Is there anything real about the fake duck guys?

I got into a minor disagreement with another blogger yesterday over the latest nugget of stupidity to drop from Phil Robertson's lips. Quite a few people are piling on Phil for his suggestion that guys would be smart to find wives who are still quite young, i.e., go dipping into the just-about-to-graduate-from-high-school pool and find women who were still trainable. This is seen by many of Phil's critics as advocating pedophilia.

Given that pedophilia by definition is being sexually attracted to children who have not yet hit puberty, that is, kids under the age of approximately 11, I thought labeling Phil as a pervert was going a step too far. Let's be clear. Phil is no doubt a sexist pig who's stuck in the dark ages when it comes to the role of women in general. However, no one's cause is being served when you resort to unnecessary hyperbole or gross distortions of the facts. When the actual facts are sufficient, why exaggerate? So I found myself in the bizarre position of defending a guy who I personally think is an ass. Phil may be a genius when it comes to marketing over-priced duck calls, but he's an idiot when it comes to giving anyone advice on how to live his or her life. Besides, I naively thought, Phil was merely advocating doing what he did: marry young. I have seen a zillion articles online about Phil giving Miss Kay a diamond ring for their 50th wedding anniversary. The math is simple: if he's 67 now and they've been married 50 years, ergo, he was a teenager himself when he got married. It worked for him; he figures it'll work for everyone.

Turns out I was wrong. I got curious enough about this whole plastic hillbilly clan to do more digging. Turns out that online good ol' Phil has multiple birthdates. One of them has to be real, because he did attend high school and college in Louisiana and there are solid references to that. However, it appears he married Miss Kay in 1966, which would mean that the marriage is only 47 years old, not the 50 as has been hyped. Okay, that means Phil is apparently 4 years older than Miss Kay, not the less than 2 than he initially appeared to be. Still not a pervert -- there were plenty of seniors at my high school in the '60s who dated freshmen. They were treated with a fair amount of scorn by their fellow seniors, e.g., the usual jokes about cradle robbing, but it wasn't too unusual. It's creepy when guys in their 40s hit on women who are just barely legal; it's age-appropriate behavior when the guy and the object of his attention are riding the same school bus.

In any case, based on when he attended LSU, of the multiple birthdates and ages given for Phil, it looks like the 1946 one is correct. But who knows? Depending on the source, Phil is anywhere from 67 to 71. Then again, considering how elusive the duck guys in general have been on providing biographical details about themselves, it's not surprising Phil's life is a tad contradictory. The S.O. and I were speculating that one reason Phil got married when he did was the typical 1960's reason, the one that arrives in diapers a few months after the wedding where the bride's father carries a shotgun. Which brought up the question of just how old is the oldest son, Alan, the minister who did not appear in earlier seasons of Duck Dynasty. Who knows? He's been preaching for over 20 years, and no doubt some serious sleuthing would uncover his age somewhere, but you're probably not going to find it in a quick Google search.

And where has Alan been preaching, inquiring minds want to know? At the church his parents attend, the same one where Phil gets up occasionally to do some lay preaching and run his mouth on the perversions of homosexuality or the proper place of women in the overall scheme of things. That's got to be handy for Phil, having a pet preacher on a leash who's going to agree with whatever bizarre interpretation of Scripture Phil may come up with. It's hard enough for a minister to disagree with prominent members of a congregation to begin with; what are the odds Alan Robertson is ever going to tell the man who's probably underwriting his salary that he's wrong about anything? Is Alan ever going to preach a sermon grounded in Matthew 6:24? Doubtful, especially considering that Alan has joined the ranks of the on camera plastic hillbillies himself, right down to growing the requisite beard. And I wonder if any of the die-hard Bible thumpers realize that when Phil says "I support my church" what he's actually saying is "I made sure my son has a job." Is it still tithing when the tithe stays in the family? Is it charity or simply money laundering to evade taxes when you donate a lot of money to a church a family member runs?

You have to kind of admire the Robertsons. For a family that has supposedly made their life an open book by appearing in a "reality" show, they've managed to keep their family life remarkably private. They've got a fairly large extended family, but only a handful of those family members ever appear in the shows. Eccentric Uncle Si, for example, managed to keep his family so thoroughly out of the picture that the show ran for four seasons without anyone realizing the man was married. Viewers know more about his favorite iced tea glass than they know about Si's actual life.

Of course, now that people are realizing there's a treasure trove lurking on You Tube and elsewhere of Phil Robertson saying dumb stuff, that privacy screen is going to get shredded. As long as the right wing nut jobs persist in defending Phil, he's going to be in the public eye. The more he's in the public eye, the more various journalists and gossip mongers will dig into his life, and the more damage gets done to the Duck Dynasty franchise. More video tapes are going to pop up, Phil is going to start looking more and more like a Cajun version of Warren Jeffs, and A & E is going to start wishing they had pulled the plug when the first clump of shit hit the fan.

Advantages of geezerhood

I read an article on Salon recently that made me realize (again) just how lucky my generation was. The article, "How not to make love like a porn star," described some of the perils of living in a time when porn is everywhere. Some people can watch porn and recognize it for what it is: pure fantasy. Other people apparently view porn and think they're watching a reality show. This can have some strange and depressing consequences, like young men being foolish enough to believe that what they see on the screen is what women actually want in the bedroom.

The author of the article points out some of the bizarre behavior that is common in porn, such as the man grabbing his hardened penis and beating it on the woman's body, an exercise that serves no discernible purpose (as far as this disinterested commentator can tell) other than to show the world that, yes, the male actor's dick is indeed hard enough to cut diamonds and that it is also large enough to be a serviceable substitute should someone require a baseball bat. This is the type of behavior that from a woman's perspective elicits baffled looks and exclamations of  "What the hell? Are you deranged?"

That, however, is not primarily why I say we aging baby boomers are lucky.  No, we're lucky because we geezers who are now in our 60s and 70s hit adulthood just in time to enjoy a decade or two of relatively carefree hedonism minus today's unrealistic expectations about body types and athletic abilities. There was porn, i.e., explicit photos and stag films, but when smut started going mainstream, films like "Deep Throat" and "Behind the Green Door" featured actors who looked like ordinary human beings. Both men and women still had body hair, men did not look like they spent endless hours at the gym, and women were not expected to have identical genitalia. The word "labioplasty" was unknown.

If someone had told me 40 years ago that vaginal cosmetic surgery would someday become relatively common I wouldn't have believed it. In fact, I'm not sure I'd believe it now if I were a little less well-read. Apparently just as men are being indoctrinated by bad porn into believing they should wield their penises like wiffle bats, thanks to the pornification of society young women increasingly believe that the labia minora should never be visible, i.e., women are all supposed to have a crotch similar to that of a Barbie doll. This goes beyond bizarre -- feminists and human rights advocates are campaigning globally to end female genital mutilation in third world countries while at the same time supposedly well-educated middle class women in the United States are paying to have their genitalia mutilated. And, just like any other genital mutilation, they're experiencing the same risks: infection, loss of sensitivity, and months or years of pain. If it's barbaric when a young woman has her labia minora removed in Ethiopia for quasi-religious reasons, isn't it equally barbaric when a young woman has her labia minora trimmed because she thinks that men expect all women to look like a Mattel product? Why no feminist outrage and/or protest marches outside the cosmetic surgery clinics in Beverly Hills or Manhattan?

In short, thanks to what is aptly termed the pornification of popular culture, we have increasing numbers of men and women making themselves miserable and falling for sales pitches for "male enhancement" products or unnecessary surgery because what they see on the screen does not match up with what they're seeing in the bedroom. I am so happy I am old.

It's Hell getting old

On top of all the usual downsides of aging -- less energy, brittler bones, mysterious aches and pains, gray hair, wrinkles, you name it -- getting older means sliding into the demographic where you get the advertising you really don't want to see. Your snail mail box starts filling up with insurance advertising and flyers from funeral homes. Being female doesn't stop your email from loading up with spam from "Canadian" pharmacies trying to sell you erectile dysfunction cures and solve your low T problem. And then the Internet in the form of Google and other search engines figures out your demographic niche and the pop ups and ads in the side bars go from being fairly innocuous to specifically targeting women of a certain age. And this appears:

You know, there are a lot of things I'd rather not think about as I get older. Butterfly body liners are one of them. In fact, this product is something I now wish I'd never heard of. Life can be depressing enough without knowing that, and I quote from the ads, "1 out of 5 women over the age of 50 suffer from anal leakage." Does the world really need to know that on top of suffering from hot flashes, gray hairs, wrinkles, vaginal dryness, and maybe wetting their pants when they sneeze, twenty percent of older women are walking around with leaking bowels? No wonder older men don't want to date ladies their own age.

A first

A Chicken Outlet store in Westfield, Wisconsin.  I'd never seen this particular variety of outlet store before, and I'm fairly sure I have no desire to see one again.  Considering some of the strange stuff I've seen in the meat cases in supermarkets, I really don't want to think about what discounted chicken parts might consist of.  In short, I may have stopped to snap a photo, but I did not venture into the building. 

Don't we all?

h/t Nerf