Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 208

“The Oldest Depiction Of Sex On Record”

Josh Jones takes a gander:

Painted sometime in the Ramesside Period (1292-1075 B.C.E.), the fragments above—called the “Turin Erotic Papyrus” because of their “discovery” in the Egyptian Museum of Turin, Italy—only hint at the frank versions of ancient sex they depict …. The number of sexual positions the papyrus illustrates—twelve in all—“fall somewhere between impressively acrobatic and unnervingly ambitious,” one even involving a chariot. Apart from its obvious fertility symbols, writes archaeology blog Ancient Peoples, the papyrus also has a “humorous and/or satirical” purpose, and probably a male audience—evidenced, perhaps, by its resemblance to 70’s porn: “the men are mostly unkept, unshaven, and balding […], whereas the women are the ideal of beauty in Egypt.” …

Sacred temple prostitutes held a privileged position and mythological narratives incorporated unbiased descriptions of homosexuality and transgenderism. Ancient Egyptians even expected to have sex after death, attaching fabricated organs to their mummies.

Check out a video about the papyrus here.

Binge-Drinking Your Way To Success

A new study indicates that heavy drinking can boost your social status:

Titled Drinking to Reach the Top, the analysis shows that men and women who engage in more frequent heavy drinking occupy higher statuses within their friend groups. Set to be to be published in the October issue of Addictive Behaviors, it provides hard data to support what shows like Mad Men preach: Alcohol is a high achiever’s secret weapon.

However:

[T]he phenomenon did have a threshold. Participants who said they’d consumed more than 12 drinks in one sitting generally showed no more social clout—and, in some cases, less—than those who drank less.

Not to mention:

Of course, binge drinking is associated with high risk factors, including increased risk of homicide and unintentional injury, in addition to liver damage, stroke, and heart disease.

Feeling The Burn

A drone’s-eye view of Burning Man 2013:

When she visited Burning Man for the first time last year, Emily Witt enjoyed the opportunity to experiment with sex and drugs. But she understands where detractors are coming from:

No wonder people hate Burning Man, I thought, when I pictured it as a cynic might: rich people on vacation breaking rules that everyone else would be made to suffer for not obeying. Many of these people would go back to their lives and back to work on the great farces of our age. They wouldn’t argue for the decriminalisation of the drugs they had used; they wouldn’t want anyone to know about their time in the orgy dome. That they had cheered at the funeral pyre of a Facebook ‘like’ wouldn’t play well on Tuesday in the cafeteria at Facebook. …

The $400 ticket price was as much about the right to leave what happened at the festival behind as it was to enter in the first place. Still, I’d been able to do things here that I’d wanted to do for a long time, that I never could have done at home. And if this place felt right, if it had expanded so much over the years because to so many people it felt like ‘home’, it had something to do with the inadequacy of the old ways that governed our lives in our real homes, where we felt lonely, isolated and unable to form the connections we wanted.

Previous Dish on Burning Man here and here.

Who Killed The RomCom? Ctd

A recent addition to the genre, Le Week-end:

The reader who pointed to Finding Mr. Right as evidence of a Chinese appreciation for romantic comedies responds to the critic who argued that culturally specific jokes don’t translate well:

It’s not true. In Finding Mr. Right, the heroine is a fanatical fan of Sleepless in Seattle, a comedy by the notoriously verbal Nora Ephron. Shakespeare in Love by the even more linguistically-oriented Tom Stoppard was a huge underground hit in China on DVD. And North American audiences have embraced British romantic comedies such as Bend It Like Beckham without even knowing exactly what the title referred to.

This reader is exactly wrong; what we often enjoy in our filmgoing experience are familiar tropes cycled through a foreign sensibility. In fact, you could argue that’s exactly what continues to make Shakespeare so popular (in all his myriad forms) with North American audiences.

Meanwhile, Megan Gibson suggests that the romcom genre peaked 25 years ago, with the release of When Harry Met Sally:

Part of what makes the movie so great is its simplicity.

First of all, the two leads aren’t thrown together due to some ridiculous bet (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, She’s All That), nor are they dealing with any kind of magic or spell (Groundhog Day, 13 Going on 30). Harry and Sally aren’t even grappling with any class or status differences (Pretty Woman, Notting Hill). Both are white and privileged, living in New York with huge apartments and loads of disposable income and time.

Instead, the Harry and Sally are simply dealing with the age-old question of the differences between men and women. The issues that the pair – along with their two best friends, Jess and Marie, excellently played by Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher, respectively – face are pretty universal in the relationships of 20 and 30-somethings everywhere: fights over possessions when moving in with someone; needing a “transitional person,” aka a rebound, after a break-up; dealing with a partner who’s “high maintenance” – a term that the movie just happened to have coined. And, of course, the tension and awkwardness that follows having sex with a good friend. What’s even more remarkable is how relevant the movie still feels today.

Watch it again. Aside from some hairstyles and sartorial choices, the film has aged remarkably well, largely thanks to its script.

Recent Dish on the state of the romantic comedy here, here and here.

Interracial Couples Are Hotter

At least among college kids in California:

A new study of university undergraduates in California found students engaged in interracial dating gave their partners higher ratings for attractiveness and intelligence than did their peers who were seeing someone of their own race. A research team led by psychologist Karen Wu of the University of California-Irvine, reports these positive evaluations were persuasively communicated to their partners, and – at least on a level of physical attractiveness – were not illusory.

“We hypothesized that because interracial daters face social biases, their partners would have to possess higher levels of (certain) positive attributes to offset the costs of these biases,” the researchers write in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Their results indicate that may indeed be the case. … For the final study, independent raters assessed the attractiveness of the individual members of 101 couples. “Interracial daters were rated as more physically attractive,” the researchers write.

Isn’t the exotic often erotic? It seems to me that one of the biggest advantages of living in a racially diverse society is that sexual life can be more adventurous and, with differing cultures, also mind-expanding. I think of the 21st Century as the era of the miscegenation nation – with Obama its early symbolic product.

“The Brassiest Of The Old Broads”

That’s how Sean O’Neal eulogizes Elaine Stritch, the legendary Broadway star most recently known as Jack Donaghy’s mom:

Stritch’s persona – bawdy, blunt, and with a 3 a.m. voice that sounded like it was carelessly swinging around a vodka stinger – was established early on stage, where Stritch came up as an understudy for Ethel Merman who soon had Noel Coward reworking all of 1961’s Sail Away around her scene-stealing presence. Her Broadway roles included star-making turns in shows like Bus Stop, Goldilocks, and Sondheim’s Company, which yielded what would become one of her signature tunes, “The Ladies Who Lunch.” A scathing look at high society women punctuated by mock “I’ll drink to that” toasts, Stritch’s recording for the original cast album – as documented by D.A. Pennebaker in his behind-the-scenes film – was an exhausting, 14-hour struggle, a testament to just how hard Stritch worked to get it right. In the documentary’s climactic final scene, Stritch returns the next day to nail it in one triumphant take.

Charles Isherwood adds, “It’s common to describe a talent as singular, one of a kind or larger than life. And yet those words seem strictly accurate, albeit a bit flimsy, when applied to Elaine Stritch”:

Perhaps more than any other performer, she embodied the contradictions that churn in the hearts of so many actors and singers:

Her constitution seemed to be equal parts self-assurance and self-doubt, arrogance and vulnerability. A need to be admired did constant combat with a nagging fear of being rejected. But unlike most performers, Ms. Stritch never felt the necessity (or had the filter) to mask either the egotism or the fragility, in public or in private. She made the complications of her own personality part of her art, indeed the wellsprings of it. And in acknowledging the depth of her needs, she touched a universal chord.

Sophie Gilbert reflects on the above video:

More than her epitaph, her alcoholism, her TV roles, and even her outlandish, cantankerous personality, Stritch will most likely be remembered for the song that’s now as inextricably hers as “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is Judy Garland’s: “Ladies Who Lunch,” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Stritch originated the role of Joanne, a bitter, booze-addled woman of a certain age who rants exquisitely about the vacuity of wealthy socialites and their daily proclivities while gesturing extravagantly with a martini. The irony of the number isn’t lost on Joanne, nor was it on the actress who played her, with Stritch telling a Times reporter in 1968, “I drink, and I love to drink, and it’s part of my life.” (She quit eventually, although started having a daily cocktail or two again in her 80s.)

Stritch’s voice – raspy, rough, and almost acidic in its ability to cut through a note – was utterly unlike the identikit vibratos that tend to proliferate around Broadway. In a recording of “Ladies Who Lunch” from the ’70s, filmed for PBS, she sits on a stool in a white shirt and stares aggressively at the camera, eking out syllables with all the confidence of one who knows the conductor follows her. “The ones who follow the rules/ And meet themselves at the schools/ Too busy to know that they’re fools/ Aren’t they a gem?” she half-screams, eventually letting out a roar of feral frustration at how infuriating it all is. “I’ll drink to them.”

You can see the full gamut of emotions Stritch accesses in that video, from self-awareness to theatricality to vulnerability to a wink and a smile. It’s that melding of fear and bravado that made musical theatergoers adore her so, as she drank to overcome crippling stage fright and wrestled with insecurity every time she opened her mouth to sing.

For more, go check out the documentary recently made about her:

Face Of The Day

A festival-goer is covered in mud during the 17th Boryeong mud festival at Daecheon beach in Boryeong, 150 kilometers southwest of Seoul, on July 18, 2014. The annual festival aims to promote the use of the mineral-rich mud for cosmetic skin-care and to promote tourism in the region. By Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images.

28 Strangers vs 600,000 DCers, Ctd

It looks like – for now, at least - Washingtonians have won, with weed decriminalization going into effect yesterday. German Lopez has details:

The law authorizes a $25 civil fine for possessing one ounce or less of marijuana and allows cops to seize the drug. It also prohibits public pot use with the threat of a 60-day jail penalty. Harsher penalties kick in for someone possessing larger amounts of pot. The goal, according to advocates, is to reduce massive racial disparities in DC’s arrest rates. Although black and white Americans tend to smoke pot at similar rates, an ACLU report found that black DC residents were eight times more likely to be arrested than white residents in 2010. DC’s overall arrest rate for pot possession was also among the highest in the nation at 846 arrests per 100,000 residents, compared to an average of about 241 per 100,000 around the country.

But as Alex Rogers notes, some Republican lawmakers are putting up a fight:

The law may still encounter some pushback from Congress, as the Republican-controlled House passed a bill Wednesday that includes an amendment to stop D.C. from using federal or local funds to implement the law. The bill was passed largely along party lines; only six Democrats supported the bill. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who sponsored the D.C. provision, told the Washington Post that pot is “poison to a teenager’s brain” and that the new law would treat teenagers in a dramatically different way to young people right across the Maryland border, where violators younger than 21-years-old are required to appear in court.

Francis Clines adds, “This is a hardy political tactic in Washington, whereby out-of-town Congressmen play top dog over elected city lawmakers, as the constitution permits”:

Congressional conservatives often can’t resist moralizing and scoring points back home by interfering with city laws. Meanwhile the city’s heavily black constituency understandably complains of “plantation” tyranny. Mr. Harris, a physician and former state legislator known for opposing late-term abortions and X-rated movies at the University of Maryland, said the city’s decriminalization law does not protect minors adequately from the addictive dangers of pot. District politicians called for a retaliatory summer boycott of the Eastern Shore beach resorts of Mr. Harris’s district.

Waldman slams Harris and his ilk:

On a whole range of issues, congressional Republicans would love to turn a city made up of mostly Democrats (and mostly black Democrats at that) into a kind of right-wing Epcot Center, where you can step out and imagine that, legally speaking, you’re in Texas or Alabama. This is just one of a number of cases in which conservatives claim to have a firmly held abstract principle that guides their thinking about specific issues, but in practice are almost always concerned about outcomes. They say they value states’ rights – but not if a state wants to do something progressive like legalize marijuana or same-sex marriage.

Recent Dish on decriminalization in DC here.

Migrant Children Get Their Day In Court

The going conspiracy theory on the right regarding the border crisis, trumpeted by Allahpundit last week, is that Democrats arguing for child migrant due process are secretly hoping that the kids skip out on their court dates and disappear into the general population. Dara Lind debunks that theory, pointing to new data that shows that most of the Central American refugee kids are appearing in immigration court as instructed:

Previous data had shown that about 20 to 30 percent of children didn’t show up for their court hearings. The [Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse] data shows that that’s still holding true. Of all the kids with cases filed over the last decade whose cases have been closed, 31 percent were “in absentia.” That percentage is a little higher for cases filed over the last few years, possibly because there are more cases that are still pending from that time.

But the important question is: are Central American kids more likely to skip out on their immigration court hearings than other children? And the answer to that might be surprising.

This chart looks at children whose cases were filed in 2012, 2013, and 2014 — i.e. those who have arrived during the current surge — and whose cases have been completed as of June 30, 2014. (Many children whose cases have been filed since 2012 are still in the court process, so they theoretically have another chance to show up.) That means that it’s a good reflection of how many children who have come from Central America during the current surge end up skipping out on their hearings.

The data shows that Guatemalan children, at least, really do skip out on court hearings slightly more often than other children. But children from Honduras and particularly El Salvador are slightly more likely to show up for court hearings than children from other countries.

A Breakthrough In Kabul, Ctd

An inside look at John Kerry’s brokering of a deal to resolve Afghanistan’s election crisis illuminates how high the stakes really were:

It was a dangerous moment, and not just for the Afghanis. Without an agreement between second place finisher Abdullah Abdullah and the election’s declared winner, Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan was at risk of an implosion like the one that enabled the Taliban to take power in 1996—creating a safe haven for Osama bin Laden to plot the 9/11 attacks. And Kerry’s visit defied the advice of other Obama officials who warned any diplomatic intervention on the U.S. part held “the risk of complete failure,” in the words of a senior official. …

By mid-July, Abdullah’s supporters had threatened to create a kind of protest government. Rumors swirled of an armed rebellion, with the potential to ignite dormant ethnic and tribal rivalries. “We will accept death but not defeat,” Ghani’s running mate, the notorious ex-warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, had recently vowed. “It was pretty frightening. People were preparing for civil war,” says one official.

“Still,” Steve Coll cautions, “the pressures over the next several weeks will be great”:

The loser of the vote audit is sure to doubt the result’s authenticity. That suspicion will create fresh pressure on the part of Kerry’s plan that is designed to empower the second-place finisher—and that part of the deal seems worryingly vague and incomplete.

Karzai is scheduled to leave office on August 3rd, but it is not likely that the vote audit will be finished by then. On Afghan social media and in the streets, feelings are running high between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns, and along other historical fault lines. The country still looks uncomfortably close to the brink. The question facing what used to be known as the Shura Nizar, or the Northern Alliance, is whether, if Abdullah loses the final count, the alliance can achieve more by compromise than by coup-making. The objective answer is yes, but there will be those of senior rank who will argue otherwise.