The Jailbait Game

So, how old is this girl? If you can't tell, look at her again, here. If you still can't tell, you're not alone. If you got a little...umm...distracted...by her hotness, you're gearing up for a career in the clink, as she's a mere 15.

Which makes her yet another exhibit in the "I can't believe it's not legal!" gallery of fashion models. The most famous models in the world are probably those Victoria's Secret girls, who manage to look both vapid and mysterious at the same time, and also signify the tense relationship between celebrity and product, between endorser and endorsee. Most are Brazilian, which means they're at once Brazil's most famous citizens and its most profitable export. In a sense, they are the product, which is good, because most of them are probably too old to get work as actual models anymore.

I'm not trying to be mean, I swear! My point is, the modeling industry is a little crappy, but I normally wouldn't care - except in the case of 13-year-olds passing themselves off as sexually mature adult women. It kind of blurs the distinction for most of us as to what an adult woman actually looks like, and tacitly promotes barely-pubescent teenagers as a sexual ideal. (And for all the dudes out there who say they can't help what they're attracted to, the New York Times would like a word.) I don't know if models were always so young, but I wasn't always alive to comment on it, so again, I don't care.

The moral is: at the risk of whining, it does seem like a symptom of serious malaise that the "hottest women in the world" (isn't that what models are supposed to be, eh?) are not, in most nations on earth, above the age of legal consent.

That time of the...life

So the crazy-sexy bloggers over at Jezebel got kinda pissy about this study, which shows that all women feel bad about their bodies after viewing advertisements featuring models. "Wake up!" they said to the women leading fashion magazines. "Doesn't this study prove that you're doing the wrong thing?"

Au contraire, femmes. The study proves that these ads are doing the right thing! Click over to this absurdly hot Guess ad. Will I ever look so glowy and skinny and full of hipbones wandering around in no shirt on a tropical island surrounded by glowy, skinny men with removable tattoos?
(That may have been a gratuitous number of links...) AH...no. Will I ever look this artfully disheveled and nakedly happy? Ah...probably not. Will I live out my dumpy, unadorned life far from the happiest place on Earth? AH...maybe.

But will I ever purchase a pair of Guess Jeans, which for the modest price of $170 will let me believe, in my own fantasy life, that I am not this but this? Really, nearly $200 is not that much to ask. It's almost nothing!

The point of these ads is to make people feel bad and, to compensate, purchase whatever the undernourished Estonian 15-year-old in the ad is schilling for at the moment. Do I feel bad? Sometimes. But that is the point. And, in the case of all those ads featuring people making out, I also feel, well...never mind.

Let's just say I might be taking my lunch break in the bathroom today. (Which kinds leads to my other, more important, question - does anyone else think Guess ads are a little like porn? I guess it makes sense, because of course sex sells, because it's the one thing we all want...ok. Really. Time for a break.)

---

Oh, and, Maryland is great! I can honestly say that I had the best sex education of anyone I know, and that the teacher never shied away from awkward questions (Condoms? Great. Gay sex? No problem. "Can a woman get sick from swallowing too much semen..." Uh...yeah, thanks for that charming memory, 13-year-old boy in sex ed class.)

The Carne Conundrum

A humorous excerpt from America’s tax code:

“It is important to emphasize that IRS estimates of the tax gap are associated with the legal sector of the economy only. Although tax is due on income from whatever source derived, legal or illegal, the tax attributable to income earned from illegal activities is extremely difficult to estimate. Moreover, the government’s interest in pursuing this type of noncompliance is, ultimately, to stop the illegal activity, not to tax it.”

I realize, in putting this up, that I’m losing my mind. First, I thought a section of the tax code was funny. Then, I admitted it. Which reminds of the time I told a roomful of people that my first crush was Peter Jennings. They laughed, but in the way of people who have just realized I might be truly ill. The laugh of denial.

But I have no dignity. Which brings me to my main point: women who have no dignity. Apparently, according to the New York Times, women have now resorted to eating steak in order to lure men into marriage.

The article tells the story of a diehard vegetarian, a skinny woman who once wore a “Meat is Murder” T-shirt. Around the age of 30, depressed that she was socially responsible and yet single, she swallowed her scruples and posted on Match.com that she loved steak. She immediately got asked out. A year of burgers and beef fajitas later, she is engaged. She had her rehearsal dinner in a steakhouse. If she has sons, she plans to name them Chuck and Shank. What if she has girls? Please. Not with all that USDA-approved hormone in her bloodstream.

According to the article, the next red-hot dating tip for women is to start chowing down on burgers. Women who eat beef are unneurotic and don’t have issues with food. They don’t worry about their weight! They’re “guys’ girls,” they play video games, watch sports, shoot Jager, hunt moose and drive sport utility vehicles even though, let’s be honest, the closest they come to ‘sporting utility’ is tossing a basketball in the trunk and forgetting about it! They get misty-eyed over Brian’s Song. And by misty-eyed, I mean, something got in their eyes. That’s all. So shut up, all right?

“Hey guys!” they shout subtly, cutting across the noise and clutter of a crowded bar, “We’re just like you, but with breasts! And vaginas! Best of both worlds, really!”

Ok. I’m done. Clearly, these are not the days when high heels were an excuse to lean on some strong man’s arm. Haha. In fact, why wear high heels at all, except on the off-chance that one encounters a stray bison and needs to stab it and harvest its meat mass?

Now I’m really done.

The reason I’m being so judgmental is because I always secretly admired vegetarians. I believe all those arguments: animals aren’t treated humanely, it’s more sustainable for people to eat veggies now that the population is massive, meat has a lot of fat in it, and it isn’t a primary source of energy.

Considering I’m so thoroughly convinced, why haven’t I converted? Well, let me explain. My parents and grand-parents are all vegetarians. So is my entire extended family (vegetarianism is very common in certain Indian communities). And they’re a royal pain in my ass. I remember once, when I bought lunchmeat to put in a sandwich. My aunt, who was visiting at the time, held out the packet between the tip of her index finger and thumb, like it might bear cooties or some other hideous illness. “Are you going to eat this?” she asked, looking as if she might faint.

Or. When I was four years old, my doctor recommended that I eat an egg everyday. A regular, unfertilized egg. I had to wake up early and do this in secret, because my vegetarian grandmother was living with us. Well, my grandmother came into the kitchen one morning, saw the eggshell on the counter, screeched and refused to eat in our house until the entire kitchen was disinfected.

Or. When my father, who by the way ate meat I saw it happen with my own eyes! converted to vegetarianism and told me he could no longer man the grill at cookouts because he “can’t touch that stuff.”

Or. My other grandmother, who averts her eyes if I ever eat meat because she can’t stand watching me violate my Hindu dharma.

Am I sensitive? Well, I was always a rebellious kid, and my crush on carne only intensified in proportion to everyone else’s aversion to it. So you could say what I really fed on was my delight at pissing my relatives off.

Ignoring any character flaws that admission might reveal, I’ve recently gone one step further. I have all but given up chicken in favor of pork and beef. As a chicken girl, I thought I could regain some of the moral cachet I secretly desired. But the other day, sitting in a substandard Chinese restaurant and savoring the gooey, gummy texture of the no-man’s-meat they referred to as chicken, I thought, “Since when is cardboard the other white meat?”

I finally had to admit it. I love red meat. I can’t resist it. But that doesn’t mean, in a corner of my heart, I’m not a little bit ashamed of myself. That doesn’t mean I don’t keep my feelings hidden. That doesn’t mean, once in a while, I don’t feel like an irresponsible baby animal killer whose veins are filling up with cholesterol.

So you see, when some vegetarian suddenly cops to loving meat simply to get a guy, I feel pretty conflicted. I have a long and contentious personal history of meat-eating. I have heard my relatives condemn it, I have weathered their scorn, I have defended my decisions, I have tried to reform. But in the end, all this did was lead me further down the same damn road.

Try to get a guy with that line, fakers.

Last year, right after her daughter passed away, Ms. Gesterling came over to our house for coffee. It was strange to see my old math teacher - the one so many kids had chortled about, convinced she was a horseback-riding lesbian - sitting at my breakfast table. The memory of her story, which started out about the funeral but ended up an account of how her daughter fell down dead in the halls of her own high school, is one I can't dwell on. Back then, very few things made me cry, but the things that did managed to do so every time (the choice paragraph from Sophie's Choice, for example). So with that afternoon, a story I've never spoken aloud but which I mentioned in this space.

I was eating lunch alone at the counter today, reading Empire Falls. (I wonder, now, if in years past I ever read books to avoid looking like I was eating by myself...at any rate, these days, it's a choice I don't regret) I didn't notice the man in the all-cream suit until he leaned over and asked, "Do you know how much tuition costs at GW?" I stuttered. I wondered if it was a pick up, but he must have been at least 55.

"Probably about 40,000 a year," I said, although I honestly had no idea. Partly I wanted him to stop talking, partly I was curious. So I kept my book propped open with a finger and paid lazy attention.

"See, my son, he's looking into college here." The man shifted, smiled, looked away and back again. "My wife, you know, she likes this area. She - " he paused. "You know, actually, she passed away in April. She had cancer, it was very unexpected." He paused, not for tears, for thought. I waited for the rest of the story.

Which, once it started, was actually about his family, not about GW’s tuition rates. He’d moved from [Iran] as a boy, intent on studying in the United States. He’d met his wife in college – she was “my best friend, my partner in life, my sweetheart, everything” (it’s strange how some people can say things like this without making me cringe, but maybe I cut him slack because, after all, the lady in question was dead) and they’d had both a Christian and an Islamic wedding. The family moved from [California] so he could work for [a government group]. They had two sons, one of whom was in the [Navy], the other of whom had just been arrested. “He’s in jail, he killed someone, believe it or not, I’m ashamed to say it.” The killing took place just two months before his wife died. The man and his wife had purchased a huge new house, their dream house, “she was going to decorate it, everything” and their younger son had brought his pregnant mistress to the place when no one else was there. (The man says the family knew nothing about the mistress, since the son was married) The son and the mistress fought about the baby, next thing anyone knew, the woman was dead at the bottom of the stairs.

“It was an accident. He’s not a murderer, for God’s sake,” said the man, tucking photos of his wife and kids back into his wallet after showing them to me. The man’s organization paid for the son’s lawyers, but the man himself had trouble. “When I told my wife, I couldn’t not tell her even though I didn’t know how, I’d never seen her yell like that.” He said, sadly enough, that he partly blamed his son for his wife’s demise. When he returned to the house without her for the first time, he “collapsed – I woke up [15] hours later and the doctors thought I might die. They still don’t know what it was.”

He said his colleagues didn’t understand how bad it was – many of them were also [Iranian] and didn’t “understand how marriage is in this country, an equal partnership.” They advised him to marry again. “But,” he reflected, “it wouldn’t be fair to the woman.”

At the end of the conversation, wherein he just talked and I listened, I went back to my desk but had trouble concentrating. I don’t know how much of this story is true, although I changed the identifying details just in case, but I realized that I was momentarily cured of my own misery.

Recently, I have been having some issues with an individual. He was born fifty years ago in a reactionary country where women had few rights, and he’s spent most of his life abusing his wife and kids. Also, the past three books I’ve read all feature wife-beaters in prominent roles (Empire Falls, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the Virgin Blue). Imagine how surprised I was to find that a man born in a reactionary country can get a scholarship to the United States, marry a woman of a different faith, and genuinely mourn her unexpected death. Maybe this happens all the time. Maybe he made her miserable while she was alive. I don’t know. I’m just saying that maybe some people do love each other. Maybe it can happen, without being twisted.

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.