The Big Throwdown

Her thumbs hooked in the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now. A suntanned goddess giving herself to her lover. With arms outstretched she walked toward me. Lightly her tongue ran over her lips, making them glisten with passion. The smell of her was like an exhilarating perfume. Slowly a sigh escaped her, making the hemispheres of her breasts quiver. She leaned forward to kiss me, her arms going out to encircle my neck.

The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out.

I stood in front of her and shoved the gun into my pocket. I turned and looked at the rubber plant behind me. There on the table was the gun with the safety catch off and the silencer still attached. Those loving arms would have reached it nicely. A face that was waiting to be kissed was really waiting to be splattered with blood. When I heard her fall I turned around. Her eyes had pain in them now, the pain preceding death. Pain and unbelief.

“How c-could you?” she gasped.

I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in.

“It was easy,” I said.

Mickey Spillane

                                                                                  I, The Jury

Women…you can’t live with them and you can’t shoot them…

                                                                             Steven Wright

             Why can’t we shoot them like Mike Hammer, pulling out a roscoe at the last minute and filling that no good tramp with some well-deserved lead? If it was so easy for the private dick in question why can’t the rest of us plug our own haranguing bags of estrogen with the emotional impunity of Mr. Hammer?  Short of murder, anathema to an un-incarcerated lifestyle, even a well-placed grapefruit ground into the mug of the shrieking harridan would still satisfy as the definitive answer as to why you left the goddamn cupboard doors open for the upteenth time.

            Recently, I perused a little ditty in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette with the title of “The rise of the raunch culture” Feminists are torn: Is it porn or liberation of women's sexuality? I will say this: other than Pittsburgh being woefully behind the raunch curve that has easily been going on a good 20 years in most other American cities and along with the occasional mullet and Jagr jersey sighting the question that needs to be asked is what do you expect as anyone who has ever talked to a stripper for more than five seconds can brutally attest? The article maintains that a growing cadre of young women are taking desperate measures to avoid the Ya Ya Spinsterhood by dressing at dance clubs in an overly provocative manner not befitting the freshly scrubbed and apple-cheeked. Tube tops, stiletto heels and skirts short enough to qualify as valances are de rigueur at the trendier nightspots. The girls are doing this to procure the favors of young men and seem to be nonplussed by this realization. The article maintains further that the influence of soft-core cable programming and pure, down and dirty pornography are the likely culprits that foster this obviousness. In a capitalist system the product with the best features and prominent shelf space usually gets the largest market share. If girls want to show their wares to the multitudes who am I to get in the way of somebody’s marketing strategy?

Besides, what is wrong with loving naked women for the sake of being naked women? This is a stupid question if you ask any man with a pulse. There is something inherently erotic about an unclothed female. I don’t care if it’s Scarlett Johansson or Frances Bavier. It is hard wired into the male DNA. That is the way it is. Forget understanding and sensitivity. You can argue all you want about porn objectifying women. It certainly does to a certain extent, just as gay male porn objectifies men. What we have to come to grips with is the fact that there is something inherently arousing simply being an object of desire when under the gaze of another. It has to do with the thing itself, its unencumbered state that is so alluring. The object is unsullied by the exigencies of life. It is pure in its prurience.

The current zeitgeist in clubs shows a typical backlash when another paradigm fails to deliver on its promise. Feminism in the 60’s and 70’s was the movement that was supposed to free women of the drudgery of being women. Equal pay for equal work. Porn was bad. Being smokin’ hot was bad. It was as if everything inalienable about being heterosexual was thrown out with the bath water. It was no longer okay to ogle or comment on the shapeliness of a woman lest you be ready to do battle with a torrent of feminine vitriol. There in lies the rub. From complete uninhibited sexual freedom to doctrinaire pronouncements everything that was human and sexy was reduced to an afterthought. Men felt the wrath like Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s nest. “What was I supposed to do Doc with her goddamn beaver in my face?”

Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind, Ned Racine in Body Heat, and Brando’s Paul in Last Tango In Paris exemplified this Dionysian view of man’s will to power. There was nothing wrong with The Big Throwdown; a no holes barred Roman Rodeo into sexual ecstasy. Each woman from Scarlet O’Hara to Matty Walker to Jeanne reveled in the experience of being taken for the sake of being taken. I am not arguing for the objectification of women. It is way too overboard in today’s culture. But we cannot deny it. Breasts and buttocks are nature’s way of keeping man interested. As the sculptor Robert Graham once remarked when being accused by a woman of sexism regarding his anatomically correct bronzes, “You don’t get it lady, it’s a guy thing!” it is a guy thing and it is a girl thing too. But taken to the extreme it can have deleterious effects.

You see this through history as groups or minorities under totalitarian regimes finally break the paradigm to the detriment of the movement itself. When one has been thwarted long enough the drive for freedom eventually explodes like a ripened pustule. Inner City blacks rioted in the late sixties sick and tired of being subjugated by the status quo as second-class citizens. Right to lifers not receiving the answers the so craved, reacted to Roe v. Wade by murdering abortion doctors in the name of the Lord. The gay movement came to a head with the Stonewall riots in 1969 and if you’ve ever seen a gay pride parade in San Francisco or Halloween in West Hollywood you know what exactly what extreme is. Five hundred men in tutus singing “Hooray for Hollywood”… As a culture we went from the conservative fifties to the sexually liberated sixties to the feminist seventies to the coke snorting profligate eighties. The feminist movement ran out of gas and women now wonder how can they can break through the glass ceiling and still be feminine. I’m sorry, I like a woman who looks like a woman and not the twin of her husband she eventually becomes in matching lumberjack shirts and sweat pants.

This is a problem in the world. We can’t seem to find the fluid center so we can have it both ways.  Integration and moderation is the key. It certainly explains why men want to sleep with prostitutes, but marry Madonnas. The trick is finding a Madonna who can blow a mean Rusty Trombone. Through out history cultural movements have always swung to the extreme. Today’s young girls are doing the only thing they know how to do. They have forsaken knowledge for artifice and have bought into a system that leaves little room for fault. If you are not pretty enough or curvaceous enough you might not be able to get the right man. The extreme exhibitionism today manifested itself from a lack of personal dimension. It is perfectly fine to be sexy, but to omit a well-rounded inner life is to ensure a very tenuous emotional future. A beautiful, educated and opinionated woman is sexier than anything you can find at your local strip club. But in a pinch well…

We live in very extreme times. Jihads and Fatwas of one or another are everywhere. There is no middle ground. The raunch culture will always be with us in some form. It is in the denial of it that creates these neurotic manifestations.  It is up to the young women not fall into this trap and keep it in perspective. It’s okay to enjoy your physicality and appreciate that others do too, but to devote a life to this one-dimensional position seems a little diminishing. Life is so big it would be a shame to leave it to something as shallow as how short your skirt is. But then again we can’t forget that no matter how hot a chick is; no chick has ever been hot in Birkenstocks.

Now, If you’ll excuse me I must prepare. Next week I am arguing the case for gettin’ some in front of the United States Supreme Court.