Bad Places to Get Sex Advice

Apparently men's magazines are obsessed with the question of why women cheat, which would be offensive except that women's magazines are obsessed with how to find out whether your man is one of the millions who are, in fact, already cheating.

So, another dispatch in the adultery wars from the magazine Details, which found (through some means or other) that 41% of women who cheat think the person they're cheating with is sexier than their primary partner.

Their question is: 41% of women think their primary partner isn't sexy? My question is: What the hell motivates the other 59%?

On another (only tangentially related) note, I recently found a book of book recommendations titled "Book Lust" in a giftstore. It's gimmicky, but how many times have I picked up a book, read the first two hundred pages, and realized that it's not going to get good. I am, in fact, reading a bad book. Can I describe the pain of realizing I spent good money and time on what will, in effect, always be a mediocre experience? It's almost unAmerican.

So I understand the point of books like "Book Lust." I was flipping through it when I came across a section titled Sex and the Single Reader. The title says it all, but on the short list that followed I came across "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

I have a long history with this book. It started in fourth grade, when my Mom told me that it (along with the Bible and Gone With the Wind!) was on a short list of books I was still too young to read. Obviously, I had to read it right away. But, being 8, I had to wait for a good opportunity. When I was 10 I finally got it. I was in India for my cousin's wedding, and my cousin had a dog-eared copy lying around (along with the many Mills & Boon romance novels she kept for rainy days). With her eventual permission, I snuck the book around in my bag for a week and a half. When I did start reading it, I found the opening boring and verbose. I flipped through for good parts, realized there were none, and put it back on her shelf. Maybe they only print a censored copy in India, I thought, wondering why it had been banned in my house.

I forgot all about it for two years, until I saw the movie "Pleasantville." In this film, everyone in a black-and-white TV town gains their colors when they break out of their cherished routines. The main character's sister doesn't get her colors until she reads her first book. What does she choose? D.H. Lawrence, because "it seems sexy." "It is," says her brother (Was that Tobey Maguire?)

Anyway, the movie rekindled my interest. I'd only read about 30 pages of the book before, I thought I'd give it another shot. I bought a used copy (probably a bad move with erotic fiction) but didn't crack it open until this summer. I settled down, expecting a steamy, enthralling read. The back of the book called it an "ode to spiritual regeneration through sexual love" which sounds like something I would enjoy.

Sadly, it was not. After years of building up my expectations, I found myself mired in a predictable and irritating romance between two predictable and irritating characters. Sure, there are long descriptions of sexual idylls, useful for anyone who wants to talk dirty in turn-of-the-century English. There are occasional portions where Mellors, one of the lovers, enthuses about the joys of "fucking" (Lawrence's word, not mine, I should attribute it since it almost sent his publishers to jail) but my tolerance finally broke when he went on a long rant about the four types of women in the world.

According to Mellors, all women fall into several distressing sexual categories. 1) Women who hate sex. 2) Women who love it and want to be in charge (which he finds an insult to his masculinity. He says this) 3) Lesbians (all women who require clitoral stimulation to get off. The unfortunate Mellors has slept with a lot of "lesbians") and 4) Black women, who are "a little bit like mud."

How am I supposed to have any sympathy for this misogynistic, racist ball of crap? Did I mention he doesn't like children, not even his own daughter? Meanwhile, his so-called "lover" is a bored Madame Bovary-type whose disabled husband can no longer get it up. Frustration drives her into the arms of the gamekeeper (gamekeeper is an old-fashioned way of saying 'gardener') which makes this story (minus the Freudian sexual psychoanalysis) feel like a Desperate Housewives rerun.

According to Wikipedia (bastion of great literary minds), Lady Chatterley's Lover follows a relationship based on "tenderness, physical passion and mutual respect." Lady Chatterley "learns that sex is more than a shameful and disappointing act" and Mellors "learns about the spiritual challenges that come from physical love."

I don't think anyone on Wikipedia has read this novel. Basically, it's a collection of mangled class criticisms and sexual stereotypes that, much like the Freudian theories about female orgasm (which appear throughout!) may once have been intriguing but now just seem dated.

Satire Only Hurts if You Mean It

I've come back from the literary dead for several reasons. First, I'm on vacation, and taking a break from my regular writing job means I have time for this. Second, it's late at night, and I'd rather not sleep. Third, I'm so tired of the bullshit that passes for humor in college newspapers that I have to complain about it to the 0 people who read this blog. It'll make me feel better about myself, and that's all I care about.

I recently read an article that caused a furor at Central Connecticut State University (and to those of us far from Connecticut, remember the adage: if a butterfly flaps its wings in Alaska, a college newspaper columnist will one day write a jackass column about it that will offend neoNazis, foreign exchange students and feminists alike). I'm not usually amused by jokes about rape, but this article had real gems buried in the sludge. For example: the "quick reach-around?" Funny. The "sway you towards a darkened alley"? Cringe-worthy.

I've also been to every one of our school's annual "Take Back the Night" marches, and I've always known one of the speakers. I admire these girls' courage, and I would be upset on their behalf to see this article in the paper. Obviously, rape is not funny to people who have experienced it. Much like famine, dictatorship, deportation and cannibalism are not funny to their victims. The reason jokes about these last four subjects are 'appropriate' is because the vast majority of Americans feel pretty distant from them. And humor depends on a particular cultural moment.

Ever since Jon Swift suggested that poor Irish people eat their babies, newspaper columnists have been searching for the next big offensive joke. It if offends people, writers argue, it must be satire. Actually, there was a time (in the golden age of humor) when the reverse was true. Swift's satire was brutal, simple and true. Petroski's jokes are none of these things. They rely not on reality, but on hyperbolic history. The rape of the Sabine women? Not the reason Western civilization began. Excessively large families? Definitely part of the reason Irish people used to be poor.

Before defending a piece as satire, editors should understand what satire is. Petroski's column wasn't satire - it was a cheap shot. It was a frat-house joke dressed up in pretentious academic allusions, which pretty much sums up the yuppie college existence. Not that I have anything against the yuppies, or want to deny their right to higher education. I mean, I am not that far from a yuppie myself, although far enough that I can look down with a bit of detachment.

Point is: is this article funny? Only in places. Is it satire? No. Is it kind? Obviously not. Was it intended that way? No. But none of that means that Petroski is a bad person, or even a bad writer. Even the best humorist lays a turd now and again. The question is: can he recover with grace? Can he capture some original voice and unique subject? Or is he going to keep rehashing the same thesis purely for shock value?

Why Are Kids Getting Left Behind?

Richard Cohen (whom I don't always like, but whom I usually read) makes an interesting point in his recent column. Despite all the money being tossed down the drain of DC's public school system, kids aren't getting any better-educated.

We can blame all this on institutional factors, but only up to a point. The problem with public education, and indeed with any education, is that in the absence of locks, chains and other illegal restraints, it's impossible to keep students in a building they are determined to leave. It's impossible - in the absence of laws allowing teachers to cane students - to force students to do their homework. It's impossible to prop kids' eyelids open with toothpicks during lectures. The results of an education depend on a student's desire to be educated.

Therefore, whence comes the desire? What inspired Abraham Lincoln to walk 20 miles to borrow a book, assuming that in fact he did? Why are some people insatiably motivated to learn, while others skip out of class to chain-smoke behind the bleachers? Because I have seen this same effect take place in the classroom. Having been through an IB program in a regular high school, I was occasionally (rarely, but occasionally) in mixed classes, and I can tell you that the IB students came to class every day and always set the grading curve. Meanwhile, plenty of other kids just didn't show up. Ever.

Here are the factors we've looked at for the disparity: race, wealth, parental education, parental involvement, early intervention, etc. And with the exception of race, I think these are only somewhat important factors (race being important only in as much as it is correlated with wealth or family influences). In terms of wealth, it's true that richer parents have access to greater resources. But plenty of rich kids pay poor kids to do their homework, plenty of other rich kids snort coke in their best friend's Maserati in the high school parking lot. (It's true, if you don't believe me, ask the CDC) Money doesn't change a student's desire to learn.

What about early intervention? Studies show that programs like Head Start can work, but that in certain students, early gains dissipate with time.

Which leaves parents, the anti-drug but also, in so many ways, the great unknown. There is no scientific consensus on exactly how parents affect student behavior. What we can all accept is that those of us with great parents know how lucky we are, and so my evidence is going to be anecdotal. Yes, I think my parents pushed me on to great academic success. I chose all kinds of magnet and GT programs, I spent hours holed up in my study with books and magazines. But my sister - equally brilliant - did none of those things. And the pressure fell equally on both of us. My dad grew up poor in a poor country. His parents had no money and no schooling. But he has been an educational success. Meanwhile, his siblings - many of whom had much greater opportunity - chose not to educate themselves.

The theory that we have trouble accepting, liberals and conservatives alike, because we are Americans and it's against our American ideals, is that some students are born behind. They don't get left there. Not everyone has the "Abe Lincoln" factor. I'm not saying the "Abe Lincoln" factor correlates with professional or emotional success. But it rules the classroom.

The question that remains is, why doesn't the "Abe Lincoln" factor occur equally in students of all races and classes, in all locales? Why are the poor black kids of DC less likely to succeed in the classroom than the upper-class Asians of suburban Montgomery County, or the rich white kids of Laguna Beach? The CDC has no answer - they didn't even include Asians in their so-called 'landmark' study. This is where we turn to cultural and institutional factors, because we know - in our hearts and our educated heads - that we are all genetically the same. The "Abe Lincoln" factor is a learned behavior. Maybe it has something to do with how we measure our success when we're young. Maybe it has to do with role models, with access, with histories of oppression.

And maybe - and I say this as someone who did face unpleasantness when she was younger - we just have to accept that the future is the only territory we can rule. The past is not our country, and we can't always claim it. It comes down to, in my opinion, a teacher who at some moment actually convinced you that you could achieve something. But this moment wasn't about the past. It was always about the future. And anyway, how can it be recreated on a mass scale? That is the question. You can't force students to prop their eyes open during a bad lecture. And you can't force the lecturer to care that somewhere, in his classroom, students are falling asleep. And this is the institutional cycle that matters. The continuing whirl of people not caring to be taught by people who don't actually care to be teaching.