more machine, now, than woman

I read Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs a while back and have been meaning to comment on Klosterman's treatment of Pamela Anderson.

Generally I enjoyed the book, or generally I enjoyed much of the book (this is in spite of K.'s continual misuse of the word comprise), but I was baffled slash annoyed by his insistence that Ms. Anderson is any kind of high-water mark for sexual beauty. Sometimes he seems to be saying only that she is representative of our culture's idea of sexiness, which is a perfectly reasonable claim—our intense sexiness¹ is also often intensely prudish and creepily unsexual—but at other times he scoffs at those who claim not to be attracted to her, suggesting that those men are out of touch with their sexuality, when in fact my guess is that it's K. whose sexual responses have been deformed and stunted by a society that fears female sexuality so much that its sex symbols have to be more plastic than flesh—as little actual human tissue as possible.

[Relevantly, K. also seems capable of understanding the difference between "professional" and "amateur" pornography as coming down only to a distinction between stale ideals and honest appetite: he seems to believe that "amateur" porn is a fetishistic thing and is all about attraction to the unattractive—again, treating surgery and an inch of make-up as the epitome of excitement. ("Within the realm of their Gateways, men prefer to look at nude images of women they'd normally ignore in real life.") K. is apparently the kind of person who thinks the only æsthetic objection anyone might have to fake breasts is on principle.]

About fake breasts: I remember in the earlier 1990s, somebody at my high school called push-up bras "false advertising." That's true of fake breasts, too, because secondary sexual characteristics are a kind of advertising, and whatever the appeal of big breasts might be, surely it has to do with the fact that the woman in question actually had the biological make-up to grow them.² K. behaves as though people's only objection to Ms. Anderson's objectively off-putting chest [O.K., O.K., that's my opinion] is some kind of moralizing or posturing: "what they hate is that Pamela Anderson is the incarnation of the perfect, idealized icon we all sort of concede is supposed to be impossible. We've established this unrealistic image of what we want from the human race, but it angers people to see that image in real life. It sort of shows why most Americans hate themselves."

Listen: I don't dislike you for having fake breasts. I don't even dislike your fake breasts. But I do prefer real breasts, sorry—and I do dislike being told that that's somehow pretentious. What could be more natural and less pretentious than being attracted to a naturally occurring secondary sexual characteristic, as it occurs? Again, is Ms. Anderson's exploding bosom an ideal in our culture? Absolutely yes. But does that mean that it's to be identified with sexuality—or even that it has anything real at all to do with sexuality?

Now, I could be way wrong about this, but in an effort to be fair, I'd like to note that I think I remember a time when Ms. Anderson was quite beautiful—back in the early 1990s when she was on the covers of a couple of Playboys that I had hidden in my second-to-the-bottom dresser drawer...

...but either I'm wrong³ or around that time she started making pretty regular trips to the Body Shoppe, and either way, by the time America saw her performing fellatio on the guy from Mötley Crüe (which K. writes about in his essay, which means he can't have written it any earlier than that⁴), she was about as sexy as a mannequin. And not even a cute mannequin.

a cute mannequin

In short, when K. writes that "Pam is the embodiment of modern female sexuality," I'm with him if and only if I accept that there can be no meaningful distinction between modern female sexuality and our culture's fantasies about modern female sexuality—a nifty intellectual claim but not a particularly persuasive one: it may be difficult to extricate the one from the other, but do you honestly maintain that there is no difference at all between the two?—that female sexuality has no meaning, even in theory, outside our culture's image of it?

The embodiment of modern female sexuality, K. writes, "is a Barbie Doll. But that's not necessarily bad; it's what intellectual men want (because she can be appreciated lecherously and ironically)...and she's a physical symbol of all the things men find alluring (some of which are rudimentary, some of which are complex)." The first claim, about intellectual men, is odd and depressing (really, K.? lechery & irony are enough for you?); the second, that she's " a symbol of all the things men find alluring," is just absurd.⁵ The most K. can acknowledge is that desiring Ms. Anderson suggests a lack of sexual creativity—i.e., it's just so obvious that you'd be attracted to her! No, K.: desiring Ms. Anderson suggests that you're attracted not to women, but to cartoons of women, that what you want isn't to have sex, but to live inside a porno.

Ms. Anderson is a woman for a culture that fears and despises women. The admittedly absurd fantasy in Mannequin is at least about a plastic woman who becomes flesh; Pamela Anderson became plastic, and to hold her up for that—well, I just can't get behind it.

Insert doggy-style joke here.

Insert insertion joke here.

¹ In Holden Caulfield's use of the word: "highly sexed," as the OED puts it (sexed : "With preceding adverb: having sexual appetites, feelings, or functions of a specified nature or intensity").

² Rebuttal to the third independent clause, slash, support for the second: believe it or not, one of the going theories about human breasts (since proportionately ours are much bigger than other mammals', and it has nothing to do with milk production) is that they're "meant" to resemble the human ass and helped the males remember why they wanted to fuck the newly bipedal females, whose asses used to be the males' primary sexual focus. Interesting side note: if this theory is valid, then a focus on breasts is in effect connected with greater intimacy because (as the story was related to me) they "brought the men around to the front" where eye contact was possible. So "breast men" ought to be the sweetest men...?

³ I was 14 years old and could very well just have been the victim of marketing: I think I remember Playboy making a big deal out of her and presenting her as a sexual superstar even then.

⁴ Simple deduction.

⁵ I myself have a vague interest in contemporary porn star Sasha Grey (who stars in an upcoming Soderbergh film); Ms. Grey evidently has a brain in her head and takes the position—one that strains credulity but is appealing to the intellect, libido, and superego alike—that her porn career is some kind of nth-wave feminist/intellectual political statement...and I'm trying and failing right now to determine whether my interest in a reasonably articulate, surgically unmodified girl with a pretty face and a tendency to describe herself as "existentialist" (and who, to be honest, would probably strike me as purely pretentious if she weren't cute) is (a) the opposite of what K. is describing or (b) exactly the same.