Title: ...Hat?
Author(s): Tom of Finland
Publisher: Hat...company?
Year: ∞
I bring up Turbonegro because it’s via my interest in them that I became aware of the work of erotic illustrator Tuoko Valio Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. I first appreciated his work via giggling teenage transgression, finding a copy of his collected works while waiting for a ride home from a meeting of the above-mentioned Turbonegro fan club, flipping through it to laugh at the big-dicked biker boys rubbing their trim mustaches together...
...but the thing is, the longer I looked, the less I laughed, and I became aware of the tremendous beauty in the images. I was genuinely fascinated, rather than merely tickled. What kept me looking through that book was genuine enchantment, not mere adolescent cheekiness. I was witnessing the same transcendent beauty in those big-dicked biker boys as I’d found a few years earlier, going to see Princess Mononoke in the theatre on its initial release.
The things a person can do with a sheet of paper and a pencil...
Tom of Finland drawings have never stopped speaking to me, and I think that’s because they so perfectly marry those two sides of my personality, of my way of viewing the world - the teenage and the transcendent. The part of me that giggles at the absurd vascularity of a Tom of Finland -penned cock is inseparable from the part of me that weeps at the movement of clouds in The Wind Rises. Both are pure expressions of joy, of the wonder in the world - both are the warm and reassuring embrace of nothing less than a god.
All of which brings me to this hat, which I was wearing one afternoon, when I went to a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant at the mall. It had been an emotionally exhausting day, and I grew more and more desperate as I walked around the food court, eventually entering this sushi spot not so much by choice as by simply collapsing there in defeat.
The restaurant was arranged such that the counters ran in a sort of maze configuration, so that parts of the counter faced each other at diverse angles. As I watched the passing dishes on the conveyor belt, I noticed the man sitting opposite me, at a 45 degree angle, so although I could see him clearly, he wasn’t facing me. He was a large, swarthy man, somewhere in his middle thirties, with a flashy watch and a big gold chain around his neck. He was throwing back plates of sushi, and while idly following the food on its journey from plate to face, I clocked the huge Brazzers logo on his black t-shirt. I started to judge him silently, perhaps composing a text message to a friend, wherein I would humourously shame this perverted slob across from me. But then I remembered my Tom of Finland hat, and I understood that I was, myself, a solo male diner in middle age, wearing a pornographic article of clothing in a mall sushi restaurant.
We’re not so different, you and I...
This tempered my judgement, and lightened the spirit of my day. Philip K. Dick wrote that signs of the divine first appear in the trash stratum, which certainly includes pornography, so a moment of blessed self-awareness as a pervert in a mall sushi spot did feel like a little wink from that joyous divinity.
But I do still wonder what the Brazzers guy felt. Perhaps that he wanted to fuck something. Or that another eel roll would really hit the spot. God’s wisdom may arise in the sewer of Pornhub, but with enough encouragement, it can grow further up into the light of Finnish daddy erotica.