Hello people, good morning, good afternoon or good night, depending on the time zone and when you are reading this. Today I'm sharing with you a couple of semi-articulated thoughts that almost made it into an article. Almost but not. Let's say it's the unfinished draft of an article, something to comment on a couple of ideas.
Marilyn Monroe Source: People.com
What do we find sexually attractive in movies and comics? I'm talking about the attraction generated by an actor or actress in a movie, or a character in a comic or novel.
One sees Scarlett Johannson clad in her Black Widow outfit and the mice begin to click happily. In other words, we see a 36-year-old woman, who is currently alive and healthy, with whom one could possibly have sex given a series of conditions, the main one being that she likes you and she is not allergic to cat hair.
Scarlett Johannson Source: https://www.filmaffinity.com/us/film996278.html
Or we see Marisa Tomei playing Aunt May or read a Manara or Altuna or even Robert Crumb comicbook.
Mariasa Tomei Source: https://www.lahiguera.net/cinemania/actores/marisa_tomei
But... what goes through your head when you see a movie about an actress and find out that she is currently 95 years old? Does it still make you horny? And when you see a movie about someone who died 20 or 30 years ago, or more than 50 years ago, like Marilyn Monroe? You're getting turned on by a pile of bones. From there to necrophilia and appearing on the TV news for looting a mortuary, there is only one step.
This reflection arose when I was watching a movie called Zombie Strippers (2008), in which we see some ladies who are quite well but as the film goes by, they deteriorate until they become a mass of guts and bones. And yes, I suppose there are also people who get turned on by that, who knows.
And if you see an erotic drawing, does it turn you on? Naughty boy it's only a cartoon, nothing more. As Robert Crumb said: "It's lines on paper, folks." And yet...
According to the little that I have read on the subject, one is already programmed from the factory to react to certain attributes and in the case of men it is about the breasts and hips, which are what supposedly guarantees the procreation and maintenance of the offspring. And this comes from a long time ago; If not, look at the old sculptures and vases of the fertility goddesses of yesteryear.
Comics and movies have a series of conventions that we usually don't think about. When we read a comic we know that it has a certain sense of reading and when we read the speech bubbles, text boxes and onomatopoeia we immediately translate them into dialogues and monologues, and something similar happens with the drawings. As for the cinema, it is only a succession of photographs (frames) that we put at a rate of 24 per second to create the illusion of movement. And yet we get excited, we get indignant, we laugh, and, yes, we get horny with the cartoons in the comics and the pictures in the movies.
Source: wattpad.com
In Japan they have it even more complicated with the manga, which has those characters with huge eyes that are also a convention, since, unlike in western comic books, the Japanese tend to give more expressiveness to the eyes than to the mouth.
So, the brain of the Japanese reader not only has to decode the drawing as such, but also ignore the fact that in real life our eyes do not occupy almost the entire face.
Source: wattpad.com
And yet, somehow our little brain overlooks all these things and that's how there are people who get turned on by a XXX cartoon from the Simpsons, the hentai version of My Little Pony (which yes, exists, and is recorded through fire in the neurons of whoever has seen it) or, why not, old Aunt May in a Spider-Man comic book.
Source: https://comicvine.gamespot.com/
And what are the conclusions? Surely the topic is worth more, but the first thing I get out of this is to marvel at the number of conventions and mechanisms that we have been building inadvertently or knowingly through the centuries, what am I saying, millennia of civilization. Second, that we are all rascals. What I do not understand is that there are those who prefer a decrepit old woman instead of a very drinkable fifty-year-old who...
- Enough with Spider-Man! We already understood.
- Great. See you in the comments.