Dick Jokes and Air-Humping
Some things never change
I am a prude. The end.
Just kidding, I’m not finished just yet, but I am a prude: easily offended by things related to sex. Some humans I have met proudly stated that sex is the only instinct remaining to our breed and this is why the urge to fuck is still so high, and I call bullshit on this. Calling reproductive functions “instinct” is denying evolution its share of responsibility. Nothing in us says instinct anymore, so much that anxiety has become an illness. What? It isn’t? In the beginning of times, anxiety* was a natural mechanism in the brain that was meant to alert in case of danger, putting aside everything else and focusing on escaping the sabretooth tiger, or the potential presence of this weaponized cat.
My point? We cannot put anything on instinct anymore, especially not sexual functions. If there were such a thing, males would predate on females and copulate with them for reproduction matters only, people would not modify their bodies and cover in perfume, and scenes involving cakes and giant rubber feet would not be mental images my brain would ever have been aware of.
That said, I went to watch improv last night, with two gals from my improv class. We have a local league, and Wednesday’s the night. To be honest, it was not my first time going because my boyfriend used to be their official musician and I had been a couple of times in a very distant past. I remembered a very loud animation and poor jokes from the past but I took a chance. Maybe I thought my recent interest had changed the concept, but rest assured that it hadn’t.
Whatever negative I am about to drop here, I had an OK night, and I had one good laugh. Rarely will you read me saying that something (out of my routine) was awesome, if anything other than a grilled-cheese or a great pun, so having an OK time is like a 5 out of 10 on my scale, where anything higher than 6 cannot exist outside my cocoon.
However, I was brutally reminded how prude I was, very soon in the night. I can handle a dick size joke, especially when it’s nicely done, and someone of the blue side (4 men) showing an invisible inch-and-a-half dimension, telling his bros that it was six inches made me laugh. But little did I know that most of the improvs on the yellow side (one man for three women) would go the easy route on almost every single presence.
Many topics challenge me in life, alcohol, obesity, freedom of speech, environment, porn, and others that would not give anything more to my argument. Most of them came up at some point and I was OK for everything but sexually vulgar scenes. Clearly, I was the exception there. Calling myself more intellectually ranked would be easy and false, because I am a great fan of toilet jokes, and I like them very graphic. Clearly, I was not the target audience because people laughed and applauded, and I didn’t see so many thumbs-down (that was the way to vote for mix improv) but mine (yep, I proudly thumbed down many times).
Before going yesterday, I chilled on the couch with my cat, watching older improv matches on YouTube and yes, there were some sex jokes, many of them. Nevertheless, we could see that higher classes of improvisators didn’t really go so far into them. The use was more restricted and seemed to let a lot of space for interpretation, not literal grabbing one from behind and humping for way too long.
That’s only my opinion but I find this kind of humour very low-end. Lacking words and ideas to the point of filling up the gaps with such low-quality material was saddening. Because that’s what I usually do, I wondered what I was doing there, and why I was in such a way, such a downer, so unable to put my brains aside.
My initial goal in going was seeing how it’s done, how people get inspired, the chemistry between players, the type of gestures. I saw. But I could not say it inspired me, and it will definitely motivate me to get more vocabulary, to find ideas that are smarter to never let anyone drag me down into the dirty abyss.
I have been raised in a household where porn was normal, and where degrading comments regarding the reproductive system were a way of life. One could think it would have desensitized me, but I tend to think it had the opposite effect, leading me to despise the easiness of this way. Maybe it’s just genetic as well because my youngest son rejects friends as soon as he sees them air-humping and talking about male parts in cheap wording. I didn’t do that; he chose his path, and I won’t get in his way to change his views!
When I joined the improv classes, I wanted to reintegrate into the “real society”, the one I escaped when I quit my career, my job, my marriage. So far, the classes have helped me a lot, like a practical way to push my limits. However, I don’t know if the hard reality of this cheap mentality presents a risk for my new passion. What if I can never fit the mould of all those people also not fitting a mould? How much of nonconforming can a nonconformist be? Especially in a low populated region of very… regional people?
When looking up the word “prude” earlier in my writing, I saw it was a negative word and I decided to use it anyway. Maybe it’s the language barrier talking but it didn’t sound like much of an insult for me. However, if you think there could be a more appropriate term, let me know. According to you, what would the opposite term for prude in this context?
Let me know in the comments.
*As stated by the National Institutes of Health, the biological definition of anxiety is “Anxiety is a psychological, physiological, and behavioral state induced in animals and humans by a threat to well-being or survival, either actual or potential. It is characterized by increased arousal, expectancy, autonomic and neuroendocrine activation, and specific behavior patterns.”