I am interested in a wider perspective for the #metoo movement, one that does bring together a number of correlated factors.

As a lover of clothing optional environments and a naturist, I completely agree that dress codes should not be imposed on any one gender more than another, let alone hijabs or burkas.

However, what I see on TV and in today’s fashion and entertainment industry (including, alas, most of the mainstream news) is the fashioning of a “woman” who is invariably youthful looking, excessively thin, perilously walking on trampoline type of stiletto heals that make it impossible to fight or flee, with wide surfaces of exposed skin regardless of temperature, and adornments that complete the image of a super decorated object available for viewing.

Why is this?

I don’t see any men intent in self decorating like this. I would like to. They would interest me. The Belmondo’s, the Pierre Clementi’s, the Alain Delon’s, the Billy Crystal’s of earlier years have disappeared. Where are they? I miss them.

Instead the scene of visualizable guys is full of trumpanzees (a Susan M Block neologism) who heavily wade thru life, with ugly limbs and muzzles full of mien, precisely like the main accused in the #metoo campaign: trumpanzee-in-chief and his doubles, Ailes and Weinstein. Who all, of course, like to be pictured next to the super decorative women described above. Even though it goes without saying that the “she” in question is barely containing her repulsion for the trumpanzee on shift, while the production of glamour is where her intelligence is applied to forge the hope for a career.

This produces an enormous gender difference. A monstrous one for our Bonoboesque species. Suppose you come of age in this era, who are the models? What stereotypes do you internalize and then reproduce? Can you really distance yourself from this polarizing trumpanzeeism and still hope for a career in, say, cinema, TV, politics or other lines of work that involve high visibility?

That’s the tragedy, I think.

The tragedy of the culture as a whole.

Then of course there are the individual dramas. We’ve all had them, smaller, bigger. And so I do say #metoo, even though I don’t want to emphasize that. A little squeeze on the butt on the city bus to school when I was 15 is nothing compared to what I observe now.

I am envisioning a bunch of sensuous, feminine, androgynous young men with gentle, seemly faces enfolded in wavy manes, encircled in dainty curls, with puffed up lips, glistening eyes, perked up nipples, and groovy tushes displaying their sensual beauty for everyone to see, enjoy, and model after. I sense their deep devotion to the pleasure of women.

“What kind of animals do we want to be?”  Asks the ecosexual person in me.

May the Bonobo Way soon replace the Trumpanzees!

Let’s hold that thought together till it becomes true.
Thank you.
aka Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD
Erstwhile Professor of Humanities and Cinema at UPRM
Convenor of Practices of Ecosexuality: A Symposium
Fellow at the Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs (2012-13)
Project: “Amorous Visions: Ecosexual Perspectives on Italian Cinema”

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