Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 195
August 2, 2014
Cosmo Discovers Girls Who Like Girls
June Thomas is thrilled with the magazine’s listicle “28 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions”:
Ogling, mocking, and largely ignoring Cosmo’s sex advice has been a venerable tradition for decades now. Nevertheless, the rag has surely made a positive contribution to Americans’ sexual satisfaction. I don’t know if, after studying this slide show, women around the world will attempt the Rockin’ Rockette, the Hot Hair Salon, or even the Lazy Girl’s 69, but I’m certain that a few women will feel more confident in their first same-sex encounters. And that really does blow my mind.
But Samantha Allen thinks something is missing:
[U]ltimately, the “Passionate Pole Dancer,” like so many of Cosmo’s lesbian sex positions, reduces the experience of lesbian sex to clitoral grinding. Only two of Cosmo’s 28 illustrations make visual reference to penetration. The remainder of them are depictions of beautiful women languorously writhing in pleasure with their legs wrapped around one another. This inordinate focus on non-penetrative intercourse is a common trope in mainstream depictions of lesbian intercourse. Lesbian poet Eileen Myles described Blue Is the Warmest Color, for example, as a “no-lesbian-sex movie renowned and lauded for its bold lesbian sex.” The leads in Blue Is the Warmest Color scissor in a dozen different positions but we never once see them penetrate each other.
Meanwhile, Allison P. Davis snarks affectionately, “While the subject matter might be new, the spirit is classic Cosmo: Its editors continue their commitment to encouraging sexual exploration and making sure that all women – no matter what they’re into – have access to punnily named sex positions.”
Dick Crit
Comedian Janet Silverman had never seen a dicpic before she decided to watch a slideshow of 89 of them selected by her friends, filming her reactions throughout. It made for a SFW video with NSFW language:
Emma Gray picks some of Silverman’s responses:
“I’m not a size queen or anything… but this one’s very short.”
“The first thing I thought right now was: gerbil.”
“This reminds me of a scary movie.”
If this doesn’t serve as a PSA for not sending photos of your private parts, we’re not sure what will.
The Dish covered a NSFW tumblr with a similar premise, Critique My Dick Pic, here and here.
(Hat tip: The Hairpin)
I See London, I See France …
Morwenna Ferrier finds that fewer French women are sunbathing topless. Is American media culture to blame?
Alice Pfeiffer, a 29-year-old Anglo-French journalist (who, incidentally does sunbathe topless in Biarritz, Guéthary, Monaco and surfing resort Hossegor), thinks the decline is inextricably linked to social media: “Young women in their 20s do it less because they are aware that … you can end up topless on your own Facebook wall.”
Pfeiffer blames “pop-porn culture – Miley Cyrus to American Apparel, ie aggressive naked imagery of young girls” – for the shift in perception of going topless. “Globalisation and Americanisation of women’s portrayal and sexiness in France has pushed away gentle (and generally harmless) French eroticism towards porno, frontal, hyper-sexualised consciousness,” she says. “Nudist, beach-like freedom is not what it used to be … breasts no longer feel innocent or temporarily asexual.”
The Germans, apparently, are the most likely to go nude at the beach. Rebecca Schuman wishes Americans would follow suit:
[A]s frantic as Americans get about the public dirty-pillows-baring of nubile young women, even self-professed progressives seem to balk at the free flaunting of a diverse array of bodies, i.e. nudity that “nobody wants to see”: older bodies, overweight bodies, scarred bodies, bodies who dare to have birthed children and remain unashamed about it. Consider Jezebel’s Kelly Faircloth, who just last week scolded the entire Speedo-wearing world—on a site that prides itself on body acceptance.
You’ll never see a German shocked at the sight of a rotund 65-year-old man with his Schawnz und Eier semi-clad by a Speedo or totally nackt; young Germans frolicking bare-breasted by the pool will receive at most a blasé once-over from their male companions. Of course, if your religion (or, like me, your infernal pallor) requires modesty at the beach, then by all means wear whatever you want. But for those whose prudery (and dislike of seeing others) comes not from necessity but conditioning? Maybe a little “free body culture” wouldn’t hurt.
Aural Sex
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR for short, refers to the pleasant tingles some people get from certain sensations, particularly whispers and other soft sounds. The little-understood phenomenon has not attracted much scientific research, but has spawned a sizable community on YouTube, where a search for “ASMR” results in 2.8 million hits. Jordan Pearson takes a look at this subculture and the wildly popular videos, like the one above, that its members produce and consume:
ASMR as an internet phenomenon that took off in 2010, when a Reddit thread asking if anyone else had ever experienced it went viral, and thousands of people realized they weren’t the only ones who’d noticed the pleasant and foreign feeling. An internet subculture of roleplay videos meant to evoke the sensation has since taken off. Tingle-seekers—lots of them—watch videos delivering agreed-upon triggers like soft whispers in order to feel what devotees vaguely describe as “brain orgasms” or pleasant tingles, though there really isn’t any word in the English language to accurately describe the strange sensation.
Many people have started making these videos themselves—gaining hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers along the way—and often with a twist: elaborate roleplaying with a weirdly maternal bent. “The most popular roleplay requests are the ones that involve a lot of what I call ‘personal attention.’ An example of that would be, if you go to the eye doctor, for instance, they’re going to be very close to you,” Ally Maque, an ASMR YouTube personality with over one hundred thousand subscribers told me. …
“I think the ASMR movement, demanding eye contact and prolonged attention, has sort of an undercurrent of optimism and care in the videos themselves that’s really nice. It’s hopeful,” Nitin Ahuja, a doctor and academic who published a recent paper on the topic, told me. “That’s really interesting to see against a backdrop of cynicism about technology wholesale.” Whether the popularity of ASMR videos that express caring and otherwise loving sentiments is a good or a bad thing, broadly speaking, is beside the point and probably a little unfair to the people who enjoy them, Ahuja said.
Can You Grin And Bear It?
David Berry gets to the root of our fear of dentists:
Most people’s fears have less to do with the cultural history of dentistry, though, than their own personal history. Sometimes that just means they’ve seen Marathon Man [see clip above], but usually it has to do with a bad experience in their past. Occasionally that means a botched procedure of some kind—true to the fascination of fear, people supposedly terrified of dentists can and do recount these experiences at some length while explaining their current discomfort… —but shame tends to be just as powerful a progenitor of dread. Phobics are not the most fabulously reliable self-reporters, but studies have suggested that up to half of even serious phobics, and more among the merely uncomfortable, have experienced nothing more traumatic than a dentist being a weapons-grade dick about how often they floss.
This is actually kind of a double-edged sword for dentists, insomuch as the longer you go without professional care, generally, the worse things get, and attempts to correct the behaviour can often just inflame the insecurity and fear. There are ways of getting you into the chair—most dentists are happy to provide either laughing gas or anti-anxiety medication, and some even specialize in just knocking you right out even for routine cleanings—but there isn’t really a way to make you floss regularly or show up ever again (at least if you’re only a dentist: cognitive behavioural therapy has been shown to be fairly effective…).
About the only saving grace to any of this is that, on the whole, people’s fear of dentists tends to decrease while they age. Although, going back to that shame thing, children are as a group less afraid of the dentist than middle-aged adults; it’s only once you start to reach retirement age that your fears begin to lessen.
A Poem For Saturday
Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
Twenty five years ago, the poet Nicholas Christopher edited an influential anthology featuring thirty seven poets who were then (as the title declared) Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets. In the years since, his talent for choosing poets whose work would grow increasingly important has been roundly confirmed. It was there that I was introduced to the wit, gravity, and highly individualistic slant of the work of Vijay Seshadri, America’s newest Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry.
Summer often turns our thoughts and hearts to love. We’ll feature some love poems from this landmark book in the days ahead, beginning with Seshadri’s poem dedicated to his wife Suzanne Khuri.
“My Esmeralda” by Vijay Seshadri:
for S.O.K.
Some people like each other and are therefore like each other,
but I like you and therefore I’m
so original a burden on my time
that all the lifeguards ring their bells
when I rise from my exclusive underneath
to wash in your England of seaside hotels,
climb my perch and send off, over the panorama
of what’s most yours—those glowing herds
of prehistoric bison, sunk in clear light
up to the eyes, browsing elsewhere
extinct skyhigh ferns—
my messenger birds,
speckled and superfine,
to soar the asymptotic line
that touches you at infinity. Big mama!
Not once in any of the meretricious annals
I’m forced to read, have I read
of you, nor through the maps
I have to make sense of
have I ever watched you pass.
Among words, you’re the meaning of ‘glass,’
and you as a river will cut your own channels.
(From Wild Kingdom © 1996 by Vijay Seshadri. Reprinted with permission of Graywolf Press. Photo of the town of Hastings, on the English coast, by Luton Anderson)
Perceiving The Kindness Of Strangers
A new study investigated how facial features play into our initial social judgments:
Each subject rated the faces on most-to-least scales for 16 traits, such as attractiveness and trustworthiness. The social traits were then evaluated in terms of three measures: approachability, youthful attractiveness and dominance.
For approachability, facial features concerning the mouth, such as mouth shape, were the most important. As seen in the image of model-generated faces (above), the corners of the mouth point slightly downward in the less approachable faces and turn upward in the visages that were scored as more approachable. …
In terms of youthfulness and attractiveness, characteristics of the eye and eyebrows were most strongly linked with the measure. For example, in the illustration above, the face farthest to the right features larger eyes and eyebrows with a more dramatic arch. As for dominance, that measure was most associated with facial features that may be construed as stereotypically masculine.
The study’s lead researcher, Dr. Tom Harley, is cautious about the results:
“Lots of the features of the face tend to vary together,” he explained. “So it’s very difficult for us to pin down with certainty that a given feature of the face is contributing to a certain social impression.”
There are some obvious trends however – including the tendency for masculine faces to be perceived as dominant, or for a broadly smiling face to seem more approachable and trustworthy. This points to a potentially worrying implication: brief facial expressions can make a big difference to how we are received by strangers.
“It might be problematic if we’re forming these kind of judgements based on these rather fleeting impressions,” Dr Hartley said, “particularly in today’s world where we only might see one picture of a face, on social media, and have to form our impression based on that.”
Face Of The Day
An Indian snake charmer holds snakes as a Hindu devotee pours milk in Jalandhar. During the Indian “Naag Panchami” festival, devotees offer milk, bananas and coconuts to snakes in the hope it will protect them from snake bites during the year. By Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images.
It’s So Hard Playing Famous
Alex Pappademas, whose “tolerance for Kardashian-related bullshit is pretty much limitless,” describes playing the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. “If this game were a person it would be a horrible sociopath,” he concludes, explaining that gameplay led him to question notions of work ethic:
Although she recorded voice-overs for her avatar (“Bible — I love that on you!”), it’s unclear how involved Kim Kardashian was with the conceptualization of this game. But the gameplay itself is an extension of the compensatory mythology of hard work that the Ks have created around their body of industrious nonwork. About once per Keeping Up With the Kardashians episode, you will hear one of the Ks use the word “work” to describe activities (having their photograph taken, drinking iced coffee while walking around a potential retail space, looking at pictures of bathing suits and saying “super cute”) that no one who actually works at a job, even an easy job, would refer to as such. I love the Kardashians and I believe they’ve sustained themselves as famous people through resourcefulness and even personal sacrifice, but them saying the word “work” is always, always funny to me. They need to come up with another word to describe what they do, like “gork.” A hypothetical Khloe quote from a world where this is the case: “I’ve just really been trying to focus on gork.”
So the Kardashian game isn’t just about providing you and me with the opportunity to vicariously live the life of a professional celebrity.
It’s propaganda designed to remind us at every turn that the life of a professional celebrity isn’t easy. That it takes gork. The most important resource in the Kardashian game isn’t fake money or the sparkly “K” stars you accumulate for successfully completing a mission; it’s “energy,” represented by little Gatorade-blue lightning bolts. Every task you do in a professional context in the game takes energy, even “Grab a drink,” which, strictly speaking, isn’t even a task.
Jessica Winter is on board:
That is the genius of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood: It perfectly captures the hollow-eyed compliant monotony of the very lifestyle it’s espousing. You absorb its value system into your bloodstream on contact.
The first big dilemma my avatar faced was deciding whether or not to spend precious Adderall-bolts of energy flirting with a D-list social worker at an overlit and underpopulated party (I didn’t, and shall therefore never know if he was the nephew of a TV executive). Her first major regret was leaving a big tip for a bartender on the hunch that he had “information” (he did not, because he was just a lowly bartender). After a few hours of play, you start to understand how, if you’d been forged in this crucible like Kim and her sisters, you, too, might have turned out just like these sad, tiny people inside your phone. In miniaturizing and cartoon-izing Kim Kardashian and her brethren, KK:H renders them as less cartoonish and more empathetic than they seem in real life. Making millions to stand around doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing—it’s harder than it looks.
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