Sexual at 65.

Helen Mirren nude in a bathtub.  An unretouched (relatively, anyway) woman.  British actresses generally choose earned character over purchased faux youth.  What is your honest reaction to this honest photo?

I love it, but then, I’m about her age and have a similar combination of a pretty good body and a pretty old face.  I’m curious (really curious — I can take it!) whether people of various ages and genders respond to this combination with revulsion and ridicule (“She should have the decency to cover it up!”), with dutiful admiration (“Well, yuck, but good for her”), or with real joy.  So tell the truth.

Creating a disease when there is no disease: Girls just wanna have fun!

By Sissy Willis of sisu

“Hey Ladies—how is Your Sex Drive?” goes the teaser at momsgather.com. As “one who kneads bread” [the etymological root of lady], for us it was one of those highway accidents we could not not gawk at. We were assaulted by the meme in the early-morning news just before Tiny came biting our nose and gouging our cheek, demanding breakfast. Here’s the deal:

Do you need a little boost after having children? Things just aren’t always the same after becoming a mother and all the duties that go along with Motherhood. A recent survey of American women ages 18-59 found that the most common sexual problem in women is hypoactive sexual desire disorder – It’s defined by lack of sexual desire or fantasies. And now there is a medication made just for a woman’s anatomy to help with HSDD – a little pink pill with a decidedly unsexy name, Flibanserin. It is pretty controversial in the medical field but unlike the drugs for men, like Viagra, which improve blood flow, Flibanserin is an anti-depressant that works on the pleasure center of the brain.

We’re treading in The Onion and ScrappleFace territory here. Then comes the same-old, same-old anti-capitalism narrative:

In an article on CBS NEWS critics say creating a pharmaceutical solution for HSDD is driven by greed which could translate to $2 billion market in this country alone — “We call that disease mongering, creating a disease when there is no disease in order to sell an expensive product — there are a lot of inexpensive products like a glass of wine or a massage.”

We’ll drink to that. For old-fashioned girls like ourselves, the music of sweet talkin’ words is the food of love:

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

There’s no pill for that.

Crossposted at sisu,  Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Are we suffering from a surfeit of unsexy overexposure?

By Sissy Willis of sisu

‘Does wearing sexy lingerie under the burka subvert the burka?” asks Amba in the comments to our previous post, crossposted at Cloven Not Crested, “Exposed: What really goes on beneath the burka“:

Is it actually sexier that way — is the ad pro-burka?? Are we suffering from a surfeit of unsexy overexposure, compared to, say, the Japanese who could go wild at the sight of the back of a fully kimono’ed geisha’s neck? Does the ad thus imply that concealment by the burka actually empowers a woman’s sexuality? Should we take up wearing burkas over our bikinis? What kind of dhimmitude is that? Of a piece, I would say, with the sinister Western attraction to Islam because it is so filled with moral fervor, purity, and conviction.

The “sinister” — left in Latin —Western attraction to Islam appears alive and well, exclusively on the left side of the aisle, where a fellow feeling for a dictatorship of relativism keeps the romance alive. But the Liaison Dangereuse lingerie ad’s “message” is in the eye of the beholder. Over here on the right side of the aisle, discreetly armed with our bikini beneath our street clothes, we look to the Tea Partiers for “moral fervor, purity and conviction,” and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, unveiled, is giving us the “commonsense porn” — Glenn Beck’s words — that floats our boat. Following the distaff glories of yesterday’s primaries, we’re looking for some hot and heavy conservative commonsense porn now through November from the ladies that lunch.

Crossposted at sisu, Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Exposed: What really goes on beneath the burka

By Sissy Willis of sisu

“Now THIS is how you hit back at the oppression of women in the Muslim world,” twittered Newsbusters blogger Lachlan Markay this afternoon, linking a brilliantly provocative Liaison Dangereuse lingerie ad that turns Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils on its head and puts Victoria’s Secret to shame. Set against the smoky, sultry strains of a ney — the flute of classical Arabic music — and tambourine, the camera’s eye caresses a smoky, sulty woman getting ready to go out on the town. Depending upon your perspective, you’ll either love or hate the surprise ending.

Crossposted at sisu, Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

An increasingly impotent chattering class of credulous Chris Matthewses

“Palin isn’t a feminist — not in the slightest,” huffs card-carrying postmodern feminist Jessica Valenti of the blog Feministing, stumbling inadvertently onto the truth that will soon send her and her sob sisters tumbling into the dustbin of history: “What she calls ‘the emerging conservative feminist identity’ isn’t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms. It’s an empty rallying call to women who are disdainful of or apathetic to women’s rights.”

By Sissy Willis

“Hitler despised Christianity for its weakness and admired Islam for its aggressiveness,” writes Ipso Facto in the comments of William Kilpatrick’s provocative but flawed FrontPage essay, “The Warrior Code vs. The Da Vinci Code,” quoting Albert Speer:

Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking : ‘You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?’”

Fast forward to today’s Global War on Terror. “As it did in the seventh century, Islam is taking on the appearance of an unstoppable masculine force,” writes Kilpatrick, arguing that an excess of “feminization” has eviscerated both Christianity and our nation’s resolve. Try telling that to the Tea Partiers and fearless woman warriors like Sarah Palin, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and Liz Cheney, for starters. It doesn’t fly. First a few excerpts, and then our critique:

But in the West the masculine spirit looks more like a ghost. In The Suicide of Reason, Lee Harris puts the matter in stark biological terms: “While we in the West are drugging our alpha boys with Ritalin, the Muslims are doing everything in their power to encourage their alpha boys to be tough, aggressive, and ruthless.”

Sounds like Harris is talking war, but in reality his book is more about cultural conflict than armed conflict …

Of course, feminization is not just a problem for Christians, but also for the culture as a whole. If Islam is all about submission, Western culture, of late, seems to be all about submissiveness. Each day brings news of some abject accommodation to Islamic law or practices. The latest is the American Academy of Pediatrics’ decision (now apparently reversed) to sanction a less radical form of female genital cutting as a concession to Islamic cultural traditions.

It isn’t “feminization” at all, but, rather, postmodern, identity-politics “feminism” — one of a cascade of unfortunate byproducts of the Gramscian march through the institutions — that has given us an increasingly impotent chattering class of credulous Chris Matthewses of both sexes, “pols, journos and ‘thinkers’” who have “surrendered to an Islamist plot more effective than any Bali bomb,” as Andrew Bolt so brilliantly explains in his must-read Melbourne Herald Sun column “How Hamas fooled the West.” [h/t spot the dog on Twitter].

Related: “Is Sarah Palin Allowed To Call Herself A Feminist?” and our own post on Harvey Mansfield’s discourse on manliness, “In spring a young man’s fancy.”

Crossposted at sisu, Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.