rejecting the sex of the past—the Lost Generation sluts and sleazeballs who cavorted, canoodled, and contorted with people like Fatty Arbuckle—to create something entirely different. Sex was redefined. It was an ultraindividualistic sport of play and pantomime which didn’t even happen when it happened. Eros, once risqué, naughty, and discreet, became stark, narcissistic, and codified like the new dances; people practiced their moves, first through smut, then with post-hippie how-to manuals (such as The Joy of Sex), and then finally with “hardcore” pornography as a guide.
Pussy-eating, cocksucking, anal sex, threesomes, wheelbarrowing, and 69 were outlined, streamlined, diagrammed, and stripped of mystery. The cobwebs were cleared and a tungsten bulb was blasted at the newly clinical sex act. Without risk of pregnancy and with the new brutal aerobics of the frug and the jerk banishing intimacy, closeness, and tenderness, the teen-amphetamined world of rock ’n’ roll begat a whole new scene. This started with the guttural obscenities of the first rock ’n’ rollers. But though Elvis and other first wavers’ gestural feats led the way, the twist was the coup de grâce which finally did away with the sexual tenderness of the old world.
New razor technology was also introduced in the new age, to address the compulsory youthfulness enforced by the new adolescent rock ’n’ roll class. Formerly, “countercultures” sought wisdom and experience. The Beat Generation had wanted to look mature and rugged, while the Lost Generation were likewise scruffy adults. Now, people shaved whatever facial hair they had to maintain a young look. Not coincidentally perhaps, shaving technology became quite sophisticated in 1957—immediately before the twist appeared—with Gillette marketing the first “adjustable” razor, which allowed a closer cut than ever before. Yet all this shaving had another function as well: to enforce insensitivity, militarism, and a brutal machinist ideology.
Hair acts as antennae on the body. Hair on one’s body makes one sensitive to one’s environment. Religious people are typically hairy and resolve not to cut their hair lest their relationship with God—via their antennae—be severed. Hasidim, Amish, Rastafarians, Orthodox Muslims, and Sikhs all have edicts about maintaining certain hairs or hair that is sacred. Samson was the biblical story of a hero who lost his power by cutting his hair. Conversely, when the Greeks and Romans successively conquered their respective known worlds, they were remarkable for their decision, culturally, to be without facial hair. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, a Greek descendant, was the last of the kings of Rome (535–496 BC) before the Senate era, and also the man to introduce the razor to the kingdom.
Lucius shaving himself signaled a paradigm shift which brought about his own defeat. The beard was a signal of the monarchic father authority, while the shaved face was androgynous and democratic. The razor excited new passions which struck with a dialectic fist. Shaving reversed time and blurred identity. Old could suddenly be young, masculine could be feminine, identities were revealed to be mutable/equivocal, and a craze for democracy was the result. Lucius’s dynasty was overthrown and gave way to the senatorial Rome of historic renown. After he was deposed, the newly shaven Roman Republic was declared, which then set about conquering the known world.
The Romans had taken their democratic model from the Greeks of Athens, who had also been known to shave and oil their bodies, as had the Egyptians who inspired them. In antiquity, the Athenians maintained an empire in the Peloponnese, demanding slaves and treasure from their neighbors. The Romans eclipsed Greek conquests and have been the aesthetic template for most imperial projects since, e.g., the National Socialists, Bismark’s Prussia, the European fascist movements of the 1930s, Napoleon (whose reign was synonymous with the architectural “Empire” style), Great Britain, and the USA (Washington, DC’s neoclassical buildings, the eagle as national symbol, and the “fasces” wall adornment at the US Congress are but a few examples of the country’s repetitive and unimaginative invocations of Roman imperial power).
Our sexual ideas are also borrowed not from the sophisticate cultures who created the Kama Sutra, but from kindred brutalists, the Romans. Roman depictions of sex in the ubiquitous brothels of Pompeii, which feature Priapus centrally, are curiously similar to images of modern pornography.
Hairless tribes were dominant over their hairy neighbors. Besides haircutting, rituals of self-mutilation were symbols of tribal potency; circumcision, an obvious example, was not religious but a cultural designator of toughness and exclusivity. In parts of the world with more history, such as Asia, it’s theorized that relative hairlessness developed as an evolutionary trait of survival. As the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians showed, less hair meant military prowess and dominance over foes. Hairiness was a sacred trait, reserved for the noncombatants such as holy men, poets, philosophers, crazies, and nursing mothers. Similarly, shaving one’s body desensitizes ones body. It makes one more machine-like, more macho; it makes brutality easier. As soon as hairiness was associated with leftism, the fate of that ideological propensity was doomed.
With the so-called sexual revolution, people started shaving not only their faces but also their pubic regions. This began with an avant-garde of homosexuals but spread with the popularization of pornography via the Internet and the “hook-up culture” of casual straight sex performed by nerds and squares. The shaved body signals a person who’s not hung up by attachments, feelings, romanticism, or any of the tawdry aspects of relationships or “love.” The shaved crotch was one that was ready for wordless action steeled against vulnerability.
Onlookers of porn complain of the childlike resemblance of the shorn genitals, that the shaved vagina looks prepubescent, which makes them uncomfortable. But the shaved pubic area is meant to look preadolescent. It denotes a preadolescent disregard for the potency of sex in regard to emotionalism, romanticism, etc. Pubic hair paradoxically doesn’t protect the sex organ but extends it; it is a quite sensitive part of it.
Chopping off one’s pubic hair is akin to cutting the foreskin or female genital mutilation that persists in some parts of the world. It is designed to desensitize. Violence-worshipping youth cults such as the military and the “skinheads” of Britain typically shave their heads as a designation of sociopathic unfeeling. The hair, instead of protecting or hiding the organ, actually comprises thousands of feelers which lend sensitivity to the organ, exposing it to its partner’s signals of empathy, love, lust, shame, fear, disgust, et al. A hairy body is simply less prepared for modernistic, mechanized body-mashing.
Hairlessness is an aggressive stance, and implies a lack of vanity and disdain for luxury. It implies a state of war. A French-style waxing job or pubic “landing strip” is like the so-called mohawk haircut favored by the Pawnee tribe and used in times of war by Cossacks, airborne troops, and the like. The “Brazilian” wax job is the full skinhead.
In the pretwist era, the dancer would often dance with many partners in a simulated orgy. It was essentially a tryout for sex or a replacement, but in its explicitness and its intimacy, it could not be called repressed. After the twist was introduced, sex repression saw its apex expression in the “mania” or alienated and displaced erotic cavalcade which met the Beatles and other stars of the era. After the disappointment engendered by the Beatles’ breakup came a mass, culturewide depression. Soon afterward, drug abuse became practically compulsory for teens who liked music. This was another replacement for sex. The so-called sexual revolution, celebrated as a liberation which encouraged participants to have more sex with more partners, was actually a revolutionary transformation of sex: changing what had been the sex act into a series of alienated, self-conscious moves, or replacing it with the sensual high of the institutionalized “culture” of drugs.
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All Power to the Pack Rats!
Ikea and Apple’s War on “Hoarders”
I. APPLE VS. THE “HOARDERS”
