What’s on TV these days

Peeing is what’s on TV these days. Men in urinals. Women boasting their panties down as if they had cocks too. It makes mediocre actors, male and female, into Oscar candidates. I remember the first movie pee scene I saw. Something Wild. She matter-of-factly squats and pees in front of Jeff Daniels for Christ’s sake. Jeff Daniels? Jeff Daniels? He was horrified. Ironically it was Melanie Griffith playing a porn star in Brian De Palma’s Body Double who declared, “I don’t do pee scenes” just two years earlier.  Sic tempus fugit. Now we have explosive, hard-ass, gun-toting, kickboxing female action peeing. In TV “streams” kids are allowed to watch (13+ designations at Netflix). Riiiiiight.

The big question is why.

For some reason, it has become important for women to prove themselves as gross as men when it comes to showboating basic bodily functions that used to be private. I’m not going to get into farting and queefing, which make an appearance in the movie The Heat (Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, who do both at each other), for example. I’m sure periods and tampons will be the next big pioneering attraction for the 70mm screens of America. Peeing on camera, however, seems to have become a mandatory rite of passage for female actors. All of which tends to verify what chauvinist pig men have long maintained — that all women really are exhibitionists at heart, over which they used to get their panties in a twist. So to speak. But no more. Panties are only twisted these days to wring out the urine leaks. I’m sure this is considered progress. Even serious movies take pride in such scenes: Jessica Lange has a majestic and stately pee on the beach in Rob Roy. You know, Old World Class... as opposed to today’s “streaming” vulgarities, like the new hit miniseries called (unfittingly enough) Utopia....

A new low in 2020: peeing, voyeurs, guns, and surround 

sound. (Blow it up by stretching the screen if you dare.)

If you’re satisfied with less than that, there’s something for every taste…

Ultimate voyeur martial artist peeing.

  Just to be clear, it seems everywoman has to squat for us on camera now.

A nature background is appealing...

A torture element is always titillating.

Adding bloody murder to the laughs was a real breakthrough.

What’s next? The one missing next step. Full-frontal extreme closeup peeing on HBO. Oh. Maybe Lena Dunham already did that…

I’m not a prig. I think peeing can be an erotic enticement, but only when women do it to show off their sexuality. Peeing as some kind of acting or plot device is just ridiculous. Like the way eating has become an equally disgusting way of grabbing a prop and running your open mouth off with cheeks full of food. Eating does not make you Oscar worthy. Or even Emmy worthy. Snork snork snork. Really? I’m guessing shitting is next. How Julia Roberts will finally get her Academy Award?

Take your cue from the transcendent gutter genius of Philip Roth

Philip Roth’s Erotic Pee Scene Is One of the Most Tender Moments in Literature

The poet and novelist Garth Greenwell, author, most recently, of Cleanness, has been known to write explicit sex scenes that are crucial to the understanding of his characters. For our Best Sex I Ever Read column, he selects a passage toward the end of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel Sabbath’s Theater, a scene that has been vilified as vulgar but one that he finds beautiful. In it, a dying woman recalls with her lover how wonderful it was to experiment sexually with him. To Greenwell, this is one of the most romantic scenes in literature.

There you have it. Even if John Updike did it better in one of the Rabbit books. She was a prostitute. Cool. And Updike was a Summa at Harvard. Peeing is trending, even in literature.