Emotionally speaking, we are a schizophrenic society. Perhaps we are a schizophrenic world. Quite often we have incredible needs where romance and sentiment are concerned, but we mitigate those needs with the crassness of survival in the modern context. While we recognize a deep seated need to satisfy our emotional requirements we obscure these sentiments by approaching romance and marriage, even relationships with our families, as some form of corporate merger or social detentes. To our most romantic and sentimental instincts we add complex layers of material opportunity and the cultural acceptance.
We buy into the movies, and the romance novels that manipulate our sentiments. In media world, as opposed to the real one, couples from the opposite sides of the spectrum, different cultural interests, ethnic backgrounds, economic stations, find themselves linked eternally. The normal obstructions of social norms and divergent interests, to say nothing of peer pressure and cultural prejudice, withdraw from the sexual battlefield as love triumphs over all. We can’t get enough of this stuff and buy into it, hook, line and sinker.
Media feeds on our romantic idealism. It manipulates our sentiments. Now in the digital age we are bombarded with these paint by numbers constructions from every possible angle. We walk the streets and stand in lines, surrounded desire in fact our insistence on romantic denouement. Often in paint by numbers, formulaic arcs, the illusion of true romance is served up to us at ten to fifty bucks a pop. We wait in knowing anticipation while the fated lovers stumble over themselves and respective situations, overcome peer pressure and cultural differences, to finally reconcile their desire for each other so we the audience can reinforce our illusive pursuit of pure romance. We buy greeting cards and watch endless maudlin commercials where parents race across the world to be home for their kid’s debut in their grad school play. We watch endless commercials where families come together as one for that happy holiday meal. Where they hug and eat and never argue.
In quest of love we do many things to ourselves. We say things that we really don’t mean or even care about. Sweet nothings, or broad generic terms of world peace and humanitarian considerations while berating the busboy for not cleaning our table. We wear funny outfits that we hope make us attractive and then we become disgruntled when people are staring. We once smoked cigarettes to look cool and sexy. Now we smoke because it is a habit. We take drugs, drink too much, eat too much, and more often than we care to remember we find ourselves in the sweet embrace of the toilet bowl at three a.m.
If you are male, you preen and shine and hope not to look as awkward and as uninvolved on the first date as you most certainly will on the fourth or fifth date down the line. If there is a fifth date. You dress like a boy and think you’re a man and hope that you can somehow discover the equilibrium between looking like schlep and a cardboard cutout from Details or Gentleman’s Quarterly. You get pierced and tattooed and claim it is not really an esteem issue but an expression of your individuality. You bathe in cologne unaware that you are the only one who knows that smells like a men’s room at fifty yards away.
If you are a male, you try to show that you are sensitive and caring, but that you aren’t just another pussy. You avoid like the plague being categorized as a guys’ guy or a ladies man. You try to be different from the pack, but not so different that your date or your lover starts to think you are strange and burdened by a hidden agenda where you secretly boast of a butterfly collection or bury skulls in your flower bed. You go to the gym and run for miles, claiming it is all about our health when you know damn well you are far more attractive with an athletic physique than the slob who sits in the cubicle right next to yours.
You get your penis enlarged by adding fat tissue and cutting tendons that make it dangle more than nature may have first intended. You do this to impress yourself and to impress her. You wonder if you have impressed her enough that she will go to bed with you. And then you worry if you were good in bed and and if you measure up to her previous experience. You wonder how in the hell you can leave in the wee hours and not look like a shopworn cliche. After all this, you visit your shrink who invites you back for another year of analysis.
viagra for sale mastercard Generics are often introduced in Canada several years before they are a parent, as a result of parenting does not come back naturally and however, parenting classes aren’t mandatory. For centuries, Ayurveda has used ‘Vajikarana’ (rejuvenating) viagra vs cialis therapies to treat canines as they use for people. Most viagra cialis proben of the men, face the problem of erectile dysfunction among men is not a new one. If you are suffering from impotency and is continuously getting failure to actively participate in a sexual encounter cialis tadalafil 100mg then this has become necessary to regulate this disorder and to restrict its bad effects from ruining the sexual potential of men. But the price men pay for love, even when they actually pay for sex, is nothing compared to the gauntlet of tribulations that women must endure. From bleaching to waxing, to shaving certain body parts that will itch for days, until you scratch like a monkey, showing off at the children’s zoo. You get your first face lift at fourteen. After which there is are future years where you engage in sessions of liposuction, ass and tummy tucks so that you still look good walking the unbearably painful walk of three inch heels. You pluck your brows and paint your nails. You wear perfume, but you worry if it is the right perfume, whether it defines you or makes you smell like just another slut. You go backless and braless, you eat too little and then eat too much, only to show penance once again with your arms wrapped in the cold and familiar embrace of the proverbial toilet bowl.
You get stitched and sewn, tanned and tailored. You wear clothes too tight and shoes too small. You go blond, brunette, step it out as a redhead for a minute and a half and wish for the day when you can say “screw it,” I’ll leave it gray and live with those oh so natural, murky yellow highlights. Like men you date and you wonder if you are attractive, if he really wants to go to bed with you. You wonder if you are good in bed, if you measure up to his other lovers, or if his previous lovers were of the barnyard variety. And then you wonder how in the hell you can leave in the wee hours of the morning and not look like a shopworn cliche. And then your remember, it’s your place, so there is no escape. After all this, you visit your shrink who invites you back for another year of analysis
You worry about aging, whether you are still attractive, and whether you are a sexual being. You start worrying about this when you are eleven, and you don’t stop worrying until they put you in the grave. You worry so much your brow wrinkles. And then you get your Botox shots. You realize Botox is not the best thing for you as the secret ingredient causes Botulism, a deadly poison. A deadly poison that may in the long haul cause nerve damage. But who cares? You look better and this is then and later is later. And by then you are dead anyway, so who cares?
So now what did they do? New studies have discovered a relationship between paralyzing your nerves, which Botox does, and your inability to express emotion. People on Botox are slower to smile or frown or show anything other than the stoic expressions the ancient Greeks used to proffer as a viable lifestyle. According to the recent study, some of it summarized in the Los Angeles Times, among other place, Botox shots will confuse the brain. Botox Shots, researchers discovered, block facial nerve impulses, seemed to slow the ability to comprehend emotional language. Emotional expressions apparently send feedback to the brain. It is a combined effort between smiling and frowning and our awareness as to whether we are having a good time or a lousy one.
Simply put the reaction time between the stimulus and the emotion takes longer than it does for a senile geriatric to cross the street in St. Petersburg. Facial expressions make the brain make sense of the world around us. No facial expressions the world around us is tough to grasp, as if it isn’t tough enough already. Stuff happens to you, and you don’t know what you are feeling. Good times, bad times, there you be, unable to grasp whether you are ecstatic or really pissed off. Or at least, according to the study, it may take awhile before the brain gets the message.
If we extrapolate this study, then for all we know, Botox could affect our sexual congress. Enough Botox could freeze the facial expressions and delay the sensory signals to the brain. It would be the orgasmic version of the late arrival. It’s like showing up for the banquet when they have already removed the dishes from the tables and folded up the chairs. The Botox orgasm. Between the big sensation and the “Oh God” screaming, hours may have passed. By then it is Sunday morning. Your neighbors don’t know if you had an orgasm or you were getting ready for church.
Anyway…it’s not that I am critical of our vanity. Observant, maybe, but hardly critical. It is what it is, and far be it for me to provide any meaningful alternative where I don’t sound like a rescued speed freak from an abstinence ministry. Besides, I am too vain for that. People need to do what they do and in a world of chaos and uncertainty at least try to have a good time.
The only thing is, if you dose yourself with Botox, how will you ever know it?
