An essay on innocence, human sexuality, and language.In a galaxy far, far away, I was an altar boy serving in the great pageant known as the Latin mass. As such, I delivered with duty and precision responses to a priest whose recitation seemed no more perfunctory and credible than my own. I was doing what I was trained to do. Whether he did so by training or belief I can never know. Everything back then was a mystery to me. But none more so than the onset of puberty in a world where puberty was something that required repression at worst and discomfited acceptance at best.
At the time, my understanding of sexuality was unusually meagre and late to arrive, in part because I was encouraged to believe that sexuality was nothing more than something to be endured rather than embraced. My own delay in biological development explains my protracted understanding of my own body and its wants. I didn’t understand much about sex until well after all my friends did. This is politely known as late blooming. For everyone I ran with at the time, it was known as retarded. As an example, the first dirty joke I heard — and which left me mystified — went like this (and which I heard a few decades before politically correct was even a thing): What did the retard get when he jacked off? The answer: Crazy Foam. Upon hearing the punch line I was perplexed. What could this possibly mean? I heard this joke well before my introduction to adolescent masturbation and so was clueless. Upon witnessing my confusion, one friend said, oh Hofmeister, you’re such a dope. Don’t you get it? I didn’t and wouldn’t for a while. This memory calls to mind my aunt who was a nun and who on occasion visited us. She was, much to me and my brother’s amusement, aghast at our using expressions like “queer.” This was yet another failure to understand what words mean, something which children do all the time. I knew that nigger was a bad word, but queer just meant odd. But I digress. Whether my intellectual delay was a reflection of my late physical maturity or the incredibly repressive and overarching reach of my religious upbringing is hard to say. I only know that as a boy of 13 in 1965, the world of human sexuality was about as close to me as the surface of Mars. It was one which my younger brother knew nothing of either — being a place we had never visited nor knew anything about, the place that connected our young bodies to the rush of desire that awaited us. But knowledge would come of course since not even the Catholic Church could ever hope to circumvent human evolution and the indefatigable needs of boys in full. So it is that I come to the title of this essay — “And Then You Blow?” At some point in my sexual education, I came to know what blow jobs were, although I wasn’t aware of their widespread occurrence, but was pretty certain that my pals who knew about them probably weren’t getting them. At least not as often as they talked about them. It was at this time that I was bringing my younger brother up to speed about blow jobs. Jimmy, two years my junior, was a good soul who generally exited the confessional booth worried, afraid, and flushed, having done nothing more than admit to lying to our Dad about something that would result in the good whack to the back of the head. Explaining a blow job to the unenlightened, let alone someone who hasn’t a clue why a guy might want one, can be problematic to say the least. I opted for the simple description of the act, leaving aside why guys so loved and wanted them. Jim listened intently, taking in this information dutifully as one learns how to bait a hook or get out of walking the dog after dinner. Anyway, he responded to my description as anyone might who is conversant with English — and with what words actually mean — by asking, “And then you blow?” I don’t recall if I burst out laughing or just smiled and said, no, no, you don’t blow, really. You don’t actually blow, maybe suck would be a better way to describe it. So, he asked in so many words, why are they are called blow jobs and not suck jobs. I didn’t know. At the time, I didn’t think it mattered. I mean, why do we call getting fucked, getting fucked, when getting fucked is often something we want and something we don’t want depending on the circumstances? Nuance. Language is full of it. Jim would survive his innocence As would I. And if you care to learn more about why blow jobs came to be called blow jobs, checkthis out. And if this story gives you a sense of why and how our understanding of human sexuality has changed in the last 60 years, all the better. ©2017 John Hofmeister.
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I have been freelancing full time for over a year now. It has proven a boon to my mental health. I make less than I did working for the man, but after a while money is just table stakes in the game of life. And since going out on my own, I have enough to both play and pay. The pay part is the mortgage and groceries and utilities and health care. The play part shows up during lulls of work. And even when busy, I can decide, what the hell, it’s awfully warm for February, so I am going to get some miles in on my bike. I can set aside time for staring out the window, reading, and feeling bad (but not too bad) for unhappy souls working for the man. Of course, I work for the man, too. Everyone has a boss of one kind or another. Mine are my clients who pay me to do what they can’t, either for lack of staff or time or both.
But one thing I don’t have to do is fill out Annual Reviews, a truly senseless exercise in keeping the HR department staffed and humming. This is especially true for anyone in the creative side of the ad business. Reviews typically ask for your successes and failures over the last year. The failures politely worded as challenges or through questions like, Where did you fall short? Of course if your boss didn’t already know this, he’d have to be a pretty awful boss. (And I say him because most of the senior creatives are guys.) But remember, it’s not for him or you. It’s for the HR gang and their Permanent Records. Reviews often include sections devoted to Your Goals for Next Year. What can this possibly mean? What, for example, would be a copywriter’s or art director’s goals for next year? Write great copy? Make exquisite layouts? Come up with interesting ideas to get people to part with their money? But only do it better than last year? Or do it faster (which is what the bean counters are always on the lookout for since they don’t understand why creatives aren’t interchangeable FTEs on an assembly line). Maybe art directors could be directed to pay more attention to kerning. Writers might reconsider how often they start sentences with and. And then there’s the corporate mission, often grouped into tiresome clusters about Client Satisfaction, Category Innovation, Career Development, you can fill in the rest. Of course, this doesn’t even skim the awful nonsense that includes Team Work, Collaboration, Fiscal Responsibility, Leadership Potential, and a host of categories designed to drive advertising creatives to blow their brains out. Our account brethren probably find all this just as onerous. If they didn’t, I can’t imagine how long they’d last at an ad agency. Having spent a career in marketing and advertising, mostly at agencies, I was exposed to all sorts of fads. Management by walking around. Management by objectives. Management by scaring the crap out of people. And then there was the Jack Welsh love cycle that gave us Six Sigma and Black Belt Training something or other. Oh, I’m sure for some enterprises, such stuff makes incredible sense. But for commercial art, that being what advertising actually is, it’s a pretty big fucking waste of time. It’s the art part of commercial art that clients pay for. And that’s not something that Annual Reviews, Management By Objectives, or whatever dreadful box-checking nonsense the HR kids dump on you can operationalize. Because operationalizing creativity is akin to asking children why they like snow. © 2017 John Hofmeister Okay, sometime back I posted Why I Freelance. It was a short missive about being able to have a beer in the backyard in the middle of the afternoon while listening to my favorite playlist. Those reasons still hold, but there are many more. Ten anyway. They include:
Anyone in the business of advertising has encountered her or his fair share of remarkably interesting clients. Of course, some clients are interesting but for strange reasons. These are the clients you remember for saying or doing things that seemed strange at the time, and with time seem just as strange.
Among my favorite stories in this vein is a conference call I was on with a client about some collateral we were producing along with a direct mail piece (anyone remember direct mail, anyone?). In our conversation, the client brought up his annual report, something we would happily assist him in producing. The discussion ambled on about timing and pricing, tone and distribution, until the client came to ask, “What do suppose the shelf life of annual report is?” Fortunately, there are mute buttons on phones. But in this case, I was so dumbstruck that I didn’t need one and couldn’t bring myself to say anything for a few moments before asking, “What makes you ask that?” He said, “I was just wondering if you had any insight on that.” I believe it was at this moment that an account guy chimed in with a dodge about how we were being kicked out of the meeting room and would have to get back to him. Account guys. Gotta love ’em. Sometimes, anyway. Maybe the answer came to our client later on. Maybe not. It never came up again. Another favorite came during my early days at an agency I had just joined. We were doing some research on some ads we were developing. Trying to gauge their effectiveness, believability, that sort of thing. Or so I imagined going in. Research started out as such gatherings always do. Introductions all around. When did you get in? What hotel? Picking over the breakfast buffet. Slowly downing our Starbucks coffees. Then our first subject showed up, and the interviewer proceeded to share the ad comps with the prospect, asking the questions one might expect. The interview concluded and afterwards the interviewer came back and “huddled” with us. The clients and the other agency folks exchanged thoughts on how things went. What was doing well. What not so well. Then the fun started. What if we change the layout and amp up the benefits more? Maybe it would work better if we didn’t show any people? Do we need a snipe? Or maybe we should just show women, they’re our real target. Yes, yes. Nods all around. Then they called the agency production studio and told them to make some changes to the ad so we could have them in time for the next interview. They even brought along a color printer to run them out. I looked about and wondered if I was the only person who found this a tad strange. But everyone agreed this course of action would yield some great insights. Into what I was not sure. This went on throughout the day and into the next. Interviews. Huddles. Revisions. Interviews. Each prospect reviewing something different in each interview. Being the new guy I kept mum, wondering, my god, what have I gotten myself into? Everyone in the business is familiar with stranger things I’m sure. Send me yours — john@jhofmeister.com. Copyright ©2017 John Hofmeister | Illustration by formerfactory After a contentious election that left us with an electoral victory for Trump and a popular vote victory for Clinton, we remain a pretty evenly divided country. But on a smaller note — and of some interest to me as writer — is the amount of noise given over to pronouns: Many Clinton supporters have brandished signs and blogs and Facebook posts with some variant of the headline “Not My President.”
I understand the sentiment of course. Basically, a desire to proclaim that the sign wavers didn’t vote for Trump. This is an old trope and aligns with the bumper stickers we eventually see after any election which say “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for __________” — the blank being whoever lost the last contest. We’re bound to see them again this time round. But back to the pronouns. I have never thought of the president as being MY president. Nor do I think of my district representative or state senator as MY representative or MY congressperson or MY senator. The first person possessive seems a bit of an overreach. I mean the senator isn’t MY senator. I don’t own him. He ostensibly represents the collective interests of MY state’s voting population, which given America’s shamelessly low turnout ends up representing a minority of the voting age population. But that’s another story. I never thought of Obama or Bush or Clinton or Reagan or any of them as MY president. I simply thought of them as THE president. The definite article pretty much covers their status as far as I’m concerned. This of course didn’t keep me from liking or abjuring or loving or loathing them, whether as human beings or for pursuing objectives I favored or abhorred. The sense of MY, the first person possessive, attaches more readily to representative or senator, mostly because the designation in that case works like a restrictive expression in that it indicates which representative or senator I am referring to, that being the one who represents my state or my district. Otherwise I would be working with labored expressions like Ohio’s Junior (or Senior) Senator or the 26th District’s congressional representative. By saying MY in these cases, and knowing that I have to live in a state and a specific district to vote, I provide the qualifying information about which senator or representative I’m talking about. In the case of president, there can be no confusion. The last time we had anything remotely confusing was during the civil war. This habit of saying “my” president has echoes of “my” country, as in the old jingoist expression, “my country, right or wrong.” But the office of the president doesn’t represent a place I’m from (like a state or district). It’s a singularly unique position, and certainly I have no more control over the president’s actions than the average joe, that being someone without wealth or a ridiculously large Twitter following — of which I have neither. So when people say “Not My President,” they’re only displaying their disdain for who the president in question is. We should remember that upon entry to a joint session of congress to deliver the State of the Union Address, the sergeant at arms loudly proclaims, “Ladies and Gentleman, the President of the United States.” He doesn’t say “our” president” but “the” president. We only have one at a time. A good thing I suppose. I might be willing to accept the designation “our” president, but I’d probably use it in quotation marks in some cases — putting quotation marks around “president” rather than “our.” But as I noted earlier, “my” president assumes a relationship I don’t and will never have. That’s how representative democracy works. You don’t own the legislators or the president or the judges. You just hope they will act in our collective interests and hope that no one can really call them “my” president. You know, like when you say my plumber or my barber or my lawyer — people who will do your bidding for a fee. ©2016 John Hofmeister. Originally published at http://www.jhofmeister.com/musings As a freelance copywriter, I enjoy (though what enjoy means is problematic) a fair amount of time perusing news sources of one kind or another, some legit, like the NYT and the WSJ, others a bit more, how shall I say, off the beaten path, like Cracked.
Still, being an ad guy, I dredge the usual sources: Adweek, Ad Age, CA, and since I do pharma marketing, MM&M. Every so often, I come by a LOL headline, one which makes me wonder how much thought went into writing it and how much relevance it might have to do with what I do for a living. So it was that I read “Meet the Woman Who Could Turn Jet.com Into the Digital Era's Ultimate Challenger Brand.” First off, I thought, gee, I had no idea that there was even a category of things called “Digital Era Challenger Brands.” I suppose the copy gang relies on shorthand expressions to telegraph the content of the story. But they typically rely on a bit of oomph to lure us in (oomph being a lovely expression that coveys the meaning behind phrases like “must read” or “10 things you need to know about _______” etc.) Anyway, the oomph was provided by an overbearing adjective, “Ultimate.” I mean, who can resist not wanting to know about an Ultimate Challenger? And an Ultimate Challenger to the Digital Era? What could this mean? And paying it off with a subhead that totally cinched it: “Will Walmart's backing help unseat Amazon?” This sounds like a Star Wars Post-apocalyptic-Prequel! Holy shit. So, did I bother to read the story? I skimmed the start but thought, oh my god, I’m on deadline. Nofuckingbody is taking down Amazon. Not even Wal-Mart. If they could, it would have happened by now. And if they were, it would be, I don’t know, covered by the NYT or the WSJ. Just saying. But kudos to the headline guys. Great grabber. Great click-bait! ©2016 John Hofmeister. Illustration from Steve Lovelace blog, where you'll find a guide to clickbait — fun read BTW. Originally published at http://www.jhofmeister.com/musings After a career, long stints at 3 different organizations and a short stint at another, I decided to leave a well-paying corporate agency job and go freelance. There's a long answer to why I did, which I might share at some other time, but the short answer I posted to Facebook. FB asks what's on your mind. This was my answer: Now I know why I left the corporate job to freelance. Knocked off early to take in this weather, this view, my favorite playlist, and a beer. Below is my view, playlist, and beer. Everyone has their own reasons. Sometimes they're pretty simple. My playlist. Partial listing. |
John HofmeisterWhen I'm not writing for clients, I write about things that interest me. Quite of bit of satire, a genre that has become increasingly difficult to work in since reality has become such a farce. Archives
February 2023
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