Pornography. Some people thing it's a bad thing, but I think those people don't know how to look at it right. I grew up in a world where the lingerie section of the J.C. Penny's catalog was about the hottest stuff a curious eight year old could find. By the time I was out of elementary school, Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Adam & Eve catalogs, etc., were in general circulation among my peers.
Anyway, smut doesn't even have to turn me on for me to be a fan. If it turns someone else on, I think that's a good thing. Don't give me a line about victimization, I don't think porn that involves anything but consenting adults is okay. Beyond that, as far as fantasies go, I don't think anyone chooses to be gay, straight, kinkster or otherwise. We discover what we are. Sure, there are people who discover they are turned on by little kids or by various non-consensual scenarios.
I'll go out on a limb and say that such a person, an honest to goodness pedophile, for instance, might not be able to choose their urges, but rather can choose how to act (or not) on those urges. I'm fine with basically throwing an offender away: you touch a kid once, you'll probably do it again, life in prison is an appropriate sentence—it's what we owe the other kids who will otherwise cross paths with this person.
`
But I think it's dishonest to pretend porn creates the urge. I watched a guy masturbate while cleaning his bicycle chain during BikeSmut. He abused himself in a very real way in the spokes of bike wheel. It did not create in me an urge to do the same when I got home. And actually, I slept through part of the movie: I'd ridden 30 miles, had four or five beers and worked a full day on the way to this thing, and even the parts that were, uh, stimulating to me were only so stimulating in terms of staying awake.
BikeSmut wasn't mainstream, it was never intended to be. Pitches were made (between calls to shut the hell up) for submissions, create and submit your own bike porn. Kinky, gay, straight, whatever, just consensual and involving human powered transportation as well as human powered erotica.
Costumes and exhibitionism were encouraged as well (as they should be). This is the Vacant Farm, the BikeSmut festival, the after-party for Critical Mass, you don't have to worry someone is going to call HR because they saw you wearing 816 Bike Collective stickers as pasties or did a Flash Dance drag tribute on a bike mounted to a trainer.
The crowd could have been more attentive, I suppose, better behaved. I guess if I want to judge the talkers and whatnot, I'd have to accept whatever their punishment is for being the fucker who fell asleep in the front row where everyone could see (I learned later on Facebook).
The cross-dresser on the trainer doing Flash Dance, by the way, had a Boss tattoo just like Frankie's in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not even slightly transexual and I've toyed with getting that one, rarely seen someone with the balls to. Don't dream it, be it.
There were bands, too. A two person band I really enjoyed, when I heard them start to play it sounded like three or four people, but it was a girl on drums and vocals with a guy on drums and vocals.
I put 'NSFW' in the headline for this post, as if the term 'BikeSmut' didn't say it.
I should have bought Schwervon's LP, actually. I might yet.
Of course the next morning I was heading out of town to cheer my friend son in the Dirty Kanza gravel grinder. I'm not good at riding on gravel myself, at least not yet, but tons of my friends are into it, and this grinder in particular is significant because my late friend Joel Dyke co-founded it.
But back to the BikeSmut thing, it was a great party. As a society, we seem like we want to celebrate diversity as far as making sure there's enough black, Asian, Hispanic, etc., kids in a given curriculum, but the diversity of sex is important, too. Conservatives sometimes try to couch it in terms that, if you can't procreate by it, it's wrong. But really, people are a long, long way from any endangered species list, so who cares if one of the greatest track & field athletes of all time wants to be called Caitlyn? If Adam and Steve can't have a baby, someone will take up the slack, guaranteed.
No comments:
Post a Comment