At least he's warning you to stay away?
I’ve gotten an ad in both of my heavy-use emailboxes several times now for a show that I can’t ignore any longer, try as I might. The mixture of pandering and cutesiness is truly puke-tastic.
The show is a one-man autobiographical performance titled “The Accidental Pervert” (whoopsie-doodles!), and apparently it takes us trippingly through years of the author/performer’s* salacious objectification of women and furtive monkeyspanking. Bring the kids!
No, don’t bring the kids. Even though the show is “the story of one boy’s odyssey to manhood via a childhood dominated by pornography, an addiction accumulated after the boy happens upon his father’s collection of XXX-Rated video tapes…. He found the tapes at 11 years-of-age. The addiction controlled him until he was 26… THE YEAR HE MET HIS WIFE.”
Caps in the original. It’s all here: young boys are sexual early, which is totally awesome!!!, a boy confronted with hardcore pornography is fodder for comedy, men are helpless slaves to their cocks, craving infinite variety and ever-more extreme acts and images…but the love of a good woman can redeem him! Awwwww.
But the best (worst) part of this ad is its tagline:
“The Best PR That The Male Race Could Ever Want”
That tag actually came from an online review, but it’s been eagerly adopted for promotional purposes. Hey dudes, come see this show, which involves tit jokes and dick jokes and wank jokes and did I mention dick jokes? Also: porn. Lots and lots of porn. With puns! “Star Whores”! Comedy fuckin’ GOLD, brah!
PLUS, you can say it’s theatre so you can trick yer ol’ lady into coming, too, and we’ll explain why your obsessive pornography use is a) normal, b) acceptable, and c) her fault, ’cause obviously if she were sweet/hot/pure/____ enough, you’d be able to do without it. See? DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE! DE-FENSE! *chestbump*
Whatever, chief. Whack off all you like. Obsessively write and talk about it, too. Wank on about your years of wanking. Your sad little show is nothing more than a sorry defense of your male privilege to use exploited women’s bodies for pleasure , and now, years later, profit. Using a childish cartoon image of a flasher–a sexual predator–with a heart over his junk as your logo is just the “tee-hee!” puke-chunk on top of your grotesque, self-indulgent vomit sundae.
There are no “accidents” here. This is carefully calculated stuff of rape culture.
*I’m purposefully omitting the douchehound’s name.
UGH! Disgusting. I am a new reader and have only posted a few times. However, this subject just makes my all of neck hair stand on end and I can’t decide if I should scream, kick or cry!
I googled the title of this “play.” (of course using that term loosely) I read a couple of the reviews and they seem to just recap the same idea that you mentioned in your post. So, my questions for him would be, is there a lesson learned in all of this for him? Does he come to grips with how this industry treats women and men? Does he look for an answer within himself as to why he personally needs porn and how he feels about himself and his relationships because of porn? (I know… these are not chest thumping questions)
Maybe the author of this lovely piece of work needs to read everything that Robert Jensen has ever had to say about porn to really understand how this industry works and how his “little play” seems to only be feeding into the insidiousness that is rape culture.
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html
Blaming others for your bad behavior, which is what this seems to be, it was Dad’s porn etc., isn’t an adult response. I pity his wife. If she ever stops living up to his ideal it’ll be all her fault.
wow, sounds like high art to me. Have we discussed Penn State’s Penis Monologues?
AmBam, I just made myself read about The Penis Monologues. Thanks a heap. I really hope you didn’t have to SM any of that drivel.
Kirstin, a lot of the reviews (that aren’t “Boners! Haw-haw!”) are critical of this show because it isn’t critical. And yet this POS has been running every weekend for AT LEAST 4 month, and has dates scheduled through mid-December. People are paying to see this.
PhDork – no, it’s not an official School of Theatre event so there’s no way I could be forced to SM it. Unfortunately, all the other SMs fought each other for the opportunity (cuz all the cute boyz are always in it and they are sooo clever, teehee). But I WAS ostracized because I was the only person in the department who had a problem with it and made that known (in my usual, vocal AmBam form). It’s not a very woman friendly department – there were incidents with guys being rewarded for violence against women, they rarely do anything with a female lead that isn’t Sweet Charity or the like. We did a Caryl Churchill show once…and hired a male director who actually rolled his eyes when I mentioned feminism. WTF? Anyway – people go ape-shit for that crap, they line up for HOURS in advance to get a seat (meaning there’s zero chance anyone can attend the Vagina Monologues the same day – not that the theatre dept ever does it, but the english and women’s studies depts usually throw something together for V Day). And I’m a bitch (how original) because I don’t think penis jokes are worth sacrificing a benefit against domestic violence.
It’s always so striking how art that women make that is considered strongly vaginal but isn’t about catering to the male gaze is dismissed as silly, gross, or just plain weird, but people (sadly, probably a fair number of women included) will pay good money to watch a dude talk about wanking it for an hour, and afterward they’ll talk about how edgy and hilarious and accurately representative of the human experience the performance was.
I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing a male equivalent to the Vagina Monologues (which made The Boyfriend and I cry for hours and clutch each other after we saw it earlier this year) so long as it wasn’t some misogynistic wankfest (hur hur) and addressed things like cultural attitudes towards circumcision, the damage done by the pervasiveness of phallic symbolism, deconstructions of stereotypical manhood, etc. And include some transguys and intersex folk!
When I was 17 I got put in charge of a group of 10-15 year-old boys at camp and there was nothing funnier in the world to them than whipping out their penises at random times. I guess some boys never outgrow that phase.