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Sex on the box

When sex becomes exercise, it loses meaning.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

[sex] I'm sitting with a book in my hand and a headset on my head. I read gender researcher Wencke Mühleisen's new article collection with one eye, while watching "dirty" music videos on the PC with the other. I try to make my eyes look the same but struggle.

Mühleisen's well-written texts on sex and gender inspire to try to see something new, think some new thoughts: Sex sneaks in everywhere, and maybe it is not as bad as many want it to be? The music videos, in turn, inspire repeating the same old: When sex is commercialized and gender becomes a commodity, everything just gets boring. The fact that my breathing is made more difficult by looking at the row of stripping rods, rotating hips, and hordes of delicious, dancing bikini ladies is due to the associations I get for activities other than bed fun.

Sex and the like is a collection of previously published chronicles and comments, primarily taken from the Class Fight. In addition, gender and media researcher Mühleisen has revised longer, previously published articles and book chapters that conclude each section of the book. Here Mühleisen writes about everything from breastfeeding-

film censorship regime, "flashing" of male genitals for stepchild adoption. It all boasts a pointed elbow to everything that tastes of cultural discipline, taste politics, traditionalism and moralism.

Dirty Work 2, on the other hand, is a compilation album with both pure songs and music videos, "romperistende", "non stop" – "the hottest videos ever made", as promised on the cover. In the same rent you will find HDM Video Parade 01, «20 of The Wildest Dance Videos Ever!». The compilation albums with sexy music videos are a new thing, and Dirty Work 1 and 2 have sold very well, reports the record company, which is now in the process of bringing together old dance hits for Dirty Work 3.

Sweating pee

HDM Video Parade is an offshoot of the popular Hard Dance Mania compilation albums, and halfway through the collection, more specifically during Brooklyn Bounce's video "Sex, Bass & Rock'n Roll", something falls into place. It says click in my head, and the wheezing gets an explanation. It is when the muscle bundle of a singer hisses between clenched teeth: "I wanna see everybody sweat / I wanna see everybody wet", and the tempo at the same moment increases.

I recognize him. He is mistaken for my spinning instructor. For all I know, I have plagued my bike for this particular song and thought it was the director and not the singer who commanded me.

The most important arena of commercial dance music today is the fitness centers. The rave parties have been replaced with bosu and kick boxing. Night has become day. The walls of the dark factory premises are painted bright. Ecstasy has been replaced with XL-1.

At the same time, the stripper bar has miraculously moved in between the treadmill and the rowing machine. Earlier this year, it was read in Ny Tid that «strippebula has become a hip-hop club. The strip motif has become such a common part of today's commercial hip hop that one would almost think it was a regular genre feature ».

But that applies to more genres than hip hop. The glamor model Carmen Electra earns light margarine on the sticky bread by selling loads of training videos titled Carmen Electra's Aerobic Striptease Collection, Fit to Strip, Carmen Electra's The Lap Dance & Hip Hop and so on. The guy in "Sex, Bass & Rock'n Roll" uses most of the video to jog, do pushups and hit the boxing cushion.

Exercise has become sexy. Sex has become exercise. Or has exercise simply replaced sex?

Health sex

"(Healthy straight) sex is part of the health regime," Wencke Mühleisen writes. Not as a comment on the pelvic training in the music videos, but as an explanation of why Kristopher Schau's "Decay" project was devoid of sex. In one week in 2001, when he inhabited a showcase at Karl Johan, he did everything that was morally flawed: consumed large amounts of junk food, lay on the couch and watched trash TV, let lice breed, let sweat run off. But he did not have sex.

And it doesn't matter. One should have sex. There is a reason why the transition between health and cohabitation journalism is slippery, and that suggestions on how YOU should have a better sex life are always confused with the scheme for how YOU get better fitness. It's all about setting aside time. Get to know the body. Varies so that you don't get wear and tear. Set clear goals. Get out. And so on.

The sad thing is that the statistics show that as sex as a phenomenon creeps in everywhere, in practice we have less and less sex. We have neither time nor desire. This is where Carmen Electra and the dirty videos try to beat two flies in one go. Sex and exercise all in one.

The only problem is that the bodies themselves stand in the way of success. For the "dirty" sex promoted by the music video pusher is so little "dirty" that you can no longer talk about sex. Desire has dried in, desire has died.

The figures in the videos appear as virile as salty clipfish fillets wearing bunny ears and a g-string. Female bodies have been taken out of softcore films, driven an extra turn in the dryer, and then some garments thrown at them. The bodies continue to move manically in the same rehearsed dances as in the porn movies – rotating hips, rocking buttocks.

These are bodies without odors, without taste. They don't even sweat. Did you say "I wanna see everybody sweat / I wanna see everybody wet", mister? Then you have to go somewhere else. Out in the real world. Into the living room, where people sweat to the tones and images of Dirty Work and Fit to Strip, and where the goal is to get the body that apparently needs it to have some sex on you. And the path to that body goes paradoxically via somehow-sex.

cold Shower

That's why we dance in the finished choreographed dance the videos have to offer, a dance where women are lovely and men are DJs. A mating dance that follows the most gender-conservative tracks you can imagine.

We dance around the stripper bar as if it were the golden calf, and think that the rewards are waiting in the wardrobe in the form of lovely, liberated, dirty sex. Coat a cold shower instead. I guess these "dirty" figures are disgusted at the thought of exchanging body fluids.

No, better then to sink to the couch after spinning and read about sex in all its diversity, about sexual excesses, dark urges and dirty sins.

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