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| Also: by Mischief Maker 08/18/2011, 2:05pm PDT | ||||
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up with pod people wrote: Well an interesting tidbit from my criminal law experience is how intertwined prostitution and drug addiction are. Like how if some guys are trying to score heroin and don't know any dealers in the area, they just look for some hookers and ask them who to talk to. Or other guys never carry cash when hiring prostitutes, they pay directly in crack rocks. I almost wonder if the thing that attracts these girls to the Host clubs is the very excess you find so unappealing. As QB said, they're beautiful, they have boyfriends, they could go to any bar and be treated like princesses. At the host club, however, that level of attention is turned to 11. Pull out a cigarette? Instant lighter. Say you want to laugh, they'll find the funniest guy in the bar to perform for you. Order a guy to drink enough alcohol to harm himself to earn your approval? Done. (there's even a scene in the movie where a girl tells the boss to down an entire bottle, and after he does it she says, "sorry.") They want the super-intense drama of having a man who will do anything to please her, except fuck her so she can pine to her friends about how she wishes he could be hers, even though she says the same thing about every host at every host bar she frequents. Even the thrill of spending such insane amounts of money (why am I buying 5 bottles of $500 champagne??? This is crazy!) is probably part of the appeal. All this overdrive of thrill and emotion and drama and crazy risks help to blot out the shame of working as prostitutes. Then I look at my own relationship with Video Games. I'm not a shitsocker, but my relationship with them definitely isn't healthy. I can pinpoint the exact moment it became weird. I went to high school in a very religious community and I was flagrantly and defiantly an atheist. For reasons I didn't understand until recently, I was Mr. Rebound with the girls. Out of the blue some super-religious girl would break up with her boyfriend and start coming on to me, go on one or two dates of heavy making out, then dump me and get back with her churchgoing boyfriend or another guy who was equally religious. Now I understand that while these girls were going through ovulation, they were looking for lovers outside their comfort zone to get recruit some genetic diversity to freshen the gene pool of their tribes, and who was more outside their comfort zone than the kid who stood up in class and yelled at the ceiling, "Prove your existence! Strike me down with your mighty thunderbolt!"? Once they were finished ovulating, they were once again interested in guys who were basically a young version of their fathers and they dumped me. I understand that now, but at the time my teenaged response was, "what did I do? We had so much chemistry. Why can't I keep a girlfriend for longer than 2 weeks? What's wrong with me???" One night a girl cancelled our date, so I decided to take the $30 I was going to spend on the date and bought a copy of Diablo. It was the perfect way to take my mind off the confusion and humiliation. From then on, when the going got rough, Video Games were my escape. But I started passing by dating opportunities and going straight to the videogames instead. I became very obsessive-compulsive about getting the perfect blend of genres and settings so I could entertain myself whatever my mood. Over time I became more and more demanding for more extreme experiences. RPGs just weren't exciting anymore. Undergraduate finals coming up? Hel-lo Freespace 2 and Serious Sam. Once I got into Law School, an experience almost custom-designed to drive over-achievers into a nervous breakdown, I discovered bullet-hell shmups. In a twisted sort of way, shmups are probably the healthiest videogame experience for me because they're so short and mentally demanding that even if I sit down with the express intention of gorging myself on videogames to escape, it's impossible to go more than an hour or two. I certainly never find myself playing shmups until quarter to three on a work night. But the weird thing that this movie makes me realize is that the Host clients and I aren't ingesting a drug that screws with our nervous system, we're getting high off our own brain chemistry. How can anyone escape addiction if excitement is all you need? |
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