Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 672
September 3, 2016
Trump’s liar-in-chief: Since joining his staff, Kellyanne Conway has been living in a world of make believe
Kellyanne Conway (Credit: Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
When Kellyanne Conway became the new campaign manager two weeks ago for Donald Trump, she established her hallmark right out of the gate: lying.
It began with very circumstances of her hiring. Everyone knew that her appointment meant that Trump’s existing campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was out. This sort of reshuffling generates bad publicity for a campaign because such a major shake-up only two months before an election indicates turmoil within the organization.
Conway’s solution to the problem was simple: to just lie. This is really not a shake-up, she insisted. Instead, she characterized it as an “expansion.” She claimed that Manafort would remain in his job and she would merely join Manafort along with Stephen Bannon, the new campaign CEO who was also brought in at the same time as Conway. She painted a lovely picture that the three of them would work together in perfect harmony to run the campaign all the way through until the election. Two days later, Manafort was gone. Some might say that Conway deserves some leeway because such a major shake-up is a sensitive event and any new campaign manager would certainly finesse the issue to minimize the damage. Fair enough.But this was no mere finessing. This was a carefully planned lie. Presenting to the media the new false management structure of the three-person team created the impression that a disorderly shake-up was not underway. But, of course, this turned out to be a deception.Furthermore, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton suggested that it was a shake-up, Conway viciously attacked her for being a liar. “That was a complete lie,” Conway charged, insisting, “Nobody got fired at the Trump campaign today.” The audacity is stunning. Not only was Conway lying herself but when someone else spoke the truth, Conway attacked that person, calling her a liar.This is how Conway began her new job as Trump’s campaign manager. And it didn’t stop there. The bald-faced lies have only continued.
Some of them are so obviously false that they are laughable like Conway’s assertion that Trump does not insult people. “He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she claimed.
This, of course, is absurd. Trump is the king of hurling personal insults. Even Megyn Kelly on her Fox News program scolded Conway for this doozy. “Now, you know that’s not true,” Kelly said.
When pushed on this, Conway has shamelessly tried to seek a moral high ground. “I don’t like when people hurl personal insults,” she said. “I’m the mother of four small children. That would be a terrible example for me to feel otherwise.” But yet there she is, stumping as the campaign manager for someone who should never become a role model for children.
After Trump flip-flopped on his immigration position by saying he could “soften” by not immediately deporting all of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are already in America, Conway took to the airwaves to insist that Trump had not changed his position at all. This was stunning because, of course, shifting from a proposal to deport them to a plan to not deport them sure seems like a change. “I assure you,” Conway said. “Nothing has changed.” Once again, her statements simply bear no resemblance to reality.
Sometimes Conway’s statements are the exact opposite of reality. For example, Conway maintains that Trump desires to focus on substance and policy, whereas Clinton just wishes to pursue attacks and insults.
The world is upside down. Conway has it precisely backward. It is Trump who lacks substance and policies. He even said himself that voters don’t care about policies, and he mocked Clinton for producing policies. Trump’s campaign is hardly based upon substance and policies; rather it is based upon instilling fear without any regard for the truth. A recent fact-checking report determined that Trump’s claims are false or mostly false a whopping 78 percent of the time. Conway reinforces this cult of egregious lying.
Clinton, on the other hand, is a decided policy wonk who has offered a healthy abundance of facts and policy proposals during the course of her campaign.
It is obvious to see that Trump’s forte is casting insults whereas Clinton’s forte is substance and policy.
Conway’s utter lack of regard for honesty is simply breathtaking. She seems to feel completely free to say anything whatsoever, regardless of whether it has any basis in truth. She appears to have absolutely no concern that lying is morally wrong. It’s like she is missing the morality gene. She will say whatever portrays Trump in the most favorable light at a particular moment, regardless of whether it is accurate.
In fact, the overall message about Trump that Conway presented to the public when she took over as campaign manager seems to have been based upon deceit as well. She announced that her new strategy would be to let Trump be Trump. This was clearly designed to reassure Trump’s core supporters that they could count on the candidate remaining true to the principles that had attracted them in the first place.
But in practice, Conway has done the exact opposite. If Trump were being his true self, he would be giving unscripted speeches off the top of his head and insulting all sorts of people. But Conway now has Trump chained to a teleprompter. This is hardly letting Trump be Trump. His “softening” on immigration is not Trump being Trump but clearly is aimed at attempting to attract Latino voters. And scaling back Trump’s insults is certainly not letting Trump be Trump.
Instead, Conway is attempting to change Trump’s behavior and positions in order to attract more voters, while simultaneously reassuring his base of supporters that Trump is not changing at all. She is speaking out of two sides of her mouth, and these two opposing positions cannot both be true.
Considering that she’s been on the job only two weeks, that sure is a whole lot of lying.
Clearly, Conway has no regard for the principle of conducting oneself with honor and integrity. As a result of her actions, she now has zero credibility. Not a single word that passes through her teeth can be trusted. If Trump were to win the election, all the lying and deception would be rewarded. This would be horrendous. For one thing, it would be morally unjust.
In fact, the lying alone provides sufficient justification for not voting for Trump. Furthermore, a win by Trump would lead to a proliferation of more and more deceitful campaigns and candidates, and thus politics in general would undergo a disastrous downward spiral.
If, on the other hand, Trump were to lose the election in an enormous landslide, this would send a very clear message that voters will not tolerate egregious lying. Subsequent candidates would be on notice that they will pay a price for waging campaigns of deceit. Voters possess the power to fix this problem at the polls by rejecting candidates who lie and casting ballots in favor of the virtue of telling the truth.
September 2, 2016
The boys of summer are men now — now what?
The author on Fire Island, center, laughing, with his housemates.
It first dawned on us when the annual Costco run to stock the beach house yielded an eight-pack of reading glasses to share: We are, perhaps, no longer quite so young and fabulous.
The Boys and I have been spending summers on Fire Island together for nearly 20 years. To us the island has always represented a cult of beauty, a festival of youth, a summerlong dance party. When we first hit the scene out there, members of the generation just before us — who would have been in their 40s and 50s — were simply gone, wiped out by epidemic. The alternative to youth, it seemed to us, could be only death.
That impression was so stark, I remember, that I used to swear every summer that I’d step in front of a bus before I would hit 40. I’ll be 47 this year. I had just finished the sixth grade when The New York Times reported the first cases of what would come to be known as AIDS. Ten years later I was still in college, in Ohio. When I finally got to New York City, every guy I knew was under 30 or well past 60.
If we are no longer the Boys of Summer, who are we? We are the first truly post-Stonewall generation to have lived long enough to ask that question. We never contemplated growing older together because we never saw anyone else doing it. It’s not that we expected to die of AIDS exactly. We simply had no frame of reference, no role models for living long and living well as gay men. And we certainly never imagined the depths of friendship that could develop through so much shared time over so many years.
In retrospect we should have seen this coming a few summers back, when an island interloper asked one of us to describe what life had been like as a “disco-era Roxy boy.” In fact, none of us came of age during the disco era but the misconception can be forgiven: The Roxy was long gone by then and may as well have been Studio 54 as far as my (er, our) young interlocutor was concerned.
But oh were we Roxy Boys! To us it is incomprehensible that a new generation has not replaced the Roxy with another club, that Manhattan no longer even truly has all-night gay dance clubs, that demand for them has waned as a new wave of arrivals has been watching their predecessors living happy, well-adjusted lives beyond the clubs — and that we could be the ones they have been watching.
We are witnessing nothing less than the rebirth of a life phase that skipped an entire generation of gay men. The feeling of it is amplified, of course, by the microcosm of a Fire Island summer, but it applies more broadly to life in New York, San Francisco and other urban centers around the world.
What does gay middle age look like today? It looks like us, I suppose, but we’re honestly never sure what that means.
Last summer we booked a table at an Island eatery to celebrate a friend’s birthday. As I threw on what I thought was a festive tank top and prepared to leave the house, the Boys hit me with a disapproving chorus of “You’re wearing that?” At first I refused to budge, but ultimately I relented and changed into something with sleeves. When did we start caring about decorum? When did we start wearing shirts?
The Boys in the house who are still dating have noted recently that young men in their 20s and 30s are inexplicably drawn to — and often aggressively pursue — middle-aged men. This phenomenon is completely alien to us. Is it because we rarely saw middle-aged men when we were younger? Or is it because when we did see them, we automatically assumed they were sick?
And don’t even get us started on sex: Condoms meant survival to us. But new HIV-prevention drugs are changing that culture, too, bringing a kind of liberation to young gay men that is reminiscent of what the pill did for women. It’s scary and exciting to us all at once — and it challenges long-held beliefs that are core to our identities.
Rent or buy, lease or own, packaged gay cruises versus custom trips with friends, monogamy versus nonmonogamy, sleeves or no sleeves, even whether or not it’s still appropriate to dance all night at our age — the opinions are stridently expressed and argued ad nauseam in our house.
As we navigate this new frontier of middle age, some of us are embracing it with grace, some are flirting with bitterness and others are just dancing through it to see where we end up. But what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is what a wonderful, messy, intrusive and intimate dynamic we have as a group — as a family, really — and how beautiful it is that we’re all going through this together, tasting it, trying it on for size, experimenting with it and (I believe) growing and benefitting from it together.
As our lives have evolved beyond the dance floor, each one of us has settled into different ways of being in the world. Some of us married, some stayed single, some broke up. Some of us are monogamous, some are open, some started with one model and switched to another. Some of us adopted pets; none of us had children. Some of us have become wealthy. Some have become comfortable enough that at least we no longer have to mortgage our entire lives for a measly “quarter share” in a place we treasure more than any other.
Along the way every single one of us has vehemently disagreed with, questioned or outright challenged the others’ choices at some point in time. And we haven’t always resolved those clashing points of view. Somehow, sometimes we’ve actually embraced them and celebrated them by turning them into running jokes — to be hauled out again and again for affectionate prodding summer after summer. (“Let’s go out for dinner tonight. Just let me change into a tank.”)
I love every single guy in that house, warts and all. And by force of the sheer unavoidable exposure to everyone’s dirt and drama over so many years. I’ve learned from them and am a better person because of our time together — because they all have challenged me so often to think about who I am and what I value, just by being who they are and living it loud.
Astonishingly and in spite of any of our intentions ever to do so, I think, we’re all finally becoming men together. And it makes me happy, joyful even, to understand that this is a thing that can happen in the world we live in now.
Watching scary movies in the dark: The success of “Don’t Breathe” and the resurgence of horror
Jane Levy in "Don't Breathe" (Credit: Screen Gems)
This is the worst summer for Hollywood in more than two decades.
As of the time of writing, the 2016 summer box office stands at $4.12 billion, according to Box Office Mojo. At face value, that doesn’t seem so bad. The legendarily abysmal summer of 2014, in which “Despicable Me 2” topped a dreary season, fared worse in total dollars, topping out at just over $4 billion. But adjusting for inflation, you have to go back 24 years to find a summer this anemic — to 1992, which saw the release of summer movies like “Batman Returns,” “Honey I Blew Up the Kid,” “Alien 3,” and “Pet Sematary II.”
The hottest months of the year are reliably big business for Hollywood, but 2016 has been notable for a series of big-budget failures. Sequels and franchise reboots like “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” “Ben-Hur,” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” all flopped, while “X-Men: Apocalypse” and “Suicide Squad” underperformed to their billion-dollar expectations. The decent $125 million haul of “Ghostbusters” would have been an unqualified success for any other comedy, but not an expensive studio tentpole that reportedly had to earn $400 million globally just to break even.
But amidst Hollywood’s sea of troubles, the horror genre continues to prove itself recession-proof. Fede Alvarez’s “Don’t Breathe” made twice what it was expected to earn over the weekend, taking in $26.4 million. The film, in which a group of teenage burglars attempt to rob the wrong blind guy, was boosted by stellar critical reviews — earning an 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a rarity for a mainstream horror release.
As I’ve previously written, 2016 has been a banner year for horror — both in terms of box-office success and overall quality. Sundance breakout “The Witch,” one of the best movies of the year so far, earned $40 million dollars, 13 times its slim $3 million budget. “Suicide Squad” and “The Legend of Tarzan,” both of which struggled to break even against massive budgets, would kill for those dividends. Fellow horror hits like “The Conjuring 2” ($319 million worldwide), “Lights Out” ($110 million), “10 Cloverfield Lane” ($108.3 million) “The Purge: Election Year” ($102.3 million), “The Shallows” ($84.5 million) each made back between five to 10 times their modest budgets.
The lower financial risk associated with horror releases makes them the “best investment in Hollywood,” as FiveThirtyEight points out. But why are audiences lining up to get their pants scared off at the theater when so many other properties have been abandoned by moviegoers?
In recent years, studios have tried to entice potential patrons to leave their living rooms by turning filmgoing into a Super Bowl-like event, a unique experience that can’t be recreated via “Netflix and chill.” But more than any other genre, horror needs to be experienced in the dark of a movie theater. It thrives on that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs as we cling to the arm of the person next to us, nervously awaiting that unexpected “boo!” moment. The communal experience of having the daylights scared out of us reminds audiences why we go to the movies in the first place.
How horror gave us what 3D didn’t
The success of horror movies in 2016 has frequently been chalked up to viewers’ desires for fresh ideas during a year where everything feels like a retread. Did we really need another “Independence Day” movie, or a “Zoolander” follow-up more than a decade too late?
That’s a nice sentiment, except that it isn’t entirely true. Of the year’s 10 highest grossing films so far, just two are original properties: “Zootopia” and “The Secret Life of Pets.” (“Deadpool” is technically a spinoff from the poorly received “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.”) Of this year’s movies officially classified as financial failures on Box Office Flops, just 24 percent were sequels or reboots. The list of bombs includes critical darlings like “The Nice Guys,” “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” and “Midnight Special,” the kinds of idiosyncratic, original concepts frustrated filmgoers say they want.
Audiences do want those movies, but they don’t want to pay $15 for them — especially when something like “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot,” “A Hologram for the King,” or “Florence Foster Jenkins” will just be available on iTunes in three months.
The latter is a fine example of the issue at hand. Starring Meryl Streep as a famously terrible opera singer, the Stephen Frears-directed comedy is the kind of well-crafted adult entertainment that — at one time — proved a reliable sleeper hit in the dog days of August, when students abandon the theaters for the classroom. That strategy worked wonders for Streep’s “Julie and Julia” in 2009. Co-starring Amy Adams, the frothy Julia Child biopic earned $94 million domestically.
Despite warm reviews and strong Oscar buzz, “Florence Foster Jenkins” has earned just $20 million in the U.S. at this point in its run. The film will likely finish with less than half of what fellow August release “Hope Springs,” in which Streep and Tommy Lee Jones played an aging couple struggling with intimacy, earned four years ago.
This isn’t a Meryl Streep problem, of course. It’s a Hollywood problem.
Overall filmgoing has notably declined in recent years, reaching a 20-year low point in 2014. Following the massive success of “Avatar,” the resurgence of 3D was intended to stem the tide of audience ennui. The James Cameron-directed film was an unprecedented global phenomenon, one that managed to get $2.7 billion dollars worth of viewers to buy a movie ticket at a time when people don’t buy movie tickets. Suddenly, everything was in 3D, even if it didn’t need to be. Baz Luhrmann’s unnecessary “The Great Gatsby” remake reimagined the Roaring Twenties as an era where the glamour and wanton excess of the idle rich literally reached out and touched audiences.
Through fourth-wall-breaking spectacle, the 3D revolution was intended to reclaim the theater’s rightful place as the center of the moviegoing universe. It was a faulty gamble. The public’s interest in 3D has drastically waned since the technology’s heyday, when the glitzy gimmick was supposed to “save” cinema. In 2014, just 6.6 percent of films were released in 3D, down from a peak of 45 percent just three years earlier.
Why horror audiences keep coming back
If 3D failed to give audiences a compelling reason to come back to the multiplex, horror has done what it did not.
“Don’t Breathe,” which relies on a tightly-wound coil of tension to build its unbearable atmosphere of suspense, needs to be seen in the largest, most crowded theater imaginable. The film was produced by Sam Raimi, cinema’s reigning grand maestro of funhouse horror. Movies like “Drag Me to Hell” and “Evil Dead 2” are designed to push the audience’s buttons, so giddily inventive that they border on cartoonish. In the former, a mousy banker (Alison Lohman) fights off the forces of the underworld after a scorned client puts a demonic curse on her. In the film’s most cringe-inducing sequence, the heroine jams a ruler down her tormentor’s throat.
“Don’t Breathe” pays tribute to that scene in what amounts to the most egregious use of a turkey baster in cinema history, a moment so deliriously tasteless that it elicits paroxysms of shock and delight. You’ll gasp. You’ll be disgusted. You might also clap for joy.
There’s a certain call-and-response aspect that’s unique to the experience of horror, which needs an active, engaged viewership to effectively get under our skin. For instance, you might roll your eyes at the crying, hysterical theatergoer next to you in “Don’t Breathe” — that is, until you are that person. In an interview with The Wrap, Alexandra West of the Faculty of Horror podcast explained that these extreme, often vocal reactions are caused by the “physical sensation” that horror elicits, one she compares to pornography.
“It provokes people in so many different ways,” West argues. “There’s a huge amount of participation. At ‘Lights Out,’ for example, it was a packed crowd and people were losing their minds.”
This communal experience is not totally exclusive to horror. Being in a standing-room-only theater filled with people laughing hysterically can make the most middling of comedies funnier (e.g. “Meet the Fockers”). No genre, however, has the ability to use mass hysteria to tap into the audience’s collective unconscious like horror does — the buried, primordial fears unearthed through public catharsis.
On a surface level, “Don’t Breathe” and “Lights Out” deal with our respective fears of silence and darkness. But Alvarez’ film also uses the landscape of contemporary Detroit — the parts that look abandoned and post-apocalyptic — as an allegory about the failed economy. “Don’t Breathe” is about our fear of getting trapped, whether that’s in a basement or a rundown neighborhood few have the opportunity to leave. Rocky (Jane Levy) robs a blind Gulf War vet (Stephen Lang) not out of greed but to buy a better life for her younger sister, whom she plans to move to California. The botched heist ends in a violent, terrifying standoff, but it’s less scary than the everyday reality of living in Detroit.
The breakout success of “Don’t Breathe” and its peers will continue to be tested in the fall with the release of a string of horror sequels: “Rings,” which trades the deadly videotapes of the 2002 original for a haunted iPad; “Ouija: Origin of Evil,” a “Conjuring”-like take on the popular board game; and “Blair Witch,” a reimagining of the 1999 cult phenomenon. Sixteen years ago, its shaky-cam forebear nabbed an unbelievable 4,143x return in its $60,000 budget, a harbinger of the decades to come. What once seemed like an outlier now looks like the future of cinema.
In “Danse Macabre,” a 1981 non-fiction book on the evolution of popular horror, Stephen King describes terror as the “finest emotion.” When it comes to the movies, it’s also the one that keeps us coming back.
How the New Yorker stays on top of the humor news cycle: “My No. 1 news source these days is my submission pile. Sometimes it beats the Times”
(Credit: newyorker.com/Screen Montage by Salon)
Over the last several years, the Daily Shouts & Murmurs section of The New Yorker website has fostered and cultivated a wide array of voices and humor styles that manage to seamlessly connect to the magazine proper while still distinguishing the online daily section as something unique and experimental. At the helm of this endeavor is editor Emma Allen, whose eye for talent and appreciation for both the absurd and the satirical help Daily Shouts stand out.
Although she’s constantly swamped with submissions (often from me, possibly from you), Allen recently took the time to respond to some questions about how digital platforms relate to comedy, how to edit humor and the value of taste in written pieces.
What was your interest in comedy before you got the Daily Shouts position? Did you write or produce humor before, or did you have other interests and the transition happened organically?
I’ve always been interested in comedy (as diversion, coping mechanism, etc.) and growing up in New York City was lucky enough to see lot of live comedy at a young age. In fact, my best friend in high school did standup, so I attended more than my share of horrifying open-mic nights before I could legally buy a beer. I remember there was one frequent open-mic performer who would bend over a stool and narrate the experience of getting an enema, which was pretty enlightening.
Then in college, I was an editor of the Arts & Living section of the Yale Daily News and edited a humor page there, with a stable of incredible writers that included Ethan Kuperberg and Will Stephen, now of “Transparent” and “SNL” respectively, who’ve gone on to contribute fabulous stuff to The New Yorker.
After graduation, I worked as a visual arts writer and editor, which sounds unfunny, but as the rookie, a lot of what I was assigned had comedic potential. (For instance, I covered the “animal artist” beat, which is a rich one, pun-wise.)
When I was hired by The New Yorker it was by the all-time great humor editor Susan Morrison, of SPY magazine fame, among many other things. She taught me so much about tightening jokes and honing writers’ voices without causing them too much anxiety, or having them feel like I’ve robbed their work of anything essential.
In a position like this, how do you compromise between keeping the voice consistent and bringing in new writers? Is there ever a situation where something is undeniably funny, but you can’t let it through because the tone or structure isn’t in line with the needs of the publication?
One of the wonderful things about Daily Shouts, which we launched about three years ago, and I took over about two years ago, is that there’s never been any pressure to have any sort of tonal consistency. I think it’s sort of fantastically all over the place. And it’s become a venue for introducing new and different types of writers with different styles and voices. It’s also become a springboard for them — a place to strengthen their writing, and maybe then get a piece in the magazine.
I’m trying to recall if there’s ever been anything that I’ve felt I had to reject — I guess there are things that are so graphically lewd that I might hesitate to post them, lest I cause some of our readers to have heart attacks — but if it’s good enough . . . I usually find a way to make it work.
With Daily Shouts, you’ve been able to give voice to more female writers, as well as have a mix of absurdist pieces and more topical ones. Were these part of your vision for Daily Shouts, or did they just happen as the site gained a certain amount of popularity?
I definitely didn’t have an agenda going in, although I do believe that there’s no reason why white men should have any sort of corner on the comedy market. I think the diversity of voices has had more to do with just having a platform where I get to promote things that I believe are good. There are so many awesome comedians out there that I see at readings, and whose work I admire on other Web sites, and I’m in the incredibly privileged position of being able to reach out to them and encourage them to try their hand at Shouts-writing.
It is true that as Daily Shouts has gained more visibility, more and more people from all over, with crazily divergent styles, have started submitting on their own, which is a huge boon for me. Things are wending their way to my inbox and the general submission inbox (which I also read) that are just superb, by people I maybe wouldn’t have found on my own. It makes my job easier, except that at all times I now have like a thousand pieces to read.
Publishing more timely stuff is just a basic benefit of the medium — I can turn things around for the web much faster than we can for a magazine that’s on a weekly production schedule.
Do you think that the rise of the Internet helped in any way to either reinvigorate humor writing, or allow new formats to emerge and find popularity? If so, what role do you think The New Yorker’s digital platform has been in that?
Yes! I’d say the Internet has been hugely beneficial for humor writers. There just weren’t that many platforms for written humorous fiction before and now there are so many flourishing ones — Reductress, Clickhole, Splitsider, College Humor, McSweeney’s. I’m so pleased that Daily Shouts gets to be a part of that dynamic landscape. (The New Yorker was founded as a humor publication, after all.)
Format-wise, sure: there’s room for more interactive and multimedia and illustrated stuff; for pieces that are much shorter (maybe too slight for the print publication); or much longer (too many print pages), etc.
One unique thing the site is able to do is feature content that responds directly to a recent news item or cultural conversation. “Behold Your Newest Silver-Screen Sex Goddess, Jane Neighbor” comes to mind as a piece that managed to sharply respond to a conversation that was maybe a week old, if that. In this way, do you see digital platforms as having more power or ability to stay current and engage culture in ways a physical publication might not be able to?
Definitely — as I said above, the medium is such that I can turn things around very quickly, which is not always possible with a weekly print publication, although we have also crashed great timely Shouts & Murmurs into the magazine at the last minute. (Susanna Wolff’s “To Fall Out of Love, Do This,” for instance, which lampooned a viral New York Times article that had just come out.)
And, yes, it’s always satisfying to really nail the timing on something. With Daily Shouts, sometimes that means seeing some news item and immediately reaching out to writers in our stable (by which I just mean frequent contributors whom I trust to turn something clean around quickly). More often, though, I don’t even see the breaking news before I get an influx of pieces satirizing it. My No. 1 news source these days is my submission pile. Sometimes it beats the Times.
Two fairly frequent contributors you have to Daily Shouts are Jesse Eisenberg and Colin Nissan. Both have fairly different voices, but they always work their way to the joke. Do you think it takes a certain kind of brain or set of experiences to write things that are funny?
I’m sure there are plenty of graduate theses that have lots to say about what makes a person funny. But I don’t know that I would dare analyze what makes Colin or Jesse or any of our other frequent contributors funnier than your average human. Both Jesse and Colin are very talented prose writers, as well as joke-makers, which is one of the reasons they end up on the site with some frequency.
The one thing I can say is that whatever it is that makes a humor piece work doesn’t follow any obvious pattern. You just have to have an original conceit and execute it well, in a surprising way. (Helpful advice, right?) But you don’t need any special degree, or special training to do it. I think it’s one of the best things about humor at The New Yorker — in a publication where you generally have to be an expert in your field, a well-established writer or scholar to be published, I get to take random submissions from college kids and first-time writers and people from, like, rural Canada and get them onto newyorker.com.
In your experience, how much influence or reworking should the editor engage in?
I think it varies from piece to piece. Beyond grammatical fixes and reformatting, though, I usually aim for minimal intervention, unless it significantly sharpens a joke or clarifies the conceit. And it’s always a give and take with the writer, too. But my writing for the magazine goes through the editing wringer, so I know first-hand the gut-wrenching pain that comes from seeing a new draft of your story that doesn’t feel like the thing you wrote. First and foremost, I aim not to cause people too much pain.
Is there anything out there that you feel hurts the medium of humor writing? I think there’s a notion for some that written humor isn’t for everyone in the same way that Will Ferrell vehicles or the soft punch lines of a Jimmy Fallon monologue might be, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the case.
People have very different tastes when it comes to comedy. And I try to publish well-written things that I think will appeal to sensibilities other than my own, even if they are not my favorite pieces ever. But I wouldn’t say that some types of humor are inherently bad (other than just like patently racist, sexist, bigoted stuff).
The only thing I really see potentially hurting the medium is the vitriol of commenters on social media who, sometimes going off only a headline, or an out-of-context quote that’s making the rounds, will say horrible and abusive things about a writer or a piece of writing. The democratic potential of online criticism is so theoretically heartening, and I take sane concerns and complaints to heart, but if someone doesn’t like your humor piece that makes gentle fun of, I don’t know, cheese, it’s crazy that then feel entitled to say that you deserve to die.
Do you think humor needs to be tasteful in order to work? What do you think the compromise is between relevancy and intent? Humor and culture at the moment?
I sometimes worry that a quest for “tasteful” humor can push people to publish stuff that’s safe or soft, which is dangerous because inflammatory humor can serve a really productive and progressive purpose — where would we be without Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks?
That said, I think one of the most important job of an editor is to try to anticipate various possible readings of, and responses to, the things you’re going to publish, and to try to only publish things that will do more good than bad, once they’re unleashed on the world. (Sorry if that sounds too Aaron Sorkinian — blech.) But honestly, I am constantly misgauging how pieces will be received. And I just have to move on to the next one and keep trying to make informed, empathetic decisions.
By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the Neu Jorker parody that lovingly skewered the quirks and signature aspects of The New Yorker. While obviously an homage, the apparently one-shot magazine did tear into the humor section a bit. I’m curious if outside criticism like this — no matter how loving or well-intentioned — penetrates a publication with such renown. Either way, what do you do to help keep the Daily Shouts sharp, engaged, and varied week to week?
I loved The Neu Jorker! And a number of its writers, including Blythe, who wrote the mock Shouts & Murmurs, are contributors to Daily Shouts, which I thought made it even better. There is no greater honor than such a specific and on-the-nose parody. I haven’t heard anyone here complain about it. Mostly, our exhausted editors are just amazed that anyone would tackle the task of producing a whole issue, albeit a parody, for fun.
And I’m flattered that you describe Daily Shouts as “sharp, engaged, and varied” — really the writers just keep churning out sharp, engaged, and varied stuff and I wade through a lot of it and try not to edit it in a way that makes them want to kill me/never submit again.
Colin Kaepernick’s brave decision: An open letter to the 49ers quarterback
Colin Kaepernick (Credit: Reuters/Jake Roth)
Dear Brother Kaepernick,
I could only imagine the repetitive thump of vomitous noise you are hearing from the racist parasites that hinder American growth. So much that maybe you questioned your decision — I hope not, but if you did, I’d like to say that we are proud you chose to sit out again and that the people are with you.
I don’t speak for every person of color, nor do I try to; however, as a community activist, professor, and writer, I have a firsthand experience in dealing with some of the victims you sided with when you sat the anthem out — through dealing with police brutality, struggling to navigate through this racist system, and drying the tears of Baltimore residents who had to watch Freddie Gray’s murderers go free. Often the fight feels like a hopeless nightmare, but the work so many of us activists are doing in an effort to enhance social relations has just been elevated by your brave decision. My time in modern activism has taught me not to rely on professional athletes or entertainers in general, and you changed that.
Don’t get it twisted, we will certainly welcome any high profile help that we can get, but I understand that over 95% of these predominantly black-stacked teams have white owners who don’t understand what its like to be black in America, probably don’t care, and have benefited from the racist legacy attached to the American flag. They have a vested interest in patriotism and nationalism, as it has played a key role in their businesses, their families, the billions of dollars they make. Anything against the ideologies that are directly connected to the money is criminal, and no endorsement-seeking athlete wants to be seen as a criminal or traitor, they just want to get paid for their talents, as they should.
I also respect the professional athletes who understand these issues, but don’t want to ruffle any feathers because they use their money to bring about systemic change in a different way, which is also valuable. Either way, your decision is monumental and you will now be mentioned in the ranks with other courageous athletes like the late great Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Craig Hodges, John Carlos, and Tommy Smith. All of you are honorable and took huge gambles just to be on the right side of history, regarding morality and representing the plight of your people. And Colin, you are also on the right side of history by boycotting the anthem, as it wasn’t intended for black people when it was created by Francis Scott Key, a slave owner in 1814.
I explained his role in the toxic legacy of the song in my book, “The Beast Side,” published last year: “Francis Scott Key sang for freedom while enslaving blacks. His hatred even bled into the lyrics of the elongated version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ you won’t hear at a sporting event. The third stanza reads, ‘No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.’
That line was basically a shot at the slaves who agreed to fight with the British in exchange for their freedom. Who wouldn’t want freedom, and how could he not understand them opting out for a better life?
A life free of mass whippings, rape and unpaid labor. Andrew Jackson caught wind of slaves agreeing to fight with the British in exchange for freedom and made a similar promise to thousands of slaves in Louisiana. He told them if they protected Louisiana, they could be free after the war. Well, we won the war, and then Jackson reneged on the deal. He went on to be president while the brave Africans who fought with honor went back into servitude.
Jackson’s lie was followed by generation after generation of broken promises. It’s 200 years later and America still enslaves a tremendous amount of its population through poverty, lack of opportunity, false hopes of social mobility, unfair educational practices and the prison industrial complex.”
This essay alone brought me hundreds of death threats and cost me money, and some employment opportunities that I really needed at the time it was published, but it was the right thing to do and I wouldn’t change a word. Hopefully your boycott will be followed by more public figures taking a stand and pushing to truly make this country a better place. The other day I saw a funny meme with a picture of that clown Donald Trump spewing hate about America not being great and receiving love from the same people ripping you for being brave, in our nation of double standards — and that’s the problem.
Too many Americans act like loving this country means never criticizing this country and that’s just stupid. Blindly praising a flag and not acknowledging the problems that exist is the most un-American thing a person can do. When did challenging our country to be better become anti American? That same mentality is responsible for our country lagging in education, healthcare, life expectancy — we are just claiming to be the greatest without doing the work.
James Baldwin once wrote, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” We change flat tires and put cast on broken arms in this country — we fix problems. So why are so many of our citizens suffering without notice? If you truly love America, you’d challenge it and all it’s flaws until it was a place where equality truly exists, that’s what you are doing and that’s what being great is all about.
Thank you again for choosing the people, we salute you.
One Love,
D. Watkins
Below, watch D. Watkins chat with activist Tariq Toure about Colin Kaepernick and police brutality
The job crisis we must not ignore: Employment for young Americans remains staggeringly low
(Credit: AP/Matt Rourke)
In the surreal kabuki theater that is “Choice 2016″ the entire focus by the corporate news media is on Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It is all about the major party candidates latest gaffe, facial tick, or how much money they have, or haven’t raised.
Missed in this over priced electoral carnival is a crisis that has been brewing in plain sight for decades, a growing cohort of disconnected teens and young adults who are neither in school nor working. By some estimates there is between 5.5 million to 6.7 million of these idle young souls whose inability to actualize will have profound lifelong implications for them and for the nation as a whole.
As older teens age into young adults, with no job and no direction, that failure to launch means failure to individuate from their parents, delaying marriage or even their own household formation. That lack of what psychologists call ‘agency over their lives’ hobbles them for life in terms of depressed lifetime earnings and the increasing likelihood they’ll end up incarcerated or bleeding out as a gun violence victim.
Dr. Harriet Fraad, a New York City mental health counselor who specializes in helping families cope with economic dislocation, said there’s an alienation that can set in the longer the young person is disconnected.
“They are told no one wants or needs you,” Fraad told Salon. “Their respites are to join others and fight for change, or become criminal to fight back, or get high and escape as rural youth can attest.”
Fraad thinks the emergence of this out of work-not in school young adult age cohort has prompted these young people to question the legitimacy of capitalism.
“That is why now a majority prefer socialism to capitalism even though they are nor certain what either means,” Fraad said. “They know we have capitalism and they are hurting.”
“Disconnected youth are white and black, Hispanic and Asian,” according to Opportunity Nation, a non-profit advocacy group’s website. “They are middle-class and poor, native born and immigrants. They live in rural, suburban and urban areas. Some struggled in school and lacked adequate supports to make it to graduation day. They include in their number the estimated one million students who drop out of high school each year, and fall through the cracks.”
Just last week, an insightful analysis by the Chicago Tribune reported that in Chicago there were 45,000 20 to 24 year olds not in school and not working. When they looked at data for the greater Chicago metro region they found that there were 150,000 idle 16 to 24 year olds.
The Chicago Tribune observed that from January to July of this year 55 percent of the shooting victims and 59 percent of the arrests related to shootings in Chicago were of young people in the 15-to-24 age cohort.
“The two trends are tragically intertwined, where youth unemployment contributes to the incidence of violence, and violence in our communities contributes to many barriers to employment, both because of the violence itself and because of the criminal justice system’s response to that violence,” Matt Bruce, executive director of the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance told the Chicago Tribune.
The trend was first flagged by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as starting to manifest in the early 2000s and has only accelerated over time. With post Great Recession structural shifts, like the spike in returning senior citizens back into the workforce, the bar is even higher today for kids to get that first job. The longer they go without that first employment experience the more depressed their lifetime earnings.
A BLS analysis noted that some of the summer youth employment drop off was the result of more kids opting for summer school or some other form of academic enrichment over working but also concluded that for kids looking for work jobs were harder to come by.
“There is evidence as well that the types of jobs that teens would normally fill have become scarcer: not only is there increased competition for such jobs from other groups, but also, fewer summer jobs are funded through government programs,” wrote Teresa Morisi, a BLS economist in a 2010 white paper. “Finally, the decade has experienced two recessions, which no doubt have diminished employment opportunities for teens as well as other age groups.
The research is clear that it is that first summer job that often acts as the catalyst for a career. While higher education, no doubt has its value, life is not always about just improving yourself, but bringing value to the broader community in the humility of service to others that we find in work.
In his last State of the Union Address, President Obama raised the issue of “disconnected youth” and he asked Congress for $5.5 billion to help fund programs to increase employment and career opportunities for this cohort in an era where globalization and automation were making jobs increasingly harder to come by. Since 2010, when that Bureau of Labor research first surfaced about the deteriorating youth employment picture, Congress’s response has been to cut this programs by hundreds of millions of dollars in the years since.
But it’s not just about Republican of Democrats. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio, a self-proclaimed progressive, celebrated his “historic” boost of summer youth employment slots to 60,000. Yet, sadly close to 140,000 kids applied to the lottery-based program, meaning close to 80,000 kids were sent away empty handed. Since when was 43 percent a passing grade and what does the use of a lottery affirm?
What we have here is not a failure of just the Democrats or the Republicans, but of those of us who are middle-aged and older, who control stuff, to make the fate of every one of our nation’s kids something we care about and that informs our voting. If we saw one of our own kids just hanging out for years, aging into young adulthood idle, you can bet we’d take action.
It would be very much about the urgency of now.
Despite 10,000 civilian casualties in Yemen — 13 per day — U.S. reaffirms support for Saudi Arabia
Yemenis carry the body of a child they uncovered from under the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi airstrikes near Sana'a Airport, Yemen on March 26, 2015 (Credit: AP/Hani Mohammed)
A minimum of 10,000 civilians have been killed or wounded in the U.S.-backed war in Yemen, according to the U.N. humanitarian coordinator.
Since the Saudi-led coalition began its bombing campaign in Yemen in March 2015, there has been an average of 13 civilian casualties a day, according to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. (The U.N. uses the word casualty to refer to both deaths and injuries.)
The U.N. and human rights organizations have thoroughly documented atrocities committed by the Western-backed coalition and have accused it of committing war crimes. Despite these reports, the U.S. continues to reaffirm its close alliance with its repressive Saudi ally and sell it weapons.
About 3,800 Yemeni civilians have been killed and more than 6,000 have been injured in the war, according to the U.N.
In August, the U.N. high commissioner released a report on the situation of human rights in Yemen. It revealed that at least 2.8 million Yemenis, including more than 400,000 families, have been forced to flee their homes because of the violence.
“The prolonged duration of the conflict has strongly heightened the disastrous risk of a systemic collapse of Yemen,” wrote Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner. “The resilience of the Yemeni people has been stretched beyond human limits.”
Before the war Yemen was already the poorest country in the Middle East. The bombing has destroyed significant parts of health infrastructure and exacerbated the already dire humanitarian situation. At least 7.6 million Yemenis, including 3 million women and children, suffer from malnutrition, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has estimated.
Al-Hussein concluded his report stressing, “The international community, in its full range of political, legal and civil forces, has a legal and moral duty to take urgent steps to alleviate the appalling levels of human despair.”
The U.N. report warned that extremist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited the security vacuum created by the war. It also noted that sectarianism is on the rise among some political and religious leaders.
On Aug. 31, Ismael Ould Cheikh Ahmed, the U.N. special envoy to Yemen, advised the Security Council of the same thing. He said al-Qaeda and ISIS “continue to wreak havoc in significant parts of Yemen.”
Ahmed cautioned, “The absence of the state in many parts of Yemen, in addition to the chaos created by war, will continue to facilitate the expansion of these terrorist groups which represents a real threat to the region.”
Journalist Safa al-Ahmad, reporting for the BBC, said she saw Emirati forces from the Saudi-led coalition fighting alongside al-Qaeda, together battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
In April the Pentagon quietly sent U.S. troops into Yemen to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has greatly benefited from the destructive war.
The U.S. and U.K. have played a pivotal role in the catastrophic war. The Obama administration has done more than $110 billion in arms deals with the Saudi monarchy. The U.S. military continues to refuel coalition planes and provide intelligence, and American and British officials have physically been in the room with Saudi bombers. The New York Times editorial board noted, “Experts say the coalition would be grounded if Washington withheld its support.”
For months, the U.N. has repeatedly said the U.S.-backed coalition is responsible for the majority of the civilian casualties. It has, however, also documented atrocities committed by Houthi rebels and militants loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh that are fighting the coalition forces.
On Aug. 31, the Saudi-led coalition bombed the home of a Yemeni imam in northern Yemen, killing at least 16 members of his extended family.
This was the latest in a slew of attacks on civilians. In just over three weeks after the peace talks broke down on Aug. 6, the U.S.-backed coalition bombed a hospital, a school, a food factory, another civilian home and more, killing at least 70 civilians.
The hospital attacked by the coalition was the fourth medical facility run by Doctors Without Borders to be bombed in Yemen in the past 10 months. Amnesty International identified remnants of bombs at this hospital that were manufactured in either the U.S. or the U.K.
In response to the attack, which killed 19 civilians, Doctors Without Borders withdrew its remaining staff from six hospitals in northern Yemen.
The bloodshed has inspired some lawmakers in the U.S. to take action. At the Sept. 1 U.S. State Department press briefing, a reporter noted that about 65 House lawmakers sent a letter to President Barack Obama, calling on him to halt a $1.15 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia. The congresspeople cited reports of attacks on Yemeni civilians.
U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby responded by emphasizing that “Saudi Arabia remains a key ally and partner in the region.”
He said, “The United States continues to support a strong defense and security relationship with Saudi Arabia,” noting that Secretary of State Kerry visited Jeddah in late August to discuss the conflict with Saudi authorities.
“We obviously understand and share concerns by members of Congress about the damage to civilian infrastructure and to innocent civilian lives in Yemen as a result of Saudi-led coalition operations,” Kirby added.
The reporter continued, “But particularly if there’s a concern about damage to civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties, there must be also a concern that that could be being done in the hands of U.S. weapons by the Saudis.”
The State Department spokesperson repeated, “Obviously, we have a strong defense relationship with Saudi Arabia, which results in foreign military sales of quite a bit of articles of defense-related equipment.” He said the U.S. has raised concerns about civilian casualties but could not provide any further details.
Amnesty International has condemned the U.S. government for its “astonishing,”and “vast flood of weapons” to the Saudi regime.
“Yemen’s horror exposes the deadly hypocrisy of arms exporters like the U.K. and the USA,” wrote Amnesty International’s arms control campaigner Rasha Abdul Rahim and Yemen researcher Rasha Mohamed, in an Aug. 26 article.
They called the silence of the U.S. and U.K. about the suffering of Yemeni civilians “deafening.”
“It is hard to imagine the despair that Yemenis feel,” the Amnesty International researchers wrote. “There is nowhere that children can feel safe; they make up a third of the 3,799 civilians killed in Yemen since the coalition campaign began in March 2015.”
Rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the Saudi-led coalition’s use of cluster munitions — banned in much of the world — in civilian areas. These bombs were made in the U.S., the U.K. and Brazil.
“The refusal of Saudi Arabia’s main arms suppliers to engage in any kind of public debate about what is happening in Yemen is shameful,” they continued. “Blunt denials, vague platitudes, or just plain silence are becoming the standard responses to reams of credible information on how the Saudi Arabia-led coalition are using those arms to commit serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.”
Until countries that are party to the international Arms Trade Treaty “begin to live up to the treaty’s obligations, all Yemenis in hospital beds can do is pray that the next round of airstrikes hits somewhere else,” the Amnesty International officials concluded.
Look Again: The day’s most compelling images from around the globe
Protesters clash with riot police during a rally to demand a referendum to remove Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, Venezuela, September 1, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY - RTX2NTR7 (Credit: Reuters)
Sao Paulo, Brazil Nacho Doce/Reuters
A demonstrator attacks the Folha newspaper office during a protest against Brazil’s new President Michel Temer
The commodity boom funded the success of Latin America’s “pink tide.” Today, plummeting prices are causing big problems for cash-strapped leftist governments throughout the region. In Brazil, the impeachment of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, widely condemned as a coup, has solidified interim-president Michel Temer’s hold on power. But Temer is extremely unpopular, and that unpopularity is a reminder that the left’s troubles in the region will not necessarily deliver the right anything like a popular mandate for its agenda.
–Daniel Denvir, staff reporter
Madrid, Spain Paul White/AP
Zaid, 8, a Syrian refugee now living in Spain, poses with a sign reading in Spanish, “I survived, 423 other children did not”
Today marks the one year anniversary of Alan Kurdi’s death, the Syrian toddler immortalized in a chilling photograph on a Turkish beach — a symbol of the cost of the refugee crisis. His father said this week that he didn’t believe the international attention ultimately made any difference. This picture is the only hope I have to think he may be wrong.
–Sophia Tesfaye, deputy politics editor
Vienna, Austria Leonhard Foeger/Reuters
Colouful umbrellas decorate Dorner Platz
“Can I get that in black?”
–Chauncey DeVega, politics writer
Caracas, Venezuela Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters
Protesters clash with police during a rally to remove Venezuela’s President, Nicolas Maduro
This photograph’s power is born of deception. As viewers, it’s obvious that the figure caped in the Venezuelan flag is in the foreground, while the burning pyre is some distance away in the mid-ground. Despite that, there’s a kinetic quality to the scene — the inchoate violence of a protest, the roaring of a fire, the flapping of a flag — that suggests if that flag traverses the ostensibly minuscule distance between it and the fire, a conflagration will occur. Only that’s not a minuscule distance. It’s a illusory tension, created by deception and viewers’ desire to read static images as potentially active scenes.
–Scott Eric Kaufman, assistant editor
FBI publishes notes on Hillary Clinton’s use of private email
In this photo taken Aug. 18, 2016,Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks to media at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. In his speech at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump made seven references to the conflict in Syria, pointing to the war-ravaged nation as a source of much of the world’s turmoil, particularly immigration and extremism. A week later at the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton made not one reference to Syria. That could be because the conflict in Syria remains a major conundrum for both President Barack Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) (Credit: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI has released 58 pages of documents from its recently closed investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, including a summary of agents’ interviews with Clinton and several of her aides.
The documents include technical details about how the server in the basement of Clinton’s home was set up.
Friday’s release of documents involving the Democratic presidential nominee is a highly unusual step, but one that reflects the extraordinary public interest in the investigation into Clinton’s server.
After a yearlong investigation, the FBI recommended against prosecution in July, and the Justice Department then closed the case.
FBI Director James Comey said that while Clinton and her aides had been “extremely careless,” there was no evidence they intentionally mishandled classified information.
Porn is not “for losers”: Pamela Anderson is wrong to blame it for Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal
Pamela Anderson (Photo by Colin Young-Wolff /Invision/AP, File) (Credit: AP/Colin Young-Wolff/Invision)
First I want to say that I understand where Pamela Anderson, who wrote an over-the-top indictment of pornography co-authored by rabbi Shmuley Boteach, for The Wall Street Journal this week, is coming froom. How do I, an outspoken sex-positive feminist erotica author, get her point of view? Because I too was once ardently anti-porn. During my college years at the University of California at Berkeley, I eagerly attended a talk and book signing at Cody’s Books by noted feminist anti-porn scholar Catharine MacKinnon, and volunteered for her partner-against-porn Andrea Dworkin’s website. Back then, in my very earliest adulthood, I had never seen porn, mind you, but I was sure it was sexist, backwards and just plain wrong. I too, like Anderson, would have signed on to the idea that porn causes harm, makes men stray and is bad for society.
And then I watched some porn during a date at a guy’s house, and my entire perspective changed. This was almost 20 years ago, so I don’t remember the video’s title. I know it was a series of XXX vignettes, where people got naked and had sex for a few minutes, and then the scene morphed to new people getting naked and having sex. I also know that the instant the first image hit the screen, I was aroused. I didn’t pause to analyze every political permutation of what I was seeing; I simply went with the feeling of being swept away by this new-to-me type of entertainment.
I honestly don’t even remember all that much about my encounter with the young man in question, only that from that moment on, I could no longer consider myself “against” porn because I was now aware that “porn” was too gigantic an entity to oversimplify. I also couldn’t default to the belief that men had a monopoly on porn viewing. Now I know they also don’t have a monopoly on porn creation and that there are so many talented women behind the camera like Erika Lust, Shine Louise Houston, Maria Beatty, Joanna Angel, Pandora Blake, Tristan Taormino and many others; check out the Feminist Porn Awards website or this guide, as just two of many resources, for more suggestions.
Yet that hasn’t stopped people from trying to paint porn as a monolithic monster intent on complete destruction of love, lust and happy relationships. Anderson and Boteach are only the latest in a long line of moralizers from both the right and the left who make sweeping assumptions about how porn affects users — and who those users are. Here’s a snippet of what they had to say:
“From our respective positions of rabbi-counselor and former Playboy model and actress, we have often warned about pornography’s corrosive effects on a man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband and, by extension, as father. This is a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness given how freely available, anonymously accessible and easily disseminated pornography is nowadays.”
They go on to make doomsday proclamations, such as, “How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill? How many children will propel, warp-speed, into the dark side of adult sexuality by forced exposure to their fathers’ profanations?”
You probably get the gist, but if not, I’ll summarize it with of their own carefully chosen, highly judgmental words: “porn is for losers.” They aren’t big on the “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy.
There are so many things wrong with this argument, it’s hard to know where to start, but first off, they don’t even attempt to define what they mean by “porn.” Instead there’s an inherent assumption that we all know what it is, and that all of it is suspect. There’s no acknowledgement that the category encompasses as wide a range of interests and outlets as the human imagination can conjure. No, instead all the niche fetish subsets and everything from softcore to the most hardcore of sex scenes are simply lumped in as “porn.”
As Cindy Gallop, founder of the website Make Love Not Porn, which features non-porn actors getting it on on camera, writes so eloquently in The Independent, the answer to the fact that porn is so often teens’ de facto sex education and adults’ only outlet for expressing their true sexual desires is a problem, but not one whose solution lies in taking any sort of pledge against porn, as Anderson and Boteach want their readers to do. As Gallop explains, “Of course we enjoy watching porn – especially when society refuses to celebrate sex authentically, openly and honestly in other forms of popular culture. So the epochal shift needs to be not censoring, repressing, blocking, shutting down – it needs to be opening up. Open up the dialogue around sex as a natural universal human experience, but very importantly also – open up to welcoming, supporting and funding entrepreneurs who want to disrupt all of this for the better.”
Anderson and Boteach want us to pick a side: for porn or against porn, without also considering all the other factors that go into our sexual makeup. They want to castigate porn and its users in the most over-the-top, judgmental way, as if shaming porn users by telling them they’re “losers” is ever going to get them to stop. They don’t pause and question whether their frustration with “porn” is perhaps instead a frustration with sexist attitudes, with men who see women as expendable, freely available and basically prey who should be pounced on at any time . . . even when they’re wearing headphones. There’s a continuum, from the kind of pickup artists who think women “owe” them smiles and conversations and, yes, sex, to the types of attitudes the actress and the rabbi are appalled by, and those predate the widespread porn use they bemoan.
But my biggest issue with their op-ed is that, by roping in Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandals to their animosity toward porn, they very smoothly let him off the hook, failing to hold him accountable when they could instead condemn an entire genre of videos. This is akin to blaming school shootings on video games, or any other boogeyman pop culture scapegoat. As adults, we all have to take responsibility for our actions. That’s not to say that culture, including porn, has no influence over our thoughts and actions, but influence is not the same as causation. Porn didn’t sext women who weren’t Huma Abedin; her husband, Anthony Weiner, did. Yet somehow, that seems to have escaped Anderson’s and Boteach’s notice, despite them trying to have it both ways with bland statements such as “All people are unique individuals and we can be sure that Mr. Weiner’s problems are at least in part a matter of his personal psycho-pathologies.”
If Weiner or any other man (or woman, for that matter) chooses to have an extramarital flirtation, sexting session or full-on affair during a supposedly monogamous relationship, they need to own up to their actions, not blame outside forces. By doing so, Anderson and Boteach are actually deeply insulting men by essentially painting them as mindless sheep who think with their dicks and will do anything a porn star tells them to. Is that really what we think of the male mind, that it’s so pliable, so weak, so easily led by temptation that it can’t make rational decisions even when the body attached to it is aroused? If so, that’s a very sad commentary on the male libido and men’s decision making process. In 2016, I would hope we’d be having a more nuanced conversation about porn, but instead, this pair is trying to drive our sexual culture backward, rather than forward.
