№ 192. NSFW

"In a strip club, nudity is a costume."





Academia is finally opening up. Its ivory gates are now pried open to the um, sex industry. 

It's not just the sordid subjects and materials that that oldest industry, and possibly, the wisest of profession can impart to the rigors and proprieties of acceptable research. The wrought-iron grills --- dissertation topics, symposia, professorial posts, fellowships ---- are welcoming the industry players themselves. Welcome, Dr. Malcolm Dominatrix!

They now have PhDs! Strippers, porn stars and their nocturnal posse, aside from cultivating the perfect alphabet cups, steel buns and abs and hoarding investment portfolios, also enjoy passing lost time with spicy madeleines tied to surgical-grade stainless slings. The 2008 financial meltdown really threw chaos into the once mutually exclusive guilds. Exciting is the word. Unfair is another. Ok, I'm just bitter.

Still another word: intellectual. 

Intellectual can now be another rich adverb linked to "stimulating" in the context of the entertainment industry. I wonder if university cafeteria will finally serve wink, wink happy meals soon. Or how about the libraries offering "typing rooms" for other quickie intellectual discourses. How we can now literally moan from the pleasures of reading Sartre.

Whip me with that leather bound Dostoevsky, will you? While you're at it, talk dirty to me in very ancient, very filthy tongues--- Greco-Aramaic, Sanskrit? Save the grunts for the climax. 

The possibilities grow rich within, or even outside, the limits of imagination. The contexts of learning have become a wonderland of nuances, blurred lines (rich and Thicke) and grey horizons.

Reading this AlterNet article made me stand up and, gasp, think.

"Context is a big part of it. Say you’re walking down the street and someone yells, 'Nice ass,' you may feel exposed because you weren’t expecting it. But if you’re exposing your body for money, that’s in the context. In the strip club, nudity is a costume. Some of the quest for authenticity that the customers were on was a result of this — they wanted to see that final costume drop away."

I remember Mira Sorvino's character in Might Aphrodite. Dear God, I have this itch for a Sunday marathon of Woody Allen. I owe myself a great mental fuck.

Here's another intellectually engaging intercourse.

"Money and sex. Sex and money. Sounds dirty already. Is it the money that makes the sex dirty? Or the sex that makes the money dirty? Or, rather, the puritan strain that says they’re both dirty? How sexy! I mean, how inappropriate!" (Meet, Pay, Love)


Bento Box:

A few iterations of the NSFW acronym:

1. No Sale For Wanda
2. Not Safe For Work
3. Not Spicy For Wimps
4. Nosepicking's Salacious for Wasabi
5. Nosepicking's Shit from Wasabi!