Sex and the Scottish Woman
by DICK CHENEY
Outlander
creator Ronald D. Moore
I recently curled up with Lynne on our recamier to revisit the 1986 classic Nine 1/2 Weeks. Kim Basinger plays a young woman who, when blindfolded, is able to consume an almost unlimited amount of fruit, vegetables, honey and milk. It stunned me that an ice cube could accomplish so much, and I remarked as much to Lynne as she began to lightly scrape my balls with her fingernail. She said, "A lot of weird things turn people on. Did you know that Mickey Rourke is completely smooth down there?"
They screened Nine 1/2 Weeks for 4,000 people in 1986. All but 40 walked out, and all but five trashed this masterpiece, from which 50 Shades of Grey is essentially plagiarized. Director Adrian Lyne went on to make Jacob's Ladder and Indecent Proposal, but outside of those two movies, his life in Hollywood was over.
It was in this spirit that I sampled the Starz! adaptation of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander. Claire (Caitriona Balfe) is a Scottish nurse who has hard sex with her history professor husband, but only when he is feeling particularly nostalgic about the fifteenth century. She lulls herself into a particularly emotional voiceover during penetration: "Frank and I always returned to each other in bed," she explains before she is abducted to the 18th century.
Women used to allow themselves to be touched by Mickey Rourke around the turn of the century.
There is nothing more boring than the 18th century in Scotland. I never really understood what Braveheart was about; I assumed it was just Mel Gibson's wet dream in which he dressed Jews up as Englishmen and murdered them in cold blood. Four centuries has done nothing to improve matters. Scotland is a lovely place, but the racial diversity is next to nil and there is absolutely nowhere to get good hummus.
Presumably Claire will travel to a variety of different time periods, sampling the penii of the area and reporting back to her husband, who will note her travelogues with clenched disdain before attempting to please her in the ways of various eras:
Ned Stark would not have done this.
Cinematic sex is nearly always dull, especially socio-historical depictions of copulation in the 1940s. As we see in Outlander, no exchange of fluids ever occurred in the wintercourse of this period. Women were only allowed to kiss their partners once or twice, and when men kissed their women, it had to be on the forehead, and they had to murmur "I'm sorry" as they did it. Homosexual sex was restricted to members of Parliament.
Women received a bottle of champagne at the conclusion of their menstrual cycle in the 1940s. What a decade.
All p & v was unprotected until the 1980s, when the condom was invented by Ronald Reagan as a subversive tool to quell population uprisings in Latin American dictatorships. When that failed, copies of Outlander were sent to Brazil, Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile and all of Bill Clinton's mistresses in the 1990s. The book had the opposite effect of what was intended. Along with Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, it got all the women of these areas in the mood for love. Hearts and hinds.
It's like Thrones without the midgets or saying "Where do whores go?" every other sentence. Basically, if Thrones were written by a woman.
When Claire and her husband Frank find a Scottish Stonehenge and a coven that sashays all night around it, they hide in some brush and mutually masturbate until morning. Claire wants to go back with her husband to investigate further the next day, but he thinks of some errand he has to do because it's really awkward the day after they make love. She visits the site alone, and is transported to 1743, where things are even more excruciating, and where Claire details her reaction to them in an extensive, throaty voiceover. His lips touched mine, and slowly his head brushed my speckled clitoris. I tasted like almonds.
If a woman is wearing a shawl, that pretty much rules out oral.
All writing about sex, unless it is by Rachel Kramer Bussel or Shakespeare, is utterly prosaic, coming across either as so brief as to be nonstimulating, or essentially braggadocio. Showtime's Masters of Sex has gone to great trouble to prove just how unexciting sex is, especially in the Midwest. I have seen Lizzy Caplan's butt more often than I have my own. It's a nice posterior, but is it really good enough to carry an hour long drama? The answer is no.
After a promising first season, the show has descended into melodrama punctuated by scenes where Caplan is fucked in some new position; last week she got it against a wall, and in the trailers for the next episode, she shows her unadorned bottom to Lyndon Johnson.
The Peggy Olson archetype taken a diaphragm too far.
"Just once," Lynne complained, "I want to see sex in art the way that it really happens." This would be a more suitable kind of birth control for our young ones. An Oregon school district recently found itself with a 5 percent pregnancy rate across its schools, and took the modest step of offering condoms to any students who wanted them. When the community learned of this policy, not a single parent came forward in support of the decision. The Daily Caller article about this was the most embarassing thing I have ever read, and I read BuzzFeed. There's nothing more pathetic than grown adults getting upset about a couple of raincoats.
How about a pink shawl? Did they not have pink fabric in this entire fucking country?
If the adults themselves were having good sex with each other, they would naturally understand what an attraction the act holds and support the raincoat policy. We can only assume these parents are having the fumbling, two minute variety, or sleeping in separate beds like Lucy and Desi. Usually art reflects society, but in more discreet and, for some, shameful matters, it is the other way around.
Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.
"This is Tinder."
"Patience Gets Us Nowhere Fast" - Capital Cities (mp3)
"I Sold My Bed, But Not My Stereo" - Capital Cities (mp3)
