Exhibit B[J]

(click to enlarge)

These ads, done by or at least featuring Terry Richardson, have dominated the Broadway–Lafayette subway station for at least a month or so—and yesterday I noticed and documented the moronic commentary, above, of another unhelpful citizen.  Possibly the only thing dumber than simplistically satirizing an ad that's already satirizing itself is making prurient jokes about an ad that's already clearly and intentionally prurient.  Oh, hey, this ad makes you think of oral sex?  Wow, I guess I see what you mean...you're obviously some kind of a comic genius!  How embarrassing to the advertisers that such an innocent image was made sexual by your incisive, irreverent gloss!*

Here's another picture by Terry Richardson for no reason at all, practically.

Harm & Chloë 4ever

* I'm tempted to say that only two kinds of person would make a joke like this and think it wasn't idiotically redundant: a total imbecile or a total Puritan.  Puritan?  Why Puritan?  Bear with me.  Our amateur satirist, in his evident failure to grasp that a blowjob was already implicit in the photograph, seems not to understand that sexy pictures are often—to varying degrees but not with a particularly high variance—about sex.  (Amazing!)

     An illustrative digression:

     A friend recently suggested that décolletage has been more and more prevalent, at least in the City, and while I don't really keep track of fashion, the observation does seem accurate: I've certainly been seeing an awful lot of an awful lot of breasts, lately^a (like, in public, I mean).  And here comes the rub:^b many of these women do not seem comfortable with the décolletage, tugging continually at their shirts to cover up what the shirts (and, one might argue, their bodies?) are designed to advertise, which makes you kind of have to ask: Why are they wearing that, then?

     This should probably be a whole post in itself, and possibilities for grievous misunderstanding are all around me like a minefield—but what I'm getting at is that the new era of sexual schizophrenia,^c where young girls are encouraged, simultaneously and with no evident awareness of contradiction, to protect their maidenheads and to dress like streetwalkers, is all about hypersexualization without content.  If you choose to advertise yourself sexually, that's fine—but know thyself!  I don't blame the confused madonnawhores themselves (although some stupidity seems to be at work, there); I blame a porno-Puritanical culture that is effectively knocking these poor fools around like, like, like corks in the ocean?

     The relevance to the defaced advertisement being simply (again) that the quiet tragedy of the vandal's apparent stupidity is that we live in a culture in which someone so ready with a BJ joke doesn't even know when a BJ joke is pretty much staring him in the face.^d

     Again, this deserves more sustained attention...but I guess what I'm really saying is that it's a mistake to focus on the pornographication(?) of American culture without recognizing the Puritanism that counterintuitively enforces and enables it.

more Richardson

^a And there the awfulness ends.

^b Huh-huh, he said rub.

^c I am misusing this word schizophrenia.

^d Insert BJ joke here.