Porn (there, I made you look)

A lot of people like to talk about how porn's gotten more disgusting over the years. They'll talk regretfully about the demure Playboy centerfolds of bygone days, and contrast them with the vulgar, vulgar stuff you can see these days, just by turning the SafeSearch off on Google Images (try typing "wet"). But you know, this is a really unproductive discussion. For one thing, it's been going on for a long time now. Geezers nowadays might regret those tasteful nude images of Marilyn, but back in the golden days of the '60's that they remember so fondly, there were plenty of geezers mourning the demise of the pin-up, and grumbling about swingers, and hippies, with their disgusting "free love". If you go back far enough, you're just going to get to 1920's-era fathers, grousing about flaming youth, and how disgusting Joan Crawford looked, dancing the charleston, and going on and on about how much better the world was, back when boys still fantasized about Harrison Fisher girls. Do you really want to have that conversation?

Underwear

I read a story once. I read it long, long ago, and I don't remember where, which is kind of amazing, because I no sooner read it, than it got stuck in my head, and has been fascinating me ever since:

It took place during the Renaissance, someplace in Europe that was north enough to get really cold in the wintertime. And it told about this court lady, a lady-in-waiting to a queen or something, who was following along in the procession behind her royal mistress as was her duty. And this lady needed to go, really, really badly, but she didn't want to leave the procession, and she certainly didn't want to call everyone else to a halt, just because she'd been caught short. And since ladies didn't wear underpants back then, and since she had a huge wooden farthengale holding her skirts away from her body as was the style at the time, she decided just to pee as she walked. But it was very, very cold that day, and according to the story, the poor lady's pee-stream froze solid as it was leaving her body, and the next thing she knew, she was rooted to the ground by a pillar of her own frozen-solid pee.

I've wondered ever since then: Could it really happen?

This story has very little to do with the history of undergarments, I know, and the main reason I led off with it, is because reading it as a teenager was how I learned that underpants had not always been as commonly used as they were in my own time. It was kind of a disturbing revelation. What made it more disturbing, was that it wasn't something people really came right out and discussed directly. You had to piece the information together out of lewd hints, and naughty, embarrassing stories. There are stories out there about Queen Catherine of France, spanking the bare bottoms of her serving women, for instance, or one creepy, perverted story that I read in The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, about how as a boy, he once hid behind some bushes and watched peasant women peeing on the ground while they were standing together talking.

The reality is much simpler (and much less gross) though: Ladies began wearing undergarments that covered their butts in the Nineteenth Century. Actually, they did not cover their butts, as cotton undergarments of the time were were split down the middle in back, as in this image:

While the long woolen kind, called union suits, had patch-openings in back to let the butt out, so a lady could go to the bathroom without having to do too much adjustment to her elaborate clothing.

Under-drawers were a cost-saving measure, a way of keeping one's outer clothes for longer. Gentlemen took to wearing them sooner than ladies, for this very reason: They wore close-fitting britches, which rubbed up against their butts and various other smelly parts of their bodies, and which were frequently made out of various expensive materials such as satin or embroidered velvet. Some of those probably couldn't even be cleaned safely, and certainly it would have been cheaper even for the ones that could, to save yourself having to do it very often, by wearing some nice linen or woolen undergarments underneath.

Ladies on the other hand, wore nice, loose-skirted gowns, that let lots of air get in, to freshen up all their smelly places. They wore chemises under their dresses, which basically protected the underarm area and the torso, in case things started getting sweaty there. They wore corsets, depending on the style of the time, to make their waists look slim and pretty.

But it wasn't until improvements in textile manufacture made cotton fabric (for under-drawers), and woolen knit fabric (for union suits) easy to afford, that they bothered wearing garments that covered places no one was going to see anyway, garments that were, after all, only going to need cleaning themselves as well as the other cleaning that already needed to be done.

At that as I have said, they wore undergarments that were open in the back. This was probably because, with all the clothes Victorian ladies were already having to shift around at the time, they didn't want to make getting to the bathroom any more difficult than it already was. It does make you think though, that it probably saved on the washing, if a lady wasn't extra-careful when she was wiping herself. -- Remember, you wiped your butt with dry corncobs in the old days, or with pages from the Sears Catalog, not with nice, pillowy-soft Charmin.

It's also amusing to think though, that the crotch-less panties your friends all thought were so naughty that they had to pile them on you for presents, "for the honeymoon," at your wedding shower, were just normal everyday wear for all ladies, back in the Victorian Age.

It wasn't until the end of the Nineteenth Century that women started wearing under-drawers that were sewn up in back as well as in front. French can-can dancers, were the first ones to do it; just because they made a living showing themselves off in front of an audience, didn't mean they wanted to show everything, to every man who paid for a seat (maybe they charged more for the good stuff, one-on-one).



As usually happens, it wasn't long until regular ladies wanted to copy the styles the loose women had started. By the 1920's, closed panties were the only kinds still being sold. Ladies found them useful, because with skirts being shorter, it was way, way easier for what was underneath to show by accident. All it took was a stray breeze:

Or an extra-wild night out, dancing with your boyfriend:

And you were going to be awfully glad Sears wasn't selling those split-panties any more.

HyperSmash

Ayn Rand

Heroine of the American Right Ayn Rand was a woman who, when reality bit her on the butt, she ran from her principles. The most recent story of course, is the one that tells how this world-famous libertarian railed against government aid her whole life, but rushed to grab benefits for herself, when her smoking habit gave her lung cancer, but it is just one of many. And really, can anyone be surprised? This was a woman who preached the courage of facing reality, but took cozy refuge in dreams her whole life.

Myself, I figured this out back when I read her books for the first time as a teenager: The first copies I had, were from my parents' library, dusty old paper-backed editions of Anthem and We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged. I loved every page of them. I loved the passion, and the free-market ideals, which went well with the Reagan Republicanism my parents had taught me. And I especially loved the cover photo of Ms. Rand that was on the back of each book:



This slim, pretty woman with the dark eyes and the passionate stare was the very embodiment of the individualistic romanticism she stood for, I thought. Surely she was what Dagney Taggart would have looked like if she were a real person.

Those were old copies of the books that I was reading. It was no wonder, I thought, that they had an old picture, of someone who was after all, still alive, on the backs of them. It wasn't until I got to college and went out and bought my own copy of Atlas Shrugged, and saw that the author photo had not been changed, that I started to wonder. After all, this was what Ayn Rand looked like in the early 80's, when I started college:



I know, I know. We all get older. And precious few of us get prettier as we age. But wouldn't Dagney Taggart have shown what she looked like in real time? Wasn't that the kind of gutsy individualist she was? ...That her creator was? I won't say I went right out and got rid of all my Ayn Rand books or anything, but in my mind, this was evidence of vanity on her part, and I thought less of her.

Actually, her books sort of led to the same conclusion. They were romantic books, not in the Nietzschean sense that she intended, but in the sense that they resembled the Barbara Cartland books that I also enjoyed back then, when I was young and foolish. They were one-dimensional characters, who were either good or evil, and never nuanced or partly one and partly the other. And you could always tell whether a character was good or bad by how they looked. Dagney Taggart, heroine of Atlas Shrugged for instance, was slim and drop-dead gorgeous, while her rival, the cynical "moocher" Lillian Reardon was aging and running to fat. The plotlines were simple conflicts of good and evil, with the good always winning, and the heroine always ending up with the most attractive male available. Yes, they were basically romance novels, and after I grew skeptical of Rand's so-called "philosophy", that was how I read them.

Attack of the 50 Ft Advertisments

Thanks to Moresay.com for the image

Have you ever noticed how aggressive advertising campaigns have become? The consumer is flooded with heavily biased information that can influence them to make decisions and purchase products that they wouldn't have otherwise. We see ads telling us to buy certain brands of dishwasher detergent and we see ads telling us to eat at certain restaurants. Companies like McDonalds and Burger King use small toys and games to draw children to their products and images of luscious food products to draw hungry adults. However, there isn't really a way for consumers to differentiate between which products are worth buying and which products should be left behind. We live in a world with an overblown market and no restrictions on advertising. Some ad campaigns even attack other products with silly phrases and accusations. I'm sure all the children of the 80's remember the bit wars between Nintendo and Sega. Do you remember the ads Sega ran in which they said things like "You can't do this on Nintendo" and "Genesis does what Nintendon't"? If not take, take a moment to watch the ad below.

Really? Do you remember the ads for the 3do? They referred to the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo as being "baby toys". Ads for Finish dishwasher detergent attack Cascade and claim that it leaves the dishes with dried on food stains. Ads for Swiffer mops claim that sponge mops simply spread germs and do not kill them. How is the consumer supposed to figure out what's true and whats  BS? There are websites like Rip-Off Report and magazines like Consumer Report who's sole goal is to weed out the bad products and the scams and warn people.  If you search for a product online you can often find reviews from other poor saps who bought the product. But what if you're the sap who buys the product? You're out of luck. I really think some rules and regulations should be applied to the advertising world to keep them from alienating consumers.

HyperSmash

Same-Sex Marriage

So I was driving my son to school today, and we were listening to Stephanie Miller on the radio. And this caller came on the line who was complaining that Stephanie's show spent "way too much time on gay marriage any more". He told her she needed to understand that if gay marriage was going to be legalized, a whole lot of other things would need to be legalized too, such as polygamy, and marriages between men and dogs. So Steph and her co-hosts responded in the standard way that most people do respond to this allegation, which was to pooh-pooh this argument. The argument was just silliness, they said, nobody was stepping up in favor of bestiality or pedophile marriages. And then they made some jokes about New Coke and marriage being a brand, that were moderately funny.

But they left me kind of unsatisfied. It seemed like there was a flaw to the logic there. And I found myself wondering, well now, what if in the push for marriage equality, someone did step up and demand the right to marry their dog (or, as in, say, Korea, their pillow)? Aren't there better arguments out there besides just, "well, nobody wants that to happen"?