Canthook

Once was a time I thought that love could be sold or bought
And everything fell in place for me.
The fashion of passion I rationed with caution
Because of the notion the potion of passion
Had never been passed to me.
But since it was Sunday and sunny I went for a stroll.
But peanuts and pigeons and people put me in a hole.
A blessing refreshing in you did unfold,
Dispelling depressing distressing thoughts from my soul.
Once was a time I thought that love could be sold or bought
And everything fell in place for me.
The fashion of passion I rationed with caution
Because of the notion the potion of passion
Had never been passed to me.
But now that you're by my side,
I find that I feel so satisfied,
Somebody must have lied to me.
-- The Mamas & The Papas.

When I was young and foolish, I thought that one needed to drink mixed drinks, smoke expensive cigars, and drive a sports car to be suave, debonair, and laid.

I eventually learned that drinking all the time made you a sloppy drunk, smoking cigars gave you bad breath (not to mention cancer), and driving a sports car meant that you paid a fortune for insurance, and left you without a back seat, none of which helped in the cause of getting laid.

Still, Ian Fleming and others gave me the impression that foreigners were much more sophisticated when it came to sex.

I'm late to the party, I admit, but I think sex is one thing that Americans do right. Not all Americans, of course. They would show the 8mm flicks at the volunteer fire department, and they didn't allow you to have dances in the gym, because that would make young men and women have impure thoughts. In fact, the beer distributors got marijuana banned by suggesting that reefer madness would cause your daughter to become sexually aggressive, and have a mulatto baby.

But that's ancient history. Americans invented the bundling board, the rumble seat, and the pill. Hugh Hefner, a nice Methodist boy, made sex respectable enough that manufacturers of hard liquor and expensive beers, high-end cigars, and sports cars paid high prices to have their ads next to nekkid shots of Marilyn Monroe and ads asking, "What kind of man reads Playboy?" with a photograph of a farmer's market where a handsome man is hefting two grapefruit, one in each hand, while an attractive girl-next-door type looks coyly over her shoulder at him, while holding a french bread.

I mean, how much more wholesome can sex be than a farmer's market, full of fruits, vegetables, nuts and breads, the things that make one grow up to be on the cover of Wheaties?

But many of those sports cars advertising in Playboy were European makes, because they didn't really make any sports cars in the USA. Well, there was the Corvette, but they didn't need to advertise that, since they could only make 10,000 a year, and customers wanted to buy 30,000 of them.

And the expensive cigars and liquors were foreign as well. You couldn't get laid with an american beer; it needed to be Heinekin, or Asahi, or at least Corona. American liquors were similarly plebian; you needed single-malt Scotch, or Jose Cuervo, or Ron Rico 151.

Meanwhile, American boys were conducting panty raids, and populating lover's lanes, or simply shacking up with their girlfriends. There's a lot to be said for shacking up. Joni Mitchell said that if you had a lot of lovers, you ended up doing the same thing again and again, and if you want variety in sex, you need to stick with one lover for a while.

But there was this glorification of the foreign. They had beaches in Europe where women sunbathed topless, right? In Amsterdam, brothels were legal, and the girls attracted customers by dressing in skimpy clothing and lying just inside a picture window. In Asia, women catered to your every whim, walking barefoot down your spine, and in Bangkok, you could have anything you wanted, just name it.

Playboy joked of a sailor, having spent months at sea, visiting a foreign brothel. If you're man enough to do it ten times, you win a huge prize. After seven times, the girl said, "You're doing really well, mister. That's five times!" The sailor realized she was lying to keep him from winning. He complained to the house madam, who listened to both sides, then said, "Well, there appears to be a disagreement here. There's only one way to settle this. We'll start all over again with the count!"

Another joke told of a place in Bangkok. The customer, a soldier on R&R from a tour in VietNam, decided he was going to get everything on the menu. After a long session, the girl tells him, well, you've had everything except a wax job. You want a wax job? The guy says yes. She stands the guy up, lays his genitals on the table, gives them a karate chop, and wax shoots out of the soldier's ears.

That's sophistication, folks. How could any red-blooded American boy not want to travel overseas, and enjoy that which the repressed American psyche had been denying him?

So anyhow, there's a press release in the news this month. Triumph International, which is apparently one of the largest manufacturers of lingerie in the world, has announced a solar-powered bra.

It's not the fact that lingerie intrigues me. Blondie always says, "would you like to see me in this?" and passes me a magazine. I take a look, and give my standard response, "I'd like nothing better." And it's true. Clothes don't make my wife look great; my wife makes clothes look great. And she makes lack of clothes look even greater. And I'm proud to be seen with her on my arm, no matter what she wears, but she always dresses conservatively in public, and usually in private as well.

But what's the point of a solar-powered bra? Isn't manual power better? I can't think of a guy who doesn't enjoy twisting those knobs. It's like churning ice cream. Homemade ice cream is wonderful to eat, but using an electric churn is not nearly as much fun as cranking the churn by hand.

It turns out that the solar power isn't used for that purpose, though. There's an electronic billboard on the midriff that you can display a message. Ladies, I hate to tell you this, but if your bra is getting enough sunlight to power an electronic billboard, and your midriff is exposed enough that a message could be displayed, it doesn't matter if it's three hours past sundown, the guy is going to get the message.

I found another press release, about a bra that has two cups of rice, for heaven's sake. No, ma'am, guys aren't interested in eating grain from your bra cups. They want to nibble on meat.

I went to their website to see what graphics they might have to illustrate this story. I was sorely disappointed. They still haven't caught on that guys like women with curves. Instead, they have models who are spindly thin, and they offer "cleavage on demand" bras, designed to make you seem like you are curvy even if you have the build of a 10-year-old boy. They have a television commercial where three of their models traipse past a bellboy. His jaw drops, which is really good acting on his part, because the bellboy is obviously gay. Nothing wrong with gays, of course, but trying to sell brassieres because they turn gays on, is sorta like using a Black Angus to sell soy protein to vegetarians. Can you spell "cognitive dissonance?"

But that wasn't the only part of the commercial that seemed wrong. I played it several times, then I played the "making of the commercial" vid clip, and it was halfway through that clip that it struck me. It's the music.

They were playing the same cheesy music that has been used in porn movies for at least forty years. The really cheap porn movies, of course, were scratched-up black-and-white silent movies. At least, they had the impression of honesty. There wasn't any attempt to create characters you could believe in and identify with. They just showed anatomy and action.

Better porn movies made an attempt at telling a story. There were two-dimensional characters driving a convertible across the busy highways of Los Angeles, then pulling up to what looked like a mansion from the outside, then they moved to indoor scenes that had sets using the $3.99 pseudo-wood paneling - the stuff that mobile homes stopped using in the 1950s, because it was just too shoddy. The sound was bad, the lighting was bad, and the anatomy and action they eventually showed was their only redeeming value. Does surrounding 20 minutes of porn with 40 minutes of wasted film make it socially redeeming? And the anatomy and action were graphic, but not very believable.

There's good sex, and bad sex, and the stuff in the porn movies constitutes wretched sex. It's unamerican.

But they were using that same cheesy music in the Triumph advertising, and that's when it hit me. It's not that foreigners are so sophisticated about sex that they can be casual. It's that they don't realize how good sex can be.

I'm sorry, Hugh. You think that those little blue pills are wonderful - and they have their place, I admit - but you haven't figured out how great sex can be.

Maybe the problem with the rest of the world is that the folks there simply don't understand what a great aphrodisiac it can be to apply hot, soapy water to your body at frequent intervals, and to display the good manners our mothers always taught us. They sure don't understand what a turnoff bad music can be.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
Black Angus - aphrodisiac - beer - Cass Elliot - solar-powered bra - brothel - cheesy - cognitive dissonance - debonair - fashion - Hugh Hefner - Joni Mitchell - lingerie - marilyn - porn - hot, soapy water - sophistication - Triumph