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CAUTION: My girl, Carol, speaks her mind in a strong,
brassy and vibrant fashion. If you are offended by straight talking,
adult oriented language (sometimes, there's a "very" in there), please be
aware that you may well find it here. Carol shoots from the hip and
tells it like it is, pulling no punches and taking no prisoners.
That's why I love her & why I hired her. If it's not your bag, let's
part still friends and salute our differences in tastes (I'm sort of a
strong strawberry flavor...) ~*~Katrina~*~
Lindze
Letherman has frequently gone on record with her modest views on revealing
outfits and love scenes. So why’s GH continually putting her teenaged
character Georgie in embarrassing, overtly sexualized situations?!
On GH and in today’s society, interest in the
indecent has become a popular art form. To keep relevant and keep viewers
interested, soaps must reflect society’s descent into the lowest common
denominator (or do they?).
The latest trends have included fascination
with humanizing the pinnacle of amoral criminality, the mob, as witnessed
with the soaring cult-like status of HBO’s “The Sopranos,” affirmed by a
recent “Law & Order” episode where the main characters reel with disgust
at the god-like awe with which made-men are revered by the general public
after a gruesome hit.
Sonny and Jason represent a nod to that
particular trend dutifully, their characters routinely, ruthlessly
ordering hits, ordering their women around, ordering the world upside-down
upon its axis, yet the whole of the town reacting as if they must exist to
enforce and soldier law and order, to usurp such responsibilities normally
given to the cops and the prosecution, who are depicted routinely and
ruthlessly as inept, corrupt, lazy and criminal.
And then there’s the teen sector, all three
members so far: Dillon, Sage and Georgie. As in real life, circa
post-millennium, the girls are all sexed up as dutiful clones of blonde
singing sensations and skank representatives, Christina Aguilera and
Britney Spears. They dress provocatively, even outside in the dead of
winter, their prevailing concern being ... not school, family or future
career goals, but the boy next door and how to nail him.
Typical? Sure. Typical in
today’s society, with children growing up in a
cyberporn
generation, easily able to access (or have forced upon them by SPIMs,
SPAMs, mousetraps and duplicitous perverts using their spelling challenges
to lure them onto x-rated sites) the Internet for a voyeuristic, often
free, view of simulated sex for money and titillation, and an unnatural
image of women as slavish Barbie dolls, big boobs, tiny waist, plump
behind, full come-hither lips half-parted, on her knees in full begging
position.
Made more frustrating by a
passive-aggressive system that automatically spits blame back to the
parents who are already spending excess of thousands on programs designed
to block such access, hovering practically over their kids’ shoulders
while trying to conduct their everyday business of cooking, cleaning and
living (hence, the use of such cyberlingo
as POS), doing everything short of eliminating the computer altogether,
and still these kids, as young as 13, find ways to check out porn under
the radar.
“In the past, we had
boundaries. Now Paris Hilton, Pam and Tommy Lee make videos of themselves
having sex. So the message is that it’s normal to watch people having
sex,” explained Mary Ann Layden, a psychologist and director of education
at the Center for Cognitive Therapy in the University of
Pennsylvania,
who spoke with “People Magazine’s” reporters for the April 26th
issue.
Offline, elementary school-aged children are
experimenting with breaking those boundaries by inappropriately touching
each other, usually boys foisting themselves on girls. Later on, as early
as intermediate school age, the girls are returning the favor with
blowjobs on school buses. In high school and college, the norm, according
to the worldwide media, is to either engage in as many sexual conquests as
possible, or go to third base often, without hitting a home run or
committing to a relationship based on more than getting off.
The intimacy and holiness of loving someone
has been successfully, routinely, ruthlessly replaced with using sex as
commonly as one would use a spatula to flip those morning eggs with bacon
and toast, all ages welcome. ...threatening the last bastion of decency,
childhood innocence,
It should then come as no surprise to
routinely and ruthlessly find high school, straight A good girl Georgie as
the recent victim.
I cringe every time she’s on, dressed down in
a fashionably hip but way too skimpy outfit, showing off her tremendous
cleavage, nipples erect through the flimsy material, belly and hips bare,
jeans practically painted on.
As an admirer of the female form, an amateur
aficionado of the soft porn classics (they make great visual aids when
making love to my husband) and certainly no Bible Belt prude, I don’t mind
when a woman flaunts her physical assets.
But, the operative term
here is woman.
Georgie is a teenager. Her portrayer Lindze Letherman, merely 15. In
America, flaunting a child’s physical assets for prurient value
constitutes grounds for investigation. As a mother, it makes me uneasy,
disgusted and worried for this generation’s future.
Imagine how Ms. Letherman feels.
In almost every interview given, this young,
talented actress – who’d never kissed a boy before GH – has admitted her
aversion to kissing on camera, much less playing out love scenes.
Aversion’s actually too mild an adjective. Try, mortified beyond belief,
sitting in a corner crying her eyes out because she has to put on a
see-through negligee for one of those love scenes, and as nice and
supportive and goofy as her co-star Scott Clifton (Dillon) has been to
her, more like a brother than an on-screen paramour, the thought of
pretending to be in orgasmic ecstasy or womanly sexy, just fills her with
incapacitating fear.
Clifton, on more than one occasion, has had to
calm Letherman down (once, because she forgot to study a huge chunk of
dialogue before a shoot), reassure her and remind her it’s okay, she’s
still a good kid, let’s not take this too seriously, with plenty of
noogies.
Yet, TIIC (The Idiots In Charge) continue to
push revealing outfits on her, put her in compromising positions by having
Georgie decide now’s the time to lose her virginity to Dillon, and the
most heinous of all, script several scenes where Sage, the rival for
Dillon’s affections, decides to secretly take digital snapshots of Georgie
taking a shower in the high school girl’s locker room, then post them on
an Internet porn website, as if Georgie were behind the pay-to-jerk
maneuver, for all the hospital staff to see (as a way to destroy Georgie
and give Tracy a successful blackmail as head of ELQ... WTF?).
All this happened right after a “Soap Opera
Digest” joint interview between Letherman and Clifton, where, again, she
mentioned her aversion to feigning grown-up actions and grown-up behavior
and he mentioned his attempts to remind her it was make-believe and he
didn’t think of her that way. One of the innocent, child-like ways they
manage their discomfort on the adult set is to make their impending
kissing scenes into a contest, to see who can out-gross the other by
eating the most disgusting smelly foods (Letherman claims that Clifton
would win, because he’ll put anything down his throat, even bile). Their
basic off-screen relationship is that of big protective brother to little
naive sister...hardly GQ, Endless Love fluff.
I know soaps have to compete with cable and
primetime programming to remain relevant and viable, as Ted King (Luis)
recently told a “Soap Opera Weekly” reporter regarding the plethora of
mob-related stories, notably his own with the Fab Four (Sonny, Jason,
Carly, Courtney) on GH, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Or, that soaps should forget their
time-honored identity as a reflection of society with a major,
fictionalized, amplified, upbeat: To follow the natural, unspoken
boundaries of decency, right and wrong, law and order... to rise above the
gore and the muck, and inspire hope, goodness, courage... to follow-up the
conflicts and obstacles with a happy ending... like a role model should.
Despite the glorification of the mob, parading women around like Barbie
dolls, easy access to sex, deviant or otherwise, people still go to jail
for breaking the law, children still need protection from growing up too
fast, women still should be treated with respect, and happy endings still
pay off.
Besides, it’s still possible to entertain,
provoke and remain in the Top 10 with the viewing public, without
pandering to the easy sell(-out). There’s quality storytelling out there
that examines the complex and the noble in the human condition, and not a
one need be another reality-TV rip-off.
A hit has to begin somewhere. How about some
originality, integrity, intelligence and insight?
Here’s a thought, how about letting Georgie
and Dillon’s natural camaraderie speak for itself without the bells and
whistles of an interfering slut template? They could explore complex
issues and survive the hazards of post-adolescence, a proving ground for
the right way to interact and distinguish themselves apart from the
conformist pack.
They could be happy, in love, interesting,
interactive and chaste until marriage.
And they wouldn’t have to take off a damn
thing.
GRAPHICS BY SCOTT BILSTAD |
