OK, ALL RIGHT, I KNOW...

OK, so it's not exactly a secret that I spend a certain amount of time on-line looking for pictures of men that you don't have to pay for access to, and I save a fair number of them on my hard drive--far more than I could ever take the time to actually look at (when I do, I find that what goes through my head most often is, "Why on earth did I want to save that one?").

So it's not about me being any better than anyone else; they're not posting anything I'm not looking for. (Well, actually, they are; finding something you really respond to in a general posting of male flesh is a rare event, especially if your tastes are... specific. I do recognize the beauty of the men that don't do anything for me, and completely understand how they would for someone else.) But I do find it a bit creepy to have the mountains of male flesh alternating with flowers. This is a conceit that turns up every once in a while--I ran into it most recently on the blog "Admire" [click here],a site that has in the past offered things I... admired. This post is headed "Special Delivery" and features more or less the sequence on the right.

It's bad enough when women's beauty is poeticized for its passing glory and inevitable fading; it seems worse when applied to men--OK, maybe it's no worse than when it's applied to women, but it is at least as bad. Isn't it? [What the hell do I know?] However, no matter how often poets may have made the connection, it's still unusual to find books of poems lauding the female form illustrated with orchids--and straight porn rarely features flowers, as far as I can tell, which isn't far. Maybe it's a political statement, and we're all meant to look for the fragility within the mountain. Ooooooooooooooooooh.

Realistic as that may be in some cases, it sure as hell isn't what I'm looking for---or is it? Ahem. As I was saying...

What's ridiculous here is not just the gender-bending application. Silly as the simile may be for women, people are expressing something about what makes women attractive: vulnerability, physical softness... I guess you could say that people are trying to express what makes men attractive to them. It must be inner softness, because the usual combination seems to be close-ups of flowers that make Georgia O'Keefe look profound with piles of muscle that resemble Sherman tanks more than flowers.

I like Sherman tanks--that's partly what I'm surfing to find. I like flowers--even photos of them. But the combination seems just a little absurd. Or am I missing something here?

Well, off to make lunch and put off some more work...
C