"V-Power"

[Dave Monroe]

X-RATED!
The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture
Marcel Danesi
Availability: Not Yet Published
>From Palgrave Macmillan
Pub date: Dec 2008
192 pages
Size 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
$26.95 - Paperback (0-230-61068-4)
Also available:
$85.00 - Hardcover (0-230-61067-6)

http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=0230610684

Book explores the lure of the X-rated

In some measure all pop culture represents the triumph of the pleasure
instinct over the Puritan one. From singing to striptease,
transgressions are us – and our safety valve

Nov 16, 2008 04:30 AM

Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer

Marcel Danesi is nursing his Stella Artois as a young woman slowly
descends the stairs that lead to the stage, the one with the gleaming
brass poles. She's wearing skyscraping stilettos, black nylons, a
garter belt, panties and a shimmering camisole.

[...]

Danesi – a semiotics professor at the University of Toronto whose
books include Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence – has come
to this downtown strip club with a mix of reluctance and curiosity, a
natural dilemma for someone who considers himself a moral man but
decidedly not a moralistic one, judging, dictating, full of disdain.

Yet the visit seems a fitting punctuation mark, both for Danesi's
personal narrative and the topic of his forthcoming book, X-Rated!:
The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture.

[...]

.. it's the symbolism around femininity that's key, the unceasing
fascination that men have with women. As Virginia Woolf writes in A
Room of One's Own: "Why are women so much more interesting to men than
men are to women?"

It's also an ancient, complicated obsession: why men have always seen
femininity and the female form as objects of both veneration and fear.
(Think Eve and Lilith.)

Danesi calls it "V-Power," after Venus, Virgo, vases and vessels, all
traditional symbols of femininity. There's a reason that the ears of
the Playboy bunny form a V, or that Thomas Pynchon called his elusive
female character V in his novel of the same name....

http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/537757