Large Fierce Mammal

A Long Winter’s Night is the perfect time for telling stories around the fire, and often those take a reflective bent on where things are, how they got here, and where they’re going in that handbasket. We’re doing that tonight to the chagrin of those younger members of the assemblage who suffer the stories of their elders as quaint reflections of a time when people were struggling to learn what everyone who is now older than ten has the agreement of their peers they already know.

At this point in time, society has ghettoized into echo chambers inhabited by people of mutually, albeit not widely, acceptable ilk, and this is because the overwhelming majority of these exist on social media websites where apartness may legitimize itself unopposed, and even the most heinous weirdness feels emboldened to self-normalize, even if only from the shadows. This seems to be rediscovered by the greater consciousness — and by that I don’t mean greater as in good, just wider in scope — when what was once hidden, or at least willfully ignored, inevitably effervesces to spill over into the mainstream media, or worse yet, onto you personally.

Something you must have noticed by now is that the long standing mantra deciding the triage of front page worthiness — “If it bleeds, it leads, — has an evil twin, and one you’ve probably heard of.

Sex.

Not the act itself, you understand. That’s just the period at the end of the sentence. What fascinates and complicates what we like to call these days “the conversation” is the mystique fueling the fantasy that is the often poorly lit, bumpy, and winding road leading to that point of punctuation.

Controversy born of scandal has always sold newspapers and incentivized click-bait, but a sex scandal will lubricate that mouse button with drool, and sometimes other things. Old as it is, the phenomenon was beautifully encapsulated by Bernie Taupin in his lyrics for Candle in the Wind, sung to greatest hit status by Sir Elton John in the days before the title —

“And even when you died
Oh, the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say
Was that Marilyn was found in the nude”

About the song, Taupin said,

“I wrote ‘Candle In The Wind’ about Marilyn Monroe, but she is absolutely not someone I admired a lot as a kid or anything. She was just a metaphor for fame and dying young, and people sort of overdoing the indulgence, and those that do die young. The song could have easily have been about Montgomery Clift or James Dean or even Jim Morrison. But it seemed that she just had a more sympathetic bent to her, so I used her. And she was female, and that was more vulnerable. But it was really about the excesses of celebrity, the early demise of celebrities, and ‘live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.’ And that was really the crux of the song.”

The kind of female vulnerability Bernie Taupin was referring to we can all recognize — the kind that comes from the commodification and attendant commercialization of sex. Ripe fruit. Fresh meat. Something that happens in gradations ranging from the merely titillating to the heinously reprehensible.

This is not a new development, but learning to traverse the perilous waters of gonads and strife is not made easier in a world where Masculinity is demonized. Power, intelligence, and even masterful combat skills are portrayed by blockbuster movies to spring inevitably from being born with a vagina. That equality doesn’t mean what most people think it means.

Boys struggle with becoming a Man because most have never met one, let alone learned by example from living with him. Nobody can agree to what a “woman” really is, in a world where laws exist demanding all someone needs to do is declare themselves one for the rest of society to treat them as such, absent further thought or, Heaven forbid, question. Where people believe that raising a baby born with a penis or vagina as anything other than a boy or a girl from the moment of their appearance upon the Earth is some sort of unforgivable imposition.

I entreat you, Goode Reader, to keep those sentiments in mind going forward, for the hour grows late, and the young ‘uns too absorbed in seeking gratification through their hand-held devices to fetch another log to the fire, or even consider what a “hand held device” meant to our gratification at their age. Let us instead move on to some timely musical accompaniment.

She’s Always a Woman was released by Billy Joel in his 1977 album The Stranger. The song was written for his then Wife, Elizabeth Weber, to whom he was married from 1973 to 1982.

“… Elizabeth had taken over management of Joel’s career, and was able to put his financial affairs in order after Joel had signed some bad deals and contracts. She was a tough and savvy negotiator who could ‘wound with her eyes’ or ‘steal like a thief’, but would ‘never give in’. Because of her tough-as-nails negotiating style, many business adversaries thought she was ‘unfeminine,’ but to Joel, she was always a woman.” ~ Wikipedia

So now here is Billy Joel to sing us out. More Long Winter Sex tomorrow night Goode Reader, and if that’s not click bait I don’t know what is.