Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Move over, Mick: Ricky Martin is a modern Prometheus for the collective penis of pop.
May 25, 1999 | Nobody's ever been quite able to successfully devise pornography for women. Playgirl magazine attempted to invent it in the '70s, utilizing the primitive theory that women got as sweaty and overstimulated by brazen, naked pictures of the opposite sex as men did, and introduced a magazine with a hairy, brick-jawed brute in the centerfold, earnestly displaying his semi-engorged Hollywood Loaf. Of course, the magazine was totally laughable and not particularly erotic to women, and Playgirl ended up being patronized more or less exclusively by gay men and sliding into obscurity. The pop sensation machine has finally found the answer, however, to the age-old marketing conundrum of What Makes Girls Randy, and now all media outlets are saturated with bedroom-haired, cologne-marinated, undergraduate-age dancing boys.
Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of puppy-lovable teen sensations is now a multinational Moloch, and such phenomena as N-Sync, The Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys represent a whole vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e. the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand-mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.
About 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York and screamed for teen masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys last week, and a few days earlier, another 20,000 girls all stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that weird screaming hysteria to die along with the Beatles.
Chick-porn, thy name is Ricky. Ricky wears see-through sweaters and has hips like a lazy susan. He runs his fingers seductively through his own hair, with his eyes rapturously closed and his moistened mouth barely parted, like Rita Hayworth. He is often seen wet, shirtless, open-mouthed kissing and driving sports cars. Ricky is an emblem of virility and energy and good-guy ethics, while being a near-perfect fusion of male clichi sexual images: one part Cary Grant self-amused privilege, one part James Bond eyebrow raised at the way these birds just seem to tumble into my lap, two parts Julio Iglesias-cum-Ricardo Montalban-cum-Desi Arnaz-cum-Medellin drug-cartel-Latino mega-suave and three parts Elvis good-natured nuclear cock-power, all shrink-wrapped into one silk 'n' leather Milano-pimp outfit. He is a multicultural young Elvis for the new millennium, with hotter blood: Ricky, an ethnic minority, has actual traces of humanity. He's a little smarter than the old Elvis; he's already lived through the whiplash agony/ecstasy of flash-in-the-pan-ism as a boy who grew too many underarm hairs to remain in Menudo, so he has a sense of self-preservation and a healthy arrogance: He's not going to need shock-levels of Demerol and pork to bolster his comfort level in the end. He knows how to "keep it real," but in character at the same time. He appears to be a limitless, unstoppable font of self-enjoyment, professing an Internal Path and a Great Love of Music and all the other stuff he's doing. He has cracked the mystical code that makes the young girls cry.
