Quote: Gussie Fink Nottle @ 17th April 2015, 9:40 PM BST
I'm sorry, Horseradish. But I just must ask this.
How do you get from backsides and twerking to American neo-liberal economics in the same post?
Reading it I can't avoid the feeling that I skipped a page or two.
But however many times I re-read, I just can't spot what I have missed.
Care to enlighten me?
Else I will have to retaliate by posting an alleged link which connects cricket, the average length of hair in the Czech Republic and Chinese industrial output.
Thanks for the question. Sex wouldn't exist in an economic vacuum. In very equal societies - eg Communism - the vast majority of people are poor. They produce children to have some chance of support in older life as they aren't going to get any money from the state. Apart from that, they lead lives that would put the purest of nuns to shame. Why? Because at a certain point they can't afford to raise any more children. In contrast, liberal societies will flaunt their economic inequalities. Huge numbers of people struggle financially but comparatively few will be really desperately poor, at least for as long as there is some sort of welfare. The entire emphasis in society is on making money out of anything. So sex is a massive selling point just as everything is a massive selling point, including even the last blades of grass. And being one of the most fundamental of things, what that does is (i) symbolise the ongoing economic inequalities (ii) reinforce them and (iii) post 1979, accentuate them.
So in the case of twerking in pop music etc, it is a fairly basic thing. Some might say it is the sort of tribal phenomenon that might be found in a jungle except there it is likely to be more more about life and death in economic terms. It is cultural in a longer-term sense, definitely roots up in emphasis and consequently dignified. Whereas in, say, the jungle of the Bronx, big money makers will take a handful of youngsters away from their hovels and say "we're gonna make you a star". "How?" they are asked. "Just trust us" is the reply followed by the instructions "Sing and Dance to this Rhythm" and "Twerk".
And yeah, those few people get very rich. It's a novelty thing. Fun. No one is in the slightest doubt that those from Yale are unlikely to be twerking other than on that night when they all took a load of drugs and decided hilariously to try to mimic poor people. But - and this is the crucial point - as for the average young member of the public, yes, everyone starts twerking. It is the in thing and the commercial packaging of it is such that it cleverly hints at being upwardly mobile. But the vast majority do not get rich on it. They have a temporary distraction. And if anything any buy in on their part is unwittingly compliance. Compliance with the neo-liberal economic expectation that they will easily display an instinct not to reach for the stars but to swing in the trees without a care about the loss of future state pensions. Hence, you, GFN can twerk if you want to. A Horseradish is not for twerking.