Sterile social value: sex
From Twitter:
Roger Ebert: Playboy may have had a greater influence on our society than any other magazine. http://journ.us/dfOMC8
I’m afraid it’s a bit more: Playboy may have set some unnecessary and sterile social values, focusing everybody on female body and sex. I’m not arguing against women or their beauty, but against making bodies and sex, social values. It’s like prolonging the ’70s without their joints…
I’ve been watching a Discovery documentary about mothers making their children sexy, in a “How to make my 6 year daughter so sexy that she can pass as a young woman while she’s still chewing her gums” manner… Of course, they’re not allowed to show their kids naked, but everything else is just as in any Miss World contest. So, I’d expect the natural social evolution to dictate these little girls to get a job at 8 and have kids at 10…
More on that, I see more than three quarters of all the magazines showing tits or butts on their covers. Although it’s not bad to look at, it’s a huge misleading reason to pay for.
I can’t find a single creative reason for buying or selling sex; only money from the blinds. Again, do not mistake women and beauty for sex; these are totally different beasts. I might consider Botticelli’s Primavera my muse, but I would never think the same about a Playboy’s Miss August.
From productivity point of view, Playboy has only made money out of women; not a new story at all. This has always happened from the beginning of humanity and it’s neither good or bad.
The bad part lies in making everybody in the world be (with) a Playboy bunny. And this, by itself, is not that bad yet. The real bad part is everybody wants that before any other need, even before physiological ones. Because sex is a physiological need, it surpasses most of the “obstacles”, like learning, eating, growing up. It surpasses even common sense making it a mere obstacle against fulfilling this empty need.
All of the derived industries and commerce, starting with cosmetic surgery and ending with selling porn are only focused on money, nothing else.
For me, building an entire world on money and sex is way too cheap for what we could have done with these 40 years from the strong momentum we’ve had with Flower Power. We’ve been selling ourselves too cheap. It’s like we’ve entered cinema and all along the movie we’ve been busy talking to our phones.
What Playboy and the likes have achieved is a “mouse death trap” – you know, the experiment with a brain-wired mouse that presses the “pleasure pedal” until it drops starved to death. They are selling this pleasure pedal.
Of course, nobody died buying sex (I think) and it should never be a crime. But, on sociological scale, imagine that we’re built like containers: if a one liter bottle is filled with water, there’s no way squeezing in another liter of oil. Once your social values are sex oriented, obviously they can’t be “something else” oriented.
Therefore, not only that we are valuing the society and its individuals through our sex values, but we are hardly able doing anyhow else. What has started with a few magazines, now is online hot content and will become something much bigger that will roll much more money and much more interests.
What for?
