Thursday, May 12, 2011

The destination of a dick

For some, this will be a repost of something Blogger ate two weeks ago. -- JRB

The guys from the Jersey Shore bring back memories of junior high school, when watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and lifting weights inevitably led to homosexual conversations with your buddies about heterosexual sex. Straight guys can get very gay with you, in fact, if you let them tell you all about the plans they have for their dicks; the epic adventures and classic confrontations that their dicks will take up -- the whole detailed dick itinerary. It can be quite exhaustive, taking into account many contingent factors that most dicks are unlikely to run into in the daily life of a dick.

I'm not going to pretend that a lot of the intellectual heft wielded by the boys of the Jersey Shore isn't devoted to charting the surest path to victory for their dicks. But I also won't pretend that this is unusual for many of the men I know, even at grandfather age. The Jersey Shore just happens to document this very well, and I suppose it can't come as much of a surprise that audiences are simultaneously horrified and enthralled by that truth.

Of course, it doesn't help that this is being attributed to a socioeconomic conception of class -- that this is how "guidos" behave, rather than "straight men" of all income levels, when the only meaningful difference is that salaried professionals wouldn't announce it on national TV. I can admire the honesty of a Pauly D or Situation far more than the supposed respectability of an Eliot Spitzer, who, whatever he wants to do with whomever, nevertheless betrayed the ones closest to him. I have yet to observe anything of that sort from our self-proclaimed sexual conquistadors, who for their honesty are condemned at the same time that the respectability of a Spitzer is restored.

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