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.

Searching for the Perfect Man

In a recent column, Matt Feeney complains about how macho movies like 300 come under fire for being, of all things, “homoerotic.”

Feeney goes on at length about how sad the gay-calling is, but he doesn’t really ask why it happens. Here are my thoughts. These movies hark back to a heroic tradition that has, in modern times, become somewhat confused. It was Aristotle who first catalogued the “tragic hero’s” traits. The tragic hero was strong, intelligent and, under the right circumstances, emotive. His life had a pattern and purpose. He couldn’t just get run over by a truck. He was always the golden boy, the sensitive strong man who took enemy fire to save the life of a friend, or who rescued some helpless woman from rape and dismemberment by cannibals – only to be fried up and eaten himself. He got scant reward. He was brought low by his own physical and mental perfection. He was better than the rest of us.

The tragic hero reflects the Greek philosophers’ obsession with the “perfect man.” The Greek ideal of the perfect man was aesthetic as well as psychological – to be fair, the Greeks were big believers in premarital homosexuality. They weren’t alone. The perfect man became the David of Michelangelo’s sculpture, the Vitruvian man in da Vinci’s sketches. (Both of these artists, incidentally, were gay.)

However, over the years, the archetypal male hero has lost his way. With the onset of equality, we’ve separated certain qualities and assigned them to one or the other of the sexes. Men got physical strength, spatial reasoning, and calm in situations of crisis. Women, on the other hand, got good looks, tenderness, sensitivity and emotion. Nowadays, we tend to think of the ideal body as feminine. Men are just a walking aesthetic disaster.

The problem with the Greek martial hero in this context is that he was a physical ideal, and society has trouble separating physical beauty from sexual attraction. In the more permissive environment of prehistoric Athens, this conflict was no problem. Nowadays, in order to appreciate beautiful men, you have to be gay. In order to appreciate beautiful women, you just need to have eyes.

But even more problematically, the tragic hero was often brought low by his high-minded respect for higher-order feelings. He prominently displayed some of the emotions we nowadays assign solely to women. I have often thought, perhaps incorrectly, that as a society we have evolved to the point where we respect everyone’s emotions, “everyone” being defined as all woman and occasional gay men. To be an emotional straight man is just plain gay.

I’m guilty of this labeling myself. I remember once meeting some guy who made the mistake of confiding to me – perhaps because I seemed more mature than I was – that he really liked certain country love songs. I hiccupped uncomfortably and told him to “be a man.” Also, that I was more of a Leonard Cohen girl myself, Leonard Cohen whose lyrics tend towards the cynical “Shit, I’m fucked up and getting blown by a stranger” theme more than the “Thank God, I love my wife” theme. If I could do this encounter over, I would probably do it differently.

The ultimate point, however, is that the perfect man didn’t need a woman to be complete. And therein lay the problem. What did he need? If he found his match only in other men, and he wasn’t gay, then what was he? An egalitarian, modern civil society has no ready answer to this question.

The bygone greatness of email spam

Today I clicked open my inbox (at work, no less!) and found a letter from Madam Beatrice Elubo. The message had been shipped to the trashbox by my spam filter, but I was curious what kind of woman referred to herself as “madam.” I opened the letter.

Inside I found one of those old-school scams, the kind of letter that made me nostalgic for the days when I was 13 and believed my email could change the world. I still remember my first petition: it was on behalf of a Botswanan boy whom, for lack of memory, I’ll call Ted. Ted had no arms, no legs, no parents and no liver. He had no liver because he’d been poisoned by his evil uncle as part of a vicious inheritance battle that had already claimed 100 Botswanan lives. Despite the apparent hopelessness (not to mention biological inviability) of his situation, Ted held out hope that kind strangers like myself would sign his email, bringing him one name closer to the 1,000,000 signatures required for a free liver transplant in his home country.

I signed another on behalf of the woman of Afghanistan, who were treated like cattle under the Taliban. Despite the tragic melodrama attached to descriptions of these women’s lives, we now know that much of these abuses reflected the truth. It’s too bad my sign of support never reached anyone in power. It strikes me in retrospect that it might have been misplaced email spam, along with fear of terrorism, that softened the President’s stony Texan heart and inspired him to invade.

Looking back, the point of these scams eludes me. They certainly weren’t targeted at swindling me out of cash. Perhaps email spam provides an outlet for stunted creative writers trapped in midlevel managerial positions. It certainly sounds like the kind of thing I would do, given time and unrestricted Internet access.

Today’s letter was more of the same. The madam in question begged sanctuary in the US for herself and her young son. She had been entrusted by her dying husband with 8.5 million dollars, and she needed refuge and investment advice. Midway through the heartfelt missive, the madam revealed that she’d pay 15% of her fortune in exchange for these services. Never mind the unlikeliness of an African royal emailing random American strangers. What upset me is that it was so out of character for a desperate woman to switch from pleading for her very existence to haggling like a real estate broker over the commission.

Perversely, I wanted to respond. I wanted to say that for only 5% more, I’d get her refuge, investment advice, and a lifelong membership with the Friends of the National Zoo. Surely she, living on the wild side in Africa, understands the value of preserving the pride and glory of our planet’s endangered species?

Why I Hate Engagement Rings

According to recent surveys, nearly 30% of Americans have at some point videotaped themselves having sex. While this is good news for voyeurs everywhere (and our amateur sex tapes might have been a better propaganda item to drop over Iraq than the threatening leaflets the Bush administration eventually OK'ed), it also takes the 'conspicuous' part of 'conspicuous consumption' to an entirely new level. For better or for worse, we are becoming Generation "Look at Me, Look at Me!"

In my eyes, shady videotapes are proof that we're more comfortable now than ever with the risk of being exposed to public ridicule. I'm not trying to suggest the Romans wouldn't have recorded their orgies if they could have, I'm suggesting that things we once considered private now lie in a strange gray area.

How does this all relate to engagement rings? It's the reason I hate them. As mentioned in Slate's wedding issue, people only started wearing diamond engagement rings in the 1930's. It was a lonely spinster (no doubt working late one Christmas night, because that's what unmarried women did back then) who came up with the line, "A Diamond is Forever." The theory was that diamonds, like marriage, were a "'til death do you part" sort of deal. Now, of course, the reverse is often true of marriage. But diamonds have stayed steadfast.

Despite their reassuring permanence, engagement rings perturb me. Maybe it's because neither my mother nor my grandmother had one, so I don't associate rings with some tearjerking romantic tradition. Mostly, it strikes me as crass to ask your fiancee you buy you a hunk of gleaming ore as proof of his love ("Baby, I think men with large...credit card debt...are so attractive...") I know that's not how wearers of engagement rings see it - and after all, they do have the population advantage.

But what's more awkward that those locker room non-conversations when one woman sidles up to another, sneaks a sideways glance at her left hand, and reassures herself that her own ring is bigger, better and shinier? It suggests that her boyfriend's love is more pure, or at least that his tax bracket is a few percentage points higher. Thank God, she thinks to herself. Not because it changes her feelings towards him - after all, isn't he the man she loves? - but because now she doesn't have to hide anything. For this reason alone, I would no more want to wear an engagement ring than tattoo my salary on my forehead or exchange homemade sex tapes with other recently-engaged friends.

Then again, while the woman with the smaller ring may feel awkward at, say, a champagne brunch on the Upper West Side, the woman with no ring suffers the worst fate of all. How can she explain this choice without making her fellows feel guilty and judged? Or worse yet, leading them to believe that her fiancee is broke, unemployed, or clueless? If you're opting out of the ring, it's probably best not to mention your engagement in public at all. Let the wedding be a surprise!

The truth is, although my grandmother never got an engagement ring, she does scramble after gems. Indian women obsess about their jewelry. They lie, steal and extort just to show off their taste. Sometimes they resort to heinously gaudy fakes. It's a relic of the days when they had nothing else to call their own and no professional opportunities. A woman's jewelry, gifted to her by others, was her only true measure of worth. To me, living your life by the light of another's carat is old-fashioned. Modern women should have a more self-centered (not to mention equitable as far as the guys are concerned) way to establish status.

Before I conclude, I have to admit that I'm biased. In terms of price-to-value relationship, most precious jewelry doesn't make my cut. If instead of engagement rings we exchanged week-long vacations in the rainforest, or books by famous authors, I'd probably accept the competitive nature of the interaction (does Costa Rica mean a better relationship than Belize? Does the girl who gets a vintage first edition of Remembrance of Things Past have a rosier marital outlook than the one who gets a mass-market paperback of The Da Vinci Code? What if neither speaks French?)

I don't, and other dramas

Yesterday I was looking through a bunch of wedding photos. I was inspired by an article in the Washington Post, a feel-good puff piece about Washington DC couples renewing their vows after 50 years of marriage. It was sweet. It glossed over the fact that most of these couples - all Catholic - had at least 4 kids, some had as many as 10. Clearly, these people take their injunctions seriously.

Personally I don't understand marriage - the thought of inviting all your friends and family to witness you join your life to another person's until you both die - well, I'm being cynical, but it just makes it worse if it doesn't work out. I feel as if life is never as perfect as wedding photographers would have us believe. If you're fortunate enough to actually be that happy, you shouldn't tell anyone. You'll jinx yourself.

But up in Antioch the other day, my aunt was telling me about her wedding. She mentioned the saptapadi, and I realized something. These gestures - the garlands, the sindoor, the seven trips around the fire - strike me as deeply romantic. For some reason I always assumed I didn't want a wedding because I was picturing a Christian wedding. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why I thought this.

There are things I would change. For example, there are never any photos from a Hindu wedding of the bride and groom making out in some exotic locale. That's a Christian tradition, but it's one we should adopt. I've always been annoyed by hypocritical Indian prudishness. This is a culture where long-lost aunts will pinch their niece and nephew's cheeks, and cousins will slap each other on the shoulders, and strangers will feed each other with their bare hands. Meanwhile, for a married couple to kiss each other on the cheek in the morning is somehow improper. Bunch of shit, and it just increases people's overall repression. And anyway, the dishonesty of priests aside, we all know that one of the seven promises is about sex. It's in the Gita.