We’re middle class. Thoughts from la Camille. I thought this relevant to the new movie production venture:
The elemental power of sexuality has also waned in American popular culture. Under the much-maligned studio production code, Hollywood made movies sizzling with flirtation and romance. But from the early ’70s on, nudity was in, and steamy build-up was out. A generation of filmmakers lost the skill of sophisticated innuendo. The situation worsened in the ’90s, when Hollywood pirated video games to turn women into cartoonishly pneumatic superheroines and sci-fi androids, fantasy figures without psychological complexity or the erotic needs of real women.
Maybe it’s not too late to change that.
A generation of filmmakers lost the skill of sophisticated innuendo.
No, a generation of filmmakers lost the skill of romance.
Alan makes a good point. Se?ual ecstasy is not romance, still less romantic partnership, and se?ual ecstasy is all Hollywood’s selling these days.
But it’s hard to see what else they could do. If they tried to return to a model in which each se? longed for something (other than complementary se? organs) only the other could provide — if men longed for the warmth and stability of the female, if women longed for the daring and humor of the male — then we’d be trending dangerously towards the notion that the se?es are inherently dissimilar (and we know where that got Larry Summers) and not, as we have been taught in school and through the gigantic media empire, shiny completely interchangeable robot cogs in the Social Machine.
s/?/x/g above.
Trying to avoid the mindless spam filter.
se?ual ecstasy is all Hollywood’s selling these days.
With a few exceptions.
Gosh no, Curt, that’s the same thing, I think, although I didn’t see the movie. If it’s all about having your parts stimulated, even if those parts are mental, then why make a big thing about the s3x of the person doing it? Male, female, animal, vegetable, mineral, plastic — who cares? Why be dogmatic and unenlightened? Sure, if it’s not your cup of tea, don’t do it. But why be so provincial as to disapprove of others choosing differently? It’s all about individual choice!
What’s missing, I think, is an appreciation of the fact that men and women are different and that, in the ideal case, they can complement each other. The post-modernist will say that all such differences are merely social constructs, and so can be redefined at will, even by each individual. This indeed has become the conventional wisdom. Whatever works for you.
It seems to have been destructive. You hear a fair amount these days from aging Gen X females about why their male peers have stopped trying to “be men” (they phrase it differently of course). Overlooked, apparently, is that a destruction of s3x roles works both ways. If you don’t want men to be men in ways that you don’t like, they will, alas, also take the opportunity to avoid being men in ways you do like. The same can be said about women, of course: when women stopped being women in the ways men didn’t like, they also stopped doing it in ways that men did like. Now everybody gets to define what being a man or a woman means for themselves. Which, as it turns out, they don’t like as much as they though they would, in part because everyone picks out the pieces that are fun and tries to leave behind the pieces that are hard work.
Still, I predict it’s the future. Human beings are simply too individualistic to want it differently.
Two words: Lois Griffin.
“Two words: Lois Griffin.”
Plus one word: Yowza!