So what the researchers were looking at was relative stimulation to different kinds of sexual materials, some suggesting sexual encounters with prepubescent girls or boys (usually about aged 10 and younger, and of sexual interest to pedophiles), some suggesting sexual encounters with pubescent girls or boys (generally aged 11-14, and of sexual interest to the group termed “hebephiles”), and some suggesting sexual encounters with sexually mature men and women (of interest to the people researchers call “teleiophiles,” and what the rest of us tend to call “normal,” i.e., “straight men and women,” “gay men,” or “lesbian women”).

For example, about ten years ago I watched and adored the first two seasons (the first “generation”) of the British show Skins. For whatever reason it caught me at just the right moment and affected me deeply. Just really hit me deep in my heart, as silly as that may seem to you.

Beach, who uses they/them pronouns, agreed. “Who decides what is arousing?” they asked. “Like ‘you must be turned on by this video and if you’re not, you must be gay?’”

Now square that with the fact that our country recently elected a bright orange Demogorgon whose administration is publicly, eagerly attempting to reverse every single gain the gay community has made in the last 20 years.

I hasten to add that my own liking for this movie, as with Lucy, has nothing to do with academic enlightenment and is strictly and exclusively a matter of fun (without scare quotes, and speaking in terms of both erotics and aesthetics, at least insofar as anyone can separate these two forms of sexiness).

In Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Henry, we’re asked to feel sorry for the slasher, who’s just a poor, crazy mixed-up kid, an attitude that’s more or less extended to Buffalo Bill in Demme’s film.

The pattern of Hollywood is to balance the independent woman with the female stereotype so that the net sum of progressivism remains zero.

Although I have no way of proving this, I strongly suspect that the enthusiasm of much of the American public for both the Gulf War of 1991-1992 and, at least initially, for the so-called Iraq War of 2003 can be attributed in part to the popularity of Star Wars and its sequels, which sold the American public on the notion of “war” (or, more precisely and accurately, violent military occupation) as an essentially bloodless video game to be enjoyed by families and households as an abstract spectacle for non-participants.

As the conversation proceeded, and I raised my hand, lowered it, and then raised it again, she became aware of the worm in her brain, a mental-emotional implant that prevented her from treating me as a colleague when certain topics were engaged.