As IF Times

link Only in Japan, Real Men Go to a Hotel With Virtual Girlfriends – WSJ.com.

No one listens to me.  For the longest time now, kids have been allowed to immerse themselves into the artificial worlds of cyber gaming and cyber life.  This is done to the exclusion of real life pursuits required of what would be considered a normal upbringing.  How many young people today aren’t displaying  their lives on facebook or some other virtual social site? If this trend continues, we may eventually witness  here what is now happening in Japan.

Apparently in Japan, the results of such artificial existence is showing up in the weirdest way, even by Japanese standards.  In thinking about this phenomenon, it was hard to come up with a conclusion as to why it should exist at all.  By all accounts,  if the men were willing to go through such extreme lengths to experience the virtual girlfriend experience you would think they would be attentive partners in real life.   One poor guy, a Mr. Kato has this experience,

“…his girlfriend, Manaka, was giving him the silent treatment. She was upset that he had been so busy at work that he had been playing the game only 10 minutes a day. “On days off, I spend one to two hours with her. I guess, compared to the people who come here, our relationship is a bit lukewarm,” said Mr. Kato…”

As well,

“…Players are expected to remember important dates like birthdays and holidays…”

Really, why inflict grief upon yourself from a virtual person if you didn’t have to?  This may have something to do with cultural expectations, ie: if you’re in a relationship, there must be grief and suffering.  Hmm.

On the other hand, if there is nothing but benign interaction, there would be no fun and challenge to the role playing game.  After all, who wants to win a game easily?  As far as we can see from the article, it’s only men playing the virtual companion game, there’s no mention of any women.    Although, come to think of it, there wouldn’t be much in the way of interaction with a virtual boyfriend.  You call him up on the screen, he’s either not there, sleeping, out with his buddies or golfing.  Guess that’s not too challenging.

link Lady Gaga and the death of sex | The Sunday Times.

Most people would profess not to care for the shtick and move on.  Not Camille Paglia, a person you do not want writing critiques of you.  Ms. Paglia, for those not familiar with her writings,  is a teacher, author and social critic who is quite influential among intellectuals and liberals.  However, despite writing articles that appear in Salon Magazine, one could hardly describe her as a liberal.   She can write opinions that are divergent from the typical liberal mindset and has been known to voice opinions quite in contrast to them.  Though many conservatives may not agree with many of her views, they are insightful, original and thought provoking.  It would be unfair to categorize her as a liberal, she is independent and iconoclastic in her views. 

So when she decides to take the scalpel to the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon, it’s not as a music critic but as a culture critic.  At last someone more qualified than yours truly, has dared to come out and declare what I’m sure has been on the minds of many.  Lady Gaga?  We don’t get it. Banal music aside, the most interesting thing she had to say was not about Lady Gaga per se, it was this comment:

“…despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Gaga isn’t sexy at all – she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era…”

I have a simpler, less intellectually embossed version of this.  It’s been done.  The originality and honesty of musical artists appears now to have been replaced by images and personas that are packaged and marketed according to successful formulas created on an excel spreadsheet.  Fame and exposure has taken precedence over talent as a measure of success in western society. When William Hung famously mangled a Ricky Martin song on American Idol years ago, he achieved not boos and the hook, but instant fame, fortune and a record deal!  When you consider almost any ‘rock’ or pop band over the past 20 years, they could be interchangeable versions of each other.  The long hair, dirty jeans and  unkempt look is essentially a uniform for musicians.  It’s as if band publicists all shopped at one rock star store like some LL Bean outlet to outfit their people.  “Hey Irv, if you’re going to the Rock Store, could you pick up a few things for me from the new Keith  Richard collection?”.

It’s almost impossible to think of any successful young female artist today that isn’t obliged to flout her sexuality and comeliness in the most overt ways in order to achieve popular success.  If it’s not outrageous, it doesn’t capture media attention, if it doesn’t capture media attention, it’s not going to sell.  The phenomenon of Lady Gaga is reminiscent of cars you’d see in Tijuana or Manila, garishly overdecorated vehicles which only happen to be cars.  A lot of today’s acts are far from being edgy and original, in fact they are stereotypical and cliche.  Any argument as to good or bad is doomed to endless inconclusive debate, but the biggest danger to ‘outrageous’ acts is not that they are bad, it’s that they are boring.

And don’t even start me on that hugely oxymoronic genre of rap music.  Rap music has as much to do with Black sensibilities as Chop Suey does to Chinese food.  We’ll visit this later.