28 May 2009: "Miss the days of authentic nip slip theory."

This post is about the three-fifths compromise. Carles begins the post with a note which actually contains the essence of its philosophical content:

This picture is not safe for browsing in environments which do not allow you to see more than 3/5 of a nipple.

Here, prohibition, pornography, wage slavery, and the ghosts of chattel slavery are brought together in one powerful sentence masquerading as a throwaway joke. Carles's true intent, hiding behind the cloak of humor, is to question whether obscenity can be parsed in this fractional way, or whether the effort to devise an airtight definition of what is pornographic is as doomed to failure as the absurd attempt to define the worth of human souls as mathematical proportions of one another.

At what point does an image become offensive? And at what point to we cede control over that decision to those who employ us or hold us under surveillance? Carles presents us with an image of a naked man and challenges us to defy his dignity: "Glad that the cobrabro is still willing to ‘be himself’." Were he three-fifths clothed, what would our assessment be? Chances are, Carles seems to imply, that we would find him that much less authentic, as each piece of apparel would be freighted with the fashion industry's significations and desperate stabs at social relevance.

Carles then defends the nip-slip as symbolic of an alternative to hedonistic abandon: Hedonism ultimately resolves in biological compulsion and unfreedom. Voluntary restraint, celebrating the hints and teases and seductions of postmodern society, as Jean Buadrillard suggested, offers a way out of the trap of the fun morality, of automatic pleasure devolving into unpleasure. Baudrillard:

To play is not to take pleasure. Seduction, as a passion and as a game at the level of the sign, acquires a certain sovereignty; it is seduction that prevails in the long term because it implies a reversible, indeterminate order.
The glamour of seduction is quite superior to the Christian consolation of the pleasures of the flesh. One wants us to consider the latter a natural finality – and many are driven mad for failing to attain it. But love has nothing to do with sex drives, if not in the libidinal look of our contemporary culture.

Carles:

nip slips might still be better than ’seeing a whole tit’ because it leaves more 2 the imagination. like it is ‘boring’ when a girl puts out 2 fast, so u sort of need her to ‘hold out’ so you can get emotionally connected+obsessed with the eventual goal of ‘cumming on/in her.’