AliceFraser
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The moon, Sexiness, Salon 31 link.
🕑 Added 2021-07-27 02:27:56 +0000 UTCThis picture is of the moon, not the sun. It doesn’t capture how MASSIVE that moon was (help me, science/photography friends - why doesn’t big moon-ness come across in pictures?)
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Some Thoughts on Sexiness
Over the last few days I have kept seeing examples of ‘creepy’ writing by men about their children - the beauty of their children, the innocence and plumpness and wide-eyed naïveté. To clarify, I don’t think these men have inappropriate feelings for their children. It comes across weirdly because the language we have for describing beauty and love is inadequate; we find it hard to describe the astonishing clarity and vibrancy of youth; its mesmerising quality, without summoning the language of romance and sex maybe. But it made me think more about distinctions between beauty, sexiness, attractiveness and all those things.
I have a joke in… ETHOS(? I think ?), about how sexiness and sex are vastly different things - it came from bumping into a Christian youth group one night, on the evening of their annual ball. I was on my way home from a gig and they were on their way to the afterparty. There were about twenty of them, young men and women, all of whom were incredibly ‘done up’ and beautiful. Their bodies and hair and makeup were all perfectly calibrated to this beauty norm of smooth ‘sexiness’, and yet it (both explicitly and viscerally) had nothing to do with the pull towards actual sex. It was almost anti-sex in its perfection.
None of this is to say sex is better than not-sex. That comes down to personal preference, context and situation, but from the perspective of our ability to communicate ideas about beauty, attraction, art and humanity, it’s interesting.
This is just a series of messy thoughts but it seems as though the idea of sexiness (as it’s presented in the modern mainstream) and the experience of human intimacy are almost completely distinct from one another.
One is an artistic aesthetic, lending itself to musing and staring. You lose yourself in the process of seeing this kind of beauty/sexiness. It’s all tied up with things like how “women dress for other women” and how fashion models look good on camera but often very strange in real life. The other is about finding the cracks in one another. It lends itself to taking pleasure in idiosyncrasies and contradictions. You feel more yourself in the process of building this second (more real?) kind of sex.
I was talking to a glamorous pregnant friend the other day and she was talking about intra-pregnant-lady competititive beauty standards. There is, according to my glamorous pregnant friend, a beautiful way to be pregnant and an unbeautiful way to be pregnant if you’re a woman; having basically to do with whether your arms and face get fat or whether you can isolate the fatness of pregnancy to the ‘right’ places. Ideally one wants to look like a snake that has swallowed a goat, I gather. Hoping desperately to be as unchanged as possible by this most profound change in your body’s function and priority.
This article by RS Benedict is a good articulation of the possibly unclose-able chasm between body-perfection and the messy, confusing, gritty vulnerability of actual human intimacy.
Anyway. As ever, no conclusions, just some rambling thinking during this morning’s walk.
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Salon 31 is 9pm US Eastern time on Tuesday 27 July, which makes it 11am east coast Aus time on Wednesday 28th July. Stick it in your calendar! (It’s the only way I remember things!)
Topic: Tea With Alice Salon 31
Time: Jul 27, 2021 09:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87602080055?pwd=eWZNNUNwMTZsK2tFV1F1L3I4b0M3QT09
I’ll send through the passcode an hour before.
Comments
I think the attachment of moral guidelines for appropriate sexual attraction has somewhat clouded the appreciation of beauty as a full-bodied experience regardless of the object.
The reason the moon looks so small is that it’s really far away. It only looks big in your mind because you’re in love with it.
(deleted from below and moved here, was meant to be in response to antzpantz!) It's interesting what is attractive/sexy through a screen and in person. An ex-partner of mine met Ed Miliband at a work event. Her preconception of him was a likeable but awkward politician. What she wasn't prepared for was how in person his genuine, funny engagement, natural voice (rather than recorded) and the way he carried himself was incredibly attractive.
The question I guess is not whether you find them aesthetically pleasing (would follow on Twitter), but actually attractive (would get into bed naked with).
From RS Benedict's article: "We don’t exercise, we don’t work out: we train, and we train in fitness programs with names like Booty Bootcamp, as if we’re getting our booties battle-ready to fight in the Great Booty War." hahaha
antzpantz
I've finally had a chance to read your thoughts on sexiness. I'll admit, I follow a lot of "sexy" women on Instagram but tend to lean towards ones that seem more confident in their bodies than ones who pose and hold up the popular 'idea' of being sexy... I'm thinking the "influencer" type: suntanned bodies, pouty faces, "living life". I feel like the latter is very performative, heavily reliant on the physical body and isn't really intrinsically "sexy". I guess, in a way, one's confidence is what I find sexy? (thought dump)
Meagan
Yes, agree. Also sad that portraying violence is OK as a reality but sex or a sexual relationship isn’t. I mean, which has a better likelihood of happening in real life? (Rhetorical question!)
J. Schuberth
Meant to add: I don't like this trend of everything has to be somewhat kid friendly, it's especially pernicious because violence is often ok, but not sex and real bodies.
J. Schuberth
Two other thoughts on sex vs. sexiness: In America, race and religion have always been part of this tension. Longer discussion. I also think something about modern parent/child relationships is at play in the market, especially for movies. Benedict mentions the PG13 ness of the Marvel movies. I think that a lot of parents want to be "part" of their kids' lives, and so in part, they don't want to have to sit and squirm through a real sex scene.
J. Schuberth
I know nothing about moons, but the article by RS Benedict was really interesting. I think about this a great deal, especially as my sons move into the teen years. Book Smart was one of the only films I've seen recently that captured some of the wonderful awkwardness of two bodies trying to do something together. Growing up I had to sneak over to a friend's house to watch Dirty Dancing.
Phil D
The big moon not looking big in photos is a perspective issue, even when the moon looks big in the sky, it is actually always the exact same size that it always is. Usually, when you see something close it is larger than when you see something far away. Also, when you see something in the sky above your head, usually it is closer than if you see that same thing on the horizon, and therefore appears larger, and your brain knows this. However, the moon is so massive, and so far away, that it doesn't change in size when it is on the horizon compared to when it is above your head, but your brain still assumes that it must be further away, therefore your brain compensates and makes you think that it is much larger than normal, even though it is the same size as normal. When you take a non-zoomed photo of it though, your brain doesn't have all the additional positional information around it, so it looks its normal size, not the falsly magnified size in your head.
Ian Stark
I believe you accidentally captured a Jewish Space Laser if I'm not mistaken. The odds of this happening are incredibly slight. Congratulations.
antzpantz
As a photographer, I have a comment about the moon (haven't read the rest of your post sorry, will do soon) The main reason you see BIG moons behind little people or landscapes is because a photographer is standing at least 1km away with an incredibly long telephoto lens which compresses the distance between background and foreground objects. The same trick is used by 'photojournalists' to make it look like a beach is crowded and not 'socially distancing'. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/13/picture-imperfect-why-photos-of-crowded-beaches-may-not-be-what-they-seem
Donald McCoy
I have the same problem when trying to photograph the moon. Maybe it is the field of view of the camera is so much larger. We can focus on the moon with our eyes and our brain can ignore the rest of the sky while we enjoy the moon, but the camera lens just takes it all in. That’s my 2 cents.
