The Imitation of Samantha as Christ

So I laughed until I cried when I watched this commercial for a little finger vibrator from Trojan. This airs on cable networks. Yes. It does.

Maybe you’re throwing a party because I know, it’s totally great that women are ‘allowed’ to talk about their own pleasure in the public sphere. That is great, and you can address your letters of gratitude directly to any and all feminists, self-identified or not, who have ever just not given a fuck. But my tears were not of joy, my friends. They were a salty cocktail of “hahah omg EMBARRASSING” and “ugh.”

Here we witness the legacy of Sex & the City-style modes of femininity in full force: that is, an infantilized female sexuality. We’ve worked hard to narrow the scope down to an infantilized male sexuality (ew, ew, ew), so now it’s our turn.  That’s what equality is all about, guys: making everything mediocre.

I think I’m feeling a bit puritanical on the necessity of advertising sex toys on daytime cable, mostly having to do with an over-saturation of commodified sex to begin with.  But generally, I’m mostly in strong objection to the giggling, adolescent sexuality used here to ease their audience into comfort, as if to say, “Oh look at us, we’re such bad girls.  We’re talking publicly about sex, we’re just like Samantha.”  The thing is, Samantha wouldn’t giggle.  And she certainly wouldn’t whisper.  It feels to me more like some awkward, unsolicited declaration of the “new” ~*sexually liberated woman*~, the kind made to prove a point to the world and seek from it outside validation.  I don’t ever think one’s own desire should need outside validation.

But fake it till you make it, I suppose.

Indulge my one academically tinged question: at what point is being performative in sex germane to sex itself, and at what point does it corrupt it?  Do we have to play “comfortable” before we can be it, and from where do those lessons come?  This giggling “frankness” about their own desire seems artificial in the same way a staged orgasm in a porno does, and it isn’t just the bad acting—both of these certainly have the power to orient our sexual imaginations in unknowable ways, and do. We know the world through imitation, but is there something beyond that?  Is there an essential desire of one’s own, or is it all just Warhol-style?  And does that even matter?  Is this an interim stage in the evolution towards a less regulated sexuality, or is this just disingenuous parody?  What does it say about the cultural state of female sexuality that it feels it must announce itself like this at all?

And most of all, do you really need your vibrator to go?  (The answer here is sometimes yes.  The answer here is also that if I’m aware you’re using your to go vibrator in my presence, I could jail your creepy ass for some passive sexual assault.)

I am thinking of the time I had to tell a student of mine in an art class, “You’ll have to explain to me in great detail why you want your relief print to be the Playboy bunny before I will help you draw it.” Her answer sucked, so I said original artwork only.