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Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

bloodknife.com

471–480 of 699 posts

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#471
post #90

Her take on the Starship troopers shower scene seems to be an american point of view. Nudity in an unisex shower isn't about flirting and sex for a european. Paul Verhoeven was naked too while filming it, because the actors felt uncomfortable at first.

>Nudity in an unisex shower isn't about flirting and sex for a european. VERY hard to make a sweeping generalization under "European" in this context. I'm from Scandinavia and I'm fine with it, but my SO that is from France, bordering to Germany, always tell me how horrified she (still) gets when she cross the border and end up in changing rooms. Heard similar story from Italians.

If you’ve ever been to Iceland and visited one of their excellent spas or swimming pools you’ll come across the staff who’s job it is to watch you shower to ensure you’ve washed yourself properly.

All of yourself. Properly.

Having someone stare at you as you soap your junk is not a common experience across most of Europe based on the warnings in travel guides.

If you want entry to the spa it’s something you just have to go through.

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#472
post #467
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Marriage", according to anthropologists .... There is a very interesting discussion about that in "Sex at dawn". Shortly put, anthropologists are very biased, and they will use their data selectively. Today, there are people that live wholesome lives with multiple consensual sexual partners, search for polyamory. IMHO, there simply is a lot of residual prejudice coming down from old religious dogma.

For good and evil prejudice is a stabilizing factor in a complex society.

Prejudice is inertia. It muffles your decisions. It can be stabilizing and it can drive you off a cliff even though you're flooring the breaks. A truly stable system is flexible and always has inertia under control.

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#473

Our society glorifies pornography and sex-work, but condemns the objectification of bodies. Our society condemns fat shaming, but makes idols out of instagram models. We are very, very confused. Huxley predicted a world where sex became God. Orwell predicted a world where sex was taboo. Unsurprisingly, the reality is that our society has become a paradox by adopting both.

[deleted]

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#474
post #291

> [Julia] was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. > Better than before, moreover, he realized why it…

That guy knew what was up. Does all of this just flow out of the technology that turns high population societies into behaving like low population communities? The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority? Is that the dynamic that Orwell was able to see?

> The lack of privacy, the moralizing.. combined with a too-far removed central authority?

Remember that Orwell was writing quite close parodies of Stalinism, based on his encounters with actual Stalinists while fighting for the socialist side in the Spanish civil war. In Animal Farm, Snowball is Trotsky, and so on. So he undoubtedly had something specific in mind when inventing the "anti-sex league", although I'm not quite sure what. But lack of privacy, moralizing, and remote unaccountable central authority? He means Stalinism.

Remember also that it's a front, in which Julia participates cynically for her own safety: ( https://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_p_2 )

> " ‘Actually I am that sort of girl, to look at. I'm good at games. I was a troop-leader in the Spies. I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I've spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of a banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.’"

> In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

And later on Orwell tells us directly what the Anti-Sex league was intended to achieve:

> She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

> ‘When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?’

> That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

(The red sash business reminds me of the "silver ring thing"; US evangelist Christians replicating similar systems of control and moralizing among their young people)

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#475
post #415

Fuck all that mass-media social programming propaganda. Murder and violence are "okay," while sex and sexuality are "bad." I'll walk around naked, look at women, and hookup whenever I damn well please. Sex is awesome, bodies are beautiful, and no shame is necessary for either. Films that cannot be made in modern America: - Laura, les ombres de l'été (1979) - Lolita (either) - Pretty Baby (1978) - Caligula (1979) - Ro…

Scarcity increases value. We often artificially enforce the scarcity of things in order to preserve its value. That's the reason why patents, IP and copyrights exists, for example. "Marriage" and "fidelity" are a means of artificially enforcing scarcity on sex, in order to increase the value and likelihood of partners bonding for life, which in turn improves the child-rearing situation for society, as single parents…

I think this is an accurate summary of certain conservative or puritanical stances on sexuality. Of course there are also decades of progressive literature that argue why this is essentially bullshit. Also, if you follow this line to its logical conclusion, you end up with inceldom.

I think there is also another mechanism at work in why many modern societies seem at the same time oversexualized and prude: By raising and restricting sexual desire you end up with some very effective carrots and sticks to control behaviour: You can sell the promise of sexual fulfillment directly (porn), you can link it to completely unrelated products through advertising (scantily-clad women that advertise cars, mattresses or mortgage contracts). You can also use it as a stick by either presenting unrealistic beauty standards ("You look unattractive! What is wrong with you?! Buy product X to fix that!") or by declaring the very desire that was raised before as immoral and therefore shaming people into compliance.

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Children exist in the same environment." Wrong. There are twin studies that establish this. But I get it, you are only pro-science when you happen to agree with the conclusions already.

How'd you get those twins to be born to mothers in different places and to have different prenatal nutrition and epigenetics?

If you meant unborn children or fetuses you should've said that, because the most obvious interpretation of your original words is that you meant postnatal children. That is typically how the word "Child" is defined: "A person between birth and puberty"[1] - not a person before birth.

Nevertheless, what you cited and attacked is uncontroversial. IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination. You then turned such a scientifically uncontroversial statement into an emotional straw-man attack.

[1] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Child

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#477
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that kids raised around parents who are naked constantly is perfectly normal and healthy. I was raised in the 70s and my parents were constantly naked. We all sat in the backyard hot tub naked. Not a thought was given to it. I now do the same to my kids. The key is to do it from day one, so there is never that first memory of “when did you first see your parents naked”. There is no first because it’s…

> Not a thought was given to it. Because you don't look at your family in a sexual way. Similarly in Renaissance, for example, we had some nudity going on in art, but it was done in a tasteful and non-sexual fashion. That's different from outright pornography or erotica, which is what children should not be exposed to.

> you don't look at your family in a sexual way.

Like the parent commentor said, it's probably about experiencing nudity from day one. I grew up in a family where you'd never see someone naked, but then, as a teen, was exposed to a family that's comfortable with being naked around each other. I had some readjusting to do, because for me nakedness had become something super private, dirty and sexual. Now that I think about it it makes me kind of angry that I grew up with such a stupid outlook on the human body.

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#478
Interesting, because at the same time sex in tv-shows have become much, much more free. In the 7 seasons of Buffy there wasn't a single nude, and even in bed everybody was completely covered up (even as adults, even when they were in long-term relationships) and that is not just one franchise, that is how I remember it in almost all media as a teenager.

I would be easy to compare with Game of Thrones, but almost all new streaming services have nudity now.

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#479

Was really glad to see 9/11 mentioned in the article in relation to the American male body entering its militaristic phase. It validates an armchair theory I've had related to the correlation between media coverage / dramatization of Special Forces operations in the early to mid 00's and the general trend of American dudes getting very ripped and growing beards. At some point around 2005-2008, I just started noticing…

> And then the ripped look was kinda table stakes. Everyone had to mirror that alpha male SEAL physique and eventually people forgot why, and it became a self reinforcing cycle for the next 10-15 years. You might be in a bubble. Outside of a few US cities and outdoorsy areas, when I look around, almost nobody looks like they are going to raid a tunnel system in Afghanistan. https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cdc-amer…

>You might be in a bubble.

You’re right. It’s mostly a city thing, places with major business centers (but bleeds out into the suburbs).

Re: Modern action films fetishize the body even as they desexualize it

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How'd you get those twins to be born to mothers in different places and to have different prenatal nutrition and epigenetics?

If you meant unborn children or fetuses you should've said that, because the most obvious interpretation of your original words is that you meant postnatal children. That is typically how the word "Child" is defined: "A person between birth and puberty"[1] - not a person before birth. Nevertheless, what you cited and attacked is uncontroversial. IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or s…

All children start off as fetuses and inherit things that affected them before they were children.

> IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination.

Yes, and I said it wasn't genetic. A "heritable" effect can only last one generation - all you have to do is invest in lead abatement.

In fact, even if it is genetic it can still be treated. Phenylketonurics have a "genetic condition that reduces intelligence" that affects them when they drink Coke, and the treatment is to not do that.

People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this - what they want is to have secret knowledge that society won't acknowledge that says they're morally superior to Mexicans so they can complain about immigration.

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