This Truly is a Golden Age

A few years ago Mc Donald's came up with what they described as their "adult" sandwich. Remember the Arch Deluxe? It was supposed to be a superior quality sandwich for those with adult tastes- read good taste. They don't have it anymore and I suspect it is because people don't go to Mc Donald's for good food. However it may also be because people associate the word "adult" with other things. Adult movies, adult themes, adult sandwiches- I'll pass. In any case, I assume everyone reading this is, if not an adult, at least mature enough to handle a topic that some might consider "adult." (Though if you wait to think about these things until you're an adult you're going to have problems).

On to the adult topic-

I am working on a conceptual music thing for one of our worship services and searched for heartbeat sounds to download. In addition to reaffirming my belief that "free" has no meaning in our culture (or that I am still familiarizing myself with the "newspeak" definiton) I learned that there are people (probably exclusively men) for whom naked girls are not enough, they must be naked girls with heart beats you can hear. There in the first page of search results for "sounds heartbeat" were pages where I could hear baby heartbeats, buy equipment to hear baby heartbeats, read studies about heartbeats, buy software to analyze heartbeats, hear how a mothers heartbeat sounds to a baby, download 100 heartbeat sound effects for "free," and (I won't be including a link for this) Heartbeat Babes, a site for heartbeat or stethoscope fetishists with heartbeat WAV files. Okay.

If there is something so gruesome, so horrible, so perverse that you are afraid to even think it, there is probably a web site and a whole web community devoted to it. Similarly, if you can think of something to satirically critique the absurdity of our depravity, there is probably someone out there who is wholeheartedly into it. Heartbeat fetishists are somewhere in that mix.

But wait, there's more. If you read the online magazine Salon, then you may have already seen this article on people (almost exclusively men) who buy super realistic dolls for pretty much one purpose. You may literally shudder if you read the article. It's a fascinating article, but be warned: it's super creepy.

Porn is an interesting thing. I don't know if the hyper realistic dolls are technically pornography, I'm going to say they are because they have the same purpose. I don't know what is popular as porn in other cultures, but it seems in our culture that men are so conditioned to dominate and be controlling that porn as we know it here is an inevitable outcome. I don't mean dominance as in order or hierarchy, but position as a tool of exploitation and consumption. Men are taught to grasp after this (I don't say women can escape this in our culture, but it seems a cultural trait of masculinity is to be dominant and able to bend others to your will). This isn't meant to systematically describe everything in our uber-sexualized culture, but it seems a feature of porn, especially if we see these dolls as pornography, is the desire to fulfill the ultimate cultural goal of abstracting human interaction into a medium for pleasure. These dolls are perfect examples of that- I know people who treat real humans little better than the descriptions in the Salon article.

This isn't how we are to know each other. In fact we don't know each other, if we see others and ourselves as objects to dominate or be dominated or consume. I wonder if that's why naked ladies aren't enough and it becomes necessary to make them uniquely "personal." That is, maybe a generic naked lady isn't enough so you have to add naked ladies with heartbeats you can hear, or naked ladies with wigs, naked ladies with big feet, naked ladies with hard hats, or naked ladies with whatever, so that they are specific to a particular fantasy.

If I wasn't concerned about what I would find, I think a fun game would be to do a search for "naked lady 'fill in the blank.'"

This isn't to excuse the porn phenomena or to say other cultures don't experience it. I am just suggesting that porn is a unique manifestation of sex as object in our culture. Sex selling cars or hamburgers can be understood similarly. Somebody write a paper on that.

A Very Adult Playlist
Here Comes the Sun-The Beatles
Canned Heat-Jamiroquai
Half a Person-The Smiths
Guerilla Radio-Rage Against the Machine
Jimmy Jazz-The Clash
The Flower Duet-Joan Sutherland
Insomnia-The Rentals
Evil-Howlin' Wolf
Theme From Narc-The Pixies
I Believe in a Thing Called Love-The Darkness
What's Happening Brother-Marvin Gaye
Billie Jean-Michael Jackson
Houses of The Holy-Led Zeppelin
Think-James Brown
Little Animal-The Raveonettes
How to Disappear Completely-Radiohead
Mr. Day-John Coltrane
City of Blinding Lights-U2