intellectual properties

add to the list of things that can blow your mind: sesame street

last night on PBS there was a special about Sesame Street and their global productions.

i had no idea they produced localized versions all around the world, especially in war-torn and developing countries, places where poverty and racism and disease run rampant. and when i say localized, i don’t mean that Big Bird gets dubbed over and everything looks the same.  i mean that they send in teams to develop and film on-site, using local children, local music, local language, different puppets that reflect their surroundings, and, in addition to the Alphabet and 1-2-3’s, focus the content on what’s most important to teach the children where they are: the puppets on Sesame Street in Bangladesh discuss unexploded ordnance, in Kosovo the Serbian and Albanian puppets broach topics of racism, nationalism and genocide, and one of the puppets on the South African version had HIV and talked about her mother dying of AIDS, which caused a national controversy here in the U.S.

watching how hard the producers worked to develop these localized versions for these children who in many cases have no other means of education, sometimes putting themselves in very uncomfortable positions (getting the Serbs and the Albanians to be in one room together proved to be monumental) and even in the middle of conflicts and wars, all to try to get positive, educational television to children  was really perspective-shifting. i never really even thought about how Sesame Street in the U.S. was revolutionary in the early 1970s, having a completely integrated cast and discussion topics like racism and sexism (in 2-4 year old terms), but UXO? AIDS? genocide? wow. kudos to PBS for funding these kinds of efforts and for realizing that, in some places, the children really are the only future some communities have, and reaching them, teaching them, is honestly of global importance.

There are several things that we hope that people take from the film. Number one is reflected in a quote that Anu Gupta of Sesame Workshop said: “Children are not born haters, they are taught to hate.” We were so surprised to find three- and four-year-old Serbians and Albanians in Kosovo talking about each other with distrust and hatred.

excessive behaviors

i have known and spent a lot of time with someone for almost 9 years now who drinks at least 2 cups of coffee every day, and never, ever, brings a reusable cup. i have been using a resuable cup every day for the same amount of time. so: 9 years x 365 days x 2 cups = ~6,570 paper cups, with plastic lids, that he has disposed of, while i have used ~1.

this kind of thing drives me nuts. i mean, on a rare occasion, i will get a to-go cup, if i forgot mine, or i am wanting a beverage at unusual place and time and without container. but why does someone who HABITUALLY drinks coffee at the same time, from the same place, refuse to bring a cup? i even bought him one once. he never used it. i, on the otherhand, will often forgo getting a drink when i am thirsty because i don’t have a cup, or getting food to go when i am hungry because i don’t want to get the plastic forks/spoons/containers. it can wait.

people sometimes think i’m being really ridiculous about this. but i do, honestly, i do, think that every. single. thing. matters. but i find i am often alone in this, especially about the cups.

and so i was SO EXCITED when i recently watched this TED video, in which Chris Jordan uses statistics about disposable cups to try to visually show the impact of people not recognizing their individual actions as collectively consequential.

i really like this talk because he gets into exactly why i get so unnerved about things like disposable cups in a way i could never before articulate, and then makes a really beautiful point in the end about our culture and mindfulness.

watch it.. it’s only 11 minutes.

the thing about cups haunts me.
40 million paper cups. every. single. day. mostly for coffee.
410,000 every 15 minutes.

think about it. please. (also embedded below)

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everybody knows the fight is fixed the poor stay poor and the rich get rich

http://www.theplaceswelive.com/

The Places We Live features panoramic photos of slums, narrated by the people who live there (through translators). Really really engrossing. To access the stories in the restricting Flash interface, skip the intro, click on a city, and then on one of the households in the upper left corner.

~via kottke

all the press about Slumdog Millionaire has created a lot of awareness about the slums abroad, which is great, but what about poverty here in america? last night, jay and i watched “Brother’s Keeper“, a documentary about the murder trial of a poor illiterate farmer from upstate NY. it was one of the most heartbreaking, and heartwarming, things i’ve seen in a really long time. i literally ACHED watching this film. related to the website about slums because these 3 farming brothers lived, in the 1990s, without water or heat in a shack on their delapidated family farm, all sleeping in one bed, and when the murder trial hit the news, no one could believe that they lived that way, right here in America. the footage of the news coverage of the way these men lived is downright degrading, painting a sort of “Deliverance” picture of the brothers and their community, not to mention the treatment by the D.A., who basically accused them of being monsters and deviants. there are slums in america too; maybe not as sprawling or populated as Mumbai or Jakarta, but there are places in this country where people live their whole lives without ever having enough to eat, or sleep 3 to a bed, or only own one pair of filthy pants. “hillbillies”, sometimes they’re called, but as this movie shows, in modern america, outside of the visibly homeless in our streets, the impoverished are usually ignored and marginalized to the point that most people don’t even believe they exist.

i also recently watched Reel Paradise, about an american family that moves to poverty-stricken Fiji and opens up a free movie theatre. the movie gets a little tedious, but i think portrays the lessons of being the “rich white people” in a impoverished community, as well as reflections on what it means to be rich or poor in this world.

all of these things make me both incredibly grateful for all that i have, but also incredibly sad that there are so many suffering, and the numbers just keep growing every day, usually due to the rich trying to get richer.

however, unlike in Slumdog, where poverty is portrayed as obviously oppressive, in both Brother’s Keeper and Reel Paradise, there is also a questioning, an implication, that maybe the simpler life isn’t so bad, and maybe being poor shouldn’t be equated with being unhappy.

the new work ethic: just paying attention

Work Ethic 2.0: Attention Control

Columnist David Brooks, commenting in the Dec. 16th New York Times about Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book called “Outliers,” made a statement as profound as it was accurate: “Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” he wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.”

But why is that truer now than ten or twenty years ago? Why will it be truer still ten or twenty years from now? As I wrote in May, Internet distractions evolve to become ever more “distracting” all the time — like a virus. Distractions now “seek you out.”

Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?

Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be “following” these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When do IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?

~via axelalbin@twitter. (ha!)

(i suck at the new work ethic.)

“The Medium is the Message”. yes. yes it is.

well, this is more than a little disconcerting.

shepard fairey, a political street artist i’ve long admired and whose art i recently even considered getting tattooed on my body, seems to have really sold out (as jon notes in the comments, he did corporate art work before).

i noted that Obey Giant recently launched a clothing line. it seemed a little odd to me that a voice against social conformity and for revolution - i mean - “OBEY” - come on. - was suddenly selling miniskirts and skinny jeans and handbags, but whatever.

i didn’t want to be hyper-judgemental about the fact that the obey clothing line is obviously catering to current hipster trends. “hipster” is always challenge to try to define, although you know one when you see one, but IMO hipsters can most generically be defined as people who follow along with whatever is hip. and hip changes every, oh, 30 seconds. so the idea of this Revolutionary catering to this group seems……trendy. i mean, yes, the hipster group as a target market has a lot of cache in terms of perpetuating a trend, and a lot of money. so if you want to pick a target market to spread your meme as quickly as possible, obviously it’s the best choice.

so then, spreading the word to Gen Y/ Gen O using their most common mode of participation - consumerism: is it possible to do so without crossing over to the dark side? my gut was still sinking looking at the obey clothing website, and so i defaulted to considering what, to me, is one of the most basic metrics of determining whether someone has, in fact, “sold out”: production.

—–Original Message—–
From: amy.leblanc
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2008 11:54 AM
To: service@obeyclothing.com
Subject: where is obey clothing made?

sorry if you have an FAQ on your site somewhere, but i can’t find it…..

—–REPLY—–
From: “OBEY Clothing”
To: “‘amy.leblanc’”
Subject: RE: where is obey clothing made?

Hi Amy,

Most of our product is made in China; however, our tee shirts are all made
in the U.S.A. Hope this helps and thanks for the support.

Thanks~

service@obeyclothing.com
SHOP.OBEYCLOTHING.COM
www.obeyclothing.com

—–RESPONSE—–
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:12:24 -0800
To:
From: “amy.leblanc”
Subject: RE: where is obey clothing made?

hm. that’s a bit hard to reconcile.
thx.

—–

HEY SHEPARD FAIREY: CARE TO RATIONALIZE OUTSOURCING IN THE CONTEXT OF THE MESSAGE OF YOUR ART? AND IN THE CONTEXT OF “HOPE” and “CHANGE” and “PROGRESS” FOR AMERICA?

or maybe your message has never been what we believed it to be, and all you really did was “cynically turned graffiti culture into a self-promoting ad campaign, turning street art into a cheap hustle that is no different from corporate advertising” (erick lyle).

le sigh.

.

.

related:

“When a right-wing Republican is the one concocting your anti-Establishment image, you start to wonder if the entire hipster movement has been duped into becoming puppets of Hayne’s billionaire income. Because if we’re all suckers, that just sucks.” –nymag

prop8: it’s not about being gay, or married.

this is one powerful piece of writing: An Open Letter to My Gay Friend; or Gay Marriage Is Not About Marriage.

the main point:

let’s establish something right at the outset. About the fundamental idea of marriage itself, straight or gay, I don’t give a shit. And as I said in a previous post, I’ve always been weary of same-sex marriage being the cause célèbre of the gay community. But the issue of marriage equality is something I have to support because gay marriage is not about marriage…

…Perhaps gay people are apathetic because we’re not hammering home the point that this is an important civil rights issue and, for the hundredth time, not about marriage. Look, it honestly doesn’t bother me that you don’t care about marriage rights, but, as a gay man who knows what it’s like to be teased, shunned, and discriminated against firsthand, it is your responsibility to care about civil rights.

There are people out there who want to change the law to designate an entire class of people as unequal to, as less than, every other class of people.

the poignant ending:

Small acts were what drove the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955; black students faced protesters when trying to attend a white school in 1957; people marched for voting rights in 1965. These small acts defied odds; these small acts helped to change the United States of America.

The rights, benefits, and acceptance that you are allowed and that you enjoy and that you take for granted as a gay man are the result of history—history created by regular people, just like you and me, who weren’t activists or politicians or crusaders. They were people who came out of the closet decades before us in a time when it was social suicide to do so; they were high school students who met opposition when they tried to start gay-straight alliances to foster tolerance at their schools; and they are the millions of people, gay and straight, who will vote no on Proposition 8 on November 4, 2008. The latter act is indeed a modest act, but one that will have far-reaching ramifications. One vote may be a footnote in our lives, but that footnote will explain how we stood up for what is fair, what is just, and what is humane. The story of lives tell our history; the footnotes give us depth.

why do i care so much about this, you might ask, as someone who a) isn’t into marriage and b) isn’t gay?

this is why. this isn’t about marriage, or about being gay. this is about equal rights. and i am into equal rights. for everyone.

again, please give even just $5 to the No on 8 campaign, even if you don’t live in California. letting this proposition pass is a cultural slide backwards that we can’t afford to take.

on a lighter note:

During his recent stopover at the Castro Theatre, John Waters quipped that if gays are denied the right to marry, then heterosexuals should be denied the right to divorce. –flavorpill

HA!

symptomatic

the long overdue health report is that since i’ve been back from burning man, i’ve been experiencing some moderate to severe physical symptoms that are vague yet consistent. these include: dizziness, vertigo, weakness, fatigue, strange burning/tingling sensations in my head and up and down my extremities, nerve tweaks/spasms, vision funkiness, pressure in my head, and sometimes nausea.

a few weeks ago i went to see my general physician and she didn’t have much to say - such vague symptoms without anything really “happening”, she couldn’t give me a diagnosis other than i should literally and figuratively get my head checked: revisit a neurologist, given my history of seizures (which were never attributed to anything specific being wrong), and possibly a psychologist/psychiatrist, to see about my anxiety.

after looking at my old records and giving me a few tests and asking a few pertinent questions, the neurologist also figures it’s generalized anxiety, as i don’t actually have what one would call a “headache” (suggesting a scary problem like a brain tumor), and my cognitive functions have remained just fine (suggesting i haven’t had any seizures), but with the continuing persistence of symptoms i am having the MRI and EEGs done again next week.

at the end of last week i thought i was getting better, that every day i was feeling a bit stronger, and i was feeling 90% ok. but then saturday came, and i spent the whole day weak and trembly, and since then i’ve felt horrid.

this has been more or less occupying most of my time, dealing with this, and has kept me from doing a lot of things, being a lot of places, writing a lot of blogs. i’ve been able to function at work just fine, although i’m probably a bit more irritable and surly than i should be, and i’ve tried to go on with my life as though everything is fine, which is maybe the worst thing to do, not ignoring the problem but not letting it take over my life. but everywhere i go, i am monitoring all these strange sensations in my body. when i walk down the street for lunch, i wonder if i’ll fall to my knees. when i’m sitting in a theatre seeing a play, i feel weak and wonder what would happen if i lost consciousness. like the world is so heavy, and my life force so weak, that i just might collapse under the weight of it all. i have also had a couple of standard anxiety attacks - the sweaty palms, the difficulty breathing - but these other symptoms are pretty much nonstop. all day long. the weakness and dizziness, and weird pressure/tingling in my head. i haven’t fallen, i haven’t lost consciousness, but it constantly feels like i might.

it’s so hard to write this here, i don’t know why. maybe because i don’t want to hear everyone’s advice or seem like i’m asking for sympathy. or maybe because it feels like i am overreacting, and putting this into writing here, for everyone to read, feels like making a mountain out of a molehill, exaggerating my symptoms. are they really as bad as they seem? or am i just being hypersensitive? maybe because its so personal, and when things are really deep, really personal, i am usually silent, and this seems like a lot of myself to share. or maybe because regardless of what is or what isn’t, i’m fucking scared.

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the hipster vacuum

i don’t get or read Adbusters magazine anymore, because it was just so…..overbearing. and drumbeat. and depressing. and during the year or so i did subscribe to the print version i wondered if reading it every month was affecting my world view a little too much. but i still subscribe to the RSS feed and click over to the website once in a while, because while i find the imagery and language too much to deal with on a regular basis, especially in the print version (100 PAGES OF DOOM!), the content and values are still right in line with how i think, and they still say the things i have been trying to say, just always so much more pointedly.

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style. — Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization

it appears to me that post-9/11, the ambient insecurity in our culture has brought about the return of materialism in a big way. much like anorexia is not about food but about control and anxiety, national insecurity has manifested itself in various ways in our culture, most prominently through xenophobia (fear of “the other”, e.g. anti-immigration) and consumer materialism (propagated by our own government…remember this? and most recently via the “stimulus package”). not that materialism in america ever went away, but americans are currently more hyper-obsessed with their brands, their celebrities, their media, their image, and their possessions (including home-ownership) than ever before, and we have more and more tools every day to feed those obsessions. unlike previous periods of extreme aestheticism in western culture, this is not just the upper class. the lower classes are just as obsessed with their gucci ripoffs as the upper class are with the real thing. and yet for many, it feels like a vacuum. this culture continually keeps sucking things out of us: our money, our time, our individuality, our creativity, our passion. what we’re left with is a mass of confused, isolated people with lot of debt and insecurity, with closets and garages full of crap. kids are dropping out of school like flies, our healthcare costs are through the roof, and like Al Gore said: “The planet is in distress and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.”

the article pokes at the specific “hipster” trend (see: american apparel) and its rehashing of everything retro, but i’m applying it to my own scene as well, cuz it fits:

Lovers of apathy and irony, hipsters are connected through a global network of blogs and shops that push forth a global vision of fashion-informed aesthetics. Loosely associated with some form of creative output, they attend art parties, take lo-fi pictures with analog cameras, ride their bikes to night clubs and sweat it up at nouveau disco-coke parties. The hipster tends to religiously blog about their daily exploits, usually while leafing through generation-defining magazines like Vice, Another Magazine and Wallpaper. This cursory and stylized lifestyle has made the hipster almost universally loathed.

in my own scene, this debate over the value we place on our specific forms of fashion and style and image gets rehashed every few months, and now that we’re in The Month of Burning Man, it’s coming up again as there are multiple “playa fashion” events every week, and people are wondering whether burning man is about personal expression, or really just one big fashion show where the HAVEs try to outdo the HAVE NOTs. is burning man anti-consumer as it claims to be, or just its own version of hipster? i’m tempted to go totally anti-fashion this year at burning man. i want to get a pair of coveralls, and just wear that all week.

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us. The hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture so detached and disconnected that it has stopped giving birth to anything new.

The Standard American Life.

i don’t know how to feel about this. in perspective of my own life, i philosophically agree: i see people chasing this carrot of a happy marriage and a big house and 2.5 kids and a dog all that comes with it over the place, and for the most part i do find the whole thing a bit nauseating. i am NOT part of that and don’t want to be part of that. however, the thing that makes me not fully say “RIGHT ON!” to this message is that i can’t judge whether those people are happy or not, or whether they want something or someone else. endless books and movies and art have been created based on this topic of the unhappy suburbanite - from American Beauty to Fake Plastic Trees - and in the real world high rates of infidelity and divorce, not to mention the economic disaster propelled by it, prove that the american dream isn’t as easy as we’d all like it to be.

but does that make it a “wrong” way to want to live our life? i don’t think just because that lifestyle isn’t for me means it should be looked down upon as uncreative or a waste of life by default. sure, there are lot of unhappily married people out there who chose the “normal” path, but i do actually know a number of standard american families who seem quite happy, and i admit that my current crop of friends here in the bay area who have recently procreated and/or are going to have babies in the next couple of months have begun to change my feelings on the subject of reproduction, as many of them are “alternative families”. it’s my friends and family back home in the midwest (including those who were here and left to go back and pursue this path) that seem to be much more driven to conform to the kind of scenario represented in this animation. that’s a generalization, i know, but at the very least i think it’s true that here in SF there is much less “pressure”, as it were, to follow that path.

while i agree that there are a number of reasons why this kind of lifestyle can be labeled “wrong” (unsustainable living habits, urban sprawl, population growth issues, etc.), the thing that really irked me about this was the end. especially after looking at this photographic essay on Death yesterday (warning: not graphic, but may be disturbing for some), the assumption that anyone would give up their life so easily, so passively just because it wasn’t superfuckingspecial is really arrogant. in the end i think we all want to live, even if life isn’t what we wanted it to be.

so at first i thought the little video was funny, but then by the end i was like: wow. could it be more judgmental? it’s fucking hard to find happiness in this world. give people a break.

~via

icky debate

one of the things that’s been sucking up my blogging time the past few days (besides having lots of fun with my friends! yay!) is this: on MSNBC’s “To Catch a Predator” show, where they set up a house and lure men who are looking to have sex with minors there and then catch them on film, entering the home of an unknown child with the intent of having sex, someone from the burning man community was recently caught. someone very popular, a member of probably the most successful performance group to come out of the playa. i’m not mentioning names here, because i don’t want to link the whole group to this one man’s act.

so now on various social networking sites, people in the burning man community are debating this. debating whether it’s ever “ok” for an adult to attempt to have anonymous sex with a 13 year old child. i am completely ASTONISHED by the number of people who are rationalizing this, men and women, with statements about “biological urges” and “when i was 13 i had sex with older guys and i turned out fine”. sure, a 19 year old guy getting busted for sex with his 16 year old minor girlfriend is a bit over the line in most cases. but a 30+ y/o man attempting sex with a 13 y/o he met in a chat room?? how is this even defendable?

as for the women who spoke up to say they had sex at a young age and therefore think it might be ok, how many those were sex with someone they met anonymously who they had never seen before in their lives nor knew anything about?

people are claiming the punishment doesn’t fit the crime for these guys caught on tape, who were immediately arrested outside the house and charged with attempts to commit lewd acts with a minor. “they’re confused”, “they didn’t know it was wrong because the young person was consenting”, “they didn’t actual do anything”, “they probably learned their lessons, they should just get counseling”, etc. yeah, except for the guy that got caught by this sting TWICE and the guy who knew exactly what was going on immediately because he’d seen the show. all of them immediately say “i’m sorry! i’m sorry! i won’t do it again!” none of them pull the george costanza excuse “was that wrong? no one ever told me that was wrong”. they all know it’s wrong.

others are crying “entrapment!”. for the record:

“ENTRAPMENT - A person is ‘entrapped’ when he is induced or persuaded by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit; and the law as a matter of policy forbids conviction in such a case.

However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the Government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime. For example, it is not entrapment for a Government agent to pretend to be someone else and to offer, either directly or through an informer or other decoy, to engage in an unlawful transaction with the person. So, a person would not be a victim of entrapment if the person was ready, willing and able to commit the crime charged in the indictment whenever opportunity was afforded, and that Government officers or their agents did no more than offer an opportunity.” — www.lectlaw.com/def/e024.htm

these men are not being entrapped.
these men had every intent of doing one thing: having sex with a VERY YOUNG minor. (they purposely used “13″ as the age, as it is fairly universally considered too young, unlike “17″, which most people don’t feel so strongly about.) that’s what they went into the chatroom for, whether or not they were deceived into thinking that’s what they were getting when they arrived.

this is about intent. and the intent here is very much, in my opinion, dangerous and i fully agree with the punishment.

and as for those arguing that this isn’t “forced sex” and it’s therefore “consensual” and shouldn’t be punishable as a sex crime:

MOST girls of barely-pubescent age in the united states (some cultures are different) are not psychologically ready to make consensual sex decisions. SOME girls *might* be, but most aren’t, and i have a hard time believing that ANY 13 y/o girl is developmentally stable enough to understand the risks of anonymous sex with a grown man and allowing one to enter your house. therefore, statements about these men not having “intent to cause harm” are invalid. they might not have wished to HURT her physically or at that time, but you have no idea what a confused sex act at a young age will do to a girl for the rest of her life (either in a big way, or small ways, such as how she feels about sex from then on), and so while it is not always “harmful” for a guy to do this, it is undeniably IRRESPONSIBLE in my opinion and probably harmful in ways that might never be measured.

what, some people ask, is a 13yo girl doing soliciting sex online if she’s not ready for it? girls these days are very confused. many girls seek attention from men for various badly-formed reasons. just because a girl asks for it does not mean than an older man should feel OK about responding, nor does it mean that it’s 100% consensual in the end, especially in the eyes of the law. same with young confused boys who might just be discovering that they are gay.

not only is it bothersome that so many are expressing that they don’t think this is a criminal act, this extreme taking advantage of naivete - but it’s disturbing that people in the BM community seem like they are defending this guy because he’s “one of their own”. this is SO WRONG.

this is not to say in any way that the majority of people involved in these discussions are supporting this activity, or that the BM community in general supports anything like it - of course not. most people agree it’s reprehensible and wrong. but i’m just so surprised by the size of the minority of people who are defending this man in various ways for either personal or political reasons.

this is bothersome more than usual because one of the MAJOR negative perceptions of the BM community by the outside world is that we’re all a bunch of immoral perverted sexual deviants. having an online discussion in the BM community wherein a small vocal minority of burners are defending this action is not helping that. i am fine with grown ADULTS doing whatever they want to eachother, as long as no one gets hurt, so i think it’s wrong to label CONSENTING ADULTS who are into kinky sex as sexual perverts. but when those same people start to defend anonymous sex with minors, it all starts looking really bad. it reflects badly on the community, and what the community is supposed to stand for: love, respect, growth, mutual freedom.

these predators neither love nor respect these children, or care about their futures as human beings. if they did, they wouldn’t be showing up for lunchtime sex with pockets full of lube.

there are of course also significant cultural discussions to be had about this issue outside of the context of this incident - about the desexualization of sex in america leading to higher rates in sex crimes, about the american confusion caused by being told by hollywood and the media to want sex and to be sexy but also at the same time being told sex is wrong/bad, making it a secretive, shameful act for some people, etc. all that leads into this. but, that gives no one an excuse - “blaming it on society” does not work with me.