Am I a prude ... or
Sun Jun 24, 2007 at 09:03:43 PM PDT
... are we witnessing the decline and fall of American culture?
I grew up in the upper midwest in the 60's in a Catholic family and have since become athiest (me -- not the family) so in my 40-some years I've been around, culturally speaking. I spent a significant number of years devoted heart and soul to theater and, believe me when I tell you, naked bodies and the overt sexual acting-out of persons of whatever sexual identity would not cause me to bat an eye in the normal course of things.
But I began to seriously wonder about modern American culture in the last ten years, give or take. It was the crotch grab gesture that did it. It wasn't the crotch grab of the inner city tough guy -- grabbing his package, I suppose, in some sort of gesture of manly fuckyouativeness. This gesture, authentic or invented, didn't bother me in the context of a movie or a strutting rap performance. Well ... to be honest ... it did bother me a little bit in that it made me wonder if my slight uncomfortableness came from the prejudice that is in my family only one generation back. But there always seemed to be a point to this gesture -- nonverbal communication going on -- and as a theater geek I appreciated the effort.
But somewhere along the line it became commonplace. It lost power. It became a dance step in MJ's bag of tricks. I'm not enough of an afficianado of modern dance culture to place this precisely, but it seemed to me that female dance performers began to get progressively more sexual around this same time.
We seem to be at the point now that bending over with your ass pointed toward the audience as you look back over your shoulder suggestively and thrusting your pelvis repeatedly are sort of the baseline gestures of popular dance. Is this okay with everybody? I expect that any day we will see video of 6 year old beauty contestants incorporating these moves. Would that be okay with you?
Then this last week, I was watching the NBC morning "news" program called The Today Show. This was Thursday or Friday. As the four morning anchors sat on their directors chair, the show cut to a video of some new female performer (I didn't catch her name) who included, among her dance moves, giving her breasts a good squeeze. After this brief video snippet they returned to the four hosts, who carried on entirely comfortable with the performance -- if they were watching it at all.
So back to my original question. Am I a prude? Am I simply too old to 'get' modern culture. Is it prudishness on my part to see way over the top sexual gesture as harmful to our culture and especially our young people? Does my diary prove that I haven't escaped my Catholic past? What do you think?
