Who put the bed in bedroom? Part 2
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Yes, son, once your dad lived in a bachelor pad.
In the pre-Woodstock Sixties, we suburban kids had no direct experience with apartments — so our conceptions were formed by endless swinging-singles movies starring Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, or even Rock Hudson.
These guys lived in apartments: high-rise apartments!
Indeed, the very words apartment complex had a Freudian eroticism, and a singles apartment complex was a California Asgard, a courtyard-style sun-drenched harem with terraces overlooking the pool, and a double balcony over which were always hanging bouffant-haired bikini babes looking to party, as in For Singles Only (1968):
Check the caption: party time 24 hours a day!
A quarter-century later, a bit grubbier, the same tropes remained in the simply named Singles (1992), for whose characters propinquity breeds familiarity, as they all live in or near an apartment building:
Yes, this U-courtyard brown brick walkup was sexy.
We have always found personal spaces, especially bedrooms, faintly risque — even the word connotes sex (as in ‘bedroom eyes’). With the internet, the third-easiest thing to sell over the internet is real estate, for as Marjorie Garber says, in her idiosyncratic but marvelously entertaining Sex and Real Estate,
in one of her many libidinously analytical passages:
Seductive galleries of homes to browse through on television or the Internet are ready to accommodate our fantasies. The virtual-reality “walk-through” has become a feature of the high-end market, whether in
Precisely this illicit voyeurism inspired Alfred Hitchcock to connect sex and death in Rear Window,
Uptown girl lounging in a photographer’s bedroom.
with its imagery of proximity, anonymity, and repressed desires both erotic and mortal:
Indeed, it appears some of these marketers are harkening back to the Swinging Sixties:
Sometimes, however, the target audience is single heterosexual men, as was the case for 255
(Those who buy apartments in the building receive a membership to the club, a lending library of sorts where members can borrow from an array of status cars, including a 1957 Porsche Speedster and a 1977 Aston Martin.)
Magnet. Babe … magnet.
Models hired for the event circulated among potential buyers, the cars and an open bar wearing panties, pasties and body paint. The paint was applied to evoke skintight race car driver suits, but the effect was more Jessica Rabbit than Danica Patrick. The words: “Condo included. Girl Not Included,” were written on the women’s backs.
Girl extra.
Meanwhile, extending the metaphor further, who puts these people together? Garber again:
The very word “broker,” while it has always meant agent or intermediary in a general sense (insurance broker, pawnbroker, stockbroker), used also to be a synonym for a pander, procurer, pimp, matchmaker, marriage agent, or go-between in love affairs.
Like unhappy Bud Baxter
Breaking and entering isn’t simply a definition of robbery, it’s also a psycho-sexual definition of defloration.
“I think the whole idea of using sex to sell apartments is passe,” she said. “In the 1980’s and 90’s, sex was very disruptive and naughty and taboo so we wanted to take a peek.”
Now, it is ubiquitous. “It’s not the new taboo anymore,” Ms. Thaler said.
And unlike most cliches, “sex sells” is not necessarily true.
Deborah Morrison, an associate professor specializing in advertising at the University of Oregon in
“The laughable part is that someone might remember the image,” Professor Morrison said, “but I bet they will not remember who ran it and where it was at.”
How much is a big column in the New York Times worth?
Or even more valuable, an AHI blog post?
Still, just as all Shakespearean singles comedies end in the tragedy of marriage, swinging-singles apartment living eventually ends in the byproduct of sex: children, and the move to the suburbs, with their driveways, lawns, and safe schools.
For some, the end of apartment living.
