103.

At first, Brown University students might be proud that their school has eliminated tuition altogether for students whose families earn less than $60k a year. Diversity! Inclusivity! Other 'ities' that universities fell affinities for!

But wait until you get a little further down the press release, because this is where you learn Brown is raising tuition for everyone else, by a whopping 3.9%. The new cost of a Brown undergraduate degree: nearly $50k per annum.


But it's ok, you think, because poor(er!) people no longer have to pay it! In fact, this is correct. The people who must pay are American middle and upper-earners. And that's all part of a process by which America's middle class is becoming its new lower-class.

Many studies have decried that the gap between America's rich and poor is growing, and they're right. The reasons are manifold: immigration, education, outsourcing, global warming, El Nino, the list goes on. But the fine people over at Brown aren't just kicking the dying middle class, they're pre-emptively building it a coffin.

I'd like to get more technical. Economics who look at public goods (and in this case we're treating financial aid like a public good because it's being provided by a single source to a heterogeneous community through an income-based charge roughly comparable to a tax abatement program) have found that when people's preference for a good increases with income (think of the standard Demand curve rising up, up and away) the voter whose opinions win out is the median voter.

Political scientists call this the median voter theorem, and it has a lot of applications.

But what people are now beginning to realize is that the standard Demand curve for a public good doesn't work. In fact, people may have a U-shaped preference curve for a public good. Look at financial aid. The people who want more of it are the upper and lower-income earners. Not the middle class. Why? The lower-income earners want it because they get the benefits without paying the cost. The upper-income earners support it because of humanitarian reasons, but really because for the Hiltons and Ambanis of the world an extra 3.9% of $27k is so much chaff in the wind.

The people who bear the burden of the increase are the middle-earners. People who went to college, who make between $100- and $250,000 a year, who support 2 or more children through college, and who almost invariably pay the entire cost of tuition out-of-pocket. The sort of person the average humanities/communications/etc college graduate can look to become in the next few years.

What are they going to do about the extra 3.9%??

What's most likely is that they're going to start sending their kids to state colleges, a trend that's already begun but is very likely to continue. Even among the very smart kids I went to high school with (#11 in the US, yeah) many went to University of Maryland for free. Their parents simply couldn't afford private school.

The reason they couldn't afford it is because they were too rich for financial aid, too poor for tuition.

This may seem like a bogus dilemma. After all, the wealth of nations is meant to be recycled, even Adam Smith knew that. But in the meantime, what happens to America's middle class? The progressives, the taxpayers, the median voters, the so-called dreamers and occasional achievers of the American Dream? Is their economic relevance dying away? Are we going to become a nation of short order cooks and hedge fund managers, with little middle ground?

102.

Does anyone remember, back in the sixth grade, when Bath & Body Works had just opened? And the idea of putting a scent - cucumber, melon, cucumber & melon - into everything from soap to candles was revolutionary and new?

Now, the homeless guy on the street outside my window wears chocolate pomade.

I, for one, hate the smell of these cheap perfumes. Making a good perfume is an art, and with the success of B&BW, all kinds of charlatans got in on the act. The result was the cheap over-odorification of all forms of public space. These scents were poorly conceived, poorly executed and - surprise, surprise - poorly received.

People hate , schmaltz-y sweet scents. I hate them. I hate walking past a girl who smells like a Starbucks Latte, one of those tweed-y haired teens who thinks her milkshake smell brings all the boys to the yard.

But unlike an (apparently) growing number of women, I don't think the answer is to step away from the spritzer altogether. After all, when worn properly, a good perfume can be lingering, beguiling, and - yes - seductive. It's the difference between smelling a Cinnabon from across the street and remembering, vaguely, a garden you passed years ago when you were walking from one place to another.

If sight is the sense that begets attraction, then smell is the sense that creates memory. I still remember when Scarlett's mother died, in Gone With the Wind, and for months afterward Scarlett couldn't shake the smell of "lemon verbena satchet" from her mind. I remember when I was little, my sister and I would remember the smell of some of my mother's silk saris - the smell of India is what we called it. A mix of spices and the strong starch that the tailors of her youth used to press in by hand.

Even now, the smell of a strong perfume I wore in Italy reminds me of that trip. And the smell of a particular hand sanitizer I took to Costa Rica reminds me of that trip. It's a subtle, beneath-the-skin reminder. It takes me a moment to remember what, exactly, I'm remembering.

And that's what a good perfume should be like. A memory before it even fades.
Something that works with and enhances someone's natural skin. Theirs, but also different. An olfactory signature.

101.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman and all-around economics guy Alan Greenspan recently suggested that the United States declared war on Iraq not because of WMD, but because of oil.

Of course, underage hippies have been shouting the same thing at the White House steps for years (I should know, I did it) but of course, it's news when Greenspan says it.

There's a lot of economic reasoning supporting this argument, and I think most economists would agree that oil had as much to do with the war as WMD (if it's not one three-letter word, it's another) Just like most economists would agree that the invisible hand is not (surprise!) self-regulating in the real world, and that the minimum wage encourages unemployment. These are facts, if you define facts as: something a lot of well-read people with a penchant for numbers either agree on or fight like horny cats about.

The moral is: is it wrong for the United States to invade a sovereign nation just to get our paws on its wells? Umm...ok, assuming this is not wrong, is it wrong to ask hundreds of thousands of American citizens to give up their lives because it's too damn difficult to conserve energy? Well, let's assume that it's inevitable. And it is, as anyone who's familiar with Marx will tell you. The "Old Kritz" was right about one thing: it is inevitable that the world will sing to the tune of money.

Put another way: today, I was walking down the street when I saw a guy in a massive SUV with about twenty yellow "Support Our Troops" stickers stuck to his bumper. And I thought to myself, If you really supported our troops, you'd be riding a bike.

And then I thought, If I really gave a damn about the troops, I wouldn't be invoking the phrase 'support our troops' to guzzle gas, lie about the war, or make a point on an untrafficked blog page.

But then again, if I really gave a damn about the troops, I wouldn't be much of an American.

100.

Hmm. So I thought that after my Human Sex lecture on Thursday, I'd scraped the bottom of the "weird psychological disorders" barrel. But then I heard about Caligynephobia. Apparently, this disorder is the reason that the hottest women in bars almost never get hit on (really? I think this depends on how much alcohol has been served) and also the reason that beautiful German women (Heidi Klum) invariably end up married to foreigners (Seal.)

The symptoms: "breathlessness, dizziness, dry mouth, excessive sweating, nausea, feeling sick, shaking, heart palpitations, inability to speak or think clearly, a fear of becoming mad or losing control, a sensation of detachment from reality or a full blown anxiety attack" in the presence of attractive women.

Urban Dictionary has a slightly different term for the same condition.

The causes vary, of course. For borderline sufferers, they arise from the fact that "a beautiful woman undermines the illusion that one is leading a happy life" but for others, the roots run into the murky past, when one had an experience that "linked beautiful women and emotional trauma."

At the risk of sounding like an asshole: doesn't extreme attraction sometimes feel like an emotional trauma? I'm sure for some people this is a legitimate disorder, but do you notice there's no accompanying "Adonisophobia" or whatever you might call it?

I think it's pretty normal to be uncomfortable - and in some people's cases, catastrophically physically uncomfortable - around people you're attracted to. The solution, of course, is to hit on them constantly until you're immune.

Or at least, that's what I imagine the solution would be. The other solution is to date unattractive women until one day you catch sight of a gorgeous girl on the street and your whole life falls apart at the seams.

And I suppose this goes for both sexes.

98.

It often happens that I'm wrong. It happened with Shaha Ali Riza (not the man-baiting monetary policy minx I painted her to be), it happened recently with rape (turns out that does occur in the animal kingdom but that's not my point) and it happened even more recently when I wrote about men being more visual than women. I was obviously talking about sex, not fashion.

Turns out, there might be some truth to this theory. I use the word "truth" because what I mean is...

I had the chance today to hear a speech by transsexual researcher Anne Lawrence (not to be mistaken, as I first did, for Anne Summers, manufacturer of the infamous "rabbit" vibrator which I find, actually, somewhat intimidating but that's not relevant). In addition to being incredibly honest and personable, Lawrence painted her transsexuality as what it is: a disorienting form of mental illness. (I know people elsewhere might go apeshit over this, but let's not split hairs: when you pay a doctor the equivalent of a Gambian village's annual wages to slice open your genitals, you're not a happy camper. And there are different forms of transsexuality, not all of which constitute an illness). Not to be confused with transvestitism, which is a lifestyle choice.

Lawrence's description of being unable to achieve real intimacy with sexual partners was heartbreaking, and in a way rang strangely true. I think one symptom that is constant across mental disorders is this feeling of "separation" - of distance from and disappointment in other people, particularly intimate partners. I've seen this distance portrayed so well in Ernest Hemingway's short story "Up in Michigan" and I know that Hemingway was an alcoholic, severely depressed, and a lifelong cross-dresser. I saw this distance again in Lawrence.

It surprises me how many normal people have problems being close to other people. It doesn't matter how much you want it - your own chemistry/history can stop you. It's sad, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. But all this is not my point.

My point is a little lighter, so I'm going to shift gears. Lawrence said that she misses only two things about being a man. The first is having effortless strength - she can't run a mile as fast, she can't lift heavy things, she can't do things that her body previously took for granted.

The second is her sex drive. As a natal man with no male organs, Lawrence has less testosterone than the average woman, and she said, "I didn't realize until my surgery how much testosterone is the hormone that drives lust." She said she missed her instinctive physical reactions when attractive women walked by (she's still attracted to women, although not as strongly) and what she referred to as her "constant, easy physical drive" and her "desperate need to have orgasms."

Ok. So. I'm not trying to generalize here. Obviously not everyone feels they have a "constant, easy physical drive": and if all sexuality were this angst-free, Portnoy would have had nothing to complain about. But I do think that being able to want other people - on a visceral level - is a marker of being alive.

Also, I think these two things that Lawrence named are things that women - whether we admit it or not - like about men, maybe because we realize that they're different.

95.

The problem with taking a class on human sexuality isn't that it's awkward. It's that sometimes, you will read things that, for whatever reason, seem intrinsically wrong.

For example, in the introduction to my textbook, the author cites a study that concludes, "By committing rape, men could have extra offspring at little cost, thus perpetuating more copies of their genes. Women, on the other hand, were limited in the total number of offspring they could have and could easily reach that number without engaging in rape. Therefore, the thinking goes, genes conferring the capacity for rape on men (and men only) spread throughout the human species."

How can someone apologize for rape on the basis of biology? But more importantly, how can they be so wrong? I feel that sometimes people refer to their "animal instincts" when they mean "my worse self." But in most species, females are the sexual decision-makers. I'm thinking about all those Animal Planet videos where a male lion tries to get it on with a female lion, and she doesn't dig it, so she claws him in the face and he skulks off. Something like that. The point is, rape does not exist in the animal kingdom.

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a fact. And if rape were an evolutionary advantage, why wouldn't it be the norm? After all, many species are better at reproducing than humans (humans, in fact, reproduce poorly. What we do well is eliminate predators.) Why is this? Lots of theories might exist, but the most obvious is that it's not always advantageous for a female to be pregnant. The other might be that rape - overall, a violent act - is both physically and mentally damaging. Not only is it less likely to produce offspring, it's more likely to leave damages that will complicate pregnancy, etc, etc, etc.

And it's not as if most rapes progress like normal sex, anyway. In general, in fact, rape prevents pregnancy by damaging the woman. And I'm not just talking about the Congo, either. At the risk of being really indelicate, it seems that in most species males are conditioned to respond to signs of a female being "in heat" (not a charming expression) but, anyway, she'll enjoy it.

Why am I even bothering with all this, since the majority of people aren't rapists and the few who are can't be reasoned out of it? And why does any of it matter? I guess because rape is already such a loaded term on most college campuses, and I wonder sometimes if it doesn't do more harm than good to expose people to science based on faulty assumptions (women can have all the offspring they want without resorting to rape? Maybe some women can, just like some men, but how can someone make such a sensitive conclusion based on such a broad generalization?)

But, in the grander scheme of things, what is becoming far too clear is that most studies about human sexuality are "quack science" - hopelessly lopsided, poorly executed, and inconsistently robust in their conclusions. Not once have we come across results that, examined in the light of statistics, come up significant time after time.

What a raft of bullshit this class is turning out to be.

92. Who Wears Short Pants?

So Times writer Caitlin Moran wrote a very entertaining piece the other day about "pantorexia:" which she terms women's addiction to tiny and impractical underpants. (Imagine this entire post being read in a British accent, that will make the subject sound much less indelicate.)

Moran is a "woman of a certain age" which is the Edwardian way of saying "older than me." I find that despite their arguments in favor of practicality, safety, etc, women like Moran see the whole dental-floss-thong phenomenon as part of the Britnification of pop culture. In other words, as a cultural scourge. Victoria may once have had a secret, but she certainly doesn't anymore.

I've been doing my own laundry since I was 15, but not because I'm all that industrious. I started doing my own laundry around the time I started buying my own underwear, and the two were not unrelated. Even now, if for any reason (packing, unpacking, carrying laundry into the basement) my mother catches sight of some of the things I've bought lately, she makes a funny little face. The other day, when we were discussing how some of my laundry had ended up mixed with hers and my sisters, she deadpanned, "it's not like I'd get confused what belonged to whom. Anything smaller than 4 centimeters is yours."

She's wrong of course - it's more like 8 centimeters.

She cites the same argument as Moran, which is that "tiny knickers" are impractical. But I think it's more than that. In her steadfastly conservative heart (and it is conservative, in spite of all her attempts to appear very liberal) my mother thinks pretty underwear is morally wrong. Or at least, indicates a lax attitude towards morality.

Meanwhile, my philosophy was: take advantage of those golden years when your ass supports itself.

But as time goes by, I've changed my mind. My interest in nice underwear - and in general, in nice clothes - has waned a lot this year. If before I viewed shopping with fanatical, frothing-at-the-wallet enthusiasm, this year I'm a lot more restrained. I walk by stores and don't go in.

And the underwear is the same. Maybe my market is saturated. I have so many damn clothes that I no longer have space or energy to acquire something new. Or maybe it's something else. I wouldn't call it maturity, but maybe it's the passing of a phase.

In high school, I was content with two pairs of shoes, both of them sneakers, which I wore everyday in the belief that should terrorists/lunatics/dogs attack me, I'd better be ready to run. I also owned several skirts so short I can't look at them - much less wear them - ever again. And a whole lot of random T-shirts. One of my best friends once called me "fashion challenged," and she was being kind.

So for me, I figured this whole "buying cute crap" thing was a phase I'd eventually outgrow. I wonder if it's happening. Or maybe I'm just feeling more responsible, since a lingerie habit can leave a girl broke.