There’ve been a couple of interesting news items about sex in the last couple of weeks, and I have a piece about them over at the Blowfish Blog. In one news item, a manager of a “take the disgusting sex scenes out of your DVDs” business has been arrested on suspicion of having sex with two 14-year-old girls, and was apparently using the “clean up your DVDs” business as a cover for a porn studio. In the other piece of news, the manufacturers of Enzyte, the obviously fakoid “natural male enhancement†pills advertised ad nauseum on TV, are being prosecuted for serious fraud.
So what do these stories have to do with each other? Find out, in my Blowfish piece, Manipulating Sex Fears For Fun and Profit. Here’s the teaser:
“Interesting stories,” you say. “But what do they have to do with each other?”
Just this:
They illustrate how easy it is, in a culture that’s riddled with shame, fear, and anxiety about sex, for frauds and liars to use that shame and fear and anxiety as a cover for their misdeeds.
To find out more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!
I absolutely loved your “second reaction”: But put on a squeaky-clean, sex-loathing facade, and you can get away with buttfucking goats in your rec room, without anyone calling you anything but a good Christian. Bastards.
About the Enzyte refund policy: It’s a common behaviour among men that gets us screwed over a lot. Take coed sports, for instance. A girl can get away with any infraction against a boy and the boy can’t complain; he’s too worried about looking like a wimp because he’s being abused by a girl. Men are willing to put up with all sorts of injustice in order to preserve the macho facade.
As Aardvark points out, the thing that makes it hard to be a man in our culture is the constant pressure to “be a man.”
I was just explaining to a group of middle school teachers yesterday that with many of our boys, “the difference between grief and anger is an audience.”
I get up at 5 weekdays, and turn on the TV right away (it helps me wake up). That time of day, on a lot of the cable channels are Infomercials. Imagine my surprise to see our old buddy Kevin Trudeau, hawking his latest book on getting out of debt. Remember this asshole? He’s the one who had books on natural cures, weight loss, etc. He was convicted of larceny and fraud, and WENT TO PRISON FOR IT. And now he’s back. And not only is he an expert on herbal cures, he’s an expert on finance, too! Wow! What a guy! What I don’t understand is why they keep giving him air time.
There are so many crooks out there taking advantage of people’s ego, vanity, grief, and fear.
I do believe individuals have a certain amount of responsibility to do their homework, and “read the fine print.” But this kind of blatant fraud needs to stop. He’s basically practicing medicine without a license.
Now that it’s cold and flu season, I’ve been wondering about the various OTC remedies I see advertised on TV – such as ZyCam and “EmergenC.” I’m going to look them up on http://www.quackwatch.org.