This is the text I got tonight from a friend: “I am trying my first sewing project with my Mom’s direction. We had a guy arrested today for jerking off next to us in a parking lot.” There are several expected responses to this statement. On one hand, I was fascinated that my friend might be taking up sewing since it is completely out of her nature. Two, when did she get a sewing machine? Three, there are multiple questions about the self-pleasuring gentleman and the circumstances surrounding this . . . um event, that I could have pursued. What I really wanted to know, however, and the first question I asked was, “What were you doing hanging out in a parking lot?”
It’s not everyday you pull into a spot at the mall and after changing your baby’s diaper and having your Mom feed her a banana that you look over and discover that a guy parked next to you, WHO SAYS HELLO, is doing the one man dosey doe. There is also the curious question of why one of the women in the adjacent car began to slowly unpeel a banana, tossing her hair as she did it , before feeding it to another woman. I mean, who does this? Oh wait, I forgot that the woman with the banana was Grandma so probably no alluring hair tossing going on there and the "woman" she fed it to was actually a 14 month-old baby. So what exactly about this situation put this guy over his excitement threshold to the point that he whipped it out right there and went to town?
I’m guessing none of it actually. I think given the fact that this guy was parked two spots in and not in the back of the lot, means that he was just looking for a little public attention, not a specific audience. We all have different triggers for what gets us off and this guy clearly needed exhibitionism. Even so, I think when you add a baby to the situation it enters a whole new level of creepiness. Anyone who has read more than one of my blogs knows that I am pretty open minded when it comes to sex, but somewhere between Grandmas and babies, even I lose my woody.
In a society plagued by images of sex in almost every commercial, billboard, or magazine ad is it really necessary to seek a public display? Or is it possible that we have oversexed our society to such an extent that the only real outlet for pushing the boundaries is such an exhibition? We have so much sex in our society that nothing is extreme anymore. For instance, it used to be that a woman flashing her ankle could set a man to perspiring. While I am not advocating this type of sexist restriction, it does seem that at a point when hard-core pornography is criticized for not doing more extreme acts, maybe we’ve just become too desensitized to sex in general. Everything is bigger and better and that includes these types of transgressions. So now, rather than some guy opening his trench coat to flash you, you have a guy slapping Mr. Happy. I’m a little afraid (and more than a little curious) to wonder where we go from here.
Micro minis, extreme fetish porn, jacking off in a parking lot, barely there clothes in commercials . . . what barriers are left to break down when these things become normalized? For now, I guess it’s just nice that such an act is still offensive enough to warrant an arrest, although I admit to thinking that this guy was probably just trying to get his pleasure and didn’t mean any harm. Then again, there can only be two possible avenues for a story that begins with, a woman, her Mom, her baby and a banana are sitting in a car . . .. One is a joke and the other is a sex offender. I guess my message is just to keep it at home, or else to park in the back of the lot and look from afar, there’s no need for chit chat to enter into it.
What I liked best was the insane juxtaposition of the first two sentences of your friend's text. It would have been better if the two sentences had been divided by a semi-colon, rather than a period. I like the notion that somehow there's a connection between the sewing project and the parking lot event.
ReplyDeleteI had an insane French prof. in college. She was young and funny and a french lit. grad student. We were in class and she was urging us to construct sentences in french that utilized something we'd just learned -- I don't remember, even looking back on the sentence I'm about to divulge -- it may have been some verb form or something. Anyway, no one responded, and she said, Look use your imagination. It could be anything; yoke any two thoughts together. (Maybe she wanted a sentence that needed a present and past tense). In any event, she blurted out -- I do not remember the French version: "I do not like nice weather; my wife has betrayed me."
The sentence stuck. How could these two clauses ever exist in the same sentence? It took a few years, but I eventually wrote a story using that as a first line. I tried my best to make it work. The story, probably, failed in the end. But it's the best sentence in anything I've ever written (though, of course, I merely stole it from Violette).
RMK