Friday, July 25, 2008

Yeoooooowwwwww . . . Body Parts Everywhere

My eight-year-old son is a huge Family Feud fan and for the past few weeks he has been pestering me to find him the theme song from the John O'Hurley version of the show. We sat down together and started searching the internet. One site seemed promising and it had the McAfee Site Security green checkmark of approval (which I have come to realize is a commentary on the anti-viral quality of a site and not a rating of its moral content). So, we clicked and just as my eyes were starting to read, the page suddenly changed and there were body parts everywhere. And worse than that . . . there were body parts doing things to other body parts.

I let out a yeeeeeoooooooowwww. My left hand instinctively reached out to cover adorable, innocent 8-year-old baby blues as my right hand frantically tried to close the window, which of course was frozen. I needed my left hand to accomplish an "end task" and told him to look away. Meanwhile, he's responding to my yeeeeeeowwwwww with an aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh. I finally managed to "end task" and we sat there laughing. I asked him what he saw and he said a lady wearing a black shirt with a baby. Okaaaay. Sounds good to me.

After things had calmed down, I sat thinking about my first internet experience gone wrong with my son. I realized that my reaction--that initial yeeeoooooow that I let out--wasn't on behalf of my son. It was my own reaction to seeing strange genitalia eight inches from my face on a bright, sunny afternoon. Definitely too much information. One person had this tiny mole right on . . . um, never mind.

They say that men and women have different reactions to things, especially sexual matters. I'm not much interested in generalizing. All I know is that, for me, sexy is a function of attitude, personality, sense of humor, creativity, intelligence, and a tuned-in vibe that puts two people on the same wavelength. Physical beauty plays an extremely small part and without the rest is meaningless to me. Maybe that's why you'll never find me in a crowd of screaming women, trying to put a dollar bill down some anonymous buff guy's g-string. And there's no stranger out there in cyberspace that has such breathtaking physical beauty that I could ever be moved by a full-monitor-sized naked image of him on a bright, sunny afternoon.

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