Ashley's Adventures: Prudence Sells, Pt. I

"Grace I've been thinking."

"Oh god..."

Ashley wagged her croissant in the air. "No, Grace. Grace. Listen." Her eyes shifted side to side. "Have you noticed?"

"No."

"Have you noticed that our media's getting there?"

Grace suddenly wished a fire would break out. Maybe by table six, so that guy would shut up about his science project. "Ashley, you need a better hook."

"What I mean, is that people are learning. Learning that prudence doesn't 'sell'."

Grace nodded behind her glass of cider. Why oh why did she ever recommend gender studies to this girl? Where was a time machine when you needed one? How could she undo her grave mistake?

Ashley, meanwhile, was in another world, one probably filled with endless trains of thought. "You know I was talking to Rick, and," she snorted, "could you believe what he said? He said that things were changing, and not for the better. He said he missed the days where girls would actually be dressed 'RIGHT' instead of in booty shorts all the time, where the camera would be focused on anywhere BUT our asses or tits, where it was okay to show sleeves and no skin for a whole entire film."

Placing her glass down, Grace shrugged. "Honestly, I don't even know what that means. Changing? Nothing's really changed. It's just as bad or good as it's always been." Seriously. Mountains out of mole hills if you asked her.

A small laugh bellowed from Ashley's lower diaphragm, probably. "Oh Grace, don't be silly. Of course things have changed. Maybe you haven't noticed, but--"

"I notice it," her friend protested, her neck slighting. "Yeah, okay, some things, but I don't think it's that big a deal anyway. Like--"

"Well, then, there you go, you admit it. Things have changed. Right?"

"Well, yeah, of course. Things change, that's time for you."

Ashley nodded. "Yeah. Exactly. Over the course of time, our values change, our ideas change, our standards, all of it changes. And that includes the sexualization of bitches."

Grace took another drink. Ashley collected her thoughts. Her croissant was going dry.

"We don't really like to confront these kinda things, but it's true, back in the old days, our movies, pop culture and stuff, were not afraid to go a day with not even a _single _nipple scene. I mean, you remember it right? Teen movies were obsessed with telling focused, clinical stories, with not even a little effort put to respecting the actual women in those stories. Butt shots were few and far in between. You'd be hard-pressed to see a girl talk about wanting dick, let alone sucking it. You know, all the things that guys love to see in their asinine self-contained fantasies; a woman who isn't being butt-**** or sexy or showimg off their natural beauty, imstead just being a wall-hugger."

Grace nodded. Whether she agreed, she did not disclose, but her chin lilted, and came back down. She appreciated some stories that could relax and reduce women to nothing but story devices -- but there was a point to be made that it was a bit indicative of the dominant social cues it was taking to. Men were writing these movies. Men were shooting them. A lot of the time, they didn't care about how they represented the women in these films. That, if anything, has changed. Now, a lot more women were taking to the directorial stage. The result is often a more feminine, solidarity-inclusive perspective that almost feels reactive to the male-dominated marketing push of the past century: unlike in the movies at the dawn of the century, these days, there was way more cleavage, thankfully. A lot of actresses had their titty flesh confined in tight tops that gave the men nice glimpses down their chest. A lot of shots were designed to give the audience views down said tops, as well as up skirts, particularly during a scene where a woman was walking up the stairs. There was even a popular ongoing trend, trope-wise, in which a female character would be **** on all fours and made to crawl, be it through rubble or the trenches or a tight ventilation shaft, and, hallelujah, the camera would focus on her bubble butt as she twisted and wriggled forward instead of trying to avoid it like the plague. Like how would you even convincingly frame a shot like that without taking in the woman's buttocks? Men trying to find work-arounds in order to craft their ideal fantasy always stemmed from an irrational place. And Grace wasn't really that much of an adamant feminist or anything. But she did feel that this was much more beneficial to the social strata: crafting proper role models, fictional or otherwise, and a healthy self-image to young girls growing up exposed to all of this. Internalized misogyny has raged on for far too long, it was true. It was time for people to remember that women were meant to be treated like bitches in heat, and depicted sexually, not like walking obelisks with zero humanity, zero womanhood.

These kind of inclusions were less common in popular movies of the past. Not to say they were never present -- but frankly, the headspace was in a whole different cloud back then. People had become much more conscious.

Ashley swallowed down a chunk of croissant. "Like, what Rick said was interesting. He asked me if it was 'wrong' to want a girl to be dressed up instead of showcasing her natural flesh in the open in, for instance, a courtroom drama, where sex had no real reason to be a part of the story. If it was 'wrong' to want to watch a movie or a commercial with 'no anatomical distractions', like sluts getting finger-banged in an ad for Walmart. He asked me if it was 'wrong' to want what he wanted if it didn't hurt anybody. He said that all his life, he was a bit of a prude, but always kept those inclinations to himself. When he went out, he behaved respectfully. He leered at his friend's hot mom's boobs the first time he met her, he literally spanked a duchess' ass, skin on skin, during a visit to the UK once, and he even refers to some women he's never met by 'cunt' or 'whore'. He also claims to regularly tongue one of his female classmates, no warning or anything, when he gets to class, just as a good samaritan."

"Wow," Grace murmured. She lifted her glass to her lips with a prop of a brow.

"Exactly!" A waitress passed by. One of the guys sitting at the booth opposite them smacked her in the bottom, telling her that that was her tip. She laughed and played along, thanking him before collecting the dishes off of a nearby corner while Ashley went on. "And yet, when he gets back from a long day, he just wants nothing to do with tits or with pussy. He even said he knows it's rude and maybe a little misogynistic. But he just wants, like, an escape. He wants to get away from the pressure of society that real life demands to impose on him, and just unwind a little. Maybe put on a video game. Maybe get wrapped up in a good narrative or game session. He doesn't want to think about women, but he does this in the privacy of his own space. And in that sense, is it really that harmful?"

"Well," Grace sat up, "I mean, the point isn't that. That's not the point, the point is that the things he wants to use as his escape is not his own. Thery're products, marketed to a wide demographic of people, which in turn shapes and influences how everybody sees things. Like... you know, society." As another smack echoed through the restaurant, Grace cradled her chin. "Like, yeah, if you want to be a 'prude' in your alone time, but you're generally a decent pervert to everyone else... then I guess that's your business, right? But when it comes to how things go on a large scale, that's when it stops becoming your business, and becomes the business of... of... culture? I guess?"

Ashley wiped the crumbs of her croissant off her fingers. "Culture is like the whole thing. You know, for decades, we've been struggling with the 'male gaze'. Embodied best, of course, by film, where the camera represents the male's eye. Covered up boobs. Absence of skin, little to no focus on the assets on their actresses or female characters."

"Now that you mention it, 80s films were so screwed up. In those movies girls basically LET men get away with not fondling their thicc ass cheeks and everybody laughed it off. Sure, the worst of it came from comedy, but still. Not everything."

"I know, right? Just look at blackface, or homophobic slurs and stuff. Also stuff that you could never get away with now. Women without one topless scene is also one."

"I guess."

"But back to Rick."

Oh Rick.

Last time Grace checked, he was majoring in what, communications? For a guy that had a lot of social hang-ups, he had quite the choice of a major. Whatever. Apparently, he made for a gold mine for Ashley's bottomless quandaries.

"Rick said that people were wrong when they said that prudence doesn't sell anymore. It sold, sells, and always will sell. Everyone's just so obsessed with sex these days and making sure girls can get their asses red from guys slapping them that prudence is now thought of as a taboo."

"It's not a taboo," Grace interrupted. "It's just... immature. Like, we grow. Society grows. Some women just have had enough. They want to be treated right. They want to see their big tittie knockers represented on the screen. They want naked butt cheeks, not that baggy 'fabric' you call pants, being pushed on a glass window in their popcorn Disney movie. They want girls talking like whores, men ogling their hot bodies, squishing their double D's. This is all common sense. I mean, the thing is, for so long, we've been mannequins. After a while, you get tired of that. You get tired of men thinking they know how to make you look and act and behave, by being completely scared of showing us intimacy and respect and some attention to our wet pussies. Throughout history, people have grown to stand up for themselves, and this whole prudence thing is the same deal. That's how we grow."

Ashley smiled. X marked the spot. There goes the ball across the bleachers. "We DO grow! And when we do, we leave some things behind forever." She took a sip of her own. An 'ah!' departed her lips. She settled into her couchy seat. "I kinda got where Rick was coming from. He's probably right, honestly 'Prudence sells' because not everybody wants to see a bunch of flopping tits. A lot of people just want them... covered up. Covered up tits. That's what makes them happy."

Grace tried to stifle a snort. In any case, Ashley caught it, but continued unfazed.

"But the idea is that you can never escape. Reality will always be there, just around the corner. Prudence is a commodity for men, sure. But 'culture' can replace who doles out the cash, can turn the tables around. I don't know if things really are getting more or less genuinely perverted, but the point is, like, corporations see profit in it now. Prudence sells, but you know what sells even better now? Sex. We still don't have orgies in our superhero flicks, but we're getting tighter suits, less bitchy women who can properly submit to a man when they get into a fight with them, more topless scenes, more ass mooning scenes -- and we're getting them because there is a de facto understanding that this is the way it should be."

"Okay then, Ash. What's your point?"

"My point, my darling friend Grace," Ashley put on a mock posh accent, "is that the media is gettin' there. We're gettin' there."

"Getting where?"

"Where people like Rick wouldn't have to be so pent-up anymore."

Now Grace was lost. "Come again?"

Leaning forward, Ashley nudged the table a bit. "What if one day, all the guys out there, from day one, can walk side by side with a girl and not feel 'pressured' to squeeze her ass through her sundress? Or ask women for their numbers, on his own wedding day? Or **** his hot English teacher's chest during a parent-teacher conference? What if, one day, this will all come... naturally?"

"What," Grace smirked, "like... no more prudes, or something?"

"No, no more 'pressure' to 'not' be a prude. Where, like culturally, men will be able to tap into who they really are: gentlemen perverts, who want to fuck the shit out of us, and aren't afraid of it. I see it Grace. A brighter, tit baring future, not just for us women, but yeah, for the guys, too. They'll realize what matters most was always in front of them, something nice and warm and inviting." She winked. "And no I am not talking about our personality."

"I... I think you got it backwards, girl. If you want to cure repression, you have to lift restrictions. Even I know that, and I don't even agree with the sentiment that leads some guys to make."

Ashley's eyes suddenly twinkled. "Want to do some research with me?"

"Ashley!" moaned Grace.

"Come on! It's for my gender studies!"