Category Archives: Culture

Facebook, go away—if I want to log in, I know where to find you

October 30, 2011 By in Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Facebook keeps sending me e-mails about how much I’m missing on Facebook; see the image at the right for one example. But I’m not convinced I’m missing anything, no matter how much Facebook wants me to imagine I am.

In “Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors,” Ben Casnocha says that writers need to “Develop a very serious plan for dealing with internet distractions. I use an app called Self-Control on my Mac.” Many other writers echo him. We have, all of us, a myriad of choices every day. We can choose to do something that might provide some lasting meaning or value. Or we can choose to tell people who are often effectively strangers what we ate for dinner, or that we’re listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Lil’ Wayne, or our inconsidered, inchoate opinions about the political or social scandal of the day, which will be forgotten by everybody except Wikipedia within a decade, if not a year.

Or we can choose to do something better—which increasingly means we have to control distractions—or, as Paul Graham puts it, “disconnect” them. Facebook and other entities that make money from providing distractions are, perhaps not surprisingly, very interested in getting you more interested in their distractions. That’s the purpose of their e-mails. But I’ve becoming increasingly convinced that Facebook offers something closer to simulacra than real life, and that the people who are going to do something really substantial are, increasingly, going to be the people who can master Facebook—just as the people who did really substantial things in the 1960 – 2005 period learned to master TV.

Other writers in the “Practical Tips” essay discuss the importance of setting work times (presumably distinct from Facebook times) or developing schedules or similar techniques to make sure you don’t let, say, six hours pass, then wonder what happened during those six hours—probable answers might include news, e-mail, social networks, TV, dabbling, rearrange your furniture, cleaning, whatever. All things that might be worthwhile, but only in their place. And Facebook’s place should be small, no matter how much the site itself encourages you to make it big. I’ll probably log on Facebook again, and I’m not saying you should never use Facebook, or that you should always avoid the Internet. But you should be cognizant of what you’re doing, and Facebook is making it increasingly easy not to be cognizant. And that’s a danger.

I was talking to my Dad, who recently got on Facebook—along with Curtis Sittenfeld joining, this is a sure sign Facebook is over—and he was creeped out by having Pandora find his Facebook account with no active effort on his part; the same thing happened when he was posting to TripAdvisor under what he thought was a pseudonym. On the phone, he said that everyone is living in Neuromancer. And he’s right. Facebook is trying to connect you in more and more places, even places you might not necessarily want to be connected. This isn’t a phenomenon unique to Facebook, of course, but my Dad’s experience shows what’s happening in the background of your online life: companies are gathering data from you that will reappear in unpredictable places.

There are defenses against the creeping power of master databases. I’ve begun using Ghostery, a brilliant extension for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome that lets one see web bugs, beacons, and third-party sites that follow your movements around the Internet. Here’s an example of the stuff Salon.com, a relatively innocuous news site, loads every time a person visits:

What is all that stuff? It’s like the mystery ingredients in so much prepackaged food: you wonder what all those polysyllabic substances are but still know, on some level, they can’t be good for you. In the case of Salon.com’s third-party tracking software, Ghostery can at least tell you what’s going on. It also gives you a way to block a lot of the tracking—hence the strikethroughs on the sites I’ve blocked. The more astute among you will note that I’m something of a hypocrite when it comes to a data trail—I still buy stuff from Amazon.com, which keeps your purchase history forever—but at least one can, to some extent, fight back against the companies who are tracking everything you do.

But fighting back technologically, through means like Ghostery, is only part of the battle. After I began writing this essay, I began to notice things like this, via a Savage Love letter writer:

I was briefly dating someone until he was a huge asshole to me. I have since not had any contact with him. However, I have been Facebook stalking him and obsessing over pictures of the guys I assume he’s dating now. Why am I having such a hard time getting over him? Our relationship was so brief! He’s a major asshole!

I don’t think Facebook is making it easier for the writer to get over him or improve your life. It wouldn’t be a great stretch to think Facebook is making the process harder. So maybe the solution is to get rid of Facebook, or at least limit one’s use, or unfriend the ex, or some combination thereof. Go to a bar, find someone else, reconnect with the real world, find a hobby, start a blog, realize that you’re not the first person with these problems. Optimal revenge, if you’re the sort of person who goes in that direction, is a life well-lived. Facebook stalking is the opposite: it’s a life lived through the lives of others, without even the transformative power of language that media like the novel offer.

Obviously, obsessive behavior predated the Internet. But the Internet and Facebook make it so much easier to engage in obsessive behavior—you don’t even have to leave your house!—that the lower friction costs make the behavior easier to indulge. One solution: remove the tool by which you engage in said obsessive behavior. Dan Savage observes, “But it sounds like you might still have feelings for this guy! Just a hunch!” And if those feelings aren’t reciprocated, being exposed to the source of those feelings on a routine basis, even in digital form, isn’t going to help. What is going to help? Finding an authentic way of spending your time; learning to get in a state of flow; building or making stuff that other people find useful. Notice that Facebook is not on that list.

Some of you might legitimately ask why I keep a Facebook account, given my ambivalence, verging on antipathy. The answers are several fold: the most honest is probably that I’m a hypocrite. The next-most honest is that, if / when my novels start coming out, Facebook might be useful as an ad tool. And some people use Facebook and only Facebook to send out messages about events and parties. It’s also a useful to figure out when I’m going to a random city who might’ve moved there. Those people you lost touch with back in college suddenly become much closer when you’re both strangers somewhere.

But those are rare needs. The common needs that Facebook fulfills—to quasi-live through someone else’s life, to waste time, to feel like you’re on an anhedonic treadmill of envy—shouldn’t be needs at all. Facebook is encouraging you to make them needs. I’m encouraging you to realize that the real answers to life aren’t likely to be found on Facebook, no matter how badly Facebook wants to lure you to that login screen—they’re likely going to be found within.

By the way, I love In Practical Tips on Writing a Book from 23 Brilliant Authors. I’ve read it a couple times and still love it. It’s got a lot of surface area for such a short post, which is why I keep linking to it in various contexts.

Process, outcomes, and random discoveries

October 9, 2011 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I was listening to a Fresh Air interview with Brad Pitt, the guy who plays Billy Beane in the Moneyball movie, and Pitt said something very interesting: Billy Beane realized that baseball is mostly about “process” and maximizing your odds. A single pitch or a single at-bat is basically random; a terrible player could homer, a great one strike out. But if you have faith in the process and fidelity to it, you’ll maximize your chance of success over time. Notice those words: “maximize your chance of success.” You won’t automatically succeed in whatever the endeavor might be, but we live in a chaotic, random world where no one is guaranteed anything.

So I heard this interview about a week ago. Since then, I’ve seen a bunch of similar stuff, which keeps reappearing like, if I were a person who wasn’t convinced things are random, the world is trying to tell me something. Here’s a description of Steve Jobs: “What was important to Jobs was not making money per se, but the process of creation.” That word, “process,” appears again: if it’s right, the money will follow if you get the process right. When a Playboy interviewer asks Justin Timberlake “Why [. . .] some celebrities crack and fade and others, like you, just keep on keeping on? Have you figured that out?,” Timberlake says he doesn’t know but will speculate, and he goes on to say:

I think it’s about process. If you care about the process of what you’re doing, you can care about the actual work. You’ll stick around. The other thing is, you always need to be learning something new. In whatever I’ve done, I’ve always looked at myself as a beginner. Hopefully I can continue to do that for the next 30 years as I grow into an older man.

He’s trying to do with music what Billy Beane is trying to do with baseball and what Steve Jobs was trying to do with consumer technology. Or what Alain de Botton describes in The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in which the author sees a worker in a Belgian biscuit factory whose “manner drew attention away from what he was doing in favour of how he was doing it.” If you attend to how you do something, the outcome will tend to improve more than absolute attention to the outcome. It seems like a lot of experts, a lot of people who can do good work year after year, are really focusing on process refining. This might map to “experimental” and “conceptual” artists, to use Galenson’s terminology in Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. As I read more about what makes artists, scientists, and others succeed, I increasingly realize that a focus on process is essential, if not the essential thing.

And it’s something I’m noticing over and over again, in a variety of contexts. When I started grad school, I began going to the University of Arizona’s Ballroom Dance Club. This is hilarious: if you asked a girl who had the misfortune of going with me to high school dances about what I’d be like a couple years later, I doubt any would’ve guessed, “Dancing.” Fewer still would’ve guessed, “At least being a competent dancer.” To aspire to “good” or “masterful” is probably unwise, but “competent” is well within my reach—and within almost anyone’s reach, really, if you have the desire. And ballroom club is all about the fundamentals too: here’s how you should move. Here’s how you isolate a single part of your body. The overall look, feel, and flow of any dance is composed of individual motions and a dancer’s control over those individual motions, which eventually come to appear to be a single, fluid motion. But it isn’t. It’s the result of the dancer breaking down each individual part and practicing it until it becomes part of him.

One time, a guy who’d been dancing for about a decade had us spend about half an hour of an hour-long classes on spins. Skilled dancers can perform nearly perfect 360-degree spins every time. I can’t. I usually end up ten to fifty degrees off. I can’t get my body, shoes, and motion harmonized sufficiently to ensure that I can perform perfect spins. But I keep working on it, in the hopes of improving this seemingly simple but actually complex activity. I’m doing in dancing what Billy Beane is doing in baseball, Justin Timberlake is doing in music, Steve Jobs was doing in technology, and you should probably be doing in your own field or fields.

And if your practice isn’t as good as it should be this time, focus on improving your process so you’ll be better next time. As you, the reader, might imagine, the same principle applies to other things. Like classes. Since I now teach and take them, I have a lot of experience with students who want to fight about grades. I don’t budge, but every semester students want to fight either during the semester or the end. I try to convey to them that grades are imperfect but they’re really about learning; concentrate on learning and the achievement, whether in grade or other form, will eventually follow.

Most of them don’t believe me. This is unfortunate, since most students also don’t know that, as Paul Graham writes, there are really Two Kinds of Judgment:

Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal. But there’s a second much more common type of judgement where it isn’t. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. We’d probably be happier if we realized which are and which aren’t.

The first type of judgement, the type where judging you is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most competitions. Such judgements can of course be mistaken, but because the goal is to judge you correctly, there’s usually some kind of appeals process. If you feel you’ve been misjudged, you can protest that you’ve been treated unfairly.

Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type, so we get into the habit early in life of thinking that all judgements are.

But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you.

To be fair, I am trying to judge them correctly. But the second class of judgments bleed into grading: the grade is the means of trying to get students to be better writers. When they want to fight about grades, they haven’t fully internalized that I’m trying to get them into a process-oriented mode despite the school setting. The grades are outcomes and a necessary evil—and, besides, some students are simply more skilled than others.

But if students have fidelity to the process—to becoming, in my classes, better writers, or in other classes, better at whatever the class is attempting to impart—they’re going to maximize the probability of long-term success. And I wonder if students internalize the outcome-oriented mode of school—”My worth depends on my grades”—and then find themselves shocked when they’re plunged into the process-oriented real-world, where no one grades you, success or failure can’t be measured via GPA, and even people who do everything “right” may still fail for reasons outside their control.

This is probably doubly painful because students are used to type one judgments, not type two, and instructors don’t do much to disabuse students. Instructors don’t do enough to encourage resilience, and maybe we should, or should more than we do now.

By the way, I’m not just climbing the mountain and shouting at the unwashed masses below. I tell myself the same thing about writing fiction (or blog posts): I’ve probably gotten dozens of requests from agents for partial or full manuscripts. None have panned out; some still have pieces of the latest novel. But I tell myself that a) I’m going to write a better novel next time and b) if I maintain fidelity to the craft of writing itself, I will eventually succeed. Alternately, I might simply start self-publishing, but that’s an issue for another post. The point here is about writing—and about what I’m doing right now.

I keep writing this blog not because it brings me fame and fortune—alas, it doesn’t—but because I like to write, I think through writing, and because some of the writing on this blog is and/or will be useful to others. And I like to think this blog makes me a better writer not only of blog posts, but also a better writer in other contexts. I’m focused on the process of improvement more than the outcome of conventional publication. Which isn’t to say I don’t want that outcome—I do—but I understand that the outcome is, paradoxically, a result of attention to something other than the outcome.

"Free Agents," the TV show, proves itself dumb in the first three minutes through the "slut" debate

September 23, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, movies Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Free Agents, the TV show, begins with two characters in bed, and one opens a full condom drawer. The guy sees and says something like, “What are you—a slut?” The woman replies, and they have an excruciating discussion whose underlying content is a typical rehash of an ancient calumny about female sexuality. The scene is neither funny nor genuine, and the two problems are related.

If your characters are old enough to have a B.A., they’re old enough not to care about the idea of the “slut.” Younger characters, especially ones in high school, might still be interested in whether someone is a “slut,” but that’s mostly because a) teenagers are projecting uncertainty and fear regarding their own sexuality on others, b) many have parents who engage in various forms of daughter-guarding and other forms of shame internalization, and c) girls, especially, will use social approbation and shaming as a form of mate guarding behavior. If older characters like those in Free Agents are still concerned about the same problems as high school students, they’ve not matured enough to even be interesting. Even a show like Californication, whatever its other flaws, has moved beyond the “slut” question.

Like Free Agents, it’s also about someone with a stunted emotional life, but at least Californication is intellectually honest enough not to go for the “slut” question. Rather, it assumes that people who want to do it, do it, and people who don’t, don’t, which seems like the way the world is heading. Besides, by college graduation or thereabouts, most people will never really know about their partners’ past, and, again, by the time one graduates from college or reaches the age at which college graduation occurs, everyone is someone’s sloppy seconds. The median age for first sex in the United Sates is somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 (see Google for more); by the time a person hits their 30s, asking number questions becomes pointless if potentially amusing.

I’m not annoyed only because the concept behind word “slut” does, as Mark Liberman put it, “project bad associations based on a framework of ideas that I don’t endorse.” Even if you do do endorse that framework, endorsing it with someone you’re about to have sex with probably isn’t the optimal place to engage the issue. It only makes you look like a hypocrite and a fool, but, from what I can tell, that wasn’t what Free Agents was going for. It played the issue straight. To go back to Liberman—who is himself also writing about a TV show, albeit Sex and the City—”The word slut itself clearly retains strong negative connotations, quite apart from one’s opinions about sexual morality, but such things can change if enough people want them to.” TV shows aren’t necessarily a medium that promotes social and intellectual

I can see why TV show writers might go for the “slut”: they think it can create dramatic tension. But it’s a false dramatic tension, which is why I said the issue isn’t “genuine,” and false dramatic tension leads to jokes that aren’t funny either, because such jokes don’t engage any substantive ideas; really funny jokes often or usually do. Pretty much every single person with the proverbial half a brain has condoms around. Their presence doesn’t mean anything more than, “I’m prepared for the best,” which is a refreshing change compared to people who are prepared for the worst. It would be stranger if the woman in the show was single and didn’t have condoms.

So the “slut” problem reduces to one of two issues: the writers are lazy, so they introduce being a “slut” or not to create artificial tension; or the writers are dumb because they deal with a dead issue. Neither bodes well for the show. But it does hold an important lesson for narrative writers, whether visual or written: don’t focus on dead or dying issues. Focus on live ones. Feminists have been arguing against the “slut” framework of ideas since at least the 1960s if not earlier; Leora Tanenbaum wrote whole book on the subject, subtitled “Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation.” People’s behavior, if not their rhetoric, shows the issue to be dead. So instead of using it, why not skate to where the puck is going, instead of where it’s been?

The question is supposed to be rhetorical, but I’m going to answer it anyway: knowing the puck’s present location is easy. Knowing where it’s going is much, much harder, and a lot of the big media businesses, including TV, are too big and too expensive to take major risks on the unknown. Better to leave those big risks to dingy writers living in their parents’ basements or hiding from the real world in graduate school. That solution probably worked pretty well in a pre-Internet era. By now, however, people who want to take intellectual, social, and artistic risks can coalesce on the Internet. While Hollywood dithers and debates about sluts, the innovators are moving or have moved online. Don’t be surprised if the audience follows. And if you’re the kind of person who wants to be in the vanguard, don’t watch so much TV. Check out the bookstores and libraries instead. You’ll find it there. TV used to be the medium of the future, but in some ways it feels like the medium of the past.

EDIT: It appears Free Agents is heading towards cancellation. I’m tempted to say something like puerile like “good riddance,” but the problems described above transcend this show and will no doubt be repeated by successors, in more or less subtle guises.

“Free Agents,” the TV show, proves itself dumb in the first three minutes through the “slut” debate

September 23, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, movies Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Free Agents, the TV show, begins with two characters in bed, and one opens a full condom drawer. The guy sees and says something like, “What are you—a slut?” The woman replies, and they have an excruciating discussion whose underlying content is a typical rehash of an ancient calumny about female sexuality. The scene is neither funny nor genuine, and the two problems are related.

If your characters are old enough to have a B.A., they’re old enough not to care about the idea of the “slut.” Younger characters, especially ones in high school, might still be interested in whether someone is a “slut,” but that’s mostly because a) teenagers are projecting uncertainty and fear regarding their own sexuality on others, b) many have parents who engage in various forms of daughter-guarding and other forms of shame internalization, and c) girls, especially, will use social approbation and shaming as a form of mate guarding behavior. If older characters like those in Free Agents are still concerned about the same problems as high school students, they’ve not matured enough to even be interesting. Even a show like Californication, whatever its other flaws, has moved beyond the “slut” question.

Like Free Agents, it’s also about someone with a stunted emotional life, but at least Californication is intellectually honest enough not to go for the “slut” question. Rather, it assumes that people who want to do it, do it, and people who don’t, don’t, which seems like the way the world is heading. Besides, by college graduation or thereabouts, most people will never really know about their partners’ past, and, again, by the time one graduates from college or reaches the age at which college graduation occurs, everyone is someone’s sloppy seconds. The median age for first sex in the United Sates is somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 (see Google for more); by the time a person hits their 30s, asking number questions becomes pointless if potentially amusing.

I’m not annoyed only because the concept behind word “slut” does, as Mark Liberman put it, “project bad associations based on a framework of ideas that I don’t endorse.” Even if you do do endorse that framework, endorsing it with someone you’re about to have sex with probably isn’t the optimal place to engage the issue. It only makes you look like a hypocrite and a fool, but, from what I can tell, that wasn’t what Free Agents was going for. It played the issue straight. To go back to Liberman—who is himself also writing about a TV show, albeit Sex and the City—”The word slut itself clearly retains strong negative connotations, quite apart from one’s opinions about sexual morality, but such things can change if enough people want them to.” TV shows aren’t necessarily a medium that promotes social and intellectual

I can see why TV show writers might go for the “slut”: they think it can create dramatic tension. But it’s a false dramatic tension, which is why I said the issue isn’t “genuine,” and false dramatic tension leads to jokes that aren’t funny either, because such jokes don’t engage any substantive ideas; really funny jokes often or usually do. Pretty much every single person with the proverbial half a brain has condoms around. Their presence doesn’t mean anything more than, “I’m prepared for the best,” which is a refreshing change compared to people who are prepared for the worst. It would be stranger if the woman in the show was single and didn’t have condoms.

So the “slut” problem reduces to one of two issues: the writers are lazy, so they introduce being a “slut” or not to create artificial tension; or the writers are dumb because they deal with a dead issue. Neither bodes well for the show. But it does hold an important lesson for narrative writers, whether visual or written: don’t focus on dead or dying issues. Focus on live ones. Feminists have been arguing against the “slut” framework of ideas since at least the 1960s if not earlier; Leora Tanenbaum wrote whole book on the subject, subtitled “Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation.” People’s behavior, if not their rhetoric, shows the issue to be dead. So instead of using it, why not skate to where the puck is going, instead of where it’s been?

The question is supposed to be rhetorical, but I’m going to answer it anyway: knowing the puck’s present location is easy. Knowing where it’s going is much, much harder, and a lot of the big media businesses, including TV, are too big and too expensive to take major risks on the unknown. Better to leave those big risks to dingy writers living in their parents’ basements or hiding from the real world in graduate school. That solution probably worked pretty well in a pre-Internet era. By now, however, people who want to take intellectual, social, and artistic risks can coalesce on the Internet. While Hollywood dithers and debates about sluts, the innovators are moving or have moved online. Don’t be surprised if the audience follows. And if you’re the kind of person who wants to be in the vanguard, don’t watch so much TV. Check out the bookstores and libraries instead. You’ll find it there. TV used to be the medium of the future, but in some ways it feels like the medium of the past.

EDIT: It appears Free Agents is heading towards cancellation. I’m tempted to say something like puerile like “good riddance,” but the problems described above transcend this show and will no doubt be repeated by successors, in more or less subtle guises.

Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power — Elisabeth Eaves

September 15, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Nonfiction, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Bare has lots of good parts but goes on too long, follows too many random tangents (the “Kim” character doesn’t illustrate anything), and repeats itself too often. But I also liked it and learned some things from it I might not have otherwise, and Eaves is usually a perceptive reader of both her own and larger social hypocrisy. She seems sensitive, or she adopts a sensitive persona in the book. I only wish she’d taken more economics classes; the big thing she’s missing is micro 111 and 201. She’s missing game theory. And evolutionary biology and psychology. Those taken together explain a lot about the double standards she justifiably complains about. Take this section, about Eaves’s dawning sexual awareness:

I had this notion until my teens that my body was my own. How to clothe it, how to gratify it, whether to impregnate it—I had believed these to be matters of personal choice. And I had a notion that the rules of society should be applied fairly to all. With the discovery of a sexual morality especially for girls, equality suddenly seemed to have been an idea meant to go the way of Santa Claus. My shock and anger would have been difficult to overstate.

She’s right. But the main disappointment of Bare is that it doesn’t go deeper into why these social forces exist, especially in the discrepancy between what parents want for their offspring and what offspring want for themselves. Girls bear the greater cost of pregnancy, and society believes that they are at greater risk of sexual predators, so parents take much greater efforts to restrict that sexuality (for more on this, see, for example, “The Daughter-Guarding Hypothesis“). If you want to deal with double standards, attack parents first, since a lot of the double standards are parentally inflicted. When parents say, “You can’t go out looking like that,” they usually mean, “you’re sending signals about sexual availability and interest that I disapprove of.” Almost no parents say the second one, however. If you could get them to, you might at least move toward greater honesty. Good luck using this vector, however.

And girls will sometimes impose double standards on themselves. Here’s another example of a spot where Eaves notes this but doesn’t go deeper:

Fraternities permitted the consumption of alcohol, whereas sororities did not. Guys could have girls over to fraternity houses any time of the day or night, but girls could have guys over only under heavy restrictions. In my sorority we could invite boys to our rooms only on Tuesday evenings from seven to ten, and most girls had three or four roommates. The upshot was that boys never made the walk of shame. The rules of the Greek system upheld an intricate web of double standards. Sororities had to have a resident ‘house mother,’ a supervising adult; the fraternities had no equivalent. When I asked other sorority girls about this rule, they told me that a house mother was required to get around an old law that classified a group of women living together as a brothel.

But sorority girls (and, perhaps, the parents who pay for their college experience) are willing to put up with “heavy restrictions”. Why doesn’t a sorority house offer a frat-style experience? If the market is there, girls will join it. That girls are willing to accept sorority rules shows that those same girls are getting something out of them, even if they complain. Think about reveled preferences here: if what people say and what they do diverge, look at what they do first.

If girls refused to enter a system that “upheld an intricate web of double standards,” the system would change. Yet they don’t. Note that I’m not advocating for double standards or saying they should exist: I believe the opposite. But Eaves should look harder for what powers and purposes these guys of social rules serve, who is enforcing them, and why, in the face of logic and the rhetoric of freedom, they persist. As I said previously, I think you can trace a lot of double-standard behavior to parents, and until you deal with that issue, you basically haven’t dealt with anything substantive. You’re making the same arguments women have been making since at least the 1960s and probably earlier. Also, I’m not convinced other sorority girls are a sound source of legal advice, or that such rules about multiple females living together would pass contemporary constitutional muster, especially if a lawsuit regarding them found its way in front of a female judge.

Plus, I can imagine what would happen to a fraternity that forbade its members from having women in their rooms: the fraternity would quickly have no members, since so much of its real purpose is ensuring sex to its members. That women don’t respond similarly en-masse to sorority rules shows that sorority girls are getting something; I could make up stories as to what (many are probably uncomfortable with having strange or partially clothed men wandering their halls), and so could you, but the important thing is starting the analysis.

This leads toward questions of how one can change larger cultures. Eaves does engage those; she starts with whether she’ll speak to others about her profession. She mostly doesn’t:

I was nowhere near as open as Zoe, a dancer with whom I became friends. She believed firmly in telling everyone. Her parents knew, as did her sister, boyfriend, and most anyone she met. I told her once that I didn’t tell certain people because I didn’t want to deal with their judgments and preconceptions. ‘That’s why you have to tell them!’ she said. ‘How are those stereotypes going to change if people like you and me don’t talk about what we do?’ She had an energy for changing minds that I lacked.

Zoe is right: maybe if people were more open about what they actually did, the many stigmas around sexuality would fade over time: but by hiding what one actually does, one allows assumptions to go unchallenged and to calcify into convention. By not speaking of then, Eaves lets the double standard get infinitesimally stronger, and by speaking of it in her writing, she at least makes it slightly weaker. You can’t complain about the double standards and simultaneously lack the “energy for changing minds” someone else has. And it makes sense that Zoe told “most anyone she met.” In high school, the essential question is, “What kind of music do you like?”, in college it’s, “What’s your major?” and once you leave the educational system it’s, “What do you do?” I don’t hide my professions. To do so would seem to hide an essential part of myself.

Still, the mere fact of being a stripper causes some change in the person. Here’s Eaves discussing some:

Stripping put me in a new world with new conventions. Having ditched the moral framework of the outside world, I was now ethically adrift where nudity and sexuality were concerned. I actually felt as if I had divorced myself from the moral norm years previously, simply by growing up and becoming sexual. But when I entered pink-and-red stripperland, my departure became official. Having given up the old norms I needed new ones, and where none were provided, I had to make my own.

Good. That comes from page 88. Two hundred pages later, from 291 – 292, we’re still there:

The sexual morality I grew up with was rife with inconsistencies. It had words to insult promiscuous women but not men, it ticketed strippers but not their customers. It imposed on women, far more than men, an intricate code of modesty that came down to a few inches of fabric, and then read a woman’s clothing or lack thereof as an indication of character. I didn’t want the morality that said I must cover my body, and that if I didn’t I was responsible for whatever came my way. I didn’t want the morality that said I should be coy and shameful about sex.

Again: there’s lots of “what” but very little “why,” which is disappointing. Why do strippers accept a sexual morality that “tickets” them (note the nice word, implying just the right amount of censure). If Eaves doesn’t want the morality—and I can’t blame her—she should be looking for more about why the morality exists. She also understands her power—”Being young, female, and attractive was one long bout of intoxication, with all the dizzy pleasure and vulnerability the word implies. In the careening, can’t-get-off, sex-saturated roller coaster from puberty to adulthood, I discovered I could hold sway over boys and men”—but not why people might use different means of finding what they want. She doesn’t like placing lonely hearts ads:

A column inch of newspaper, struck me as a sterile way to find someone compatible, whether for life or just an affair. I didn’t think of myself as romantic, but when it came to meeting men, I was attached to ideas of chemistry and coincidence. I was convinced that sex and love would follow naturally from other things I did—work, hobbies, or friends. By definition they would be unplanned and messy, but all the more exciting for it. I couldn’t understand why I would want to engineer an affair as though I were buying or selling a used bed.

Spoken truly like someone who’s attractive enough to have plenty of offers to accept or reject. The rest of us need to gin up more offers and do what it takes to do so. It’s easy to be “attached to ideas of chemistry and coincidence” when you’re young and attractive. Lots of men will offer their services, so to speak, and she gets to pick from them. For others—who are either bored with the standard offers or looking for something better—she doesn’t speak or acknowledge why they might do what they do. I know very attractive women who’ve signed up for online dating because they’re tired of the men they meet in their everyday lives. Eaves seems unusually lucky with “work, hobbies, or friends.”

Bear in mind, too, that Bare has over-readings and inconsistencies of its own, as in this description of one of Eaves’s boyfriends who has admitted to hiring a prostitute:

For men to pay for sex as a matter of course seemed to show a profound insecurity or worry about women—that women wouldn’t want to sleep with him without payment, or that when they did they wouldn’t be kind and acquiescent enough, or that a man’s and a woman’s sexual wishes simply couldn’t coincide. I also thought paying for sex indicated a subtle sense of guilt—if a man was uncomfortable facing the women he had sex with, he could pay for the promise that he wouldn’t have to.

Alternately, it’s possible that men paying for sex doesn’t mean anything, and that women who dance for sex doesn’t mean anything more or less than any other profession. She doesn’t consider that the men might just want to get laid. Not everything has to mean something. That would make for a much shorter book, of course, since books about sexuality thrive on analysis even when that analysis might not be warranted. And, sometimes, “a man’s and a woman’s sexual wishes simply [don’t] coincide”: how many women want a tall, handsome, wealthy alpha male with an impressive job who could get any woman he wants but chooses her? How many men want a perky young pneumatic blond with who is, as Ludacris once put it, “a lady in the street but a freak in the bed,” and who also thinks he’s witty and looks up to him and doesn’t make the very reasonable demands women in the real world tend to want?

Maybe Eaves isn’t really unhappy about a subtle sense of guilt: maybe she’s actually unhappy that sex-for-money subverts her own sexual power by making it easier for men to obtain a lot of what they want quickly. She has her own sexual morality that might not be much better than the one she derides. She can’t or doesn’t want to imagine why people would use dating services, and the same is true of prostitution. By writing what she wrote, Eaves has helped ensure that more men will lie about the hookers they’ve hired, since they know they’ll be judged by women like Eaves.

Consider this, on the same subject:

What angered me, specifically, was his easy acceptance of a buyer-seller relationship between men and women. In some ways I came to regard Paul as I would a customer: someone cynical, who didn’t place a high value on sexual honesty, who was easily manipulated by female facades. I could never bring myself to trust him completely. And though I wasn’t fully conscious of it, on some level I decided that he wasn’t due the respect I would have accorded a different kind of man. For me, Paul symbolized men who preferred buying women to knowing them.

Is a “hard” acceptance somehow better? Is nattering on about morality and improvement? And maybe Paul is just a dude, not someone who should be held as a symbol for all men. This preference Eaves expresses actually indicates she doesn’t like conflating market and gift norms, or that she doesn’t like it when a man she’s with does it but doesn’t mind when she herself does. Or this is another random boundary. I suspect it’s conflating gift and market economies; lots of people have addressed this, including Lewis Hyde in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World Geoffrey Miller in Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior. But these are issues Eaves doesn’t address: her own blindspots are there for people to see. Mine probably are too, but no one has taken the trouble to observe them.

Eaves also makes the mistake some of my freshmen do in their papers: she assumes there is some unified thing called “society” “culture,” or “the media,” which gives her and others a single message. It’s not that easy. Words we use to flatten the dialectical nature of collective individual desires, like “society” or “the media” leave so much out of them. This is one lesson of Michel Foucault, however problematic some of his other comments might be. Eaves, for example, listens to this idea:

There was very little stigma attached to being a passive sex object. Images of the legs, breasts, and lips of strangers suffused my life thoroughly, from billboards to magazines to television. Far from shaming the bodies’ owners, society made them starlets, supermodels, and video queens, glorifying them with money and fame. Yet to actively pursue sex-object status—to say, ‘Okay, I agree, please look at me’—in this I felt as if there was reproach. The difference between a stripper and a woman modeling bathing suits was that the stripper acknowledged her intention to arouse, whereas the model could pretend ignorance.

Do most people make the “passive sex object” and active pursuit of “sex-object status?” Maybe they do, but it seems like an unlikely distinction to me. Plus, as I said in the paragraph above there is no “society” inflicting a sole message on you. There are only individuals who respond. It sounds like Eaves is wrestling with her own feelings and her own internalized demons and then re-projecting those on a nebulous “society” at large. The experiences of someone growing up in a small town with a highly religious family probably experiences a much different “society” than Kate Winslet’s children, since the actress “talks to her kids about same-sex feelings — reminding even liberal parents to go beyond pink and blue.”

Those two are extremes. Eaves probably grew up somewhere in the middle; she says this about when she starts having sex as a teenager:

Sex also mitigated an asphyxiating boredom. I lived on a dead-end street on a hillside, where every house sat in the middle of its own private patch of green, with views of the water and the mountains. The street was surrounded for miles by detached houses and an occasional park or school. It took about an hour on city buses to get downtown, and I had no car. [. . .] It was beautiful, peaceful, and the urban equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. [. . .] Boys, though, were a world to be discovered. While I waited for my life to begin, I had sex.

Suburbs are boring. That’s why parents move there: to protect their children from perceived dangers. But they don’t realize that, to a 15-year-old, the boringness of suburbia makes life itself look boring and pointless. No wonder so many yearn for college. Paul Graham gets this too:

If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world.

Notice how Graham goes a little further than Eaves, to the “why:” “Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.” Eaves’s parents, whatever they did right or wrong, presumably thought they were doing the right thing. She was also doing the right thing, since sex does quite effectively mitigate (some might even say “relieve”) “asphyxiating boredom.” But she’s old enough to be able to empathize with her parents—to ask, “Why did they do what they do?” She’s smart enough to empathize with men like the hooker-hiring boyfriend. Unlike, say, Norah Vincent in Self-Made Man, however, she doesn’t. It’s too bad, because the stretch is so easily within her reach.

Bare has its problems, and it has too many weak sentences like this one: “He was tall and angular, with chiseled features, pale skin, and black hair and eyes.” It’s too much description and too little analysis. But it’s fun, and it offers access to a world not easily entered by outsiders. At the very least Eaves starts the conversation, and she does so in a way better than how many others would try to finish it.

Lovers, writers, and scheduling

August 28, 2011 By in Culture, status, Writing Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

A friend who I’ll call “Heather” was describing a common problem among artistic types in their teens and 20s: she wants time to write, but she also wants time for sex, and sometimes the time that might be spent on the former gets slotted into the aftermath of the latter.

“Gets slotted into the aftermath of the latter” is a strange phrase I should explain further: Heather said that she’d invite a guy over after she gets home from work and they’d make dinner, and hang out, and watch a movie, and chat, and get down to it; all these activities necessarily took all night, while I got the impression she was most interested in one of them. Heather also said she’d feel bad about giving a guy the boot on a Saturday morning after he’d stayed over on a Friday, instead of spending most of the day with him. But she also wants to be a writer—would-be writers tend to clump—and she said she’d also feel bad if an entire week had gone by without her managing to accomplish anything because she’s busy running from work to guy to sleep back to work, leaving no time for any substantial projects of her own.

The solution seemed obvious to me, but I have a fair amount of experience in this department, and, as with many matters romantic, the honest and simple solution is often best. Instead of inviting someone over as soon as you get home from work, say, “I’ve got an hour between eight and nine. Bring a bottle of wine.” Or, if you’re more direct, just say, “I’ve got an hour between eight and nine. Come over.” As New York Magazine’s sex diaries series makes clear, this is not unusual or unreasonable behavior. On a weekend, you do your morning thing—like E does in that one episode of Entourage*—and say something like, “I’m going to start writing. You need anything?” If the answer is no, start writing. If the answer is yes, and if it’s concrete, do something about it. Ignore the pouting that may result (more on that below).

Heather and I chatted some more and it came out that the problem is not really the simple stuff—it’s what Heather worried that her actions said about her and/or the guy she’s dating. To me, saying, “Hey, I’m going to start writing this morning” doesn’t say anything other than, “I want to get some writing done.” To her, however, it says a host of other things bound up with femininity: that she can’t be a person who might be perceived as an “easy lay,” whatever that means; that she has to want to develop a deep relationship quickly; that a “deep relationship” means spending nearly every waking moment outside of work with someone; that two people can’t see each other for an hour and still care about each other. She kept saying things like, “I can’t do this to someone!”, until I said, “Your language is all wrong. You’re not doing to someone. And the guy might be happier anyway.”

It turns out she’s internalized social norms into some voice in her head. We talked about that some, and she said—by this point I realized there was a solid blog post in our conversation—”I know what I want. I want it now. Then I’ll create a block: ‘No, you can’t.’ ” The answer, of course, is that she can. And it’s not even really Heather doing it to Heather: it’s what she imagines other saying about her: “You know what gets me into trouble? Other girls. We are a factory of bullshit.” My observation: she just needs to stop caring what she imagines other girls think and how some vast cultural narrative of how relationships works. Because real relationships seldom fully work like they’re supposed to (which is why Dan Savage coined the term “monogamish,” which I just taught Textmate how to spell). Heather said that she feels like if a relationship or hookup isn’t serious, if a girl isn’t being treated in a certain way (whatever “a certain way” means)—it’s automatically bad. But why? There isn’t a great answer.

Philosophy is good at digging underneath assumptions, and so are teachers; while we were talking, I was basically digging at assumptions. After Heather figured out what was going on, she wanted to know: “How do I avoid this shit?” I didn’t have a perfect answer, because it would be something like, “Internalize some of the feminist arguments about cultural conditioning,” which isn’t an easy or short-term process. A more practical, immediate approach is to be conscious of it. Tell yourself: you can make boundaries. The whole argument about, “Am I getting taken advantage of?” go away. Heather feared what others would think of her. That’s a status question, and once you become cognizant of the status games people play you can, I hope, become like Neo when sees through the Matrix and learns to manipulate the fabric of perceived reality itself. You can’t be taken advantage of if you’re getting what you want and giving someone else what they want.

Besides, I told Heather something important: “You are not like other girls: you want to be an artist.” Other girls can be perfectly happy wasting an infinite amount of time sitting in their boyfriends’ or fuck buddies’ apartments (which I know, having been on the receiving end of the sitting treatment before I knew better) not doing anything. If you want to be an artist, you can’t do that, or you can’t do it all the time.

Note that this isn’t an argument for not spending time with another person, or for avoiding intimacy, or for any number of misreadings I can already imagine. It’s an argument for recognizing priorities and for realizing that work, sex/love, sleep, and being an artist can coexist, if you want them to. The trick, of course, is sticking to your offers. When nine rolls around, say, “I’ve got to go to work in the morning.” If the guy (or girl) doesn’t take the hint, say, “I’ve got to got to work in the morning—you should take off.” Very few people will refuse, for obvious reasons, especially if you remain firm.

Heather observed that she was worried she’d get attached to a guy who wasn’t attached to her. It’s not an illegitimate fear, but my response to it was simple: so what? The sex in the meantime is probably better than none. Being the kind of person she is, Heather observed that, if she gets attached and the guy doesn’t, she still gets a net Pareto improvement, demonstrating that, as Dan Ariely and Tim Harford have shown, economics does apply to love. And she’s right. There’s been a spate of dumb movies about what happens when people in their teens or twenties who start out mostly just having sex develop feelings; No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits are the most recent I’m aware of, although there are doubtlessly others. People who’re just doing it often develop feelings. And if they don’t, that’s okay too.

Look: you don’t need to have a stopwatch next to your bed, couch, chair, or kitchen table, and no one wants to feel like they’ve been scheduled into a slot. Or they don’t want to in the heat of the moment. But it’s also reasonable, if you’re an artist or want to be an artist, to make time for your work. You can find a million posts and essays and so forth like “Find the Time or Don’t” (which is John Scalzi’s version) that all say what his title says: people who find writing (or other art) valuable will find time to do it. Those who don’t, won’t. But you shouldn’t have to compromise on your love life. And you don’t, which I pointed out to Heather. You can be reasonable about time: you don’t need to fit someone in a “slot” every day, and it’s reasonable to spend an hour hanging out when you wake up on a Saturday. If you’re a writer, you can also involve your “friend” by asking him or her to read your work, since almost everyone knows how to read even if many people are effectively aliterate. If you’re reading this, you’re highly unlikely to be aliterate, but there’s a decent chance you’ve also slept with someone who has been. While their comments might not be as helpful as an editorial assistant for a literary agent, who I’ve been told are good to sleep with for multiple reasons, reading tens of thousands of words also takes at least a couple of hours, during which you, the writer, can produce some more words.

Even if you can’t get that person to read, after an hour or so you can get up, make breakfast (if you need to), and say, “I’m going to start writing. Do you need anything?” If the person says yes, and it’s a small task (“I need potato chips”), give it to them, and if they say no, start writing. If the person interrupts you with questions like, “What did you think of The Social Network?” Turn and stare at them for a good three to five seconds. Say, “I don’t know” or “I don’t care” and go back to writing. They’ll stop interrupting you. Print a copy of “A Nerd in a Cave” if the need arises. If they’re bored and don’t have anything to do, suggest they go home; meet up with them later in the evening, perhaps with new pages for them to read.

The danger is lounging in bed for two hours, then going for a leisurely brunch, then coming back to “hang out” (assuming “hang out” is not a euphemism for something more fun), then going to Bed Bath & Beyond (which is like death itself condensed into one shiny, plasticized place), then you find it’s 5:00, which means you’re going to meet some friends for a drink, or you promised your family you’d have dinner with them, or the person who you found in your bed that morning wants you to have dinner with their family, and so on. The occasional day like that is obviously okay. Having every weekend day like that while you work a weekday job means that you’re not going to get any real writing done, and any kind of writing can only be done one keystroke, one word at a time. So if you don’t guard your time to some extent, you’re going to let it through your hands until you wake up and realize that you haven’t accomplished whatever you wanted to accomplish, and the fault is your own.

The other extreme—simply saying, “no sex while I do this”—sounds even more unpalatable than having someone slurp your entire weekend into nothingness, and I suggested to Heather that one can have both. If, of course, you’re willing to set boundaries. In her case, that meant understanding the social conditioning she’s had, which implies that a) she always has to be on the hunt for a “serious” relationship, b) that she needs to play games to gauge a guy’s commitment, c) that feelings might be hurt by her having other interests, and d) that the person you’re sleeping with has to be at the entire center of your being. None of those have to be true, but when they’ve been ingrained since, if not birth, then your advent into American culture,

None of this is especially true: feminists have been saying stuff like this for years. Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own. But the conditioning remains, and if you’re not willing to dig underneath the assumptions that are preventing you from doing what you need to do, you might also simply not have the tools to be a writer. Heather does, from what I can tell, and if she has those tools, she should also be able to apply them to the conditioning she’s undergone as a member of our society. She once said, “I can’t help it. I’m a girl. Our foreplay starts 12 hours before the actual sex.” That might be true, but she can help it, or re-channel her energy, or take other steps to make sure she’s not wholly bound by other people’s desires. I’m merely pointing out to her that it’s possible for her to do so.

If it’s possible for her to do so, it should be possible for you to too.

* Found it: Season 2, Episode 2, “My Maserati Does 185.” Worth watching for, uh, educational purposes.

Sexting and society: How do writers respond?

August 26, 2011 By in Books, Culture, Essays, ideas, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 7 Comments

In a post on the relative quality of fiction and nonfiction, I mentioned that fiction should be affected by how society and social life changes. That doesn’t mean writers should read the news de jour and immediately copy plot points, but it does mean paying attention to what’s different in contemporary attitudes and expression. I got to thinking about “sexting,” an unfortunate but useful portmanteau, because it’s an example of a widespread, relatively fast cultural change enabled by technology. (Over a somewhat longer term, “From shame to game in one hundred years: An economic model of the rise in premarital sex and its de-stigmatisation” describes “a revolution in sexual behaviour,” which may explain why a lot of contemporary students find a lot of nineteenth century literature dealing with sexual mores to be tedious.)

Laws that cover sexting haven’t really caught up with what’s happening on the ground. Penelope Trunk wrote a an article called The Joys of Adult Sexting, in which she does it and thinks:

And what will his friends think of me? Probably nothing. Because they have women sending nude photos of themselves. It’s not that big a deal. You know how I know? Because the state of Vermont, (and other states as well) is trying to pass a law that decriminalizes sending nude photos of oneself if you are underage. That’s right: For years, even though kids were sending nude photos of themselves to someone they wanted to show it to, the act was illegal—an act of trafficking in child pornography.

But sending nude photos is so common today that lawmakers are forced to treat it as a mainstream courting ritual and legalize it for all ages.

Sending a naked photo of yourself is an emotionally intimate act because of the implied trust you have in the recipient. When you act in a trusting way—like trusting the recipient of the photo to handle it with care and respect—you benefit because being a generally trusting person is an emotionally sound thing to do; people who are trusting are better judges of character.

Trunk’s last paragraph explains why, despite all the PSAs and education and whatever in the world, people are going to keep doing it: because it shows trust, and we want significant others to prove their trust and we want to show significant others we trust them. You can already imagine the dialogue in a novel: “Why won’t you send me one? Don’t you trust me?” If the answer is yes, send them; if the answer is no, then why bother continuing to date? The test isn’t fair, of course, but since when are any tests in love and lust fair?

Over time, as enough kids of legislators and so forth get caught up in sexting scandals and as people who’ve lived with cell phone cameras grow up, I think we’ll see larger change. For now, the gap between laws / customs and reality make a fruitful space for novels, even those that don’t exploit present circumstances well, like Helen Shulman’s This Beautiful Life. Incorporating these kinds of social changes in literature is a challenge and will probably remain so; as I said above, that doesn’t mean novelists should automatically say, “Ah ha! Here’s today’s headlines; I’m going to write a novel based on the latest sex scandal/shark attack/celebrity bullshit,” but novelists need to be aware of what’s going on. I wrote a novel called Asking Alice that got lots of bites from agents but no representation, and the query letter started like this:

Maybe marriage would be like a tumor: something that grows on you with time. At least that’s what Steven Deutsch thinks as he fingers the ring in his pocket, trying to decide whether he should ask Alice Sherman to marry him. Steven is almost thirty, going on twenty, and the future still feels like something that happens to other people. Still, he knows Alice won’t simply agree to be his long-term girlfriend forever.

When Steven flies to Seattle for what should be a routine medical follow up, he brings Alice and hits on a plan: he’ll introduce her to his friends from home and poll them about whether, based on their immediate judgment, he should ask Alice. But the plan goes awry when old lovers resurface, along with the cancer Steven thought he’d beaten, and the simple scheme he hoped would solve his problem does everything but.

Asking Alice is asking questions about changes in dating and marriage; if you write a novel today about the agonies of deciding who to marry with the metaphysical angst such a choice engendered in the nineteenth century, most people would find that absurd and untrue: if you get married to a Casaubon, you divorce him and end up in about the same circumstance as you were six months before you started. But a lot of people still get married or want to get married, and the question is still important even if it can’t drive the plot of a novel very well. It can, however, provide a lot of humor, and that’s what Asking Alice does.

A lot of literature, like a lot of laws, is also based on the premise that women don’t like sex as much as men, don’t or won’t seek it out, and are automatically harmed by it or wanting it. This is a much more tenuous assertion than it used to be, especially as women write directly about sex. A novel liked Anita Shreve’s Testimony, discussed extensively by Caitlin Flanagan here and by me here, engages that idea and finds it somewhat wanting. So does the work of Belle de Jour (now revealed as Dr. Brooke Magnanti), who basically says, “I worked as a hooker for a long time, didn’t mind it, and made a shit ton of money because I made a rational economic decision.” A lot of academic fiction premised on professors having sex with students examines the idea that female students can want/use sex just as much as men; this is how Francine Prose’s Blue Angel works, and Prose is a canny observer of what’s going on and how it connects to the past.

Note that women wrote all these examples, which I don’t think is an accident, since they’re probably less likely to put other women on pedestals than men are. I’ve been reading a lot of sex memoirs / novels written by women (Never the Face; Nine and a Half Weeks; two of Mary Karr’s memoirs, which are good but overrated; Abby Lee (British sex blogger); Elisabeth Eaves’ Bare) in part because I want to write better female characters. After reading a lot of this stuff, I’m even less convinced than I was that there are stereotypically “male” or “female” ways of thinking or writing about the world, but knowledge itself never hurts and I don’t regret the time spent. On a similar note, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance is totally fascinating, even when Radway tries to explain away retrograde features of romances or how women are often attracted to high-powered, high-status men.

She write in a time before sexting, but I wonder if she’s thought about doing a Young Adult version using similar methodology today. For writers and others, sexting shows that teenagers can make their own decisions as people too, even if those are arguably bad decisions. To me, this is another generational gap issue, and one that will probably close naturally over time. One older agent said on the phone that maybe I needed a younger agent, because her assistant loved Asking Alice but she didn’t want to rep it.

Damn.

I’m old enough to have lived through a couple medium-scale social changes: when I was in high school, people still mostly talked to each other on the phone. In college, people called using cell phones and often communicated via IM. After college, I kept using phones primarily for voice, especially to arrange drinks / quasi-dates, until I realized that most girls have no ability to talk on the phone anymore (as also described Philip Zimbardo and the ever-changing dynamics of sexual politics). As I result, I’d now use text messages if I were arranging drinks and so forth. Around the time I was 23, I realized that even if I did call, women would text back. That doesn’t mean one should race out and change every phone conversation in a novel that features a contemporary 19-year-old to a text conversation (which would be tedious in and of itself; in fiction I write, I tend not to quote texts very often), but it’s the kind of change that I register. Things changed between the time I was 16 and 23.

I’m in the McLuhan, “the medium changes what can be said,” which means that the text is probably changing things in ways not immediately obvious or evident. Sexting is one such way; it lowers the cost of transmission of nude pictures to the extent that you can now do so almost instantly. Laws are predicated on the idea that balding, cigar-chomping, lecherous 40-year-old men will try and coerce 16-year-old girls outside cheer practice, not ubiquitous cell phone cameras. Most parents will instinctively hate the cigar-chomping 40-year-old. They will not hate their own 14-year-old. So you get for all sorts of amusement where laws, putative morals, conventional wisdom, technology, and desire meet. Still, when pragmatics meet parents, expect parental anger / protectiveness to win for the moment but not for all time. Nineteenth and twentieth century American culture is not the only kind out there. As Melvin Konner wrote in The Evolution of Childhood:

Contrary to some claims of cultural historians, anthropologists find that liberal premarital sex mores are not new for a large proportion of the cultures of the ethnological record and that liberal sexual mores and even active sexual lives among adolescents do not necessarily produce pregnancies. In fact, a great many cultures permit or at least tolerate sex play in childhood (Frayser 1994). Children in these cultures do not play ‘doctor’ to satisfy their anatomical curiosity—they play ‘sex.’ They do play ‘house’ as Western children do, but the game often includes pretend-sex, including simulated intercourse. Most children in non-industrial cultures have opportunities to see and hear adult sex, and they mimic and often mock it.

Perhaps our modern aversion to sex among adolescents is in part because of the likelihood of pregnancy, economic factors, and others. Given the slow but real outcry from places like the Economist and elsewhere, this might eventually change. That’s pretty optimistic, however. A lot of social and legal structures merely work “good enough,” and the justice system is certainly one of those: we’ve all heard by now about cases where DNA evidence resulted in exoneration of people accused of murder or rape. So maybe we’re now heading towards a world in which laws about sexting are unfair, especially given current practice, but the laws remain anyway because the law doesn’t have to be optimal: it has to be good enough, and most people over 18 probably don’t care much about it unless it happens to be their son or daughter who gets enmeshed in a legal nightmare for behavior that doesn’t result in tangible harm.

Something like a quarter to a third of American adults have smoked pot, but we still have anti-pot laws. America can easily afford moral hypocrisy, at least for now, and maybe sexting will be something like weed: widely indulged in, a rite of passage, and something not likely to result in arrest unless you happen to be unlucky or in the wrong situation at the wrong time. The force generation the prohibition—that is, parents engaging in daughter-guarding—might be much stronger than the force of individual rights, utilitarianism, or pragmatic observations about the enforcement of laws against victimless crimes that do not result in physical harm.

There’s more of the legal challenges around this in Ars Technica’s article “14-year old child pornographers? Sexting lawsuits get serious,” which should replace “serious” with “ridiculous.” In the case, a 14-year-old girl sent a 14-year-old boy a video of herself masturbating, and then her family sued his. But how does a 14-year-old be guilty of the sexual exploitation of children,” as is claimed by the girl’s family—if a 14 year old can’t consent to consent to this kind of activity, then a 14-year old also can’t have the state of mind necessary to exploit another one. Paradoxes pile up, of the sort described in Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity, where the writers show how the age of consent has been rising as the age of being tried as an adult has been falling. Somewhere inside that fact, or pair of facts, there’s a novel waiting to be written.

Questions like “What happens when people do things sexually that they’re not supposed to? How does the community respond? How do they respond?” are the stuff novelists feed on. They motivate innumerable plots, ranging from the beginnings of the English novel at Pamela and Clarissa all the way to the present. When Rose and Pinkie are first talking to each other in Brighton Rock, Rose lies about her age: ” ‘I’m seventeen,’ she said defiantly; there was a law which said a man couldn’t go with you before you were seventeen.” Brighton Rock was published in 1938. People have probably been evading age-of-consent laws for as long as there have been such laws, and they will probably continue to do so—whether those laws affect sex or depictions of the body.

Adults have probably been reinforcing prohibitions for as long as they’ve existed. Consider this quote, from the Caitlin Flanagan article about Testimony linked above:

Written by a bona fide grown-up (the author turned 63 last fall), Testimony gives us not just the lurid description of what a teen sex party looks like, but also an exploration of the ways that extremely casual sex can shape and even define an adolescent’s emotional life. One-night stands may be perfectly enjoyable exercises for two consenting adults, but teenagers aren’t adults; in many respects, they are closer to their childhoods than to the adult lives they will eventually lead. Their understanding of affection and friendship, and most of all their innocent belief, so carefully nurtured by parents and teachers, that the world rewards kindness and fairness, that there is always someone in authority to appeal to if you are being treated cruelly or not included in something—all of these forces are very much at play in their minds as they begin their sexual lives.

In Testimony, the sex party occurs at the fictional Avery Academy; Shreve imagines Siena, the girl at the center of the event, as a grifter, eager to exploit her new status as victim so that she can write a killer college essay about it, or perhaps even appear on Oprah. For the most part, the boys are callous and self-serving.

Flanagan has no evidence whatsoever that “teenagers aren’t adults” other than bald assertion. That “they are closer to their childhoods than to the adult lives they will eventually lead” has more to do with culture than with biology, as Robert Epstein argues in The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen and Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry argue in Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry, and even then, it depends on when a particular person hits puberty, how they react, and how old they are; nineteen-year olds are probably closer to their adults selves than thirteen-year olds. Saying that teenagers believe, according to an ethos created by teachers, that “the world rewards kindness and fairness,” indicates that Flanagan must have had a very different school experience than I did or a lot of other people did (for more, see “Why Nerds are Unpopular.”) As I recall, school was capricious, arbitrary, and often stupid; the real world rewards fulfilling the desires of others, whether artistically, financially, sexually, or otherwise, while the school world rewards jumping through hopes and mindless conformity. If I don’t like the college I go to, I can transfer; if I don’t like my job, I can quit; if I don’t like some other milieu, I leave it. In contrast, school clumps everyone together based on an accident of geography.

In Testimony, Shreve misses or chooses not to emphasize that Sienna enjoys the attention, and she’s not actually got much beyond that. She says that “I”m going to start a new life. I can be, like, Sienna. I can whoever I want” {Shreve “Testimony”@27}. In Rob’s voice, Sienna is described this way:

I remember that Sienna started moving to the beat, a beer in her hand, as if she were in a world of her own, just slowly turning this way and that, and moving her hips to the music, and little by little the raucous laughter started to die down, and we were all just watching her. She was the music, she was the beat. Her whole little body had become this pure animal thing. She might have been dancing alone in her room. She didn’t look at any of us, even as she seemed to be looking at all of us. There was no smile on her face. If it was a performance, it was an incredible one. I don’t think anyone in the room had ever seen anything like it. She was in this light-blue halter top with these tight jeans. The heels and her little jacket were gone already. You just knew. Looking at her, you just knew.

She took off her own clothes, and “We watched as she untied her halter top at the neck. The blue cloth fell to reveal her breasts. They were beautiful and firm and rounded like her face. You knew at that moment you were in for good [. . .]” Later, he says “It was group seduction of the most powerful kind.” Given how Mike, the headmaster, describes the video in the first section, it’s hard to see Sienna as lacking agency, or someone who’s coerced into her actions. That, in the end, is what I think makes the Caitlin Flanagans of the world so unhappy: if the Siennas will perform their dances and give it up freely and happily, does that mean other girls will have to chase the market leader? Will they have to acknowledge that a reasonably large minority of girls like the action, like the hooking up, like the exploring? If so, a lot of Western narratives about femininity go away, if they haven’t already. If you’re a novelist, you have to look at the diversity of people out there and the diversity of their desires. Shreve does this quite well. So does Francine Prose in Blue Angel. If you’re writing essays / polemics, though, you can questionable claim that teenagers are closer to their childhood selves all you want.

I like Flanagan’s writing because she’s good at interrogating what’s going on out there, but I’m not the first to notice her problems with politics; William Deresiewicz is more concise than I am when he writes Two Girls, True and False, but the point is similar. Flanagan wants to imply that all people, or all girls, are the same. They aren’t. The ones unhappy with the hookup culture are certainly out there, and they might be the majority. But the Siennas are too. To deny them agency because they’re 14 is foolish. Matthew, J. Dot’s father, says that “The irony was that if a few kids had done something similar at the college, they’d be calling it an art film.” He’s right. Things don’t magically change at 18. Our culture and legal system are designed around the fiction that everything changes at 18, when it actually does much earlier. The gap between puberty and 18, however, is a fertile ground for novelists looking for cultural contradictions.

Looking them in the eye and Peter Shankman's story

August 18, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

There’s a back-and-forth going on at Hacker News over Peter Shankman’s post, “The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told, Starring Morton’s Steakhouse.” First, read Shankman’s post, because what Morton’s did is, in fact, amazing, and I say this in an age where most of what people call “amazing” is, in fact, not. And I don’t want to spoil the surprise, beyond noting that he sent this Tweet as a joke: “Hey @Mortons – can you meet me at newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours? K, thanks. :)”

The top Hacker News commenter said, “With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene.” Someone else disagreed: “The difference of quality between meeting face to face and through a webcam is so high that it’s sometimes worth taking a plane just for one lunch.”

The second person is right: sometimes the quality of a face-to-face meeting is worth a plane trip. As Paul Graham said in “Cities and Ambition:” “The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.” You don’t reproduce the same effect meeting someone in person when you “meet” them online. This doesn’t just apply to romantic partners, either, although that’s an obvious example of the effect described: how many people want to see their lovers solely on the Internet?

The high-bandwidth physical world argues for meetings, and I suspect Shankman wasn’t just going to New Jersey for the meeting—he was going to communicate how important the meeting was. You don’t just spend hours on a plane for something frivolous; he was sending a signal and reaping face-to-face rewards. If someone flew to Tucson solely to meet with me, I’d be impressed. Very few people fly on a whim.

A brief story, although it‘s not on the same scale as Shankman’s: I’m a grad student in English Lit at the University of Arizona, which means I teach freshman composition. Students e-mail me all the time. Constantly. Unless there’s some compelling reason to reply, I usually answer their emails in class; if they want or need a longish explanation, I tell them to come to office hours (note: if they can’t make office hours, I also do office hours by appointment, so I’m not doing this to stiff them).

This strategy has a three-fold benefit: it cuts down on the amount of e-mail I receive over the course of the semester because students realize I won’t answer frivolous e-mails twelve hours after they’re sent. If I have follow-up questions, or the student does, those questions are easier to ask face-to-face. Misunderstandings caused by not not being face-to-face are evaded; it’s hard to ascertain context from e-mail. I think everyone has had misunderstandings and hurt feelings caused by dashed off e-mails that aren’t carefully considered. Finally, if students want me to read their papers or other work and show up to office hours, I know they really want me to edit their work, and their desire to get feedback isn’t just a passing fancy as ephemeral as a Facebook status update. The back-and-forth that can come from reading work and immediately responding to it can’t be easily duplicated—especially among non-professionals—over e-mail or other asynchronous communications.

I meant to list three things, I really did. But the reasons kept popping into my head, and I think they’re all valid.

Taken together, these issues point to why I doubt face-to-face meetings will disappear any time soon. If anything, their value might rise as they become less common. When I can, I interview writers, and I only do such interviews face-to-face because I think they’re more valuable. I’ve signaled to the writer that their time is valuable enough for me to come to them, and the conversations that result are, on average, deeper than I think they would be otherwise. There’s something about a person sitting across from you that you don’t get over the phone or Internet.

EDIT: Regarding students and e-mail, this story by Wired’s Chris Anderson also gets it right: “Why is e-mail volume getting ever worse? I believe it’s because of a simple fact: E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems counterintuitive — after all, it’s quicker to read than to write. But reading a message is just the start. It may contain a hard-to-answer question, such as ‘What are your thoughts on this?'” The solution is to reduce e-mail wherever possible by making it equally expensive for emailers as e-mail receivers. Office hours help do this, and showing up at them signals that the student isn’t merely wasting time.

This principle affects other scales, too. Big tech companies still have central offices, usually in very high-rent areas, where they make sure everyone in the company gets together on a regular basis. The willingness of companies to pay for offices indicates they still get a lot of utility from having large numbers of people hanging out in a concentrated area—perhaps because of knowledge-spillover effects, which is Edward Glaeser’s explanation in The Triumph of the City.

If there weren’t such spillover effects, companies would disburse to avoid paying for office space, people would move to rural areas with fast internet and low real estate costs, education wouldn’t consist of a group getting together in a classroom, and the world would look much different than it does. Even in an age of social media, a lot of people want to live in Manhattan—a city not exactly renown for its wonderful weather. Commenters have been predicting the death of distance and the death of place and so on since the dawn of the Internet, if not earlier, and so far they’ve proven wrong. As long as humans remain basically as we are today—in the absence, in other words, of some singularity-type event—I don’t think people are going to want to stop seeing each across a table, or standing next to each other in a room. Social media has not turned our world in Snow Crash, at least not yet. Shankman knows this. Digital technologies complement, rather than substitute for, real world experience. He uses Twitter and flies for face-to-face meetings. That’s the essence of one aspect of modernity: being able to handle multiple registers of communication fluently and realizing that most of them have their place for most people.

Looking them in the eye and Peter Shankman’s story

August 18, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, Teaching Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

There’s a back-and-forth going on at Hacker News over Peter Shankman’s post, “The Greatest Customer Service Story Ever Told, Starring Morton’s Steakhouse.” First, read Shankman’s post, because what Morton’s did is, in fact, amazing, and I say this in an age where most of what people call “amazing” is, in fact, not. And I don’t want to spoil the surprise, beyond noting that he sent this Tweet as a joke: “Hey @Mortons – can you meet me at newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours? K, thanks. :)”

The top Hacker News commenter said, “With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene.” Someone else disagreed: “The difference of quality between meeting face to face and through a webcam is so high that it’s sometimes worth taking a plane just for one lunch.”

The second person is right: sometimes the quality of a face-to-face meeting is worth a plane trip. As Paul Graham said in “Cities and Ambition:” “The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the ways cities send you messages are quite subtle.” You don’t reproduce the same effect meeting someone in person when you “meet” them online. This doesn’t just apply to romantic partners, either, although that’s an obvious example of the effect described: how many people want to see their lovers solely on the Internet?

The high-bandwidth physical world argues for meetings, and I suspect Shankman wasn’t just going to New Jersey for the meeting—he was going to communicate how important the meeting was. You don’t just spend hours on a plane for something frivolous; he was sending a signal and reaping face-to-face rewards. If someone flew to Tucson solely to meet with me, I’d be impressed. Very few people fly on a whim.

A brief story, although it‘s not on the same scale as Shankman’s: I’m a grad student in English Lit at the University of Arizona, which means I teach freshman composition. Students e-mail me all the time. Constantly. Unless there’s some compelling reason to reply, I usually answer their emails in class; if they want or need a longish explanation, I tell them to come to office hours (note: if they can’t make office hours, I also do office hours by appointment, so I’m not doing this to stiff them).

This strategy has a three-fold benefit: it cuts down on the amount of e-mail I receive over the course of the semester because students realize I won’t answer frivolous e-mails twelve hours after they’re sent. If I have follow-up questions, or the student does, those questions are easier to ask face-to-face. Misunderstandings caused by not not being face-to-face are evaded; it’s hard to ascertain context from e-mail. I think everyone has had misunderstandings and hurt feelings caused by dashed off e-mails that aren’t carefully considered. Finally, if students want me to read their papers or other work and show up to office hours, I know they really want me to edit their work, and their desire to get feedback isn’t just a passing fancy as ephemeral as a Facebook status update. The back-and-forth that can come from reading work and immediately responding to it can’t be easily duplicated—especially among non-professionals—over e-mail or other asynchronous communications.

I meant to list three things, I really did. But the reasons kept popping into my head, and I think they’re all valid.

Taken together, these issues point to why I doubt face-to-face meetings will disappear any time soon. If anything, their value might rise as they become less common. When I can, I interview writers, and I only do such interviews face-to-face because I think they’re more valuable. I’ve signaled to the writer that their time is valuable enough for me to come to them, and the conversations that result are, on average, deeper than I think they would be otherwise. There’s something about a person sitting across from you that you don’t get over the phone or Internet.

EDIT: Regarding students and e-mail, this story by Wired’s Chris Anderson also gets it right: “Why is e-mail volume getting ever worse? I believe it’s because of a simple fact: E-mail is easier to create than to respond to. This seems counterintuitive — after all, it’s quicker to read than to write. But reading a message is just the start. It may contain a hard-to-answer question, such as ‘What are your thoughts on this?'” The solution is to reduce e-mail wherever possible by making it equally expensive for emailers as e-mail receivers. Office hours help do this, and showing up at them signals that the student isn’t merely wasting time.

This principle affects other scales, too. Big tech companies still have central offices, usually in very high-rent areas, where they make sure everyone in the company gets together on a regular basis. The willingness of companies to pay for offices indicates they still get a lot of utility from having large numbers of people hanging out in a concentrated area—perhaps because of knowledge-spillover effects, which is Edward Glaeser’s explanation in The Triumph of the City.

If there weren’t such spillover effects, companies would disburse to avoid paying for office space, people would move to rural areas with fast internet and low real estate costs, education wouldn’t consist of a group getting together in a classroom, and the world would look much different than it does. Even in an age of social media, a lot of people want to live in Manhattan—a city not exactly renown for its wonderful weather. Commenters have been predicting the death of distance and the death of place and so on since the dawn of the Internet, if not earlier, and so far they’ve proven wrong. As long as humans remain basically as we are today—in the absence, in other words, of some singularity-type event—I don’t think people are going to want to stop seeing each across a table, or standing next to each other in a room. Social media has not turned our world in Snow Crash, at least not yet. Shankman knows this. Digital technologies complement, rather than substitute for, real world experience. He uses Twitter and flies for face-to-face meetings. That’s the essence of one aspect of modernity: being able to handle multiple registers of communication fluently and realizing that most of them have their place for most people.

Philip Zimbardo and the ever-changing dynamics of sexual politics

August 16, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

A friend sent me a link to Philip Zimbardo’s talk, “The demise of guys?“, which recapitulates and shortens Hanna Rosen’s long Atlantic article, “The End of Men.” Based on the video and reading lots of material on similar subjects recently (like: Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?, although I do not find all of it compelling), I replied to my (female) friend:

1) There is still a very strong preference for males in much of the developing world, including India and China.

2) Barring unpredictable improvements in reproductive technology that bring us closer to Brave New World, I do not see substantial numbers of women wanting to live without men. There are some, have always been some, and will always be some, but they’re in the minority and probably will be for a long time.

3) I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s actually happening is that we’re seeing an increasing bifurcation in male behavior, as we’re seeing in many aspects of society, where the winners win more and the losers lose more than they once did. I suspect you can see more guys getting a larger number of women—a la Strauss in The Game, guys in frats, and guys who want to play the field in major cities—but also more guys who substitute video games and porn for real women, or who are incarcerated, or otherwise unable to enter / compete in mating markets. This makes women unhappy because they have to compete for a smaller number of “eligible” guys, the word “eligible” being one women love to use without wanting to define it. Women on average aren’t punishing men as much as one might expect for playing the field—see, e.g., this Slate article. Notice how Baumeister is cited there too.

4) Guys are more likely to drop out of high school, but they’re also more likely to be in the top 1% of the income distribution. They’re overrepresented in software, engineering, novel writing, and lots of other high-octane fields. They’re also overrepresented in prisons, special ed classes, and so forth. If you concentrate on the far reaches of either end of the bell curve, you’ll find guys disproportionately represented. Feminists like to focus on the right side, Zimbardo is focusing on the left. Both might be right, and we’re just seeing or noticing more extreme variation than we used to.

5) I’m not convinced the conclusions drawn by Zimbardo follow from the research, although it’s hard to tell without citations.

6) If guys are playing 10,000 hours of video games before age 21, no wonder they’re not great at attracting women and women are on average less attracted to them. This may reinforce the dynamic in number 3, in which those guys who are “eligible” can more easily find available women.

7) Most women under the age of 30 will not answer phone calls any more and will only communicate with men via text. If I were on the market, I would find this profoundly annoying, but it’s true. Many women, at least in college, make themselves chiefly available for sex after drinking heavily at parties; this contributes to perceived problems noted by Zimbardo, instead of alleviating them. If women will mostly sleep with guys after drinking and at parties, that’s what guys will do, and guys who follow alternate strategies will not succeed as well. Despite this behavior, many women also say they want more than just a “hookup,” but their stated and revealed preferences diverge (in many instances, but not all). In other words, I’m not sure males are uniquely more anti-social, at least from my perspective. When stated and revealed preferences diverge, I tend to accept evidence of revealed preferences.

EDIT: At the gym, I was telling a friend about this post, and our conversation reminded me of a student who was a sorority girl. The student and I were talking and she mentioned how her sorority was holding an early morning event with a frat, but a lot of the girls didn’t want to go if there wasn’t going to be alcohol because they didn’t know how to talk to boys without it. Point is, atrophied social skills are not limited to one sex.

8) For more on number 7, see Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus; I read the interviews and thought, “A lot of these people, especially the women, must experience extreme cognitive dissonance.” But people on average do not appear to care much about consistency and hypocrisy, at least in themselves.

9) In “Marry Him!“, Lori Gottlieb argues that women are too picky about long-term partners and can drive themselves out of the reproductive market altogether by waiting too long. This conflicts somewhat with Zimbardo’s claims; maybe we’re all too picky and not picky enough at the same time? She’s also mostly addressing women in their 30s and 40s, while Zimbardo appears to be dealing with people in their teens and 20s.

10) If Zimbardo wrote an entire book the subject, I would read it, although very skeptically.