Welcome to “Another Important Piece of Writing” a monthly newsletter/life update/writing exercise/rant/potenially the next most important piece of literature from the 21st century but probably not.
There seems to be this renaissance for dicks on screen in the last few years (Games of Thrones, Sex/Life, Shame and more recently White Lotus) and I for one am here for it!
I don’t know why it hasn’t been more prevalent. Women have been getting their tits and asses out, sometimes apropos of nothing, for what feels like millennia; but when it comes to the humble schlong it seems to have been hidden away, only to be accessed in the hoity toityest, arty of artiest house films. Somehow seeing a penis in a film equated to it being sophisticated and nuanced, even though I can see one most nights of the week on my train ride home?
Not only that but in more recent exposures to on-screen-peen we’re not even getting realistic looking dicks! These men have been wearing prosthetics! (See: the infamous Sex/Life shower scene and The White Lotus change scene) Adding another layer to the viewing experience as people find themselves frantically rewinding and pausing the tape like a weathered cop trying to ID a perp on CCTV; except we’re trying to pinpoint where the real dick ends and the fake one begins.
I don’t know of one female actor who has ever had to add a fake pair of tits or strap up her labia to look like a barbie doll for the sake of one shot. They’ve had to have an incredible set, a flawless rig while also being a talented and skilled actor. I doubt there’s a behind the scenes photo of naked Margot Robbie from the Wolf of Wall Street where she’s been strategically taped and pegged a la Kent Brockman and Homer Simpson trying to remain ageless and skinny (although could you IMAGINE).
If this trend continues I either wanna see normal looking curves to the left, grower not a shower dicks on my screen OR I want porn stars delivering Oscar worthy monologues alongside Meryl Streep as their dicks drag along their knee caps!
~~~
I’m envious of but also fucking hate people my age who still live or moved back in with their parents. It’s always because they’re frickin’ loaded so they don’t have to worry about charging them board or rent, their meals are taken care of and they have absolutely zero concerns about how they’re gonna pay the next power bill. With this stunning freedom they can actually use all their energy on their creative or extracurricular pursuits and/or stash major cash towards a house deposit.
I on the other hand use about 80% of my mental and physical energy keeping myself alive on a day to day basis, that I’m still surprised when I have the mental capacity to write one good joke. After somehow finding the energy to look over my notes the other day, I wrote one tag and almost just about passed out after feeling my mental fuel gauge click over to empty.
Also, god forbid I pile drive my life into the ground, I don’t really have the option of moving back home unless I want to go all the way back to Queensland and crash on a single mattress in my Mum’s office.
I know I should probably be more mad at the state of the world as a whole, the one that makes people have to live at home long into their late 20’s if they want any shot at some kind of home ownership or an ounce of security – and I am, don’t you worry! I’m just pissy once again that I wasn’t born into some kind of grand generational wealth. However, I do hold out hope that my estranged family will feel guilty enough to leave me some money in their wills – a posthumous apology I might accept – a girl can dream!
~~~
I’ve been sober for 5 years – don’t ask me how I’ve managed to be after a global pandemic, moving house 5 times and a break up because I! Don’t! Know! – however one small thing that has helped is pragmatically removing any and all alcohol ads that come up in all of my respective feeds. I simply go “Report Ad” and select “It’s irrelevant to me”, and voila!
Unfortunately, it took what was quite frankly an upsetting amount of time for my algorithm to understand what I was doing, and even now FIVE YEARS LATER they still creep in. There’s nothing I’m buying or engaging with that would suggest that it’s something I want to purchase, but assumably because of my age and demographic they’re still thrown at me no matter how many times I ask them to stop.
I could simply rewrite this section but I think it’s important to note that as I was writing this I got served up an ad front and centre on my home page for Round Theory Wines. It would be creepy to insinuate that because all of my accounts are connected it picked up on me writing about alcohol over here in my Google Docs and it thought I was BACK on the wagon; but at this point I don’t know why I would have been shown one again now of all times.
More interestingly, as I went to report the ads I’ve noticed the options have changed?The options are now either: I find it offensive, it’s spam, it’s sexually inappropriate, it’s a scam or misleading, it’s violent or prohibitied content, it violates my intellectual property rights or this account is pretending to be another account. I can’t just say it’s irrelevant to me which feels like the most polite version of me telling them to just fuck off. Now I’ve gotta say I find it offensive like a little whingey bitch who’s been triggered by a ~wittle dwink~.
I don’t care about being advertised things, that’s simply just something I’ve had to accept as a millennial and app user – I had a look at some dresses and now another dress site is telling me about it’s sale, ok fine, they’re cute too! But I’m not engaging with Gordons Gin, I don’t care that you’ve got a pink one now!
No matter what I do they follow me around like a stray cat in an alley acting like I don’t know it’s being fed by every other person in my block. They’re incessant and predatory and honestly a little desperate, sweetie. It feels like an ex trying to reach out by starting off their message like “Don’t you remember all the fun we used to have!” but like any toxic relationship, it was only kinda fun for one of us.
X