Hotness in Hollywood

I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with three. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my beloved wife Cathy, here’s a fourth. Today I shall consider hotness in Hollywood — some movies that at least partly sold me with sex, and how they did it.

Pornography redefined

Long-time readers of this blog will be aware than I’m fascinated by the semiotics of pornography. Not by pornography itself; as I wrote in Why does porn got to hurt so bad? I find most pornography ugly and unappealing. No; I’m interested in the meaning of pornography, the code it’s written in and what it… Continue reading Pornography redefined

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Pretty People Behaving Stupidly

I’ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we’ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I’ve learned that romance fans use an acronym… Continue reading Pretty People Behaving Stupidly

Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft

Fascinating. This NYT article bears out a suspicion I’ve held for a long time about the plasticity of sexual orientation. The crude one-sentence summary is that, if you go by physiological arousal reactions, male bisexuality doesn’t exist, while female bisexuality is ubiquitous. I’ve spent most of my social time for the last thirty years around… Continue reading Gayness is hard, lesbianism soft

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A Unified Theory of Male Slobbishness and Female Preening

It’s all about asymmetrical investment, boys and girls…. One of the hot topics in the blogosphere recently has been the difference between male and female standards of attractiveness, and what this has to do with feminism and “the beauty myth”. Ann Althouse has been having fun at the expense of Laura Kipnis’s column bemoaning the… Continue reading A Unified Theory of Male Slobbishness and Female Preening

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What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

Naomi Wolf’s essay The Porn Myth strongly suggests that she lives on some other planet. It has been pretty well fisked over at Haight Speech and elsewhere. But so far, all of the people I’ve seen shredding it are women. Perhaps this is because it’s politically incorrect for us panting, grunting persons-of-testicle to trash-talk a… Continue reading What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

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Bad porn reprise

Many people wrote me with comments on my essay Why Does Porn Got To Hurt So Bad?. For all of those who sent praise, thank you. It’s actually nice to know there are so many people who would like to reject the bad-porn aesthetic. For all of those who refrained from calling down fire and… Continue reading Bad porn reprise

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Why does porn got to hurt so bad?

A couple days ago I chased a link over to unablogger and found myself unexpectedly confronted by pictures of naked women. This picture, in particular. And I noticed something unusual — which was that I liked it. Don’t get me wrong, here. I’m a functioning heterosexual male; I enjoy looking at naked women. It’s most… Continue reading Why does porn got to hurt so bad?

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Teen Sex vs. Adult Resentment

A wise and cynical friend of mine once described the motivation behind puritanism as “the fear that someone might be fucking and getting away with it”. I think the subtext of the periodic public panics about teen sex has always been resentment that sexy young things just might be getting away with it — enjoying… Continue reading Teen Sex vs. Adult Resentment

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Sexual Competence

Most of the participants in the recent blogospheric mini-flap about a Yale Press Daily article on the fine points of fellatio either make crude jokes, dismiss the article as either a sophomoric exercise in tweak-the-fogies or shocking evidence of the depravity of today’s youth. I think both are missing the real point. Well, OK, the… Continue reading Sexual Competence

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