introductions

– Don’t give up on love, Chris. There’s somebody out there for you.

– Really? Who? I mean, it’s not you, right? And obviously you think it’s not anybody you know, otherwise you’d’ve introduced them to me.

Okay, so that conversation didn’t happen. But it could. If anyone cared enough to have a conversation with me, and we got around to why I’m not actively pursuing sex or a relationship or love or whatever.

But’s it’s completely true that people do not introduce me to other people. I don’t even mean introducing me to some woman with whom they think I’ll get along. I mean people in general. I used to think that people just assumed I know most of the other people that exist, or at least the ones they know. But I’ve come to realize that isn’t it. It’s just that I do not matter enough to anyone that they even would think or care about whether I know this other person. I simply don’t rate enough in anyone’s mind to be worth consideration.  

Wow...I’m feeling bitter today. Maybe that’s why no one cares. Vicious cycle. 

Whoever did this? - they need to stop.

A little earlier this morning I saw this photo on tumblr. Yes, tumblr. 

Yes, yes, I know; tumblr is full and overflowing with nudity. That’s why I’m there. I actually joined tumblr as a place to see what’s out there photography-wise. On tumblr you can find some really great artistic photography. You can also find some really poor quality, disturbing porn. Sometimes you’ll find both, together on the same page, which I find much more disturbing than the disturbing porn itself. You can all kinds of nudity anywhere on the spectrum between those extremes of great art and bad porn.

Anyway…

This morning I saw this photo (just a warning, it’s a nude): click link 1

I thought it does have some appeal, but basically I don’t like it. And the more I looked at it, the more it seemed not quite right. So I did a google image search, and found this (also a nude): click link 2

I believe it to be the original. I find it much more appealing. Mainly, I don’t get that “not quite right” vibe from it. I like it. It’s quite lovely. 

Obviously, these are versions of the same photo. The one on the right has been re-done: her skin is darker, her breasts and nipples are larger, there’s a significant bush of pubic hair added, and – most bizarrely – a totally different face has been superimposed.

WHY?!?!? 

I do not understand. Who is this other face? Is this some kind of revenge-porn thing? Is that someone’s ex-girlfriend, and they didn’t have any actual nude photos of them to post online, so they made this? (If so, that’s bad. Don’t do that, people.) Or was this version, perhaps, made to fit someone’s personal masturbatory preference? (If so, that’s a little odd, but...just keep it to yourself, eh?)

As a photographer, as a creator of what I hope are some artistic images, I find this disturbing. I’ve seen, on tumblr, a few photographers complain about other people editing and posting versions of their photos – cropping, maybe changing the color &/or contrast, etc. That’s not good. But, this seems much worse. Someone’s turned this photo into a photo of a different person, and it doesn’t seem to be an obvious, clunky version for comic effect. (I admit, I’ve done that once or twice, but never published it online, or tried to convince anyone that it was “real”.)

Anyway... Whoever did this? - they need to stop.  

Roswell - bad, bad, bad, bad thing

I’m watching this TV show – Roswell– on the netflix. If you’ve not seen it, it’s a Vampire Diaries-type thing but with aliens instead of vampires. It aired about 15 years ago. A lot of the main characters are attractive teen-agers.

So, in this episode (“Disturbing Behavior” season 2, episode 13), there’s a young woman, about 17 or 18 years old, who’s gone off with a young man to deal with “alien stuff,” but her mom doesn’t know about the alien stuff. Her mom is so mad and upset and terrified that her daughter is going to have sex. She’s talking with her daughter on the phone and bawling and yelling and threatening. Like it’s a horrible, awful, evil, shameful, bad, bad, bad, bad thing. 

This is such a common idea in our culture: parents being scared and angry that someone would have sex with their post-pubescent child, at a time when their bodies are screaming at them to have sex; and parents threatening violence toward the similarly-aged young men wanting to have sex with their daughters. That’s crazy. It’s extremely unhealthy in the attitudes that it conveys to these young people about sex. 

Of course, by the time they’re old enough to have sex, they’ve certainly already been messed up by our mixed up, crazy, damaging cultural attitudes about sex. And I’m fairly sure that any parents who would react that way to the possibility of their child having sex will have already made sure to convey the nightmare apocalypse that is normal human sexual activity.