Ok, I know the pie fight talk has been around for a week already, but…
Yeah, I’m slow, but I eventually get there.
For reading, go to Shakespeare’s Sister who has the links.
As for the crowd that dares not shave its legs, I don’t get why this is an iusult because I haven’t shaved my legs since I was 19. Or under my arms. I forget that some individuals might find this distasteful. Like I care. I expect others, if they notice, to behave like civil human beings and pretend not to.
There is a place in society for sex clowns. Clowns, by exaggeration , can drag potentially community-disrupting problems to the surface and help defuse them. When the pendulum swings too far to the left or right, the function of clowns is to restore balance.
It ain’t always pretty.
The Gilligan’s Island show of the 60s was a pile-up of clowns. I was eight years of age and the erotic tensions spoofed were screamingly clear, which means I was right about the right age for the target audience. (I can’t believe I”m doing a web analysis of Gilligan’s Island.) Order was only maintained on the island by the the Skipper and Gilligan being taboo through their stupidity, the Professor presented as intellectually captive and physically unconscious, and Thurston Howell soaked through with green-fingered greed. Which we could see, because the program was in color! (A huge selling point and the reason I went over to Nancy Raymond’s house, next door, to watch the first show.) The women were sexual, the men were not, the primary attraction of the show was less the Laurel and Hardy relationship of Gilligan and the Skipper than the weekly inability of Ginger and Maryann to rouse any action. In the 60s this was all very coy but coy wears after four decades. The TBS ad acknowledged what the show was really about with Ginger and Maryann exploding and going full body tactile on each other with lick ’em up creamy pies. Finally, Maryann and Ginger were getting some forbidden action.
Clowns spoofing clowns.
Clowns, however, need appropriate context and tailoring for the context and culture.
Like when you’re a hard-core porn star member of parliament in Italy popping open the booby hatches in order to appropriate political capital for yourself and your concerns. (Something like that.)
Had the TBS commercial been on Mad TV it would have been perceived as a comment on the show.
On Daily KOS, this was instead a commercial that sat in a sidebar with Maryann’s perky Kansan rear cheek thrust prominently up in the air, greeting all viewers. There was complaint. Response was bitingly negative. And so the commercial brought to the forefront concerns about and examples of swarming sexism within the community and associated Lord of the Flies behavior that can take over the comment areas. (Note: The Lord of the Flies comparison was on another blog that I lost the link to. Will put it back in if I relocate. Was right on target. 2nd Note: Poetic Leanings is identified as the blog that made the Lord of the Rings comment. You can read Scott’s post here, “The women are the least of Democrat’s problems”.)
Shit got stirred up because shit was there.
Because our society is really serioiusly confused about sex and power and power and sex.
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