Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 222
July 5, 2014
Love Yourself, Love Your Porn
Melissa Dahl relays the findings of a new paper showing how “narcissists watch more online pornography, and the more internet porn people watched, the more narcissistic they tended to be”:
The researchers, from the University of Houston–Clear Lake, tested narcissism levels on the participants, most of whom were heterosexual women between 18 and 61 years of age, using a standard 40-item questionnaire. They found that the higher respondents scored on the narcissism scale, the more likely they were to say they’d ever watched pornography; this held true even when excluding answers from men, who in this study and previous ones cop to watching more porn. And among the people who watched porn, higher narcissism was correlated with more hours watching internet porn.
Past research has shown that the more control narcissists have over sex, the more gratifying the experience tends to be, the researchers note — and this could help explain the narcissism-porn connection. “The use of internet pornography offers this control,” write the study authors, in that the online-porn viewer is able to click around until he or she finds exactly their idealized sexual imagery.
Gents For Rent
When Ted Peckham arrived in Depression-era New York as “a foppish Midwestern arriviste,” he saw dollar signs in the would-be female patrons of “the Stork Club and the Mirador, the Cotton Club and the Savoy.” His Guide Escort Service set up wealthy ladies with men who would “hold coats but never hands” for a night in exchange for some cash:
The illusion of male dominance, however, needed to be maintained. If women were to pay the men directly—and, worse, pay their own checks—the role reversal would turn off both the clients and the escorts. So women would fill two envelopes with cash, one the escort’s fee and the other her budget for the evening, and her date then used her money to pay waiters and bartenders, reasserting his superficial control of the evening.
In January, 1938, an anonymous “girl reporter” for the Hartford Courant sampled the service, reporting that her rather gloomy escort, “Mr. Smith,” was in it for the money, and considered it unglamorous hard work. By handling the money on dates, he kept some control, although only over how much his date drank. The women held the real power, and had to be kept happy. “After three complaints an escort is dropped,” he explains. “Women complain because they don’t draw a Clark Gable for $10.”
But men still controlled the city’s night life and its social codes—men like the columnist Lucius Beebe, the “orchidaceous oracle of café society,” and, less subtly, the bouncers and gangsters guarding the doors at the Stork Club and the Rainbow Room. Single women, especially in multiples, especially of uncertain age, were unwelcome. Even when they were guests at an upscale hotel, women alone could not freely visit all the public rooms. Peckham saw college graduates with no cash to take women out and women with cash but no men to take them, and the solution was simple: he would “bring these two desolate and palpitating groups together.”
The Big Six Oh!
In this midst of musing on what it feels like to be sixty, the British writer and critic A.A. Gill gets real about sex:
I’ve been making a list of the sex that I’m now too old to consider. I will probably never have sex again on a jiggling sofa with her parents asleep upstairs. Or in a skip. Or in the back of a stationary 2CV or the front of a moving Alfa Romeo.
I won’t do bondage, sadomasochism or erotic yoga or miss them. Neither will I partake in role play. I am too old to be a pirate, a policeman, a Viking or the Milk Tray Man (they don’t know who the Milk Tray Man was either).
And I realise with a sudden shock that I’m probably too old to sleep with anyone for the first time. The thought of having to go through the whole seduction, will they, won’t they, can I, can’t I, is far more terrifying than it is exciting.
Sex definitely changes. It is less athletic, more romantic, more intense, more a special event. Not because it’s rare, but because it’s finite. There is a point in your life when you stop counting up and start counting back. It’s not the laps run, it’s the laps that are left.
The Moral Of The Story
“Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?” asks Roxana Robinson, who ventures an answer (NYT):
When Leo Tolstoy wrote “Anna Karenina,” he was drawing on a local real-life tragedy: a young woman, jilted by her lover, threw herself under a train in despair. But he also drew on something more personal: His married sister had an adulterous affair and an illegitimate child. She was abandoned by her lover, who left her to marry another woman. She grew desperate and suicidal and wrote anguished letters to her brother. Did Tolstoy have the right to tell her story? He changed it to suit his literary needs, and used her desperation for his own purposes. But what were those purposes?
I don’t think Tolstoy was exploiting his sister, quite the reverse. I think he was voicing his own pain and desperation. He was driven, not by a narcissistic urge for literary gain, but by deep empathy for his sister. His response was not, “I can use this,” but “I can’t bear this.” Writing was a way to relieve his own pain. This was a deeply compassionate response. … A great writer like Tolstoy will feel a character’s life as his own; he’ll enter fully into that consciousness, and his responses will reverberate through his work. A great writer will use a narrative because she finds it moving, or compelling, troubling or heartbreaking or exhilarating. What drives her is empathy, not voyeurism.
A Cronenberg Creeper
David Cronenberg’s new short The Nest is NSFW from the first frame:
Aisha Harris sums up the appeal of the intensely creepy film:
In the film, shot in a single long take in what looks like a very bleak storage basement, a woman (Evelyne Brochu) goes through a consultation with a doctor (voiced by Cronenberg) in hopes of having a rather unusual mastectomy. The two discuss her reason for wanting surgery, with the camera focused upon her almost the entire time. There are no peeling, mangled, or deformed body parts here, but the woman’s vivid, visceral description of her supposed condition combined with the mundane, relaxed tone of Cronenberg’s interaction with her might creep some viewers out nearly as much as some of the goriest moments in The Fly.
Scott Beggs praises Brochu’s acting:
It’s constructed as an unflinching POV shot of the young woman, resting entirely on and proving wholly the powerful presence of Evelyne Brochu (who some will recognize from Orphan Black). Simply put, this is a dull film without her intensity and calm insanity (similar to another of Cronenberg’s modern shorts). She sells a delusion to the point that we’re left questioning whether her garage-set surgical consult is actually the right course of action for a human wasp’s nest.
Or maybe the doctor … is a mad opportunist taking advantage of mental illness. Or maybe a dozen other things. We’re left pondering a lot of possibilities, but it seems clear that no matter the reality, what’s going to happen next will be terrible.
The Shock Of Proust
Daniel Mendelsohn recalls how reading the author for the first time transformed his ideas of love and writing:
Discovering Proust was a real shock—it was the shock of recognition. I was twenty, and going through a rough patch in my love life. It gave me a shock that, I believe, is felt by every gay person reading Proust for the first time—the unsatisfied desires and the frustration I harbored had not only been felt by someone else but, even more extraordinarily, they were the subject of a great book. When I read Swann’s Way, it wasn’t the description of homosexual desire that touched me—because it’s practically absent in that volume—but something much more general, the description of unreciprocated desire, and above all, the astounding revelation that desire can’t endure its own satisfaction. We see that exemplified in Swann in Love. When Swann succeeds in physically possessing Odette, when she ceases to escape him, his desire for her vanishes. For me … that was a revelation as well as a recognition.
And then I had another kind of shock. Thanks to Proust, I found a certain consolation in thinking that all artistic creation is a substitute for frustration and disappointment—that art feeds on our failures. Back then, I remember thinking to myself, I can’t get what I want anyway, I may as well become a writer!
July 4, 2014
A Poem For Independence Day
Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
The jacket copy of the recent and brilliant edition of Frank O’Hara’s Selected Poems, edited and introduced by Mark Ford, describes O’Hara as “one of the most original and influential American poets of the twentieth century,” which is gloriously on the mark. He was also one of the most expansive and beloved personalities of his day and the spiritual anchor of what came to be known as The New York School of Poets, including in its first wave, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery, who reigns now and has for decades as one of the most original and influential poets of our time.
Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), to whom O’Hara’s poem is addressed, was a German poet and critic, also a physician, whose early verse and poetic dramas were, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, “strongly expressionistic and even nihilistic” and his later poems and his autobiography, Doppelleben (double life) reflective of “his ambivalent though ultimately negative reactions to the National Socialist era.”
“To Gottfried Benn” by Frank O’Hara:
Poetry is not instruments
that work at times
then walk out on you
laugh at you old
get drunk on you young
poetry’s part of your self
like the passion of a nation
at war it moves quickly
provoked to defense or aggression
unreasoning power
an instinct for self-declaration
like nations its faults are absorbed
in the heat of sides and angles
combatting the void of rounds
a solid of imperfect placement
nations get worse and worse
but not wrongly revealed
in the universal light of tragedy
(From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Alan Levine)
Pass On The Pyrotechnics?
Sarah Miller wonders if celebrating the sound of munitions exploding is really the best way to mark our independence:
Most Americans are very, very lucky to have escaped any homefront experience with war. So there’s perhaps something arrogant about being like, “Whoo! Let’s make lots of sounds that sound like war!” To say nothing of fireworks’ considerable expense, or the fact that they aren’t great for the air, or that they tax fire departments who need to be at the ready for other more important things, especially since wildfires are increasing and intensifying with climate change.
I’m not against fun, and I’m not always against maybe-not-environmentally-friendly fun. Meaning: I don’t blame people for loving giant trucks and speedboats and ATVs. I own a Toyota Yaris that is so light you could punt it like a football, but if money were no object and cars burned dried albizzia flowers instead of fuel, I would drive a Ford F150. But we don’t live in a world where driving a giant car means nothing, or where loud, scary, artillery-like noises mean nothing. Now I’m not saying “Fireworks are bad, ban them!” or “Let’s make the Fourth a day to weave God’s Eyes together!” (Though if someone brings beer, I’m in.) But it’s worth imagining a world without them. And if you don’t believe me, ask the nearest Irish Setter.
Meanwhile, Steven Overly stresses that fireworks injuries are on the rise:
The number of fireworks-related injuries soared to their highest level in more than a decade last year, according to a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission report released last week. An estimated 11,400 injuries were reported during 2013, a staggering 31 percent climb compared to 8,700 injuries reported the year before. … As one might expect, a majority of the fireworks-related injuries last year occurred in the month surrounding Independence Day. CPSC conducted an in-depth study of the 7,400 injuries reported between June 21, 2013, and July 21, 2013. Here’s what they found:
Men were more likely to be injured than women, 57 percent to 43 percent.
Roughly half of the injured were 25 or younger. Children under 4 accounted for 14 percent of the injuries.
Which fireworks caused the most injuries? Sparklers accounted for 2,300 of the 7,400 injuries reported during the in-depth study. The flickering wands burn at roughly 2,000 degrees, Adler noted, and often wind up in the hands of children.
Hands and fingers were the body parts most likely to be burned or otherwise injured, accounting for 36 percent of injuries during the month-long study. They were followed by the head and face (22 percent), eye (16 percent) and leg (14 percent).
approximately 3 percent were admitted to the hospital. The remaining 2 percent of victims left the hospital without being seen, according to the report.
The First Fireworks
Simon Werrett looks back at the history of pyrotechnics, noting that prints like the one above were markers not so much of fun and games but of court power in 16th-18th-century Europe:
[D]isplays … typically featured symbolic or allegorical decorations and scenery which were intended to present a more specific message to audiences. The figure of a lion might represent a powerful king, or the slaying of a dragon might signal the conquest of the king’s enemies. As such, it was important to states to make sure that everyone understood the message of fireworks, and so artists were commissioned to engrave large prints of displays for distribution to relevant audiences. Fireworks prints became something of a genre in their own right, and were made by artists across Europe for several hundred years. …
Images were typically large, printed on paper, or sometimes silk, and distributed either at the display or as gifts to diplomats and other courts subsequently. Prints were not intended to capture the reality of a performance, like a photograph, but to serve as well-ordered representations of official events. Fireworks prints acted as a front-stage, sanitizing the messiness of the real event to leave only an idealized account. In fact many fireworks failed – displays often witnessed accidents, sometimes quite horrible, and there were frequently mistakes.
(Image: fireworks at The Hague, June 14, 1713 on the occasion of the “Peace of Utrecht,” via Wikimedia Commons)
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