Sense, Sensibility, Sensuality and Sex
Sunday night during television’s prime time viewing slot, ABC produced a ‘investigative’ show entitled ‘The Outsiders.” It was an appalling hour, not for the show’s content, but for the program’s attitude – an attitude that will further reinforce, if not re-infect, the sad and pathetic mentality of George and Martha, typical non-thinking, easily swayed viewer.
The ‘outsiders’ in question were people who neither view nor participate in sexual thoughts or acts endemic to the absolutist minds of individuals taught to believe all forms of perversion exist relative to the miracle of the human body. In other words, the attitudes of these ‘outsiders’ was not a mainstream attitude of sexual fear, disgust, preoccupation, or lasciviousness. While I hesitate to call them more enlightened than their peers, I feel free to say they are far less inhibited and far more realistic.
The bulk of the program was geared toward exhibiting, or in the program’s terms, exposing happily married couples referred to as swingers, individuals who refer to themselves as asexual and female dancers of the ‘exotic’ persuasion. (Perhaps the hour droned on to showcase other groups with differing attitudes to the human body and its natural functions, but annoyance was displayed in the flick of a channel change.) Considering the mind-set of the run-of-the-mill American, there was ample room and opportunity for titillation, condemnation, the tsk-tsk of pity, and all forms of head shaking in denial and confused consternation. What rot.
Why, who, how and for what reason were we originally taught to feel and see shame in our bodies? Why, who, how and for what reason were we originally taught to feel and see shame in our thoughts about those bodies? Why, who, how and for what reason do we attempt to fully separate mind and body, thus being able to condemn two things instead of one and thereby achieve some doubly powered adrenaline rush in our self righteousness?
Does not our mind and body combine to make one entity, one whole person? After all, we take both with us no matter where we go.
And, why and how have we contrived to not only maintain this abnormal separation of self, but expand upon it? There is nothing natural to the prevailing views that any celebration of the sexual, naked self in either body or mind is a perversion, or the devil at play, or that a denial of such naturalness is the puritanical embodiment of absolute morality and superior thinking. It is not even a question of accepting different viewpoints of normality until we first recognize the right of differences to exist.
Had the television production attempted to retain objectivity in their presentation, I would not have been so disgusted in their program, but they did not. The subjectivity was obvious from the first moment, simply in the name they chose – The Outsiders. The first question has to be ‘outside of what?’ If the answer is ‘outside the norm,’ the next questions has to be about who and why and how those ‘norms’ were established. And at no time should anyone lose sight of the fact that it is only when a radical idea is explored that advances to civilization are achieved. Being designated an outsider should not automatically be construed as negative, yet in flouting that designation with sarcastic disapproval, the program offered up an automatic reason for George and Martha, average person, to fear, to hate, and to condemn.
ABC primetime might not have intended to make itself an arbiter or morality, but it did make itself a rubber stamp of those too powerful and self aggrandizing elements in today’s society that seek conformity, seek authority, and strive to punish any human difference they choose to place outside their own rigid strictures of what humans can be allowed to think or do. It was another absurdity given flesh and air time, as offensive and non-human as absolutism.
The ‘outsiders’ in question were people who neither view nor participate in sexual thoughts or acts endemic to the absolutist minds of individuals taught to believe all forms of perversion exist relative to the miracle of the human body. In other words, the attitudes of these ‘outsiders’ was not a mainstream attitude of sexual fear, disgust, preoccupation, or lasciviousness. While I hesitate to call them more enlightened than their peers, I feel free to say they are far less inhibited and far more realistic.
The bulk of the program was geared toward exhibiting, or in the program’s terms, exposing happily married couples referred to as swingers, individuals who refer to themselves as asexual and female dancers of the ‘exotic’ persuasion. (Perhaps the hour droned on to showcase other groups with differing attitudes to the human body and its natural functions, but annoyance was displayed in the flick of a channel change.) Considering the mind-set of the run-of-the-mill American, there was ample room and opportunity for titillation, condemnation, the tsk-tsk of pity, and all forms of head shaking in denial and confused consternation. What rot.
Why, who, how and for what reason were we originally taught to feel and see shame in our bodies? Why, who, how and for what reason were we originally taught to feel and see shame in our thoughts about those bodies? Why, who, how and for what reason do we attempt to fully separate mind and body, thus being able to condemn two things instead of one and thereby achieve some doubly powered adrenaline rush in our self righteousness?
Does not our mind and body combine to make one entity, one whole person? After all, we take both with us no matter where we go.
And, why and how have we contrived to not only maintain this abnormal separation of self, but expand upon it? There is nothing natural to the prevailing views that any celebration of the sexual, naked self in either body or mind is a perversion, or the devil at play, or that a denial of such naturalness is the puritanical embodiment of absolute morality and superior thinking. It is not even a question of accepting different viewpoints of normality until we first recognize the right of differences to exist.
Had the television production attempted to retain objectivity in their presentation, I would not have been so disgusted in their program, but they did not. The subjectivity was obvious from the first moment, simply in the name they chose – The Outsiders. The first question has to be ‘outside of what?’ If the answer is ‘outside the norm,’ the next questions has to be about who and why and how those ‘norms’ were established. And at no time should anyone lose sight of the fact that it is only when a radical idea is explored that advances to civilization are achieved. Being designated an outsider should not automatically be construed as negative, yet in flouting that designation with sarcastic disapproval, the program offered up an automatic reason for George and Martha, average person, to fear, to hate, and to condemn.
ABC primetime might not have intended to make itself an arbiter or morality, but it did make itself a rubber stamp of those too powerful and self aggrandizing elements in today’s society that seek conformity, seek authority, and strive to punish any human difference they choose to place outside their own rigid strictures of what humans can be allowed to think or do. It was another absurdity given flesh and air time, as offensive and non-human as absolutism.
posted by kaz at 2:07 PM
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