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STYLE_IMPAIRED

                                              August 20, 2005

On the documentary
"The Lifestyle"...

Fascinating because
the people are so
dreadfully unhip.

You might expect a bunch of people
engaging in group sex orgies to
have some sort of edgy quality to
them.

At least as much as, say,
the Rocky Horror cult.

Instead, these are people who
seem to be stuck in the tackiest      Oh, and by the way: some
elements of the early seventies.      people -- not me -- have
                                      trouble with the idea that
"The Panther Palace":                 people who don't look like
a nightmare of                        porn stars might have sex.
fur-lined interiors...
                                                    Just get over it, eh?

                                                    Even people who look
                                                    like your mother have
                                                    a right to have sex.

                                                    For that matter, your
                                                    mother has a right to
                                                    have sex.
Now, the devotees of "The
Lifestyle" undoubtably
regard themselves as
pretty damned cool...

They must look on us stodgy
monogamists with a certain
superior air, however restrained.


The fact that they seem
like total dorks to a                Though I suppose you'd
lot of us (not evil or               find the "evil or
reckless or weird, but               reckless" opinon well
*really dorky*) would                represented in some
probably come as a                   circles --
surprise to them.

    Different subcultures look down on each other,
    that's nothing new... but the magnitude of the
    difference here, that's pretty amazing.

        San Francisco vs Orange County?




Anyway, I think there's room for some
insights in this example, and someday
I may stagger toward a few of them:

  the nature of Cool
  symbolic actions
  changing meanings of symbols


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