This week is going to be all about sex. Sex! Sex! Sex!
I've spent the last year playing with ChatGPT, writing Arthurian fiction. I've worked through almost every conceivable story arc and I'm out of ideas. Now my writing is more conversational and experimental. I'm trying to figure out why I've loved the Arthurian legends all my life. For example, I used to collect antiquarian books, specifically, illustrated versions of the Arthurian legends. As far as I know, at my peak, I had every single English-language version ever created. It was on the order of 80-100 volumes.
In the process of my conversations with AI, we've had long discussions about the nature of romance and therefore, sex. In short, Romeo and Juliet is romantic while watching dogs go at it in your front yard is not. Why? Therein lies all kinds of interesting topics for conversation.
Today, let's take a specific, real world example and ask: Is it porn? It may seem tangential, but it really isn't, which I hope you'll see when I'm done ranting at the end of the week or whenever this series of posts concludes.
The Case
I was at our local supermarket recently when I noticed the young lady in the checkout line ahead of me. I couldn't help but notice her. She blew every other woman in the store out of the water. Her hair was mid-length and subtly well-styled. She wore red lipstick which was the only dramatic thing about her. She wore a modest white blouse, a knee-length, A-line skirt and pumps with 1" heels. She looked something like this.
Our supermarket is near the local public high school. I've ranted before about the girls there. They are universally, deliberately ugly. Frumpy, overweight, tats, bizarre hair colors, sullen faces, if there's a way to take all the glorious beauty of a girl in her late teens and utterly ruin it, they do it.
The employees at the supermarket are no different. Fat, sullen, bizarre makeup, hair that looks like they dunked their heads in the effluent from a Chinese chemical factory, the women working at the store are experts in being homely.
The girl described above wasn't showing off her body with revealing clothes or wearing date-night makeup. She was simply elegant, appropriate for going to the supermarket. She was so much more beautiful than all her competition that the first thing I thought was that it was practically pornographic.
Exit Questions
1. Was it porn? She was several standard deviations more attractive than everyone else in the store. Is that a decent definition of porn? If a woman does things to her appearance that make her stand out that much, is it porn?
2. The girl wasn't dressed inappropriately. She wasn't slutty. She wasn't even trying that hard. Her clothes weren't from Nordstroms, they were of average quality. What made her stand out was that she was intentionally pretty. What happened to young women where a girl making a relatively minor effort at classical beauty blows all her competition away?
My own answers to those questions will come in future blog posts.
7 comments:
"a girl making a relatively minor effort at classical beauty blows all her competition away"
I guess that raises the question, "are girls and women that you see in a grocery store competing?" I mean, they most likely aren't at the store looking to impress a man. They are looking for something for dinner. As for the cashiers, do they actually want male attention while doing their job? Does looking attractive help them in any way? I can see where it might be more of a problem than a help. On top of the normal hassles of working as a cashier, being attractive would add the occasional clueless guy hitting on her, with all the issues that could lead to.
I dunno. Maybe, if a woman is not dressed attractively, it is because she doesn't want to attract anyone at the moment?
Been awhile since I saw 'one of those'. I remember them, I'd always say 'Good morning, beautiful' or something similar, then promptly move along. Yes, it has been ... a long time. Thanks for reminding me of happier days :)
".. a girl making a relatively minor effort at classical beauty blows all her competition away ..."
A few weeks ago, I chanced to encounter the woman I once thought I would marry (I hadn't seen her in 20 years). After we had talked a bit, and as I was leaving the store, I saw a middle-age woman and a late-teen-early-twenties women enter the store. I saw the younger woman only from behind ... and what a pleasant wiew it was. I don't mean that in a "dirty" way; I mean that she was shaped as a young woman ought to be shaped, and were when I was young, rather than as a slab of bacon as most young women these days are shaped.
Way back in 1982, when I started working at what became Sprint, there was a woman in the office who understood that. Rather than tarting herself up in skimpy clothing, as so many women even then were beginning to do, she wore stylish-and-conservative skirts ... which just happened to display what a nice figure she had.
"Maybe, if a woman is not dressed attractively, it is because she doesn't want to attract anyone at the moment?"
There is *never* a time in the typical women's life when she is in seeking to attract attention from men and/or display to other women that she can attract more attention from men than they can.
It wasn't porn. What you experienced was the loveliness of real femininity. I lived in S. Korea for ten years and experienced it every day. Since I have returned to the States, I have been saddened by how brutally and purposely ugly American women have become.
Great comments, all.
me (correction): "There is *never* a time in the typical women's life when she is [NOT] seeking to attract attention ..."
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