September 29, 2007
"Sex Times Technology Equals the Future"---J.G. Ballard
What: Arse Electronika 2007, a conference about pornography in the Digital Age.
Speakers: the usual roundup of sexperts, theory jocks, gadget fetishists, smoke-shoveling cyberpundits, and hairy-palmed hangers-on.
When: I'm delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday, October 5, at 11 A.M. PST. Conference schedule here.
Where: Kink.com Porn Palace, 415 Jessie St. San Francisco, CA 94103.
What I'm Talking About: "Humanimal" Porn in the Age of Xenotransplants and Genetic Chimera." Executive Summary: "Humanimal" porn is calculated to blister the mind of even the most been-there, done-that pornsurfer. Armed with image-manipulation software, morph auteurs are conjuring up images worthy of a medieval bestiary or a postmodern Decameron. The result is Dr. Moreau's idea of Web porn: Hyperreal cheesecake in which nude babes with cow ears, tails, and udders suckle each other and naked werewomen flaunt donkey ears straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Is this an absurdist attempt to push the envelope of fetishism to the point where not even devotees of this obscure desire can take it seriously? Or an earnest attempt to feed the fantasies of a vanishingly obscure market niche that would have flown under radar cover in the lost world before do-it-yourself Web porn? Or is it something more profound---a campy, tongue-in-cheek exorcism of our cultural anxieties about genetic hybrids and human-animal transplants in the age of pigs with human hemoglobin and babies with baboon hearts?
Caveat: That's what I'm contracted to speak about, in any event. As always, there's a better than even chance I may just go off on some hairy-eyed rant about one of my current obsessions, such as: pathological masculinity in America, the country that brought you warporn, gorenography (a.k.a. "torture porn" in the Saw and Hostel vein), The Passion of the Christ (considered as Foucauldian fever dream), Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and 300, that dyspeptic mix of homophobia and homophilia whose target demographic seems to be the sweet spot between Michael Savage and Tom of Finland.
Consider yourselves forewarned. And come up and tug on my sleeve if you make it to this thing. Posted by Mark Dery at 08:56 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 21, 2007
Brasil '69
You are cordially invited to...
Another (!) lecture on Netporn, the subject that has captivated minds and moistened loins around the world.
This talk is part of the Frontiers of Contemporary Thought series, jointly produced by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the University of the Sinos River Valley (UNISINOS) and Copesul, a private chemical company located in Porto Alegre. According to Copesul's website, confirmed speakers for the series include Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Greenaway, Pierre Levy, Marshall Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, and Michel Houellebecq. I am reliably informed, by one of my hosts, that I'll speak before "a selected audience of Brazilian scholars, journalists, and decision makers." In other words, I'll have the Ear of Power as I talk, preposterously enough, about...
"Humanimal" porn in the age of genetic chimera and xenotransplants; the cultural crosstalk between warporn and gorenography (Saw, Hostel, et. al.); pathological masculinity in Dubya's America; male bonding in the military, stalked by the ever-present specter of the Queer Within; Theweleit; Sontag; Foucault; Zizek; and what happens when Matrix "bullet time" meets PhotoShopped cumshots, among other things.
When: June 26, 2007 7:30 pm
Where: Porto Alegre, Brazil Federal University Federal University Lecture Hall
Stop by and say hello, if you're in town.
Posted by Mark Dery at 09:31 PM
| Comments (14)
| TrackBack
June 13, 2005
Paradise Lust
Believe it or not, people are still having sex. The religious right's jihad against sexual expression hasn't put a lid on the American libido.
Erotic wallpaper, Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
(Note: The following article originally appeared, under the same title but with different photos, in the spring/summer '05 issue of Vogue Hommes, pps. 244-7. Under the inspired, focus-groups-be-damned guidance of Editor Richard Buckley, Vogue Hommes was, for a brief time, home to some of the most exuberantly over-the-top journalism and criticism ever to bluff its way into a glossy fashion magazine. Props to Richard for the act of intellectual courage implicit in commissioning this, and to photographer Darren Smith for his atmospheric images.— M.D.)
Despite the pitchfork-and-bible brigade's crusade against gay marriage, sex ed, and that Mother of Harlots and Abominations, the smutty soap opera Desperate Housewives, pop culture's low-slung undercarriage is still well-lubricated. The mass appeal of Desperate Housewives (the second highest-rated show during the fall 2004 TV season, averaging nearly 22 million viewers a week), not to mention the success of erotica such as 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P.; Jenna Jameson's best-selling confessional, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star; Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, a photo book calculated to steam the veneer off your coffee table; and the biopic Kinsey and T.C. Boyle's latest novel, The Inner Circle (both about the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey), give proof through the night that the appetite for vicarious sex, at least, is undiminished.
America is a house divided, says Dr. Barnaby Barratt, president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists. "The media are becoming more sensationalist and more titillating" even as the religious right is becoming "far more conservative and puritanical, sexually," he said, in an interview with this author.
From his vantage point as an educator, sex therapist, and psychoanalyst, Dr. Barratt looks out on an America wracked by a civil war over what pollsters call "moral values." On one side, sex-positive straights and gays, civil libertarians, and random rutters—you know, the guy who just has to have that Make Your Own Dildo kit ("Thousands sold worldwide! Just add water! Amazing detail!"), the girl who won't leave home without her Ultraviolet Jelly Rubber Butt Beads.
On the other side are Christian soldiers marching as to war against frank, factual talk about sex, especially in the classroom. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship's Sex & Censorship Committee, fundamentalist groups are clamoring for censorship of medically accurate sex education. In its place, they champion a faith-based curriculum that urges America's youth to gird up its loins against Satan's temptations, foreswearing masturbation, contraception, abortion, and homosexuality, and arming themselves with abstinence (some religious curricula urge kids to bring Jesus along on that hot date, as a "chaperone").
By their fruits ye shall know them: According to a Planned Parenthood factsheet, the fruits of abstinence-only sex ed include public schools forced to host "chastity" rallies in which students pledge to God that they will remain chaste until marriage, and a seventh grade health teacher in Belton, Missouri suspended when a parent complained that she had discussed "inappropriate" subject matter in class. (The hapless instructor answered a student's question about oral sex). In Granite Bay, California, a student asked where his cervix was; another wanted to know if oral sex could make her pregnant. If a little learning is a dangerous thing, faith-based cluelessness is suicidal at a moment when, according to Planned Parenthood, the United States "has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, and American adolescents are contracting HIV faster than almost any other demographic group."
According to Dr. Barratt, "there is more opposition to sexual expression than ever" because "sexual values" are a flashpoint in the culture wars. "We now have the government attacking scientific research," he says. "The NIH [National Institutes of Health] has a blacklist of researchers who will not get funds because they are seen as being on the wrong side of the government's agenda...of abstinence-only [sex] education."
How did we get here? By the early '70s, several decades' worth of scientific studies and pop sexology, such as the Kinsey reports (1948 and '53), Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), and Dr. Alex Comfort's Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking (1972), had exposed American prudery for what it was: a fig leaf covering our guilty pleasures. The nation was ready for the guilt-sucks, if-it-feels-good-do-it ethos of the disco, the bathhouse, and the swingers' club. Celebrities, socialites, and hedonists flocked to discos such as the Manhattan-based Studio 54 (where 24-hour party people prowled for fresh meat of either gender), swingers' clubs such as Plato's Retreat (also in New York City), and utopian experiments in polyamory such as Sandstone Retreat and the nudist "growth center" Elysium, both in the hills of L.A.'s Topanga Canyon.
So how did we go forward, into the past? How can the '70s seem so futuristic while our own era seems so retrograde? Over 30 years ago, Dr. Comfort noted Western culture's emergence from "a period of moral panic into a re-awareness that there is nothing to fear," rejoicing in society's "recovery from Puritanism." Now, America is gagged and bound by the "moral values" of neo-Puritans and paleoconservatives.
What happened on the way to the orgy?
Welcome to Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
In search of some answers, I asked Marty Zitter, the former public relations director and longtime resident of Sandstone, to take me on a tour of the now-defunct utopian commune and weekend retreat. There, on a 15-acre estate in the hills of Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, a handful of couples (and hundreds of weekend utopians) shed their clothes and lived the Dionysian dream. From 1969 until the end of '73, the aerospace engineer-turned-free love visionary John Williamson and his wife Barbara, along with a flock of converts, embarked on a radical social experiment, "living in open sexual freedom and seeking to eliminate sexual possessiveness and jealousy," as Gay Talese put it in his chronicle of the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbor's Wife. (Sandstone closed in '73, then reopened in '74 under new owner Paul Paige, closing for good on December 30, 1976, a victim of financial troubles.)
On a hot day in August 2004, Zitter, now 62 and retired from a career in real estate, is driving me up the cliffhanging road that zigzags into Topanga Canyon's chaparral-covered hills. At last, we come to a rambling, mission-style mansion overlooking the canyon. The caretaker, a tanned, amiable man named Alan Zellar, lets us in through the front door, where in Sandstone's heyday the exuberant, fast-talking Zitter greeted guests, buck-naked. Everyone came (one uses the verb advisedly): Timothy Leary, Peter Lawford, Bobby Darin, Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame), Paris Review editor George Plimpton, Dean Martin.
Marty Zitter greeting the ghosts of polyamorists past at Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
There was the time Sammy Davis, Jr., showed up with his wife, Altovise, accompanied by porn star Marilyn Chambers. "He grabs hold of me and takes me out to the middle of the room [Zitter, as always, was naked] and says, 'This is a warm cat!,'" recalled Zitter. "People are laughing, and he says, 'Wow, I think I'll get into this place.' So he takes off a cufflink, probably a 10-karat diamond cufflink, and drops it on the floor. And Marilyn Chambers grabs the cufflink! And then he takes off one of his diamond studs and drops that on the floor, and Marilyn grabs that. Then he lights a cigarette with his diamond-encrusted lighter [and tosses it aside] and Marilyn grabs that. And then he started doing a soft-shoe..."
Another time, a big fire swept through the hills of Topanga Canyon, in '71, and a woman swimming in the Sandstone pool slaked the lusts of a dozen or more firefighters, one by one. "She said, 'We need more fires around here,'" laughed Zitter.
We step out onto the terrace. "On a typical weekend, you'd see as many as 200 people out here on the front lawn, sunbathing or in various stages of encounters," says Zellar, with a dry chuckle.
View of Sandstone Ranch from the front lawn, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
We head downstairs, which back in the Sandstone days was wall-to-wall waterbeds and coupling couples. Hence its name: The Ballroom. In Thy Neighbor's Wife, Talese describes it as a delirium of "shadowed faces and interlocking limbs, rounded breasts and reaching fingers, moving buttocks, glistening backs, shoulders, nipples, navels," all flecked with light from a spinning mirrorball.
Moving on, we come to the Playroom, a back room where "you might walk in and find 20 people all wrapped up around each other," says Zellar. A nearby bathroom features a double shower—for group showering, naturally. The wall still flaunts the X-rated wallpaper it wore in the '70s, a gold-and-white tangle of foliage and Art Nouveau curlicues that reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be inhabited by fornicating Lilliputians.
Wallpaper, Sandstone bathroom. Photo: Darren Smith.
Of course, Sandstone, whose official name was the Sandstone Foundation for Community Systems Research, was more than just a "'fuck club,'" insists Judith Boyd, 64, a semi-retired therapist who frequented the retreat from 1973-'77. "It was definitely a place of open sexuality," she says, "but it wasn't a swingers' club. And yet it was, because there was all the overt sexuality." In an e-mail, she added, "The time I spent there was worth more than several years of college in the study of sensuality, sexuality, and intimacy."
Dr. Leanna Wolfe, a professor at L.A. Valley College and a doctor of sexology (she did her doctoral dissertation on "Jealousy and Transformation in Polyamorous Relationships"), confirms that Sandstone drew a "who's who of cultural movers and shakers—highly literate people, avant-garde professionals." She notes, "Swinging today's a big business, whereas Sandstone had much to do with personal growth. Sex is powerful, sex is transformative, and Sandstone embraced those possibilities."
In Hot & Cool Sex (1972), a booklet published by Sandstone, the Farleigh Dickinson professor of social biology Robert T. Francoeur and his wife Anna talk of "a revolution in consciousness, a night-to-day shift in our sexual images"; of our fixation on genital sex giving way to the "grokking" of Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, "a kind of demi-erotic relating and interpersonal knowing in the original biblical sense." Yeah, baby. Grok me all night long. Hot sex is for the uptight; Sandstone sex is cool sex—"egalitarian, single-standard, sensually diffused and oriented towards intimacy and open relations with persons." "Sandstone is an experimental transitional TRIBAL ENVIRONMENT." Whoa! Is America ready for "the tribalization of our culture on a global scale"? Not to worry: Sandstone is "a bridge which will allow people to experience a tribal culture, then move back into our hot sex society and transform it from within." Awesome, dude! (Did somebody say "hot sex"?)
Well, it was the '70s. And now it's history. The Playroom is all played out: in the nearby bathroom, a daddy-longlegs clings, motionless, to the wall. The swimming pool, where guests made love underwater, has been drained; a drift of leaves lies scattered in the deep end. (Is there anything more melancholy than a drained swimming pool?) The "sighs, cries of ecstasy...the slap and suction of copulating flesh, laughter, murmuring" that Talese once heard in the Ballroom have faded, the people who made them gone away and gone flabby or gray with age or, in some cases, gone to dust.
Pool, Sandstone Ranch, 2004. Photo: Darren Smith.
In 2004, when George Bush's populist theocracy is trying to turn the United States into what Zitter calls "America the monastery," Sandstone's polyamorous Tomorrowland seems as dated as the unisex get-ups and orbital shopping-mall decor of Logan's Run (1976), the sci-fi film set in a Sandstone-like pleasuredome where everyone is under 30 and free love rules.
Still, Regina Lynn, the sexpert who writes the "Sex Drive" column for Wired News, is hopeful. "It's a cycle," she writes, in an e-mail interview. "The more a group tries to repress, the more [the other] group resists and perhaps gets even more transgressive than before, sparking another surge of repressiveness. But this time Pandora's box has been nailed open, and the repressives are not going to be able to put everything back inside."
Zitter's banking on that. "I think that human evolution is going to progress in the way that Sandstone led," he says. "If you look at a [chimpanzeelike] primate called the bonobo, bonobo [society] is matriarchal and all disputes end with sex, oral as well as genital. From what I've read, it is a totally pleasure-oriented psychology." In the near future, he predicts, medical technology will zap the AIDS virus and "other party-pooping infectious diseases." Then, Sandstone's experiment in free love will become a blueprint for a better world, a bonobo-like Eden of polymorphous perversities and demi-erotic relating. There, we'll all wander naked through a kinder, gentler Planet of the Apes.
— Mark Dery (© 2005 Mark Dery).
February 07, 2005
Toe Fou
Heavy-breathing devotees of subliminal seduction, start your engines.
Text:
Subtext:
Is that an unnaturally well-hung big toe?
Or an ordinary digit, digitally inflated to Jeff Stryker proportions?
Or am I just having my own clam-plate orgy, here?
Maybe so, but toe cleavage is always erotic, alluding (if you squint hard enough) to buttcrack, crotch, and decolletage, all at once. The phallic big toe only adds to the polymorphous perversity. Of course, foot fetishism is as old as the Golden Lotus (brought to you in the 11th century by Chinese footbinders) and as recent as Geoff Nicholson's Footsucker (about an obsessive whose swoony description of a pair of plaster feet—"They were perfect, of course; as pale and pure and cold as vellum"—could easily be a description of Madonna's alabaster feet.)
The big toe, specifically, has a venerable history as a penile surrogate or substitute nipple, from Lya Lys slurping rapturously on a statue's toe in Luis Bunuel's L'Age d'Or (1930) to Dr. Alex Comfort's funny-creepy paeans in The Joy of Sex (1972)—"the pad of the male big toe applied to the clitoris or the vulva generally is a magnificent erotic instrument." (The other shoe drops when one learns that the good doctor was missing four fingers on his left hand, blown off while playing with explosives as a kid. At '70s swingers clubs such as Sandstone Retreat, he needed all the appendages he could muster. Thus self-serving advice such as: The "gentleman who is keeping six women occupied...using tongue, penis, both hands and both big toes [must] make sure the nail isn't sharp.")
L'Age d'Or, Bunuel, 1930.
In the Versace ad, part of a campaign debuting in women's magazines this month, Madonna lazes on a daybed, nibbling a pen with slow-burning, bedroom-eyed sexiness. (Never has the phrase "pencil-licker" sounded so lubricious. Where's that Truth or Dare Coke bottle when you need it?) But the picture's composition guides our gaze from that suggestive pen, along the cord between her breasts, to the chain tossed across her crotch), and ultimately to that immaculately pale foot, with its weirdly prehensile toe.
Of all fetishes, podophilia has long been synonymous with clammy, bottom-feeder perversity. (Not that it's the limit case in unacceptable obsessions: Necrophilia, coprophilia, or zoophilia ensure death by stoning or banishment to Jerry Springer's green room, depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line you live on. Doubtless, the unspoken taboo on foot fondling, sucking, and (insert your worst nightmare here) has something to do with the skanky nature of the human foot, before the advent of the pedicure, the odor eater, and Dr. Scholl's Fungal Nail Revitalizer. As the Surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille wrote, in his wonderfully over-the-top essay "Big Toe,"
The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rachitic. It is stupidly consecrated to corns, calluses, and bunions, and if one takes into account turns of phrase that are only now disappearing, to the most loathsome filthiness: the peasant expression 'her hands are as dirty as feet,' is no longer as true of the entire human collectivity as it was in the 17th century.But beyond the obviously yucky (and possibly risky) nature of podophilia in premodern times (Our Savior's thing for foot-washing notwithstanding), feet are inherently grotesque. We may have our heads in the clouds, straining toward godhood, but we're standing in shit, as Bataille pointed out. In the hierarchy of the body, the head is the sovereign, seat of the self; the feet are mere peons (from the medieval Latin pes, for "foot"). The foot, Bataille theorizes, is base, in both senses of the word. (Does this explain the ubiquity of hardcore porn, on the Web, in which people perform unimaginably bizarre acts with their socks on?) "[T]hough the most noble of animals," writes Bataille, Man "nevertheless has corns on his feet; in other words, he has feet, and these feet lead an ignoble life, completely independent from him." Toes, for Bataille, are the worst: freakish parodies of fingers, creeping things that creepeth upon the earth.
The gothic photos that accompany his essay, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica—blurry, nocturnal images that look like something out of CSI, say it all:
(Jeepers, peepers, where'd you get those creepers?!?)
"[F]ingers have come to signify useful action and firm character, the toes stupefaction and base idiocy," writes Bataille. Long, thin fingers are shorthand for mental dexterity; in Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, the brilliant detective relaxes, after a long day of ratiocination, at the symphony, "gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music" ("The Red Headed League"); likewise, in the Doyle novella "The Hound of the Baskervilles," a character's keen intellect is symbolized by "long, quivering fingers, as agile and restless as the antennae of an insect." By contrast, stubby, simian fingers are a social Darwinist's evidence of inborn inferiority, if not atavistic imbecility; Spy magazine, the lacerating humor magazine of the late '80s, once mocked Donald Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian." If toes evoke "base idiocy," then fingers resembling toes are proof positive of mental deformity. Hipgnosis, the graphic artists who designed the brain-curdling cover of the eponymous debut album by the prog-metal band Toe Fat (1970), followed this chain of association to its absurd extreme:
Such associations, Bataille, maintains, are why "classic foot fetishism leading to the licking of toes" is condemned by official culture as "a base seduction," a grotesque burlesque of "normal" sex. And the big toe, he insists, is the ghastliest of these appendages, with its "hideously cadaverous and at the same time loud and defiant appearance." (Those French!)
So what does Madonna's big toe mean, exactly? Sex, duh. According to the New York Post's "Page Six," Madonna wanted Mario Testino's photos for the Versace ads to be "provocative and sexy," flaunting "how good she looks at 46." Groping for deeper meaning, we remember that Madonna is a lapsed Catholic, so maybe Anthony N. Fragola's 1994 essay, "From the ecclesiastical to the profane: Foot fetishism in Luis Bunuel and Alain Robbe-Grillet" in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, can shed a little light: "Bunuel believes that sexual compulsions and deviations originate from the repressive teaching of Catholicism that equates sex with guilt," writes Fragola. L'Age d'Or is the cinematic equivalent of the 39 lashes, administered with relish by an ex-Catholic who devoted his creative life to scourging the church as well as the unblinking, ungulate herd that filled its pews. The movie is Bunuel's mordantly anti-Catholic ode to l'amour fou ("mad love"), the libidinous frenzy the Surrealists prescribed as shock treatment for repressed, repressive bourgeois society; the infamous toe-sucking scene, still crazy after all these years, is its centerpiece.
Is Madonna using Versace's ad to do some covert signifying of her own, playing footsie with podophilia as a papa-don't-preach retort to the Vatican, which recently issued a maledictum decrying New Age spirituality, Eastern mysticism, and the "Kabbalah as espoused by Madonna"? To be sure, she's no stranger to anti-Catholic sacrilege or market-tested outrage, calculated to ruffle Letterman's forelock. Besides, wasn't she sucking somebody's toe in that scene with the skinheads in Sex, the book that made Helmut Newton safe for heartland America? And isn't that her, slurping away at Tony Ward's foot, on the back cover of her record Erotica (1992)?
Or is she signaling her gay fandom that she's still the Phallic Mother of their mirrorball dreams? Or is she simply making the latent content of the Versace aesthetic, which combines the tasteful understatement of Caesar's Palace in Vegas with the rectitude of Caligulan Rome? In Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power, Valerie Steele asserts that designers like Versace "frequently copy 'the style, if not the spirit, of fetishism.' [...] To understand contemporary fashion, it is crucial to explore fetishism."
Steele links the boundary-pushing edginess of couture to sexual perversions, which are simultaneously manifestations of late-night psychological cravings and acts of symbolic rebellion "against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation and against the institutions which guarantee this order." (She's quoting Marcuse, here.) Fashion, the ultimate commodity fetish, exists in the context of a consumer culture that is at once hedonistic and puritanical. Pushing manufactured desires and peddling instant gratification, consumer culture is at the same time deeply phobic about sexual difference and deviant desires—"mad love" whose unorthodox, "unproductive" (in every sense) urges refuse to be channeled into more profitable outlets, such as blowing one's wad at the local megamall.
Ironically, fetish fashion is itself the instrument of what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation," his term for the socially sanctioned expression of radical impulses that might assume a more genuinely political shape if not harmlessly acted out in the pleasure dungeon. In that sense, Madonna and Versace are perfect together: in order to stroke their fan bases yet play in the arena of mass culture, both need to negotiate the perilous strait of boho perversity and upper-class power, dominatrix and, respectively, Eurotrash jetsetter (Donatella Versace) and domestic diva (Madonna). Madonna wants it both ways: She wants to be the author of children's books with titles like Mr. Peabody's Apples (do not even go there), the supremely capable mistress of the Upstairs, Downstairs manor who told CBS Early Show interviewer Harry Smith, "I get up in the morning with my kids...and then they go off to school, and I stay home and I become a sergeant in my house and...start going through the lists that have been made by my hardworking, diligent staff and start delegating responsibility," the paragon of good breeding who confided to Cynthia McFadden of ABC's 20/20 that "even my children have to clean up their mess, clean their rooms, manners, thank you, pick up your dishes, gratitude, being grateful—that has to happen." But between impersonations of a mockney Martha Stewart, she still needs to play tonsil hockey with Britney Spears on TV, now and again, in order to justify the love of the core fandom that cherishes its memories of her more salacious days. Fetishistic yet boomer-friendly, elegant but a little bit bodacious, the Versace sandal is just the thing for the Desperate Housewife who was once a Boy Toy.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
© Mark Dery 2005.
(Props to feminist critic and body scholar Margot Mifflin for pointing out the ad that launched this essay.)
Posted by Mark Dery at 11:44 PM
| Comments (4)
| TrackBack
