Hair, Apparent

 I live my life staring at a screen. I'm not complaining. I've chosen to do this. Well, chosen makes it sound less like I ran out of options and panicked. I'm aware everyone else also spends all day staring at a screen as well - like Agnetha sang, "I'm nothing special, in fact I'm a bit of a bore." And when I'm finished for the day, I go into the other room and stare at a bigger screen to relax. Sometimes I go to the cinema and stare at a massive screen for a lovely treat. 

But the writing screen is the worst one, because a) I have to have an idea, and b) when I dont have ideas, I look at social media. Not to get ideas. I have never had a single idea prompted by social media, it rather seems to suck the ideas right out of your head. But I am fascinated by social media. It's a fucking mess out there. And people do not seem to care. 

Today, while scrolling a film site, I read the following question: 

"Why female genitalia in movies is always hairy? 

Watching movies and occasionally sex scenes I noticed that actresses always have genitals covered by hair to the point you can't see them, especially in 1980's movies. Was it all a censorship thing?"

Mate, wait until you see 1970's movies!

Obviously, he - and, yeah, I'm going to go ahead an assume this was a boy - was roundly mocked by his peers, but still. I'm wondering what kind of world we live in now where boys have no information on what women's bodies are actually like and, furthermore, have no concept beyond the NOW. It happens again and again: people no longer seem to be able to imagine further than their own immediate circumstances. There's no sense of progression, no history. Perhaps the internet flattened everything. It made everything available all the time. Cause and effect disappeared, genealogies stuttered to a halt. Pete Frame's life's work turned to ashes in front of him. They laugh at the FX in old films because the FX are basic and therefore bad, they sneer at the clothes in old films because the clothes aren't like modern clothes and therefore bad. They find the films slow and dialogue-heavy and boring and therefore bad. Black and white now seems like a perverse style choice. Everything is "cheesy". They say old films are problematic because they haven't personally witnessed the incremental crawl towards a better, fairer society. If it all happens on a flat plain, there are no mitigating circumstances - the films are just evil. Why would anyone make a film like that today, even if it was made in 1972.       

I'm assuming the discoverer of women's pubes gets most of his information about women's bodies from pornography, where the depilated vulva is still king. But imagine his weird isolated life, where he's seen a trend in films of the past, and can only assume that women have been forced to grow pubic hair by men as a way of censoring their genitals. And he can only talk about this cool theory with strangers on an internet forum. There is no other source of information available to him. This is shocking to me. In my day we had schools, but that no longer seems to be the case. I went to a Roman Catholic school in the 80's and was taught by an assortment of nuns and defrocked monks, and seem to have had a better sex education than they have nowadays. I mean, I'm also going to assume he's American, so maybe he comes from that Footloose town where they've banned dancing and pubic hair, for 'tis the devil's beard. 

God. It's so bleak. At least he's trying. He's actually trying to fathom the mysteries of the past. Why DID those poor actresses have to wear great bog-brush merkins instead of the mature woman's natural state of smooth genital alopecia. He's actually an outlier - he's trying to understand the past. He, at least, realises there was one. And he's getting smacked down on the internet because of it. 

Maybe I'm just old. (I am old) I found out today that there's a Gen Alpha now. That's three generations of people who are younger than me. Christ. I remember when a generation was twenty years. Now they keep coming at me like new iPhones. Three generations of people I'll never understand, four if you include the Boomers. 

Five if you include Gen X.