October 2023 – Splendid Isolation

So let’s look at some not-so serious news, for starters:

...asking the question nobody really needs an answer to.

...and if you think she had “daddy issues” before this...

But some have different ideas on the facility:

...keyword: Germany.

...wait, you mean Trump’s not going to set up firing squads after he’s elected?
#LostVote

...I guess “hunting over bait” is illegal there. And somebody remind me again why people like this are still alive, let alone not still in jail.

And in Glueball Jihate News:

...and the Izzies missed out on this Target Of Opportunity?

...and Turkey’s Kurdish separatists are just freedom fighters. See how that works, you Islamist asshole?

...hey, it’s their First Amendment right. Now, under the same auspices, let’s talk about taking care of this bitch:

...crucifixion or beheading? I report, you decide.
#CulturalAppropriation

…my suggestion: round up everyone involved in this rally, and deport them to Gaza. Let’s see how they’re treated by Hamas.

And now for some more Girlyman News:

...IBM HQ is in Armonk, NY (he explained unnecessarily).

From the Great Cultural Assimilation Project comes this item:

...so much for that silly “Homeland Security” thing.

Time for the ever-popular (and link-free) INSIGNIFICA:

...hey, “EggSlut” isn’t that bad, when you consider the other options, e.g. “Brekkie-Box” , “Fried Faggots” or “Spotted Dick”.

Finally, on thinking about things we’d like to eat, here’s another perennial favorite:

…

Call that “busty”? Nope. We want MOAR busty:

…kinda like that.

Erratum: in last week’s roundup, I suggested that the brewery worker found peeing into the vat may have been employed by Anheuser-Busch. This was incorrect. The actual brand of beer thus “affected” was China’s Tsingtao and not Bud Lite. I regret the incorrect aspersion, because we all know that Bud Lite is most excellent beer, the favorite of young drunken men for decades, who can’t all be wrong. [eyecross]

Also, keyword: China.

By the way, Tsingtao is the Asian equivalent of Bud Light — very popular, for no apparent reason.

Worn Out

October 31, 2023 Kim du Toit Writing

I see that aged author Jilly Cooper has thrown in the towel, so to speak, when it comes to writing her bonkfest novels. Actually, it’s kinda sad:

The 86-year-old, who’s known for her light-hearted take on erotic fiction, confessed that penning her new book, Tackle!, was much tougher than her others because she’s not that interested in sex any more.

The British author, who lost her husband Leo ten years ago, and said writing hot scenes to satisfy readers was harder than people think.

She told Good Housekeeping magazine: ‘I’m 86 now and have forgotten how to do it!

‘It’s quite difficult to write sex scenes – you can’t go on finding ways to do it differently.’

Well, yes — it’s the same thing about having sex itself: once you’ve gone through the Kama Sutra and gone around the clock face a few times, it is a little difficult to imagine new ways of putting it together, so to speak. Hence, I suppose, why people do things like threesomes, sex parties and affairs, not to mention going over to the Dark Side and exploring things like BDSM and bonking those of Tender Years.

Writing it is even more difficult. I once wrote an entire erotic novel, the sex scenes strung together with only the flimsiest of common threads, and by the end of it — after a massive sex orgy — I had the “hero” of the story get married to the only woman he hadn’t managed to seduce. I think he was as tired of fucking around as I was. (And no, I haven’t published it, and probably won’t, even though it did receive rave reviews from a select few beta testers, as it were.)

Anyway, ol’ Jilly’s sex scenes were quite racy for the times in which she wrote them — good grief, over thirty years, it’s a miracle she can come up with a different plot, let alone yet another different way to describe the insertion of Tab A into Slot B (as Sarah Hoyt so delightfully puts it).

But if the old pen is starting to droop with over-use, there’s unfortunately no Writer’s Viagra to come [sic] to the rescue.

Writing about sex is about as ridiculous as having it, at age 86.

Disturbing News

October 31, 2023 Kim du Toit Entertainment, Men & Women

Following on from the above post: I can see why someone at age 86 might not be interested in sex… but youngins?

A new poll found that Gen Z isn’t very interested in steamy sex scenes in their entertainment.

The survey of 1,500 respondents was conducted by researchers at UCLA. It found that almost half of Gen Zers aged 13 to 24 (47.5%) said sex “isn’t needed” for most TV shows and movies. A significant amount (44%) also said romance is “overused” as a plot device.

So what do they want instead? A majority of the respondents (51.5%) say they would like to see more stories about platonic friendship.

I can see why this is, though. Back in the day soon after the wheel was invented (i.e. when I was at the age of the Gen Z group), if you wanted to see sex, you’d have to watch movies where a couple would kiss and the scene would cut to the next morning, showing them fully dressed and having coffee.

Or you could read a Jilly Cooper novel.

Nowadays, of course, PornHub or xHamster are but a mouse-click away for anyone to watch not just a single sex scene, but dozens upon dozens, until you are heartily sick of the whole thing. (Or so I’m told.)

Under those circumstances, I can quite see why Gen Z doesn’t care about sex scenes in movies, and would prefer to see movies about platonic relationships. They can have video sex anytime they want; what they can’t get on any Internet channel is how to handle a friendship.

But platonic relationships? That’s almost as bad as “Young mother, who has just lost her only child to a terrible illness / car accident, goes back to her home town to rebuild her soured relationship with her aging father.” Great Caesar’s bleeding eyeballs, that’s enough to make me venture over to yet another true-crime show on Discovery+. Kill me now.

On the other hand, though, I have to defer to the late and brilliant novelist Alistair MacLean, none of whose popular novels had so much as a passionate grope in the story, let alone a full-ahead bonking. MacLean put it quite simply: “Sex scenes slow the story down.” And he was quite right, of course, and the same is true for the movies.

Anyway, most sex scenes in movies are soft-core thrustings, which I’ve always found somewhat insulting. And the ones that are “courageous” [/pretentious movie critic] end up being horribly depressing, as though the director can’t get himself/herself to show sex as being actual fun, or loving.

And it’s still true that doing an explicit sex scene most often spells the end of the actor’s career (anyone seen a decent movie with Chloë Sevigny since Brown Bunny was released?), so the best one can hope for is some wannabe / usetabe actor doing the dirty.

And who cares about that? Not I and, it definitely seems, not Gen Z.