June 2009 archive

There’s been a lot of ink spilled on the death of Farrah Fawcett–even the august New York Times has more than half a page today. Like the rest of the mainstream media, it gingerly avoids the n-word: nipple. But nipples are why Farrah Fawcett signifies; she embodied quite an important cultural shift in US society.

I kinda stopped watching teevee before Charlie’s Angels came out, but I’ve never heard anyone argue that it was one of the great masterpieces of the medium or that, with better politics, the then FFM would have rivaled Vanessa Redgrave or Jane Fonda.

Cultural achievement was not why the red swimsuit poster became ubiquitous in the late ’70s. It was because you could see her nipples right through the damn fabric.

Observers have long noted that American males, the straight ones anyhow, tend to have deep-seated breast fixations, and psychiatrists and anthropologists and creative people in diverse artistic fields have responded in their own ways to this fact. But there have been changes within that general pattern.

In the decades before Farrah Fawcett arrived on the scene, the sexualization of breasts in film and photography was centered on the size of breasts and particularly on cleavage. Think Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield. Cleavage is fairly artificial, the product of confining clothing designed to produce it (or fake it). And it has nothing to with the actual erotic zones on the breasts. It emphasizes the preparation of the female as passive object for consumption by the male gaze.

But the claiming of sexual agency by women was a part of the ’60s upsurge and of the modern women’s movement born during it. The red swimsuit poster marked the mainstreaming of the nipple (and underscored the then-shocking symbolic dumping of painfully restrictive women’s undergarb enacted at the Miss America pageant less than a decade earlier).

This was, I’ll argue, a historic advance for materialism and for democracy. Nipples are, among other things, full of actual nerves which can carry actual sexual sensations. Even in guys. And pretty much everybody is born with them. Even guys.

I make no giant claims that Farah Fawcett ended the sexual objectification of women, nor even that the real advances in sexual enjoyment and equality she symbolized are solid-look what happened to Janet Jackson. But she deserves credit for the role she played, not the pussyfooting around we’ve been treated to since her death.

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain.

1. The Washington Post reports the White House says that a transportation system overhaul must wait. One area where reform must wait, according to the Obama administration, is “overhauling the nation’s aging, congested and carbon-emitting transportation system.”

   “The 18.4-cent federal gas tax has not been raised since 1993, and revenue from it falls increasingly short every year because of inflation and the shift to more fuel-efficient cars.” An increase in gas tax or changing it to a “miles driven” fee is off the table until after the 2010 elections.

   To do so, the administration will need “Congress to provide a $20 billion patch to continue funding at current levels, because the Highway Trust Fund, supported by the gas tax, is expected to run dry next month.”

2. The NY Times reports a Derivatives tug of war takes shape. Banks are resisting attempts by Congress to create a new regulator system for derivatives.

   Instead of regulating them, some believe “there needs to be consideration as to whether some derivatives deserve to exist at all.”

   “Simply put,” said Richard Bookstaber, one of the pioneers of financial engineering on Wall Street, “derivatives are the weapon of choice for gaming the system.”

   The Obama administration’s outline favors regulation, but what the actual details of the regulations are will be critical.

   “Wall Street will try to keep as much of the market as possible from moving to exchanges, where prices would be transparent and those taking risks would have to put up collateral immediately when prices moved against them. Instead, the derivatives industry has already started a public relations campaign claiming that it is helping businesses”.

   Despite the clear evidence that Warren Buffett was right when he called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction,” there has been little talk of giving regulators authority to ban some derivatives.

Four at Four continues with stoned wallabies and the world’s oldest musical instrument.

Trying to make sense of the gloomy and chaotic world political scene requires evaluating the likely outcome of the massive conflict between the entrenched forces of organized irresponsibility and the growing forces of an emergent global networked intelligence. To my mind, the best metaphor for what appears to be happening is the electronic warfare phenomenon of “burn through.”

In electronic warfare, radar is a primary sensing system for determining target location and movement. To deny the adversary this information, electronic jamming is used to interfere with accurate radar returns. However, as the power of the search radar increases relative to the jammer, the false signal created by the jammer is overwhelmed and accurate radar information is obtained.

Consider Iran. Ten years ago, the authoritarian regime could easily have suppressed reporting from the streets showing massive protests. But the advent of ubiquitous image-gathering cell phones and wireless Internet access have made censorship in Iran nearly impossible. The power of the Internet has “burned through” the jamming of a sovereign state’s propaganda apparatus.

In America, a similar phenomenon is occurring with regard to reporting of economic conditions. Dozens of independent bloggers are posting grim statistics and analysis indicating that economic conditions are bad and worsening, while the corrupt commercial press and our Wall Street-owned government keeps talking about the end of the recession and “green shoots.” Again, the Internet is burning through the propaganda jamming.

This trend will continue until propaganda and disinformation tactics are thoroughly discredited and a new paradigm for institutional leadership is established. Honesty will become not only the best policy, but the only available option. The force driving history now is the steady, irresistible assault of the collectively gathered truth on the ancient tactics of deceit that have been the basis of concentrated power since the first political lie was told.