Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 344

Unsexy Sexting

Maureen O’Connor is ambivalent about it:

Even as sexting colonizes our phones, the activity hasn’t exactly taken over our libidos: a study of American college students recently found that 55 percent of women and 48 percent of men have engaged in “consensual but unwanted sexting,” i.e., sexting when they’re not that into it. That sounds pretty bleak: Why contort yourself posing butt selfies in the bathroom if it doesn’t turn you on? …

Of course, sex has always been something of a performance. But as amateur porn floods into our lives – and our lives flood into amateur porn – the difference between earnest pleasure and enthusiastic fakery is increasingly difficult to discern. It’s tempting to think that in performing the “consensual but unwanted” things we believe to be sexy, we are preventing ourselves from engaging in the truly sexy – behaving like thwarted teenagers instead of adults who actually have sex.

But sexual diversions don’t need to be measured by how closely they approximate coitus; innuendo can be enjoyable on its own, the same way hot photos are fun to look at even when masturbation is, like, the furthest thing from our minds. If I hadn’t been sexting that night at my kitchen counter, I might have been watching TV or killing time on the Internet. That sexting session wasn’t an inferior version of sex; it was a superior version of Candy Crush.

Sexual Do’s And Donuts

Amanda Hess traces the amusing history of Cosmo‘s “most infamous sex tip,” which first appeared in the magazine in 2003, along with 98 other “Fresh, Frisky Tips [That] Will Thrill Every Inch of Your Guy”:

The pastry made its appearance in tip No. 30, spoken from the mouth of an apocryphal anonymous boyfriend: “My girlfriend gets a glazed donut and sticks my penis through the hole. She nibbles around it, stopping to suck me every once in a while. The sugar beads from her mouth tingle on my tip.” Soon, tip No. 30 ascended in the public consciousness to become known as the most infamous Cosmo sex advice of all time—even stupider than the one where you take a sip of hot water into your mouth, introduce a penis, and gargle. Tom Wolfe skewered the doughnut line in his 2004 novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, and Maureen Dowd used it as evidence that feminism is stalling in her book Are Men Necessary?. If a real person actually admitted to executing the move, it was performance art in the service of mocking the magazine. In “I Tried Cosmo’s Weirdest Sex Tips So You Don’t Have To,” Anna Pulley advises against choosing a chocolate glaze: “It looks like shit. Actual, literal shit.”

Hess puts the donut advice in the context of an info-deprived audience:

When [former editor Kate] White took the reins at Cosmo in 1998, young women had few outlets for reading about sex outside of the Starr Report.

Crowding around a Cosmopolitan beat sneaking to the family desktop that moved at dial-up speed. Helen Gurley Brown, who ran Cosmo from 1965 to 1997, had made a “bold, gusty, irreverent magazine,” White says. But only when White took over did the magazine actually get “very candid” about just what a fun, fearless female does when she hops into bed. “This was a time when young people were clamoring for information, and they couldn’t get it from their friends,” White says. “We gave them permission to enjoy having sex.” For all its ludicrousness, Cosmopolitan presented a vision of limitless sexual experimentation, no shame. Cosmo wasn’t just a magazine that would tell you to put a doughnut on a penis—it would also put it on the cover, then reprint it in three books. And women bought the magazine, even if they didn’t really buy the tip: When White left Cosmo in 2012, she’d grown its audience by 700,000 to rival Helen Gurley Brown’s peak circulation of 3 million.

(Photo by Rob Boudon)

How To Make Dates And Influence Algorithms

Logan Hill talked to four of the most popular New Yorkers on OKCupid.  Among them is James, “the living embodiment of his OKCupid handle, MyTiesAreSkinny,” who shares his strategy for maximizing dating success:

“You ready for the secret?” James asks me. “Not to blow your mind, but it’s disgusting …” He picks up his phone. “So, every couple days, I will do this,” he says. He opens the Tinder app, but before I can see the first woman’s face, he swipes right: interested. If the woman he likes also swipes right, he has an official match. In short: He never swipes left (not interested).

“I will say yes to every single person,” James says. And he never follows up with someone who hasn’t already confirmed her interest. On ­OKCupid,­ he does the same thing: He gives everyone five stars (and if someone gives him four or fives stars in return, the site will notify him of a match). By doing so, he exposes himself to less risk, an appealing upside to James, who’s had two difficult breakups. He’s since had thousands of matches—so many that he’s had to refine his strategy.

When he messages women on ­OKCupid­, it’s time-consuming:

He reads the profile and tailors each email with personal details. On Tinder, he basically tweaks the same message. “The last person I matched with was Allison,” he says. If he were to send a message to Allison on a Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday, it would read: Hey there Miss Allison. What kind of trouble did you get into this weekend? “That’s exactly what I do, every fucking time,” he says, laughing. For Wednesday: Hey there Miss Allison. What sort of trouble are you getting into this week? Thursday or Friday: What kind of trouble are you getting into this weekend? And if it’s Saturday: What kind of trouble have you been getting into?

Depending on how the Tinder chat evolves, he tries to move the conversation to text and then to a real date. “There’s a tyranny of choice,” he says. “I feel kind of gross saying that out loud, because I don’t want to objectify people. But you just kind of have to.”

Previous Dish on online dating here and here.

A Short Story For Saturday

James Franco reads Amie Barrodale’s short story, “William Wei,” first published in the Summer 2011 Paris Review:

The opening paragraph:

I once brought a girl home because I liked her shoes. That was the only thing I noticed about her. I live in a really small apartment. A lot of my clothes end up piled on my mattress or draped over the open door of the microwave. I guess the girl with the pink high heels woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t remember where she was. She went out naked in the hall and closed the door behind her. She said that she had asked me, and I told her that was the way to the bathroom, to go out the front door. I don’t remember doing that. I remember I woke up with the cops in my house, asking me if I knew this girl. I said of course, she was the girl with the pink high heels. They thought that was really funny. After that, I didn’t drink for about five months. I was mostly celibate, except for my upstairs neighbor, until she moved away. She was this Indian girl. She liked to do it from behind, in this one position. That was the only thing she wanted to do. The other things were boring, she said. When I went to the shower, she got up on all fours to masturbate.

Keep reading here. Check out our previous SSFSs here.

Face Of The Day

For his series Notes for an Epilogue, Tamas Dezso captured scenes of post-Soviet Romania:

[T]here is a documentary element to the photos, which chronicles a way of life that is fast disappearing. The communist-era factories and structures being salvaged for scrap will eventually vanish. Entire villages, like Geamana in the fifth slide, have already been abandoned entirely. The cultures in the area are also disappearing…. It may seem rural Romania’s transition into post-soviet life is taking an inordinately long time, but Dezso says the region operates at a different pace than many westerners are used to. This is another imperative behind his effort to capture the essence of what’s being lost — these are cultures and traditions that have lasted a very long time, and now stand to disappear in the equivalent blink of an eye.

(Photo by Tamas Dezso)

The Moral Fiber Of Fiction

Paula M.L. Moya explores the connection between literature and morality:

Because works of literary fiction engage our emotions and challenge our perceptions, they both reflect on and help shape what we consider to be moral in the first place. Importantly, this can be the case as much for the author as for the reader.

Consider Toni Morrison’s Sula.

In a 1985 interview conducted by Bessie Jones, Morrison formulated the question that motivated the novel Sula: “If you say you are somebody’s friend as in Sula, now what does that mean? What are the lines that you do not step across?” Elsewhere in that same interview, Morrison explains that she views writing as a way of testing out the moral fiber of her characters in order to see how they respond to difficult situations: “Well, I think my goal is to see really and truly of what these people are made, and I put them in situations of great duress and pain, you know, I ‘call their hand.’ And, then when I see them in life threatening circumstances or see their hands called, then I know who they are.” Moreover, because Morrison regards writing as a process of moral and epistemic investigation, she does not write about ordinary, everyday people or events. Instead, she plumbs the hard cases—the situations where “something really terrible happens.” She explains: “that’s the way I find out what is heroic. That’s the way I know why such people survive, who went under, who didn’t, what the civilization was, because quiet as its kept much of our business, our existence here, has been grotesque.” The process of writing a novel can be mode of inquiry in which the “answer” surprises even the author.

Mental Health Break

Be careful when you selfie:

Selfie from Andy Martin on Vimeo.

Reading The Rain

As California enjoys a welcome reprieve from its ongoing drought, David Ulin considers how the state’s legendary downpours have shaped its literary – and psychological – landscape:

“Easterners commonly complain that there is no ‘weather’ in Southern California,” Joan Didion observes in “Los Angeles Notebook,” “that the days and the seasons slip by relentlessly, numbingly bland. That is quite misleading. In fact, the climate is characterized by infrequent but violent extremes: two periods of torrential subtropical rains which continue for weeks and wash out the hills and send subdivisions sliding toward the sea; about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire.”

I could do without the Santa Ana, but in such a landscape, the rain — especially when it is torrential — is a revelation, and I have missed it this year. Why? Because in California, rain reminds us (to borrow another phrase from Didion) of “how close to the edge we are.” It is often neither gentle nor reassuring, which the region’s writers have recognized all along.

In one of the climactic scenes in his novel Mildred Pierce, James M. Cain describes the New Year’s flood of 1934: “She slogged on,” he writes of his protagonist, “up the long hill to Glendale, down block after block of rubble, torrents, seas of water. Her galoshes filled repeatedly, and periodically she stopped, holding first one foot high behind her, then the other, to let the water run out.” It’s a vivid image, of nature in ascendance, of the elemental world asserting itself over the human, as every Southern Californian understands will happen in the end.

Recent Dish on California’s endless summer here, here, and here.

Invasion Is Imminent, Ctd

In pro-Russian Kharkiv today, activists for the revolution are beaten and forced to kneel: http://t.co/onto628G1e via @HromadskeTV #Ukraine—
Simon Shuster (@shustry) March 01, 2014

The most popular Qs in Kyiv right now: "Where is US, EU?". Shocked ppl just randomly talk to each other on the streets—
Maxim Eristavi (@MaximEristavi) March 01, 2014

quite a coincidence that @navalny is in court-ordered Internet silence now.

— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) March 1, 2014

Here is Moscow’s protest against Putin’s move to invade Ukraine. One guy. (Anyone else’d be arrested) pic.twitter.com/nPHspwBTj0 via @oosipova — Simon Shuster (@shustry) March 1, 2014

The new prime minister of Crimea, who requested Russian troops, belongs to a party that won 4% of the vote in last election — igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) March 1, 2014

Photo of riot-policemen, disbanded for mass-murders in Kyiv, allegedly showing off their new Russian IDs in Crimea pic.twitter.com/Wu6h5ToaR9

— Maxim Eristavi (@MaximEristavi) March 1, 2014

Ukraine Liveblog: Without testing its loyalty, Ukrainian leader Vitali Klitschko calls for mobilizing the army http://t.co/oj3rmcjr3P

— The Interpreter (@Interpreter_Mag) March 1, 2014

Earlier tweet reax here. Max Seddon summarizes today’s developments:

Putin asked Russia’s upper house of parliament for permission “to use the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine until the normalization of the socio-political situation in that country,” the Kremlin said in a statement. The body is a rubberstamp institution that fulfills Putin’s every wish and voted unanimously to approve his request less than two hours later.

In an extraordinary session of the Federation Council reminiscent of a Soviet party congress, senators accused protesters in Kiev of having been trained in Lithuania and Poland to overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych and moved to ask Putin to recall Russia’s ambassador to the United States as a rebuke to U.S. President Barack Obama[.] … Ukraine has accused Russia of an “invasion” of Crimea, where Russia has a key naval base, but Putin’s request would give him the right to send troops anywhere in the country.

It’s not yet clear if or when a formal invasion might begin. But the US seems to have been caught flat-footed:

“Nobody thought Putin was going to invade last night,” one Senate aide who works closely on the Ukraine crisis. “He has the G8 summit in Sochi coming up, no one really saw this kind of thing coming.” This source also stressed that events are still moving quickly on the ground. “There is still a question about whether this is Russian troops coming across the border or Russian troops moving around the installations in Crimea.” …

Among the options being considered [by the Obama administration], according to U.S. officials, is boycotting the G8 Summit scheduled for Sochi in June and encouraging other countries to do the same. If Russian troops stay in Crimea, it could scare off trade and further investment in Russia and also further weaken the ruble. It’s debatable whether that would influence Russian thinking.

Michael Weiss is critical of the administration:

It’s obvious that Putin calculated correctly yet again. The United States was gulled into thinking that Russia would forbear this time because the siloviki gave assurances to a U.S. diplomatic corps eager to believe anything that it would do. Washington’s own intelligence community, fresh from proclaiming a year ago that Bashar al-Assad had “weeks left” in power, assessed yesterday that “we don’t have any reason to think” that the surprise drill of 150,000 soldiers announced overnight by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu would amount to “more than military exercises.” And given that the United States has yet to definitively label what transpired eight months ago in Egypt a “coup,” the Kremlin must have also reckoned that a rapid takeover of Crimea would be all over but for the shouting as Washington sputtered to define exactly what had just transpired, much less attempted a coherent response to yet another international crisis.

Ioffe sizes up the Russians:

We didn’t think Putin would do this. Why, exactly? This has often puzzled me about Western analysis of Russia. It is often predicated on wholly Western logic: surely, Russia won’t invade [Georgia, Ukraine, TK] because war is costly and the Russian economy isn’t doing well and surely doesn’t want another hit to an already weak ruble; because Russia doesn’t need to conquer Crimea if Crimea is going to secede on its own; Russia will not want to risk the geopolitical isolation, and “what’s really in it for Russia?“—stop. Russia, or, more accurately, Putin, sees the world according to his own logic, and the logic goes like this: it is better to be feared than loved, it is better to be overly strong than to risk appearing weak, and Russia was, is, and will be an empire with an eternal appetite for expansion. And it will gather whatever spurious reasons it needs to insulate itself territorially from what it still perceives to be a large and growing NATO threat. Trying to harness Russia with our own logic just makes us miss Putin’s next steps.

Larison’s take on the crisis:

Obama has threatened Russia that there would be unspecified “costs” for what it is doing, but whatever real costs Russia pays will not be imposed by Western governments or the U.N. Moscow is not only wrecking its reputation with most Ukrainians, but it is also potentially risking a ruinous war that could make it a pariah in much of the world for little real gain.

Western mediation is probably of little use here, but if there is a government that might be able to get through to Moscow at the moment it might be Germany. Because Germany has taken Russian interests into account more often in the past than other major Western governments, it might be able to defuse the situation before it results in violence and further escalation. It should go without saying that the U.S. and NATO shouldn’t make any threats to take their own military action or make promises to Ukraine that everyone already knows they aren’t going to keep. They would be foolish, they wouldn’t be meant or taken seriously, and they would only make the crisis harder to resolve. …

Annexing Crimea outright would be a clumsy and provocative action that would leave the new government in Kiev with almost no choice but to fight, so it seems more likely that there would be an attempt to use continued control over Crimea as leverage in future dealings with Kiev. Does Russia “want” Crimea? Maybe not officially as a part of Russia, but it does seem to want to be able to use control of it to its advantage. Whether this takes the form of phony independence or just autonomy remains to be seen.

Millman wonders if the Ukraine would be better off giving up Crimea:

I can make a reasonable case that Ukrainian nationalists should welcome Russian intervention in Crimea. The status-quo ante meant a large Russian bloc, and a large Russian naval base, within Ukraine. The former makes it harder for Ukrainian nationalists to dominate the country electorally; the latter makes it harder to maintain a policy of distancing from Russia. Lose Crimea, and both problems are solved.

Of course, nationalists can’t simply allow sovereign territory to be seized by enemy forces. But what if Crimea achieves de-facto independence, but is not annexed by Russia and independence is not recognized by any other country? Kiev could demand an end to the violation of its sovereignty. And Russia could refuse to accede to that demand. And this could become the new status quo. Wouldn’t that, in the short-term, anyway, be optimal from the perspective of a Ukrainian nationalist?

Josh Marshall wonders if control of Crimea is all the Russians are considering:

There is of course the possibility that Putin may have in mind the occupation of most or all of Ukraine. But this is difficult to envision. Not only would the international response be ferocious. More importantly, recent events have shown that sustaining and normalizing such an occupation in the vast portions of the country where ethnic Ukrainians predominate would be difficult and debilitating.

The real levers Obama or more specifically the US and Europe have are the ability to make the price of a Russian land grab some version of international pariah status, through a mix of economic and diplomatic exclusion. Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas and oil significantly complicates that option. But the combined economic might of the US and the EU is vast in comparison to Russia’s.

Taking a step back, Masha feels that ”the Crimean invasion is a landmark in Russian domestic politics”:

It signals a loss of innocence: no longer will Russians be able to think that Putin merely feels nostalgic for the USSR. It also signals ever greater polarisation of Russian society: in addition to all the other lines along which Russians are divided and across which civilised dialogue is impossible, there is now the chasm between supporters and opponents of the planned annexation. It also means the political crackdown in Russia will intensify further.

These clear and tragic consequences obscure the challenge the new Crimean war poses to Russia’s post-imperial consciousness. “I can be reasonable about everything, but I cannot give up the Crimea,” was a line from the late Galina Starovoitova, who as Boris Yeltsin’s adviser on nationalities policy, oversaw Russia’s first attempts at releasing its colonies. She meant that, like just about every Russian, she felt the Black Sea resort area was part of her birthright, whatever the maps may say.

Malkin Award Nominee

“The gay movement has really brought this on themselves. These African countries have only been concerned about passing these laws after the global homosexual movement started pushing their agenda in these very morally conservative countries. What looks like offensive action by these governments is really defensive … We were invited by these African countries when they were confronted with the problem. And frankly, a lot of this comes down to male – you know, white male homosexuals from the United States and Europe going into these African countries because the age of consent laws are low and able to take these, you know, young, teenage boys and turn them into rent boys for the price of a bicycle. And that just outraged the people in these countries,” – Scott Lively, the American Christianist, partially responsible for the terrorization of gay people in Uganda and Nigeria.