...with the otherwise delightful review of 'The Anglo Files' to which I linked you yesterday.
Author Sarah Lyall discusses British sexuality--a chapter which, in my opinion, could have been written just by pasting in a bunch of pictures of Daniel Craig, David Tennant, Christopher Eccleston, Sting, George Michael, John Simm, Hugh Laurie, Alan Rickman, Keith Richards and Craig Charles. And a defibrillator. We'd definitely be needing one of those. What is it with these criminally hot British men? Do you see the sheer diversity of human affect represented by that list? You got rough necks, soft lips, hard eyes, mocking calm, antic promise, dark wit, trembling soul, skull-sight, puppy-dog, oncoming-storm, and so much else all up in there, not only among them but within them, each of them, behind whatever quality they foreground in the world. I mean, there's so much to...so much to...
Where was I?
Oh yes. The book. Right. She covers such topics as the apparently pervasive male-male sexual harassment, the spanking thing, and so on. What caught my eye, though, is that she sums it all up as follows:
"Is it any wonder that Englishmen--particularly British men of a certain class--are so mixed up about sex?"
Um...as opposed to who? Is Lyall trying to imply that Americans, by contrast, are somehow not mixed up about sex? (ED.: I should probably, you know, read the book and find out. Which I think will be a ton of fun! Off to the library...And now, back to my rant.) We are a country that cannot even bring ourselves to tell our teenagers what's what. We just scream at them to wait, then send them home to watch TV, aka The Human Sexuality Exploitation Machine. We silently order them to behave irrationally, then blame them when they do.
And that's just us. We haven't even gotten started on all the other nearly 200 countries out there on this little green football. EVERYPLACE is mixed up about sex. And everything else. Humans are the stupidest species on earth. Our brilliance has arisen out of our stupidity, our inability to operate ourselves properly in any sphere whatsoever. Our brilliance is our compensation. And it isn't half good enough. We're still stoop-shouldered, weak in the core, locked in old patterns, pointlessly argumentative, riddled with disease, governed by fascists, victimized by our childhoods (most insidiously in the ways we can't even perceive), personally unfulfilled, and fundamentally confused. We're not even smart enough to stop inflicting war and crime on ourselves. How do we manage this much wrongness? It should be physically impossible.
Yet here we are, writing books comparing Britain and America.
