Just the other day, I was pointed toward an article in the Washington Post
concerning how young college-age women have no reference for positive sexuality in today's Internet society: they are either virgins ("Just Say No") or they are "porn stars" in order to match up with what "sex" is according to the Internet. This is to say, they haven't any other scale for what to do if, as the columnist says, they decide to say "yes."
This ongoing problem is reaching epidemic levels in a society of really misinformed young women. And many boys/men are taking advantage of a new upsurge in young women degrading themselves instead of being degraded by men. This is seen as a tool of empowerment, but it's just making it easier for dudes to pack it, smack it, and rack it. In fact, I can't imagine growing up in these here days, when the term "pwn" does not exclude young women based on their relative naivety, but preys on it. What are these girls naive about? Well, they are pretty naive about just how far "the guys" will go to nail them; and not nail them because the girls are irresistable and worth pursuing, but just to get it on tape to show their friends. It is, no matter how you slice it, a new world of sleaze you can't even begin to respect.
This started me thinking about the boys involved in this situation. I'm not saying the young dudes shouldn't be trying to score, because their hormones will pretty much drive them toward that goal regardless. Having respect, some kind of decency, toward the girls however...that is something learned, something ingrained. Respect doesn't mean to treat the girls like sluts or virgins. Respect and decency, part of the outline of being a man, are necessary components to learn how, firstly, to pursue girls and actually adore them and secondly, to learn how to live with the girls once they become women. That's right, girls grow up. This is important in the manly education: practice being decent to a girl, so you can later respect a woman.
Again, before anyone points it out: respect and decency doesn't mean men remove their balls and become weak, soft shades of themselves (or Oprah-ized, one might say). This crushing blow to manhood isn't remotely necessary, and is actually contrary to a healthy sexual relationship. As the great Oliver Reed once said, the best women in bed are sluts in bed. They are willing participants in a civil passion only us humans can engage in. Outside of it, women remain the delightfully intelligent human beings that drew you to begin with, vexing, practical and even wondrous at times. But a man and a woman in bed require a substantial theatre for getting down that is unique to them, and not found in any video on Redtube starring professional sluts or naive amatuers pretending to be sluts.
I know a woman, in fact, a beautiful love of my life type (forever denied me, natch), who has a boy who is 13 years old. Puberty age, teetering on the edge of horny teenager. I was thinking about when I was growing up, lacking Internet porn, and finding some 1970s-era skin mags in a wrecked car in my grandfather's junkyard at age nine or ten, and also the budding of cable television in those early 1980s exposing me to all kinds of hedonism, violence, and sex. My education arrived fairly quickly, but also fairly restrained. Nothing I saw was on the level of "Two Girls One Cup."
I didn't have the kind of clinical degradation you find online nowadays. I had movies with some explicit sex in them, mostly tastefully carried out (even something like BODY HEAT with the blazing sexuality of Kathleen Turner, a story practically melting off the screen, with two people so consumed by passion that murder was the only pathway to allow them to have more hot sex, was still artful in its presentation), and I had Captain Kirk making out with shapely alien chicks via "Star Trek" reruns. Sex in the early 1980s, culturally, still had a close eye on itself, still adhering to codes of conduct established in earlier decades. Next thing you knew, Madonna came along and reinvented the "virgin" in the video "Like A Virgin" and we were well on the road to a myriad of talentless entertainers becoming wealthy and established from their willingness to suck the bulging excess of an over-sexualized, over-stimulated culture.
While considering this, in relation to this teenage boy, I spoke about exposing him first to "representations of sex that reflect what sex really is, before he gets his education off the Internet." At least, representationally, in movies.
With that in mind, I'm going to list the movies which have sex scenes in them which any red-blooded American boy of thirteen should see. This is a rough guide to sexual expression in movies which entertained the hell out of me and also drew me in via their willingness to get down. Point of fact, it was so common for there to be a "sex scene" in movies that, by the 2000s, it was a cliche mocked even by Hollywood.
I'll rate these sex scenes from one Eric Dickerson jheri curl (former Hall of Fame running back for the Indianapolis Colts and Los Angeles Rams in the 1980s, and his awesome hair) to four Eric Dickersons, in descending order. This rating includes poignancy of story context, how well done, and also by explicitness. Keep in mind too, these are movies a teenage boy will want to see, and be able to watch in most cases. The kid should be entertained in other ways than just finding out how beneficial smut can be. (And this list will evolve; I have to rewatch a lot of movies again to remember if the quality matches up with my memory...but here's the ones I'm pretty sure about. So for right now, the money shots!)
AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON 1981
CONAN THE BARBARIAN 1982
THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY 1982
REVOLVER 1973
BODY HEAT 1981
THE PIANO 1993
OUT OF SIGHT 1998
RISKY BUSINESS 1983
DON'T LOOK NOW 1973
SHARKEY'S MACHINE 1981
GHOST 1990
AGAINST ALL ODDS 1984
See them alone, see them with a friend, but make sure your kids see what a real approximation of sex is before they see what it shouldn't be.
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