Saturday, November 29, 2008
But not together. Mushrooms are in a separate photo album linked above. Our other topic is below.
And it is of course quite delicate. For one thing, being one of the innocents, I have no direct experience with sex. Sometimes I say to myself, what CAN the fuss be about? I have even heard someone say that sex explains almost everything that goes on in America in one way or another. That's ridiculous, of course. Nevertheless, I have promised to examine American culture, and I have noticed--in my three months that I have been back here--that sex is as much a part of it as ever. It's a gigantic topic, maybe even bigger than football! So I won't pretend to do it justice, but here are some observations anyway.
First, marriage. On the one hand marriage is a popular topic of discussion. Some gay people and some conservative Christian people are highly interested in it. Proposals to allow gay marriage were on the ballot in three more states in this last election. All were defeated, including one in California, where the Mormon church, headquartered in my old home state of Utah--good old Utah--expended large sums of money and effort in opposition. While this battle is raging, however, something else is happening. For a certain number of people, marriage has become uninteresting and irrelevant. We know a very nice couple who have been living together for ten or twelve years, who have purchased a very nice home for themselves, who have two lovely children, and who don't seem much interested in marriage. They are not alone, far from it. At least one member of the U.S. Congress, for example, is living her life in a similar way. The extent to which this is a trend remains to be seen.
Next, sexting. Sexting is the practice of taking "nude" or "x-rated" pictures of yourself or your friends and then sending them by cell phone to other friends, who may or may not send them to more friends. We read that this occurs all over the U.S., chiefly among teenagers. We don't know how common it is, but we'll accept that it happens. The innocents I must say haven't seen any such pictures, possibly because we're not exactly teenagers and possibly because we use very primitive cell phones. But apparently someone has seen them and there has been some massive hand wringing by adults and attempts by school authorities to somehow make it stop. A teenager at Licking Valley High School in Newark, Ohio was arrested for sending nude pictures of herself to friends. She was charged with “possessing criminal tools and the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material.” Her friends were said to be liable to arrest for possession of child pornography. The charges seem a little shaky. The criminal tools are what, her phone? And she's illegally using herself? Hmm. The charges were later dropped. All in all, a very American story. Licking Valley, by the way, does not get its name from any connection to oral sex. There are apparently salt licks in the area.
And now, the "pornification of women." I ran across this phrase in a Salon blog entry that was written in response to a teaser on a Cosmopolitan magazine cover. I thought the post would be about the article, but it turned out to be only about the words on the cover. Apparently it was not necessary to read the article in order to understand how it was related to the objectification and exploitation of women. The post inspired dozens of reader comments, mostly very supportive of the author, and none of them referenced the article either. Whatever this is, it is not rational public discourse. It is, rather, the appropriation by one writer--the blogger--of an idea developed by another writer--someone at Cosmo. Both writers have found a strong attention getting device--the orgasm face--and both are using it for their purposes. The blogger’s thesis is that “young women are being encouraged by other women to believe that they exist only for the sexual satisfaction of young men”. This is a pretty strong claim, when you think about it, and before making such a general indictment, shouldn’t you actually read the article that you are using to support the claim? Now it's true that if you've read one article in Cosmo, you have in some sense read them all. But that's cheating. The implied assertion here is that this particular article degrades women. Yet there is no summary of the article, no quotes from it, no paraphrasing, no reference to it at all! So apparently the mere fact that the article exists is a problem. 
We have only the ten words of the teaser, enough to make a fairly complex mix of stuff, but which can be broken down into five or six related assertions, one or two of them a little dubious. I will leave it to the reader to unpack them. One thing that is NOT objectively here, however, but which many responders seem to assume, is that this article could only be of interest to a woman who believes that only a man’s sexual satisfaction matters, or that readers would be more likely to believe such after reading this article. There could be truth to this of course; but without engaging the article, the assertion is completely bogus. Why not assume that the article might be of interest to people who believe that the sexual satisfaction of both partners matters? I am willing to bet that that’s what Cosmo editors would say and also what Cosmo readers would say. Would they be lying? And might the article not be somewhat interesting even to women who believe that only their own satisfaction matters? Seems to me, it might. The poison here is not coming from Cosmo. It's coming from people who are willing to say "I’m not going to think about this topic and I want to make sure that you don't either. And since my response is the only permissible response for a proper person to have, there is no need for us to consider any alternative interpretations."
The great struggle for Cosmo is that while sex always sells there's only so much one can say about it. The pressure to keep coming up with new attention getters issue after issue has to be intense. Someone at Cosmo came up with a good one, so good that other people want to use it too. But fair is fair, if the semi-professional journalist who wrote the blog post is getting paid for her work, she might consider sharing a little with whoever that Cosmo person was. After all, she’s using it to peddle her line, just as Cosmo is using it to peddle magazines.
In our case, assuming that basic labor and equipment costs are being met via donations, we estimate that net cash flow to the innocents for this blog post is roughly a negative $2.00. We are actively searching for anyone wishing to share in it.
