Sic dolet

(This was posted to my MySpace Weblog on July 1, 2006). This comes a bit late, this commentary of Joan Acocella's review of  The Playmate Book  which appeared in the March Twentieth issue of  The New Yorker . At first I was surprised that the sophisticates at  The New Yorker  would dignify such blatant exploitation by giving it so many pages of analysis. Then again,  Playboy  is very much a cultural phenomenon, and  The Playmate Book  is a very stylish coffeetable monument to that phenomenon or at least tries to be. So, the  The New Yorker  as America's judge of true style has a duty to review this book and determine whether it is truly stylish. The answer is no. The nude playmates are so vapid that they are not even erotic. The whole Playboy culture that Hefner espouses has not extricated itself from Hefner's own fantasy of a brandy-snifting bachelor world filled with highbrow discussions about Nietzsche and good, wholesome devianc...

The anthropology that underpins transgenderism, namely the complete disassociation of the mind from the body, is precisely the anthropology necessary to understand prostitution as a "job like any other". If one locates human identity entirely in the mind, then there can be no parts of the body considered so integral to personhood that they should be off limits to the profanations of commerce. The entire body is merely an instrument, which means that one's "privates" have as much significance as one's arms and legs, and just as we do not think it is any violation of our dignity as humans to put our limbs to work, it should not be deemed below our dignity to put our "privates" to work either because neither our limbs nor our "privates" have anything to do with our identities as men and women. They are all equally instrumental. It is little wonder then that George Soros is funding both the Transgender Movement and the Pimp Lobby.

 For a little while in a roof's shade, Brightly painted horses turn in a band. They have all been taken from a land That hesitates before it fades. A pinching harness keeps them bound, But all have courage in their eyes, A crimson lion terrifies, And now the china elephant comes 'round. Just as in the woods there's a buck, Except that it's saddled and carries A little blue girl all buckled up. And on the lion rides in white a young Boy and holds on with a small warm hand As the animal shows his teeth and tongue. And now the china elephant comes 'round. Bright young ladies are also there, Almost too old for these wooden mounds, In the middle of the leaps and bounds, They look up, around, at us, anywhere. And now the china elephant comes 'round. And so it goes--faster, hastening its end, It circles and it turns and has no aim, A red, a green, a grey sent around, A small inchoate outline of a face, And sometimes we see a smile triumphant And bless'd that sparkl...

Man: Hey, I would like to buy you a drink. Woman: (flashes her wedding ring at him) Man: So? Woman: I’m married, dumbass. Man: So? Woman: Are you really THAT stupid? I’m married. That means that I am off the menu. Get it? Man: Oh, I get it. You think that marriage means the forsaking of all other lovers, right? Woman: Hey, Einstein, that’s not what I think marriage means. That is what marriage means, you creep. Man: No, it doesn’t. That may be what your particular religious tradition says it means, but that’s NOT what marriage means according to Rawlsian Public Reason. Woman: What the hell? Man: Before you throw your mojito in my face—and you don’t want to do that, anyway, because the mojitos here are just scrumptious— Woman: Well, yes, okay, you have to go down to Miami to find any better.   Man: True that. They use their own mint, did you know that? Woman: Yeah, fine, don’t change the subject. Why shouldn’t I throw something else in your face, you creeper? Man: For the simpl...