A staff writer at the LA Times tries to answer the soon-to-be-age-old question: Why are we infatuated with lewd celebrity videos? His answer isn't bad, even if incomplete. Although I'm not sure, I think he's admitting at the end that sex is overrated, which is another way of saying it's puffed up beyond all importance--perhaps to an obsession--in our society. It's a rare admission in the MSM, fueled as it is by lasciviousness.
You could argue that this disenchantment of celebrity sex is just the point, that consumers of these videos want to see that the stars are, in their awkward carnality, just like us. But that doesn't explain the insatiable curiosity. Don't we know by now what goes on behind closed doors? Apparently not. When this paper ran a story about the transcripts from Marilyn Monroe's taped sessions with a psychiatrist, in which the star detailed her sexual liaisons (including a weird one-nighter with Joan Crawford), it was the most e-mailed story for days on end.
The metaphysics of celebrity operate on the belief that the rich, famous and notorious are the keepers of a secret knowledge. And nothing baffles us more than intimacy and sex, which is precisely the hinge of our Cartesian mind-body dilemma. So we keep looking to those we presume have greater authority. And because demand has always outstripped supply, a whole industry has sprung up to create celebrity look-alike porn, like the ersatz Veronica Lake prostitute in L.A. Confidential.
This is a very old curiosity. I remember reading Ovid's bawdy poetry in college–the gods were always pouncing on each other in creative ways–and thinking how much like a bad Hollywood tell-all it was. From the Song of Solomon and the Titan-peopled erotic poetry of Sappho, from the pagan canvases of Veronese to Catherine the Great's horse to the pilfered videotapes of celebrities–our Immortals–humans can't seem to get a satisfying answer to the question: "Is that all there is?"
The irony is we already know the answer.
Link.
