The Fascinating Seventy Year-Old Virgin

The internet loves the news of the weird.  Apparently, a lot of web browsers are clicking over to a brief story about a seventy year-old virgin.  This isn’t that interesting at first blush, especially in light of the story from a few months ago about a woman who’d remained a virgin for over 100 years.  In the latter case, though, I got the impression that the woman may have simply been asexual.  She expressed an overall disinterest in sex and suggested that her longevity could be explained by her not concerning herself with that pursuit.  This seventy year-old woman who is in the news now, on the other hand, claims to have retained her virginity as a matter of moral commitment, as she doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, but never found a husband.

This story wouldn’t be that interesting except for the fact that by being limited to a one paragraph synopsis it opens up my mind to all sorts of speculation about the surrounding circumstances.  That speculation is made all the more intriguing by virtue of two unusual facts:  The woman, Pam Shaw, performed for many years as a cabaret singer, and she’s in the news now because she’s apparently hit her virginity’s breaking point at long last, being ready now to give it up to “a tall, dark, and handsome millionaire.”

This woman seems fascinating.  The image that I get is a tight bundle of lifelong contradictions.  I appreciate that because it’s something that I can relate to, even though there are aspects of it that I admire and aspects that I’m eager to criticize.  First the praise:  Good for her for maintaining her virginity amidst a career in which she was referred to as “The Sexational Pam,” in an industry in which loose attitudes about sex are presumably the recognized norm.

It’s a unique personality type that encourages a person to eschew particular experiences for herself at the same time that she flirts with the edges of those experiences and indulges an active curiosity about them.  As a deliberate virgin, and arguably an asexual, myself, I kind of want the life that she’s led.  I felt oddly comfortable when I had an opportunity to go to an art exhibit at an S&M parlor and when I followed a drunken friend into a pornography store.   So I applaud Ms. Shaw’s commitment to a strangely indulgent sort of chastity.

But here’s the thing that strikes me negatively about her story:  She spent, let’s say, fifty-five years maintaining a commitment to virginity on the basis of not believing in sex before marriage and now she’s announced her readiness to “take the plunge” if the interested part has enough money?  That seems like freakishly inconsistent morality.  Doesn’t the decision to trade virginity for a cash-rich lifestyle sort of betray the very sentiment behind Ms. Shaw’s lifelong chastity.  I would presume that if she didn’t believe in sex before marriage, she felt that love was more important than physical pleasure.  Am I to conclude that now at seventy years old she’d determined that money is more important than both?

On the other hand, I can understand the impulse underlying her statement.  The longer you retain something that requires consistent sacrifice, the more valuable in becomes to you.  Thus, even if you have decided that enough is enough, it can take an awful lot of incentive to push you to an actual breaking point.  It may be that after years of working so close to sex, and now approaching the end of her life, Ms. Shaw has simply decided that she wants to experience something that she’s denied herself for so long.  She probably feels that it can no longer be on the terms that she’d set, so instead she’s changing the terms, compromising the rigid morality in order to cease compromising the physical indulgence.

The woman has evidently lived her life amidst contradictions.  What’s one more?

Andrej-yny

I’ve just read about the fashion model Andrej Pejic, a fascinating story of glamorous androgyny.  Pejic’s particularly notable claim to fame is now having been ranked number ninety-eight on FHM’s list of the 100 Sexist Women in the World, in spite of being a man.  I already commented on last month’s Maxim Hot 100 list, and called attention to the masculine features of their number one pick.  But in that case, I used the observation to make fun of meatheads and their repressed homosexuality.  The case of Andrej Pejic and FHM, however, speaks to something deeper.  After all, since Pejic is identifiably male, the readers who voted him in had to be conscious of the impulses driving their decision.  Either significant numbers of FHM readers believe that the shape of a model’s genitalia does not affect the attractiveness of his or her feminine features, or they voted Pejic in as a joke of some sort, or else a bunch of frat boys genuinely didn’t know the gender of the person they were looking at and have spent the entire time since the release of the magazine trembling in horror and confusion.

Hot Analysis

My friend Lisa, despite being female, receives a trial subscription to Maxim, which she never signed up for and can’t cancel, so she tends to just hand them off to me when she gets each issue. I accept them gladly, but I don’t really read them, because this particular magazine doesn’t generally seem to contain words. I took a definite interest, though, in the one that she got yesterday, because it was the issue containing the Maxim Hot 100, “the definitive list of the most beautiful women in the world.” I was dubious of the self-aggrandizing subtitle, but intrigued to know what the mainstream standard of attractiveness is, and how I would feel about it. It provides me with another great opportunity to be overly-analytical about something that most men would simply look at and not give a second thought.

The vast, vast majority of the entries on the seemingly excessively long list were names, faces, and bodies that were not at all familiar to me. I think I am entirely too divorced from pop culture. But I don’t think that reconnecting with it would put me on the same page as the editors and readers of maxim, into whose presumably base characters I try to gain some insight by evaluating the mode of presentation of a list of a hundred beautiful women. Among the names that I do recognize is Kim Kardashian, who comes in at number thirty-five, and any list that includes in its top half somebody whose shallow character is so clearly reflected in her shallow features is bound to meet with some criticism from me.

But generally speaking, what puts me ill at ease with the list is not the women who have been chosen for it, but the ways in which they have been photographed and otherwise displayed to the readers, if I may so loosely use that term to describe the people who regularly buy Maxim. That is what really speaks loudly of the impulse to objectification and the lack of self-awareness, and it gives us a top-ten that includes Anne Hathaway looking like a corpse, Cameron Diaz made to look as though her legs make up fully two-thirds of her body, and Mila Kunis arranged in such a disheveled position as to reach way over the top in amplifying her sexuality, and consequently making her look like a crack addict.

But obviously the greater share of analysis needs to be reserved for number one, and it doesn’t take too much reflection for me to arrive at a set of conclusions as to what the image says about the publishers and the consumers. Their number one slot goes to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and the accompanying photograph is decidedly unappealing to me, on account of three identifiable factors. I stress again that this is not a judgment of the appearance of the actress herself, only a judgment about the particular photograph chosen to represent her.

Firstly, despite clearly defined cleavage, her overall appearance suggests that she could be jailbait. Exactly how that comes across I cannot quite tell; it is just a general impression I get from her facial features and expression, and from her posture, which has her extremities kept close, but held in a loose way that to me could be indicative of naïvite, a lack of assertion, and if I may go so far, victimization. It is an appearance probably befitting the appetites of a stereotypically heterosexual man, with the sort of aggressive, unthinking sexual drive that Maxim seems to consider its bread and butter.

Also befitting those appetites is another evident feature of the picture. To phrase this indelicately, she looks mentally handicapped. Her eyes are extremely narrowed, and her lips unnaturally parted, her overall expression entirely vacant. The basic impression, at least beyond the simple observation, “she’s hot,” is that she looks as though she must be either very dumb, or highly inebriated. And I suppose that your average jock would find great appeal in that, because it also means submissiveness, and the kind of girl who is easily bedded, easily deceived, and again, easily victimized or objectified.

And finally, the very clear presentation of a strong jaw-line and wide-spaced eyes amplifies features that, in this photograph, look very masculine. I think that that, too, was an unconscious factor in the Maxim staff’s decision to install that girl, and that photograph of her, at number one, because I think it provides an outlet for repressed homoeroticism in your typical insecure, intellectually limited, sex-obsessed man. It may seem like I strive a little too strongly to set myself apart from that group by making this all a point of public record, but really, I see a lot more on that page than a hot chick.