SENSUALIZING NATURE

First, Kammann, I want to see spoiler or non-spoiler warnings (re: TARXII)...or this could get ugly. I know you haven't watched The Wire yet...

Anyway, I've survived three days of free German beer, but I'll get to that later (in another post). I need to find the camera to get some pictures off of it.

Jeff started talking about prudishness (yeah, I know it was just a way for him to say he liked seeing women dressed up as sluts "for Halloween"), and this subject always makes me realize how much I've taken on some European traits. I'm fairly prudish by nature (I am American!), but I watch TV here or go to the beach and I realize how Americans are, as a culture, stuck in 1932. Although I blame, in large part, the right-wing religious groups for this, it's not everything; it's our Puritan heritage too.

I just read an article about San Diego. It's one of the last West Coast cities where a man can watch women in bikinis surf with a nice cold Ballast Point Yellowtail Pale Ale. That's right, anywhere else on the left coast Lieutenant Bullitt's gonna come throw your ass in the pokey. No [uncovered] tits and no beer. That's why I go to the fucking beach. I'm serious. The beaches here are almost all clothing optional (although there are "family beaches" where bottoms are strongly recommended) and the guys who walk up and down the beach all day selling stuff have a cooler full of cold ones. I've never seen any real problems with alcohol on the beach although I'm sure that people get out of hand from time to time, as people are wont to do from time-to-time.

This is the weird thing about France and Europe overall. The governments want to get up in your shit about all different kinds of things (taxes, government oversight of absolutely everything, etc), but they take a laissez faire attitude when it comes to other things (drinking, sex, [until they realized how much money was to be made] driving). I know of no European city that has an open container law, yet I don't see any more drunk people in the streets of Europe than I do in the streets of the US. As far as I know, there's no formal "watershed" in France and I've seen on multiple occasions soft-core porn on broadcast TV (after 10 or 11pm though). It's not abnormal to see nipples in ads for body wash, shampoo or other products where nipples would be present under normal usage. This is not to say that they don't sell sex here: this is a real commercial from 2003 for milk products! Fuck "Got Milk"...this is how you sell food products!



Now that I'm used to naked women at the beach, it's just like going to the beach with bikinied women for me...you see a bit more, but its "normal." Like Jeff said before, every baby has seen a nipple (and a vagina for that matter), yet for some reason we have to protect our children until at least 18 or 20 years old. I much prefer the Euro system of doing this...by not making nudity and human sexuality "bad", children don't grow up thinking that it's some evil thing to be avoided.

And it just keeps getting worse: The abstinence-only sex education programs that refuse to even teach kids about safe sex and protecting oneself are so asinine that I'm not even going to get into it...

Anyway the douchebag of the day is Scott Chipman: "If you can't enjoy the beach without alcohol, then you have things wrong with you."

Does anyone in San Diego want to go ahead and break all his windows for the rest of us?