Sex Symbols

One of my casual New Year's resolutions ("casual" here meaning not written down or promised) along with eating less and moving more, is to spend less time paying attention to politics. Your faithful correspondent has long held the belief that blogging and talking about politics, both world and national, is a waste of time because very few blogs have any influence on the body politic and talking about the latest crisis in North Korea at the shop coffee pot only shows one to be a news geek and does nothing for the victims of the North Korean Elvis, Kim Il Jung.

So yours has made a resolution to spend more time blogging about things that he is interested in such as music, culture, religion and literature.

A case in point is the decline of sex symbols. When I was a laddie gambolling about the banks of the San Gabriel River, there were women,why, since we were young sprites unaware of exactly what a sex symbol was, were considered by man, woman and child, to be sex symbols and truly beautiful women. Such women had names such as Jane Russell (a tough but sexy woman), Rita Hayworth, Rhonda Fleming, Sophia Loren, Gina Lolabrigitta (sp?), and the almost divine Brigitte Bardot. The common factor in all these women was that they were women. They were not teenagers. They were not children. They were all women who knew their own minds. A grown man who had the hots for Jeanne Craine in her role as Margie was considered a little suspect because Margie was a teenager.

Now that I am a man approaching senior citizenship I find that the sex symbol has become the child-like teenager as is evinced by Brittany Spears, Lindsey Lohan, Gweneth Paltrow, et al. In other words, youth women who all look like they just got out of junior high school instead of ripe women. Apparently the modern taste is for the green instead of the ripe, and that says something not good about the society. It's as if a bunch of adolescents have taken over the society. When Catherine Zeta-Jones, a truly sexy woman, is considered and oldie, one knows that something is wrong.

It may be that I'm spoiled. I grew up with truly beautiful women. The ever young Baroness Nib (my mother) and her sister were beautiful women. I married a truly beautiful and sexy woman -- the ever lovely Lady Nib --(especially when she wears stocking and a nice pair of black pumps), and she is still, some thirty odd years, later my ultimate sex symbol.

The sex symbols of my youth all smelled of Tabu or Nuit de Noel. The current crop smell of Heaven Scent or bubble gum.

It's sad.