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From Box Office Mojo:
Friday Report: Moviegoers Submit to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
by Ray Subers
Fifty Shades of Grey had a strong first place debut on Friday, though Kingsman: The Secret Service was no slouch in second.
Playing at 3,646 locations, the big-screen adaptation of the insanely popular novel Fifty Shades of Grey opened to an estimated $30.2 million yesterday. That ranks fourth all-time among R-rated movies behind The Matrix Reloaded ($37.5 million), The Hangover Part II ($31.6 million) and American Sniper ($30.3 million).
From the Washington Post in 2012:
12/07/2012
Random House employees get $5,000 bonuses, thanks to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
By Caitlin DeweyRandom House CEO Markus Dohle announced at the publisher’s Christmas party on Wednesday that he would award $5,000 bonuses to every member of his staff, from “top editors to warehouse workers,” reports the New York Times.
Random House employees have author E.L. James to thank — her erotic novel, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” sold more than 60 million copies and has spent 37 weeks (and counting) at the top of the New York Times’ paperback best-sellers’ list.
As commenter Hippopotamusdrome points out this giant bestseller started out as fan fiction on a website for Twilight fans.
Ross Douthat writes in the NYT today:
The Caligulan Thrill
FEB. 14, 2015
Ross DouthatIN a society where almost every cultural phenomenon ends up interpreted through an ideological lens, the success de scandale of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — the books, the movie, the branded cuffs and whips — has left culture warriors a little bit confused. Is this another transgressive breakthrough — the latest blow to whatever remains of traditional morality, the mainstreaming of a lifestyle long locked away from view? Or is the now-famous story, with its alpha male gazillionaire and his punished female prize, actually a reactionary fairy tale, encouraging submission to the latest version of the patriarchy?
The answer, of course, is a little of both, which is also the secret to the books’ success: In their not-exactly-literary pages, the central tension of the sexual revolution is finessed, tamed and happily resolved.
Viewed from one angle, the sexual revolution looks obviously egalitarian. It’s about extending to everyone the liberties — the freedom to be promiscuous, to pursue sexual fulfillment without guilt — that were once available only to privileged cisgendered heterosexual males. It’s about ushering in a society where everyone can freely love and take pleasure in anyone and anything they want.
But viewed from another angle, that same revolution looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children … and so on down a long, depressing list. At times, as the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently suggested, this side of sexual revolution looks more like “sexual reaction,” a step way back toward a libertinism more like that of pre-Christian Rome — anti-egalitarian and hierarchical, privileging men over women, adults over children, the upper class over the lower orders.
Note that the institutional memories of both Christianity and Judaism (and perhaps Islam) go all the way back to the ancient world in which homosexuality consisted largely of the strong taking advantage of the weak or the weak being aroused by being taken advantaged of by the strong, which helps account for the religions’ traditional objections to homosexuality.
Are we so sure that ancient approach won’t come back?
… The hope, in other words, is that we can eventually have the fun of Rome without all the nasty bits: Contraception and abortion will pre-empt the inconvenient infant, age-of-consent laws will make sure that young people’s initiation doesn’t start too early, and with enough carefully drawn up regulations for initiating intercourse we can all experience the courts of Tiberius and Heliogabalus without anybody getting hurt.
And if any member of a favored class suffers a broken heart or embarrassment or friendzoning they can sue or persecute or make up stories about members of the unfavored of class of straight white men. Everybody’s happy!
I don’t think I can take Douthat writing about anything related to sex seriously.
It would seem like the sexual revolution is all about shielding the left from the consequences of their actions, foisting blame upon the patriarchy. They want readily available abortions and birth control because of a lack of self control, but are outraged at the idea abortion can be used to reduce crime as as Steven Levitt and others propose. What does this book signify? The crappy writing sells and that women still want to be dominated – but at Douthatt alludes to, in way that confusing to outsiders not familiar with all the implicit rules and contradictions of modern feminism .
Sex is several hundred million years old. And it has nothing to do with the “sex” of the so-called “sexual revolution”. “Sexual revolution” is a misnomer. It should be called the “Eusocial revolution”.
yeah it it kinda weird how douthatt, supposedly a big Christian, views this with an air of moral detachment.
All the Costco Calligulas in flyover country will be whipping their special someone tonight when they get home from the multiplex. How squalid it all is. Only Charles Dance can give it any class at all. Do a search for ” Charles Dance – Fifty Shades of Grey ” if you want a laugh.
Using Fifty Shades as an entree to discussing sexual promiscuity reminds of what I heard from my mother and grandmother about Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover many decades ago. People, including women, like titillation.
As far as the comparison to Rome goes, I was hearing it already in school in 1966.
I am getting very curious to know what causes periods of sexual promiscuity to swing back to something more prudent. I know in my lifetime that AIDS, and to a lesser extent, herpes had something to do with it, at least for a time. The ’20′s were pretty raucous until the depression. The World Wars led to a lot of quickie marriages but things settled down considerably after that. So what exactly causes the pendulum to swing back?
I do think the current mania of sexual assault allegations is directly tied to the current climate of promiscuity, and one can see that maybe women are corporatively yearning for a more stable situation, in which sexual activity has non-venereal and non-criminal consequences. Part of my intuition here is that for most people, sexuality is profoundly reproductive and consequential, and when it isn’t, sexuality becomes ever more blatant, as though all those Cupids with arrows are redoubling their efforts to be born.
Given the proposed equality of sexuality with regard to all sexual preferences, and above all, between genders, I can’t see how any return to a more prudent sexual climate could be achieved, at least in terms of ideas. But we will see. I’d appreciate any historical inputs.
Its terrible. Not much anyone can do about it.
Not wholly off-topic.
At motherjones : Love in the Time of PTSD: Mac McClelland’s Irritable Heart, The former MoJo reporter talks about her new book, her own trauma, and what defines a badass.
So I executed google(Mac McClelland phony PTSD). Sure enough :
“I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD”
http://magazine.good.is/articles/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd
… reminds of what I heard from my mother and grandmother about Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover many decades ago. ….
As far as the comparison to Rome goes, I was hearing it already in school in 1966.
Jeez, you Boomers. No matter how weird and off the rails society gets, there’s always a Boomer chirping up about how “they warned us about Elvis too!”. Sometimes I think we could have mass rapes on the scale of the Red Army capturing Berlin and there’d be a Boomer saying “well at least it’s better than that uptight, ‘Leave It To Beaver’ world I grew up in!”.
I don’t think Doubtthat knows what he’s talking about. Women have pushed so hard for equality that some of the more enterprising men have them where they want them – free, available, and worthless.
Not much to be said here other than the obvious “women are odd”. If this exact same book had been written by a guy it would have had trouble getting published, let alone made into a hit movie.
When men write it, it’s pornography. When women write it, it’s “erotic”.
So far, this is the money quote of 2015.
You sound bicurious.
“But viewed from another angle, that same revolution looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children … and so on down a long, depressing list. At times, as the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently suggested, this side of sexual revolution looks more like “sexual reaction,” a step way back toward a libertinism more like that of pre-Christian Rome — anti-egalitarian and hierarchical, privileging men over women, adults over children, the upper class over the lower orders.”
However they did it in Rome, however they did thing in the 19th century…
I am reasonably sure the poor, at least some of them, have sex a lot more frequently than most people better off than they are.
So is this guy talking about people he knows? Does he even know the slightest thing about anyone that’s not in his particular peer group?
Anything you say with about people that includes the qualifier "at least some of" is likely to be a tautology. However, the evidence from sexual surveys is well nigh overwhelming in supporting the proposition that the higher up the social ladder you go in the US the richer (no pun intended) the sexual life is likely to be.
No, the real problem with 50 Shades, the very worst thing about, and especially the popular reaction to it, is that it corroborates every last darned thing that “Whiskey” has been saying . . .
Don’t you hate it when certain people turn out to be right?
Whiskey is like one quarter right.
Reading through the NYT comments about Ross’s column, it was pure nastiness!
It didn’t so much respond to anything Ross actually wrote so much as to project upon him what they think he wrote.
Liberals are really nasty and rude.
““I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD””
I read that article. Bitch is crazy.
Everyone talks up the sex in 50 Shades of Grey but what about the hypergamy or class angle?
Christian Grey is a gazillionaire with a fleet of private cars and a chopper or plane IIRC. He has a playroom in his mansion/penthouse where he performs bondage/whippings.
Would so many women have got the tingles reading this book if the male lead was a longshoreman named Bob who drove a 9 year old Ford pickup and kept a paddle under his bed in lieu of a playroom? I doubt it.
Virtue must be rewarded at the end in these movies. The sub must move on to find another available orbiter to dote on her
Steve, are you going to review the movie?
Well, the feminist “lumpengentsia ” seem to positively hate both the movie and the book:
http://www.themarysue.com/exploitation-of-female-submission-in-film/
http://www.themarysue.com/i-dated-christian-grey/
http://www.themarysue.com/fifty-shades-review/
This one is quite funny.It accuses EL James of “colonizing” the BDSM community:
http://www.themarysue.com/power-playing-advice-to-fic-writers/
And this one slams the guy playing Christian Grey for not properly respecting the BDSM community:
http://www.themarysue.com/50-shades-sex-dungeon/
"For audiences, the message is clear: this is the type of women men want to pay ten dollars to watch,"
Book written by a woman, with majority woman readership, movie theater with majority woman viewers.
Now 'Survivors of Submission' sounds more like a winner.
*'creepy' - adjective, highly perjorative, applies to old white men with scary attributes, such as hair longer on the temples than on the crown.
Fifty Shades of Gay next?
However they did it in Rome, however they did thing in the 19th century...
I am reasonably sure the poor, at least some of them, have sex a lot more frequently than most people better off than they are.
So is this guy talking about people he knows? Does he even know the slightest thing about anyone that's not in his particular peer group?
“I am reasonably sure the poor, at least some of them, have sex a lot more frequently than most people better off than they are.”
Anything you say with about people that includes the qualifier “at least some of” is likely to be a tautology. However, the evidence from sexual surveys is well nigh overwhelming in supporting the proposition that the higher up the social ladder you go in the US the richer (no pun intended) the sexual life is likely to be.
Ummmm, I hate to break this to you, but poor people... they don't do surveys. Over the phone surveys maybe, but not the Kinsey type thing you are talking about.
For god's sakes, I've been in your world. I also saw another one growing up.
Heck watch Cops sometimes. Or Springer.
http://www.blogher.com/50-shades-grey-when-if-fan-fiction-not-fan-fiction
“As was reported in the Washington Post, the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy has its origins in Twilight fan fiction. James took Bella and Edward, placed them a few years in the future in Seattle, and called the book Master of the Universe. That book was published on FanFiction.net. James reportedly rewrote the story to remove the Twilight influence, adding new characters and situations. Edward’s character became Christian Grey and Bella was re-imagined as Anastasia Steele. All paranormal elements were removed — there are no vampires whatsoever.”
I had never heard of women being into bondage/whipping and that sort of thing as the recipients. Usually you hear about how some weird guy likes being dominated by women as the recipient of bondage and whipping, or about how some women like being the dominatrices who dominate and whip the men.
Are the women who are into 50 Shades really into bondage/whipping in the recipient role, or is that stuff really just ancillary to what they’re really into i.e. wealthy, powerful men?
I'm by no means the world's greatest lothario, but I've known a couple of women like this. This kind of thing doesn't do much for me, but I was brought up to be solicitous of my guests' wishes.
Steve said :
Note that the institutional memories of both Christianity and Judaism (and perhaps Islam) go all the way back to the ancient world in which homosexuality consisted largely of the strong taking advantage of the weak
—–
We’re all aware of the extreme distate for (male) homosexuality that exists in most black african countries. One of the lesser known reasons for that widespread distaste is the perception that in order to get a good job, many young men are asked to submit to sodomy by their higher ups. In countries like Gabon or Cameroon, there is the perception that men have to join secret societies in order to succeed at anything and that when one joins a secret society, one is asked to compromise oneself in various ways. The sodomy isn’t officially about sex. It’s about an inferior being humiliated by someone higher up (though I’m sure some of the participants enjoy the ritual!). There is a lot of anger among the youth over there about this rumoured phenomenon.
I’m alro reminded that in Uganda, the christian church there has, as martyrs, young men from the late 19th century who had converted to christianity and had been burned at the stake for refusing to sleep with their homosexual king! That’s partly why they are so worked up about the issue.
” When men write it, it’s pornography. When women write it, it’s “erotic”. ”
So far, this is the money quote of 2015.
You said it, women are odd. That’s cause we keep wanting to believe women want things even. Haha.
Gilbert Gottfried Reads 50 Shades of Grey
Fifty Shades of Grey: Random Text Generator Spits Out Prose Uncannily Similar to the Real Thing
http://www.themarysue.com/exploitation-of-female-submission-in-film/
http://www.themarysue.com/i-dated-christian-grey/
http://www.themarysue.com/fifty-shades-review/
This one is quite funny.It accuses EL James of "colonizing" the BDSM community:http://www.themarysue.com/power-playing-advice-to-fic-writers/
And this one slams the guy playing Christian Grey for not properly respecting the BDSM community:http://www.themarysue.com/50-shades-sex-dungeon/
http://www.themarysue.com/exploitation-of-female-submission-in-film/
“For audiences, the message is clear: this is the type of women men want to pay ten dollars to watch,”
Book written by a woman, with majority woman readership, movie theater with majority woman viewers.
I imagine every MILF hunter in America will be camping out in the theater lobby.
I’d be curious as to who is going to this film. The women I know all said the book was silly. The feminists thought it was not sexy enough. I got the impression it was a book they bought, thumbed to the sex parts, were let down and never read the rest of the book.
I wonder how many illegal immigrants were buying the book.
http://www.skoob.com.br/livros/libidodominandi/186495ed208132
What do women want? Believe it or not Garry Marshall (Happy Days) wrote and directed an S&M comedy in the 1990s. Exit from Eden stared Dan Akroyd and Rosi O’Donnel.
The following dialogue from the movie explains why SM movies always fail.
Male sex slave: What can I do to serve you mistress?
Normal Hetrosexual Woman: Paint my garage.
When the movie failed at the box office Marshall said I made a movie about S&M and got hurt.
These movies come out periodically, but the reality is people just aren’t interested in SM.
Rotten tomatoes says movie not worth the effort.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fifty_shades_of_grey/
Radio station KFI in Los Angeles, at least over its internet stream, ran commercials for a 50 Shades version of the Vermont Teddy Bear, with a pitch about “dominating your love this Valentine’s Day,” or words to that effect.
We know that Brave New World will have arrived when young teens play “Christian and Anastasia” on their dates.
Are the women who are into 50 Shades really into bondage/whipping in the recipient role, or is that stuff really just ancillary to what they're really into i.e. wealthy, powerful men?
Bit of both, I should think
"For audiences, the message is clear: this is the type of women men want to pay ten dollars to watch,"
Book written by a woman, with majority woman readership, movie theater with majority woman viewers.
Being a feminist requires a lot of mental judo
Christian Grey = Jeffrey Epstein
http://www.themarysue.com/exploitation-of-female-submission-in-film/
http://www.themarysue.com/i-dated-christian-grey/
http://www.themarysue.com/fifty-shades-review/
This one is quite funny.It accuses EL James of "colonizing" the BDSM community:http://www.themarysue.com/power-playing-advice-to-fic-writers/
And this one slams the guy playing Christian Grey for not properly respecting the BDSM community:http://www.themarysue.com/50-shades-sex-dungeon/
Grossed out? Ha, yes those places are full of uglies. Let no one think that Eyes Wide Shut e.g. is anything like about 90%+ of actual orgies.
How many more American males are willing to:
1. Have sex less often?
2. Have considerably fewer sexual partners in their lifetimes?
3. Stop pressuring girls and women into having sex (if that is something they do)?
4. See marriage as a better alternative to living together or remaining single?
5. To think of marriage and parenthood as important life experiences and goals that are worth sacrificing personal goals and leisure time for?
We would need more American men — and a significant number of them — to put a greater premium on marriage, family, commitment and genuine intimacy to achieve the kind of changes many of you are talking about here.
These kinds of changes do not happen if everybody wishes other people would change while they do not.
If most guys don’t think most guys who are not good husband and father material will change, well then that would say a lot about what we can expect in the future.
Please note that I am not putting all men down — not at all.
I am just not willing to pretend we don’t have a lot of guys out there right now who think the current male/female system is working great for them because they can get the milk without buying the cow.
Take it from “a big Christian”: the only way to stay sane in this world is to take your own morality seriously, while viewing the actions of those outside your orbit with “an air of moral detachment.”
Women really haven’t pushed for equality. Kind of like blacks didn’t really push for equality. Pale males pushed for equality on behalf of women and blacks. Equality is not on the radar for most people, period. A few women and a few blacks pushed for equality, but we all know that goes exactly nowhere without some muscle of which they had none. It takes power to get power and they didn’t have any. I figured this out by myself in grade school. They were telling us the usual BS of how blacks “fought” for civil rights. I looked up what fraction of the US was black and immediately knew that blacks were given rights because no amount of “fighting” is going to make 12% a majority.
The bondage stuff is actually among the milder and tamer aspects of the book. What’s really extreme are the graphic extended passages depicting things like analingus. I can’t see how they could have put that stuff in the movie, but it must be at least alluded to since they’re such significant elements of the book.
It's already appeared in the first episode of this season's Girls. As if he didn't have enough to think about, Brian Williams' daughter Allison is the recipient of this act on broadcast TV.
http://www.peeperz.com/allison-williams-gets-ass-eaten-tv/
Ross writes: It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests. . .
He had to get that in. How about, "It’s the revolution that’s been better for black varsity football players than their female guests. . ."
Don't you hate it when certain people turn out to be right?
Inquiring Mind says:
Nah, Christian Grey wasn’t an NBA player.
Whiskey is like one quarter right.
syon:
Not really any more than being a woman.
What on earth is he talking about? As far as I can tell, the large majority of porn for heterosexual men centers on the fantasy of giving ecstatic joy to women. The camera is focused on the woman as she writhes and moans and pretends to have explosive orgasms. The man is portrayed as merely the instrument of the woman’s satisfaction. Man-hating feminists and self-hating fellow travelers like Douthat simply cannot believe the obvious fact of life that most men actually like women and want to make them happy, although they do wish that women wanted to have sex more often.
Maybe it would be more accurate to say that 98% of the porn consumed by Ross Douthat is about preying on and exploiting the weak. Just guessing.
Christian Grey is a gazillionaire with a fleet of private cars and a chopper or plane IIRC. He has a playroom in his mansion/penthouse where he performs bondage/whippings.
Would so many women have got the tingles reading this book if the male lead was a longshoreman named Bob who drove a 9 year old Ford pickup and kept a paddle under his bed in lieu of a playroom? I doubt it.
I doubt it. I think most women are looking for Prince Charming – rich, good-looking, well-groomed, powerful and able to make them the queen bee. Also, women want to be “the one” selected by the prince, selected over and above all the other women. If he happens to be dangerously super sexy, that just kind of adds to the allure and the fun – at least in the fantasy.
What do women want?
At least a few of them want a relationship with a dominant male. And probably more than just a few. And those that don’t still find some part of it attractive just as fantasy.
If nothing else, it frees female sexuality from ambiguity, negotiation, and too much thinking.
As far as BDSM … I don’t have anything to add. Dom/sub isn’t much different than traditional sex roles relabeled. Isn’t that part of the modern romance fiction formula?
And from what little I’ve seen, being dominant is a lot of work. No one wants to be simply brutalized. It is ritualized and scripted and … like I said … too much effort for someone with more vanilla tastes.
Pain? I don’t know. Why do people run 10 miles?
The real fantasy isn’t simply Dom/sub … it is submission to a tight script that reflects exactly what the sub wants. Or even better, desires that the sub isn’t aware of.
I would rather just watch TV.
Anything you say with about people that includes the qualifier "at least some of" is likely to be a tautology. However, the evidence from sexual surveys is well nigh overwhelming in supporting the proposition that the higher up the social ladder you go in the US the richer (no pun intended) the sexual life is likely to be.
“Anything you say with about people that includes the qualifier “at least some of” is likely to be a tautology. However, the evidence from sexual surveys is well nigh overwhelming in supporting the proposition that the higher up the social ladder you go in the US the richer (no pun intended) the sexual life is likely to be.”
Ummmm, I hate to break this to you, but poor people… they don’t do surveys. Over the phone surveys maybe, but not the Kinsey type thing you are talking about.
For god’s sakes, I’ve been in your world. I also saw another one growing up.
Heck watch Cops sometimes. Or Springer.
What’s really extreme are the graphic extended passages depicting things like analingus. I can’t see how they could have put that stuff in the movie. . .
It’s already appeared in the first episode of this season’s Girls. As if he didn’t have enough to think about, Brian Williams’ daughter Allison is the recipient of this act on broadcast TV.
http://www.peeperz.com/allison-williams-gets-ass-eaten-tv/
Ross writes: It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests. . .
He had to get that in. How about, “It’s the revolution that’s been better for black varsity football players than their female guests. . .”
Am I the only one who read this as a nod to Otter's defense of the Deltas in Animal House? "We may have taken a few liberties with our female guests..."
The day after the Super Bowl, I overheard a young-20-ish woman in a restaurant saying, "Tom Brady is pretty hot ... how'd he end up with that mannish Amazon bitch?"
A few years ago, some college chick made a PowerPoint ranking the jocks she'd done. When I first heard about it, I thought, "Mudshark" ... but it turned out that nearly every guy on the list was a white lacrosser.
Some filmmaker looking to make money should adapt/reprise the ideas of “Working Girl” for a new generation. It would be easy to throw in some S&M if that is really what women want now.
Christian Grey is a gazillionaire with a fleet of private cars and a chopper or plane IIRC. He has a playroom in his mansion/penthouse where he performs bondage/whippings.
Would so many women have got the tingles reading this book if the male lead was a longshoreman named Bob who drove a 9 year old Ford pickup and kept a paddle under his bed in lieu of a playroom? I doubt it.
You are right, the class/status angle gets downplayed too much, but in reality the book is about women’s fantasies of landing the perfect Alpha, just like “Twilight”, or “Gone with the Wind”, or countless other romance novels. The author just made the smart commercial decision to make the sexual element of a woman’s submission to an überalpha more explicit than in most other romance novels.
[…] Source: Steve Sailer […]
I don’t get the whole “promiscuous, tearing down all the boundaries” view of it…not having read the book (perish the thought!) or sat through the movie, I still know through cultural osmosis that the plot seems to be about a man and a woman in their 20s who enter into a completely monogamous relationship where super rich masculine man totally dominates struggling girl, she frequently runs away from him and he just continues on ruling the universe and impressing her until she comes back and submits to another round of spanking, whipping or being restrained. So a mass of modern women crave a monogamous relationship with a very dominant guy with status who can pass the various tests she throws at him to see if he submits to her. This con says yawn….Great Big Red Eye of Juipiter.
“cisgendered”, “Heliogobalas”? Another regular isteve reader at the NYT.
Normal Hetrosexual Woman: Paint my garage. When the movie failed at the box office Marshall said I made a movie about S&M and got hurt.These movies come out periodically, but the reality is people just aren't interested in SM.Rotten tomatoes says movie not worth the effort.http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fifty_shades_of_grey/
Dan Akroyd and Rosie?! Ewwww, count me out…I dunno, I find men just enjoy visuals of young, fertile and feminine women’s bodies. Beating people up? Getting beat up? Who cares as long as she’s in tight leather! Hell, the majority of guys can get aroused by a short plotless video of a random woman’s privates…Women on the other hand seem to especially love fiction with dominance themes, provided its the man doing the duty and he is also high status in the fictional world. Oh, and it needs scenes of him passing her attempts to control him through breakdowns and whatnot. Great Big Red Eye Of Jupiter.
1. Have sex less often?
2. Have considerably fewer sexual partners in their lifetimes?
3. Stop pressuring girls and women into having sex (if that is something they do)?
4. See marriage as a better alternative to living together or remaining single?
5. To think of marriage and parenthood as important life experiences and goals that are worth sacrificing personal goals and leisure time for?
We would need more American men -- and a significant number of them -- to put a greater premium on marriage, family, commitment and genuine intimacy to achieve the kind of changes many of you are talking about here.
These kinds of changes do not happen if everybody wishes other people would change while they do not.
If most guys don't think most guys who are not good husband and father material will change, well then that would say a lot about what we can expect in the future.
Please note that I am not putting all men down -- not at all.
I am just not willing to pretend we don't have a lot of guys out there right now who think the current male/female system is working great for them because they can get the milk without buying the cow.
You make good points. I’d add – how many men get married and regret it? Wish they hadn’t bothered. Think they made a bad exchange for sex. Or thought they would be getting more. Ross isn’t interested in their problems apparently….
“Note that the institutional memories of both Christianity and Judaism (and perhaps Islam) go all the way back to the ancient world in which homosexuality consisted largely of the strong taking advantage of the weak or the weak being aroused by being taken advantaged of by the strong, which helps account for the religions’ traditional objections to homosexuality.”
The Arab view of homosexuality seems very much the pre-Christian Roman one. Catamites are punished; high-ranking men raping little boys are not. In Rome the little boys were slaves; in the Arab world they’re the children of Bangladeshi servants.
No one is asking the real question: why can’t this 27-year old, tall, good-looking, billionaire alpha male actually do better than what looks like a mousy secretary? Were there no supermodels available? Does he routinely step over the Hollywood actress to shag the housekeeper?
The class and hypergamy element is certainly there, but what I could never understand is why the men would ever give love and commitment to these plain-jane women. I mean, Twilight had the same problem: I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
The bottom line is, a lot of real good looking women are nuts that's why and they don't put out because they know that most men will kiss their a** just because of their looks. Plain janes OTOH are more appreciative and don't have the drama associated with the bi*** supermodel who thinks the entire world revolves around her and thinks being treated like royalty is normal.
A smart guy avoids all that because there is no upside, just more hell. In the end he'd have to get a mistress to keep him sexually and emotionally satisfied.
USA press freedom way way down at #49 http://index.rsf.org/#!/index-details/USA
Sex sells and sexual freedom is up along with guys. Academic freedom is going down so go down on her…Our production of the Vagina Monologues occurs every year and this year, it will be held on February 27th and 28th at Irvine Auditorium. View the show details on our calendar.
http://www.vdayupenn.org/theshow/
The Show Must Go On!
http://www.themarysue.com/exploitation-of-female-submission-in-film/
http://www.themarysue.com/i-dated-christian-grey/
http://www.themarysue.com/fifty-shades-review/
This one is quite funny.It accuses EL James of "colonizing" the BDSM community:http://www.themarysue.com/power-playing-advice-to-fic-writers/
And this one slams the guy playing Christian Grey for not properly respecting the BDSM community:http://www.themarysue.com/50-shades-sex-dungeon/
‘BDSM community’ = powerless whites (mainly ‘creepy’* old dudes) so special pleading shall be discounted with a grain of salt.
Now ‘Survivors of Submission’ sounds more like a winner.
*’creepy’ – adjective, highly perjorative, applies to old white men with scary attributes, such as hair longer on the temples than on the crown.
What do women want? Let’s look at their sexual fantasies. In my long years, I’ve known large numbers of women with drawers and e-readers full of “romance novels”. The story lines and characterizations are generally all the same. They are the Cinderella story recast:
There are one and more women between Cinderella and the Prince, who is handsome, charming, and has lots of money, status, and power. Cinderella acts to remove the female competition between her and the Prince so that she can take her rightful place as the Princess of the realm. The story line is generally consumed by scenes of females going at each other as they compete for the Alpha Male. The “bodice ripping” at the end of the chapters are thinly veiled rape fantasies. The Prince eventually finds Cinderella so “hot” that he cannot control himself. His lack of control excites her … because, it represents her final victory over the female competition who are unable to drive the Prince to sexual frenzy. The final scene fades as Cinderella takes her rightful place on the throne next to the Prince. Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after.
What do little girls (in waiting) want? It appears to be much the same, given the success of the Princess movies and the paraphernalia in the Princess Industry.
The class and hypergamy element is certainly there, but what I could never understand is why the men would ever give love and commitment to these plain-jane women. I mean, Twilight had the same problem: I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.
“No one is asking the real question: why can’t this 27-year old, tall, good-looking, billionaire alpha male actually do better than what looks like a mousy secretary? Were there no supermodels available?”
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
The problem is the suspension of disbelief. Sure, it's aimed at women who are not supermodels, but consider this plot line, supposedly aimed at men:
Imagine a show about a guy who looks like Danny DeVito, has no money, no friends, no status, no charisma, yet somehow manages to date a hot model every episode. And this is a serious drama, not a comedy, so we basically have a show about a guy dealing with all the problems with having sex with such fine women.
Would men watch it? Of course not. The suspension of disbelief required to watch such a show is too great to attract any attention. Only a comedy can pull off such a plot line, and that is only barely.
Yet, women lap up the female equivalent of this nonsense without any sense of how improbable it really is.
Just because people read something fictional it does not mean that they do actually want to experience that in real life.
Bingo.
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
“No one is asking the real question: why can’t this 27-year old, tall, good-looking, billionaire alpha male actually do better than what looks like a mousy secretary? Were there no supermodels available?”
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
This is my point exactly! The same narrative repeats itself in other popular book series and corresponding films aimed at female audiences. In Twilight, plain-looking Bella is fought over by two men who are clearly out of her league in the attractiveness department: the aristocratic vampire Edward and muscled shape-shifter Jacob. In the HBO series True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris’s many Southern Vampire Mysteries novels, frumpy waitress Sookie Stackhouse is the love interest of hunks like dignified vampire Bill Compton, dazzling Viking-turned-vampire Eric Northman, and physically imposing werewolf Alcide Herveaux. All these men literally risk their lives for average-faced, gap-toothed, and flat-bodied Sookie throughout the series. Other mousy female characters in True Blood also dated above their weight in looks.
I contend that such books and series perform so well because they represent the inner desire of most women (who statistically will huddle around the mean in physical features) to be sought after by men physically in the 99th percentile of masculine appearance.
In all fairness, I must admit that Anna Paquin, who played Sookie Stackhouse in the HBO series, met and eventually married Stephen Moyer, who played Bill Compton’s character.
As for the whole "average woman, impossibly attractive man" thing, you just have to remember that the male equivalent is a porn movie. In real life a man who looks like Ron Jeremy would not be having sex with a series of women who look like young porn stars. Most porn "plots" serve men the fantasy of an attractive young woman throwing herself at an average guy who puts no effort into pursuing which really is the mirror of the "high value man puts a lot of effort into pursuing an average woman" fantasy.
The fantasy for the woman is getting a long plot for sex from a high value man, the fantasy for the man is getting sex from a high value woman without a long plot.
I just started reading “The Confessions”. Very powerful and very contemporary.
Arnold Schwarzenegger did.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1388674/Arnold-Schwarzeneggers-wife-Maria-Shriver-confronted-Mildred-Baena-love-child.html
Maria was a hotty when young. Even now she’s pretty well-preserved, but Arnold was nevertheless so overcome by lust for the fat dumpy Chicana housekeeper that he couldn’t even restrain himself long enough to put on a condom.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1388875/Arnold-Schwarzenegger-love-child-maid-Mildred-Baena-boogie-down.html
Shudder.
My wife and I watched Fifty Shades last night, and we both liked it.
The movie was panned by all the professional reviews that I read, but word-of-mouth reviews will keep the movie showing profitably in the theaters for several weeks.
The movie accurately depicts the novel (I read it). Everyone who read the novel will like the book.
Dakota Johnson was born to play the leading role. Her performance is perfect.
The movie has lots of funny moments. I laughed aloud many times.
It’s a good story. The young woman does not like the sadistic sex or her boyfriend’s addiction to sadistic sex. She submits only to please him, although she too does receive some pleasure from it. Meanwhile, however, she tries to guide her boyfriend out of that perverse addiction and into a normal sexual relationship.
The story involves various relatives and friends — their mothers and step-fathers, his brother, her roommate, her photographer friend. The story does have some complexity, which will be developed in several sequels.
That’s the thesis of Michel Houellebecq’s first book, “Whatever“.
Guys on the left side of the sexual-attractiveness curve are a lot better off than they were thirty years ago. Even the ugliest, dweebiest, most-numb-nutted guys have free unlimited access to high-resolution depictions of high-quality T&A.
If someone had told you in 1985 that, within ten years, any guy with a computer and a modem would have access to billions if not trillions of pictures and videos of beautiful women doing things even the nastiest horndog couldn't possibly imagine, you probably would have laughed in his face.
And yet, by 1995, the smut-filled Web was here. It was slow and ornery, but it was already well on its way to becoming the porn paradise that we all know and love.
And to think that you don't have to pay even a penny to get your rocks off! Oh, you can and will pay for some things, but so much is totally gratis.
Yeah, whacking off sucks compared to the real thing. And playing video games or watching movies or reading books sucks compared to going out and conquering vast lands or slaughtering zombies (or whatever floats your boat). Listening to music made by someone else sucks compared to having music in your soul. But it's a lot better than nothing.Serfs need *something* to keep them going. Bread, circuses, and [p-word].
Sometimes 2015 gets a bad rap. Yes, our society, politics, and culture are dominated by multiculti PC bullshit, and our wealthy sociopathic assholes are wealthier, sociopathier, and assholier than ever. But we downtrodden shits can watch, read, or hear most of the best (and a lot of the worst) works from earlier years.
(Remember when people marveled about the fact that all of Shakespeare's works were online? "My God, even the schlubbiest schlub can revel in the joys of Shakespeare!")
It is easier for someone living in 2015 to watch a movie made in 1985 than it was for someone in 1990. In 1990, or 1995, or even 2000, if I wanted to see a movie made in 1985, I'd have to drive to a video store and rent or buy it on VHS.
Now, VHS movies had a certain charm, a certain aesthetic, but watching a film on tape was not at all like watching it in a theater. There are movies that I watched dozens or even hundreds of times on VHS that, when I first saw them on DVD, were nearly unrecognizable - so much of the visual landscape had been panned-and-scanned into oblivion. Keep in mind that not all movies were released on VHS, and it was easy to waste a day driving to various stores trying to hunt down a copy of a hard-to-find flick.
Nowadays I can look for a film online, and odds are that I'll find it. Yes, there are some titles that are still hard to find, or even (gasp!) available only on VHS, but we have Amazon for that.
I like '80s music, so sometimes I wish I were living in the '80s. (1989 was the first year where I was old enough to remember hearing new songs - and I was barely in elementary school.) But what I really like is the '80s software - the content itself, streamed online. If I had to deal with '80s hardware - if I had to get in the car, drive to a record store, and shell out cash for an album with only one song that I wanted to hear - I'd probably be a lot less enamored with the time period overall.
Christian Grey is a gazillionaire with a fleet of private cars and a chopper or plane IIRC. He has a playroom in his mansion/penthouse where he performs bondage/whippings.
Would so many women have got the tingles reading this book if the male lead was a longshoreman named Bob who drove a 9 year old Ford pickup and kept a paddle under his bed in lieu of a playroom? I doubt it.
In BDSM play, the star of the show is topping from below. In these fictions, the star billing, the delighted center of attention is the Kim Bassinger part not the Mickey Rourke role; the Maggie Gyllenhall not the James Spader.
Virtue must be rewarded at the end in these movies. The sub must move on to find another available orbiter to dote on her
1. Have sex less often?
2. Have considerably fewer sexual partners in their lifetimes?
3. Stop pressuring girls and women into having sex (if that is something they do)?
4. See marriage as a better alternative to living together or remaining single?
5. To think of marriage and parenthood as important life experiences and goals that are worth sacrificing personal goals and leisure time for?
We would need more American men -- and a significant number of them -- to put a greater premium on marriage, family, commitment and genuine intimacy to achieve the kind of changes many of you are talking about here.
These kinds of changes do not happen if everybody wishes other people would change while they do not.
If most guys don't think most guys who are not good husband and father material will change, well then that would say a lot about what we can expect in the future.
Please note that I am not putting all men down -- not at all.
I am just not willing to pretend we don't have a lot of guys out there right now who think the current male/female system is working great for them because they can get the milk without buying the cow.
More and more of those free cows are delivering sour milk.
Note that the institutional memories of both Christianity and Judaism (and perhaps Islam) go all the way back to the ancient world in which homosexuality consisted largely of the strong taking advantage of the weak
-----
We're all aware of the extreme distate for (male) homosexuality that exists in most black african countries. One of the lesser known reasons for that widespread distaste is the perception that in order to get a good job, many young men are asked to submit to sodomy by their higher ups. In countries like Gabon or Cameroon, there is the perception that men have to join secret societies in order to succeed at anything and that when one joins a secret society, one is asked to compromise oneself in various ways. The sodomy isn't officially about sex. It's about an inferior being humiliated by someone higher up (though I'm sure some of the participants enjoy the ritual!). There is a lot of anger among the youth over there about this rumoured phenomenon.I'm alro reminded that in Uganda, the christian church there has, as martyrs, young men from the late 19th century who had converted to christianity and had been burned at the stake for refusing to sleep with their homosexual king! That's partly why they are so worked up about the issue.
It’s an interesting idea that Christian homophobia is really based in the perception that such relations always involve exploitation and power imbalances, sort of like Andrea Dworkin’s views of normal sex. But that implies that, if you could have homosexuality without the power imbalances, Christians would see nothing wrong with the practice, but as we’ve seen this is not the case. Conservative Christians never talk about the power imbalances, but only about how homosexuality is “unnatural” and offensive to God in itself.
The class and hypergamy element is certainly there, but what I could never understand is why the men would ever give love and commitment to these plain-jane women. I mean, Twilight had the same problem: I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.
Low stamina?
Douthat is writing for a very hostile audience. Look at the comments on his posts. I would say his moral attachment is clearly evident, although he makes a heroic effort at disinterestedness.
Are the women who are into 50 Shades really into bondage/whipping in the recipient role, or is that stuff really just ancillary to what they're really into i.e. wealthy, powerful men?
I had never heard of women being into bondage/whipping and that sort of thing as the recipients.
I’m by no means the world’s greatest lothario, but I’ve known a couple of women like this. This kind of thing doesn’t do much for me, but I was brought up to be solicitous of my guests’ wishes.
What makes some women so attracted to this genre, and others totally baffled by it? And what is the breakdown? I’m annoyed by assertions that this literary genre and relationship scenario depict “what women want,” when I know many women who like me regard the romance genre with bemused disdain. But are we the minority? Is it a matter of heredity (my sisters and mom are likeminded) or environment (my girlfriends from similar backgrounds are likeminded)? I have no idea.
The romance genre used to be entertaining and intelligent. Philip Sidney’s Arcadia was wise and hilarious. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies were great. Jane Austen’s romantic comedies also great. F. Scott Fitzgerald could write a good love story. Even Nabokov wrote some beautiful if definitely non-normative love stories (Lolita, Ada). Whit Stillman’s stuff is wonderful. Houellebecq writes intelligent but bitter love stories.
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
“This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.”
The problem is the suspension of disbelief. Sure, it’s aimed at women who are not supermodels, but consider this plot line, supposedly aimed at men:
Imagine a show about a guy who looks like Danny DeVito, has no money, no friends, no status, no charisma, yet somehow manages to date a hot model every episode. And this is a serious drama, not a comedy, so we basically have a show about a guy dealing with all the problems with having sex with such fine women.
Would men watch it? Of course not. The suspension of disbelief required to watch such a show is too great to attract any attention. Only a comedy can pull off such a plot line, and that is only barely.
Yet, women lap up the female equivalent of this nonsense without any sense of how improbable it really is.
One summer he didn't return. I was told he was living down south-- Alaskan for Washington state-- with a stunning beauty of a wife. More pretty than sexy, but several leagues above him, or any of us for that matter. His co-workers had photos to prove it, too. So your scenario does happen at times.
Do I need to mention that she's from France?
It's already appeared in the first episode of this season's Girls. As if he didn't have enough to think about, Brian Williams' daughter Allison is the recipient of this act on broadcast TV.
http://www.peeperz.com/allison-williams-gets-ass-eaten-tv/
Ross writes: It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests. . .
He had to get that in. How about, "It’s the revolution that’s been better for black varsity football players than their female guests. . ."
Ross writes: It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests. . .
Am I the only one who read this as a nod to Otter’s defense of the Deltas in Animal House? “We may have taken a few liberties with our female guests…”
The class and hypergamy element is certainly there, but what I could never understand is why the men would ever give love and commitment to these plain-jane women. I mean, Twilight had the same problem: I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.
Looks aren’t everything, it’s just something the MSM tries to sell us. Nor is success having a clothes horse as a wife/girl friend.
The bottom line is, a lot of real good looking women are nuts that’s why and they don’t put out because they know that most men will kiss their a** just because of their looks. Plain janes OTOH are more appreciative and don’t have the drama associated with the bi*** supermodel who thinks the entire world revolves around her and thinks being treated like royalty is normal.
A smart guy avoids all that because there is no upside, just more hell. In the end he’d have to get a mistress to keep him sexually and emotionally satisfied.
That was no commercial decision, man. The authoress was simply unloading her wet dreams. Her mind didn’t make the decision. The tinglez did.
The class and hypergamy element is certainly there, but what I could never understand is why the men would ever give love and commitment to these plain-jane women. I mean, Twilight had the same problem: I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.
“No one is asking the real question: why can’t this 27-year old, tall, good-looking, billionaire alpha male actually do better than what looks like a mousy secretary? Were there no supermodels available? Does he routinely step over the Hollywood actress to shag the housekeeper?”
It’s a modern version of Cinderella. This makes all women think they have a chance with the most alpha man out there. They don’t need to be supermodels.
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
“This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.”
It’s a movie aimed at all but a handful of women. In other words, a very broad audience.
“Just because people read something fictional it does not mean that they do actually want to experience that in real life.”
Bingo.
There are one and more women between Cinderella and the Prince, who is handsome, charming, and has lots of money, status, and power. Cinderella acts to remove the female competition between her and the Prince so that she can take her rightful place as the Princess of the realm. The story line is generally consumed by scenes of females going at each other as they compete for the Alpha Male. The "bodice ripping" at the end of the chapters are thinly veiled rape fantasies. The Prince eventually finds Cinderella so "hot" that he cannot control himself. His lack of control excites her ... because, it represents her final victory over the female competition who are unable to drive the Prince to sexual frenzy. The final scene fades as Cinderella takes her rightful place on the throne next to the Prince. Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after.
What do little girls (in waiting) want? It appears to be much the same, given the success of the Princess movies and the paraphernalia in the Princess Industry.
Great comment! I find that women’s fantasies starkly contrast those of men.
Men’s fantasies go along the lines of “Women want him, and men want to be him.” In men’s fantasies, the protagonist is a composite of James Bond, Napoleon, Zeus, Conan the Barbarian, d’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis in Die Hard, Bogie in Casablanca, and so on. Men want to be ultra super mega badass – fear no one, have the answer to everything, walk through walls, chew stone.
With women it’s not quite like that. What strikes me as remarkable about women’s fantasies, is that the protagonists tend to be Plain Janes who miraculously attract the amorous attentions of badasses by just “being themselves” and loving and caring and submitting. In both Twilight and 50 Shades, the protagonist is a decidedly unremarkable young girl who attracts an ubermensch (who, in the former case, is not even quite mensch). The levels of submission in both stories beggar belief. They are quite insane. In Twilight, the girl converts to, em, living deadhood. And in 50 Shades the girl submits to torture. Insane.
——-
“I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.”
Haha, that’s exactly the point – I don’t understand that, either. It’s because we are men, and the book is written by and for women.
Bella is remarkable. She's different from her peers. And Edward has great powers cuz he's a vampire, but he's naturally not the ubermensch type. Bella doesn't submit to vampirehood. She demands that she be made one so she could be powerful and immortal. The vamps submit to her will. Edward didn't want to change her, but her will was stronger than his. All throughout the story, it is Bella who always gets what she wants.
She is the driver. Even when she got preggy, she decided to have the kid and that was that.--------------“I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.”"Haha, that’s exactly the point – I don’t understand that, either. It’s because we are men, and the book is written by and for women."How dumb is that! Bella is one heck of a girl, and you two boys are too namby pamby to admit it. To be sure, Alice Cullen is more special, but she's the friend type than the sexy type.
Yes. And also the law of diminishing returns from a recent column. It must be gratifying to Steve, though I hope that Douthat donates well to compensate for all the great ideas he lifts.
A prophet is without honor in his own country. Of course, the celeb version of fifty shades, Kim Kardashian, is an obscure nobody who never apoears on tv or magazine covers. Oh no.
Hypergamt rewards the most violent and dominant and assures a race to the bottom of ghetto violence.
50 shades of Grey ??? .. more like “50 shades of blue” .. as in bruises. This movie makes women look dumb and weak. This “virgin” not only loses it to a man she JUST met, but allows him to take “the relationship” to a level that not many couples go to. Also, she had a safe word to use, yet she never uses it and at the end of the movie walks away upset that he hurt her. No S*** SHERLOCK, what did you think he was gonna do ?!?!??
This is a fantasy movie aimed at non-supermodel women.
Because supermodels are a lot smarter than they appear. They would have been out the door the second Mr. Grey asks them to sign A non-disclosure statement and contract.
“I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.”
Because they are driven wild by how she smells.
It’s like those sitcoms dating back to the Honeymooners where fat slob men have wives far better looking than they would get in real life.
Who said you didn’t get Twilight, Steve? Yeah, that seems to be Bella’s appeal.
In the realm of the senseless.
The movie looks really stupid.
Sexual deviancy and extremism is total turn off.
Btw, the woman looks dull and the guy looks dorky.
Where’s the sizzle?
LAST TANGO IN PARIS it ain’t. That had real pain and soul.
Part of the appeal of FIFTY SHADES seems to be its sterility and lack of emotions. It’s more like AMERICAN PSYCHO for females. No real conviction, thus no real pain.
Real pain in cinema is emotional than physical. Fifty is all slick physical, it seems to me.
Thank you for your reply … as I postulated, these fantasies are the Cinderella story retold, one of the primary mythologies of Western civilization: The “plain Jane” triumphs over the beautiful, aspiring, intelligent, seductive female competition and wins the hand of the Alpha Male, who often saves them from danger and rescues them from themselves. This is the fantasy but this is not the reality. In my long years, I have met many women who seem depressed by the assumption that they had to take what they can get in the marriage market. It is a self-esteem issue. It irks them every day of their lives. It is sad. I always felt that they were better than their perception of themselves as they looked in the mirror.
But the sadness is an aspect of female culture. Don’t women realize that aspirations to the be the Princess of the Realm can only be held by one women? One women wins … all of the rest lose. Why would be we want our daughters to be THE Princess? It is Not a game that a rational person would want to play. At least male culture allows for many territorial projections based on men making non-aggression packs with each other. One of the terminal issues with Western female culture is that women typically do not make non-aggression packs with each other … it is either win the Alpha Male or be condemned to whatever you can get on the Dominance Matrix.
Stephen Moyer is 13 years older than Anna Paquin so I don’t think that’s a sexual market mismatch in real life without make up and such.
As for the whole “average woman, impossibly attractive man” thing, you just have to remember that the male equivalent is a porn movie. In real life a man who looks like Ron Jeremy would not be having sex with a series of women who look like young porn stars. Most porn “plots” serve men the fantasy of an attractive young woman throwing herself at an average guy who puts no effort into pursuing which really is the mirror of the “high value man puts a lot of effort into pursuing an average woman” fantasy.
The fantasy for the woman is getting a long plot for sex from a high value man, the fantasy for the man is getting sex from a high value woman without a long plot.
I want to insert “[sic]” after “men.”
The problem is the suspension of disbelief. Sure, it's aimed at women who are not supermodels, but consider this plot line, supposedly aimed at men:
Imagine a show about a guy who looks like Danny DeVito, has no money, no friends, no status, no charisma, yet somehow manages to date a hot model every episode. And this is a serious drama, not a comedy, so we basically have a show about a guy dealing with all the problems with having sex with such fine women.
Would men watch it? Of course not. The suspension of disbelief required to watch such a show is too great to attract any attention. Only a comedy can pull off such a plot line, and that is only barely.
Yet, women lap up the female equivalent of this nonsense without any sense of how improbable it really is.
I knew a guy on a summer job who wasn’t even DeVito, he was Rick Moranis-channeling-Jerry Lewis. Entertaining at times, but no woman’s idea of a dreamboat.
One summer he didn’t return. I was told he was living down south– Alaskan for Washington state– with a stunning beauty of a wife. More pretty than sexy, but several leagues above him, or any of us for that matter. His co-workers had photos to prove it, too. So your scenario does happen at times.
Do I need to mention that she’s from France?
It's already appeared in the first episode of this season's Girls. As if he didn't have enough to think about, Brian Williams' daughter Allison is the recipient of this act on broadcast TV.
http://www.peeperz.com/allison-williams-gets-ass-eaten-tv/
Ross writes: It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests. . .
He had to get that in. How about, "It’s the revolution that’s been better for black varsity football players than their female guests. . ."
Not to go all Caste Football on you, but white football players aren’t starved for sex. Lots of women seem to like Rob Gronkowski’s kielbasa polska. If guys like Clay Matthews and J.J. Watt want to get laid, they don’t have to beg.
The day after the Super Bowl, I overheard a young-20-ish woman in a restaurant saying, “Tom Brady is pretty hot … how’d he end up with that mannish Amazon bitch?”
A few years ago, some college chick made a PowerPoint ranking the jocks she’d done. When I first heard about it, I thought, “Mudshark” … but it turned out that nearly every guy on the list was a white lacrosser.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/27/concerns-continue-about-role-hostesses-football-recruiting
The day after the Super Bowl, I overheard a young-20-ish woman in a restaurant saying, "Tom Brady is pretty hot ... how'd he end up with that mannish Amazon bitch?"
A few years ago, some college chick made a PowerPoint ranking the jocks she'd done. When I first heard about it, I thought, "Mudshark" ... but it turned out that nearly every guy on the list was a white lacrosser.
I have no idea how “Rob” ended up getting added to my name.
The last twenty years or so have been the Golden Age of Masturbation.
Guys on the left side of the sexual-attractiveness curve are a lot better off than they were thirty years ago. Even the ugliest, dweebiest, most-numb-nutted guys have free unlimited access to high-resolution depictions of high-quality T&A.
If someone had told you in 1985 that, within ten years, any guy with a computer and a modem would have access to billions if not trillions of pictures and videos of beautiful women doing things even the nastiest horndog couldn’t possibly imagine, you probably would have laughed in his face.
And yet, by 1995, the smut-filled Web was here. It was slow and ornery, but it was already well on its way to becoming the porn paradise that we all know and love.
And to think that you don’t have to pay even a penny to get your rocks off! Oh, you can and will pay for some things, but so much is totally gratis.
Yeah, whacking off sucks compared to the real thing. And playing video games or watching movies or reading books sucks compared to going out and conquering vast lands or slaughtering zombies (or whatever floats your boat). Listening to music made by someone else sucks compared to having music in your soul. But it’s a lot better than nothing.
Serfs need *something* to keep them going. Bread, circuses, and [p-word].
Sometimes 2015 gets a bad rap. Yes, our society, politics, and culture are dominated by multiculti PC bullshit, and our wealthy sociopathic assholes are wealthier, sociopathier, and assholier than ever. But we downtrodden shits can watch, read, or hear most of the best (and a lot of the worst) works from earlier years.
(Remember when people marveled about the fact that all of Shakespeare’s works were online? “My God, even the schlubbiest schlub can revel in the joys of Shakespeare!”)
It is easier for someone living in 2015 to watch a movie made in 1985 than it was for someone in 1990. In 1990, or 1995, or even 2000, if I wanted to see a movie made in 1985, I’d have to drive to a video store and rent or buy it on VHS.
Now, VHS movies had a certain charm, a certain aesthetic, but watching a film on tape was not at all like watching it in a theater. There are movies that I watched dozens or even hundreds of times on VHS that, when I first saw them on DVD, were nearly unrecognizable – so much of the visual landscape had been panned-and-scanned into oblivion. Keep in mind that not all movies were released on VHS, and it was easy to waste a day driving to various stores trying to hunt down a copy of a hard-to-find flick.
Nowadays I can look for a film online, and odds are that I’ll find it. Yes, there are some titles that are still hard to find, or even (gasp!) available only on VHS, but we have Amazon for that.
I like ’80s music, so sometimes I wish I were living in the ’80s. (1989 was the first year where I was old enough to remember hearing new songs – and I was barely in elementary school.) But what I really like is the ’80s software – the content itself, streamed online. If I had to deal with ’80s hardware – if I had to get in the car, drive to a record store, and shell out cash for an album with only one song that I wanted to hear – I’d probably be a lot less enamored with the time period overall.
“In both Twilight and 50 Shades, the protagonist is a decidedly unremarkable young girl who attracts an ubermensch (who, in the former case, is not even quite mensch). The levels of submission in both stories beggar belief. They are quite insane. In Twilight, the girl converts to, em, living deadhood. And in 50 Shades the girl submits to torture. Insane.”
What a dumbass you are.
Bella is remarkable. She’s different from her peers. And Edward has great powers cuz he’s a vampire, but he’s naturally not the ubermensch type.
Bella doesn’t submit to vampirehood. She demands that she be made one so she could be powerful and immortal. The vamps submit to her will. Edward didn’t want to change her, but her will was stronger than his. All throughout the story, it is Bella who always gets what she wants.
She is the driver. Even when she got preggy, she decided to have the kid and that was that.
————–
“I could not understand why Jacob and Edward could not do better than Bella.”
“Haha, that’s exactly the point – I don’t understand that, either. It’s because we are men, and the book is written by and for women.”
How dumb is that! Bella is one heck of a girl, and you two boys are too namby pamby to admit it.
To be sure, Alice Cullen is more special, but she’s the friend type than the sexy type.
The day after the Super Bowl, I overheard a young-20-ish woman in a restaurant saying, "Tom Brady is pretty hot ... how'd he end up with that mannish Amazon bitch?"
A few years ago, some college chick made a PowerPoint ranking the jocks she'd done. When I first heard about it, I thought, "Mudshark" ... but it turned out that nearly every guy on the list was a white lacrosser.
The colleges are actually recruiting these girls:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/27/concerns-continue-about-role-hostesses-football-recruiting
But it's chattel slavery, so it's wrong wrong wrong!
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/27/concerns-continue-about-role-hostesses-football-recruiting
Young, testosterone-addled men are easily manipulated by older, gelt-hungry men who dangle [kitty-cat] in front of them. Film at 11.
But it’s chattel slavery, so it’s wrong wrong wrong!
And we are wasting precious time and space writing about this deranged crap movie…for what reason, again?
Why do we have movies? Because a man invented the technology, and other men figured out ways by which filmed narratives could be made efficiently and distributed widely.
But why do men invent? Because they seek wealth and power? (Wealth and power are good for buying one thing - snatch.) Because they're bored? (Boredom is unspent energy. All energy is sexual.) Because they want to "make the world a better place"? (Anyone who goes around thinking that he's "saving the world" is stoking his ego. Ego-stoking is the mental equivalent of whacking off.)
Some of the worst shit happening in the world today is brought about by feminists. They're pathetic, but they're also dangerous. Crazy bitches, and the social/political/cultural changes they've brought about, have ruined many men (and women).
Feminists say that women want to band together and lord over menfolk, but most women want to find big men to lord over them. That so many women are shelling out big bucks and dragging their boyfriends to see Fifty Shades brings this fact into stark relief.
Everything in the world boils down to fucking.
Why do we have movies? Because a man invented the technology, and other men figured out ways by which filmed narratives could be made efficiently and distributed widely.
But why do men invent? Because they seek wealth and power? (Wealth and power are good for buying one thing – snatch.) Because they’re bored? (Boredom is unspent energy. All energy is sexual.) Because they want to “make the world a better place”? (Anyone who goes around thinking that he’s “saving the world” is stoking his ego. Ego-stoking is the mental equivalent of whacking off.)
Some of the worst shit happening in the world today is brought about by feminists. They’re pathetic, but they’re also dangerous. Crazy bitches, and the social/political/cultural changes they’ve brought about, have ruined many men (and women).
Feminists say that women want to band together and lord over menfolk, but most women want to find big men to lord over them. That so many women are shelling out big bucks and dragging their boyfriends to see Fifty Shades brings this fact into stark relief.
I feel sexuality is constantly nannied – worse still – it is constantly subject to precipitous fads / books / magazine articles. The Overton window of “acceptable” changes daily. People no longer rely on their instincts (a good thing in certain instances – but then a bad thing if those instincts are replaced by a gay man telling kids how to fist themselves).
Around the time of my burgeoning sexuality, all of the above were constantly in flux – 2nd wave prudish feminism was meeting “sexy” 3rd wave feminism, along with “you go grrrlism”, and, “you-ain’t-never-gonna-get-this-but-i’ll-prick-tease-you-anyway-ism.” The over-riding emotion of my teens was wtf wtf wtf wtf???
Then there was the lockdown with rape culture hysteria, with a brief hiatus for slut-walk. (to show that the girls were still cool and sexy and not regressing back to their prudish ways)
Anyways it is now cooool again to dominate a woman, because Dorian Grey.
Thanks Dorian. Good to know.
In studying the Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald I’ve tried to identify certain characteristics, themes, motifs, images – call them what you like – that crop up frequently throughout the various books. I don’t claim that the following are particularly important or have any special significance or meaning; nor do I say this is a comprehensive list. They are simply some things I’ve noticed in more than one of the novels. Some of these appear in quite a few of the Archers. In time I hope to post the results of reading through each of the books individually while searching for these ‘repeaters’.
http://postmoderndeconstructionmadhouse.blogspot.com/2014/12/ross-macdonald-characteristics-of.html#.VPJ31tKUc7V