STOP THE HOTTIE !

STOP THE HOTTIE !

Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap

The title, Stop the Hottie, and the writing that follows were largely determined by a synchronicity that happened in the last hour. I was walking in the parking lot of King Soopers, the setting Colorado sun illuminated everything in an orangey-yellow light that made every complexion, every hub cap, glow with the glamour of Boulder high dessert mountain town orangey-yellow sunset lighting. Metal flake paint on the late model SUVs sparkled like fairy dust. Even King Soopers itself seemed imbued with a larger than life all-American vitality, as if it were seen through the eyes of a Hudson River School painter while Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring played in the background.

I had just left a friend’s basement, the lighting in there was terrible, but he provided me with something that enhanced my appreciation of colors and turned the intuitive part of my mind way, way up, while turning the part of my mind that focused on practical and mundane items way, way down. This was a most welcome shift in the ratio of these two psychic functions as practical, somewhat mechanical tasks, had been dominating a great part of my waking life for the past two days.

At the edge of the King Sooper’s parking lot, bathed in orangey-yellow light, my vision was arrested by a hexagonal red stop sign. In the center of the giant O of the “STOP” was a mylar sticker, that although slightly weathered and partly ripped away, was in this lighting sparkling like red and blue sapphire in a field of pavé diamond. The sticker depicted a little winking “cow girl” sex toy. This was the sort of cheesy cow girl fantasy that your worst stereotype of a truck driver would blow a quarter on in a Texas truck stop. Probably the sticker was purchased by a 13 year old boy of the sort that lived the ADD, Ritalin, M-80s, violent cartoon, ultra sour candy type of life style. Impulsively, he had blown a quarter on it, and then seeing the utter cheesyness of what he had gotten, decided to slap it on a stop sign in a random Ritalin-driven gesture of juvenile vandalism and ineffectual rebellion.

Set in a circular version of the American Flag, was a seductive cow girl glowing with fiery mylar sparkles. She wore a cowboy hat, a breast-revealing red halter top with a white star in the middle above an exposed midriff, and sparkling blue panties over leather cowgirl pants. And in case this subtlety of costume wasn’t enough to hook a prospective sticker purchaser, she was also winking gigantically, and twirled a lasso with which she was improbably lassoing her own left leg. Her form and gestures seemed to express some very basic reptilian truck stop fantasy, something like, “Hey big cowboy, you’ve lassoed yourself one hunk of hot, wet cowgirl pussy tonight!!!”

I stared with fascination at this sticker, recognizing that it was the perfect manifestation in cultural artifact of that emergent archetype I’ve been writing so much about recently, “The Hottie.” Of course, there are zillions of artifacts all around us depicting The Hottie, but never before had I seen a winking self-lassoing mylar cow girl right in the center of the “O” of a hexagonal stop sign. She was the center of what looked like a giant zero at the center of the word that better than any other in the English language expresses that most basic of messages: “STOP!” Hence the title and theme: “STOP THE HOTTIE!” (I immediately pulled out my camera and photographed this archetypal artifact from all sorts of angles. Through the camera viewfinder, zoomed in close, the colors enhanced by a polarizing filter, the cow girl seemed to glow and wink right out of the collective unconscious.)

So what exactly is a Hottie, and why does it need to be stopped? “Hottie,” as far as I can tell, is a word of recent American coinage. My guess is that so many people were wearing out the adjective “hot” by saying, “She’s so hot!” and “He’s so hot!” that someone decided to make this abused adjective a noun, and a new word—-“Hottie”—–was born.

The concept, Hottie, implies the eye of a beholder. Somewhere there must be a perceiver for whom the Hottie is that sexy person making a throbbing, red blip on the radar screen of their prowling sexual fantasy. Hotties may occur naturally, or may be manufactured. Hottie providers include some of the largest, most revenue-producing industries on the planet. Pornography, as you probably know, is up there with big oil, the drug trade and pharmaceuticals in the stratosphere of mega industry. If you add in prostitution, much of Hollywood and various music and fashion industries, you begin to realize that the providing and soliciting of Hotties is the largest industry on a planet abounding with gigantic industries. Professional Hottie, Britney Spears, is a major industry just by herself, with a net worth of close to half a billion, her share in the billions of commercial revenue she has generated, without even including all the Britney internet fantasy porn sites.

Last week I saw a recent French movie called, “Bon Voyage.” The setting is France at the outbreak of World War Two. The main characters include the French Minister of the Interior, a Jewish professor who has in his car the only heavy water in the world—essential to the production of nuclear weapons, a German agent who wants to capture the heavy water for the Nazi secret weapons program, and a writer who has been wrongly imprisoned for murder. You would think that such people, in those circumstances, would have a lot of heavy stuff on their minds, but most of them, and most of the plot, centered around pursuit of The Hottie. One of the main hotties in the movie was a glamorous movie staress, who manipulates men in the most obvious of ways—faking crying fits, etc.—–and who is not above murdering an inconvenient boyfriend and getting another boyfriend to dispose of the body.

So is this the type of Hottie that needs to be stopped? Am I saying that we need to stop Britney, mylar cowgirls, and French movie staresses? That would be the solution of Islamic Fundamentalism, which forces anyone of the female persuasion to walk around with a black tarp covering up any glimmer of Hottiness. The most essential thing to realize about the Hottie, is that the Hottie is not so much a person, as it is a fantasy that exists in the mind of the beholder, the Hottie Projector. The Hottie fantasy is projected by the beholder on to some person or image, and sometimes the person or image is not trying to be hot, but is perceived as a Hottie anyway, and sometimes the person or image is designed, like a target, to attract the attention of Hottie Projectors.

Hottie Projectors are probably a substantial majority of people between the ages of puberty and withered elderhood. You know who you are. But there is also a minority of persons who are not Hottie Projectors, and this may be because their hormone levels don’t support this addictive obsession, or their eros is too evolved, or their attention is completely consumed by a struggle for survival, or some other obsession consumes their attention. Besides the Hottie Projectors, there is also an overlapping group that is obsessed with trying to be the Hottie, and the will to be a Hottie can be so intense that it will motivate some people to undergo the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves, endure punishing workouts, and spend fortunes on costumes and cosmetics. I’m not talking about healthy efforts to look your best, so much as the feverish, consuming obsession with becoming the Hottie no matter what the cost. To this group add another overlapping group that are depressed, even despairing, because they are not the Hottie, or can’t get the Hottie, or got the Hottie but then the Hottie got away, or maybe the Hottie didn’t get away, maybe they even married the Hottie, but then the Hottie outlived their Hottiehood years, or maybe they are a Hottie and have succumbed to some of the soul-destroying temptations that come with Hottiehood, or maybe they stalk the Hottie, or buy all the Hottie’s CDs and products, but never obtain the Hottie in the flesh, or they have obtained the Hottie and are so caught up in living out their fantasies with the Hottie, that life is passing them by without their noticing. If the amount of human psychic energy, that in one way or the other, was devoted to the Hottie were expressed as a physical force, it would surely be the equivalent of enough hydrogen bombs to give a Republican President a gigantic hard-on.

So am I trying to stop all that? Am I trying to stand like a school crossing guard with my hand up in the STOP gesture before the thermonuclear power of the Hottie? The history of people trying to say STOP! to various forms of sexuality is so riddled with hypocrisy, insanity, projection and sadism that I assure you I have no interest in being the school crossing guard of anyone else’s sexuality. Wherever it rears its ugly head I am opposed to “One size fits all.” And nowhere does one size fits all fail to fit all more than with the fantastic and surreal variations of human eros.

So when I say “Stop the Hottie!,” I am saying that for myself, for my projections, the Hottie in the stop sign was my synchronicity, and I share this only because I imagine that there may be others who may be tired of handing their power over to the Hottie archetype. I only seek to preach to those who know themselves to be in the choir, to those who are tired of Hottie soap operas, and I’m not trying to convert those who are of the Hottie persuasion, and have the Hottie as their religion, and image of salvation. If the Hottie quest works for you, go with it if you want. I’m not going to stand between anyone and their Hottie, don’t much want to be a school crossing guard holding up a paper STOP sign before a rushing orangey-red river of volcanic magma.

Only you can stop the Hottie within, and even if you are committed to reclaiming that projection, you may find this to be a daunting project, so heavily conditioned are we to chase the Hottie, that giving that up may prove nearly as difficult as the Hottie itself.

As I have written in my study of the Tolkien mythology, Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Androgyny, Alchemy and the One Ring, chasing the Hottie is the most obvious case of grasping for Precious, the One Ring. I won’t go into every intricacy of that symbolism here, but the One Ring begins as Sauron’s Hottie. He has given away so much of his power in the creation of this Precious that he must get it back, and if it is destroyed, his physical form, and all that it has manifested, is destroyed. Like the Hottie, the Precious has an ability to burn holes in the mind of anybody vulnerable to its power. On one level, the One Ring is the emblem of what happens when power is projected onto an outside object. The projector becomes obsessed with capturing this Precious, or if he has captured it, he strives to greedily hold on to it. This obsession becomes so consuming that it eventually turns the projector into a Ring Wraith, or a Gollum. Even noble-hearted Frodo ultimately fails to be able to cast Precious into the cracks of doom.

The Hottie, like the Precious, conveys a powerful, illusory message that it has what is needed for completion. The gold ring is the perfect symbol of wholeness. The circle is a divine shape—-the Sanskrit definition of God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere. A circle represents wholeness, the gold ring particularly so. The gold ring has a relationship to the yin-yang symbol, it has an interweaving of opposites. The feminine aspect of the ring is its coital shape, able to be penetrated by a finger. It’s feminine aspect is encoded in its shape, but perfect shapes are part of the yang realm of the Creative. It’s specific materiality is its feminine aspect. But in its specific materiality, it is made of the most solar or yang of elements—-gold. The One Ring in the Tolkien movies was modeled after someone’s wedding ring. So the ring embodies the alchemical marriage of yin and yang, masculine and feminine. The problem is that the alchemical marriage of yin and yang needs to happen within, when it is instead pursued as a Hottie or other magical object on the outside it becomes the golden shackle binding us ever deeper to Maya/Matrix. Wholeness is never found outside, to pursue it externally is to begin the process of becoming withered into an obsessive wraith.

Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, says that before we incarnated in our present forms we were spherical beings containing both genders, but on this plane we are fractured into (usually) gender specific bodies. A painful and illusory consequence of this split is that we would seek some other, some Hottie perhaps, to complete us, to be our “better half.” But two halves don’t make a whole, they make a quarter. If you did, however, rediscover the inner wholeness you always had within, then you would be in a great place to have healthy, relationships without addictive, obsessed codependence.

The more imbalanced we are, the less we have integrated the masculine and feminine elements within ourselves, the more voraciously will we pursue them on the outside. But we can never regain our inner wholeness by seeking to import it from outside. If we are missing part of our inner wholeness, we become a hungry ghost forever trying to devour this missing inner ingredient in an addictive all-consuming and never satiated effort to find it in the outside world. The more we identify with our present bodies, the more incomplete and limited we feel, and the more we feel that we must have the body of the Hottie (to be it and/or to capture it) to achieve salvation. The more we tighten our grasp, the more the Hottie, the Precious, slips through our fingers.

The characters best able to resist the power of the One Ring—-Bombadil, Aragorn, Gandalf, Galadriel and the other elves, Faramir, Sam—-all have a healthy balance of integrated masculine and feminine qualities. The ones who are most readily corrupted by ring lust—-Boromir, Denethor, Saruman, Sauron—are all notably lacking in the feminine. They lack the inner androgyny or wholeness, are overbalanced toward an arid masculinity and therefore crave the outside object, the Precious, with the most addictive hunger.

In this realm, those most integrated with the androgynous principle of inner wholeness, those most aware that their power or essence is not a function of their present bodily form, are those best able to resist the power of the Precious, the outside object, the Hottie.

During this period of alignment with the black hole at the center of our galaxy (which I have compared to the Cracks of Doom, as both are places where even the most dense external objects are irrealized) we need to cast Precious into the Cracks of Doom. We don’t need to stop the Hottie, we need to stop the illusory belief that the Hottie or any externalized Precious can bring us wholeness.

To unplug from Maya/Matrix we need to see that the Hottie is not our energy source. Imagine the following thought experiment. You enter a crypt filled with pirate treasure. The crypt is absolutely dark. You have a flashlight with you and switch it on. You gasp as the flashlight beam illuminates red rubies, glittering gold, green emeralds and cobalt blue sapphires. What beautiful colors these precious objects have!

Actually, this is the illusion of projection, these objects have no color, no light energy, the light, color and energy are mere reflections and refractions of the white light of the flashlight which contains all colors. Freud noticed something similar about the sexuality of the modern person as compared to the “primitive.” The primitive worshipped the mysterious inner fire, and the object on whom this might be bestowed was secondary. The modern person conversely sees all the magic and fire in the outside object (in another words, the Hottie) and fails to recognize the mystery and power of their inner fire. Some guy sees Britney on television and says, “She’s so hot!” Actually, she’s an odorless, touchless, two inch pixel phantom moving beneath a glass screen. What’s hot is his inner fire, the power that he forever gives away to the image, fantasy or person of the Hottie.

Some of us are being called to reclaim that inner fire, to recall the inner power that we project outward binding us to the matrix, to cast Precious into the Cracks of Doom, regain our inner wholeness and Stop the Hottie!