Fluffers

For Halloween, my gorgeous, outrageous and tremendous niece had a very original costume idea. She dressed as a fluffer. Don't know what a fluffer is? Here's Wikipedia's definition:

A fluffer is a hired member of the crew of a pornographic movie whose role on the set is to sexually arouse the male participants prior to the filming of scenes requiring erections. The term was also extended to include female participants.

You can also check out Urban Dictionary's definition, but you get the idea. I won't bother to describe my niece's costume but I will say that it did not leave any doubt about who she was supposed to be, did not expose a lot of skin and was hilarious. So, with the addition of some pictures - which I have but won't post without her permission - this would have been a perfectly adequate blog entry. But my niece's costume, per se, is not why I'm posting.

While looking over the Halloween pictures my niece sent me, I was therefore naturally thinking about fluffers and their role in the production of porn when it suddenly occurred to me that there are political fluffers, too. They're the ones who keep the population ready for the next big scene. In today's political arena, those who continually bleat about the threat to America from those "not-white not-christian homuhsekshuwal terrorist immigrants" are simply nothing more than FEAR FLUFFERS (a term which I am now copyrighting©, BTW). Their job is to keep the general population worked up and afraid so that they'll be receptive to the "We can protect you if you let us do what we want" message that's being forced on them. You can even pick a receptive orifice to complete the analogy, if you want. Simply put, without the Fear Fluffers©, the politicians might not get (re)elected; the movie might not get made.

BTW, in the process of writing this, I looked up the word "pornography" simply because it's one of those words that while "everybody knows what it means", I couldn't ever recall reading an actual definition. What was fascinating to me was the etiology of the word. It comes from the Greek pornographos meaning "(one) writing of prostitutes". Utilizing that original meaning, then, most political reporting today could quite possibly be called pornography.

[UPDATE 14:00 13 Nov 2007: And if you needed a Fear Fluffer© example, check this out.]