Raquel Welch always gives an amusing interview. At 71 years-old, she’s not only a working actress in amazing and beautiful shape, but is prone to dishing commonsense with a great pithy and sassy style. In an interview with—of all things—the magazine Men’s Health, Welch fires bullets on the cultural decline being brought on by rampant sexual explicitness. Commenting first on the music business, she says:
It used to be about a great song, great lyrics and a great voice. And now everybody is more concerned with being cutting edge and pushing the envelope. You have to be funkier, you have to be more audacious and more provocative than anybody else. When there’s somebody like Adele, it seems revolutionary because she’s not out there in a g-string and pasties. You forget that all music, all art, isn’t about T&A and girls spreading their legs for the camera.
Observing society more generally, she goes on:
I think we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where we’re all sex addicts, literally. We have equated happiness in life with as many orgasms as you can possibly pack in, regardless of where it is that you deposit your love interest.
[…]It’s just dehumanizing. And I have to honestly say, I think this era of porn is at least partially responsible for it. Where is the anticipation and the personalization? It’s all pre-fab now. You have these images coming at you unannounced and unsolicited. It just gets to be so plastic and phony to me. Maybe men respond to that. But is it really better than an experience with a real life girl that he cares about? It’s an exploitation of the poor male’s libidos. Poor babies, they can’t control themselves.
These are something of a continuation of observations she made in writing a couple of years ago. She’s on the money, and if the world were organized correctly, she would be head of Sociology at Princeton or somewhere like that. Continue reading “Raquel Welch is right (and notes on Limbaugh/Fluke)”