap-dance clubs). Their purpose is to sell–to sell magazines and videos, to sell their own star-images.
And a lot of the time, they’re not even all that sexy.
It’s an aesthetic that has everything to do with turning young men into good consumers and nothing to do with turning them into good lovers.
Its deficiencies wouldn’t seem to matter, since Playboy has had the softcore-hetero market pretty much to itself. Its only non-sleazy rivals are the new Perfect 10 and the newer print version of the website Nerve. All the other girlie magazines have gone to hardcore porn.
But while neither Hefner nor anybody else Stateside was looking, the British “bloke magazines” such as Maxim started U.S. editions with leering-attitude text pieces, non-nude pictures of supermodels (themselves sales professionals in the business of selling women’s clothes), and advice (albeit often wrong advice) on how young men might get beyond just looking at pictures of women and start dating and mating with genuine females.
Maxim and its ilk are simultanously treating sex more like a part of its readers’ lives and making it seem naughty again. They’re rapidly gaining on Playboy in both circulation and in the cultural consciousness; while Hefner continues to schmooze at his palace with his invited Hollywood celebrities, ignoring (or trying to ignore) the social/sexual changes challenging both his and Hollywood’s grip on America’s minds and crotches.
NEXT: Sex magazines may be dumb, but sex is still great!
JUST AS I START to get bored with my existing selection of cable channels, AT&T Digital Cable serves me up a fresh batch. In an effort to stave off the juggernaut of home-satellite-dish ownership, they’ve quickly gone and snagged up a bunch of the secondary and tertiary program services dish owners have long enjoyed.
Among them, in no particular order:
Still not on local cable screens but wanted, at least by me: The Food Network, ABC SoapNet, Boomerang (Cartoon Network’s oldies channel).
NEXT: If you’re really nice, I might share some pieces of my next book.
IN OTHER NEWS (Mike Barber in the P-I, on unseasonably-low levels in hydroelectric lakes): “A walk down through the terraced brown bluffs is a stroll through the history of modern beer. Colorful newer cans and bottles glimmer in the sun at the higher levels, giving way to more faded cans tossed overboard in the pre-Bud Lite era.”
LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
Then we went off on a tangent, and started instead to discuss the centuries-old dichotomy between established Christendom and the pleasures of the flesh, a topic some folk have written whole books about.
Religion needs more sex; it needs to acknowledge human passions and the joys of earthly existence. And it always has needed this. Back in the early Christian days, when the study of Jesus was was essentially an ethnicity-free Judaism for Romans (and Roman-conquered peoples), women from prominent families were among its leading converts. These women appreciated a religion that treated women as something more than just sex-and-baby machines.
(Then, of course, Constantine made it Rome’s new official religion, and a hierarchy formed that kept women out of power within the church, etc. etc.).
Anyway, Christianity developed as an antithesis to the decadence and excess of Rome’s bread-and-circuses culture, its orgies and slavery and human lion-feedings and corruption and cruelty. It developed into a religion that, in various degrees and with various exceptions over the years, renounced sex and the whole physical aspect of human existence.
But porn (or erotica, or whatever PC term you prefer to use) also needs more religion, or at least more spirituality.
Whether you’re talking hardcore videos and magazines, hard-sell web sites, softcore cable shows and magazines, strip clubs, “women’s erotica” books, or the get-a-guy articles and see-thru supermodel pictures in women’s magazines, you get almost nothing to do with two human souls using their bodies to come closer together.
You just get stimulus-response mechanisms. Sex is defined as a shallow physical pleasure to be obtained by spending lots of money and suppressing anything cool or individualistic about yourself.
It’s a ruthlessly materialistic vision. In a nation where prostitution is outlawed (except in rural Nevada), commercial sex-culture defines both female and male genitalia as nothing more than capitalist tools, products to be sold and/or target markets to be sold to.
All this means the “Christian porn” I thought up last Friday half jokingly could actually be a useful thing, an aspect of reintegrating bodies to souls, females to males, and humans to one another and their universe.
We finish this topic, at least for now, with a very brief example of what written Christian porn might be like.
(Be warned: This particular fiction piece is not only sexual, but also involves an attempt to write characters of an ethnicity other than my own, in a nondemeaning yet candid manner.)
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself. All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.” Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself.
All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in “tongues,” many “Praise Be”s and “Hallelujahs.”
Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches–“No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited.”
TOMORROW: Remembering some things that went away at the end of Y2K.
LAST FRIDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.
That simple gimmick led me to pondering a whole bigger question–how to bring sex, and a healthy respect for it, back to Christendom.
This might seem either double-icky or sacreligious to some of you. I assure you I don’t intend to be either.
After all, many of the world’s great religions and cultures have embraced strongly sexualized images and messages–including the Euro-pagan cultures Christianity borrowed so much else from.
What I imagine, in 3 parts:
Examples and precedents from over the centuries:
TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.
