On the Love Between Men and Women
Some years ago I was in the iconic Saint Kilda Esplanade Hotel watching a local band perform a cover set of the entirety of Red Hot Chilli Peppers' breakout album 'Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic' and something strange happened.
My mind got blown.
Not by the faithful reproduction of early 1990s bay area experiments in Funk-Rap-Rock crossover music, but by the lyrics of an album I had listened to on high rotation for hours and hours of my formative years in a bedroom in Ballarat. Here's a taster, if it's been a while since you listened to any tracks from BSSM other than 'Under The Bridge':
Present in my mind, is the thought that this is not much of an anecdote. And that was folded into a kind of sexual reawakening. It's ridiculous because there is centuries of art, dedicated to men and women getting it on. Furthermore, it's not like I never heard RHCP's music before. I spent a lot of 1998-2000 with Blood Sugar Sex Magic and One Hot Minute on high rotation, and on occasion busting out Mother's Milk.
Skip forward a year, and on my mind is another 90's classic track. 6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps. And I seemed to recall it being featured in a Levi's Ad involving mermaids shot with under water effects. Turns out I'd got my influences mixed up, but the search sent me down a rabbit hole of Levi's old TV ads.
And yes, there was a period where the way to try and reach youth culture, was through the television waves. Big brands sunk big dollars into campaigns to worm their way into the minds of young people. And they produced works of art. And like I do occasionally with other works of art, I shared it on facebook. Here is what I feel, may be the best of the Levi Ads:
I became fascinated, because it got no reaction at all. I posted a Levi ad every day for like 10 days, to deafening silence. And these were ads, so it seems unlikely that the algorithms were tuning them out. The 30 or so people who both look at the fb newsfeed regularly and get presented with my posts because the algorithms have determined they like seeing my posts, were having none of this. In the end they started to get some 'likes' because I would talk to people in real life about this fascinating phenomena I had discovered - something that wasn't simply contrarian, but that nobody was reliably interested in, or felt any nostalgia for. I had gotten my thumb, right off the pulse. Something I didn't even achieve when I posted House Of Pain's 'On Point' with the lead-in caption 'let's hear it for White Men!' that got like 2 likes.
But nobody? Nothing? Nada? Nix? I've never been so successful at getting paid no heed. And why? The 'Creek' ad has high production values, it's shot in beautiful crisp black and white, it has a succinct self contained narrative, judicious use of 'speilberg face' where we are invited to cue in to the daughters' sexual awakening, their exuberence and excitement that delivers the bait and switch, product as hero - a very successful and well made ad.
And I know, I can't attribute the lack of interest to the overtly heterosexual tone of the ad. It is perhaps simply a confirmation of Bob Hoffman's critique of 'Social Media Expert' charlatans' claim that people talk about brands on social media. I was doing something that isn't done, I was talking about a brand and posting advertising on social media.
So as the scientist I ain't, I cannot conclude that people steered clear of endorsing me in my public square as sharing my appreciation for a fallen brand's former aesthetics as executed on a now defunct medium, to establish as fact, that heterosexual people aren't interested in their own sexuality.
Unforch, I can't prove the null hypothesis either. I can't prove anything. Things like this are always problems of perception, skewed by the availability heuristic, are there more four letter words that start with the letter 'D' or words that have 'D' as their second letter? I dunno, but we are likely to guess 'start' because it's easy to recall word's that start with the letter D, much easier than recalling a list with 'D' in the second place slot 'Dart, Duck, Dude, Drab... etc' is much easier than... 'Adam, Edam (the cheese)...'
Brain don't catologue that way chief.
Now going back in time, I'm sitting outside the now closed Hostel Genova, that I stayed in 8 years earlier when I used a Lonely Planet Guide to Travel. It is positioned up in the hills with a great view of the city, the lighthouse, the Mediterranean sea and the viewing deck thankfully still exists and is accessible. So I'm sketching away, trying to remember how to draw without a table to put my sketchbook on, and perspective and how to draw ground rather than figure and how bad my attention span has gotten.
Then I'm interrupted by a group of youths, who ride up on Vespas, and start lounging around. They don't really disturb me, but two of the group are a young attractive couple, and they basically start showing each other affection.
And I was like, 'I haven't seen this since high school.' Not out loud, I just thought it.
Then over the next three months, I'd walk around the city in slow winding exploratory manner, and I would keep coming across tucked in every nook and cranny, men and women, boys and girls, making out with each other.
It was strange to be in a heteronormative environment. Foreign to me, yet familiar. I felt I was in a place where it was safe to approach women. And by safe, I mean from my own selfish perspective, where a man can approach a woman and be treated with charity that they aren't a creep attempting to inflinct permanent emotional and psychological damage.
Yeah, I was curious, and I dug into the statistics. Because despite the wafting musk of heterosexuality in the air, Genova had a pride march complete with fireworks while I was there, and Genova is roughly 1/10th the size of my hometown Melbourne. I saw lesbians walking around holding hands, I saw gays walking around holding hands, I saw trans people.
None of this explains last years election results of course. The economy does a better job of explaining that. But again, when I dug into the stats, in terms of outcomes, whatever Italian culture is, on paper it is pretty much the same in terms of Gender equity outcomes as Australia. Parliamentary seats held by women, domestic violence statistics etc.
Unforch with lies, damn lies, and statistics, it's hard to compare apples with apples. At the time, egocentrically, what hit me was what a queer culture I had personally gravitated towards living in, in Australia. (perhaps because I'm not conscious of being gay?) but upon reflection some years later, I'd say Australia is probably a fairly homo-social culture. At least relatively.
Now lest etymology escapes you, 'homo' means same. So homo-social isn't the same as homo-sexual culture. it means the two big genders do relatively less socializing with each other, Japan is a very homo-social culture and I would argue, with some confidence (but not buckets of it) that it is less progressive than both Australia and Italy.
But not here. There's things though that have to be attributed to differences in culture, in Italy, as in much of Europe people greet each other with kisses on the cheek, or cheeks. I feel, that this helps break down a fundamental barrier of social awkwardness and put people at ease with each other. The sensation of lips touching the skin of cheeks also, probably activates the human endocrine system in a manner that handshaking does not. It probably releases some oxytocin, some dopamine, the good stuff that fosters attachment and belonging. And specifically between the genders.
By contrast, Australia shakes hands with new people and strangers. Only with familiarity do we hug.
Anyway, now I'm in Mexico and it reminds me of Italy. You see affection demonstrated between couples in public spaces. You kiss people hello, albeit Mexico has between dudes, an annoyingly onerous handshaking process, that I object to only because it takes twice as fucking long as 'the traditional'.
...
All of this stimuli, makes me wonder, why do I, a heterosexual person, invest so little of my conversation energy into relationships between men and women instead opting for things I ultimately don't care about? Why in myself is there such a distinction between the amount of energy I invest cognitively in trying to understand heterosexual relations, and the amount of time I will spend conversing with friends about heterosexual relations?
It's not that queer culture has no place in my understanding of relationships, sex, sexuality etc. It just has little relevance. Last year Australia had a plebiscite or something, basically a mail out survey that every Australian had the opportunity to "vote" in.
The outcome of this expensive undertaking, was that the government established that polling, and statistical theory was sound, because the nationwide survey bore out exactly what polling predicted.
However, during this time, there were 'campaigns' to encourage people to "vote" in the survey - there was apparently a 'No' campaign, though I got no fucking exposure to it whatsoever. But the 'Yes' campaign was much more visible. Possibly because I lived and moved in circles where every last person was going to "vote" 'Yes' regardless of anything the No campaign could come up with.
And as someone who was never going to drop the ball and abstain, had little interest in the coverage, and presumed that if not this government, the next, would legalize marriage equality. The 'Yes' campaign was annoying, in the same way a mother is annoying when she suggests passively aggressively you might want to do the thing you are obviously going to do.
I know it comes from a place of love, but speaking of love, the campaign slogan that made me uncomfortable was 'Love is Love'.
Yes, a vacuous, shallow, superficial 'deepism' as I believe Dan Dennet might describe it. If I were more charitable, I'd say it's trying to convey that all forms of love (except of course, the love between Rolf Harris and Child, or Man and Sheep etc.) are equally valid, as successful and flawed as eachother.
But to me it came across as condescending, it suggested that right-minded, progressive, modern Australians had some insight into love, and could teach backward conservative red-neck Australian's something about love.
I'm not suggesting however, that there is a surplus of heterosexual shame in our culture, and that straight people need their own pride march.
I would suggest that, their is in fact, a deficit of heterosexual shame. Because I feel, all evidence suggests, that despite all the art and culture and literature and science dedicated to boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. We straighty-mc-straightfaces are really good at being not very good at love and then perhaps, distracting ourselves by trying instead to master knowledge of much more difficult and harder to know concepts like polyamory, trans-identities and raising non-binary children or theybies.
And while I applaud the ambition, there are times when I find myself wondering how this:
and this:
(by the way, Alicia's phone call in this clip is just unbelievable game)
These are both expressions on the same subject, the same longings and the same impasse - which is why I feel heterosexual relations are possibly of particular interest to heterosexuals - because the conversation is largely two subjective experiences talking past eachother, projecting where they think themselves empathizing, failing, for milennia to listen, and dismal at passing this information down.
Imagine if, Miseducation of Lauryn Hill style, you had a teacher at the front of the class asking the kids 'what is love?' and two hands shot up and you got Rammstein's cover of Depeche Mode and Alcia Key's 'You Don't Know My Name' and they'd both be correct and you'd be nowhere near an answer. And you could throw in LL Cool J's 'Big Ole Butt' because it would be relevant, and Sinead O'Conner's 'Nothing Compares' and Spice Girls 'Two Become One' and Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love' and Madonna's 'Express Yourself' and Lauryn Hill's 'Ex Factor' and it would all be relevant, and still unsufficient.
And it's not that a perfect film like Moonshine has nothing to teach everyone about love and life. It has much to teach everyone. It's that there's a wealth of knowledge about two very different kinds of people by nurture and nature that tend for all their difficulties to actually quite dig-eachother, and the inefficiency with which that information is transmitted is probably the gold standard of inefficiency.
Again I blame a lack of shame and humility. But dropping the ball there appears to mean that who picks up and runs with that ball is pornography. And pornography isn't an educator, a sagacious teacher there to gently tack the hand of youth and pass the torch of enlightenment on to its next custodian, it's a business that competes in the attention economy.
So while it isn't unusual for me to write a pre-amble in a post that is this long, and particularly on a subject so complicated. I'm going to endeavor to write more about unsexy meat-and-potatoes love between men and women with greater frequency and share as it were, my ignorance, and how far I've gotten. Because there's probably no status to be gained by writing or reading the newsletter of mainstream culture, but alas, no choice have I but to muddle through it, and I find from experience people are fucking interested in this subject.
Somewhat as I am, endlessly fascinated.
My mind got blown.
Not by the faithful reproduction of early 1990s bay area experiments in Funk-Rap-Rock crossover music, but by the lyrics of an album I had listened to on high rotation for hours and hours of my formative years in a bedroom in Ballarat. Here's a taster, if it's been a while since you listened to any tracks from BSSM other than 'Under The Bridge':
I got stopped by a lady cop In my automobile. She said get out and spread your legs and then she tried to cop a feel. That cop she was all dressed in blue. Was she pretty? Boy I'm tellin' you. She stuck my butt with her big black stick I said "what's up?" now suck my dick. Like a ram getting ready to jam the lamb, She whimpered just a little when she felt my hand... On her crotch so very warm I could feel her getting wet through her uniform. Proppin' her up on the black and white, Unzipped and slipped "ooh that's tight" I swatted her like no swat team can, Turned a cherry pie right into jam.'Sir Psycho Sexy' is one of the songs with particularly graphic lyrics, and despite maybe having listened to this track for solid hours over the course of my lifetime, I still don't know how to feel about that last cherry pie-jam comment. But the mind blowing was the kind that comes with an almost embarrassing fluster of scandalization: 'they're singing about men and women having sex!'
Present in my mind, is the thought that this is not much of an anecdote. And that was folded into a kind of sexual reawakening. It's ridiculous because there is centuries of art, dedicated to men and women getting it on. Furthermore, it's not like I never heard RHCP's music before. I spent a lot of 1998-2000 with Blood Sugar Sex Magic and One Hot Minute on high rotation, and on occasion busting out Mother's Milk.
Skip forward a year, and on my mind is another 90's classic track. 6 Underground by the Sneaker Pimps. And I seemed to recall it being featured in a Levi's Ad involving mermaids shot with under water effects. Turns out I'd got my influences mixed up, but the search sent me down a rabbit hole of Levi's old TV ads.
And yes, there was a period where the way to try and reach youth culture, was through the television waves. Big brands sunk big dollars into campaigns to worm their way into the minds of young people. And they produced works of art. And like I do occasionally with other works of art, I shared it on facebook. Here is what I feel, may be the best of the Levi Ads:
I became fascinated, because it got no reaction at all. I posted a Levi ad every day for like 10 days, to deafening silence. And these were ads, so it seems unlikely that the algorithms were tuning them out. The 30 or so people who both look at the fb newsfeed regularly and get presented with my posts because the algorithms have determined they like seeing my posts, were having none of this. In the end they started to get some 'likes' because I would talk to people in real life about this fascinating phenomena I had discovered - something that wasn't simply contrarian, but that nobody was reliably interested in, or felt any nostalgia for. I had gotten my thumb, right off the pulse. Something I didn't even achieve when I posted House Of Pain's 'On Point' with the lead-in caption 'let's hear it for White Men!' that got like 2 likes.
But nobody? Nothing? Nada? Nix? I've never been so successful at getting paid no heed. And why? The 'Creek' ad has high production values, it's shot in beautiful crisp black and white, it has a succinct self contained narrative, judicious use of 'speilberg face' where we are invited to cue in to the daughters' sexual awakening, their exuberence and excitement that delivers the bait and switch, product as hero - a very successful and well made ad.
And I know, I can't attribute the lack of interest to the overtly heterosexual tone of the ad. It is perhaps simply a confirmation of Bob Hoffman's critique of 'Social Media Expert' charlatans' claim that people talk about brands on social media. I was doing something that isn't done, I was talking about a brand and posting advertising on social media.
So as the scientist I ain't, I cannot conclude that people steered clear of endorsing me in my public square as sharing my appreciation for a fallen brand's former aesthetics as executed on a now defunct medium, to establish as fact, that heterosexual people aren't interested in their own sexuality.
Unforch, I can't prove the null hypothesis either. I can't prove anything. Things like this are always problems of perception, skewed by the availability heuristic, are there more four letter words that start with the letter 'D' or words that have 'D' as their second letter? I dunno, but we are likely to guess 'start' because it's easy to recall word's that start with the letter D, much easier than recalling a list with 'D' in the second place slot 'Dart, Duck, Dude, Drab... etc' is much easier than... 'Adam, Edam (the cheese)...'
Brain don't catologue that way chief.
Now going back in time, I'm sitting outside the now closed Hostel Genova, that I stayed in 8 years earlier when I used a Lonely Planet Guide to Travel. It is positioned up in the hills with a great view of the city, the lighthouse, the Mediterranean sea and the viewing deck thankfully still exists and is accessible. So I'm sketching away, trying to remember how to draw without a table to put my sketchbook on, and perspective and how to draw ground rather than figure and how bad my attention span has gotten.
Then I'm interrupted by a group of youths, who ride up on Vespas, and start lounging around. They don't really disturb me, but two of the group are a young attractive couple, and they basically start showing each other affection.
And I was like, 'I haven't seen this since high school.' Not out loud, I just thought it.
Then over the next three months, I'd walk around the city in slow winding exploratory manner, and I would keep coming across tucked in every nook and cranny, men and women, boys and girls, making out with each other.
It was strange to be in a heteronormative environment. Foreign to me, yet familiar. I felt I was in a place where it was safe to approach women. And by safe, I mean from my own selfish perspective, where a man can approach a woman and be treated with charity that they aren't a creep attempting to inflinct permanent emotional and psychological damage.
Yeah, I was curious, and I dug into the statistics. Because despite the wafting musk of heterosexuality in the air, Genova had a pride march complete with fireworks while I was there, and Genova is roughly 1/10th the size of my hometown Melbourne. I saw lesbians walking around holding hands, I saw gays walking around holding hands, I saw trans people.
None of this explains last years election results of course. The economy does a better job of explaining that. But again, when I dug into the stats, in terms of outcomes, whatever Italian culture is, on paper it is pretty much the same in terms of Gender equity outcomes as Australia. Parliamentary seats held by women, domestic violence statistics etc.
Unforch with lies, damn lies, and statistics, it's hard to compare apples with apples. At the time, egocentrically, what hit me was what a queer culture I had personally gravitated towards living in, in Australia. (perhaps because I'm not conscious of being gay?) but upon reflection some years later, I'd say Australia is probably a fairly homo-social culture. At least relatively.
Now lest etymology escapes you, 'homo' means same. So homo-social isn't the same as homo-sexual culture. it means the two big genders do relatively less socializing with each other, Japan is a very homo-social culture and I would argue, with some confidence (but not buckets of it) that it is less progressive than both Australia and Italy.
But not here. There's things though that have to be attributed to differences in culture, in Italy, as in much of Europe people greet each other with kisses on the cheek, or cheeks. I feel, that this helps break down a fundamental barrier of social awkwardness and put people at ease with each other. The sensation of lips touching the skin of cheeks also, probably activates the human endocrine system in a manner that handshaking does not. It probably releases some oxytocin, some dopamine, the good stuff that fosters attachment and belonging. And specifically between the genders.
By contrast, Australia shakes hands with new people and strangers. Only with familiarity do we hug.
Anyway, now I'm in Mexico and it reminds me of Italy. You see affection demonstrated between couples in public spaces. You kiss people hello, albeit Mexico has between dudes, an annoyingly onerous handshaking process, that I object to only because it takes twice as fucking long as 'the traditional'.
...
All of this stimuli, makes me wonder, why do I, a heterosexual person, invest so little of my conversation energy into relationships between men and women instead opting for things I ultimately don't care about? Why in myself is there such a distinction between the amount of energy I invest cognitively in trying to understand heterosexual relations, and the amount of time I will spend conversing with friends about heterosexual relations?
It's not that queer culture has no place in my understanding of relationships, sex, sexuality etc. It just has little relevance. Last year Australia had a plebiscite or something, basically a mail out survey that every Australian had the opportunity to "vote" in.
The outcome of this expensive undertaking, was that the government established that polling, and statistical theory was sound, because the nationwide survey bore out exactly what polling predicted.
However, during this time, there were 'campaigns' to encourage people to "vote" in the survey - there was apparently a 'No' campaign, though I got no fucking exposure to it whatsoever. But the 'Yes' campaign was much more visible. Possibly because I lived and moved in circles where every last person was going to "vote" 'Yes' regardless of anything the No campaign could come up with.
And as someone who was never going to drop the ball and abstain, had little interest in the coverage, and presumed that if not this government, the next, would legalize marriage equality. The 'Yes' campaign was annoying, in the same way a mother is annoying when she suggests passively aggressively you might want to do the thing you are obviously going to do.
I know it comes from a place of love, but speaking of love, the campaign slogan that made me uncomfortable was 'Love is Love'.
Yes, a vacuous, shallow, superficial 'deepism' as I believe Dan Dennet might describe it. If I were more charitable, I'd say it's trying to convey that all forms of love (except of course, the love between Rolf Harris and Child, or Man and Sheep etc.) are equally valid, as successful and flawed as eachother.
But to me it came across as condescending, it suggested that right-minded, progressive, modern Australians had some insight into love, and could teach backward conservative red-neck Australian's something about love.
I'm not suggesting however, that there is a surplus of heterosexual shame in our culture, and that straight people need their own pride march.
I would suggest that, their is in fact, a deficit of heterosexual shame. Because I feel, all evidence suggests, that despite all the art and culture and literature and science dedicated to boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. We straighty-mc-straightfaces are really good at being not very good at love and then perhaps, distracting ourselves by trying instead to master knowledge of much more difficult and harder to know concepts like polyamory, trans-identities and raising non-binary children or theybies.
And while I applaud the ambition, there are times when I find myself wondering how this:
and this:
(by the way, Alicia's phone call in this clip is just unbelievable game)
These are both expressions on the same subject, the same longings and the same impasse - which is why I feel heterosexual relations are possibly of particular interest to heterosexuals - because the conversation is largely two subjective experiences talking past eachother, projecting where they think themselves empathizing, failing, for milennia to listen, and dismal at passing this information down.
Imagine if, Miseducation of Lauryn Hill style, you had a teacher at the front of the class asking the kids 'what is love?' and two hands shot up and you got Rammstein's cover of Depeche Mode and Alcia Key's 'You Don't Know My Name' and they'd both be correct and you'd be nowhere near an answer. And you could throw in LL Cool J's 'Big Ole Butt' because it would be relevant, and Sinead O'Conner's 'Nothing Compares' and Spice Girls 'Two Become One' and Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love' and Madonna's 'Express Yourself' and Lauryn Hill's 'Ex Factor' and it would all be relevant, and still unsufficient.
And it's not that a perfect film like Moonshine has nothing to teach everyone about love and life. It has much to teach everyone. It's that there's a wealth of knowledge about two very different kinds of people by nurture and nature that tend for all their difficulties to actually quite dig-eachother, and the inefficiency with which that information is transmitted is probably the gold standard of inefficiency.
Again I blame a lack of shame and humility. But dropping the ball there appears to mean that who picks up and runs with that ball is pornography. And pornography isn't an educator, a sagacious teacher there to gently tack the hand of youth and pass the torch of enlightenment on to its next custodian, it's a business that competes in the attention economy.
So while it isn't unusual for me to write a pre-amble in a post that is this long, and particularly on a subject so complicated. I'm going to endeavor to write more about unsexy meat-and-potatoes love between men and women with greater frequency and share as it were, my ignorance, and how far I've gotten. Because there's probably no status to be gained by writing or reading the newsletter of mainstream culture, but alas, no choice have I but to muddle through it, and I find from experience people are fucking interested in this subject.
Somewhat as I am, endlessly fascinated.
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