🩻✨The Nexialist #0115

obviously | naked education | lost pearls | good sex explained | mri sex | the age of average | tanganmen | playboy / positions | too much music

Apr 06, 2023

welcome to another week of random-cyber-neuro-stimuli, the nexialist

hey, you! yes, you! i hope this e-mail finds you open for some brain cuddles. don’t tell me i didn’t warn you, but there might be some arousal happening until the end of this edition (as i hope it happens every week). read until the end for some naked education, sexy science and feel good music. and i promise i was sober while writing about the age of average, it’s just that the brainsparks were more like fireworks. oh well, now go ahead, and keep scrolling. slowly please 🫀

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🇫🇷obviously

this song has been on repeat me, and it is the french candidate in eurovision. i don’t speak french, but google translates it pretty well (i hope), and i just love how she sings about paradoxical ideas when the name of the song is “obviously.” also, the shiny dress with big shoulder pads it’s just everything. press play and get ready for an earworm.

Je vends demain, j'rachète hier / I sell tomorrow, I buy yesterday
Le temps est assassin / time is killer
…
Je cherche la vérité, tout en l'évitant / I seek the truth, while avoiding it

🍑naked education

last week i talked about the outrage over a statue’s nudity being shown in a sixth-grade classroom; now imagine how the [conservative] internet reacted to this: actual adults naked on tv for educational purposes. [gasp, clutch your pearls]. i haven’t watched it (yet), but the format airs here in the netherlands and on the uk on channel4. reading comments like “degenerate” or “groomers” makes me so frustrated to see adults scrambling over nudity.

i honestly think it’s a great way to normalize nudity, promote self-acceptance e improve confidence, as the show presents different body shapes, cis-trans bodies, bodies with scars, and different body-hair choices and allows teens to ask questions about it. yes, it may be a bit awkward, but remember, kids are being exposed to pornography at an average age of 11, so there needs to be active naked/sex education. and remember the mantra, nudity is not pornography.

read: Naked Education review – the look at pubic hair is wonderfully revelatory

🪩lost pearls

talking about clutching your pearls, i couldn’t help but think of this delicious pairing of jessie ware with pabllo vittar. shake it til the pearls fall off!

❤️‍🔥good sex explained

if you are going to press play on one thing here, this is it. sex educator dr. emily nagoski helps us with some history of the science of sex therapy (which i had never even heard before). i was very drawn to how far we’ve come:

Three major phases
Four-Stage Model of Sexual Response (Masters&Johnsons, 1966)
-Arousal, Plateau, Orgasm, Refractory
Triphasic Model of Sexual Response (Helen Singer Kaplan, 1977)
- Desire, Arousal, Orgasm
Dual Control Model (Janssen&Bancroft, 1990s)
- Sexual Excitation System (SES, or Accelerator) x Sexual Inhibitory System (SIS, or brakes).

at first, desire was missing from the model, and of course, a woman researcher came up with that and revolutionized the field. then the realization that sex happens in the brain was the next revolution, with accelerator/brake forces coming into play. i know… it’s a lot to take in (and i feel now like every other word coming out of my mind has some kind of double entendre…)

“sex is far more a brain process than a genital process. genitals can be fun; the brain is essential. you can't have sex without a brain.”

🩻mri sex

vice

A post shared by VICE (@vice)

i love this story not only because it happens here in the netherlands, but because it mixes art and science. this happened more than 30 years ago, and it was met with public outrage and academic backlash. seems like we haven’t changed a whole lot, no? it’s also a reminder of how tabus can hold back development and keep us stagnated.

This sketch was created around 500 years ago, but we’ve stuck by its basic shape ever since. Nearly all diagrams found on tampon boxes and in sex-ed books depict the vagina as a straight tunnel. Penises aren’t forced to bend around corners, or conform to the female form in any way. They just go in straight and come straight out, as da Vinci had assumed. But no one had ever actually fact-checked his sketch with an MRI, so no one knew if da Vinci was correct.

read: The Story of the Couple Who Shagged in an MRI Machine for Science - vice

🫠the age of average

alex murrell’s text, the age of average, has not left my mind since i recently read it. i had brought one of its manifestations recently, the moodboard effect (tn#66), and this article shows how this movement has slowly been crawling up on us for a long time, with its claws reaching different areas: the hipsterization of cafes, non-places, generic cities, airspace style, the wind-tunnel effect for car design, the instagram face, the homogenisation of Hollywood, etc. i thought about other terms like: the pasteurization of everything or ultra-processing everything.

what alex manages to do is to eerily tap into the collective imagination in an age where mediatic power is concentrated in the hand of a few companies. he also mentions other possibilities which are quite plausible: “perhaps when times are turbulent, people seek the safety of the familiar. perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimization. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of inspiration becoming globalized.” this reminded me of the maya (most advanced yet accetable) principle on tn#107, which invites designers to risk enough but not so much.

the images he shared reminded me to AI training models imagery and made me think about how AI models might further accentuate this movement as they are heavily trained on existing data and replicates that in their creations. another tool of ultraprocessing reality? a cultural warp?

alex ends with an inspiring invitation (spoiler alert)

But it’s not all bad news. I believe that the age of average is the age of opportunity. When every supermarket aisle looks like a sea of sameness, when every category abides by the same conventions, when every industry has converged on its own singular style, bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course. To be different, distinctive and disruptive. So, this is your call to arms. Whether you’re in film or fashion, media or marketing, architecture, automotive or advertising, it doesn’t matter. Our visual culture is flatlining and the only cure is creativity. It’s time to cast aside conformity. It’s time to exorcise the expected. It’s time to decline the indistinguishable. For years the world has been moving in the same stylistic direction. And it’s time we reintroduced some originality.

via messy nessy chic

👁️tanganmen

now this is something refreshing (and creepy?). click and go check the photos of the tanganmen, the japanese subculture where people wear giant cyclops masks. it’s material for non-sense dreams.

via gustavo nogueira

👠playboy / positions

talking about creepy-but-you-can’t-stop-looking masks, this new video shygirl is on point. such a great bop. enjoy!

🕶️too much music

jake shears has this power to make feel-good music so i cannot wait for his next album. this track reminded me of justice, with glorious gay vocals. thank me later!

see you next week, pearly pearls 🫀

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