Foreplay

Jude Hammerle

In March of 1996, everyone I talked with complained that the Comet Hyakutake was a disappointment, and frankly I agreed with them. If you looked right at it with the naked eye, Hyakutake was just a fuzzy, dirty little dot in the sky. Through binoculars it looked even blurrier, even more disappointing. 

One night during Hyakutake’s brief visit I needed to bring the recycling up to the head of our driveway. It was a clear moonless night in the country, a pitch-black backwater night. As I stood on a little hill at the crest of the drive I caught a sort of glow in my right peripheral vision. I looked up, and noticed a gigantic, broad swoosh of very faint light that stretched across the entire sky. It all emanated from that one little blurred dot.

The next year, the Comet Hale-Bopp came. It too was just a tiny fleck of light, but it was brighter and sharper and had a little tail and looked every bit like a comet should look. Everyone got all excited about Hale-Bopp. Some cultists even killed themselves in the hope of hopping a ride on it, as you might remember.

The long and the short of this story is that the Comet Hyakutake passed much closer to Earth than Hale-Bopp did. So close, in fact, that you couldn’t comprehend the totality of it unless you looked away and let your peripheral vision process its reflected light. The faint glow that had stretched all the way across the night sky was the tail of Hyakutake, millions of miles long. Had I lived nearer to any city or any other great source of light I would have missed it completely. Since then I have made a point of looking away for a second or two from everything I look at, just in case there is a bigger picture to be seen in the periphery.

Some of the smartest people I know (and all of the dumbest) have told me that sex sells. For many, many years I did not believe them. Then one day, while consulting simultaneously on a beer project and a car project, I looked away for a moment. When I did, I saw that sex does sell, and how.

Sex buys, and that is how sex sells. [1]

I am certain that some people will use this book to justify the insertion of ever more nipple, bulge and ass into the already nipple-, bulge- and ass-laden media. They will shrug slyly when confronted with their prurience, and say simply that sex sells, just as the faithful say amen without ever knowing what it means. [2]

Other people will quietly begin removing the aforementioned body parts from the aforementioned media, and replacing them with far more seductive rhetoric and imagery. This book is dedicated to them.

 

This is the Preface to How Sex Sells: The Persuasive Power of Identity, a work in process.

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[1] I believe this makes me the first scribe who ever gave it all away in the Preface.

[2] Amen means ‘So be it.’