Call me naïve

You know when I was thinking of writing a blog, I knew people might hate on it based on the content, the style, the writing, the opinions expressed therein, etc. What I did not foresee, however, was the occasional raunchy look-at-me shock value comment. The first one, after only three posts, was a wake up call.

I’m not going to tell you the name of the commenter – let’s just call him or her “Nellie”. I’m definitely not going to describe the profile picture of Nellie. I’m just going to mention casually that nether parts were involved. Oh, and in our gender neutral world, I’m sure you don’t want me to give some binary, irrelevant categorization of what those parts were. Let’s just say I have three daughters and I saw those parts a lot back when they were in diapers. You know I’m well familiar with those parts — it’s just kind of a shock when they are used as a profile picture. If I was supposed to be shocked, I guess I was — eventually anyway — once I squinted enough at the tick-size icon containing the picture to discern what it was a picture of. The thing is if you’re trying to shock a person of advanced years, you really have to take into account that something requiring acute vision might not do the trick.

I’m not going to repeat what Nellie said in the comment. Let’s just say Nellie was giving advice on how to please a man. Now, this made me think of something Mama used to say. Mama was 35 years old when I was born, so by the time she would have said these things to me, she must have been in her fifties, as I am now. The gist of what she said was that she found it funny when young people made smug little overt sexual comments as though she was uninformed. She’d reference the fact that not only was she young once, but she’d been married for decades. And she’d throw in at some point that “there is nothing new under the sun.” I laughed to myself when I thought of that because in this moment I knew exactly where Mama was coming from. I was married for over three decades and I’ve been a single adult for 8 years. I didn’t comment back to Nellie, but if I had, I think it might have been “well, duh who doesn’t know that?” I might also have asked “so what?”

The one thing I like about growing older is how it gives you perspective. I think most of us long for companionship and intimacy in our lives. We were created that way. In the grand scheme of things we’re pretty much controlled by the same things other mammals are controlled by – the need for food, shelter, comfort, reproduction and so forth. Despite the build up we give it in literature, movies, media and even dirty jokes, sex with all its allure, unaccompanied by real relationship and the fellowship of kindred souls, is just another drive for us to fulfill, and the satisfaction we derive from it is as fleeting as eating a piece of Johnny Ray’s coconut creme pie.

What a sad and foolish person it is who makes his or her profile picture a sex organ. Is there anything more indicative of where this society has fallen? Again I’m reminded of my mother’s history lessons about the Roman Empire. She spent a lot of time explaining about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and moral decay was a big chunk of the explanation. Hearing about something is one thing; seeing is quite another. Mama loved historical movies. That’s how it came to pass that as a college freshman, I ended up in the movie theatre with Mama to see the movie Caligula.

Now there’s some chance she should have known better since Roman Polanski was the director, but I guess she brushed that aside since the movie was historical in nature. They had to cut portions of that movie to get it down to an R rating. I believe we saw the R-rated version. It’s hard to say. Talk about some shock and awe. There must have been 5000 phallic symbols used in creating the set of that movie. They were hard to miss. At some point there was a wedding ceremony and two huge cakes were brought out- one representing the male and one the female. (That’s back when we all thought in binary mindset.) When they brought the male one out, Mama leaned over and whispered: “Do you know what that is?” Ah, the 1970’s were a kinder, gentler time.

It’s sort of sweet that there was at least an inkling of a chance that an 18 year old girl in 1979 didn’t know what was represented with that cake. There’s basically zero chance of that now. With the internet, a child literally cannot be shielded enough to miss anything related to sex. When you least expect it, a profile pops up represented solely by a photograph of a sex organ. That’s such a wake up call for our generation(s). It only goes down from here unless as a society we collectively reject the culture that exalts a biological drive to god-like status.

We’ve gone too far. Children are sold as sex slaves. Women and girls can’t even pump gas without fear of being sold into sex slavery. Young boys are at risk of being stolen from the streets near their homes. Meanwhile we have leaders who drop all pretense of real feminism and instead promote the notion that the “sex trade” is a worthy profession to be encouraged, shielded and promoted. Our leaders turn a blind eye to the vile unhuman-human beings who spirit young refugees across our borders on the promise of freedom only to enslave them in the most dehumanizing of trades. I’m not sure how we put the genie back in the bottle. If we don’t, it’ll be “Coming to a theatre near you – The Decline and Fall of the American Empire.”