Site Meter Reflections on Playboy

August 18, 2008

Monday morning autodidact report 6

Lately, some things have been sucking. Moving away from my past and towards the Pacific coast has proven more difficult than I thought. Meanwhile, I embarrass myself with daily failures of nerve: I keep failing to find the guts to give nearly as much of myself as I could to the self-study projects. Do the self-employed have the toughest bosses of all? If the work is not necessary to earn a living and yields only intangible rewards of self-enrichment, does this paradoxically make the work so much harder to get done?

Unfortunately, it’s been another seven days with nothing on my Playboy fan blog between two autodidact reports. This embarrasses me in at least two ways. For one, I feel unworthy of the beautiful ideas Playboy symbolizes for me, having let so much time go by with no thematically appropriate material on the blog. For another, I’m starting to get paranoid at the thought that people will suspect that the time I waste avoiding my own goals is spent masturbating.

As these paragraphs brew, it occurs to me that I only wish I could name masturbation as the thief of my time. Physical self-love is an order of magnitude more dignified than the mental acts of self-abuse I indulge in almost constantly. All day long, I have compulsive fantasies about being helplessly victimized as other people piss all over me verbally. The temptation to unhappiness is shockingly difficult to avoid. Who, especially among Playboy fans, wouldn’t be less ashamed of an addiction to wanking than to that?

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:50 AM

November 11, 2007

Think your kid’s puberty is funny? YouTube shows how much you are hated.

How do I know? Because this diabolical musical variation on Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds looks so much like the sadistic glee of the two dipshits who gave me life in teasing me in public on a difficult subject during a difficult time. Not coincidentally, it’s the sadistic glee I take in publishing this post, too. This is a scene of grand-scale science-fiction violence with imagery clearly intended to evoke the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Sensitive persons, you know the drill.


Naturally, Wikipedia can tell you everything you didn’t know you would enjoy knowing about “Yakety Sax” (not to be confused with the less interesting “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters).

For another inspired take on extraterrestrials extra-tyrannicals, read here.

Update, June 15, 2008, 5:37 p.m.: Probably the fourth time all the way through for me, the Spielberg version of the Wells novel is as good as I remember.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 12:07 AM

February 21, 2007

When economists are obsessed with masturbation

Sure, ’tis nothing at all like the morn in spring. (Finish the song parody yourself.) “Pornography may lead to masturbation much as a novel or film may lead to tears or laughter,” says the Feminists for Free Expression website. Of course, FFE intends this analogy as part of a political defense of pornography. But I’ve found another, ahem, use for it: to help understand the economics (and aesthetics) of pornography.

I don’t have the background in economics to answer the question of journalist Brian Doherty and economist Tyler Cowen, “Why is there (still) a market for porn?,” in the language of that discipline. But I’ll point out that porn doesn’t fuel masturbation in the exact sense that gasoline fuels a car. Comedies, tearjerkers, romantic narratives, and dirty pictures earn fans by having socially complex but agreeable effects on consumers’ nervous systems. (Remember that all solitary behavior has social implications, because all secrets are fragile.)

If economists still can’t rid their heads of the admittedly hilarious image of millions of Glenn Quagmires beating off surreptitiously in their bachelor pads, I invite them to replace that image with the implied, off-screen female masturbation scene about 35 minutes into I Wanna Hold Your Hand, an underappreciated 1978 farce that does for the psychology of fandom what Dr. Strangelove does for the psychology of war. In a moment of solitude and moral weakness, Nancy Allen’s character falls under the spell of the Beatles’ early romantic narratives.

There now, isn’t that image more fascinating economically?

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:52 PM