PRUDISH AMERICA
I spend hours wading through the filth. Scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. My hand cups my balls while a beautiful day flits by outside my window.
It used to be; you had to work for the thing. I remember sitting at Mom’s computer in the living room in a private browser. You had to type something like: STRIPPER NAKED BOOBS. Internet was slow and beads of sweat would form on the brow as the loading wheel turned with painstaking slowness. It was like a heist. A horny heist. Somewhere down the line of results in; say, the thirteenth video, was a pixelated breast that might sustain you to the next over-the-pants rubbing session under the table in class the next day. A generation before me would have to be lucky enough to sneak out of their room unnoticed and make their way down to their family television in order to catch an advertisement on the adult channel you had to pay extra in your cable plan for. These were legends; the sons and daughters of the Playboy and Hustler magazine hiders. Nowadays, it’s different. No work at all. Grab your rectangle of doom, open Twitter, (this writer refuses to call it “X”), scroll a bit, and you see: DON’T OPEN THIS THREAD IN PUBLIC; BIG BOOBS ONLY.
It’s a deeply confusing time. Despite the ease of access the internet has afforded us, it’s almost as if nudity and sexual liberation is as shunned and derided as it has ever been.
These critical bastards. This is who I pen furiously about. These prudes in both the socially conservative and progressive camps that bash the Onlyfans models, the mattress actresses, and the like. Oldest profession discourse aside, what happened to the respect that we as a nation used to give to the entrepreneurial spirits? Sometime after the summer of 2016, Onlyfans became the mecca for homemade, paid pornography; and, shortly after, insane financial numbers were revealed to the public. In the ensuing years, the yearly income of the top models became headlines in outlets from TMZ to Forbes. Think pieces in The New York Times and Associated Press both for and against the new platform and its users popped up like California wildfires in the early summers.
All bets were off. A new era had nutted in our faces without warning.
Homemade promotional material started to spring up; and, with it, a voice with an air of superiority from both women; and, primarily, men, began to rise into the howl that it is today. The discourse is poison. I see the posts from people talking about how they’d kill themselves if their daughter took part in the current culture of homemade porn for exorbitant sums of money. In all likelihood, a large percentage of these hopeful parents are men who haven’t touched a woman not made of silicone or printed on a pillow. A smaller, but non-nominal group of critics are the progressively minded, yet almost puritanical women who vomit condemnation with an air of jealousy. They voice that they find it gross that a person would subject themselves to the hungry eyes of the furiously masturbating apelike masses, but wouldn’t have the sack to put themselves out there even if they wanted for the same. You see it in their eyes, fearful. They talk from high places; but, for lack of courage, they can’t bear to send a plate back with the waiter at the restaurant who got their order wrong; nor do they possess the stones to stand up to their domestic partners who rarely treat them with respect anyway. Present also in the discourse is, of course; the classically puritanical, Bible thumping, boomers and Generation X individuals who shriek at any form of bodily liberation primarily because their husbands are unsatisfactory and their wives wouldn’t be able to conceptualize a good blowjob if they had a dick themselves. The world keeps turning with all these voices pulling it in all directions. It takes all kinds, after all.
The youngest generation, the one most known to forge ahead with progressive thought, seems to be more prude than ever, while the oldest of society reel from the continued effects of the Catholic church’s Hays Code being foundational in the media they consumed and were influenced by in their heyday. The free-loving hippies of the sixties and seventies are the red blooded, conservatively minded, women-hating Facebook patriots of today while the rebels in the hip-hop communities of the nineties are in their thirties now and look down on the workers in the adult industry. They look down from their poisonous-to-society seats at jobs in tech, and marketing, and finance at the women who pee on their feet for thousands of dollars a month and they lie to themselves, thinking they are better than their fellow human because they have a “real job.” People like this are the most boring people you’ll ever have the unfortunate luck to meet. In the communities I occupy it is talks of rock-climbing, and DJing, and high-wattage biking, and meditation, and other insufferable things like that. I hate it all. I participate in half of those things too. Self-hate is a funny thing. It can make me write what I just wrote, and it can make a young person hate their body because they see models on social media use good lighting, a snatched waist, and a unnaturally achieved six-pack to show the world how much better they are than the average.
Something is wrong in America and has been for a very long time.
It permeates the culture. Sex and nudity have such an odd place in western media. Look at any cable television broadcast of an R-rated film, for example. So often, censors stringently blur, or, outright remove full scenes of sex and nudity in films while they do nothing to censor violence and death. I heard it once put like this: “Why is it okay to a blow a guy’s head off on TV, but it’s not okay to blow a guy’s head on TV?” Further, in film, there have been academic studies that show a clear inequality between the sexualization of men and women with the numbers leaning directly in favor of women. Is this because women are more willing to be nude on camera? Is it because writers and directors skew primarily male? Is it because no one wants to know if their favorite male lead has an ugly dick? I don’t know, I didn’t do much research because this isn’t a research paper. It’s a plea to have more cock and balls in mainstream media. Likely, male full frontal just doesn’t get the pants to tent and the panties soaking quite the same as a good pair of honkers and a landing strip. Regardless, the reactions in a theater full of people to full frontal female nudity are far less sensational than that of their male equivalents. We’ve got to get over the fear of it all, anyhow. The only solution I can come up with is to create a rule in which you aren’t allowed to be an actor unless you show skin. From Hunter Schafer to Tom Holland; Idris Elba to Gary Busey, everyone must drop trow. Equality isn’t real until I see Tom Cruise’s full hog in IMAX.
There’s this place in Atlanta, where I live, called Jeju Sauna.
Jeju is a traditional Korean bathhouse with showers, heated pools, saunas, and cold baths aplenty. There’s even these dark nap rooms with roll out mats like the ones you get when you’re in kindergarten and it’s nap time. It’s one of the most peaceful and relaxing places in the entire city. I could’ve used a place like Jeju when I was homeless. For forty dollars, you have full access to the entirety of the facility for twenty-four hours with food from a cafeteria, massages, and some treatments being extra while you stay. You get this electronic watch that you can scan throughout the facility to enter things like your locker that can also be used to track and pay for the extra services you purchase, allowing you to roam about without your phone or wallet. It’s heaven. Here’s the thing though, there’s a catch that serves as a deterrent for the prudish. Here’s how it works: you enter the building and go up to the desk. You pay your forty, get your watch and a kind of burnt orange spa uniform, and are guided by gender to a grand bath area. These baths lead eventually to a separate co-ed space with the cafeteria and some sauna rooms. The bath areas are where the magic happens, the deterrent for the prudes. You see, with Jeju being a traditional Korean bath house, tradition rules supreme. Common in Asian cultures, the removal of shoes before entering the facility is required. Also common in Asian bath house and spa culture; full nudity is required in the bathing areas. This means, from the moment you enter the bath area, you’re greeted with a communal nakedness that you’re required to participate in.
I started penning this after my first ever time in Jeju. I’ll end with this now.
I sat, after a shower, naked in a warm bath. There were probably a dozen of us in the bath area. Some folks were milling about between the hot and cold baths, others were coming in and out of the men’s sauna rooms. I sat there peacefully enjoying my bath. An older Japanese fella and his friends entered the bath area and began to make their way to one of the baths. This Japanese fella, probably around his early seventies with a thin body standing at no more than five and a half feet knew the score. Barefoot and naked, he sauntered around like he’d been there before, because he assuredly had. Shortly behind gramps and his colleagues, a huge black dude, probably six foot three and easily more than three hundred pounds; entered, fully clothed and wearing Nike slides; looking lost, confused, and unsure of himself. It’s almost funny to see a guy like that so out of sorts. He looked nice, but he definitely, with ease, could snap me and the Japanese fella in half and stuff us into his shorts. This tank of a dude was a little wide-eyed, but it was clear to me he was just looking for what we are all looking for, a little peace. He stood there, right at the entrance of the bath area, unsure of what to do. I’m not sure anyone told him of the full nudity rules. In just a moment, the small Japanese grandpa made his way to the big black dude and politely told him about the nudity rules and where to put his clothes back in the locker room area. The black dude nodded with equal politeness, thanked him with tenderness, and went back to the locker area. In no time at all, the black dude was back in the bathing area, freshly showered, one pool away from me displacing water; and, hopefully, getting some of that peace he came for.
It was incredible. It filled me with hope, and curiosity, and an eagerness to put pencil to paper. The sight of that small Japanese man, naked; talking to this massive black dude with a hog the size of a Louisville slugger so politely, tenderly, and without judgement or pretense filled me with ideas of a world without fear of our own nudity and sexuality. The normalcy of it all; like two people talking about the weather or someone asking for directions at a gas station, was a sight burned indelibly into my mind forever.
Born from this interaction were the thoughts you read about now; these thoughts about the lens western society views its naked form.
The rest of that trip to Jeju was without incident, as always. I finished my bath, grabbed some noodles at the cafeteria; sat in a cold room, then a warm room, then made my way home, pondering forevermore about how we could get those same Korean traditions to permeate the entirety of western culture. Also, a vision came to me regarding how to work in a line about wanting to see Tom Cruise’s hog in IMAX.
At least I accomplished something today.
scrolling with my left hand,
TCB
