Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 989

My iPhone is ruining my life: I’m guilty of “phubbing” my partner, and I can’t unplug

If my boyfriend and I ever break up, it will probably be because of my cellphone. My incessant staring at my iPhone has caused more fights between us than any other topic. Yes, I admit it, I’m a phubber, a phone snubber. According to a study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior this is a major problem. “Partner phubbing (Pphubbing) can be best understood as the extent to which an individual uses or is distracted by his/her cell phone while in the company of his/her relationship partner.” As summarized by the Huffington Post, the study found, “The results found 46 percent of respondents reported feeling phone snubbed by their partner and nearly 23 percent said it caused an issue in their relationship. More than 36 percent of participants reported feeling depressed at least some of the time.” I took a quiz at Health.com to find out whether phubbing is ruining my life, and got a resounding yes. I answered in the affirmative to most of their statements, such as “During a typical mealtime that my partner and I spend together, my partner pulls out and checks his/her cell phone,” “My partner keeps his or her cell phone in their hand when he or she is with me” and “My partner glances at his/her cell phone when talking to me”—but I’m the partner in this case. The latter is an accusation my boyfriend told me just last week was hurtful to him—yet it’s hard for me to stop. I could blame my job, but that wouldn’t tell the whole story. As a freelance writer who pitches story ideas to my editors, part of my workload involves researching what’s happening this very second, and trying to be among the first to come up with a unique idea around it, the oft-maligned “hot take.” But in addition to that responsibility, scrolling through my inbox and Facebook updates makes me feel connected to the world around me. When I don’t check my phone for a few hours at a time (which I admit rarely happens, save for when I’m sleeping), I start to wonder what’s happening in those spaces when I’m not looking. Perhaps it’s a type of scarcity mentality—if I’m not available to respond, or at least, absorb, the latest emails or status updates, I fear that I will never be in the loop, or that friends and editors will stop contacting me if I don’t get back to them immediately. My need to know has only increased since I moved away from most of my closest friends, trading Brooklyn for New Jersey in 2013. Whereas I at least used to see my friends in person occasionally, and might run into them, and got social engagement by my daily coffee shop visits, I now spend 90 percent of my weekdays home alone, which I admit is often lonely. Being connected online helps. I now find out what my friends are up to primarily through social media, rather than chatting with them in person. So yes, I’m snubbing my boyfriend who’s sitting on the coach with me, but I’m not actually trying to be anti-social. I’m attempting to be a good friend by checking out baby photos and seeing what everyone else is eating/thinking/doing. My boyfriend asked me recently how long I could give up my cell phone for. Rather than give him any quantifiable amount of time, I sat there thinking, Why would I want to do that? While I do understand the impulse to temporarily unplug, the idea of doing so on a regular or extended basis unnerves me. It’s not just that I fear I’d miss out on writing jobs; it’s that I fear I’d miss out on life. I realize as I type those words that “life” does extend beyond the internet, but it can easily feel like it doesn’t, especially when there’s always one more thing I want to see or read or check online. I even used my phone during a recent weeknight movie date. I allowed myself that taboo activity by telling myself I just wanted to briefly check my email, but the truth is, there’s nothing that couldn’t have waited two hours. This isn’t a new social phenomenon. In 2013, a “Stop Phubbing” campaign by Australian graduate student Alex Haigh gained traction. According to Time, “Though the movement’s website is decorated with faux statistics–like ‘92% of repeat phubbers go on to be politicians’–his message addresses people’s real tendency to stare at phones like they’re going to produce winning lottery numbers.” The same article highlighted a University of Essex study on mobile phones’ influence on face-to-face conversation quality in which researches found that phones “may inhibit relationship formation by reducing individuals’ engagement and attention for their partners, and discouraging partners’ perceptions that any self-disclosure had been met with care and empathy.” Ouch. Just this week in The New York Times, "Reclaiming Conversation" author Shelly Turkle urged readers to engage in “whole person conversation,” the kind that involves you and another person or people, not you, a device, and human beings. “[I[f things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t text another friend. You take the moment to read your friend more closely or look at something you haven’t attended to before. Perhaps you look into her face or pay attention to her body language. Or you simply allow the silence,” she advised. In an earlier Times piece titled starkly “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.,” Turkle summarized the status quo as “These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention.” I agree that not only is phone use rampant, we aren’t trying to hide it. Why would we, when almost everyone around us is doing the same thing? Another trick I’ve conned myself into believing is that I wasn’t being rude because I read interesting tidbits to my boyfriend while I’m perusing my phone. While this is sometimes true, I know, because he’s told me, he’d rather have my undivided attention than know about whatever story du jour I’m sharing with him. I admit that I sometimes welcome hanging out with friends where we both feel comfortable whipping out our phones should the need arise—and I’m using a very loose definition of “need.” We are able to simultaneously have conversations and use our phones without either party feeling snubbed, because we’re engaging in an act of seamless multitasking. I truly believe that kids growing up now are going to find ways to incorporate their technology use into their daily conversations and other tasks in ways that aren’t socially awkward. I admit I do have a problem, and plan to try my best to wean myself away from being glued to my phone beyond the workday. Yes, it provides plenty of conversational fodder, but at the expense of making my partner feel neglected, which is too high of a price. If I don’t respond to your email or Tweet for a few hours—or ever—you’ll know why.If my boyfriend and I ever break up, it will probably be because of my cellphone. My incessant staring at my iPhone has caused more fights between us than any other topic. Yes, I admit it, I’m a phubber, a phone snubber. According to a study in the journal Computers in Human Behavior this is a major problem. “Partner phubbing (Pphubbing) can be best understood as the extent to which an individual uses or is distracted by his/her cell phone while in the company of his/her relationship partner.” As summarized by the Huffington Post, the study found, “The results found 46 percent of respondents reported feeling phone snubbed by their partner and nearly 23 percent said it caused an issue in their relationship. More than 36 percent of participants reported feeling depressed at least some of the time.” I took a quiz at Health.com to find out whether phubbing is ruining my life, and got a resounding yes. I answered in the affirmative to most of their statements, such as “During a typical mealtime that my partner and I spend together, my partner pulls out and checks his/her cell phone,” “My partner keeps his or her cell phone in their hand when he or she is with me” and “My partner glances at his/her cell phone when talking to me”—but I’m the partner in this case. The latter is an accusation my boyfriend told me just last week was hurtful to him—yet it’s hard for me to stop. I could blame my job, but that wouldn’t tell the whole story. As a freelance writer who pitches story ideas to my editors, part of my workload involves researching what’s happening this very second, and trying to be among the first to come up with a unique idea around it, the oft-maligned “hot take.” But in addition to that responsibility, scrolling through my inbox and Facebook updates makes me feel connected to the world around me. When I don’t check my phone for a few hours at a time (which I admit rarely happens, save for when I’m sleeping), I start to wonder what’s happening in those spaces when I’m not looking. Perhaps it’s a type of scarcity mentality—if I’m not available to respond, or at least, absorb, the latest emails or status updates, I fear that I will never be in the loop, or that friends and editors will stop contacting me if I don’t get back to them immediately. My need to know has only increased since I moved away from most of my closest friends, trading Brooklyn for New Jersey in 2013. Whereas I at least used to see my friends in person occasionally, and might run into them, and got social engagement by my daily coffee shop visits, I now spend 90 percent of my weekdays home alone, which I admit is often lonely. Being connected online helps. I now find out what my friends are up to primarily through social media, rather than chatting with them in person. So yes, I’m snubbing my boyfriend who’s sitting on the coach with me, but I’m not actually trying to be anti-social. I’m attempting to be a good friend by checking out baby photos and seeing what everyone else is eating/thinking/doing. My boyfriend asked me recently how long I could give up my cell phone for. Rather than give him any quantifiable amount of time, I sat there thinking, Why would I want to do that? While I do understand the impulse to temporarily unplug, the idea of doing so on a regular or extended basis unnerves me. It’s not just that I fear I’d miss out on writing jobs; it’s that I fear I’d miss out on life. I realize as I type those words that “life” does extend beyond the internet, but it can easily feel like it doesn’t, especially when there’s always one more thing I want to see or read or check online. I even used my phone during a recent weeknight movie date. I allowed myself that taboo activity by telling myself I just wanted to briefly check my email, but the truth is, there’s nothing that couldn’t have waited two hours. This isn’t a new social phenomenon. In 2013, a “Stop Phubbing” campaign by Australian graduate student Alex Haigh gained traction. According to Time, “Though the movement’s website is decorated with faux statistics–like ‘92% of repeat phubbers go on to be politicians’–his message addresses people’s real tendency to stare at phones like they’re going to produce winning lottery numbers.” The same article highlighted a University of Essex study on mobile phones’ influence on face-to-face conversation quality in which researches found that phones “may inhibit relationship formation by reducing individuals’ engagement and attention for their partners, and discouraging partners’ perceptions that any self-disclosure had been met with care and empathy.” Ouch. Just this week in The New York Times, "Reclaiming Conversation" author Shelly Turkle urged readers to engage in “whole person conversation,” the kind that involves you and another person or people, not you, a device, and human beings. “[I[f things go quiet for a while you look deeper, you don’t text another friend. You take the moment to read your friend more closely or look at something you haven’t attended to before. Perhaps you look into her face or pay attention to her body language. Or you simply allow the silence,” she advised. In an earlier Times piece titled starkly “Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.,” Turkle summarized the status quo as “These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention.” I agree that not only is phone use rampant, we aren’t trying to hide it. Why would we, when almost everyone around us is doing the same thing? Another trick I’ve conned myself into believing is that I wasn’t being rude because I read interesting tidbits to my boyfriend while I’m perusing my phone. While this is sometimes true, I know, because he’s told me, he’d rather have my undivided attention than know about whatever story du jour I’m sharing with him. I admit that I sometimes welcome hanging out with friends where we both feel comfortable whipping out our phones should the need arise—and I’m using a very loose definition of “need.” We are able to simultaneously have conversations and use our phones without either party feeling snubbed, because we’re engaging in an act of seamless multitasking. I truly believe that kids growing up now are going to find ways to incorporate their technology use into their daily conversations and other tasks in ways that aren’t socially awkward. I admit I do have a problem, and plan to try my best to wean myself away from being glued to my phone beyond the workday. Yes, it provides plenty of conversational fodder, but at the expense of making my partner feel neglected, which is too high of a price. If I don’t respond to your email or Tweet for a few hours—or ever—you’ll know why.

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Reboots done right: How “The Affair” and “The Leftovers” played to their strengths and wiped out their biggest flaws

Last year, audiences had mixed responses to the season's buzziest Sunday night cable offerings, with Showtime’s “The Affair” and HBO’s “The Leftovers” winning both staunch admirers and vehement detractors over the course of their initial runs. While some praised “The Leftovers” for its inventive storytelling and evocative performances, others found it overly gloomy and cryptic to the point of being inaccessible. Likewise, while “The Affair” wracked up Golden Globes for best drama series and for lead actress Ruth Wilson, many critics seemed to grow tired of the self-indulgent central romance. I was on the fence about both: intrigued and cautiously optimistic, yet not entirely invested in the stories the creators were trying to tell. But tuning in to the second season premieres of both shows last night offered pleasant surprises. Both shows have expanded their narrative scope — new perspectives in “The Affair,” new characters and a new location in “The Leftovers" — in ways that seem to respond directly to some of the criticisms of their first seasons. While reboots on TV shows are common (“Homeland,” another returning drama, seems to be trying to wipe the chalkboard clean pretty much every season), both of these shows seem unusually cued in to what it was that made them special -- and, subsequently, what they can afford to leave behind. Let’s start with “The Leftovers.” In season two, the show trades Mapleton, New York, for Jarden, Texas (aka Miracle), a town that miraculously didn’t lose any of its inhabitants in The Sudden Departure. It also introduces a new central family, the Murphys (the Garveys end up moving in next door, but not until much later in the episode). From the beginning, the difference in tone from last season is striking. Gone are season one's gloomy credits, which depicted figures, in the style of a Renaissance painting, being ripped from one another’s arms to the strains of a mournful violin backdrop. This season, Iris DeMent’s folksy, buoyant track “Let the Mystery Be" soundtracks a series of candid snapshots of friends and families: typical scenes of daily life, but for the fact that in each image, figures are missing, rendered only as translucent silhouettes. (The song’s title, meanwhile, seems like a wink and nod to Damon Lindelof’s repeated insistence that he’s not looking to “solve” the Departure.) In a recent Vulture interview, Lindelof explains that he changed the title sequence partly in response to online backlash (as the “Lost” creator points out, he is no stranger to being pilloried online for his narrative choices) but also because it is more self-aware, as well as “tonally more in line with what I want the show to be.” As Lindelof explains, the new title sequence “can express seriousness and loss. But it can also express other ideas. It can have smiling faces, as opposed to anguished faces. It can have real faces, as opposed to painted faces.” This openness to new ideas is evident throughout the episode. While Mapleton was a living mausoleum, a town whose inhabitants walked around sunken from the weight of their grief, there is a lightness to the early scenes in Miracle. Evie Murphy frolics with friends in a lake. Buses of tourists come to revel in the town’s optimism. There is laughter, singing, electronic music. Season one of “The Leftovers” was not just about loss but also its flip-side — finding a way to start over — and season two appears much more concerned with exploring that latter element, at least to start with. Of course, it’s not all rainbows and sunshine. The premiere ends with a tragedy, while an ambitious, wordless, nine-minute opening sequence set in the caveman era will certainly irk those who found the first season a little too Terrence Malicky for their liking. But the most interesting aspect of “The Leftovers” is how the high-concept premise can be brought down to a human level, and how the global cataclysm of the Sudden Departure serves as a springboard to explore personal stories of loss, as well as to interrogate how human beings adapt and find meaning in the wake of tragedy. In broadening the show's world and introducing new characters with new outlooks, the show’s innovative premise stands to be built out in an even more creative and compelling way. “The Affair” has also undergone an expansion in scope. While season one told the stories of an affair from the perspective of its two participants, Noah (Dominic West) and Alison (Ruth Wilson), season two expands to include the perspective of the jilted exes Helen (Maura Tierney) and Cole (Joshua Jackson). Season one was at its best when it used the "Rashomon" effect to explore the nuances of memory and perception that shape our interactions with others, and at its worse when it devolved into cheap shock-and-awe melodrama. The whole murder business still has to play out, but the premiere was much more focused on the psychological ripple effects of Alison and Noah’s affair than last season’s tedious game of Who Killed Scotty Lockhart. What's more, by bringing Helen and Cole into the fold, the show seems committed to the nuanced human drama that made the show so compelling at its start. As creator Sarah Treem told THR, “the whole idea of the first season is that [Noah and Alison] could be together, so they were always on opposite sides of a field looking into the middle trying to understand each other. But now the characters that are actually estranged from each other are no longer Noah and Alison, they are Helen and Noah. Then it became clear that a lot of the storytelling — the paradox that is the engine of the show — was going to lie in the relationships between the estranged characters, which are now the ex-spouses.” While it's still early, the season premiere adeptly broadened the scope of the show and refocused itself by putting these complex relationship dynamics at the forefront. Bringing Helen in as a narrator was a particularly smart choice, partly because Maura Tierney is such an appealing actress (indeed, both Helen and Cole are arguably more likable than their exes), but also because the character feels so realistic, and her grief and bitterness so compellingly rendered, in a way that Noah and Alison often weren’t in season one. In particular, the mediation scene, the only scene that we saw play out twice in the premiere, showed how effective the doubled perspective can be when complex emotions are at stake. Many of Noah and Alison’s POV scenes in season one diverged from each other so much that they felt either ludicrous, or else they seemed unnecessarily obvious, serving more to bolster the characters' own rose-tinted views of themselves than to say anything meaningful about their relationship. Seeing how Noah and Helen perceive each other is much more interesting because of their deep shared history. Across the mediation table, we see their marriage as a power struggle, a complexly calibrated performance rooted in years spent playing off one another. They have each built roles for themselves in opposition to their partners, roles that have codified and warped over time: The entitled princess vs. the principled idealist; the stable provider vs. the selfish deadbeat. While it was interesting, at times, watching Alison and Noah get to know each other, it’s even more interesting to watch characters who thought they knew each other so well -- characters who built a life together -- be confronted by the crumbling of the facade they built together. Or, as Helen puts it, leaving the session: “You're so selfish. How did I not see that, all these years?” If “The Leftovers'” new season is about the possibility of moving on in the wake of tragedy, “The Affair” is about the wounds that remain open even when a chapter closes. Whether these ambitious narrative changes will build to a satisfying conclusion is an open question, but it's worth sticking around to find out.

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“It’s like if ‘When Harry Met Sally’ ended with everybody getting hit by a truck”: Inside the “Year of Lear” and the terrorist plot that changed Shakespeare

Terrorist attacks are not unique to our age. Near the end of 1605, a group of radical, disenchanted Catholics plotted to overthrow the British government by blowing up the House of Lords, killing King James I, and wiping out the nation’s religious leadership, which had in recent generations become Protestant. Due to an intercepted letter, the 36 barrels of gunpowder were discovered, and the plotters, including Guy Fawkes, arrested, tried, and grotesquely executed. It was more than just one of the more colorful chapters in British history: The Gunpowder Plot helped shape the work of the most celebrated playwright in the English language. In the “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606,” scholar James Shapiro describes the way the plot and other events of the day influenced the three important tragedies the Bard completed that year – “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” We spoke to Shapiro -- a Columbia University English professor who is also the author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare” – from New York City. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. Lets’s start with 1606 – what was happening in Britain at that point, and what was happening in the life and work of William Shakespeare? There’s a way in which I face an obstacle talking about this stuff because people think of Shakespeare as a dead white guy, and that his plays don’t matter to us unless we want to cozy up to someone at a cocktail party. And that’s just not my Shakespeare, and that’s not why I spent 10 years of my life working on a book about 1606 and before that, 15 years on 1599. If so, it was a wasted life. So what’s happening in 1606? What’s happening is England has just confronted a massive – luckily, stopped in time – terrorist attack that, if it had succeeded, would have cut off the head of the government, the king, [his] family, religious and political leadership, rolled back religion 70 years, would have probably killed one out of seven Londoners in the explosion. This is really the first time, in the Anglo-American world that I study and live in, that you’re dealing with how to make sense of violence of this kind: Where does it come from, is it the Devil? Is it from hearts of men? Does it come from people who harbor religious views that are radically different? How do you spot those people? Is the danger over? So that’s what’s happening to England at this time. Throw in another outbreak of plague. Throw in King James opening up a national identity crisis by saying, You’re all Brits now; people had thought they were either Scottish or English. So it turned out to be a really bad year for England. But as a result of that, a really good one for Shakespeare. Shakespeare was in a different phase of his career than he was during the Elizabethan years, I think… Yeah – we imagine Shakespeare turning out his two plays a year, going home to the wife and kids, being steadily productive… I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met an artist who is [that] steady. I was watching “Amy” on a flight home from London last night, and was riveted by the way she had inspired bursts. And 1606 was an inspired burst that followed about four or five lean years for Shakespeare. I’m not suggesting that he had a coke and heroin problem that kept him from his plays the way Amy Winehouse was interrupted from her songs, but he was already the oldest major playwright working in England at this point. I’m sure the young guys were saying, “He’s Neil Simon, he just is a guy who wrote for the Elizabethan age… We’re young, edgy playwrights.” We know he felt that pressure, because he started teaming up with playwrights who were 15 years younger. He knew he had to find his footing in this new regime. Let’s talk specifically about the Gunpowder Plot. What motivated it, what were the instigators like, and what impact did it have on Britain? It’s funny – the legacy of that now is you go to a protest, and you see people wearing these anonymous Guy Fawkes masks. I laugh when I see that – 400 years later, he’s still the symbol of speaking truth to power, trying to overthrow the established order. Back then, he was part of a group of disaffected Catholic gentlemen, who thought that with King James coming to the throne – a man who was married to a Catholic, whose mother was a Catholic – he would take the boot off the head of Catholics in England and let them practice more openly, and without fear. James didn’t do that, and they figured: He’s going to live a long time – let’s act. They didn’t get authority from the pope or Rome to go ahead with it; they claimed authority on their own. And they came pretty damn close to succeeding. They also had a Plan B that no one is really aware of: Ride 100 miles north, to Shakespeare country, where they suspected there were a lot of people who still had the old faith in their hearts. So Shakespeare was at the center of both the almost-attack in London, and then the armed insurrection that petered out: His next door neighbor was the bag man with Catholic relics, who was caught and sent to jail. This is like someone who lived in New York who knows people on both sides of the 9/11 attack. Shakespeare was connected through his mother's line with a number of the conspirators, and he’s connected in Stratford with those who suppressed the uprising. How widespread was that level of frustration among English Catholics at the time? To ask that question is akin to asking, How disappointed are Americans today with their political leadership? Everyone knows they are, but will they go with a Donald Trump? Nobody knew the answer to that question. The government was nervous enough about it to mobilize an army to crush that short-lived uprising. And the conspirators thought: Everybody’s grandparent was a Catholic. So why not? And they were shocked when they’d ride into a town and servants would say, “We’re for the country, but we’re also for the King.” It was disheartening to them. But nobody knew when you put together a rally in New York against business interests whether you’ll get a million people, or a hundred people. The uprising didn’t get a lot of followers. It’s like the Occupy movement: Those who are behind the movement think the world is about the change. Those who are against it are nervous: Hey it might be these forces that are going to threaten us. Those are the forces of drama. And Shakespeare started infusing plays like “King Lear” and “Macbeth,” even “Antony and Cleopatra,” three pretty amazing tragedies he rattled off this year. What was the effect of the Gunpowder Plot on Shakespeare’s work – both in specific ways and in broader thematic ways? Shakespeare figured out that there was a new buzzword in the air – it was the word “equivocation.” It was the word associated with a how-to book about teaching Catholics how to lie. It was written by the religious mentor – his name was Henry Garnet – to the plotters. And Shakespeare writes a play in which [Macbeth] keeps talking about equivocation, and a drunken porter goes on again and again about equivocation. And everybody swears, and lies – which is what equivocation is. Good people and bad. So “Macbeth” is the great Gunpowder Plot play – it captures just how… there are no clean answers. How these kinds of shocks change a culture, and erode the kind of trust that exists and needs to exist between people. “King Lear”… half of it was written before the plot, half of it after. It’s a play that begins with characters talking about division of the kingdoms – at a time when King James is eager to unite the kingdoms. And the Gunpowder Plotters were trying to send the Scots home – they were playing into nationalism and anti-immigration [sentiments] – that play speaks powerfully to a political leadership reduced to ashes and a family destroyed. I can’t imagine what it was like for King James, at Christmas, to sit through a production of ["King Lear"], the grimmest play imaginable. [Because “Lear” was based on an earlier play, “King Leir,”] it had always had a happy ending. It’s like if “When Harry Met Sally” ended with everybody getting hit by a truck.Terrorist attacks are not unique to our age. Near the end of 1605, a group of radical, disenchanted Catholics plotted to overthrow the British government by blowing up the House of Lords, killing King James I, and wiping out the nation’s religious leadership, which had in recent generations become Protestant. Due to an intercepted letter, the 36 barrels of gunpowder were discovered, and the plotters, including Guy Fawkes, arrested, tried, and grotesquely executed. It was more than just one of the more colorful chapters in British history: The Gunpowder Plot helped shape the work of the most celebrated playwright in the English language. In the “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606,” scholar James Shapiro describes the way the plot and other events of the day influenced the three important tragedies the Bard completed that year – “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” We spoke to Shapiro -- a Columbia University English professor who is also the author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare” – from New York City. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. Lets’s start with 1606 – what was happening in Britain at that point, and what was happening in the life and work of William Shakespeare? There’s a way in which I face an obstacle talking about this stuff because people think of Shakespeare as a dead white guy, and that his plays don’t matter to us unless we want to cozy up to someone at a cocktail party. And that’s just not my Shakespeare, and that’s not why I spent 10 years of my life working on a book about 1606 and before that, 15 years on 1599. If so, it was a wasted life. So what’s happening in 1606? What’s happening is England has just confronted a massive – luckily, stopped in time – terrorist attack that, if it had succeeded, would have cut off the head of the government, the king, [his] family, religious and political leadership, rolled back religion 70 years, would have probably killed one out of seven Londoners in the explosion. This is really the first time, in the Anglo-American world that I study and live in, that you’re dealing with how to make sense of violence of this kind: Where does it come from, is it the Devil? Is it from hearts of men? Does it come from people who harbor religious views that are radically different? How do you spot those people? Is the danger over? So that’s what’s happening to England at this time. Throw in another outbreak of plague. Throw in King James opening up a national identity crisis by saying, You’re all Brits now; people had thought they were either Scottish or English. So it turned out to be a really bad year for England. But as a result of that, a really good one for Shakespeare. Shakespeare was in a different phase of his career than he was during the Elizabethan years, I think… Yeah – we imagine Shakespeare turning out his two plays a year, going home to the wife and kids, being steadily productive… I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met an artist who is [that] steady. I was watching “Amy” on a flight home from London last night, and was riveted by the way she had inspired bursts. And 1606 was an inspired burst that followed about four or five lean years for Shakespeare. I’m not suggesting that he had a coke and heroin problem that kept him from his plays the way Amy Winehouse was interrupted from her songs, but he was already the oldest major playwright working in England at this point. I’m sure the young guys were saying, “He’s Neil Simon, he just is a guy who wrote for the Elizabethan age… We’re young, edgy playwrights.” We know he felt that pressure, because he started teaming up with playwrights who were 15 years younger. He knew he had to find his footing in this new regime. Let’s talk specifically about the Gunpowder Plot. What motivated it, what were the instigators like, and what impact did it have on Britain? It’s funny – the legacy of that now is you go to a protest, and you see people wearing these anonymous Guy Fawkes masks. I laugh when I see that – 400 years later, he’s still the symbol of speaking truth to power, trying to overthrow the established order. Back then, he was part of a group of disaffected Catholic gentlemen, who thought that with King James coming to the throne – a man who was married to a Catholic, whose mother was a Catholic – he would take the boot off the head of Catholics in England and let them practice more openly, and without fear. James didn’t do that, and they figured: He’s going to live a long time – let’s act. They didn’t get authority from the pope or Rome to go ahead with it; they claimed authority on their own. And they came pretty damn close to succeeding. They also had a Plan B that no one is really aware of: Ride 100 miles north, to Shakespeare country, where they suspected there were a lot of people who still had the old faith in their hearts. So Shakespeare was at the center of both the almost-attack in London, and then the armed insurrection that petered out: His next door neighbor was the bag man with Catholic relics, who was caught and sent to jail. This is like someone who lived in New York who knows people on both sides of the 9/11 attack. Shakespeare was connected through his mother's line with a number of the conspirators, and he’s connected in Stratford with those who suppressed the uprising. How widespread was that level of frustration among English Catholics at the time? To ask that question is akin to asking, How disappointed are Americans today with their political leadership? Everyone knows they are, but will they go with a Donald Trump? Nobody knew the answer to that question. The government was nervous enough about it to mobilize an army to crush that short-lived uprising. And the conspirators thought: Everybody’s grandparent was a Catholic. So why not? And they were shocked when they’d ride into a town and servants would say, “We’re for the country, but we’re also for the King.” It was disheartening to them. But nobody knew when you put together a rally in New York against business interests whether you’ll get a million people, or a hundred people. The uprising didn’t get a lot of followers. It’s like the Occupy movement: Those who are behind the movement think the world is about the change. Those who are against it are nervous: Hey it might be these forces that are going to threaten us. Those are the forces of drama. And Shakespeare started infusing plays like “King Lear” and “Macbeth,” even “Antony and Cleopatra,” three pretty amazing tragedies he rattled off this year. What was the effect of the Gunpowder Plot on Shakespeare’s work – both in specific ways and in broader thematic ways? Shakespeare figured out that there was a new buzzword in the air – it was the word “equivocation.” It was the word associated with a how-to book about teaching Catholics how to lie. It was written by the religious mentor – his name was Henry Garnet – to the plotters. And Shakespeare writes a play in which [Macbeth] keeps talking about equivocation, and a drunken porter goes on again and again about equivocation. And everybody swears, and lies – which is what equivocation is. Good people and bad. So “Macbeth” is the great Gunpowder Plot play – it captures just how… there are no clean answers. How these kinds of shocks change a culture, and erode the kind of trust that exists and needs to exist between people. “King Lear”… half of it was written before the plot, half of it after. It’s a play that begins with characters talking about division of the kingdoms – at a time when King James is eager to unite the kingdoms. And the Gunpowder Plotters were trying to send the Scots home – they were playing into nationalism and anti-immigration [sentiments] – that play speaks powerfully to a political leadership reduced to ashes and a family destroyed. I can’t imagine what it was like for King James, at Christmas, to sit through a production of ["King Lear"], the grimmest play imaginable. [Because “Lear” was based on an earlier play, “King Leir,”] it had always had a happy ending. It’s like if “When Harry Met Sally” ended with everybody getting hit by a truck.Terrorist attacks are not unique to our age. Near the end of 1605, a group of radical, disenchanted Catholics plotted to overthrow the British government by blowing up the House of Lords, killing King James I, and wiping out the nation’s religious leadership, which had in recent generations become Protestant. Due to an intercepted letter, the 36 barrels of gunpowder were discovered, and the plotters, including Guy Fawkes, arrested, tried, and grotesquely executed. It was more than just one of the more colorful chapters in British history: The Gunpowder Plot helped shape the work of the most celebrated playwright in the English language. In the “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606,” scholar James Shapiro describes the way the plot and other events of the day influenced the three important tragedies the Bard completed that year – “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.” We spoke to Shapiro -- a Columbia University English professor who is also the author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare” – from New York City. The interview has been edited slightly for clarity. Lets’s start with 1606 – what was happening in Britain at that point, and what was happening in the life and work of William Shakespeare? There’s a way in which I face an obstacle talking about this stuff because people think of Shakespeare as a dead white guy, and that his plays don’t matter to us unless we want to cozy up to someone at a cocktail party. And that’s just not my Shakespeare, and that’s not why I spent 10 years of my life working on a book about 1606 and before that, 15 years on 1599. If so, it was a wasted life. So what’s happening in 1606? What’s happening is England has just confronted a massive – luckily, stopped in time – terrorist attack that, if it had succeeded, would have cut off the head of the government, the king, [his] family, religious and political leadership, rolled back religion 70 years, would have probably killed one out of seven Londoners in the explosion. This is really the first time, in the Anglo-American world that I study and live in, that you’re dealing with how to make sense of violence of this kind: Where does it come from, is it the Devil? Is it from hearts of men? Does it come from people who harbor religious views that are radically different? How do you spot those people? Is the danger over? So that’s what’s happening to England at this time. Throw in another outbreak of plague. Throw in King James opening up a national identity crisis by saying, You’re all Brits now; people had thought they were either Scottish or English. So it turned out to be a really bad year for England. But as a result of that, a really good one for Shakespeare. Shakespeare was in a different phase of his career than he was during the Elizabethan years, I think… Yeah – we imagine Shakespeare turning out his two plays a year, going home to the wife and kids, being steadily productive… I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met an artist who is [that] steady. I was watching “Amy” on a flight home from London last night, and was riveted by the way she had inspired bursts. And 1606 was an inspired burst that followed about four or five lean years for Shakespeare. I’m not suggesting that he had a coke and heroin problem that kept him from his plays the way Amy Winehouse was interrupted from her songs, but he was already the oldest major playwright working in England at this point. I’m sure the young guys were saying, “He’s Neil Simon, he just is a guy who wrote for the Elizabethan age… We’re young, edgy playwrights.” We know he felt that pressure, because he started teaming up with playwrights who were 15 years younger. He knew he had to find his footing in this new regime. Let’s talk specifically about the Gunpowder Plot. What motivated it, what were the instigators like, and what impact did it have on Britain? It’s funny – the legacy of that now is you go to a protest, and you see people wearing these anonymous Guy Fawkes masks. I laugh when I see that – 400 years later, he’s still the symbol of speaking truth to power, trying to overthrow the established order. Back then, he was part of a group of disaffected Catholic gentlemen, who thought that with King James coming to the throne – a man who was married to a Catholic, whose mother was a Catholic – he would take the boot off the head of Catholics in England and let them practice more openly, and without fear. James didn’t do that, and they figured: He’s going to live a long time – let’s act. They didn’t get authority from the pope or Rome to go ahead with it; they claimed authority on their own. And they came pretty damn close to succeeding. They also had a Plan B that no one is really aware of: Ride 100 miles north, to Shakespeare country, where they suspected there were a lot of people who still had the old faith in their hearts. So Shakespeare was at the center of both the almost-attack in London, and then the armed insurrection that petered out: His next door neighbor was the bag man with Catholic relics, who was caught and sent to jail. This is like someone who lived in New York who knows people on both sides of the 9/11 attack. Shakespeare was connected through his mother's line with a number of the conspirators, and he’s connected in Stratford with those who suppressed the uprising. How widespread was that level of frustration among English Catholics at the time? To ask that question is akin to asking, How disappointed are Americans today with their political leadership? Everyone knows they are, but will they go with a Donald Trump? Nobody knew the answer to that question. The government was nervous enough about it to mobilize an army to crush that short-lived uprising. And the conspirators thought: Everybody’s grandparent was a Catholic. So why not? And they were shocked when they’d ride into a town and servants would say, “We’re for the country, but we’re also for the King.” It was disheartening to them. But nobody knew when you put together a rally in New York against business interests whether you’ll get a million people, or a hundred people. The uprising didn’t get a lot of followers. It’s like the Occupy movement: Those who are behind the movement think the world is about the change. Those who are against it are nervous: Hey it might be these forces that are going to threaten us. Those are the forces of drama. And Shakespeare started infusing plays like “King Lear” and “Macbeth,” even “Antony and Cleopatra,” three pretty amazing tragedies he rattled off this year. What was the effect of the Gunpowder Plot on Shakespeare’s work – both in specific ways and in broader thematic ways? Shakespeare figured out that there was a new buzzword in the air – it was the word “equivocation.” It was the word associated with a how-to book about teaching Catholics how to lie. It was written by the religious mentor – his name was Henry Garnet – to the plotters. And Shakespeare writes a play in which [Macbeth] keeps talking about equivocation, and a drunken porter goes on again and again about equivocation. And everybody swears, and lies – which is what equivocation is. Good people and bad. So “Macbeth” is the great Gunpowder Plot play – it captures just how… there are no clean answers. How these kinds of shocks change a culture, and erode the kind of trust that exists and needs to exist between people. “King Lear”… half of it was written before the plot, half of it after. It’s a play that begins with characters talking about division of the kingdoms – at a time when King James is eager to unite the kingdoms. And the Gunpowder Plotters were trying to send the Scots home – they were playing into nationalism and anti-immigration [sentiments] – that play speaks powerfully to a political leadership reduced to ashes and a family destroyed. I can’t imagine what it was like for King James, at Christmas, to sit through a production of ["King Lear"], the grimmest play imaginable. [Because “Lear” was based on an earlier play, “King Leir,”] it had always had a happy ending. It’s like if “When Harry Met Sally” ended with everybody getting hit by a truck.

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“Damn, Meryl”: Streep facing harsh criticism over T-shirt declaring “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave”

In today’s edition of Bad Hollywood Liberals, Meryl Streep and her “Suffragette” costars made the baffling decision to wear shirts that say “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” on the cover of Time Out London. https://twitter.com/i_D/status/651079... Here’s the full line, which is a quote from Emmeline Pankhurst, the British women’s right activist Streep plays in the forthcoming film:

"Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.”

Source material aside, it’s pretty poor optics to be wearing a shirt that not only ignores the historical context of the term "slave," but, to quote Charline Jao over at The Mary Sue, "seems to reproduce the same lack of intersectionality that was present in Pankhurst’s time." It certainly seems like something the film's PR team should have picked up on given that the movie is already been criticized for its lack of diversity (not to mention Streep’s refusal to label as a feminist in an interview last week). Read some of the online backlash below: https://twitter.com/iSmashFizzle/stat... https://twitter.com/TheChangeU12C/sta... https://twitter.com/SaintHeron/status... https://twitter.com/mynameisjro/statu... https://twitter.com/TyreeBP/status/65... https://twitter.com/deray/status/6510... https://twitter.com/theferocity/statu... today’s edition of Bad Hollywood Liberals, Meryl Streep and her “Suffragette” costars made the baffling decision to wear shirts that say “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” on the cover of Time Out London. https://twitter.com/i_D/status/651079... Here’s the full line, which is a quote from Emmeline Pankhurst, the British women’s right activist Streep plays in the forthcoming film:

"Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.”

Source material aside, it’s pretty poor optics to be wearing a shirt that not only ignores the historical context of the term "slave," but, to quote Charline Jao over at The Mary Sue, "seems to reproduce the same lack of intersectionality that was present in Pankhurst’s time." It certainly seems like something the film's PR team should have picked up on given that the movie is already been criticized for its lack of diversity (not to mention Streep’s refusal to label as a feminist in an interview last week). Read some of the online backlash below: https://twitter.com/iSmashFizzle/stat... https://twitter.com/TheChangeU12C/sta... https://twitter.com/SaintHeron/status... https://twitter.com/mynameisjro/statu... https://twitter.com/TyreeBP/status/65... https://twitter.com/deray/status/6510... https://twitter.com/theferocity/statu... today’s edition of Bad Hollywood Liberals, Meryl Streep and her “Suffragette” costars made the baffling decision to wear shirts that say “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” on the cover of Time Out London. https://twitter.com/i_D/status/651079... Here’s the full line, which is a quote from Emmeline Pankhurst, the British women’s right activist Streep plays in the forthcoming film:

"Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.”

Source material aside, it’s pretty poor optics to be wearing a shirt that not only ignores the historical context of the term "slave," but, to quote Charline Jao over at The Mary Sue, "seems to reproduce the same lack of intersectionality that was present in Pankhurst’s time." It certainly seems like something the film's PR team should have picked up on given that the movie is already been criticized for its lack of diversity (not to mention Streep’s refusal to label as a feminist in an interview last week). Read some of the online backlash below: https://twitter.com/iSmashFizzle/stat... https://twitter.com/TheChangeU12C/sta... https://twitter.com/SaintHeron/status... https://twitter.com/mynameisjro/statu... https://twitter.com/TyreeBP/status/65... https://twitter.com/deray/status/6510... https://twitter.com/theferocity/statu...

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We have to say their names: It’s not “glorifying” mass murder to report on it — and refusing to won’t help

Chris Harper-Mercer. John Russell Houser. Vester L. Flanagan II. Dylann Roof.  Elliot Rodger. Adam Lanza. Seung-Hui Cho. James Holmes. I could go on, unfortunately, like this for a very long time, listing the men who in just the past few years have committed some of America's deadliest mass shootings. And I wouldn't be glorifying them. I wouldn't be giving them fame. I wouldn't be giving them what they wanted. I would be stating facts. Because we now live in a country in which we need to have regular conversations about how we talk about it whenever some unhinged man with ammunition goes into a school or a church or a movie theater and starts murdering people, there has been of late a push to not put their names and faces all over the media, for fear of inspiring copycats. And indeed Mercer was allegedly enamored of Vester Flanagan, who killed two former television news colleagues live on the air this past summer. On MySpace, Mercer reportedly wrote, "I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight." After Mercer's deadly spree in Oregon last week, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin refused to give him the attention in death that he sought in life. "

We have committed a war crime: “Patients were burning in their beds”

Doctors Without Borders says it is under "the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed" after a U.S.-led NATO coalition bombed its hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The aid organization, referred to internationally in French as Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF), asserted that it "condemn[s] this attack, which constitutes a grave violation of International Humanitarian Law." The U.S. military's version of the story behind the bombing is full of holes, and constantly changing. After launching airstrikes on Kunduz, which has recently seen an insurgency by the Taliban, on Saturday morning, NATO said its bombing "may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility." At least 23 people people were killed in the airstrikes, including 13 staff members and 10 patients, three of whom were children. A minimum of 37 more were wounded. A hospital nurse said there "are no words for how terrible it was," noting "patients were burning in their beds." Uncertainty dominated Washington's earliest account of the attack. The media echoed this ambiguity, but MSF insisted all "indications currently point to the bombing being carried out by international Coalition forces" led by the U.S. The humanitarian organization stressed that it had "communicated the precise locations of its facilities to all parties on multiple occasions over the past months" and yet, despite this, the NATO bombing of the hospital continued for over 30 minutes, even after MSF "frantically phoned" Washington. Subsequently, the U.S. and Afghan governments moved away from describing the attack as an accident, a tragic instance of "collateral damage," and proceeded to imply the bombing was intentional. Afghan officials claimed the hospital was being used as a "base" for the Taliban. "The hospital has a vast garden, and the Taliban were there," insisted Kunduz acting Governor Hamdullah Danishi. MSF was not buying it. The aid organization called the "Taliban base" claims "spurious" and said it is "disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack." The organization flatly denied that the Taliban was ever fighting from its hospital. "Not a single member of our staff reported any fighting inside the MSF hospital compound prior to the U.S. airstrike," MSF recalled. "These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present," MSF stated. "This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimize the attack as 'collateral damage.'" On Monday morning, the U.S. officially confirmed that it carried out the airstrikes on the hospital. Yet its story has changed once again. Now the U.S. says the Afghan military asked it for air support. Gen. John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, told reporters NATO airstrikes, requested by Afghan forces, "were called to eliminate the Taliban threat, and several innocent civilians were accidentally struck." Twenty-three clearly constitutes more than "several," but this is not the primary problem with Gen. Campbell's claim. The three accounts of the incident promulgated by U.S. military cannot all be true; they contradict each other. MSF expressed frustration with the mercurial U.S. position. The government's "description of the attack keeps changing," MSF remarked, and Washington is "now attempting to pass responsibility to the Afghanistan government." "The reality is the US dropped those bombs. The US hit a huge hospital full of wounded patients and MSF staff," the humanitarian organization added. "The US military remains responsible for the targets it hits, even though it is part of a coalition. There can be no justification for this horrible attack." Other international organizations have condemned the U.S. for the attack. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein stated that, if "established as deliberate in a court of law, an airstrike on a hospital may amount to a war crime." "This event is utterly tragic, inexcusable, and possibly even criminal," the U.N. chief added. He called for an independent and transparent inquiry into the bombing. Like the U.N., MSF is also requesting that "an independent international body" conduct an investigation into the attack on its hospital. The organization maintained that the U.S. investigating its own bombing "would be wholly insufficient." Just days before the bombing, MSF said it was "overwhelmed with wounded patients" amid heavy fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan government. In just two days, it had treated 252 people, including 53 children. The aid group noted its medical teams were "working nonstop to provide the best possible care." The Kunduz hospital was the only medical "facility of its kind in the whole northeastern region of Afghanistan, providing free life- and limb-saving trauma care," MSF emphasized. The closest large hospital is hours away. Now, Doctors Without Borders, after losing a dozen staff members, is withdrawing from Afghanistan, leaving behind a city full of besieged civilians who will no longer have access to desperately needed medical care.

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Bernie Sanders admits he initially mishandled Black Lives Matter: “I plead guilty — I should have been more sensitive”

The New Yorker is out with a new in-depth profile of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, featuring interviews with the senator, his wife, his former chief of staff, and numerous close friends in an effort to examine his rapid rise in the polls. In "The Populist Prophet," Margaret Talbot goes on the campaign trail with Sanders and speaks with supporters to understand his appeal. What she discovered can best be summarized by this passage:

Sanders’s message is particularly potent for young people who are struggling financially. Several weeks after the rally, I wrote to Dawn York, and she said that she had been thinking about “how refreshing it was to have someone point out to us that, as hardworking Americans, some things aren’t a privilege, they are a right. . . . I’m self-employed, I started my own business three and a half years ago, and my husband works full-time for Whole Foods—and we barely get by. We own a home, we both graduated from college, and we work more than forty hours a week, and we can barely put oil in our heating tanks in the winter. We have no savings and no way to financially handle any hiccups that may come our way. And I had to be reminded that it shouldn’t be that way.”

Here are four other notable nuggets from the New Yorker profile: Sanders can do a selfie but he can't do small talk Describing the "counterintuitive Sanders charm," Talbot wrote of Sanders's mastery of the selfie while on the campaign trail while forgoing niceties and small talk:

He also understands the necessity of the selfie dance, maneuvering quickly into place and smiling briefly. Sanders does not excel, however, at the middle ground of casual, friendly conversation. He has no gift for anecdote. When talking to voters, Hillary Clinton has perfected the head-cocked semblance of keen interest; it’s clear when Sanders becomes bored.

But close friend and University of Vermont political scientist Garrison Nelson described a Sanders who was always keen to stop and speak to any Vermonter who stopped him in the streets of Burlington -- even critics. On his initial handling of Black Lives Matter and racial injustice  Talbot spoke with Sanders in his Senate office about his much-publicized encounters with some Black Lives Matter activists earlier this summer and about how his campaign has adjusted to the critique that it overlooked specific racial inequities in favor of a focus on broader economic inequality. "I plead guilty -- I should have been more sensitive at the beginning of this campaign to talk about this issue," Sanders admitted. “The issues these young people raised are enormously important,” he said. He then went on to recount watching the arrest video of Sandra Bland, the young African-American woman who mysteriously and suddenly died in a Texas jail cell, as a pivotal moment of recognition for him. “It impacted my night’s sleep,” he said. “I don’t sleep that great, and it made it even worse.” "It's hard to imagine if Sandra Bland were white she would have been thrown to the ground and assaulted and insulted," Sanders argued. His old roommate says Sanders has always had a "prophetic sensibility" Richard Sugarman, a housemate of Sanders in the 1970s recalls that the longtime activist always had a "devotion to the ethical part of public life in Judaism, the moral part." Sanders, he observed, although hardly an observant Jew, felt endowed with "a prophetic sensibility,” rooted in the religion:

Sugarman says that his friend would often greet him in the morning by saying, "We're not crazy you know," referring to the anger they felt about social injustices. Sugarman would respond, "Could you say good morning first?"

Sanders credits his high school cross country experience with instilling in him lifelong stamina  Altough Sanders has notably shied away from relying on his personal biography to cast himself as more relatable to voters, opting instead to stay focused on policy issues, he did reveal to Talbot that his experience on James Madison High School's cross country team "accounts for some of his formidable stamina today." Sanders's Brooklyn high school is the same one attended by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

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A double standard in enforcing prostitution laws: “It’s economically advantageous to have [high-end sex work] going on”

Maddy has a “date” Friday evening in Washington, D.C., with a high-ranking government official who saw her ad on eros.com, a popular website for escort ads. The hazel-eyed twenty-six-yearold from North Carolina (whom I met at the Desiree Alliance conference) is staying at a boutique hotel in Dupont Circle, and she has agreed to meet with me before her date. We decide to rendezvous at Kramer’s, a popular bookstore and eatery a few blocks from her hotel. Earlier in the day, she had called to move up our meeting because her client was thinking of booking extended time with her. So I rush over to Dupont Circle on the Metro, and as soon as I walk into Kramer’s, I get a text from her: “The timing didn’t work out so there’s no need to rush.” I text her back saying I’m already at Kramer’s and will wait for her here. What better place than a bookstore for dawdling? Ten or fifteen minutes later, I get another text from Maddy: “I’m here.” A minute later, I discover her bent over behind a table of stacked books, changing from flats into high-heeled black pumps. She straightens up and grins. “You caught me in the act,” she says. Maddy, it seems, takes her persona as an enticing escort seriously. We grab one of the few unoccupied tables in the back room at Kramer’s, but Maddy orders only a coke. “I have serious food allergies,” she says. “But that’s okay. I’ll have a soda.” She is dressed casually, in a light-pink tailored shirt and tight-fitting blue jeans; a gauzy white scarf is wrapped loosely around her neck. She is wearing no makeup, and she has tied back her flyaway blond hair in a loose braid. Even so, she looks model-fresh and exquisite, like a porcelain doll that could easily break. Maddy says she comes to Washington, D.C., about once a month to see clients. Most of her clients are corporate executives and top government officials who have seen her ads—one recent ad she wrote described her as a “sharp wit in a soft body.” “This guy I’m seeing in a few hours, he found my ad a few months ago and finally got around to getting in touch,” she says. “According to a survey done by eros.com, most gentlemen will peruse a lady’s website five times before they actually contact her.” Once a client contacts her, Maddy does her due diligence. “I never see clients I haven’t screened,” she says. “I find out where they work, and I can verify that they actually are who they say they are.” This evening, Maddy will meet her gentleman caller at the boutique hotel where she is staying and spend two hours with him (for a set fee of $1,200), fulfilling any fantasies he might have. Going to a sex worker, she says, “is a safe place for [clients] to explore their desires, such as cross-dressing or getting fucked in the ass. I use a strap-on with a lot of my clients.” (A strap-on is a dildo that Maddy can strap around herself.) Many married men choose to go to an escort rather than risk endangering their marriages with an affair. “We’re not going to call them, we’re not going to disrupt their marriage or their family,” Maddy says. “They love their wives, but they have physical needs.” After her business engagement, Maddy plans to have a late dinner and a “foursome with two men and another woman,” all three of whom she is friendly with. “These are all people I enjoy,” she says. They know what she does for a living and are not at all bothered by it, she adds. Even though she has been working as an escort (on and off) for nine years, Maddy has never come close to being arrested. “I’m very careful. I never discuss money and I never count my money. I just leave it there until after the appointment is over,” she says. “I won’t compromise my safety.” As a stylishly dressed white woman catering to upper-class clients whom she has carefully screened, Maddy does in fact face little risk of being arrested. She herself is acutely aware that there is a double standard in the United States when it comes to enforcing the laws against prostitution. While the D.C. police routinely arrest streetwalkers and raid massage parlors in poor and mixed-income neighborhoods, they tend to leave high-end independent escorts like Maddy alone. Abolishing laws against prostitution would benefit streetwalkers the most, if only because they bear the brunt of law enforcement. “The practice is not to prosecute what isn’t seen,” Maddy says. “It’s economically advantageous to have [high-end sex work] going on.” Maddy believes that many companies and government agencies are less likely to hold major conferences in places where prostitution laws are strictly enforced. And indeed, several gentlemen’s clubs (a euphemism for private clubs where men can drink, obtain lap dances, and meet sex workers) are openly advertised right next to the restaurant listings in Where magazine, one of the free publications on display in my Marriott Hotel room. “[Going to an escort] is so prevalent among the upper level of government that if they really prosecuted it, it would collapse the government,” Maddy says, giggling. “My client list alone would be enough to put the country on hold for a few days.” The woman sitting at the table next to us is staring at her; it’s likely that she has overheard parts of our conversation. Maddy feels the intensity of her gaze and flushes. “I’m going to have to talk more quietly,” she says. “I have a loud voice.” Like many other sex workers, Maddy doesn’t understand the distinction that society makes between men like Donald Sterling (the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers) who have a trophy girlfriend and pay all their expenses and then some, and men who spend a few hours with an escort like herself in exchange for compensation. “That is the only thing where two consenting adults can engage in something, but because money is involved, it’s suddenly illegal,” she says, her eyebrows drawn together into a dark-blond line. “What’s the difference between this and maintaining your younger girlfriend in an apartment?” Four blocks to the west of Kramer’s, the sex industry assumes a decidedly different cast. A passerby would never know that on the fourth floor of a narrow building on Connecticut Avenue hides the office of FAIR Girls, the nonprofit organization that serves sexually exploited girls and young women. There are no signs outside or in the lobby announcing the organization’s presence. A prearranged appointment is required, and the door to the suite is locked. When the door is opened, I walk into a brightly lit room buzzing with young women; there are no men on the premises. Three young African American women are sitting around a conference table; they look up and smile at me brightly. A twenty-something woman rushes over and introduces herself as Teresa, the director of FAIR (Free, Aware, Inspired, and Restored) Girls. Teresa guides me through another room, containing a blanket-strewn sofa, a chair, and a small refrigerator, to a back office where Executive Director Andrea Powell is typing intently on her laptop. She looks up briefly and asks me to wait a few minutes until she finishes. She too looks young and is slender, with long blonde hair and bare legs under a short skirt. Two necklaces of brightly colored beads hang around her neck, made (I later learn) by the girls her organization helps. FAIR Girls provides services to girls and young women, age eleven to twenty-four, who are “survivors of sexual trafficking and labor exploitation,” Powell explains. “The average age of our clients is sixteen, and the average number of years they’ve been trafficked is four years.” FAIR Girls provides emergency housing, clothes, and food, along with counseling and legal support. It also helps its clients find jobs or schooling and teaches them the skills they need to become independent. Powell founded FAIR Girls in 2004, a few years after she first stumbled across the problem of sexual exploitation, while doing a junior year abroad in Germany. In a German class, she met a sixteen-year-old Bosnian Muslim girl who had been sold by her family into servitude as the fourth wife of a much older man. The relationship had become abusive, and Powell and her new friend made plans for her to escape, but before they could put the plan in motion, the girl disappeared. “I traveled to Bosnia to find her, and while I was there I saw a lot of girls and young women engaging in what you could call survival sex—this was not long after the Yugoslav war,” which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, Powell says. “I also saw what I think was some trafficking.” She never did find her friend. After Powell returned to the United States and graduated from Texas State University, she started FAIR Girls in Boston, initially working with young women who had been trafficked to the United States from abroad. But when she moved to Washington, D.C., she started hearing more about domestic youth being exploited. “We now serve upwards of 125 to 150 girls a year,” Powell says. “Over 90 percent are American citizens.” Most of the girls have run away from abusive situations at home or in foster care. The work Powell and her employees do involves everything from helping their charges get their records expunged—laws in many states now allow sex workers to get convictions expunged from their records if they can prove they have been trafficked—to getting them back home or into school. FAIR Girls also runs an “empowerment” program that teaches the girls how to make jewelry. “They earn a small amount of money, but more importantly, their self-esteem goes through the roof,” Powell says. “We have an annual gala, and the girls sell the jewelry they made. Fesha, the young woman from Kenya, made a necklace that Rose [DeLauro], the congresswoman from Connecticut, bought. That made her feel so great.” Powell works closely with local police, since they are the ones who often refer clients to her organization. But she doesn’t think sex workers of any age should be arrested, and her organization (along with others that work with exploited youth) is currently pressing for the passage of a bill, known as Safe Harbor, that would prohibit the arrests of minors involved in commercial sex in Washington, D.C. Safe Harbor laws have already been passed in other states, including New York, Washington State, and Illinois. “Criminalizing those who are being sold is just retraumatizing the victims and pushing them further underground,” Powell says. Like other nonprofits, FAIR Girls finds that working with law enforcement can be a double-edged sword, since many teenagers from dysfunctional families have had run-ins with the law and don’t trust the police. Powell, who is now thirty-four and married, says she can also do without the teasing from some cops. “I have a standing fight with one detective, who calls me ‘Rescue Barbie,’” she says. “I tell him I know how to tweet and he doesn’t, and one of these days something I say about him is going to go viral.” Unlike some antitrafficking proponents, Powell recognizes the difference between trafficking and prostitution. “Prostitution is a crime in which a person is selling sex on their own and there’s not any force, fraud, or coercion,” she says. But then she adds, “If the majority of our clients were between thirteen and twenty-four when they first got coerced into [sex work], the concept of choice gets pretty blurry.” For that reason, she supports laws that would criminalize buyers, particularly those who have sex with underage girls and boys. “Someone who buys sex from a sixteenyear-old and does it more than once, that’s not a john, that’s a serial child pedophile,” Powell says. “They need to be held accountable.” Sex workers’ rights advocates agree that it should be illegal to buy or sell sex involving underage prostitutes. However, several studies have found that blanket laws criminalizing the buyers of sex from adult prostitutes only expose sex workers to greater violence and make it more difficult for them to practice safe sex.1 For that reason, many academics who study the sex industry are opposed to overly broad laws that make it illegal to buy or sell sex. Researchers, antitrafficking groups, and sex worker advocates all agree that sanctions against violent pimps and coercive traffickers should be increased but diverge widely on the definition of a trafficker and on the question of who should be subject to criminal penalties. Many states currently criminalize anyone who lives off the earnings of a prostitute, which means that a nonabusive boyfriend or husband or even a roommate can be arrested and charged with pandering, pimping, or trafficking. Some researchers say such overly broad laws should be repealed because they make it more difficult for sex workers to work safely with people who know when and where they are selling sex and who can be summoned if help is necessary. “Punishment should be restricted to those who are violent or coercively exploitative—for example, forcing a person to work at certain times, to earn a certain amount of money before she or he can leave work, to perform disliked sex acts, and so on,” says Ronald Weitzer, the sociology professor at George Washington University who has studied the sex industry for years. Weitzer and other respected researchers favor a relatively open system that decriminalizes sex work but also subjects it to some restrictions, akin to New Zealand’s approach. Such a hybrid system of semiregulation would permit the licensing of both large, corporate-run brothels (like Sheri’s Ranch in Nevada) and smaller, cooperative brothels, where a number of sex workers could band together, rent an apartment, and hire a manager to screen calls and make appointments for them. The brothels themselves would be licensed and taxed, but individual workers would not be required to register. “Escorts want to be able to work just like any other business, but they don’t want to go through any kind of licensing,” says Barbara Brents, the sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has written several books about prostitution. “And when you’re working the streets to escape an abusive husband and feed your kids, who wants to register?” In countries where prostitution is legal and individual sex workers are required to register (for example, Germany), many refuse to do so and continue to work illegally, which defeats the purpose of decriminalization. Instead of a requirement that individual sex workers register (and be exposed to public stigma), researchers who study the issue say that brothels and other venues (for example, massage parlors and private clubs) should be licensed, taxed, and inspected regularly, like any other business. And if such businesses violate the law (by hiring minors or illegal immigrants or exploiting their workers), they should be shut down. Even though independent sex workers like Maddy should not have to get licensed, they should still be required to pay taxes and could list their occupation as escort. (Maddy already pays taxes now, but on tax forms, she lists her occupation as a model and translator.) Like many other sex workers, Maddy supports decriminalizing prostitution but is adamantly opposed to a legal approach that permits only the kind of heavily regulated prostitution found in Nevada’s brothels. “If it’s heavily regulated, we’ll be targeted and further marginalized,” she says. “We’d be relegated to red-light districts, to strip clubs that are in the poorest, most crime-ridden areas.” Or to brothels in the desert that are an hour away from any urban centers. Some researchers agree. As Weitzer notes in his 2012 book, “the less onerous and costly the regulations, the smaller the illegal sector [of sex workers],” and he points out that the latter is virtually nonexistent in New Zealand. Taking another page from New Zealand’s bold experiment, researchers suggest that policy makers take into account the voices of sex workers themselves as well as the views of local residents, who know what may be best for their neighborhoods. “The fear is that the politically savvy men who make the laws are listening to the voices of people with a lot of capital and resources instead of listening to people who actually do the work,” Brents says. If federal and state prohibitions against adult consensual prostitution were removed, it would be up to local municipalities to decide how they want to regulate the commercial sex trade. “Every area might come up with something a little different,” Brents says, again echoing the approach in New Zealand and the Netherlands of putting control in the hands of local counties or municipalities. All municipalities would probably prohibit sexually oriented businesses from locating near schools and playgrounds, and some might also ban street prostitution, as Amsterdam has done. Adopting New Zealand’s hybrid approach to regulating prostitution would bring millions of dollars into local government coffers in licensing fees and taxes from brothels, massage parlors, and escort services. Much as the legalization of marijuana in a growing number of states has done, it would take money away from the criminal element (in this case, exploitative pimps and traffickers) and put it into the hands of sanctioned businesses, individual women, and regulatory agencies. A recent study in Britain suggests that legalizing and taxing brothels and other places of prostitution would boost that country’s gross domestic product by at least $8.9 billion. When New Zealand removed prohibitions against adult consensual prostitution, the same legislation officially recognized sex work as legitimate work, thus according its participants the rights and protections available to workers in other occupations. As a result, sex workers Down Under can sue brothel owners for harassment or exploitation, and have done so successfully. Weitzer suggests that the United States remove such prohibitions as well, so that sex workers can better protect themselves from exploitation and the pressure to practice unsafe sex. Indeed, during the period when Rhode Island unintentionally decriminalized indoor prostitution, the state saw a steep decline in reported rapes and cases of gonorrhea. Experts also suggest that local government encourage safe sex practices and regular health exams, but not mandate them (as currently required in Nevada’s brothels). “Compulsory testing for sexually transmitted infections stigmatizes sex workers, tests are not always accurate, and testing clean on a certain day may give the false impression that a person is sexually healthy afterward,” Weitzer says. Instead, he recommends that local health officials conduct safe-sex outreach education with sex workers and clients and encourage regular exams and free testing, as they do in the Netherlands and New Zealand, which don’t mandate testing and have very low rates of HIV infection. Mandatory testing may actually increase the danger of sexually transmitted disease transmission, according to some. As Lenore Kuo, the professor of women’s studies and philosophy at California State University, Fresno, writes:

In reality, medical exams simply force prostitutes who are infected to work in an illegal venue, where they are often more likely to infect their clients due to the related difficulties of practicing “safe” sex. In Nevada, as in other jurisdictions, there is a common tendency for many men to offer prostitutes bribes not to use condoms. Regulations requiring medical testing of prostitutes are only likely to increase this tendency because they lead to the false expectation that the prostitute is disease-free. It is quite possible that a prostitute has been exposed to an STD [sexually transmitted disease] since her most recent test. . . . There is therefore no clear value in such tests but significant danger in encouraging clients to believe that prostitutes are disease-free.

Both Weitzer and Kuo make persuasive arguments that criminalizing prostitution is a failed and dangerous strategy. It doesn’t reduce the prevalence of sex work, and it clearly harms the women who do it. Arresting prostitutes heightens their isolation and estrangement from family and friends and makes it very difficult for them to seek other types of employment. Kuo notes that “criminalization also strengthens the prostitutes’ dependence on pimps, who will post bail, arrange child care, and obtain legal counsel when they do get arrested.” Women who are not sex workers are also threatened by a culture that allows sexual predators to kill with impunity and views prostitution as something dangerous and forbidden. Kuo argues that “women will never be normalized, will never cease being ‘other’ until sex and sexual activity are normalized. And sex and sexual activity will never be normalized until the sale of sexual activity is normalized (and vice versa).” On a more pragmatic level, decriminalizing adult consensual prostitution would allow law enforcement to focus on violent crimes and what both sex worker advocates and antitrafficking proponents consider a priority: prosecuting pimps who exploit underage youth and traffickers who force illegal immigrants into the sex trade. Many researchers argue that decriminalization would make it easier for victims and clients to report abuse to the police without the fear of being arrested themselves. “Sex workers would be much more likely to come forward if you just talk to them than if you arrest them,” says John Lowman, the criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “If there’s an adversarial relationship between prostitutes and the police, they’re not going to solve anything.” * Back at Kramer’s Bookstore, Maddy is getting restless. Earlier in the interview, watching me scribble away in a notebook, she admitted, “I’m a little nervous talking to you.” Now, in response to my questions about her future, she says she won’t be doing sex work for much longer. “The work I do is a wonderful fit, but it’s not forever,” she says. “It’s like modeling or sports.” At the time of the interview, Maddy was about to complete a bachelor’s degree and had already been accepted into several M.B.A. programs. She tells me that when she starts graduate school, she will probably stop doing sex work. “The economy has tanked, so there’s less of a demand for luxury goods,” she says, implying that this may be a good time for her (as a luxury item) to get out of the business. She bends over and changes back into her flats. Then she abruptly stands up. “I really have to go,” she says and, with a quick wave of her hand, flies out the door. Excerpted from "Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law" by Alison Bass. Published by ForeEdge, an imprint of University Press of New England. Copyright © 2015 by Alison Bass. Used with permission of University Press of New England.Maddy has a “date” Friday evening in Washington, D.C., with a high-ranking government official who saw her ad on eros.com, a popular website for escort ads. The hazel-eyed twenty-six-yearold from North Carolina (whom I met at the Desiree Alliance conference) is staying at a boutique hotel in Dupont Circle, and she has agreed to meet with me before her date. We decide to rendezvous at Kramer’s, a popular bookstore and eatery a few blocks from her hotel. Earlier in the day, she had called to move up our meeting because her client was thinking of booking extended time with her. So I rush over to Dupont Circle on the Metro, and as soon as I walk into Kramer’s, I get a text from her: “The timing didn’t work out so there’s no need to rush.” I text her back saying I’m already at Kramer’s and will wait for her here. What better place than a bookstore for dawdling? Ten or fifteen minutes later, I get another text from Maddy: “I’m here.” A minute later, I discover her bent over behind a table of stacked books, changing from flats into high-heeled black pumps. She straightens up and grins. “You caught me in the act,” she says. Maddy, it seems, takes her persona as an enticing escort seriously. We grab one of the few unoccupied tables in the back room at Kramer’s, but Maddy orders only a coke. “I have serious food allergies,” she says. “But that’s okay. I’ll have a soda.” She is dressed casually, in a light-pink tailored shirt and tight-fitting blue jeans; a gauzy white scarf is wrapped loosely around her neck. She is wearing no makeup, and she has tied back her flyaway blond hair in a loose braid. Even so, she looks model-fresh and exquisite, like a porcelain doll that could easily break. Maddy says she comes to Washington, D.C., about once a month to see clients. Most of her clients are corporate executives and top government officials who have seen her ads—one recent ad she wrote described her as a “sharp wit in a soft body.” “This guy I’m seeing in a few hours, he found my ad a few months ago and finally got around to getting in touch,” she says. “According to a survey done by eros.com, most gentlemen will peruse a lady’s website five times before they actually contact her.” Once a client contacts her, Maddy does her due diligence. “I never see clients I haven’t screened,” she says. “I find out where they work, and I can verify that they actually are who they say they are.” This evening, Maddy will meet her gentleman caller at the boutique hotel where she is staying and spend two hours with him (for a set fee of $1,200), fulfilling any fantasies he might have. Going to a sex worker, she says, “is a safe place for [clients] to explore their desires, such as cross-dressing or getting fucked in the ass. I use a strap-on with a lot of my clients.” (A strap-on is a dildo that Maddy can strap around herself.) Many married men choose to go to an escort rather than risk endangering their marriages with an affair. “We’re not going to call them, we’re not going to disrupt their marriage or their family,” Maddy says. “They love their wives, but they have physical needs.” After her business engagement, Maddy plans to have a late dinner and a “foursome with two men and another woman,” all three of whom she is friendly with. “These are all people I enjoy,” she says. They know what she does for a living and are not at all bothered by it, she adds. Even though she has been working as an escort (on and off) for nine years, Maddy has never come close to being arrested. “I’m very careful. I never discuss money and I never count my money. I just leave it there until after the appointment is over,” she says. “I won’t compromise my safety.” As a stylishly dressed white woman catering to upper-class clients whom she has carefully screened, Maddy does in fact face little risk of being arrested. She herself is acutely aware that there is a double standard in the United States when it comes to enforcing the laws against prostitution. While the D.C. police routinely arrest streetwalkers and raid massage parlors in poor and mixed-income neighborhoods, they tend to leave high-end independent escorts like Maddy alone. Abolishing laws against prostitution would benefit streetwalkers the most, if only because they bear the brunt of law enforcement. “The practice is not to prosecute what isn’t seen,” Maddy says. “It’s economically advantageous to have [high-end sex work] going on.” Maddy believes that many companies and government agencies are less likely to hold major conferences in places where prostitution laws are strictly enforced. And indeed, several gentlemen’s clubs (a euphemism for private clubs where men can drink, obtain lap dances, and meet sex workers) are openly advertised right next to the restaurant listings in Where magazine, one of the free publications on display in my Marriott Hotel room. “[Going to an escort] is so prevalent among the upper level of government that if they really prosecuted it, it would collapse the government,” Maddy says, giggling. “My client list alone would be enough to put the country on hold for a few days.” The woman sitting at the table next to us is staring at her; it’s likely that she has overheard parts of our conversation. Maddy feels the intensity of her gaze and flushes. “I’m going to have to talk more quietly,” she says. “I have a loud voice.” Like many other sex workers, Maddy doesn’t understand the distinction that society makes between men like Donald Sterling (the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers) who have a trophy girlfriend and pay all their expenses and then some, and men who spend a few hours with an escort like herself in exchange for compensation. “That is the only thing where two consenting adults can engage in something, but because money is involved, it’s suddenly illegal,” she says, her eyebrows drawn together into a dark-blond line. “What’s the difference between this and maintaining your younger girlfriend in an apartment?” Four blocks to the west of Kramer’s, the sex industry assumes a decidedly different cast. A passerby would never know that on the fourth floor of a narrow building on Connecticut Avenue hides the office of FAIR Girls, the nonprofit organization that serves sexually exploited girls and young women. There are no signs outside or in the lobby announcing the organization’s presence. A prearranged appointment is required, and the door to the suite is locked. When the door is opened, I walk into a brightly lit room buzzing with young women; there are no men on the premises. Three young African American women are sitting around a conference table; they look up and smile at me brightly. A twenty-something woman rushes over and introduces herself as Teresa, the director of FAIR (Free, Aware, Inspired, and Restored) Girls. Teresa guides me through another room, containing a blanket-strewn sofa, a chair, and a small refrigerator, to a back office where Executive Director Andrea Powell is typing intently on her laptop. She looks up briefly and asks me to wait a few minutes until she finishes. She too looks young and is slender, with long blonde hair and bare legs under a short skirt. Two necklaces of brightly colored beads hang around her neck, made (I later learn) by the girls her organization helps. FAIR Girls provides services to girls and young women, age eleven to twenty-four, who are “survivors of sexual trafficking and labor exploitation,” Powell explains. “The average age of our clients is sixteen, and the average number of years they’ve been trafficked is four years.” FAIR Girls provides emergency housing, clothes, and food, along with counseling and legal support. It also helps its clients find jobs or schooling and teaches them the skills they need to become independent. Powell founded FAIR Girls in 2004, a few years after she first stumbled across the problem of sexual exploitation, while doing a junior year abroad in Germany. In a German class, she met a sixteen-year-old Bosnian Muslim girl who had been sold by her family into servitude as the fourth wife of a much older man. The relationship had become abusive, and Powell and her new friend made plans for her to escape, but before they could put the plan in motion, the girl disappeared. “I traveled to Bosnia to find her, and while I was there I saw a lot of girls and young women engaging in what you could call survival sex—this was not long after the Yugoslav war,” which followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, Powell says. “I also saw what I think was some trafficking.” She never did find her friend. After Powell returned to the United States and graduated from Texas State University, she started FAIR Girls in Boston, initially working with young women who had been trafficked to the United States from abroad. But when she moved to Washington, D.C., she started hearing more about domestic youth being exploited. “We now serve upwards of 125 to 150 girls a year,” Powell says. “Over 90 percent are American citizens.” Most of the girls have run away from abusive situations at home or in foster care. The work Powell and her employees do involves everything from helping their charges get their records expunged—laws in many states now allow sex workers to get convictions expunged from their records if they can prove they have been trafficked—to getting them back home or into school. FAIR Girls also runs an “empowerment” program that teaches the girls how to make jewelry. “They earn a small amount of money, but more importantly, their self-esteem goes through the roof,” Powell says. “We have an annual gala, and the girls sell the jewelry they made. Fesha, the young woman from Kenya, made a necklace that Rose [DeLauro], the congresswoman from Connecticut, bought. That made her feel so great.” Powell works closely with local police, since they are the ones who often refer clients to her organization. But she doesn’t think sex workers of any age should be arrested, and her organization (along with others that work with exploited youth) is currently pressing for the passage of a bill, known as Safe Harbor, that would prohibit the arrests of minors involved in commercial sex in Washington, D.C. Safe Harbor laws have already been passed in other states, including New York, Washington State, and Illinois. “Criminalizing those who are being sold is just retraumatizing the victims and pushing them further underground,” Powell says. Like other nonprofits, FAIR Girls finds that working with law enforcement can be a double-edged sword, since many teenagers from dysfunctional families have had run-ins with the law and don’t trust the police. Powell, who is now thirty-four and married, says she can also do without the teasing from some cops. “I have a standing fight with one detective, who calls me ‘Rescue Barbie,’” she says. “I tell him I know how to tweet and he doesn’t, and one of these days something I say about him is going to go viral.” Unlike some antitrafficking proponents, Powell recognizes the difference between trafficking and prostitution. “Prostitution is a crime in which a person is selling sex on their own and there’s not any force, fraud, or coercion,” she says. But then she adds, “If the majority of our clients were between thirteen and twenty-four when they first got coerced into [sex work], the concept of choice gets pretty blurry.” For that reason, she supports laws that would criminalize buyers, particularly those who have sex with underage girls and boys. “Someone who buys sex from a sixteenyear-old and does it more than once, that’s not a john, that’s a serial child pedophile,” Powell says. “They need to be held accountable.” Sex workers’ rights advocates agree that it should be illegal to buy or sell sex involving underage prostitutes. However, several studies have found that blanket laws criminalizing the buyers of sex from adult prostitutes only expose sex workers to greater violence and make it more difficult for them to practice safe sex.1 For that reason, many academics who study the sex industry are opposed to overly broad laws that make it illegal to buy or sell sex. Researchers, antitrafficking groups, and sex worker advocates all agree that sanctions against violent pimps and coercive traffickers should be increased but diverge widely on the definition of a trafficker and on the question of who should be subject to criminal penalties. Many states currently criminalize anyone who lives off the earnings of a prostitute, which means that a nonabusive boyfriend or husband or even a roommate can be arrested and charged with pandering, pimping, or trafficking. Some researchers say such overly broad laws should be repealed because they make it more difficult for sex workers to work safely with people who know when and where they are selling sex and who can be summoned if help is necessary. “Punishment should be restricted to those who are violent or coercively exploitative—for example, forcing a person to work at certain times, to earn a certain amount of money before she or he can leave work, to perform disliked sex acts, and so on,” says Ronald Weitzer, the sociology professor at George Washington University who has studied the sex industry for years. Weitzer and other respected researchers favor a relatively open system that decriminalizes sex work but also subjects it to some restrictions, akin to New Zealand’s approach. Such a hybrid system of semiregulation would permit the licensing of both large, corporate-run brothels (like Sheri’s Ranch in Nevada) and smaller, cooperative brothels, where a number of sex workers could band together, rent an apartment, and hire a manager to screen calls and make appointments for them. The brothels themselves would be licensed and taxed, but individual workers would not be required to register. “Escorts want to be able to work just like any other business, but they don’t want to go through any kind of licensing,” says Barbara Brents, the sociology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has written several books about prostitution. “And when you’re working the streets to escape an abusive husband and feed your kids, who wants to register?” In countries where prostitution is legal and individual sex workers are required to register (for example, Germany), many refuse to do so and continue to work illegally, which defeats the purpose of decriminalization. Instead of a requirement that individual sex workers register (and be exposed to public stigma), researchers who study the issue say that brothels and other venues (for example, massage parlors and private clubs) should be licensed, taxed, and inspected regularly, like any other business. And if such businesses violate the law (by hiring minors or illegal immigrants or exploiting their workers), they should be shut down. Even though independent sex workers like Maddy should not have to get licensed, they should still be required to pay taxes and could list their occupation as escort. (Maddy already pays taxes now, but on tax forms, she lists her occupation as a model and translator.) Like many other sex workers, Maddy supports decriminalizing prostitution but is adamantly opposed to a legal approach that permits only the kind of heavily regulated prostitution found in Nevada’s brothels. “If it’s heavily regulated, we’ll be targeted and further marginalized,” she says. “We’d be relegated to red-light districts, to strip clubs that are in the poorest, most crime-ridden areas.” Or to brothels in the desert that are an hour away from any urban centers. Some researchers agree. As Weitzer notes in his 2012 book, “the less onerous and costly the regulations, the smaller the illegal sector [of sex workers],” and he points out that the latter is virtually nonexistent in New Zealand. Taking another page from New Zealand’s bold experiment, researchers suggest that policy makers take into account the voices of sex workers themselves as well as the views of local residents, who know what may be best for their neighborhoods. “The fear is that the politically savvy men who make the laws are listening to the voices of people with a lot of capital and resources instead of listening to people who actually do the work,” Brents says. If federal and state prohibitions against adult consensual prostitution were removed, it would be up to local municipalities to decide how they want to regulate the commercial sex trade. “Every area might come up with something a little different,” Brents says, again echoing the approach in New Zealand and the Netherlands of putting control in the hands of local counties or municipalities. All municipalities would probably prohibit sexually oriented businesses from locating near schools and playgrounds, and some might also ban street prostitution, as Amsterdam has done. Adopting New Zealand’s hybrid approach to regulating prostitution would bring millions of dollars into local government coffers in licensing fees and taxes from brothels, massage parlors, and escort services. Much as the legalization of marijuana in a growing number of states has done, it would take money away from the criminal element (in this case, exploitative pimps and traffickers) and put it into the hands of sanctioned businesses, individual women, and regulatory agencies. A recent study in Britain suggests that legalizing and taxing brothels and other places of prostitution would boost that country’s gross domestic product by at least $8.9 billion. When New Zealand removed prohibitions against adult consensual prostitution, the same legislation officially recognized sex work as legitimate work, thus according its participants the rights and protections available to workers in other occupations. As a result, sex workers Down Under can sue brothel owners for harassment or exploitation, and have done so successfully. Weitzer suggests that the United States remove such prohibitions as well, so that sex workers can better protect themselves from exploitation and the pressure to practice unsafe sex. Indeed, during the period when Rhode Island unintentionally decriminalized indoor prostitution, the state saw a steep decline in reported rapes and cases of gonorrhea. Experts also suggest that local government encourage safe sex practices and regular health exams, but not mandate them (as currently required in Nevada’s brothels). “Compulsory testing for sexually transmitted infections stigmatizes sex workers, tests are not always accurate, and testing clean on a certain day may give the false impression that a person is sexually healthy afterward,” Weitzer says. Instead, he recommends that local health officials conduct safe-sex outreach education with sex workers and clients and encourage regular exams and free testing, as they do in the Netherlands and New Zealand, which don’t mandate testing and have very low rates of HIV infection. Mandatory testing may actually increase the danger of sexually transmitted disease transmission, according to some. As Lenore Kuo, the professor of women’s studies and philosophy at California State University, Fresno, writes:

In reality, medical exams simply force prostitutes who are infected to work in an illegal venue, where they are often more likely to infect their clients due to the related difficulties of practicing “safe” sex. In Nevada, as in other jurisdictions, there is a common tendency for many men to offer prostitutes bribes not to use condoms. Regulations requiring medical testing of prostitutes are only likely to increase this tendency because they lead to the false expectation that the prostitute is disease-free. It is quite possible that a prostitute has been exposed to an STD [sexually transmitted disease] since her most recent test. . . . There is therefore no clear value in such tests but significant danger in encouraging clients to believe that prostitutes are disease-free.

Both Weitzer and Kuo make persuasive arguments that criminalizing prostitution is a failed and dangerous strategy. It doesn’t reduce the prevalence of sex work, and it clearly harms the women who do it. Arresting prostitutes heightens their isolation and estrangement from family and friends and makes it very difficult for them to seek other types of employment. Kuo notes that “criminalization also strengthens the prostitutes’ dependence on pimps, who will post bail, arrange child care, and obtain legal counsel when they do get arrested.” Women who are not sex workers are also threatened by a culture that allows sexual predators to kill with impunity and views prostitution as something dangerous and forbidden. Kuo argues that “women will never be normalized, will never cease being ‘other’ until sex and sexual activity are normalized. And sex and sexual activity will never be normalized until the sale of sexual activity is normalized (and vice versa).” On a more pragmatic level, decriminalizing adult consensual prostitution would allow law enforcement to focus on violent crimes and what both sex worker advocates and antitrafficking proponents consider a priority: prosecuting pimps who exploit underage youth and traffickers who force illegal immigrants into the sex trade. Many researchers argue that decriminalization would make it easier for victims and clients to report abuse to the police without the fear of being arrested themselves. “Sex workers would be much more likely to come forward if you just talk to them than if you arrest them,” says John Lowman, the criminology professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. “If there’s an adversarial relationship between prostitutes and the police, they’re not going to solve anything.” * Back at Kramer’s Bookstore, Maddy is getting restless. Earlier in the interview, watching me scribble away in a notebook, she admitted, “I’m a little nervous talking to you.” Now, in response to my questions about her future, she says she won’t be doing sex work for much longer. “The work I do is a wonderful fit, but it’s not forever,” she says. “It’s like modeling or sports.” At the time of the interview, Maddy was about to complete a bachelor’s degree and had already been accepted into several M.B.A. programs. She tells me that when she starts graduate school, she will probably stop doing sex work. “The economy has tanked, so there’s less of a demand for luxury goods,” she says, implying that this may be a good time for her (as a luxury item) to get out of the business. She bends over and changes back into her flats. Then she abruptly stands up. “I really have to go,” she says and, with a quick wave of her hand, flies out the door. Excerpted from "Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law" by Alison Bass. Published by ForeEdge, an imprint of University Press of New England. Copyright © 2015 by Alison Bass. Used with permission of University Press of New England.

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“The Affair’s” real-estate porn: Class politics, twisted perspectives and New York’s torrid romance with real estate

The pilot episode of Showtime’s self-indulgent character drama “The Affair” makes prominent use, in the first few scenes, of On Prospect Park, a 15-story glass building designed by celebrated architect Richard Meier. It’s difficult to miss—an incongruously geometric pile of aquamarine glass on the stately oval of Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, which is otherwise populated by brick-and-stone buildings. For a filmmaker, I imagine the Meier building is too captivating a subject to ignore, especially as Dominic West’s character Noah is engaged in the thematically appropriate hobby of swimming in his first scenes—the Eastern Athletics directly next door to the condominium tower has a pool, which is a rare enough commodity in New York City. “The Affair’s" opening credits offer a sensuous, atmospheric view of moving water and roiling surf, so the show had to start with Noah swimming in his cramped, confined, citified pool, before he breaks away from Brooklyn to the wild shores of Montauk, where the waitress Alison (Ruth Wilson) captures his heart. And what, was “The Affair” really going to film Dominic fucking West at one of the city’s (numerous, affordable and indispensable) YMCAs? No, indeed, it must be the Meier building, with the implications of any glass house: transparency, perspective, fragility. Noah will go on to shatter his own carefully constructed home life with a few devastating blows. The characters of “The Affair” are pent up in lush interiors or confined to intimate, exclusive social spaces; their experience of New York City is as ostentatiously singular as the Meier building itself. And just as the building has drawn fascination for its defining characteristic—which is that neighbors and passersby can see right into every unit of the building—so too are the private lives of Noah, Alison and their spouses, Helen (Maura Tierney) and Cole (Joshua Jackson), exposed entirely to us, the audience. In my cynicism about the class politics of television—and as a Brooklynite who lives not far from the Meier building—I am inclined to dismiss at least some of “The Affair’s" luxury as the television version of Catalog Living. Especially on premium cable networks, who know exactly who is paying for their programming, shows about the mundane neuroses of rich white people take up a lot of space—and Noah and Helen are so rich that they barely seem to live in the harried, money-conscious, waiting-on-line New York City that most of its 8 million residents live in. Their lack of daily worry for things like parking tickets and cab fare—and the conspicuous lack of public transit—is as much a signifier of their privilege as their vacation plans to go to the family summer home in Montauk. This is exacerbated by the storytelling problems of the show, which splits each episode into two halves, and then tells the same events from the point of view of another character. In the first season, those perspectives were split between Noah and Alison, and took place almost entirely in Montauk over one summer. In the second, Noah and Alison have moved to Cold Spring, on the Hudson Valley, while Noah and Helen negotiate the terms of their divorce. Helen now has a perspective, which adds a lot of necessary depth (and gives us the added benefit of seeing Tierney do more things on-screen, which is never a bad thing). But the show is paralyzed by its own vision, at times; the problem with making a show about singular perspectives is that those people are necessarily self-absorbed. So it’s been hard to tell if Noah feels entitled to his wife’s money, or stifled by it; it’s hard to tell if Noah and Helen are effortlessly rich, or just perceive of themselves that way. “The Affair” has used this ambiguity, these necessarily isolate perspectives, as a lens for examining romantic relationships. Lurking in the background, though, is far more interesting subtext about the politics of gentrification. The leads in “The Affair” are both the gentrifiers and the gentrified; Helen, who owns their brownstone through her trust fund and grew up on the Upper East Side, is diametrically opposed to bicycle-riding Alison who picks up catering shifts for wealthy visitors. Montauk, in the mid-2000s, was the subject of its own hand-wringing about gentrification, as the ostentatious wealth of the Hamptons crept all the way to the lonely little fishing village all the way at the end of Long Island. (It got to the point that there was even a Montauk branch of the Momofuku Milk Bar, though that is now apparently closed.) Property is a primary concern for Alison and her husband, Cole, in Montauk; they’re broke, but they own their house, and the influx of new money means they could sell it for a lot of money. It’s a point of contention in the first season, complicated by the years-ago death of their son, nearby family, and a collapsing marriage. Meanwhile, Alison becomes entangled with Noah, who is a novelist who can only afford his modicum of success and four children because Helen bought their brownstone in Brooklyn with her trust fund and her parents fund the kids’ private-school tuitions. Helen herself is as a result constantly beholden to her overbearing parents, who use money as a way to infantilize and manipulate her. And in the opening of Season 2, as Noah and Helen start the grueling process of dividing their worldly assets, we find that he and Alison have decamped to a small apartment in Cold Spring, N.Y., on the Hudson Valley, which itself has been the target of a renewal effort for decades. The space is being lent to themby publishing friends who own it while Noah and Alison figure out their finances. The romantic perspectives of “The Affair” might be distorted and unrealistic, but the demographics of real estate acquisitions are eerily on-target. Indeed—the romantic machinations of the show have ceased to interest me at all. The relationships with real stakes in “The Affair” are the characters’ confrontations with their environment. In one of the season premiere’s more wrenching scenes, Helen tries to manufacture romantic interest for a man who is interested in her. They are in a hotel room with floor-to-ceiling glass, again; the view from the room is staggering. She is entirely disengaged from it, despite staring out the window so that she doesn’t have to look at him. The height and view give the bed the impression of being perched in the sky. In the background, the wannabe-beau (Josh Stamberg) rattles on about acquiring the hotel being a big move for his clients, the Greenpoint Hotel Group—Greenpoint being another controversial hotbed of glass-building development in what was a middle-class neighborhood. He stops nattering, finally, observing that he is being boring. She shakes her head, as if to disagree, but she’s clearly beyond caring about it. And yet she, and he, and the rest of the characters, are inexorably bound up in the class politics of the city; it burbles on in the background, molding their lives, while they stumble through romantic ups and downs. The problem that “The Affair” has, consistently, is how limited it is by its unhappy characters. The show is fixated on interiority—going so far as to film New York City, an incredible, dense city with extraordinary public spaces, primarily in interiors. They’re well-appointed and lush, but empty—even the production design yearns for connection. (I marked a scene in Washington Square Park as one of the first that used a New York City public space. It’s the grittiest the show has gotten. The character in question, naturally, started vaping in public, without even a stifled fear of being caught doing something illegal.) There is something brilliant about “The Affair’s" understanding of New York City’s—and the broader world’s—socioeconomic politics. But it’s hard to push characters who are so stuck in their own spaces to come to broader conclusions about the world. Indeed, one of the sad truths of “The Affair” is that its leads are rather too wrapped up in themselves to see the shape of the world they’re creating; maybe that is the show’s most political statement of all.

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The bad mother’s last refuge: Smashing the cult of mommyhood

The ambivalence of motherhood is a touchy subject that violates one of our greatest taboos: not liking your children. It’s a topic of conversation that rises to the surface of our social consciousness when we gawk at horrors like Andrea Yates murdering her children, or the trial of Casey Anthony. Since society has no use for bad mothers except as scapegoats, these conversations are often didactic and are repressed often as soon as they begin. But in fiction, we can examine with empathy that which horrifies us in real life. Thus, novels become the purgatory of problematic mothers, where the guise of fiction acts as a protective shield. Take the central relationship in acclaimed fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins’ debut novel "Gold Fame Citrus," set in the dry, dystopian desert of future California where the aquifers are dry, resources depleted and most of the population has been evacuated. All that remains are the criminals, the mystics, the holdouts and the native Mojave. They struggle to survive, living in the empty shells of L.A.’s splendor, or sent to internment camps in the mountains. Luz Dunn is a Mojave, who was once heralded as Baby Dunn, the child of the desert, the symbol of the conservation effort. Newspaper clippings from her childhood promise, “…there will be fresh water for drinking, irrigation and recreation waiting for Baby Dunn and her children…” None of those promises held true. Luz becomes a model and is raised by the ambivalent world of fashion—which both embraces her body for its beauty, but rejects it for not being beautiful enough. Later in her career, Luz becomes a simulacrum of other more beautiful models, chosen for low-budget campaigns. Her body is often photographed bound and gagged—a symbolic rape that has resonance in references to the sexual abuse in the fashion industry. The novel opens with Luz, now 25, living amid the parched splendor of an abandoned Hollywood mansion with her partner Ray. At a rain festival in downtown L.A., Ray and Luz find a child, Ig, who lives with a violent band of scavengers. Caught in a surge of maternal desire, Luz kidnaps the child and together the three of them try to escape the confines of L.A. to find something better. Ray is AWOL from the military and Luz is a Mojave, and together they don’t qualify for emigration. So, they seek out refuge in a colony rumored to live on the edges of a vast sand dune. Luz, whose own mother died when she was young, is an ambivalent mother figure to Ig. She both sacrifices for Ig’s survival and resents her neediness. When Luz and Ig are rescued by the colony, Luz is torn between her own passions and perceptions and Ig’s all-consuming needs. Though Luz has forced herself into the role of mother, she closely identifies with Ig — both are motherless, children of the land, who are raised in tribes dominated by Messianic figures of men. In the end of the novel (this is a major spoiler, so stop reading now if you can’t bear it), Luz chooses to give up Ig to the colony—an Abrahamic sacrifice with devastating consequences. By writing Luz as a reluctant maternal figure, Watkins has tapped into the lean but vital tradition of fictional ambivalent mothers. In her 2010 book "The Monster Within," Barbara Almond explores maternal ambivalence through psychological case studies and, most notably, fiction. Almond explains that she turned to novels because they offer a rich look at a topic so often brushed under the rug of domestic anxiety. Almond’s goal, as she states, is to “recognize that however problematic this ambivalence may be, it is part of the human condition.” Yet, with few exceptions, maternal ambivalence even in fiction is rife with horror—"Frankenstein," "Rosemary’s Baby," "We Need to Talk About Kevin," "Beloved" and "The Fifth Child" all explore the shadows of motherhood as a terrifying realm of murder, love and loss. While these books are satisfying for maternal Id, rarely is the ambivalence of everyday motherhood so dark. The reality of this conflicted state is more like Elisa Albert’s "Afterbirth," where the main character, Ari, has the thought that her infant son is “Still a baby… of which even the best are oppressive fascist bastard dictator narcissists.” Or, as the poet Adrienne Rich described it a little less directly: “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification.” While many authors have grappled with the conflicts of motherhood, what is significant about Watkins is that her discussion of maternal ambivalence takes place in a dystopian landscape—a genre that up until the 1970s had been largely shaped by the pens and minds of literary men. In her 1972 essay “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write,” Johanna Russ, herself an author of dystopian literature, wrote that women writers are often stuck with male myths and male protagonists. The solution for Russ was to write a new future: “Women cannot write—using the old myths. But using new ones?—” Watkins’ world is both new and unfamiliar. It is not a radical reimagining of gender roles, like many feminist utopian or dystopian novels, but where it does subvert the paradigm is in the reversal of a tale of the land as a male story. The landscape of Watkins' novel is undeniably female, not only in its symbols—Luz, her mother and Ig— but in Watkins' phantasmagoric imaginings. The light and color are ever-shifting and -changing. Attempts to understand and control this world are futile. The landscape is both victim and victimizer—like an angry Medea, satisfied with nothing but a total obliteration. The land is then the ambivalent mother—it gives and betrays, nurtures and devastates. The fates of women in this novel are closely intertwined with the land. Luz is Baby Dunn, the symbol of the desert—dirt fills her eyes, the crevices of her body, and her very identity— that when the water comes, Luz, like the land, is consumed by it. But here there are no sainted mothers. Luz gives Ig to the colony, which they believe is what the land wants. But in this act, Luz is no Mary giving her Jesus up to save the world. She is relieved to be rid of Ig, and so is Ray. They are afraid of the child, of her wounds and her difference. The sacrifice is also problematized by the colony and their Messianic leader—is he an inspired diviner or a cruel scavenger? Is the colony a tribe with a special connection to the land? Or are they drugged-up cult members? Is what Luz has done good or selfish? Is she a survivor or a victim? “What is?” Ig asks in her baby talk throughout the novel, “What is?” Her question could be the reader’s. The dissonance created is as unsettling as the landscape and relationships that Watkins has created. But like in so many maternal relationships, the mother is also the child. Luz is chided for her childishness, which makes her cling first to Ray and then to the leader of the desert colony. The earth, too, seems almost like an angry toddler, mid-tantrum, an “oppressive fascist bastard dictator narcissist” who cares for nothing and no one but herself. Almond explains that through their identification with their mother, children often end up replicating their relationships, sometimes inverting them so that their children become the mothers and they stay the child. Whatever the dynamic is, Almond states, we cannot run from these maternal ties. Even those who remain childless must struggle against their hold. This is evidenced in the novel when, as Ray struggles through the sand dune in search of Luz and Ig, he embraces the ambivalence of the landscape: “Instead of terror he grasped what made these dunes a sea, and for the first time he felt the serenity of that.” Ultimately, this condition of maternal ambivalence in Watkins' novel is not just a female question. The earth is both the monster child and the angry mother; everyone must reckon with her. Everyone must cleave to her, beg of her, and everyone is party in destroying her. It is precisely because of this flesh and earth ambivalence that all characters struggle with the monster they made and the dry dust that made them. The clawing hold of the landscape over the events of the novel mirror the cyclical nature of the maternal—from mothers we are and to mothers we will return. This is the power of Watkins' novel, which casts an unforgiving sun on our conflicted nature with nature. The ambivalence of creation and creators. Watkins offers no answers. But I’m not sure there are answers to be had. In her book, Almond quotes Swiss psychoanalyst Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, who felt “that the knowledge of the shadow side can stabilize female identity…” Mothers can be monsters, children can be, too. In the horror that created us, there are islands of love that bind us to our mothers. In the seas of love, there are squalls of sheer horror that push us away. In a society that fetishizes motherhood and our earth, while both systematically undermining and destroying them, this discussion of ambivalence is an important part of creating the new myths that we will one day write from.The ambivalence of motherhood is a touchy subject that violates one of our greatest taboos: not liking your children. It’s a topic of conversation that rises to the surface of our social consciousness when we gawk at horrors like Andrea Yates murdering her children, or the trial of Casey Anthony. Since society has no use for bad mothers except as scapegoats, these conversations are often didactic and are repressed often as soon as they begin. But in fiction, we can examine with empathy that which horrifies us in real life. Thus, novels become the purgatory of problematic mothers, where the guise of fiction acts as a protective shield. Take the central relationship in acclaimed fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins’ debut novel "Gold Fame Citrus," set in the dry, dystopian desert of future California where the aquifers are dry, resources depleted and most of the population has been evacuated. All that remains are the criminals, the mystics, the holdouts and the native Mojave. They struggle to survive, living in the empty shells of L.A.’s splendor, or sent to internment camps in the mountains. Luz Dunn is a Mojave, who was once heralded as Baby Dunn, the child of the desert, the symbol of the conservation effort. Newspaper clippings from her childhood promise, “…there will be fresh water for drinking, irrigation and recreation waiting for Baby Dunn and her children…” None of those promises held true. Luz becomes a model and is raised by the ambivalent world of fashion—which both embraces her body for its beauty, but rejects it for not being beautiful enough. Later in her career, Luz becomes a simulacrum of other more beautiful models, chosen for low-budget campaigns. Her body is often photographed bound and gagged—a symbolic rape that has resonance in references to the sexual abuse in the fashion industry. The novel opens with Luz, now 25, living amid the parched splendor of an abandoned Hollywood mansion with her partner Ray. At a rain festival in downtown L.A., Ray and Luz find a child, Ig, who lives with a violent band of scavengers. Caught in a surge of maternal desire, Luz kidnaps the child and together the three of them try to escape the confines of L.A. to find something better. Ray is AWOL from the military and Luz is a Mojave, and together they don’t qualify for emigration. So, they seek out refuge in a colony rumored to live on the edges of a vast sand dune. Luz, whose own mother died when she was young, is an ambivalent mother figure to Ig. She both sacrifices for Ig’s survival and resents her neediness. When Luz and Ig are rescued by the colony, Luz is torn between her own passions and perceptions and Ig’s all-consuming needs. Though Luz has forced herself into the role of mother, she closely identifies with Ig — both are motherless, children of the land, who are raised in tribes dominated by Messianic figures of men. In the end of the novel (this is a major spoiler, so stop reading now if you can’t bear it), Luz chooses to give up Ig to the colony—an Abrahamic sacrifice with devastating consequences. By writing Luz as a reluctant maternal figure, Watkins has tapped into the lean but vital tradition of fictional ambivalent mothers. In her 2010 book "The Monster Within," Barbara Almond explores maternal ambivalence through psychological case studies and, most notably, fiction. Almond explains that she turned to novels because they offer a rich look at a topic so often brushed under the rug of domestic anxiety. Almond’s goal, as she states, is to “recognize that however problematic this ambivalence may be, it is part of the human condition.” Yet, with few exceptions, maternal ambivalence even in fiction is rife with horror—"Frankenstein," "Rosemary’s Baby," "We Need to Talk About Kevin," "Beloved" and "The Fifth Child" all explore the shadows of motherhood as a terrifying realm of murder, love and loss. While these books are satisfying for maternal Id, rarely is the ambivalence of everyday motherhood so dark. The reality of this conflicted state is more like Elisa Albert’s "Afterbirth," where the main character, Ari, has the thought that her infant son is “Still a baby… of which even the best are oppressive fascist bastard dictator narcissists.” Or, as the poet Adrienne Rich described it a little less directly: “My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification.” While many authors have grappled with the conflicts of motherhood, what is significant about Watkins is that her discussion of maternal ambivalence takes place in a dystopian landscape—a genre that up until the 1970s had been largely shaped by the pens and minds of literary men. In her 1972 essay “What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write,” Johanna Russ, herself an author of dystopian literature, wrote that women writers are often stuck with male myths and male protagonists. The solution for Russ was to write a new future: “Women cannot write—using the old myths. But using new ones?—” Watkins’ world is both new and unfamiliar. It is not a radical reimagining of gender roles, like many feminist utopian or dystopian novels, but where it does subvert the paradigm is in the reversal of a tale of the land as a male story. The landscape of Watkins' novel is undeniably female, not only in its symbols—Luz, her mother and Ig— but in Watkins' phantasmagoric imaginings. The light and color are ever-shifting and -changing. Attempts to understand and control this world are futile. The landscape is both victim and victimizer—like an angry Medea, satisfied with nothing but a total obliteration. The land is then the ambivalent mother—it gives and betrays, nurtures and devastates. The fates of women in this novel are closely intertwined with the land. Luz is Baby Dunn, the symbol of the desert—dirt fills her eyes, the crevices of her body, and her very identity— that when the water comes, Luz, like the land, is consumed by it. But here there are no sainted mothers. Luz gives Ig to the colony, which they believe is what the land wants. But in this act, Luz is no Mary giving her Jesus up to save the world. She is relieved to be rid of Ig, and so is Ray. They are afraid of the child, of her wounds and her difference. The sacrifice is also problematized by the colony and their Messianic leader—is he an inspired diviner or a cruel scavenger? Is the colony a tribe with a special connection to the land? Or are they drugged-up cult members? Is what Luz has done good or selfish? Is she a survivor or a victim? “What is?” Ig asks in her baby talk throughout the novel, “What is?” Her question could be the reader’s. The dissonance created is as unsettling as the landscape and relationships that Watkins has created. But like in so many maternal relationships, the mother is also the child. Luz is chided for her childishness, which makes her cling first to Ray and then to the leader of the desert colony. The earth, too, seems almost like an angry toddler, mid-tantrum, an “oppressive fascist bastard dictator narcissist” who cares for nothing and no one but herself. Almond explains that through their identification with their mother, children often end up replicating their relationships, sometimes inverting them so that their children become the mothers and they stay the child. Whatever the dynamic is, Almond states, we cannot run from these maternal ties. Even those who remain childless must struggle against their hold. This is evidenced in the novel when, as Ray struggles through the sand dune in search of Luz and Ig, he embraces the ambivalence of the landscape: “Instead of terror he grasped what made these dunes a sea, and for the first time he felt the serenity of that.” Ultimately, this condition of maternal ambivalence in Watkins' novel is not just a female question. The earth is both the monster child and the angry mother; everyone must reckon with her. Everyone must cleave to her, beg of her, and everyone is party in destroying her. It is precisely because of this flesh and earth ambivalence that all characters struggle with the monster they made and the dry dust that made them. The clawing hold of the landscape over the events of the novel mirror the cyclical nature of the maternal—from mothers we are and to mothers we will return. This is the power of Watkins' novel, which casts an unforgiving sun on our conflicted nature with nature. The ambivalence of creation and creators. Watkins offers no answers. But I’m not sure there are answers to be had. In her book, Almond quotes Swiss psychoanalyst Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, who felt “that the knowledge of the shadow side can stabilize female identity…” Mothers can be monsters, children can be, too. In the horror that created us, there are islands of love that bind us to our mothers. In the seas of love, there are squalls of sheer horror that push us away. In a society that fetishizes motherhood and our earth, while both systematically undermining and destroying them, this discussion of ambivalence is an important part of creating the new myths that we will one day write from.

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