Since 1992, Blue Blood has been about encouraging people to think critically and not just go along with the herd. My hair is purple and red at the moment. But the hair color is a signifier, not the endgame. What I mean by this is that all of us who fought the battle to convince the world that someone with primary-colored hair or tattoos could be beautiful or sexy, we can all pat ourselves on the back and go home, if that was all the whole thing was about. That battle is won. But the point is that the physical appearance was supposed to be about being a maverick and living on your own terms, about marching to the beat of your own drummer. If mohawks become trendy, then having one does not necessarily signify that one is a nonconformist. You can still aesthetically enjoy very tall hair, but the most important body part in the battle against conformity is slightly lower — your brain. You need to have an evolved intellect to avoid being a bah bah sheep conformist.

I’m about to tell you all the most important lesson of a liberal arts education and it is not even going to cost you a hundred grand or whatever higher learning is priced at these days. I was less enamored of the lessons I learned in school, while I was paying off the tab, so here is the most crucial stuff for free. My parents certainly deserve most of the credit for my brain, but my education really helped ingrain some of their lessons.

In order to have an intelligent and human approach to the world, you must learn to be analytical and think critically. Some people are born more or less disposed to having these abilities, but they are definitely learned skills. The direction culture is moving, driven by technology, does not nurture skills in analysis and critical thinking. First television advertisers, and then internet marketers, found that people respond most primally to sound bites and slogans, as opposed to actual data. As a result, a lot of modern debate, especially online, sounds like the old “Tastes great!” vs “Less Filling!” argument. A person capable of analysis and thinking critically would look at that argument and realize that a discussion of Miller Lite probably entailed a beverage which did not taste good at all to most people and which would indeed be less filling because fewer people would drink much of it.

Which is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that you need to make up your own mind. When you are presented with a debate or controversy, you need to deconstruct what is actually being discussed. What are the sides of the issue? What is each side actually trying to accomplish? Who are the people presenting the sides of this issue? What, if anything, do these people stand to gain from one or another outcome? Are the people debating a particular side anonymous?

Politicians and salesmen will frequently present their own viewpoint as the side that all people of a certain type will be on. This is to induce everyone who is that type of person to side with them. For example, “if you care about children, you have to donate to my campaign.” Or, “if you are artistic and independent, you have to buy my product.” You need to analyze what the actual issues are and what the actual qualities of a product are. If you do not, then you are doomed to sheepdom.

Once you figure out what the actual issues and values being presented really are, as best you can discern, you need to think critically about them. You might love children and think of yourself as very artistic and independent. But that does not mean you need to buy what a politician or salesman is selling. Thinking critically means deciding for yourself, being able to process new data as it becomes available for your analysis, and determining for yourself how the real issues actually fit with your personal values. Thinking critically means not just wholesale swallowing whatever the last person you talked to told you to think. It means questioning authority and thinking for yourself.

I am often asked why I permit dissenting opinions on the Blue Blood boards. How can I permit people to disagree with me, with the only rule being that they have to be capable of explaining and supporting what they say, preferably without sloganeering or name-calling? So many forums online censor what can be posted in order to make sure as many people as possible will eat the sound bite argument and site owners will not have to back up what they say. So I try to provide a venue where people from many different walks of life can come together to exchange their varied points of view.

Thinking critically combined with being analytical means being able to find the real answers which are best for you, means being your own person. Even if some of your tastes and decisions end up being common ones, coming to your conclusions via critical thinking and analysis means being a nonconformist inside your own gray matter. Where it counts the most.

I believe there is nothing more important than individual liberty. Black eyeliner and glitter lipstick might be ways of expressing your love of freedom, but they will not make you free. Only application of your unfettered brain can do that.

People tend to be most open-minded about trying new things when they are first being romanced. For example, most people are extra-likely to taste a new food or listen to a new band then they start dating someone new. By this scientific equation, I hope that readers perusing the erotic portraiture of BlueBlood.com will be feeling extra-receptive to new ideas.

One of the most important messages I would like people to internalize from Blue Blood is that having purple hair or a tattoo or a pervy wardrobe in no way makes a person a second class citizen. You are entitled to the rewards of the larger society. You are entitled to the same love as anyone, whether or not your sex is a bit kinkier than average.

The ancient Romans celebrated Lupercalia on the Ides of February by whipping hot girls with portions of sacrificed goat. (The Ides is the 15th day of a month, for those of you who have repressed your Julius Ceasar studies.) Historians can’t agree on the origins of Lupercalia or precisely which gods the festival honored. They are pretty solid on the format for the party though. If you wish to throw a Lupercalia event, you will need a variety of eligible maidens, two goats, and a dog. The idea is to sacrifice the animals and then hit the girls with pieces of them in order to ensure fertility, painless childbirth, and general sensuality. A match-making lottery is optional but considered to be part of the tradition. Sort of the bloody pagan version of a 70’s key party. Blue Blood is not really down with the animal sacrifice portion of the show because we love our dogs and goats far too much for that.

In non-ancient Roman and non-70’s times, having an unusual piercing or wearing your lingerie in public can mean that your love life is limited to brief conversations with strangers off MySpace you message for 2am threesomes. But it doesn’t have to. There is no rule that thinking for yourself, owning your sexuality, and dressing flamboyantly equals eschewing all sentimentality and always feeling alone on Valentines Day. So I’m thinking I know more people who celebrate Valentines Day than Lupercalia.

Historians appear to be even more confused about the origins of Valentines Day than they are about the origins of the older Lupercalia. There are three different dudes various factions present as being the patron saint of romance. Most folks these days celebrate Valentines Day February 14th with hearts and flowers and, of course, sentimental greeting cards in both digital and paper form. Some scholars argue that the match-making lottery tickets of Lupercalia were the first Valentines. I feel that a date lottery ticket is no more a Valentine than the keys to some guy’s Porsche (unless maybe I got to keep the car.) The medieval Xtians appear to have come up with a variety of different mythologies and rituals in attempts to co-opt and dilute the pagan Lupercalia rites. Difficult to discern which one was the most successful, but, by the 1700’s, it is well-documented that there was a thriving Hallmarkian industry which created pre-made cards for Valentines Day and produced books with suggestions of how to express one’s love.

So flowers are pretty and an obvious gift, but how did hearts get associated with Valentines Day? Cadbury, founded in 1824, is credited with producing the first heart-shaped box of chocolate. Perhaps it is because of the way one’s heart beats when aroused or in love. Not that a heart shape is shaped much like a human heart. There are vaguely disgusting treatises on how what we consider to be heart-shaped is more similar in structure to a cow’s heart than a human heart. I’m not sure if those who study this are proponents of cattle-fucking or what.

Whether you prefer pieces of sacrificed animals or pieces of chocolate, there is someone out there who is the perfect match for you. If you have already found them, Valentines Day is the perfect holiday to celebrate your good fortune. As part of Blue Blood’s Valentines Day greetings to all of you, Forrest Black and I photographed a professional piercer, the lovely purple-tressed Natalie Addams, cutting out her own heart, gift-boxing it, and sewing up the “wound” with quite genuine play piercings. The Cadbury chocolate boxes of the mid-1800’s were made with velvet and mirrors. So we just had to say Happy Blue Blood-style Valentines Day with a bloody heart in a spooky ornate gift box! We’re traditional like that.

Happy Valentines Day!

100 AD: Roman Legions. Actually they all had those Eminem haircuts, but the helmets had bolt-on Mohawks. Original wig-hawkers: Romans suck.

1976: Bobby DeNiro as Travis “Taxi Driver” Bickle. Travis’ hawk was a wig (DeNiro had another job lined up and needed to keep his hair), but it got the job done with style. Inspired presidential assassin John Hinckley, who was apparently too busy beating off over Jodie Foster to watch all the way to the end.

1977: Wendy O. Williams of the Plasmatics. Hatchet-faced punk rock bitch W.O.W. is owed by everyone who gets off on electrical tape pasties, shaving cream shirts, and women rocking chainsaws and shotguns onstage. The Dark Bros. classic New Wave Hookers vidporn series never would have happened without Wendy O. Tell me I’m wrong.

1982: GBH. Seminal UK triple-initial punk rockers. A bunch of jolly Thatcher-era working-class kids, the sort who would more likely use broken pint glasses on your face like cookie-cutters than bore you with student Marxism. The initials stood for Grievous Bodily Harm, but those were some Great Big Haircuts.

1982: Lawrence “Mr. T” Tureaud. Beat the shit out of Sly in Rocky III, shot AKs with eyes closed in The A-Team. Took the long way around rationalizing beard/hawk combo, mostly relied on the “YOU tell him he looks ridiculous” factor. Must shoulder no small blame for the jockhawk.

1984: The Kid in Suburbia. Come on, you choked up when the little bastard hit the windshield.

1986: Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Wig-hawkers extraordinaire. Looked like post-apocalypse Rip Taylors. Supposed to be some sort of post-ironic Max Headroom anti-consumerist performance screed that would make money no matter how much it sucked because we’re all sheep and deserve to be told it. The music sucked plastic dogshit and the whole thing sank without a trace, resurfacing recently as a hideous side-effect of VH1’s “I Love the 80s”.