"Those who can, do. Those who can’t, bitch about it on the Internet." -Simon, from The Book of Simon
Some bios list credentials, such as: Education BFA in Illustration, Massachusetts College of Art Occupation Former Production Slave, Ballantine Books Comics Credits Columnist, Writer, Artist, Editor Etc…
And some bios tell a story, such as: I can remember sitting in front of my television one morning, watching the old Batman show, when Julie Newmar appeared in that skintight black leather outfit as Catwoman. It was my first boy/girl thing. >A year later I was in kindergarten telling Katherine Burke that I loved her. It’s pretty much been a string of stupid mistakes ever since…
Still other bios state an intent, such as: This is a series of essays illustrating the life of one particular struggling artist as he plods through the world and occasionally bumps into some interesting shit.
But most bios just sit to the right of the column and are never looked at. So ignore this space and just read the damn column already…
Here we are at May, with another Spring Break season behind us. Over the last two months, along with the thousands of collegiate drunks, MTV, and local news channels, every third guy with a digital video camera trying to make some cash has swarmed down to the warmer parts of the US and Mexico. On television it’s depicted as nothing short of Sodom and Gomorrah. But is it really just a party that’s been heading towards out of control since the sixties, or an indicator of a major, and painful, change in the America sociological consciousness?
Girls Gone Mild If you’ve turned on a television after midnight you’ve no doubt seen the commercials for the videos. Girls wandering around Spring Break, Mardi Gras, and just random parties lifting their shirts and showing off their titties. About a year ago, when I first heard of this thing, the word ‘wild’ immediately gave me expectations that the videos would never live up to. A friend of mine downloaded part of one off the Internet and I watched five minutes of it. To my disappointment, it was exactly what they advertised: chicks showing their titties in public. And all I could think was how boring that was.
Don’t get me wrong, I love breasts. But I’ve seen them before. And, I imagine, so has the vast majority of guys who shell out money for those tapes. It seems kind of strange to me to drop $19.95 on something you can either a) see on Cinemax late at night or b) get for free off the Internet. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that word ‘wild’ had anything to do with it.
To me, lifting your shirt in public is about as wild as mooning someone. I mean, their just tits. I have a friend who used to fuck men in the ass with a strapon for money. There are people who stick needles through their skin, attach wire to the needles, and then hang suspended in the air. In Tijuana you can go see a Donkey Show, where a woman has sex with a donkey. That is what I think when I hear the word ‘wild’, and those are just the things I can pick off the top of my head.
But this isn’t meant to be an indictment of what other people think is ‘wild’. The fact that so much public nudity is going on shows that maybe our sexual hang ups are starting to fade, if even just a little. When you look at it, how much more ‘wild’ is today’s Spring Break from Woodstock in ’69? The biggest differences are that today it’s more about booze, more people are taping the festivities, and it’s on a grander scale. But I think of that anti-drug commercial where the dad finds a box of grass and asks the son where he learned how to do that stuff. Just like the drug commercial, if today’s parents want to know where their kids learned how to get naked and party, they learned it from watching you. And, just like the difference between drugs in the sixties and drugs today, the nudity and partying is amped up to the power of ten.
Crossing The Delaware As most people know, the legend is that America was founded by Puritans escaping religious persecution. They came to the New World and set up a repressed little microcosm for them to practice their lifestyle. As things expanded, the ultimate irony seeped in and the Puritans ended up practicing the same persecution that they worked so hard to escape. Ignoring the Jamestown colony, that’s how America started, and it so infected the mentality in this country that we’re only just starting to break free of it.
They claim that the Sexual Revolution happened in the late-Sixties. But I think that the Summer of Love and Woodstock were more like the battles of Lexington and Concord. The Free Love movement was ‘The Shot Heard ‘Round the World’. If you compare the Sexual Revolution with the American Revolution, the Seventies seemed to be like the Battle of Bunker Hill, with the AIDS crisis being Washington camping his troops at Valley Forge for the long, cold winter. All things considered, the Sexual Revolution is really only now entering its worst days of fighting. We’re still a long way from the surrender of Cornwallis. The point is, like any major change, the Sexual Revolution can’t be confined to just a few years, no matter how much the Baby Boomers would like to lay claim to every step forward America has taken.
And the Girls Gone Wild phenomena, along with Spring Break, is just part of this painful birthing process. Until the advent of rock ‘n’ roll, America was a highly repressed society. Sure, sex was going on, but it was kept quiet and considered shameful to mention in public. Now we have Sex And The City discussing when the right time to do anal is. Go into a Virgin Megastore and the porn shelves almost equal the regular movies. Turning on the television today, aliens would think we’re obsessed with sex, and they wouldn’t be far from the truth. Sex is like a new toy for a child. Now that we have it, all we want to do is play with it. The Sexual Revolution handed the toy to us and now we’re fascinated by it because it’s new and fun and there’s so much about it left to explore.
People always react to one extreme by going to the other. It’s the first law of physics; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. So, naturally, if you found a country on repressed sexual attitudes, and maintain that repression for over four hundred years, eventually the pendulum is going to swing back in the opposite direction. And that’s how you get girls going wild. But, just like a pendulum, eventually it’s going to slow down and just twitter back and forth in the middle. I don’t think it’s going to take four hundred years to stop, but I think we’re in for a few generations of sex freaks until it all just becomes no big deal. Just like the child with the toy, over time it doesn’t hold our attention and we move on to whatever the next shiny thing in the box is.
The biggest concern I have is safety. I don’t really care if sorority chicks are fucking fratboys left and right while wandering around Cancun. What bothers me is that, in an environment like the one that has been created, the door is open for a lot of instances of rape and other abuses. I think it’s a great thing for American society to go balls out, literally, and shatter the Puritanical cage we’ve been living in for so many years. We should be exploring and coming up with new, fun things to do. But when you involve alcohol as much as Spring Break and Mardi Gras do, and you add to that mix single-minded fratboys and simple-minded sorority chicks, you just know bad things are going to happen.
I don’t really have an answer for my last dilemma. Like I said, what’s going on right now is like a birthing process. It’s violent and bloody and, like some births, there will be casualties. But these brave soldiers will be remembered for their attempts to expand the boundaries. In the years to come, we will know them as patriots. So I say, march on drunken girl showing her titties. Sally forth wasted guy who gave her the Mardi Gras beads. You are true American heroes. And though you may not have fed the Tree of Liberty with blood, you’ve left behind a different bodily fluid to help keep its roots strong.
From The Monkey House a/k/a Simon Right hand on his heart, left hand on something else
The Random: What can I say about X-men 2? People quoting lines from the movie the second after they’re spoken, a guy in my row creaming himself at the Shrek 2: Hulk Smash preview, Watts seemingly the only one intrigued by the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen trailer, and a woman actually making a phone call while the film is still showing. Other than that, I kind of liked Nightcrawler.
