Look at the home pages of Lycos, Webcrawler, Yahoo etc at the moment. They are promoting Mother’s Day (and grandmother’s day) gifts. Your average 30 year old Goth mother can barely remember the Sex Pistols. A lot of grandmothers, though, probably had an unhealthy interest in safety pins in the 70s. But what are Lycos’s gift suggestions? Romance novels and flower arranging equipment. Q.E.D. The image of motherhood is a false one. The list of films to-take-mother-to by one search engine is especially bad. Get over it.
I had my grandmother in mind when I posted. She is almost 80.
You asked in the OP why flashing is still illegal. I wanted to point out that even though most women my age probably wouldn’t be bothered too much by it, the law is there to protect those who would be intimidated. Children and old people are not as physically strong and are much more likely to feel threatened.
If some guy wants to wave his dick around he should go to a nude beach or something. He shouldn’t expose himself to unsuspecting park goers.
How can people in a liberal country which supports casual sex be opposed to sexual intercourse when it occurs outside a consensual relationship between two adults?
Maybe it’s different on your planet, but here on mine the Pillow Book was rated R, which gives a hint that Ewan’s pee-pee had the possibility of going for a little jog outside his pants, aside from the fact that children are - usually - prohibited from viewing. I think there’s a big difference between me choosing to go see the Pillow Book and some perv in the park flashing his John Thomas at me without my asking, not the least of which is the fact that I would very much like to see Ewan’s light saber and am willing to pay $9.50 for it, whereas some old fart can keep it to himself, thank you very much.
Hang on. I thought you were a New Zealander? WTF is the connection between multi culturaliam and nudity? Aside from Dun Mihaka being locked up so he can’t moon Liz Windsor?
Things have changed one hell of a lot in a short period of time if suddenly people are running round nude and calling it biculturalism. I sure as hell didn’t see rude bits on prime time TV 6 months ago. You got any cites for this ludicrous assertion?
I was once flashed by a woman while we were both sitting at a stoplight. Her boyfriend was driving, and I looked over at the girlfriend, who besides being very cute, reminded me of someone I used to know. All of a sudden, she reaches down her shirt and pulls a breast out. As I stared, dumbfounded, her boyfriend leaned over, pointed to her breast, and shouted out the window “Isn’t she great?” I muttered “yeah, she’s amazing”. What I meant was I couldn’t believe she had done it.
I was less than 2 miles from home, and when the light turned, they started to follow me. Since I was going home to wife and kids, I quickly lost them. When I got home, I said to my wife “you’ll never believe what just happened to me”, and proceeded to tell the story. Her only response was, “well, did you call the police?” I had the good sense to keep my mouth shut, because otherwise I would have said something like "you’re not very clear on the concept, are you?’
I don’t have any experiences to match joltsuckers, (must be my breath or my car or something…) but the best response to a flasher I’ve ever heard about was what Bernadette Peters said in the movie “Pink Cadillac”. When she was confronted by a flasher, she looked at him and said “It looks like a penis,… only smaller.”
DavisMcDavis wrote: How can people in a liberal country which supports casual sex be opposed to sexual intercourse
when it occurs outside a consensual relationship between two adults?
Forgive me if I am misunderstanding this quote, but to me this sounds like people should support rape. Am I way off here? Please explain what you mean. Thanks!
I think you did miss the point, Voorvie. Happens to all of us.
Seems to me that Davis was making a silly statement in order to point out the silliness of G. Nome’s previous silly statement. He wasn’t really making the argument you thought he was.
And, er, Davis, did anything specific spark the thread resurrection? Not that I mind, I was just a little surprised.
I think it comes down to solicited versus unsolicited. Let’s take the sex thing out of it at see how it looks:
I go to see the latest Arnold flick. At the end of the film, there is a park scene where the evil homeless bad-guy crashes his shopping cart into a fountain and vaporizes in an enormous gasoline explosion. His head tumbles out of the sky to impale itself on the antenna of Arnold’s Hummer like an enormous tennis ball. I chuckle, hit myself in the head for not reading a film review once in awhile, and walk home.
On the way home, as I take a shortcut through the park, an enormous musclebound Austrian with a flamethrower immolates a homeless person on a park bench in front of me. Then, he produces a spear gun and pins the homeless man’s flaming body to a tree. Slowly, he turns to me. “Hi there,” he says, “I’m Arnold, and I’ve been forced to do street performance art to pay off the dismal opening-weekend performance of my latest film. How did you like my little charade?”
Well, chances are, it scared me sh*tless. And the emotions I experienced while actually there in the park are far, far different from what I experienced in the theatre. And for a second there, I saw my life pass before my eyes. Granted, I’m a cheap guy, and my tolerance for art is as broad as a Christo fence line, but I didn’t ask for this.
Maybe I’ll sue Arnold for his Gulfstream before the studio takes it back. Maybe I’ll try to kick his ass. Maybe I’ll keel over from a heart attack. Maybe I’ll cry, or run, or babble incoherently, or ask for his autograph. But I can guarantee you I will not simply chuckle and continue walking home. Why? Because movies aren’t real.
But there was full-frontal nudity of Superman in the first (1979?) Christopher Reeve flick. Check out the very first scene after he emerges from his rocket from Krypton.
Yes. Despite what the papers say, the MPAA has always been very soft on kiddie porn.
This might be a good opportunity to enquire about the fortunes of Notthemama, who, as far as I know, was last seen disappearing into a Ewan MacGregor film festival. Is there a back row in some obscure duplex somewhere, in which her rotting remains might possibly be located?
Handy: You are soooo right.
Satchmo: In her short story “Southern Comfort,” found in her collection Foggy Mountain Breakdown, Sharyn McCrumb has a female character tell a flasher: “I’ve seen Vienna sausages that were more impressive. You want a pair of tweezers so you can jack off?”
To Primaflora (and anyone else interested): As I understand it (which is probably at quarter strength to a lot of other people here) a politically strong nudist cult is supported by a morally relativistic zeitgeist in which there are no absolute moral laws and in which social philosophies are adopted which address the rights of the “other”. A politics of contingency and pluralism expressses incredulity towards the metanarratives and calls for toleration of the diversity of cultures. Now, some people see this as a morally offensive standpoint since it lends support to immoral cultures and it permits violations of universal standards of human decency. But it has its good sides.
Whatever, I think it means that first you create a cult, e.g. a nudist group, and then you get that cult tolerated. What I could never get was why this climate of respect allowed the Freddy (Nightmare on Elm Street) phenomenon to develop. Freddy dolls are a blot on society as far as I’m concerned because they certainly demonstrate a horrible inconsideration for burns victims.
Aside from all the work G. Nome just had to do looking up all these words in her dictionary, I would like to point out the following.
If you’re gonna be snotty and use foreign words, try to do it correctly. The word “Zeitgeist” is German, and thus needs to be capitalised even when used mid-sentence.
And I dare G. Nome to explain her last post in plain English.
It is in plain English and just because I haven’t read Barthes, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and Baurillard all the way through doesn’t mean I didn’t write it without a dictionary. You can do it too, if you remember to include incredulity towards the metanarratives. That’s the best bit, you know that, I know that.
When I was about 24, I was on holiday in Toronto, visiting a friend who was, like me, a student. Friend went into a Hi-fi shop to see the progress of repair work on his beloved stereo. I was browsing around, wondering why these stores have so little stuff you can actually look at. It was about 11 AM.
Suddenly, a fairly good-looking girl, mid-20s, dark hair, with a very nice body is standing a couple of metres away from me. She looks at me and smiles. I smile and think nothing of it. I saunter around trying not to die of boredom while I am waiting for my friend to finish with his goddamned stereo affairs. I lean on the sales counter.
Suddenly, the girl is there too, leaning lasciviously on the counter, only a few handspans away from me. She winks at me. I smile. I wonder what the heck is going on.
Suddenly, the girl is a lot closer and grabbing my ass. I move away slightly, check my wallet is still there (it is) and say some inanity like “can my ass help you?”
Suddenly, in the middle of this store, the woman raises the sweater she was wearing and flashes me her breasts (breasts, not bra or other top). It was more of a constant exposure than a flash, because she did not seem to want to put them away again. Still holding her sweater up, she started to sway around and move closer. Her breasts jiggled. I had still not heard one word from her. In my University days I broke a few heads belonging to uneducated bullies, but I found myself wondering how to react to this situation. No one had ever thrown thesmelves naked at me in daytime in a public place. Eventually, since this woman was not speaking at all, I walked away to find my friend.
The woman put her breasts away and started walking around the store. I tried to explain to my friend that there was something strange going on, but he was a little too involved in discussions with the store owner about the stereo.
Suddenly, the girl is there again, and this time she has managed to intertwine her four limbs with mine in a matter of split-seconds. I have no idea how she did it, but when I turned around to make her keep her distance all I could see when I looked down were breasts, and I could not move very well owing to the embrace. Talk about being freaked out. Again, I checked for my wallet (still there). Then I tried to extricate myself from the woman without hurting her and without touching too much naked flesh. I’m not prudish, but I don’t touch women I don’t know, out of respect, safety, and the fact that something like this in N. America can end up being a sexual assault case against me!
Throughout this entire exchange, the store owner and my friend are continuing heir discussion. When I extricate myself from the desirous woman, the owner grabs a newspaper and shoos her away. She looks at him with another lascivious expression and moves away a bit. I ask the owner who she is, and he replies that he has no idea and has never seen her before. The girl still has not uttered a single word.
To make a long story short, this girl kept following me around to show me her breasts, rub them against me, and touch me. I did not hear her speak a single word. Throughout the 20 minutes or so this took,
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the owner did not seem too concerned, although he tried to shoo her off a couple of times
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my friend was bewildered but more eager to talk about his stereo than to focus on a young woman with a willing attitude
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other shoppers did not seem bothered! They looked, their mouths opened, and then they continued shopping, perhaps making comments to each other while staring at exposed tits.
From my point of view, although there is nothing I enjoy seeing more than the female body, the experience was quite disturbing. Flashing is an invasion of privacy as well as an insult and an attempt to assert authority over the flashee. If it is unsolicited, flashing a stranger is much ruder than giving them the finger and a stream of insults.
I like seeing strippers, naked women, revealing clothes, pornographic films, and so on, but I was not comfortable with being flashed and followed around like that, even though I knew at all times that I was in no physical danger.
Using the same reasoning, I suspect that women may enjoy seeing the male body live and in media, but that is no reason why they should be pestered <i>with</i> the male body as a tool for pestering.
Make love, don’t pester people.
All I can say, Manny, is that you can be fickle. GQ? Really!
Mind your own business Darkcool. My original question was intelligent enough to require a proper answer, and although Abe goes a long way towards that there’s still something missing. He says exposure is ok if it’s asked for by the spectator. So now I understand how it’s ok for the Red Hot Chillie Peppers and Blink 182 to go naked at their concerts. You buy a ticket with the expectation that might happen. You’ve given your ok. But does that then mean it’s ok for men to go bottomless at the next Woodstock in place of the traditionally topless women? If not why not?
Let me put it this way:
Average man wants to see average woman naked in public because of lust.
Average woman wants to see average man naked in pubic only on very rare occasions, and then it’s usually for a good laugh with friends, not for lust.
This does not imply women do not have lust, just that they handle it differently from men. Men tend to be more visually oriented than women. The sexes respond in different ways. Just because we men want to see naked women all the time does not excuse us to go flash women.
Now here’s a take on the situation that will probably cause a lot of controversy, but I include it just because it popped up in my head and I thought it was curious.
Think of our ancestors. Men like naked women around them because it gives them the impression that they are the leader of the tribe with access to all the females. That’s a great feeling. Whereas women surrounded by naked men will be intimidated because very few women actually like a gangbang, and a gangbang is implied when you’re a woman surrounded by naked men. Sex is an affirmation of power throughout the animal kingdom, and the male sexual organ is often how this power is exercised. In our times, “Suck my cock” is the same as saying “I am the superior alpha male here, so pay me the homage I deserve you worthless trash”.
A flaunted penis is a sign of dominance and an assertion of power, and I suspect that is why it causes so much offense when flashers flash. That simple gesture implies, to our animal natures, that the flasher is the dominant male and will have his way with whomever he wants. That is also precisely why flashers flash–it gives them a sense of power (the same goes with rape). The wonderful world of animal signals…