Let's Talk About Sex Baby

I have been quite disturbed recently with a great deal of ... SEX! I have to dip into other media, not just books for this talk. I have recently been reading a book, London: The Wicked City: A Thousand Years of Prostitution and Vice by Fergus Linnane. This book is making me really begin to consider what the muffin man really did on Drury Lane since it was a hotbed of nasty nasty! There were things called posture molls that were basically dominatrix ladies. They flogged or were flogged and many of them did a special dance and trick that was followed by the spectators attempting to chuck money into her "commodity" (and she was typically in a head stand about this time). It is kind of interesting to see that sex and sex fetishes have not changed since the 1700s...and I'm sure Mesopotamia and Greece and Rome had just as many freaks as London did in the 18th Century. It is easy to see why there was such prudery in the Victorian Era if it followed the horny 18th Century - this is probably why British people are so darn repressed now. They were kinkier than kinky back in the day and now they are trying to work back out to a normal after fluxing into the extreme prude in the Victorian Era.

This leads me to our more modern media and literature. Is anyone else disturbed that more and more lyrics are beginning to sound like rape? The whole of Kanye West's addition to Katy Perry's ET is raunchy and this part sounds like rape:

Tell me what's next, alien sex
I'mma disrobe you, than I'mma probe you
See I abducted you, so I tell ya what to do
I tell ya what to do, what to do, what to do

There are a bunch of other songs out there as well that sound exactly like this or have similar lyrics to excuses guys use as justification for rape. Justin Timberlake and 50 Cent have lyrics in a song, Ayo Technology, that sound like these justifications:

Ooh, she wants it, uh uh, she wants it
Ooh, she wants it, (so), I gotta give it to her,
Ooh, she wants it, uh uh, she wants it
Ooh, she wants it, (so), I gotta give it to her,

Call me crazy, but I think I like my songs with more of sexual innuendo than full on descriptive. We don't have anymore black snake moans or hound dogs. Artists had to be so creative back in the day to get their yearning out there, now guys just tell all us girls to shake it, "sit" on "it", spin it round the pole a few times, and show them our breasts. I was really quite disturbed in 2010 when popular radio stations were playing the Top 100 (or whatever number their station was) songs of the last decade...most of the top 20 were about shaking your butt. I think part of the reason I have taken to folk and blues music more and more because there is actual emotion and plot and detail to these songs other than grabbing or shaking or humping! Goodness Grapenuts, Josephine Baker used to dance around topless in Paris and she had more class in her songs than half the music on the radio today. Personally, I think I'd rather listen to my kids sing Night Moves by Bob Seger than Right Round by Flo Rida.

I do have to say that pop culture is trying to redeem itself in the form of Glee. I have to say on of the most honest and real sex talks I have ever heard was when Kurt's dad sat down to talk to him about sex. It was definitely a respect yourself and that's the best you can do for yourself when it comes to sex. I can respect someone that gives a message of expressing yourself sexually but doing it in a way true to yourself and respecting yourself. That is the best way to keep the balance - just be true to self!