The Vulture site is carrying an interesting article on the old HBO show Real Sex. I was amazed to discover it first aired back in 1990 and ran for almost 20 years. I didn’t encounter it until I moved to the States in 2001 and, based on the frank manner it addressed sex, had always assumed it was of a fairly recent vintage.
It was by no means a great show. Although the article claims they aimed to be sincere and to laugh ‘with’ and not ‘at’ the people involved, I always detected an undercurrent of cynicism. Beneath the veneer of education and illumination there were clearly elements of titillation (ok with me) and mockery (not so good). However, all that said, I think it still was a net positive in helping people talk more frankly about their sexual interests. For example, this post from D. Hubby directly references the effect an episode on spanking had on his life.
One particular part of the interview that caught me eye was this quote…
It was always a challenge for us to find good-looking people. It’s certainly true of nudists, but a lot of people doing weird sex stuff are not necessarily young and attractive.
Katie Smalheer, associate/coordinating/supervising producer, 1996–2005
I think that’s a very telling comment. It could be taken to mean that people doing ‘weird sex stuff’ are unusually unattractive.The reality is that this media filtered view of the world is incredibly biased. Visual attractiveness is a valued commodity, particularly when nakedness is involved. Almost all commercial visual media picks from a tiny pool of conventionally attractive people. People into ‘weird sex stuff’ are simply a normal cross-section of the populace, and that clashes with the narrow selection criteria we normally expect for naked people on film. Our perception of what is acceptable or normal is horribly skewed.
I don’t have a particularly great image to use for this post, so I’ll finish with the kind of scene that I’m sure Real Sex would have loved to feature. That Miss Eve from the Young Dommes site.
There was a sex-positive talk show called “Real Personal” on CNBC that was arguably better. They had very sympathetic coverage of the scene.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll look out for that. I feel that I might have encountered it on late night cable at some point, but don’t remember it clearly.
-paltego
Lookism and ageism are rife in the entertainment business, and thus in the world at large via the unbelievably dumbed-down cult of celebrity.
If you don’t look right or if you’re over a certain age you become an un-person. But this injustice is unevenly distributed. It’s far worse for women than men.
Look no further than Hollywood, where stars like 50 year-old Brad Pitt are still eminently bankable, but the ranks of similarly-regarded female stars are much depleted.
Sucking greedily at the teat of lookism is a multi-billion dollar cosmetics, weight-watching, and aesthetic surgery industry with a massive marketing presence. They steal people’s self-respect, then sell it back to them via the product.
On the other hand, a woman who has had body image issues, but then discovers her domme-ness can find the experience vastly empowering and exhilarating, or so I’ve been told by a dear friend.
There’s definitely a big skew between the way men and women are treated in mainline entertainment scenarios, which is kind of broken. But I don’t stress too much about the fact that attractiveness is a marketable commodity and movies (both pornographic and not) place a premium on it. People want to pay to see attractive people, myself included. Where I think it becomes problematic is when those people are treated as the rule rather than the exception, and that standard is held up everywhere as either a goal or a minimum bar. That’s when it starts creating the problems of guilt, self-respect and body images.
By analogy I don’t feel inadequate when I watch professional sports or when I play sports badly (which I do). But if everytime I walked onto a court or course I had somebody comparing and judging me against the pros, that’d be a problem. And that’s what seems to happen with standards of appearance, particularly for women.
-paltego