I had heard the song before. I’m sure you have too, a thousand times.
Blurred lines.
I know you want it.
For most of last summer, it was the only song on the radio. Being a forty-five year old father of two, I wasn’t exactly the target demographic. The only reason I remembered the name of the song was when my wife showed me the online-only version of the music video.
“I can’t believe this,” she said, as two almost entirely nude girls frolicked around on the screen. “Remember when we watched MTV and it was just music and the band playing? What the hell is this?”
I shook my head, partly disgusted (because I was), and partly playing the role of the cordial husband. “I know it’s cliche, but what is wrong with kids these days? This is practically porn.”
All the while I was half-wondering when I’d find the alone time to jerk off to it. I had to say things like that ever since her moral crusade had started some years ago. It was a reason we’d started to grow apart, and why sex was perhaps a once-a-month proposition. I would think back to our younger days, when she told me she would have married me only for my massive ‘endowment,’ and we even fooled around with the idea of swinging. I’d also think back to my idealistic young self thinking that looks weren’t that important in a wife. Now I was trapped with a flat-chested republican raisin (my God I’m awful, but if you’d seen how she looked, you’d at least understand me, I hope). Where had my cute little pervert gone? C’est la vie, I’d tell myself. Such is marriage.
“This is how it happens, boundaries just get destroyed,” she continued, “It’s not like this is obscure. This is the most popular song and video right now. A song about rape with four minutes of nude girls dancing around for the video. What’s next? What will shock our grandkids? When does it stop?”
She shook her head. I walked away from her desk as she kept browsing the internet on her laptop. And, as far as I was concerned, I’d never think twice about the silly song again.
A week later, I left work early walked into my house, and the song was blaring out of my living room. It wasn’t the first time I’d come home to a girl dance party. My eighteen year old daughter had been boogying it up with her friends after school since her grade school days. I usually glanced into the living room before leaving them be, rather than barging in to be the “lame dad” that made them hit the stop button.
As much as it may make me sound like a pervert, my daughter had to deal with being otherworldly attractive for years. By the time her birthday hit, she was something you can’t describe. You could say it was “it.” If I had to take a shot at it, she would be Jennifer Lawrence’s face attached to Kelly Brook’s body, but that doesn’t do her justice. Take away the minor faults of either of those two gorgeous woman, and you’ be closer to the miracle that was my daughter.
Cheerleading, modelling, acting, “pretty girl” things were her activities for years. She was the girl you looked at and knew she could make a career just from being beautiful. Yet she was fairly smart, or at least average, which I accepted. Still, I never thought of it in anything beyond a fatherly capacity. When the thousandth person remarked that “she should be a model” to me or my wife, we knew what they meant. When another neighborhood dad, coach, or teacher, was a little too smiley and let their hand linger on her shoulder after demanding a hug because of “how glad they were to see her,” I never made a fuss. She had the common sense to know when an old man wanted a hug to feel her chest against them. It was the way the world worked, and that was the end of it.
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