Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 282

Mental Health Break

Christian Tingle, a dating site for those who want to avoid the sin of landscape mode:

A Drink For The Lady

Katy Waldman considers why “bartenders and waitstaff often expect their female customers to order ‘juicy or sweet’ beverages, [while] those who defy convention with a whiskey neat get vaulted to cool-girl glory”:

Only tough people seek out stuff that tastes “bad”—think about the virile rumble in phrases like “stiff drink” and “hard liquor.” Subjecting yourself to strong spirits implies a kind of Trojan indestructibility, as if the really great thing would be if the bar were a Cormac McCarthy novel so you could publicly not care about the apocalypse, but since it’s not, you’ll just have a Jameson.

“Liking hard drinks is related to other indicators of badassery,” says Anna Newby, a Washington, D.C., bartender and Slate contributor. “It’s finding out a girl boxes instead of running for exercise. Why do we care how people work out? But we do.” Newby notes that whole nooks of drinking culture are propped up by the desire to “prove something”—no one assumes that people enjoy keg stands or tequila shots, but they’ll do them for street cred. And yet other types of self-punishing willpower—the feminized kinds—only attract scorn: “I’ve seen people roll their eyes at a table of girls ordering vodka sodas,” Newby says, “which is perceived as the anorexic drink. It’s like, one girl orders it, and they all do.”

(Video: “Girl Drink Drunk” from Kids in the Hall)

But Is It Art?

Gabrielle sporting a goatee and chest hair. We will be adding new galleries soon! pic.twitter.com/8Cm97452mM

— Sinthetics (@Sinthetics) May 1, 2013

EJ Dickson toured a sex-doll factory and found a bunch of aesthetes:

“There are other doll brands that go solely for usability,” [Sinthetics owner Matt] Krivicke says as he guides me around the shop. “They think the product is just used for sex, so they design around that parameter. I don’t. The function will always be there, but my intent when I’m starting a sculpture is I want to give it life.” … Hearing the pair talk about their dolls as sculptures, it’s easy to dismiss them as misguided or self-deluded. After all, most sex toys, however expensive or elaborate they might be, are designed solely for one purpose—and are used as such.

Yet looking at the dolls, it’s clear what Sinthetics do is a peculiar mix of art and engineering. They spend at least six months crafting each doll to their client’s specifications (they’ve only made 150 during their three years in business), assembling its skeleton, molding its parts one-by-one, and testing out its range of motion (link NSFW) to ensure no sexual positions will compromise the “integrity of the doll’s internal structure.” Which is not to say they have sex with the dolls themselves. “They’re our silicon family,” Keller says. “That’d just be weird.”

The View From Your Window

Bangalore, India, 9 am

Loving Ladies, Banging Bros, Ctd

A reader writes:

Hi Andrew and Dish team. I’m a bisexual, heteroamorous guy, and I absolutely agree with Dan Savage’s and Charles Pulliam-Moore’s call for bisexual men to be forthright with their partners. The trouble is, as a bisexual, you can’t necessarily know that you’re heteroamorous until you’ve tried and failed – perhaps multiple times – to be bi-amorous. As a younger guy just coming out as bisexual, I genuinely thought I might be romantically attracted to both sexes and that I just hadn’t found the right guy yet. I was very inexperienced with both women and men, and I ended up hurting a couple of guys that I really enjoyed being around (and hooking up with) because the romantic spark I was hoping for never materialized.

That isn’t to absolve bi guys who treat people like shit, or simply with carelessness. I’m guilty of some the latter myself. (Not the former, I hope.) But I think that the emotional scars that some gay men bear from their interactions with bi men can sometimes be attributed to youth and inexperience, rather than dishonesty or fear. Raising awareness of a more accurate definition of bisexuality – one that includes heteroamorousness – is very important, as Savage says. But if forthrightness is bi men’s special responsibility, then I think we can ask for understanding in return, especially for our youthful transgressions.

Another:

I’m a bisexual man in a gay marriage.

My (very gay) husband and I have been together for 12 monogamous years, but prior to that time I dated both men and women in high school and college. My porn and fantasy life continue to include both genders. When someone turns my head on the street, or when I crush on someone at a party, it may be either a woman or a man. I would say that I’m equally bisexual and bi-amorous.

I am definitely not one of those men with “an internal incompatibility between [his] romantic desires and his fear of social judgment,” as your reader put it. If my marriage were over tomorrow, I have no idea whether my next long-term relationship would be with a man or a woman. But either way, social judgment will have nothing to do with it. I was privileged to grow up in a time and place where I was safe and comfortable being completely open from age 16 on about my relationships with both men and women. And today I live in a state that gives my relationships equal footing under the law regardless of who I fall in love with, in a city that practically celebrates my marriage. Thanks to the activism of you and many others who broke down the closet door and showed the world that queer folk are “virtually normal,” in my daily life I experience no social judgment whatsoever about being in a gay relationship.

That makes me wonder whether the traditional-marriage rearguard left a plausible argument on the table in their legal battles. In the string of court cases in recent years, the opponents of marriage equality repeatedly came up with no rational justification whatsoever to keep marriage a heterosexual-only institution. But the argument never really acknowledged the existence of bisexuals.

If “fear of social judgment” is a major factor driving bisexuals into child-producing heterosexual marriages (or keeping them in those marriages) rather than long-term same-sex romances, isn’t it reasonable to expect that tearing down that social judgment will result in fewer child-producing marriages? If I had graduated from high school in the ’70s or ’80s, rather than the late ’90s, isn’t it likely that a bisexual, bi-amorous man like me would have kept my gay trysts secret and ended up married to a woman like the men your reader has been banging?

Excluding gays from marriage has no real rational arguments to back it up, as several courts have held and as a majority of Americans now seem to understand. But doesn’t excluding bisexuals from gay marriage leave them only one available, socially acceptable romantic option, which happens to be the option that may result in bearing children? And if we accept a bisexual, bi-amorous model of human sexuality/amorosity, isn’t that a rational reason to adhere to traditional heterosexual-only marriage?

A female perspective:

I’m a “straight” woman, but the post seemed to be talking about me. It has helped me understand an experience that has left me reeling and confused about my sexuality. I would definitely say that I am “bi-sexual but hetero-amorous.” I’m 29 and I’d never had a sexual experience with a woman, not even so much as a kiss, but I’d always been open to it. It was such a part of me that I sort of thought that everyone felt this way. How could you not want to kiss women? They are so soft and beautiful!

However, it wasn’t something that ever made me question my sexuality, because I was so obviously attracted to men and the thought of dating a woman did nothing for me. I had no desire for it whatsoever. I was perfectly romantically and physically satisfied by men.

A few weeks ago, however, I had a threesome for the first time (two girls and one guy) and it was one of the most satisfying and eye-opening experiences of my life. It was a great experience, but it left me with a lot of questions. I kept wondering: Am I bisexual now? But I have no desire to date a woman, even though having sex with one was amazing and satisfying. Am I terrible person? Someone who only wanted to have sex with women but didn’t want to date them? Reading that other people have experience this same kind of disconnect between their emotional and sexual desires has helped me put this experience in context.

Do You Know Your Ass From Your Elbow?

Because some digital book scanners don’t:

As Sarah Wendell, editor of the Romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books noticed recently, something has gone awry. Because, in many old texts the scanner is reading the word ‘arms’ as ‘anus’ and replacing it as such in the digital edition. As you can imagine, you don’t want to be getting those two things mixed up. The resulting sentences are hilarious, turning tender scenes of passionate embrace into something much darker, and in some cases, nearly physically impossible.

Some choice errors:

Mrs. Tipton went over to him and put her anus around his neck. “My dear,” she said, rapturously. “I have been hoping for years that you would talk that way to me.”

And:

“Bertie, dear Bertie, will you not say good night to me?” pleaded the sweet, voice of Minnie Hamilton, as she wound her anus affectionately around her brother’s neck. “No,” he replied angrily, pushing her away from him.

Alison Flood adds:

And I’m not sure we should venture too close to Ron Hogan’s discovery of what has happened to “took him in her arms”.

(Photo from Carl Warner‘s “Bodyscapes” series. Hat tip: PetaPixel)

The Rise And Fall Of The Gay Novel

Caleb Crain ponders the reasons why, after gay literary figures broke into the mainstream in the 1980s, their work has been a harder sell of late:

Gay novels do sell, and gay people do buy novels. But capitalism is a numbers game. Self-identifying homosexuals are not an enormous population, and, in general, they don’t buy literary fiction about themselves at a rate that would compensate for their small numbers. It can’t have helped that AIDS decimated the generation of gay men who, in the nineties, would have been in their forties, fifties, and sixties—prime ages for reading and buying books. It might also be the case that AIDS brought the attention of straights to gay voices in the eighties and early nineties, according to the principle that John of Gaunt set forth in “Richard II”—“O, but they say the tongues of dying men  / Enforce attention like deep harmony”—and that interest in the gay novel faded in tandem with journalistic coverage of the AIDS crisis.

Whatever the cause or perceived cause, I suspect that, nowadays, a mainstream publishing house rarely takes on a gay novel unless an editor believes that the book will find straight readers, too. Because some straights still find homosexuality disgusting (cf. comment trolls across the Internet) and a larger number fail to find gay characters “relatable,” a gay novel faces steeper odds from the start. “It’s a non-homosexual world, and the majority of those who are buying, selling, and reading literature are non-homosexual,” the journalist Tyler Coates wrote for Flavorwire last summer, in an article that riveted my attention because it happened to appear the week before the release of my own novel, “Necessary Errors,” whose main character is gay. Or, as Cunningham put it, even more trenchantly, in 2000, while reflecting on the success of his novel “The Hours,” “I can’t help but notice that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”

Previous Dish on gay literature here and Crain’s own novel, Necessary Errors, here.

Mental Health Break

NSFW, because CK:

The Lost Art Of Memorizing Poetry

Nina Kang suggests that contemporary verse is simply difficult to remember:

Unfortunately, that strict meter we dislike was a pretty valuable mnemonic tool. Memory is reconstruction, and when we recite, we must reconstruct from the pattern of rhyme, internal rhyme, and meter, and from the remembered sensations of our throat muscles articulating the phonemes. During the era of rote memorization, poets generally used predictable and memorable formal techniques where “rhymes hinted at their partners and sense—and small remembered groups of words – contributed enough to restore the whole … as satisfying as solving a crossword clue” (from “Gray on a White Night: Reconstructing the Elegy through the Small Hours” in the London Times of April 22, 1960, according to Heart Beats). As a result, memorizing free verse poetry often feels like solving a crossword with only half the clues.

Face Of The Day

A defendant who is in custody flashes the four finger symbol known as Rabaa, meaning four in Arabic, during the trial of 20 individuals, including five Al-Jazeera journalists, for allegedly defaming the country and ties to the blacklisted Muslim Brotherhood in the police institute near Cairo’s Turah prison on May 3, 2014. Peter Greste, an Australian journalist with the satellite news channel Al-Jazeera on trial, described his ordeal as a “massive injustice”, after spending more than four months in jail. By Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP/Getty Images.