Pleasantville
Alternate Titles: “Chocolate in A Vanilla World” and “Sexuality in a Public World”
Remember that film Pleasantville? We have a DVD on the shelf. I haven’t seen it in years, but what with the recent spate of writing about FaceBook, friendship, spanking and identity, I was reminded of it. You see, in the movie, the inference is that sexual knowledge and a knowledge of a world beyond Pleasantville brought color to humanity, made things – people - brilliant where before they had been shades of gray.
And.
And revealed to the world – family, friends, colleagues - that they were different.
At one point in the movie, Betty Parker (the mother) is afraid for everyone to know that she has experienced something more than her traditional Leave It To Beaver role suggests. She is horrified at the thought that her husband might discover her secret, that neighbors will not understand. And it is her son, David/Bud, who gently and gallantly helps cover up her brilliance with the gray cosmetics in her purse.
Isn’t that why we hide our inner souls from the bright glare of lights? Isn’t that what everyone does, to some extent? In the morning we get up and put on our clothes and walk out into a world. (Well, most of us, I mean.) Some of us are confident enough, or free enough, or open enough to be able to splash our sexuality out into the greater world. Our pictures appear in books or on websites as authors of erotica or models of fetish fiction or gasp in adult movies. Others of us paint our faces with gray-toned make-up and blend in with other gray-toned skin, for practical purposes no different than the man behind us on the subway or the stranger on the sidewalk outside Starbucks.
To some extent, really, every gray face is painted though, isn’t it? Maybe some of us wear make-up to cover up the evidence of a hard life – the bruising from abuse or the wrinkles from stress and anxiety or the brilliance of our secret world, lived at home with our partners or online or in the backseat of a father’s old Chevy. We put on the paint to protect our children, or ourselves, or other loved ones, or relationships, don’t we?
When I was in college we talked often about wearing masks, and how most people have different masks – there’s a professional mask and a parent mask and sometimes a partner mask. Some people have more masks than others, ready-made and waiting. Me, I was just learning about my sexuality, but I understood it was an intensely private thing. From the first I did not share it with my friends, and when my online life threatened – a few times – to cross into that educational world or meet up with my college friends, I fled straight in the other direction. A potential play partner from a hundred miles away, I discovered at a first meeting, was my boss’ godson. That was the end of that. Another older gentleman wanted to visit. Meeting him in the basement of the business building on a Saturday night was the scariest moment of my life. It wasn’t that he was terrifying, no. It was more that I was scared of someone I knew schlepping along and finding me in discussion with a man who clearly didn’t belong there. We went to his hotel, but my head was totally in another world by then. I wasn’t old enough or mature enough to bring color into that gray-shaded (vanilla, public) world, and I learned to apply that gray paint so that I would be and feel safe.
Later, when I first met Chris and familial disruption revealed to my parents some color beneath my gray make-up, I learned to hide it again. My mother was terrified that something was wrong with me. I’d gone away to college, then further to graduate school. And here I was traveling to California for no good reason except vacation, instead of going home. I dared not add fuel to the fire by telling her I was going to meet a man. No, I told her once I got there that I’d met a guy. (Left out the phrase “in the airport”.) I told her a friend had introduced us. (Mija has suffered in silence at family events ever since.) Placating her became almost immediately my first concern, and the gray make-up was so thick as to hide any traces of color, even in my eyes.
And then there was living itself. Before the princess arrived, I worked at a Catholic girls’ school, uniforms and all. Standard operating procedure meant signing that annual contract that pledged I would not do anything that violated the sacred code of conduct established by the Vatican and the archdiocese. Indeed, I could be dismissed at will for the appearance of violating any number of theological points that I didn’t even believe – as could any teacher, whether they were Catholic, not Catholic, male, female, nun or priest or layperson.
Naturally, one day I was shopping in the grocery when on the same trip I ran into a student and later my mother-in-law. When said student appeared brightly smiling, mother in tow, I grabbed the first random thing off the shelf and threw it in the basket over those trusty Trojans lying so openly in the brightly lit market. When my mother-in-law happened along at check-out, I rapidly retrieved them and dropped them in a basket underneath the conveyor. She knew we were trying to have a baby – why would I be buying condoms?
Chris worked for a large organization downtown, which had a credit union on site where we did our banking. I had a check from an online provider of spanking literature, made out to me, that we needed to deposit in our checking account. Chris took it in, walked to the counter… the teller was the mother of one of my students. They’d met previously at an open house, when Chris had sat in a corner and tried to be invisible. Luckily the name on the check was not explicit enough to cause concern.
And yet very recently I had a package slip in the mailbox here at our house. The princess and I went to pick it up at the post office, where we know the postal clerk on a first-name basis. I knew the package was for Chris but had no idea what he’d bought, who it was from, or even that we were expecting something.
The long, round circular container was marked in big, bold letters with the retailer’s URL address. Let’s just say the packaging and the URL name were NOT discreet. The only point for relief here was that the princess did not read then, or at least those words are not in her vocabulary. “What did Daddy get?” she asked, as I took the package from the girl, knowing smirk on her face and all. “Can we open it?”
“No, dear, let’s let Daddy open his own mail,” I said firmly, knowing that the paint on my public mask had inexplicably and utterly failed. Salvaging my parent mask was perhaps more important. “Don’t you like to open your own packages?”
“Have a good evening,” the clerk said, her smile huge now.
I could hardly look at her. “Thanks,” I said, trying to be gracious, but really wanting to pummel Chris over the head for sender’s packaging practices.
Sometimes it’s better not to get too friendly with people you see everyday. You never know when, once they know your first name, they might find opportunity to rub that make-up off your cheeks.
Themocracy
I loved that movie and I love having a place in Cyberia where I can show some color! Great post! And some retailers should really be more discrete! Meow
The retailer (unnamed) claimed it was a mistake, that they use discreet packaging for shipping to customers and more, hm, obvious packaging for shipping to other re-sellers of their wares. And that they had a new employee in the back room.
Still.
Wow, this touched many nerves for me. I’m a teacher – at a VERY private place – and sometimes I’d like to say things about my day, but I get scared. Sometimes I start to say something sort of kinky on Faebook and realize that only three or four people on there *know* — and others are friends from high school, cousins, MY MOM. I really feel, a lot of the time, like I’m juggling the different parts of me.
FaceBook is SO vanilla. Mom, Dad, bosses, colleagues, parents of princess classmates, etc. Twould be nightmare for me, truly. That’s what I have twitter, to let out those momentary bursts of thoughts that are FB no-no, even the non-kinky no-no things!
wow. i’ve always found online sellers to be almost OVER discrete, if you know what I mean.. just as well, really, seeing as how we live next to hubby’s parents and they often take in parcels for us if we’re out…
We’d never before had something come in so obvious a box. Sometimes the return address is a give-away if you look at it carefully, but this was plastered with big labels, like they were advertising to the post office employees or something equally horrific.
And then there are the people who are simply psychic, just plain psychic: I’ll never forget Fr. B saying to me, not one hour after we met, sitting in church, in his office, mind you, that, “open marriages work very well for some people.” And it wasn’t, at all, that he was saying something inappropriate or what have you: the man had me pegged. *shakes head* And let me tell you: my gray make-up is pretty thick, I dress modestly, am discreet in conversation and so on. But I have met any number of, particularly, Dominant men who can see right through that, with me. It’s the weirdest thing. I tend not to be so very concerned with folks I know, or those sorts of connections; it’s the strangers, and the things they can see which tilt me, a bit.
You know, I’ve never had someone make a psychic connection before, at least about this, but I imagine it would be an interesting experience.
Or maybe I’m just so plain terrifying that they wouldn’t suggest it?
Oh.I.Would.Just.Die.
I sweated for DAYS when I ordered my first and second dildo orders. Didn’t want delivery when wife would be home. First one came minutes after she left for the park with the kids, phew. Second time was when she was away and I was at work. I was afraid someone would come by and see it, despite the discreet packaging…
Nilla
who has obviously perfected the ‘gray makeup’…oh, you so touched a nerve here! *nods* Ouchies!
Oh. I was barely in the car before I was sending Chris indignant text messages.
s
Fascinating post, to which, naturally, I’ll have a different response than most.
I enjoyed Pleasantville but thought it had a lot of flaws. The satire was too thick — in what alternate reality would breakfast be a foot-tall pile of pancakes (or whatever it was)? If the books are blank — if there’s nothing to teach — what do they do in school all day? I guess that was the point — they have the comforting forms of real life but none of the sometimes-troubling substance — but it often didn’t work for me, I couldn’t sustain my suspension of disbelief. It seemed to say that adultery is a good thing — part of finding your true self. When Jeff Daniels put a nude painting of another man’s wife on the front window of his business, I remember thinking “That’s not appropriate in our full-color world!”
On the other hand, it did make the point that prejudice all comes from fear of difference, and is all basically the same — so that prejudice against the colored people (literally, as distinguished from black and white) looked and sounded a lot like prejudice against People of Color (as WE use the term), or Jews, or Gays.
Plus, the exchange where the brother tries to explain to his slightly slutty sister that no one in Pleasantville will notice her boobs, even though she’s wearing a bra that turns them into missile nosecones, is absolutely priceless.
But how does that apply to our chocolate existence in a vanilla world? I’m not sure. There’s a difference between being ashamed of something and merely thinking it’s private — between being afraid something will get out versus merely not wanting to impose it on anyone else. When I mention how much I wish I could reveal my spanko nature to the vanilla part of my little world, I’ve been asked “Do they talk to you about their sex lives?” and of course the answer is no. I think our sexuality is harder to keep hidden because it affects a larger part of our lives than most people’s. That’s one reason why, when asked if they would choose to be vanilla, so many of us say “It sure would be easier but it’d be so boring” — because our sexuality makes theirs seem limited. But that comes with a cost — there’s more to keep private.
So I’m not sure if we’re hiding an essential part of who we are, or merely being polite by not shoving our sexuality in someone else’s face, any more than they do to us.
But I do agree it’s hard.
Michael, that’s why I said at the beginning that we all wear gray make-up to hide something. It just so happens that what I’m hiding is my sexuality…
Of course I would not talk to my parents about the details, but it would be nice to not have to lie outright sometimes to my family about how we met someone.
s
Serenity, Sorry to be late to this post. The timing is very relevant for me as my worlds are crossing in all sorts of uncomfortable ways. How creepy about the bosses godson… I’m constantly trying to duck and cover. Joined RWA local group recently & had to be discreet about my writings because of the Mayberry factor (I call it) MF for short (!) I also wanted to say, like Ellie, I have a problem with Dom’s picking up on my sub nature which is apparently eminating screaming-to-be-heard vibes. It’s disconcerting to say the least; causing even more confusion – as I’m trying to fly under the radar. Given that component, it is next to impossible. Me too doing NaNoWriMo zero words – probably ending up that way too. I didn’t realize you write too. I’m fairly new to the blog world just started mine in Sept. Been poking around for about a year now. Please don’t tell me you write for Reesa and my checks will have to be cashed out of the county!! KayLynn