Category Archives: sex

Why fiction? Why reading?

March 3, 2014 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Nonfiction, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

When we pick up a decent book, we live not once but twice, and each new book allows us to live again and absorb the thoughts of someone who has absorbed thousands of other people’s thoughts. The book is the most powerful medium yet invented for intellectual stimulation, growth, and change. The bounty is endless and in the contemporary world very cheap. Most, though, reject the gift. Is this not strange?

Pretty much everyone who is deeply interested in reading gets and/or writing gets some version of the utility question that I answered in the first paragraph (and have answered in other places). Each answer has its own idiosyncrasies, but I think they have a common core that revolves around knowledge and pleasure. The issue is on my mind because a friend wrote me to say regarding Asking Anna, “thanks for having thought through that book content and made it available for people like me to read and then not have to do some of the work. I like that.” The crazy thing is that crazy people have been doing this for centuries: packaging many thousands of hours of thinking into works that take only a few hours to read.

That’s true of fiction and nonfiction, and in some ways lately nonfiction has been leading the perceive quality race. But historically fiction has tended to advance the state of the art in prose, with novelists especially leading the charge towards renewing the language. Arguably this tendency has decreased over time, but I’ve never read a great nonfiction writer who didn’t also read fiction, or read a lot of fiction at one point.

Good novelists tend to be obsessed with the quality of their prose in a way fewer nonfiction writers are. Too many nonfiction writers focus on content at the expense of form and beauty; some have been glamored by some of the stupid literary theory that passes for erudition in some academic circles (Katharine Frank’s books, like Plays Well in Groups: A Journey Through the World of Group Sex, suffer from this, though she is merely a salient example and far from the only offender).

Fiction tends to train us to attend to language, and books like Wood’s How Fiction Works and Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer do the same. When one becomes sufficiently attuned to language, poorly written work or even work that is merely competent becomes aggravating, like a song messed by a drunk guitarist.

That’s my short utilitarian defense of fiction, but I read it for pleasure. The history of the West is one in which pleasure is suspect, especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition; sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for less-good reasons. That tradition encourages us to make sure that pleasure is always deferred, and that’s the tradition that led to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution and hence to the present day. We’re still getting somewhat used to enormous material wealth, at least by historical standards. But pleasure has its own importance, and there is pleasure in the many lives we can choose to live through books. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that so many people do not make the choice.

Every great book is the result of years or decades of studying and experience, distilled into a volume you can read in a few hours. How could you not want that?

If you want to understand frats, talk to the women who party at them (paging Caitlin Flanagan)

February 20, 2014 By in Academia, Culture, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Caitlin Flanagan’s well-researched and -argued “The Dark Power of Fraternities: A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame” does everything an article of its nature should do except for one important thing: talk to the women who go to frats.

The minute women stop going to frat parties, frats are going to either disappear or shrink to irrelevance.

I taught at the University of Arizona for four and a half years and unlike Flanagan have talked to lots of college women about frat parties, few of whom harbor illusions about frat parties or their purpose. Many sororities apparently tell women not to get drunk, since being drunk makes them easy victims, and to go in groups. Women would sometimes say—including in class—that they wouldn’t go to frat parties except in groups. Why? To protect themselves (from themselves or from the frat guys is sometimes an open question).

I’d sometimes ask why they’d go places they felt were sufficiently dangerous to require a group. Usually there wouldn’t be a real answer; it was as if I’d broached a new, un-analyzed subject for the first time. One woman did answer, however, and said simply that “It’s where the party’s at.”

(c) Stephanie GA of Flickr

(c) Stephanie GA of Flickr

Ten points for honesty, but I think that if I were a woman I wouldn’t go. Yet college girls keep going, despite apparently being aware of the dangers. Flanagan mentions “the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers” but doesn’t note that most women seem to know someone who had something unfortunate happen to them at frat houses, and yet knowledge doesn’t seem to deter many of women.

This absence a huge, obvious blank spot in her otherwise fascinating article. Women are not stupid—at least I don’t think they’re stupid—and most know what they’re doing when they get drunk and/or go to frat parties. I’ve written as much here and here (“It seems that many people go through a two-step process to get what they really want: they drink, which gives them an excuse to decry their actions while drunk at a future date while achieving their hedonic ends—which are often sexual.”)*

Men are interested in frats because they offer a way of forming a cartel that in turn attracts women. I remember talking to a student in a frat, who was giving me the usual bullshit about frats when I stopped him and said: “Let’s conduct a thought experiment: if instead of increasing the probability of a guy getting laid, joining a frat decreased the probability by 1%, do you think anyone would?” There was a long pause. He wanted to respond but he also knew that his intellectual credibility was on the line (he was a bright guy).

There’s another important flaw in Flanagan’s article: while she does cite a horrific rape of a woman identified only as “Jane Doe,” in Doe’s case justice does happen: the perpetrator is caught, arrested, and convicted. The system worked in this instance! The frat helped the cops get the guy. As such it’s a curious example in an anti-frat article.

I’ve also suggested to women in sororities that, if they don’t like frat parties, why don’t the sororities hold parties, and invite men to them? The immediate responses tend to be baffled puzzlement, and sometimes muttering about not wanting to do the work. I leave possible implications of this to the reader.

She does note one thing that deserves more frequent mention:

Furthermore, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities.

A lot of 18-year-olds like to drink and take other mind-altering substances, and, regardless of whether legislators and/or lobbyists like MADD think they have the capacity to make that decision, many do make it anyway. Perhaps we should continue to try to hector them into stopping using the legal system, but, to my mind, their making of the decision indicates that they have the capacity…to make the decision, since they are making it (I understand and am trying to emphasize the circular reasoning). One way to chip away at the appeal of frats, for both men and women, would be to legalize drinking; based on what I’ve heard a lot of frat boys and sorority girls drift away from their Greek affiliation when they turn 21. Some of that probably comes from the dawning realization that real life is en route but some probably also comes from the opening of different avenues for drinking and mating rituals.

College presidents have realized as much and launched the Amethyst Initiative, which is a plea to drag reality back into law and politics. Apart from the Amethyst Initiative, I’m struck by the level of dishonesty and pretending that attends this whole conversation. All the relevant parties know exactly what’s going on, and pretend to not know what’s going on.

Anyway, the minute the Flanagans and college presidents and parents of the world can convince women not to show up at frat parties is the minute we’ll see the end of frats. Based on America’s bipolar feelings about drinking and sexuality in general, however, I doubt we’re going to see it.

EDIT: I should add that I’m not pro-frat, as one of two people suggested; I’m also not anti-frat, although years ago I wrote this snarky letter to the editor of the New York Times (“Although the fraternity system as it exists is flawed, it does serve one important purpose: it voluntarily segregates a large number of drunken fools from the rest of the student population — some of whom may be interested in novel concepts like learning and academics”). Today I mostly think that frats serve an evident need or want, and although I myself wouldn’t want to join one—I don’t have the right personality—I see why many others do.

* A sorority girl once told me that her sorority cohort didn’t want to attend sober events with frats because the other girls didn’t know how to talk to boys, or talk to boys without the aid of booze.

The Lost Girls interview, war, and its relationship to sex

July 2, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Nonfiction, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In the Lost Girls interview I linked to recently, one thing that Alan Moore says stands out as resolutely wrong:

War, I still believe, is a complete and utter failure of the imagination. It’s when everything else has been abandoned or hasn’t worked. It’s what destroys the imagination. It set back the progress of the human imagination.

It’s true that war “set[s] back the progress of the human imagination,” but war is actually about resource control, with “resources” defined broadly. Resources may be primarily geographic (one thinks of the recent U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan) or they may be about commodities (one thinks of Japan capturing oil fields in World War II) or they may be people themselves (one thinks of innumerable pre-modern religious wars). They are also often sexual, or have a sexual tinge, which Moore and Gebbie do get right in Lost Girls and foreground, since sexual behaviors and motives tend to be glossed or ignored in most histories.

There are exceptions, however; consider, for example, this passage from Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II:

The number of sexual relationships that took place between European women and Germans during the war is quite staggering. In Norway as many as 10 per cent of women aged between fifteen and thirty had German boyfriends during the war. If the statistics on the number of children born to German soldiers are anything to go by, this was by no means unusual: the numbers of women who slept with German men across western Europe can easily be numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

Resistance movements in occupied countries came up with all kinds of excuses for the behaviour of their women and girls. They characterized women who slept with Germans as ignorant, poor, even mentally defective. They claimed that women were raped, or that they slept with Germans out of economic necessity. While this was undoubtedly the case for some, recent surveys show that women who slept with German soldiers came from all classes and all walks of life. On the whole European women slept with Germans not because they were forced to, or because their own men were absent, or because they needed money or food – but simply because they found the strong, ‘knightly’ image of German soldiers intensely attractive, especially compared to the weakened impression they had of their own menfolk. In Denmark, for example, wartime pollsters were shocked to discover that 51 per cent of Danish women openly admitted to finding German men more attractive than their own compatriots. (164–166)

That wartime behavior became a topic of community discussion and cathartic release and punishment after the war. Still, this passage and other, similar ones from Savage Continent demonstrate that a lot of men treat women like resources in the context of war. Saying that war “is a complete and utter failure of the imagination” implies a level of goodwill that often doesn’t exist. To continue with the World War II example, it’s evident that Hitler had a phenomenal imagination, to the point that most of his adversaries and victims couldn’t believe the staggering, cruel audacity of what he was attempting. In a more recent example, in the first Gulf War it was apparent that Saddam Hussein imagined himself taking over Kuwait and perhaps Saudi Arabia, although he didn’t presumably imagine that he’d provoke a world-wide counter-reaction.

Nonetheless, the rest of the Moore and Gebbie interview is excellent and unexpectedly moving, and Lost Girls itself is, from what I know, still a singular, highly unusual, and highly recommended book.

The sex plot: a discussion for novelists and readers

June 25, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, ideas, sex Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

I wrote to a friend:

I wonder about the extent to which novels in general are continuing to have trouble with sexual liberalization; so many major novels in the canon deal with that topic, but it’s much harder to use those tropes in a permissive age.

He replied: “This intrigues me, but I’m not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?”

Yes!

The novel as a genre has tended to thrive on sexual repression, and has used steadily increasing sexual liberation as fuel for plots. Leslie Fiedler wrote about this in Love and Death in the American Novel, and Tony Tanner wrote about it in Adultery and the Novel. In taking courses about the novel as a genre, I was struck by how many times I heard or read phrases like, “X pushed the limits of the sexual mores of his / her day,” where X is any number of writers ranging from Richardson to Flaubert to Dreiser to Roth and Updike. (Weirdly, however, the Marquis de Sade has always been lurking beneath the history of the novel as a genre, mostly unacknowledged and often hidden from the reading public).

But working against sexual repression as such doesn’t really work so well as a plot device anymore because the barriers are mostly down. If you’re over age 18 today, you can more or less do whoever you want as long as they’re not under 18. This may be why professor-student plots are somewhat popular: it’s one of the few forbidden-but-plausible-and-not-gross relationships left.

There are only so many sexual lines one can cross, and too many books like 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, to make the mere crossing of the few lines left all that interesting. When an entire society is set up to repress, re-channel, and control sexuality, a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover is shocking. In our society, it’s not. Today, if you want it, go get it—just don’t make promises you can’t keep. It’s not hard to live a life of constant sexual novelty and most parts of society won’t really censure you, provided that you don’t marry someone else, and even then lots of people divorce.

It’s much harder to get wring major consequences from affairs and what not. Don’t want to cheat? Don’t get married. It’s not impossible to use sex and romance plots—my to-be-self-published novel, Asking Anna, is a comedy about such subjects—to get material from these fields, but it’s a greater challenge than it used to be, and hard if not impossible to shock. A novel with the sexual politics of Stranger in a Strange Land wouldn’t have the same shock-value today then it did when it was published, though actually now that I think about it I still think it would raise a few eyebrows.

Some genres, like science fiction, don’t rely on sex plots as much, but even in SF sex plots are still often present. The growth of murder mysteries and thrillers may also represent some veering from sex plots, since premature death is still a big deal and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

On a separate but related note, it also seems that many “literary” writers borrow SF-ish ideas. Think of Ian McEwan’s Solar. Not a great novel, but I liked a lot of what McEwan was doing by meshing discovery, politics, social ideas, environmentalism, science, and a not-very-nice character into one bunch. It’s McEwan, so the writing is good on a sentence-by-sentence level. The technical descriptions are also interesting and too uncommon in novels. I like the idea of writing about intellectual, social, technical, or business discovery as a motive. It’s underutilized as a driver of plot.

One section of Paul Graham’s essay “The Word ‘Hacker’” addresses this point and continues to have a profound impact on me:

Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock picking kit. (He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)

It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would want to do such things. Another friend of mine once got in trouble with the government for breaking into computers. This had only recently been declared a crime, and the FBI found that their usual investigative technique didn’t work. Police investigation apparently begins with a motive. The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex, revenge. Intellectual curiosity was not one of the motives on the FBI’s list. Indeed, the whole concept seemed foreign to them.

Most novels focus on money, sex, revenge. Why don’t they focus more on intellectual curiosity: perhaps how intellectual curiosity relates to money, sex, revenge, and similar topics? That seems like a fruitful avenue, especially because we might be moving towards a world where many people’s material needs are met, making money less immediately important; though of course many people are still driven by keeping up with the Joneses, in large swaths of the industrialized world we have plenty of money and plenty of stuff.

(A relevant side note about money: Among people interested in “game” and picking up women, it has become a common observation that additional money above the amount needed to buy drinks, dress reasonably well, and live independently doesn’t do much help most guys. A guy making $50,000 a year and a guy making $200,000 a year are mostly on a level playing field, and if the guy making $200,000 has to work 60+ hours a week, he’s at a disadvantage. Personalities and tenacity count far more than incomes, all else being equal. This could be seen as a variant on one of Geoffrey Miller’s points in Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior.)

I don’t see money, sex, or revenge—and motives for revenge usually reduce to money and sex—becoming unimportant as long as humans remain humans and not brains in vats or on chips, but intellectual curiosity and a sense of wonder and discovery should be more emphasized in narrative. I think the tedium of Jonathan Franzen’s novels can in part be explained by the tedium of his characters: if those characters had a greater sense of discovery and possibility, they wouldn’t be so annoying. The other day I was listening to a friend describing single electron chain reactions in photosynthesis and how she misses research and life in the lab. It’s very interesting stuff, and the sort of thing that is rarely really discussed in novels.

But it should be!

Plus, the progression of science, technology, economics, and the attitudes that go along with them have ameliorated a lot of the money-revenge resource-distribution fights that used to define every aspect of human existence, instead of most aspects of human existence. To the extent major societal problems in the future are going to be solved—most obviously involving energy, but certainly involving other topics too—the solutions are going to come from intellectual curiosity and the intellectually curious. Maybe we, collectively, should be thinking about art that cultivates and glorifies those traits, instead of art that cultivates or glorifies simple status domination, or the ability to be cooler than the other guy or girl.

Another Paul Graham quote, from “How To Make Wealth:”

Making wealth is not the only way to get rich. For most of human history it has not even been the most common. Until a few centuries ago, the main sources of wealth were mines, slaves and serfs, land, and cattle, and the only ways to acquire these rapidly were by inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. Naturally wealth had a bad reputation.

Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world’s history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds’ lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.

A great deal has been written about the causes of the Industrial Revolution. But surely a necessary, if not sufficient, condition was that people who made fortunes be able to enjoy them in peace. One piece of evidence is what happened to countries that tried to return to the old model, like the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.

People still steal to get rich, and even more people make many movies and write many books about stealing, along with efforts to thwart thieves. Making stuff people want is, again, an under-explored avenue. It’s also harder to represent dramatically. The movie The Social Network does this successfully, albeit at the expense of accuracy; most of the important parts of Facebook actually happened in the heads of Zuckerberg and other programmers, not in interpersonal drama.

Still, The Social Network works as a movie, and it does something very different than yet another version of Fast & Furious, which is about sex, power, tribal loyalty, and blowing shit up—like most movies (sample from the link: “Like any reasonable person, I watch the Fast and the Furious film franchise primarily for its insights into moral philosophy and political economy. At a fundamental level, the franchise is about what Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard identifies in The Sources of Normativity as the ‘intractable conflicts” that arise from our conflicting practical identities'”). I like Solar despite its flaws in part because the protagonist, Michael, makes his money and gains status by discovering something that may turn out to be essential in solar panels.

Solar and The Social Network don’t deploy straightforward sex / family plots, and that’s refreshing. They’re part of an answer to the question of what happens in a world where you can, if you have sufficient skill or are sufficiently desirable, sleep with anyone who’ll have you? Because that’s the world most people above the age of 18 or 19 find themselves in. Marriage rates are dropping. Arguably the most interesting parts about marriage and children right now are economic: what’s happening with alimony and child support, and how those issues affect behavior and emotions.

Moreover, for the highly sexually experienced—people who’ve had their share of three-ways, sex work, group sex, etc.—the sex plot is going to be dull. Juvenile. If you’ve slept with five people in a week, agonizing over who you’re going to sleep with for the rest of your life isn’t going to seem that important. It’s going to be more important that you find someone who loves you but who also has an sufficient level of adventure compatibility. Arguably a more interesting question is what it takes to be a highly desirable person, which a lot of romance novels appear to be exploring (strangely enough) and how to become that desirable person if you aren’t already. Becoming the sort of person who can get the man / woman / men / women of your dreams is often more interesting than the immediate process of getting him / her / them.

Sex plots need a sense of the sacred attached to sex, along with the dangers of pregnancy that can be ameliorated by IUDs and other forms of birth control. Danger used to generate sacredness. Most people today still don’t want their significant others to sleep with random people, even though many obviously do anyway, but taking away or reducing the risk of pregnancy also reduces the fear and risk of affairs or multiple partners. One reason Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs) got written is not just because of the affairs Plump and her husband have, but because he knocks up the other woman, or the other woman deliberately gets knocked up by him. Women tend to fear that their man will impregnate another woman and thus split his resources / time / affection, and men tend to fear that their woman will be impregnated by another man and thus stick them with the costs of raising another man’s child. While these fears can obviously be alleviated by the judicious use of birth control, not everyone is diligent about birth control and deeply seated fears aren’t always allayed by modern technologies laid over atavistic drives.

The highly adventurous and experienced probably don’t represent a hugely overwhelming portion of the general population, but they probably represent a portion that is either growing or coming out of the closet. Through divorce and other means, many people are already leading a serially monogamous and/or hypocritically adventurous life, though perhaps because they are bad at anticipating what temptation and desire feel like in the moment and good at rationalizing. The only thing missing is intellectual honesty, which may itself be rarer than fidelity.

There will probably always be challenges in admitting to fantasies or taboo desires, and it will probably always be difficult to find another person with roughly similar tastes, predilections, and preferences, but I’m not sure how easy it is to build a novel around those ideas. That question might be best answered in novel form.

Once you get away from the sex plot, where do novels go? Martha McPhee’s Dear Money is one successful recent example. Cryptonomicon is another. Solar, which I mentioned before, is a third. Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder is a fourth. More writers need to get this memo, and more readers need to use their attention to direct writers towards topics that matter instead of those that have been exhausted by the tradition.

Further discussion:

* Sexting and society: How do writers respond? Sample:

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.

Pamela and Clarissa are interesting as historical documents, but it’s not easy to project the modern mind backward into the dilemmas of someone with a very different set of social and intellectual concerns.

Concern trolling, competition, and “Facebook Made Me Do It”

June 18, 2013 By in Culture, News, sex Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

In “Facebook Made Me Do It,” Jenna Wortham says that she was innocently browsing Instagram and saw

a photo of my friend in a hotel room, wearing lime green thong underwear and very little else. It was scandalous, arguably over the top for a photo posted in public where, in theory, anyone who wanted would be able to see it. But people loved it. It had dozens of likes as well as some encouraging comments.

Of course it had dozens of likes and some encouraging comments: as should be obvious, a lot of men like seeing nude and semi-nude women. So do a lot of women; I read the quoted section to my fiancée and she said, “they like it because it’s hot.”

No shit.

So why does Wortham use language that lightly chastises the anonymous thong-wearer-and-poster? What do “arguably over the top” and “scandalous” mean here? Perhaps in 1890 it was scandalous to see women in their underwear. Today one sees women effectively in their underwear on beaches, catalogs, billboards, the Internet, and, not uncommonly, the Internet.

Since it’s not actually a scandal to see a woman in a thong and “arguably over the top” doesn’t really say anything, I think there are separated, unstated reasons related to competition and to a term coined by the Internet: “concern trolling.”

Concern trolling happens when

A person who lurks, then posts, on a site or blog, expressing concern for policies, comments, attitudes of others on the site. It is viewed as insincere, manipulative, condescending.

In this case, it happens on the Internet, and Wortham is expressing faux concern about a friend, when she’s really saying that a) she doesn’t like that the friend can take a shortcut to Instagram fame and attention through posting hot lingerie shots and b) she doesn’t like the friend as a sexual competitor. A friend who does or says something more sexually adventurous than the observer or writer is “over the top” because she’s a competitor; a friend who is less adventurous is uptight. Those kinds of words and phrases only make sense relative to the person using them, and they’re both used to derogate rivals, just in different ways.

Wortham doesn’t want to say as much, however, for an innocuous reason—she only has so many words available, as she writes in the New York Times instead of a blog, and for a less salubrious reason: she wants readers to believe that she’s writing from the voice of God, or the arbiter of culture, or something like that, and has widely shared views on community standards that the friend in the hotel room should uphold. If she explains that the views she’s espousing are really her own, and that they reflect sexual and attention competition in the form of concern trolling.

There’s a term of art that describes Wortham’s problem: “Don’t hate the player—hate the game.” Wortham is, in a highbrow and subtle way, hating the player.

The concern trolling continues later in the article, when Wortham quotes a professor saying, “The fact that the world is going to see you increases the risks you are willing to take.” But there’s no evidence cited for this claim, and, moreover, in the context of the article it’s possible to substitute “fun you’re going to have” for “risks you are willing to take.” Given a choice between inviting Wortham or her friend who posts herself to Instagram in a green thong to a party, and I know who I’m going to invite.

Lisa Levy, Alain de Botton and the meaning of intellectuals and their relationship to sex

June 7, 2013 By in Books, Culture, ideas, Nonfiction, sex Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Lisa Levy’s How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual (actual title: “How To Think More (But Not Better): Alain de Botton’s School of Life”) isn’t really about de Botton’s How To Think More About Sex so much as it is about throwing rocks at de Botton’s intellectual middle road from the high road where most supposed scholars are unread, unloved, and unsexed.* It’s true that How To Think More About Sex is de Botton’s weakest book, to the point that I didn’t bother reviewing it because it’s so bad; any pop evolutionary psychology book from the last ten years offers more and better information, and sex is arguably the field least informed by the philosophy and philosophers most often in de Botton’s purview.

But his other books are fun and informative. Levy writes that “he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own.” Maybe “an original observation” is overrated in philosophy, especially compared to accessibility. Levy writes that “he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward,” but if de Botton meanders in an interesting way—which he usually does, in books like The Architecture of Happiness and his novel On Love, which is charming (a word that never appears among academics trying to prosecute dubiously original arguments)—then he’s at least doing one thing better than 90% of those allegedly being original. For one thing, he’s writing clearly enough to make a judgment about originality; how many doctoral dissertations and tenure books are written in impenetrable, deliberately misleading jargon, such that it’s difficult or impossible to tell whether an argument is original?

Most people trying to make “an original observation of [their] own” don’t seem to make actual original contributions but do bloviate quite a bit. If more people admitted to synthesizing and fewer had to pretend to originality, we’d probably live in a better original world. Levy says that “he’s not exactly Michel Foucault,” and I’d call that a very good thing.

That being said, however, Levy is right that “This might in fact be the most boring book ever written about sex.” Sex might also be the field that, of all that de Botton has addressed, philosophy is the least well-equipped to handle, especially compared to current psychology and biology.

Still, the funniest bits of The Consolations of Philosophy concern the number of aged philosophers in their twilight years who fall for vapid but hot teenage girls and adult women, which could arguably tell us more about the nature of life than all of their books combined; actions speak louder than words, as the cliché goes, and what one wants in the midst of composing a monumental manuscript may be different from what one wants when confronted with real people. De Botton describes how the 43-year-old Schopenhauer “turns his attentions to Flora Weiss, a spirited girl who has turned seventeen,” and feels “revolted” by his gift of white grapes. Nietzsche, similarly, faced rejection from “a twenty-three-year old, green-eyed blonde” named Mathilde Trampedach. From there, “a succession of similar rejections took their toll” in his marriage proposals, caused in part, perhaps, by “his extraordinarily large walrus mustache” and “his shyness.” Later still, he chased around a twenty-one-year-old hottie (my word), who “was more interested in Nietzsche as a philosopher than a husband.”

Perhaps we should consider philosophers’ work in light of their lives, and the lessons we should take are not necessarily those entombed in The World as Will and Representation or On the Genealogy of Morality. Alas, however, that de Botton might have instead worked to write original observations that go unread in a university library somewhere instead.

* Hannah Arendt and a few others famously excepted.

Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs) — Wendy Plump

May 19, 2013 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Vow is about adultery, and two people married to each other who both routinely commit it, and yet the most obvious question isn’t addressed until page 245 of 258:

People have asked me why Bill and I didn’t just have an open marriage. The answer is simple. We didn’t want an open marriage. If an open marriage is the route both spouses choose to go, that is one choice. It’s very cosmopolitan. I know a local couple who tried this for years, and it worked out to some degree. They had a lax attitude toward sleeping around. [. . .] But the idea doesn’t have much appeal to me. If we were able to do it, we would all do it. Almost no one I know could do it.

For a practice that “doesn’t have much appeal to me,” Plump sure did a lot of it; most people who don’t like Pilates don’t keep going to the classes. She effectively had an open marriage without labeling it as such, or getting the benefits, like hot threesomes. Not addressing the open marriage until the end is bizarre. Plumps and her husband appear to like the drama of lies more than the simplicity of truth.

A book like Never the Face (my essay about it is at the link) is about fundamentally more honest people: on its fifth page, David says to the narrator of his wife Maria, “She knows about it, and she’s okay with it.” The paragraph breaks: “What?“, the narrator thinks. Then: “For the next two days, my mind argued with itself.” Even if the narrator can’t conceptualize or accept the possibility of uncommon arrangements, her partner can. That’s what Plump and her husband are missing. Instead they get recriminations, and the problem of simultaneously wanting the other person to be monogamous while they don’t have to be. Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, and so is hypocrisy.

The overall effect yields the strangeness of art, from the level of the sentence to the level of the whole, which is why I feel compelled to write about Vow amid other projects and other purposes.

Still, Vow is spectacularly well written and yet spectacularly frustrating, because the simple, obvious solution to the problems between Plump and her husband is simply off the negotiating table. They don’t even try events like this one, slightly NSFW, described in Time Out New York.

Plump says that “I assume Bill approached the altar with every intention of doing the right thing. Don’t we all? I’m not sure that I did. Even as I took my vows, I was aware of some mocking little voice in my head, particularly when I got to that part about forsaking all others” (120). Then. . . don’t get married? Again, it’s the obvious solution to a book that’s about looking at the obvious and then doing something else.

Consequently, on some level Vow is one long yowl of cognitive dissonance and “I want.” Plump cheats, basically, because she feels like it: “So I was thrown off balance when I first met Tommy and felt an attraction so compelling I no longer cared that I was married” (8). That’s it, and at bottom it’s the reason most cheaters cheat. In Plump’s universe, feelings trump emotion; I’m not sure about the extent we should extrapolate her comments to all women, or all people, but there’s definitely a temptation to do so, though I’m going to refrain.

At one moment Plump writes:

I have tried many times to deconstruct allure. It is the least romantic of tasks, but it is marginally useful, if only to prove a point. When you take attraction apart, when you look back on what developed and how, you find that it is a physical impulse for about eight seconds before it moves on to something bigger. (50)

Many people, mostly guys, have worked to take attraction apart and to learn how to build it up. Neil Strauss is the most famous, but many others, like Roosh, have also field-tested what works in attraction, in allure. Women are now also producing their own material on overt allure. Note that I’m not necessarily endorsing Strauss, Roosh, or the linked Female Pickup Artists, but I am saying that they are attempting, through observation, trial, error, and research, to develop methods for attracting women or men—in other words, “to deconstruct allure.” Chances are that the peculiar alchemy involved in attraction will never be completely standardized, but pretending that there’s no way to “deconstruct allure” is just pointless and incorrect romantic mystification.

Plump says that “Immediately on standing next to Steven I felt a frisson snapping between us. Some neuron in my brain knocked itself loose and began rapping on my awareness, saying, Yo, are you still in there? Pay attention. You’re doing it again.” Chances are good that Steven was doing something, consciously or unconsciously, to make that attraction happen. Maybe he was just really hot. But maybe he’d begun systematically learning about what to do around women. Plenty of guys do.

Why does she sleep with these guys instead of some other guys? She doesn’t really say. What do they do? How do they behave? It’s lost to Plump, who isn’t asking why she likes what she likes: she’s just liking it. It’s the triumph of feeling and the reason so many guys, and some number of women, read The Game.

There’s also a lot of “I” in Vow: a lot of “I loved not only the way I felt with Steven, I loved who he was with me, as well.” There’s not a lot of thinking about what other people are thinking or feeling. That may explain the quality of Plump’s marriage, which demands “we” and “you” as much or more than “I.”

One also wonders why her husband, Bill, can’t or chooses not to understand presumed shifts in his relationship with his wife: “Sex with Bill became unwanted by comparison, through no fault of his. It changes utterly from an act of love and passion to an act of crushing obligation” (41). Perhaps she shouldn’t be married, then? Perhaps he should recognize what’s going on and leave? The obvious questions pile up, and Plump is telling us that she has no answers. Maybe there are none. There are only contradictions. She says that “Through it all, again, I was certain of one thing. I did not want our marriage to end. I was crushed but not finished.” For someone who doesn’t want her marriage to end, Plump behaves in strange ways.

Some niggling intellectual points bother; Plump, for example, must not have read much evolutionary biology: she writes that “They [friends] think I must have been aware that Bill was having an affair, as if suspicion were linked to some primal instinct we all have. I have no idea what imperative suspicion would serve Neanderthals such that it would repeat upward through the species to find its expression in us” (4). Leaving aside the question of mistaking Neanderthals for a major modern human ancestor, I can very easily imagine “what imperative suspicion would serve:” for men, suspicion is one way of ascertaining paternity. If you check a woman’s fidelity, her offspring are more likely to be yours. For women, jealousy is a form of resource guarding: if you want your mate’s resource capacity to be primarily devoted to you, and not to the hussy a few huts over, you want to make sure he’s not knocking her up (The Evolution Biology of Human Female Sexuality discusses these issues and empirical findings around them).

These obviously aren’t absolute, and the anthropological literature is filled with alloparenting, group sex, and other arrangements, but the basic utility of jealousy as an adaptation remains. Plump does note that her husband’s child with another woman “moved us into a whole new circle of deceit, into that tortured fraternity of women and men [ . . .] who are heaved by their loving spouses into the dirtiest of vortices—women who find out their husbands have fathered children elsewhere; men who find out their children are not biologically their own” (31). Right. It’s the “dirtiest of vortices” because of the tremendous resources invested in children. To have someone who is supposed to be investing your children investing in someone else’s is the cruel problem that jealousy is there, in part, to address.

I’m keeping Vow, though it’s the sort I would normally sell.

Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser — Clarisse Thorn

December 30, 2012 By in Books, Nonfiction, Reviews, sex Tags: , , , , 9 Comments

Since 2005 and Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, the number of blogs, books, and forums devoted to teaching men how to get with women has, as they say, exploded, and pickup offers a seductive conceit: with the right words, posture, and attitude, average guys can sleep with attractive women. The seductive conceit tends not to play out all that well: by the time one learns enough and changes enough to sleep with lots of attractive women, a random guy isn’t the guy he was when he started.

Confessions_Most of these guys are guys, both writers and readers. Clarisse Thorn, “a feminist S&M writer and activist,” obviously isn’t. She doesn’t want to sleep with more women today! She wants something that, from an intellectual perspective, is more interesting: understanding. In Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser, she offers an introduction similar to the one I wrote in the first paragraph of this post:

There’s a huge subculture devoted to teaching men how to seduce women. Within the last half-decade or so, these underground ‘pickup artists’ have burst into the popular consciousness, aided first and foremost by Neil Strauss’s bestselling 2005 book The Game.

One real question: Why do so many men need to learn “how to seduce women?” What aren’t men being taught in schools? By their fathers? Friends? Culture? Anything that needs to be consciously learned and taught isn’t being absorbed from other avenues. Why did “Game” emerge when it did, as opposed to 1970, or 1950, or 1850? To my mind, the sexual revolution and the Internet play large parts: the former reduced monogamy, encouraged more people to sleep with more people, and made women more independent of their families, while the latter allows outsiders to congregate and discuss matters that can’t find mainstream publishers and outlets.

I can say that, at least in my case, I noticed the same sorts of things many guys notice in high school: the same handful of guys seem to get 80 or 90% of female attention, and, as usual, that “chicks dig jerks” and that they eschew “nice guys.” The question eventually becomes, again, “Why?”

Bad answers tend to be, “women are inscrutable” or “just because.” Better answers are out there. I think a lot of guys glom onto pickup ideas not only because some specific tactics work, but because the ideas themselves help explain behavior that seems otherwise mysterious and self-defeating. As Thorn says, “When there’s no standard etiquette or well-understood social channels for how to meet women, then it seems obvious that a bunch of dudes would start getting together trying to figure out how to do that.” If there was “standard etiquette,” it’s gone now, along with standard corporate jobs-for-life.

The role of evolutionary biology and psychology is also underrated in the growth of pickup artists. That field provides answers about what people, or at least people from some cultures, find attractive, and helps to explain why people find what they find attractive. Without that intellectual ballast, I doubt we’d see the surface phenomenon of the pickup artist; that’s merely the mast and the deck. The stuff keeping the ship upright is down below, out of sight. Bad, sloppy, or reductivist evolutionary psychology is easy to discredit, and it should be discredited, but there’s an intellectual core that remains.

Pickup shows, or attempts to show, guys how to get with women in modern environments; as Thorn says, “often, the discussions and the seminars and the meetups are one big group of people who break down seductive behaviors as precisely as they possibly can.” Some pickup artists see what they do as part of self-improvement and enhancement. Others, in Thorn’s view, are “Darth Vader” pickup artists; Thorn describes one this way: “whatever would be more evil and more powerful than Darth Vader, that’s Roissy. [. . .] he is almost comically villainous.” She’s right in that last description, and “comically villainous” has a weird, almost 18th Century ring that’s appropriate for Roissy’s commentary and fundamental harmlessness (he writes a blog and lives in DC, after all, and it’s hard to take his more hyperbolic assertions seriously).

Nonetheless, men like Roissy are the ones Thorn seeks out. There’s a thread of honesty, of self-criticism, that runs through Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: “I can’t deny that I myself pay more attention to hot men [. . .] I can’t deny that I wanted PUAs’ approval.” The wanting “approval” makes sense: if you don’t want approval, it’s easy enough to rant ignorantly about a subject. Plus, when a phenomenon is sufficiently widespread, it’s worth understanding it, and your own relationship to it, before criticizing it. Thorn does both.

She also gave an interview in which she said that, while she sees feminism as telling us a lot about the macro aspects of gender in our society (in work and school, for example), feminism does very little to describe, let alone evaluate, how micro, day-to-day interactions are structured. Pickup artists, or whatever one may want to call guys who are consciously building their skills at going out and getting women, are describing the specific comments, conversations, styles, and venues women respond to. The pickup artists are saying, “This is how you approach a woman in a bar, this is how you strike up a conversation at the grocery store, and so forth.” In other words, they’re looking at how people actually go about the business of getting laid. Their work is often very detailed, and the overall thrust is toward the effectiveness of getting laid rather than how male-female interactions work in theory. Feminism, in Thorn’s view, appears to be silent, or mostly silent, on the day-to-day interactions.

Women also haven’t tended, so far as I or Thorn knows, to produce the same material about why they pick the guys they pick, what they say, what happens in the lead-up to sex, and what happens afterward. Men produce these sometimes voluminous field reports (Reddit’s “seduction” community is full of them), to the point where the occasional woman appears to ask why no one is producing pickup material for women. Nothing is stopping women from doing so, but the average woman appears less interested in how to “pick up” guys and more interested in relationships (which one can see from, say, The Rules versus The Game, or romance novels versus porn). The average of many people’s desires doesn’t say anything about a particular individual’s desires or proclivities, but we do see patterns emerge through aggregation.

It’s virtually impossible to be a thinking person and not notice the disjuncture between behavior in bars / clubs / parties and academic / Internet feminist thinking. It’s hard to reconcile 50 Shades of Gray, submissive S&M preferences, and romance novels with feminist thinking (Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance is excellent for its observations, but her preexisting ideological framework automatically assumes everything about gender preferences is the fault of a pervasive “patriarchy” that, if it once existed, didn’t by the time I came of age).

People like Thorn are trying to bridge that gap, which I admire. What academic feminists think average women should want (and what average men are like) seems very different from what many normal women want. It’s hard if not impossible to legislate desire, or change it through haranguing, though people certainly have tried and continue to try. One thing I think most people have in common is hypocrisy and lying, either to themselves or others, and sexual behavior is certainly rife with both hypocrisy and lying. My favorite public example are the closeted Republicans who fulminate against being gay and then get caught in a “wide stance,” tapping their foot in a men’s bathroom. But they’re so pathetic a target that they’re not really worth discussing on an intellectual level.

Thorn’s book is worth that discussion, and running through Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser is a simple conundrum: we don’t know who someone really is, versus when someone is who we want them to be (example: “When I met Neil [Strauss] in Chicago, he seemed low-key and authentic, but I suppose that’s just what he’d want me to think”). The authenticity question isn’t unique to Confessions: it runs through literature, especially in literary fiction and science fiction, through psychology, through sociology, and through everyday life. Our personalities themselves aren’t stable, and they’re influenced by situations. We want to believe ourselves to be authentic, and we want to believe that we can fully understand other people, but those beliefs whither in the face of both academic evidence and the evidence of everyday life and social interaction.

We just don’t know. Pickup wants men to believe that we can mold ourselves into something better; that molding is simply of a particular kind, oriented in a particular direction. To be good at pickup is as hard as being good at anything else: it might start with learning some clever lines and some confidence, but it ends with the entire state of one’s social and physical being, from wardrobe to workout to interests to speaking skills to dancing to friends. Maybe the scariest thing of all to women is the extent to which men will change their personalities to attract women, or the extent to which attracting women is a skill that can be learned, contrary to the dominant cultural paradigm of love at first sight, “it just happened,” and the belief in romantic destiny. Women, however, don’t like to feel as if they’re being “gamed.” By definition, the best pickup artists conceal their craft. If you know you’re being gamed, the game itself has failed.

Good pickup also means empathy, which men and women lack in equal measure. Thorn writes:

Age 15 may also have been when guys began shouting gross comments at me in the street, but I’m not sure. It was a few years before I started going to parties and clubs where some guys would approach and refuse to leave me alone, no matter how obvious I thought I made it that I wasn’t interested. These experiences, among many others, contributed to the development of what a PUA would call my “bitch shield”: my instinctive tendency to be cold and unfriendly during unexpected interactions with unfamiliar guys.

Many women have bitch shields to some degree — when we don’t, we get a lot more “I’ve been watching you and your nice breasts” comments. PUAs devote a lot of mental energy to figuring out how to quickly convince women.

Pickup teaches, or should teach, men to appreciate why “Many women have bitch shields to some degree.” I’m not sure that there’s a female equivalent to make pickup that helps women realize just how much rejection being a male entails. Pickup is also about teaching you to imagine how you appear, or should appear, to others; Thorne correctly notes that “‘Just be yourself’ is terrible advice if you are naturally unbelievably awkward.” The self you should be, whether you want to form relationships or just get laid, is something else.

Although the better pickup types don’t promise something for nothing, the worst ones do. The reality with pickup is the same reality that confronts anyone who wants to truly a master a skill, whether that skill be programming, knitting, writing, music: it takes time, effort, and intensive effort. “No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it,” as Leon Battista Alberti said, and seducing women is an art like any other. Some men appear to be “naturally” good at it, which usually means that they have some inborn predisposition combined with unconscious training

I discussed ideas and trends in the first part of this essay because those are the most interesting and useful parts of the book. A lot of Thorn’s writing, however, is weak. At one point she says of pickup artists, “some of them were so smart it blew my mind.” Such clichés should be excised like a demon: swiftly, surely, and religiously. Chapter 3 starts with Thorn saying, “I’m a feminist sex-positive activist. For me, that means that I try to raise awareness of social problems around sexuality.” But, again, anyone with decent reading comprehension skills will already know that, because she mentioned it several times. Some sections are too long and should be cut, and it becomes easier to skip sections the longer one reads. The word “super” is overused as an intensifier: “I acknowledged times in the past when I’ve been super awkward;” “He’s super-analytical too;” “his consent was super important to me;” “he wasn’t going to be a super-major relationship no matter what.” That’s only a handful of examples. Like “very” or salt, “super” should be used sparingly. Too many super things aren’t super at all.

The word “problematic” is similarly problematic: instead of arguing why an idea or a concept is a problem, “problematic” simply asserts that it is; as word, it conceals more than it reveals, and it conceals a lot: “some men are so starved of knowledge about masculinity that they idolize Roissy and overlook some of the more problematic things he has said;” “the seduction community is very heteronormative: it really buys into problematic gender standards;” “all the words that I put in quote marks above are concepts that I consider incredibly problematic;” “while the advice in The Rules is often problematic, much of it works;” a woman named Kristen J says “[ad] agencies understand the effects of problematic norms on women.” Using a weasel word like “problematic” once or twice falls within the author’s license not to explain everything. Using it more than half a dozen times means the next version should be edited with greater care.

While I’m here, let me talk for a moment about Kristen J. I’m not convinced advertisers exploit women, or know that they do, but the bigger issue is that advertisers want to do whatever works; if ads didn’t work, at all, advertisers would quit trying. She says that “The thing is, advertising isn’t just a consequence of problematic norms… it’s a creator of them, too.” Maybe. But the norms emerge from collective individual choices, and I think advertiser are mostly reacting to what they see as being effective. It’s certainly more fun to blame ad agencies than to look around and say the blame for the effectiveness of advertising lies, at least a little bit, in each of us, and in our aggregate preferences (for more on this topic, see Geoffrey Miller’s Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior). I mentioned a similar idea in a different context above, but the same principle applies here.

Technical problems with Thorn’s writing aren’t limited to the level of the sentence, either. She assumes the reader’s stupidity:

Here we are again at the end of a chapter! Did you read it all? Was it too long for you? It’s okay if you didn’t read it all, because I hereby bestow upon you some ‘Too Long; Didn’t Read’ bullet points!

“Was it too long for you?” sounds vaguely pornographic out of context while simultaneously being infantilizing: if you’re not in middle school, a couple thousands words on a compelling topic shouldn’t be too long. If it is too long, the writer should cut words. The best writing advice I’ve ever heard is “omit unnecessary words.” In Confessions, Chapter 12 begins this way: “This is the last chapter, and I won’t offer a “Too Long; Didn’t Read” section at the end. My Grand Theory of The Ethical Game cannot be reduced to mere bullet points!” This implies that the preceding 11 chapters can “be reduced to mere bullet points”—but if they can, why bother writing extended narratives? Why not just shorten the book to the bullet points? I don’t think the preceding chapters can be reduced to bullets, which is frustrating both about the bullets themselves and the way they disrupt the book’s flow.

Confessions is slack. It’s hard to describe precisely what tautness entails, but in vague terms it means feeling like every part of the book connects to every other part, or at least to a linear, forward-moving narrative or level of understanding. Too many of the conversations in Confessions feel superfluous—not on their own, but put in the context of each other. Fixing this kind of problem is a long and difficult effort, and I don’t have a good sense of how rising action in each chapter or scene should function.

But I know it when I don’t see it, and too often I didn’t see it. Neil Strauss’s The Game builds in a classic fashion, portraying his journey from outsider to neophyte to expert to transcending the limits of his field. Confessions sort of has that structure, but it’s more digressive, more random, and not in ways that feel like they build. In the middle of the book I began skipping sections that felt repetitive, as issues about pickup, game, and feminism were analyzed from angles that seemed nearly indistinguishable from how they’d been previously analyzed. There was a feeling of “almost, but not quite;” I want the stories to be tighter than they are.

Tautness can’t be quoted. It can be observed: Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl has it. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has it. Tucker Max’s stories have it. So do Chelsea Handler’s better stories. Confessions needs it.

I may also be more attuned to tautness because for a long time I had a major problem with it in my own writing. To some extent all writers worth a damn struggle with tautness; the ones who don’t care either write tautly unconsciously or risk boring their readers.

Even the best non-narrative, nonfiction is intellectual taut, with ideas that build on one another towards their conclusions. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind has this quality, even though it’s not a narrative book. observing the issue may be worthwhile: nonfiction writers need to think about the tautness issue, because readers will recognize when a work builds and when a work should be restructured in a way that makes it more compelling.

The first couple chapters were the most compelling, followed by the Neil Strauss chapter. I’m spending so much time on stylistic weaknesses because I want the book to be better. The subject interests me and Thorn’s vantage is fresh. Only the execution is lacking. Thorn is doing something I admire: reporting. For a self-published writer, this is unusual. She goes out to meet and talk to people involved in her subject. She only needs her Robert Gottlieb, her Maxwell Perkins.

I hope Thorn finds him, or her.

Anytime someone describes sexual behavior as “dumb,” ask: Dumb in what timeframe?

December 4, 2012 By in ideas, Links, sex Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In writing about the David Petraeus non-scandal, Adam Gopnik says, correctly, that “Benghazi is a tragedy in search of a scandal; the Petraeus affair is a scandal in search of a tragedy,” and, perhaps less correctly, this:

The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd”—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement.

But whether lust “lures us to do dumb stuff” depends on timeframe we’re looking at: if we do “dumb stuff” that results in our genes still existing, say, 200 years from now, then what’s dumb in the context of the next month may be “smart” from the context of a couple centuries from now. We’re evolutionarily primed to propagate our genes—that’s Richard Dawkins’ point in The Selfish Gene.

We also have to ask what happens in the very short term: presumably, in the minutes to hours that Petraeus and Broadwell were doing it (or anyone is “doing it”), they were making a very smart decision for themselves over those few minutes. One might be able to look at the quality of their decision making in terms of Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd’s The Time Paradox, and as being very good for the immediate present when they were doing it, not very good in the months or years after the scandal comes to light, and, depending on conception, very good over the very long term.

Don’t read this post and the books linked, then go out and cheat on your significant other only to say that your selfish genes and hedonistic time perspective “made” you do it. But do think about the intellectual context in which Portnoy’s claim exists, and how desire can function in the very long and short run.

The beta orbiter problem: Observations from the field

October 8, 2012 By in Culture, sex Tags: , , , , , , , 6 Comments

A newly-graduated friend sent me this, as part of an e-mail about the difficulty of making friends after moving to a big city:

I’m now trying to “friend-date” whenever I meet a female (or male) who seems platonically cool. I have an easier time with males, but I don’t think the single ones ever intend to be friends with me from the beginning… mostly beta orbiters I guess.

Think about it this way, from the guy’s perspective: you’re exceedingly hungry. As hungry as you’ve ever been. And you can smell a delicious curry. You can see it. You’re very hungry. You’d love to eat the curry. But you can’t eat the curry.

The metaphor isn’t perfect—women have agency and curries don’t, among other things*—but it should impart the basic urgency single guys feel and the reason why single men who don’t want to be “just friends” also don’t want to hang out with you as a friend. How badly would you want to go to a restaurant when you’re desperately hungry but can’t eat at the restaurant?

My friend also said:

I found this article recently that was telling guys why they should be friends with the women who reject them for dating, but want to be friends. 1) The guy will become more confident around the type of women he’s interested in. 2) She will introduce him to her hot friends.

While “She will introduce him to her hot friends” is true in theory, it isn’t true, or very often true, in practice (based on my experience, anyway). More often, when a girl I’m interested in declines my affections, at best she sets me up with friends who are substantially less attractive than she is, and frequently says they’re “cute” and promises that I’ll “like them for their personality.” Unfortunate euphemisms lead to hurt feelings all around. Actually, my feelings don’t get hurt, but the feelings of other women sometimes do.

The hot girl’s friends also often know the hot girl turned the guy down, and that sends a powerful negative signal. If the guy isn’t good enough for the hot girl, why should he be good enough for her friends? Again, I won’t say that no straight guy has ever gotten the female-friend hookup, but I suspect that the female-friend hookup is more mythologized than actualized.

I’m familiar with the the beat orbiter mindset because I spent a lot of high school being one—but that’s because I was an idiot who didn’t know any better. I finally stepped back from that behavior, wondered why the hell I was doing it, and stopped. Non-adaptive behaviors should be altered. Most self-respecting guys who are dumb enough to go through a beta orbiter phase leave that phase by the time they graduate from college, if not earlier. Not all do, however, and you’ll occasionally run into 35-year-old men with the emotional temperament of 15-year-old boys in the thrall of their first serious, unrequited infatuation.

I’ve also had girls be the female equivalent of beta orbiters. I say “girls” here because, like men, adult single women usually grow out of this behavior, and if they’re attracted to a guy, they either make their move and see where it goes or they find a guy who is interested in them, instead of pointlessly pining after the unavailable. Straight American women seem to be more susceptible to acquiring beta orbiters than straight American men, while women seem to be, on average, more deluded about their “real” relationships with their supposed male “friends.”

One thought experiment might clarify your “friendships:” imagine that you’re lying in bed, wearing lingerie or nothing, and your male friend comes in. Does he leave or partake? If he leaves, you’re real friends. If he partakes, he’s probably not.

The attention of beta orbiters is kind of flattering to women, but it’s also mostly pointless; if you’re in the game, so to speak, you want to focus on the game, not the crowd. This is true of both sexes, whether gay or straight, but it seems like a lot of people have trouble admitting it.

(As a side note, literature is full of idiots pursuing pointless love for no particular reason: think of Gatsby and Daisy, or Robert Cohn and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, or any number of 19th century novels, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, or Romeo and Juliet (which has the advantage of Mercutio, until he dies; it’s his death that’s tragic, because he’s hilarious—”I will bite thee by the ear for that jest” and “for the bawdy hand of the / dial is now upon the prick of noon”). In each case, the obvious thing for the pursuer to do is get over whoever he or she is obsessed with and find someone better / more available, which are much the same thing. That’s a problem with Gatsby and Sun in particular: both novels are constructed around idiotic, self-defeating sexual behavior that contemporary teenagers often see glorified in pop culture and eventually must learn to overcome. The writing and style in both novels are specular, but their plots leave much to be desired, since the obvious thing for Jay Gatsby and Robert Cohn to do is get over Daisy and Brett Ashley. If they do, however, one no longer has a novel. But we shouldn’t admire guys who do things that are clearly dumb and sub-optimal.)

It may also be hard for attractive women to become genuine friends with a guy who already has a girlfriend because most girlfriends won’t want a rival—especially an attractive rival, sniffing around their campfire—so to speak. The reasons should be obvious. The major exception, however, occurs when the girl herself is bi, or at least interested in some girl-on-girl experience(s), but third-wheel situations among relative strangers seldom seem to last long.

This kind of misunderstand seems to be incredibly, stupidly common; I occasionally read the reddit.com/r/relationships section, which is filled with people like “jaqueinabox” who say

I have a friend who I’ve known for about four or five years. A couple years ago, when my boyfriend at the time and I were on a break, I invited him to a social [. . .] I dropped him off at his car, but we ended up making out for a few minutes before I told him I had to stop (I never really do stuff like that and I was incredibly uncomfortable with it.) [. . .] When my boyfriend and I broke up for good, my friend started insisting we hang out more. Go to movies, go out for dinner, go to his place and watch movies, sending me texts with “xoxo” and “;)” in them, and it feels a lot like dating. [. . .] I still see movies and hang out with him because it seems rude to say no.

She’s wrong: it’s actually rude, both to herself and, to a lesser extent, the guy, to keep going out with him. In the thread, I wrote that “Directness is beautiful, both for you and these ‘guy-friends,’ who are not actually friends.” The other day a Reddit commenter wrote, accurately:

Most male friends become friends with attractive women with hopes of getting with them. Usually, when it doesn’t happen or she gets into/is in a relationship, they step back. When she gets out of a relationship, they usually try again.

The best movie scene dealing with this dynamic is the famous bit from When Harry Met Sally:

The contemporary term of art for these guys is, of course, “beta orbiter.”

I do want to clarify one point: It is possible for men and women to be authentic friends (I have a bunch of authentic female friends). It’s just much more unusual than many young straight women want to think it is. Many young straight women want to lie to themselves, or simply like deluding themselves, about male “friends.”

Authentic cross-gender friendships are great and they are no less worth cultivating than any other friendship. But don’t lie to yourself and don’t go into authentic friendships with the purpose of trying to covertly shoot for more.

* As far as I know.