Week 15 (30)
Give
a little more, while you’re at it.
Saturday, 11:57
And there’s more you can do to feel all good about yourself and active and progressive and saving-the-world—or at least this poor, benighted corner of it, this hideous netherworld American law and culture and general stupidity have carved out for our kids: those years between 12 and 13, when puberty starts kicking in, and 18 years of age, when the emotional maturity to have and handle sex is magically granted to them by legislative fiat. —Until then, of course, they aren’t supposed to do it (God, no), or look at it or read about it, they shouldn’t really think about it, beyond a hazy sort of “no, God no, not until I’m married” anticipation—and they should never, ever talk about it.
For five or six or seven years.
Show me the kid with that kind of patience.
So enter Scarleteen, who’ve been taking up the shameful slack left by the Federal and state governments in this country, all on a wing and a prayer and sheer chutzpah. Excellent articles that deal with facts and truth and real-world actions and consequences, rather than “family friendly” moral fantasies of denial; raucous (though moderated) discussion boards where kids come from all over the country (heck, world) to yammer about everything from labial issues to the trials and travails of being queer in high school—the sort of discussion that’s desperately needed and so sadly lacking, the kind of place that garners accolades from everyone who deals with kids and has their head screwed on right.
Of course, it’s also the kind of place that needs your help.
So go. Give money. (They take PayPal.) Spread the word. Pop over here, grab a graphic, download it to your server and put up your own link to let everyone know: here’s something good and vital and necessary that the internet has made possible. Let’s show our appreciation and help it along.
—Give and let live, in other words.
Your
daily moment of activism.
Saturday, 10:19
Here’s a control-freak law that must be stopped (that doesn’t have anything to do with intellectual property). HR 476 is also known Owellianly enough as the “Child Custody Protection Act”: basically, it criminalizes any adult other than a parent (grandparent; adult sibling; counselor religious or otherwise) who accompanies a minor across state lines for the purposes of obtaining an abortion if that minor has not complied with her home state’s parental consent or involvement laws.
So stare aghast at the computer screen for a moment and curse under your breath and hit the wall or something and get it out of your system and then go to NARAL’s website and do something about it. Send a fax. Deluge your representative. Go on! Now. Do it. —Those readers from Britain and the Netherlands who occasionally tune in hereabouts are reminded that the House of Representatives tends to be the more yokelly side of our bicameral legislature; more jingoistic, impractical, and freakishly partisan than the Senate (if that is possible) (and here, to prove I’m not just kicking the far right wing). Therefore, faxes or emails or letters from furrinners castigating the House for their unbelievably backwards, barbaric, uncivilized approach to social engineering and family planning will drive them further into their obstinate shells and do more harm than good—no matter the essential truth of the accusations.
Bring
the noise.
Thursday, 21:07
Day of Silence? Well, okay. There’s certainly something pomo right about choosing your form of protest in this sound-bite saturated meme-storm age as one of silence. (Plus, it’s a great excuse for why nothing got posted last night, ha ha.) —And I’m thinking about that truly awesome spine-shivering moment: summer of 1990, Gay Pride in New York City, I’m at the south end of Central Park having just fallen in to march with the GLB (no T then; we were still antiquated in those days) contingent from my alma mater, when the Moment of Silence was declared—
—and New York City was, like, quiet.
The whole fucking town.
I could hear birdsong from the Park. A bus, grunting at the curb somewhere out of sight, blocks away.
People shifting around me, a little. Standing there, heads bowed, eyes closed, listening, feet scraping on sidewalks and pavement.
Breathing.
And then the roar swelling up out of nowhere, moment over, the yells, the cries, the applause, the whooping, because, by God, you keep silent as a show, you keep silent for a moment to prove your fucking point, you keep silent out of respect but only for so long because what the silence now, yesterday, is supposed to have commemorated and called attention to, all the bullshit and stupidity and ignorant crap we were supposed to be over and done with by now but that kids still have to struggle through, day after day (just like then it was about the thousands, tens of thousands, dead and dying, gone and never coming back, all because of a disease, a plague in this day and age that no one would pay attention to because, you know, no one important was dying of it), you think a moment about all of that and it starts to bubble up inside you and boil over and come rolling out of you forcing your mouth open and you are damn well gonna make some fuckin’ noise—
Yeah. Be silent for a day. And then go right on back to kicking up a goddamn ruckus.
Might
as well face it—
Tuesday, 22:56
Station-keeping, tonight. There’s (finally) a new Cuyahoga up; “Giggling” made the finalist cut for March’s Silver Clitoris, so if you liked it better than anything else you read that month, go vote for it, thanks. Other than that: there’s this test sponsored by Singapore’s Ministry of Health—one for men, one for women (and don’t even get me started; look at the questions yourself, and I’ll leave the rant as a homework assignment for y’all), 25 questions long, and though there’s no radio buttons to punch and it doesn’t score for you, I think nonetheless you’ll find it quite illuminating. I am, in fact, willing to bet the farm that in Singapore, every single one of you perverts would qualify as addicted to sex.
(The joke’s on you, if you’ve already picked up on this meme from linkfarms like Plastic. Singapore ain’t the only place to use this test; it gets around. Yeesh.)
The
Old Man and the internet.
Monday, 22:17
Click through to this New York Times article (yes, you’ll have to register to read it, just do it, that’s what Hotmail and Yahoo accounts are for, but if you’re too bleeding paranoid you could always try I think it’s “mefi” and “mefi” and see if that works) and scroll down to check out the photo of Bob Guccione. —See? That’s how I always imagined Jubal Harshaw would look, in his big old house with his lickspittle sycophants and his three gorgeous female “assistants” (blonde, brunette and redhead, as I recall) and his wit and his pith and his more than a whiff of good old-fashioned homophobia.
But I come not to bury Robert Heinlein, but to bury Guccione, and to peer askance at the spin his more-than-likely shutdown of the print version of Penthouse is receiving from the media. “The web is doing what Andrea Dworkin couldn’t,” as more than one headline has tagged it, following the lead the Times has given them—and which, to be fair, Guccione gave them: “There is ‘no future for adult business in mass market magazines,’ he said. ‘The future has definitely migrated to electronic media,’ he said, adding that he expects to be part of it.”
No future in magazines, eh? I’ll have to remember that the next time I’m in my local newsstand, browsing the Hustlers and the Clubs and the Ouis and the Mayfairs and the Playboys and to be fair the Maxims and the FHMs and the Stuffs.
Nah, the truth is right there in the article itself (and—being fair—I’m pretty sure the Times got it, too): it’s the bad loans and the failed casinos and the Bussard fusion reactors and the ill-timed clumsy jump to “hardcore” and the other failed magazines that sank his publishing empire. Not the internet. (Sounds rather like EMI paying Maria Carey 21 million dollars for an album that tanked and then 28 million dollars not to record any more albums and then blaming that year’s 77 million dollar losses on, uh, internet piracy. Yeah. That’s the ticket.)
And it’s even simpler than that. Take a look at the photo again. The unbuttoned shirt. The gold chains. The leathery, reptilian tan. The (um) toupee. Now. What year was it we were in, again? —I’m not laughing at a 71-year-old trying his best to stay deeply ensconced in his glory days, honest. (If I were, Hef would prove a much richer target.) I think the picture’s a good enough indication of what went wrong with Penthouse, and why the magazine’s sales have dropped so precipitously. —Have you opened an issue lately? Despite the much-vaunted “hardcore” additions (penetration shots and the occasional piss take, oh my), the magazine doesn’t look or feel all that different from its heyday, back in the late ’70s and ’80s. The models still all look like they’re hanging out in the back room of an endless wrap party for a ZZ Top video; the poses and the staged sex still look like bad Vegas floorshows lit by the cinematographer for Caligula ; even what new stuff they’ve had, like those grainy black-and-white lesbian shoots they’ve been enamored of lately, still somehow manage to look like something I would have found under my dad’s side of the bed back in the day. It’s stuck, lost, dropped down a time warp, a retro that isn’t working—a former party animal in a bad toupee with a hidebound St. Tropez tan, scratching his chestful of gold and hair and wondering where all the chicks went. —Disco Stu, indeed.
It’s all kind of sad, really, because at its heart there was something vaguely sweet and utopian about the whole Guccione thing. (I’m talking more about Omni and Longevity here than Penthouse, per se.) It was that peculiar linkage of science fiction and urbanity, that tech-friendly hippiedom that spread through the late ’70s like some peculiar fungus you’d find under a long-unused isolation tank on the redwood deck of a northern California A-frame—if only, it seemed to say, we manage to hit upon the right combination of tech and drugs, well, we can sit around all day and live forever and never have to work or get sick and we can have great sex and work on our tans. —Of course, the “we” were all pretty much understood to be men (naturally), and “we’d” all be having sex with Penthouse Pets (Pets, or Playmates? Which is more demeaning?), but hey. You can’t have everything.
Sweet, perhaps, if one is feeling charitable, and willing to overlook; but even if one is feeling charitable, one has to admit it has not aged well. —Oh, the basic idea has kept chugging along; Peter Pan will always have legs, after all. There are folks like the Extropians and the Hedonistic Imperative who owe more than they perhaps care to admit (maybe not) to Bob Guccione, and Omni, and Penthouse. But it’s grown and adapted and changed (as it always will); Penthouse—rather like Stranger in a Strange Land —did not.
And so.
nicholas urfé
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