Author's Note
This story is the seventh installment in my "Origins of a Writer" Series.
Now that I've reached #7 I think I can tell you that the end is near. Just four more after this one.
You can find previous parts on my page or by searching "Origins of a Writer" on the top left.
If you don't have time to read the previous parts, it's okay! Lucky for you, the actual stories aren't related, so all you really need to know before you start reading Part 7 below is the Author's Note portion of Part 1. And just because I'm so accommodating, here it is ---
Believe it or not, but I wasn't always a great writer (if you're laughing at this statement, I can't hear you).
In my first year of college at UC San Diego, I took a class called 'Theatre And Film' (I think), in which we studied (watched) films that were based on stage plays. Instead of exams, we were graded on essays comparing each adapted film we studied to its original written play.
Obviously, I got an 'A' in this class (this is a verifiable fact, and I am boasting because it was my first A in college). But on a more serious note, this class (and the 'A' grade, just saying) was particularly important to me because it was the first time I wrote something I wanted to write.
Basically, when historians in the future research my life, they will find traces of Launchora's origins in this class.
So to continue celebrating Launchora's first weekend of story-publishing (i.e. June 20-22, 2014), I'm going to publish some of my college writings/essays in this multiple part series, which I would like to call "The Origins of A Writer". Yes, I just made that up and then changed the name of this story to reflect it.
---- End of Author's Note from Part 1
This essay (part 7 of the series) is the first of the third segment of my college writing, which I wrote during a class called CAT 3 (a decent sequel to Culture, Art, Technology 2). I wrote three essays for this class, one about an animated short and two about blockbuster movies. And since you can't ask but are dying to know, I got an A- in this class.
This essay was written (finished) on April 28, 2009, and is reproduced here word-for-word, typo-for-typo. As always - don't judge my writing, judge 19-year-old me's writing (yeah so I just realized I've been 19 since Essay #4 but didn't state it, so judge this new guy now).
Spoiler Alert: In this one I talk about society's perception of sex and how that affects individuals. I was 19...so obviously I wasn't speaking from a personal perspective. All professional observations. Seriously. Duh.
ESSAY SEVEN
Sex and the City-induced Insecurities
Bernard Derriman’s flash animation video, Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me, deals with a depressed rabbit questioning whether everyone else feels the same way. James Wood, in the Irresponsible Self, mentions the forced moments when someone in a group asks “do you want to hear a joke?” and the uneasiness and pressure felt by some as to whether they would get the punch line. Our protagonist, the rabbit, is that someone who didn’t get the joke. He feels left out, angry, and even experiences some self-pity that he didn’t get the joke. Furthermore, he tends to believe himself to be the joke that everyone else laughs at.
Our society has dragged the issue of sex to such an extent that it is no longer the sacred act of procreation, but rather a universal sport that everyone HAS to play and be good at too.
The animator’s choice of using animation as the method of filming the video and a rabbit as the protagonist sets up the viewer with the expectation of harmless and/or childlike humor, since that is what the audience is used to when the subject is rabbits or animation. The outcome is something entirely different. The video deals with an extremely mature subject - man’s inner struggle with his sexual insecurities and the embarrassment of having to wear the ‘how many times I’ve had sex’ crown. Our laughter comes from the surprise of seeing a rabbit talking about what most people consider (or at least used to consider) a taboo to even talk about in public. Jim Holt mentions this in his article, The Art of Laughter, as the incongruity theory. “We laugh when two things normally kept in separate compartments in our mind are unexpectedly yanked together”(Reader, p.88).
As the video progresses, what was once laughter due to surprise, dials down to periodic jolts of uneasy laughter, to a point where it is no longer funny and the laughter turns into sympathy. We see the rabbit as a depressed person living in a world where the number on his chest (which states how many times he has had sex) determines his status in society. Our sympathy arises from, in some cases, superiority to the protagonist, similar to his sympathy for the ‘0’ keyboardist (The Art of Laughter, reader p.88).
The rabbit begins the song with the title ‘everyone else has had more sex than me’, portraying himself as someone with no self-esteem left due to society’s pressure on sex. By the time he encounters the one rabbit who has had less sex than him, with the camera showing his back to the audience, he is looking at the keyboardist with our eyes, the way we see him, but now he is the superior one. This superiority lasts only for a while because even after finding someone who apparently feels worse than he does, the rabbit seems unaffected. He doesn’t see the faces of the other rabbits, just their number. He doesn’t see the pain in their eyes that comes from their own insecurities about sex or maybe something else, because he believes himself to be the one with the most suffering. Sex has taken over his life, and “he would rather die than not get to f***”(2min25secs).
The video deals with what is wrong with our society’s view and opinion on sex, and how the consequential pressure drives people into depression. These people consider themselves to be outcasts in the ‘real’ world, a world constituted of fantasies enabled by celebrities, films, television shows, advertisements, and other forms of entertainment.
Sex, originally a consequence of love between two people, has been transformed into a sport that says ‘not for everyone’. Just like any other sport, sex has top players who play for the league, average players who play with their friends every weekend, and rejects who are just not good at it. The resulting success, failure, and competitiveness is represented by the numbers displayed on the chests of the protagonist and other rabbits.
The concept of sex has been pushed to such a point that there is no moral difference between the two questions “How many times have you had sex?” and “How many beers can you chug?” - and for both the answer is always an exaggerated number. We are judged for so many things that we do that, after a while, we expect to be judged and thus create a mechanism or a cover that hides the number on our chests. The rabbits in the video are stripped of that mechanism, showing their true, insecure, and vulnerable insides to the rest of the world.
It is hard to locate such a problem, since our society has a habit of redefining or modifying most norms bit by bit everyday. Jim Holt refers to this as “the shift in attitude” in terms of the evolution of humor and wit. This applies to the man-made problem of sex in our society where the result is a version that even though being in the same category, is far from the original.
Popular media has played a huge role in making sex an everyday thing to talk about from celebrity teenage pregnancies to awareness of STDs, leading to unforeseen consequences (sex being the center of everyone’s life and loneliness being directly proportional to sex). By addressing sex-related issues with teenagers, we also tell them that sex is what everyone is doing, thereby adding another thing to their insecurities. The message works and it is important, but it also creates new problems, creating a never ending cycle where sex is at the center. Society decides ‘what should matter?’ and for now what matters is a person’s sex count. In today’s world, sex controls a person’s existence in society - holding by a thread a person’s popularity, relationships, marriage, future, etc. Sex makes people walk up and down the social or work-place ladder, it makes or breaks their relationships or marriages, it decides their level of popularity in schools and colleges, and so on.
In the chorus ‘Does everyone’, we are shown images of the rabbit in different positions along with colored backgrounds. But if these images are seen as separate from the rest of the video, they may no longer seem funny to the viewer, if not offensive and pornographic. Most of these are suggestively erotic positions that would be considered obscene if the rabbit wasn’t animated or not alone. Considering the rabbit’s actions throughout the rest of the video where he is seen to be angry, depressed, hateful, and beating himself up, these images invoke in the viewer what Wood refers to as ‘the comedy of forgiveness’. Similar to the comic strip Garfield Minus Garfield by Dan Walsh, where the absence of Garfield in the pictures gives the story ‘the real world’ look where Jon is just a depressed and lonely man, the presence of a rabbit in the images keeps the viewers from looking at the video with ‘the real world’ magnifying glass - making the rabbit this video’s Garfield. The rabbit, just like Garfield, is necessary for the intended funny theme of the video, so that the viewer doesn’t see the the connection between the rabbit’s world and our world.
In the concluding paragraph of The Art of Laughter, Holt talks about what has become of the art of laughter in the example of Evelyn Waugh and his attempt to force his son to have a sense of humor. This example applies to the world the rabbit lives in and the world we live in, where the true meaning of the arts of laughter and sex and what they are supposed to represent is irrelevant and lost, and all that remains is success, failure, and competition. By misinterpreting a good sense of humor as something that one has to work for - rather than a human quality - and sex as a competitive sport - rather than something personal and special between two people - we have really lost the point.