If your sex toy lasts for more than 4 hours . . .

Before the fall

Let's just call it "failure to raunch."

Apparently, some in Paris have been a-quiver over the last few days due to the fact that a gigantic, kelly green, um, "Christmas tree" has been erected in the the posh Place Vendôme area of the city.

After a couple of days of outrage--including the issuance of some very public slaps to the artist's face--someone has taken the matter into his own hands (ahem) and purposefully deflated the Jolly Green Giant Sex Toy of Paris.

Quelle tragique. Or not.

Personally, I think the Butt Plug Assassins (and wouldn't that make a great name for a punk band?) missed a wonderful opportunity. The artist notes that indeed his alleged work of art was designed to resemble a giant sex toy but also could be interpreted to resemble a Christmas tree. Ho ho ho.

So, conservative Parisians, why not make it a Christmas tree? Form a fashionably ensemble'd guerrilla group and decorate that gros garçon kamikaze style--guns at the ready to blast balls of paint in colors that look like ornaments and lights, maybe get a ladder and string some veiny garland around the circumference, and then climb to the top and plant at the tip a rather splashy-looking star, something with an effervescent spray of glitter, that erupts or perhaps smokes.

Really, art critics, use your imagination. You'll be far ahead of the artist if you do.

I don't know that I think Paris was "humiliated" by this vision/derision in polyurethane, as Printemps Paris claims. At the same time, is the work really worth the outrage? It just seems like another lazy conceptual art piece, something the artist conjured up to provoke easy shame and cheap indignation. Like the Big Rubber Ducky that inhabited the Pittsburgh waterfront a year ago--but with an outsized erection. In other words, not much more than a smutty joke told between work colleagues but accidentally overheard by your clients when you thought you'd disconnected the conference call but, oops, no, you hadn't.

Not that that's ever happened to anyone I know.

So wow, Monsieur Artiste. Vous êtes such a vrai trailblazer. [Insert sarcastic tone.]

Essentially, Madonna trod the same ground with her Sex book way back in the last century--and that was hardly an original idea then. It was all designed to provoke, to challenge, to engorge public opinion, and have it spew forth all over proper society--oh, and sell records and un-stall a career, too.

So let's not pretend we're noble, Painter Man, that we're doing this all as an ironic public service to the perpetually pinched. I've been to the Tate Modern. I know bullshit when I see it in an art gallery and read about in an exhibition catalog.

Thus, one of my reactions to this sort of thing is, meh, how boring, how childish. It's the same reaction I have whenever I watch The Colbert Report or The Daily Show and the Colorado legalization of marijuana gets a mention. A certain element in the crowd always whoops it up, shouts, celebrates, sounding like thirsty frat boys at a Rush Week kegger. Beer! Dope! Sex! Human behavior reduced to the most thuddingly dull and monosyllabic of advertising campaigns!

Despite promises by skin creams and surgeons to the contrary, you simply cannot be 16 forever, dudes. More to the point, why would you want to? What's missing from your life that makes you idealize your youth and infantilize your joy?

My other reaction is--if I must be honest--a small amount of embarrassment. It's not because I'm shocked by the sight of a sex toy--trust me on this. While seeing one out of context, in public, is provocative and makes a vague point (and hence the term conceptual art), it also seems . . . immodest--akin to too much sharing about your bodily functions, too many sloppy tongue kisses on the TV screen, too great a knowledge about what turns you on and turns you off when you're just an acquaintance, and I really don't want or need to know.

Yes, you can share everything with everyone. But do you really need to? Shocking the easily shocked is hardly a bold maneuver. About all it does is draw attention to yourself, which I suspect is mostly the point anyway.

And yet, I'm blogging about this, finding it amusing, the reactions from the quickly enraged as well as the staff writers tripping and dripping all over themselves to find the best penis pun in the mix. As a Facebook friend of mine suggested earlier today, The Guardian did a nice job, but I still don't think there's a clear winner in The Chronicles of Wangia just yet.

* * *

Even though I'm definitely a Westerner and that's unlikely to change anytime soon, the West in general seems incredibly, unnecessarily immodest, prurient, and frivolous to me these days, this being an excellent example of the anything-goes-just-add-nipple-clamps approach to popular culture. I don't know that I think we should live our lives cloistered, concealed, and chastened, too frightened, too ashamed to be our real selves, beat down by the wowsers among us. I benefit in many ways from a more liberal, laissez-faire culture, and I have no desire to step back in time--at least not too far back. Nothing before the Second World War in the U.S., please, or possibly during the interwar years in Europe, thank you.

I also don't want us to live our lives as if the whole world were watching. But the fact remains that the whole world is watching and judging and dismissing or despising us for our "freedom"--or maybe it's just because we're tacky fools who have an it's-all-just-one-big-dirty-joke take on life.

I feel the same sort of embarrassment when I am reminded of some of the street festivals in San Francisco, particularly the Folsom Street Fair, in which bodily functions are eroticized, S&M peccadilloes are put on display--and then immediately photographed and filmed by religious conservatives and shared with their converts to further "prove" that gays are "dirty," "disgusting," and "perverted."

No thank you, not even a cigarette

Of course we're not all like that and some of us are bothered by the behavior of our brethren and the resulting undue pressure that we need to "get with it" in order to be hip, cool, hot, or radically out there. Alternately, that doesn't mean we all want a spouse, 2.5 kids, and a mortgage in the 'burbs either. There's a lot to be said for living between the extremes, one foot on this red dot, a hand on the blue one, an elbow on yellow, a knee on green, Twister-style.

At the same time, I can't spend a lot of time worrying about what other consenting adults get up to in their spare time, in their private or semi-private rooms, with whom, and with which household objects.

However, conversely, I don't like being tarred with the same brush or having my hide tanned by the same bullwhip. Yes, it would be great if the world would just lighten up a tad and let people be. But that's unlikely to happen--and even if it did, would we be prepared for the Libertarian-styled, don't-tread-on-me-but-don't-mind-if-I-do-tread-on-you lengths such a world would be likely to extend to?

Maybe it's because I grew up in the South and in a small town that I'm particularly attuned to this dis-ease over showing too much of your private self to the world. The goal growing up was for everyone to not know your business, any of your business, or even to know what the inside of your house looked like. Because you knew those who found out anything would talk about you in the most unflattering (and inaccurate) terms behind your back while smiling sweetly and insincerely to your face. You might get lucky and catch them in their hypocrisy--overhear them dissing and deriding you or read about them getting caught (literally) with their pants down or dress up with someone else's spouse. But you couldn't bank on that--although their sanctimony had a life-time guarantee.

Thus, sometimes I think it might not be a bad idea to cover up just a little, to tone it down a notch, to share that thought when we're among friends but maybe not shout it so loud while we're seated next to a family of four at Red Lobster. Use our inside kink, as it were.

And keep that sex toy in the drawer of the bedside table--or if we feel impelled to share it in public, try San Francisco or Amsterdam where it's likely to be more appreciated.