Dana Goldstein

The Kids These Days, Pornography, and Pleasure

Sasha Grey, via her Twitter feed

A Cuddle Party would exist in my personal ninth circle of hell. Nevertheless, the sex/relationships guru who came up with the concept, Reid Mihalko, made some interesting comments in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday that back up the ideas I was getting at in my critique of Katie Roiphe's Newsweek article on women, work, and S&M. 

In short: Greater interest in sadomasochism has less to do with economic trends and more to do with increased access to porn and erotica online. Mihalko spends a lot of time conducting workshops for college students, and he has found that many of them are exposed to really kinky stuff via the Internet, yet lack basic information on sexual health and pleasure, in part because they are graduates of abstinence-only sex-ed programs or received no sex education at all. He explains:

About 30 to 40 percent of what I do is lecturing at colleges. I do a lecture called "Sex Geek Chic," which is about using peer pressure in a positive way to encourage young adults to get their shit handled. If you don't know your STD status, if you don't know how to use a condom, if you're not savvy with consent and how to navigate your emotions in intimate relationships, you're uncool. ...

There's an interesting dynamic going on among college students. A lot of them grew up with federally funded, abstinence-only education. But they also grew up with the Internet. So for visual learners, especially, they're getting their love-making cues from watching porn.

 Trying to learn how to be a better lover from porn is like trying to learn how to drive from watching "The Fast and the Furious."

Yes. I began high school in 1998, before pornography could be easily streamed online. It could be downloaded, but this took some real time and effort; guys I knew figured out how to do it, but if any of my female friends were experimenting with this in the late nineties and early aughts, we weren't talking about it openly with one another. (We were reading Anais Nin, though, don't get me wrong!) And way back when we were first hitting puberty in the mid-nineties, it was still scandalous and fascinating to get one's hands on an issue of Playboy.

Obviously, everything changed during my first few years of college--not just because my friends and I were getting older, but also because of technology. I don't want to be all old-ladyish at 27, but the last decade has seen a sort of epochal shift in how teenagers and young adults explore their sexuality. It used to be you had to go to an adult movie theater or the adult section of a video rental store or a sex club to watch other people getting it on; you had to actually interact with other human beings in those places and you risked getting "caught" by someone you knew. (A somewhat separate category of consumption would be the semi-ironic screening of retro porn movies on college campuses. Been there! And how prevalent was buying video pornography via the mail back in the day? I don't really know. Commenters?)

Now you can watch other people have sex anytime you want, for free, and in total privacy. This is a really significant development in the history of human sexuality, and I think its effects are both positive (less shyness about sex) and negative (more exposure to unrealistic, staged sex; more sexual outlets other than one's partner; and possibly more body anxiety as a result of comparing oneself to hundreds and thousands of other naked people).

Today it seems like we're having a constant, national conversation about porn and how it is changing our culture. Pornstars like Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey have achieved some modicum of mainstream respectability, and pornography is regularly opined upon in the kinds of publications nobody would be embarassed to read on the subway. Porn has gone mainstream before, as it did in the "Deep Throat" era. But the shock and moral panic is, for the most part, missing these days (pace Rick Santorum); the general assumption is that almost everyone over the age of 12 has seen video porn at least a few times.

In any case, Reid Mihalko is on to something about young people and kink, even though he also seems a bit kooky. I really love the site MakeLoveNotPorn, and would like to especially refer my younger friends and readers to it (make sure to click on the arrows to see all the tips!). A more comprehensive resource on these matters is ScarletTeen.

My Thoughts on Katie Roiphe, Sadomasochism, and Feminism

are over at The Nation:

Katie Roiphe has written a link bait-y Newsweek cover story making an interesting claim: that the pop culture appearance of submissive female sexual fantasies, in shows like Lena Dunham's "Girls" and pulp fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey, is somehow a backlash against women's increasing economic power.

I think this is generally wrong. ...

Taboo-breaking sex is culturally prevalent right now not because of macroeconomic trends like the decimation of the male manufacturing sector, but because we live in an age in which all sorts of sexual practices are incredibly visible and talked about. In particular, easy access to online pornography allows people, at a younger age than ever before and with more privacy, to explore non-vanilla sex, whether low-key spanking and restraints or much kinkier stuff. Female-authored erotica and sexualized fan-fiction are burgeoning genres online, as well, and e-readers have made it possible for consumers to purchase and read this material with perfect privacy. This is the world from which Fifty Shades of Grey emerged.

But these desires are as old as the human race; in every century and decade, sadomasochistic erotica has broken into the mainstream, from from de Sade to Swinburne to Anais Nin to Anne Desclos to Anne Rice. Why assume, as Roiphe seems to, that some authoritative brand of feminism was ever supposed to lead to human beings losing their curiosity about power-play during sex, which is, after all, a physical act? 

Read the whole post.

On Bullying, Teen Suicide, and the Rush to Ascribe Blame (Often to Schools)

One of my first assignments as a college student journalist for the Brown Daily Herald was covering the suicide of a sophomore, who killed herself while home for October break. I remember feeling sick to my stomach as I walked to the girl's dormitory to interview her shocked, grieving friends. About 10 of us gathered in the dorm's common area, sitting in a circle. I scribbled notes as the dorm mates described an intelligent, curious, and socially conscious young woman. But when I pressed, somewhat uncomfortably, for details on the victim's emotional state and the recent events in her life, the friends were hesitant to speculate as to why, exactly, she had killed herself.

They were correct to be wary of my questions--and of the entire endeavor of "explaining" a suicide in a 600-word news article. Doctors, social workers, and researchers know that every suicide is unique and incredibly complex; there is rarely one simple reason why a person decides they no longer want to live. In a Slate review of the new documentary "Bully," Emily Bazelon does an excellent job complicating the picture of suicide the media so often paint, noting it's all too easy to blame schools after a tragic death, when, in fact, many suicidal teens are suffering not only from peer bullying, but also from mental illness, learning disabilities, and unsupportive home environments.

"Bully" devotes a lot of time to the story of 17-year old Tyler Long, whose parents--among the film's heroes--are suing his school district in the wake of Tyler's suicide. But as Bazelon reveals, the film never mentions that Tyler was on the Autism spectrum and had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD, nor that he sometimes picked fights at school and that his parents strongly suspected he was considering suicide, but didn't tell his therapist about it. What's more, Tyler's suicide note, addressed to his family, didn't mention bullying at all, and instead focused on their lack of support. "I don’t have a supporting family or friends for that matter," Tyler wrote. "You think I am worthless and pathetic. All I wanted was acceptance and kindness, but no I didn’t get love."

Jesse Green's 2010 New York article about Teddy Graubard, a 17-year old private school student who jumped to his death after being caught cheating, does an excellent job of showing just how complicated it can be to suss out why a teenager with Asperger's syndrome and a history of mental health issues kills himself.

The point is not that we shouldn't feel awfully, terribly sympathetic with suicidal teens and their devastated parents. We should. And of course, schools need to do everything in their power to help students feel safe and supported, both by cracking down on bullying and by referring kids (both the bullied and bully-ers) to in and out-of-school mental health services. The problem is the over-simplification of this issue in the public conversation, which actually makes it more difficult for schools and governments to address teen suicide rationally.

We saw this a lot around the story of Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers freshman who killed himself shortly after his roommate, Dharun Ravi, secretly filmed him making out with an older man. My Nation colleague Richard Kim has been eloquent on this point: The prosecution and conviction of Ravi had less to do with evidence that his actions led directly to Clementi's death, and more to do with moral panic over young people, bullying, technology, and sex. Richard writes:

Among the things blotted out by the trial and media circus is the enduring mystery of why Tyler Clementi committed suicide. He had an older, gay brother with whom he had a close and supportive relationship. His parents' reaction to his sexual orientation was mixed; his father was cool, his mother not so much, but they were still in regular and civil communication. He was clearly vexed about what Dharun Ravi had done, but was discussing what to do about it with a friend, the RA and online message boards. There’s nothing in these records that indicated he was suicidal or even beyond appropriately anxious about a situation to which he himself saw a resolution within reach (a new room). He wasn’t the victim of bullying across campus, and although he was socially shy, he was also somewhat sexually daring. He had four years of college, and a life, to look forward to—and indeed, until his Facebook post announcing his suicide, he was doing just that.

There are all too many cases of gay teenagers whose lives have been made intolerably miserable and who are driven to suicide by the harassment and violence of parents, family, fellow students, teachers and other authority figures. This is not transparently one of them.

In the wake of Clementi's suicide, New Jersey passed aggressive legislation requiring schools to document and address all cases of alleged bullying of students, whether they take place in or outside of school, or online (via Facebook, MySpace, email, etc.). As the Newark Star Ledger reports, the law, which did not include much extra funding for mental health services, has led to complaints from parents that it doesn't do enough, and complaints from school officials that it imposes a heavy paperwork burden without providing much explanation of how, exactly, to define bullying, or support to enable schools to monitor and address it effectively:

Guidance counselors and teachers face a steep challenge in trying to draw the line between conflict and bullying.

One suspected bullying incident in Roxbury involved two kindergartners fighting over crayons, and another stemmed from two intermediate school students excluding a third from their lunch table. The crayons case was ruled not to be bullying, but the lunch-table incident was, said Roxbury anti-bullying coordinator Phyllis Prestamo.

I'm not going to propose a solution to bullying or teen suicide, because I obviously don't think there is any kind of silver bullet, beyond supportive, caring families and schools, and expanding access to affordable, high-quality mental health care. It's just important to note that law suits, hate crime legislation, and education policy cannot be the only avenues for addressing these problems. I really do hope the Affordable Care Act, which will help a lot, is not overturned.

On "Ides of March," Politics, Sex, and Morality

Evan Rachel Wood and Ryan Gosling in "Ides of March."

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT. SERIOUSLY. DON'T READ THIS IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET.

Tonight I saw "Ides of March," the George Clooney film in which a sex scandal is grafted onto a presidential campaign based loosely on both Obama '08 and Dean '04. 

The movie features riveting acting and smart dialogue; my favorite scenes were those between Ryan Gosling, who plays an idealistic communications staffer, and Marissa Tomei, a journalist covering the race for the New York Times. Of course, it goes without saying that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti were fantastic. But I found the film far more problematic than believable, particularly in the way it deals with sex and gender.

The female lead is Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Molly, a 20-year old campaign intern and daughter of the Democratic National Committee chairman. She gets pregnant after a one-night stand with the candidate, Gov. Mike Morris (Clooney), whose judgement apparently slips as he is riding the high of his Iowa caucus win.

Sexually forward and whip-smart, Molly later seduces Gosling's character, who learns of her tryst with Morris and fires her, but not before helping her obtain a $900 abortion. Alone in her hotel room after the procedure, Molly kills herself by overdosing on painkillers and alcohol--either because she is worried that her affairs with both men will ruin their careers and the Democratic Party's chance to regain the White House or, perhaps because she is intentionally exacting revenge on the men who've wronged her. (The movie does not make Molly's intentions clear.)

Allow me to deconstruct this. First of all, the average cost of an abortion at a clinic like the one Molly visits in the film is $350, not $900. It is unlikely that an affluent, educated young woman like Molly would need to beg for help in acquiring this amount of money. More disturbingly, given that Molly's character is portrayed as neither depressed nor unstable before the abortion--indeed, she seems happy, ambitious, and hard-working--her suicide in the procedure's aftermath perpetuates the myth of "post-abortion syndrome:" the unsubstantiated belief, which has nevertheless crept into real-life anti-choice legislation and court decisions, that women are particularly suspectible to mental, emotional, and physical illness after an abortion.

The film also harkens back to the age-old pop culture tradition of female characters being "punished" for promiscuous sex and abortions with either sickness or death. 

In short: This is all highly unrealistic and dated. What's more, none of it convinced me to feel particularly cynical about politics--at least not for the reasons presented in the film. Clooney's character, the candidate, is actually the most sympathetic person in "Ides of March." Although he is an adulterer, the governor at least tends to resist the temptation to moderate his policy positions on the death penalty and foreign wars, to pander to the religious right, and to trade cabinet positions for endorsements. His staffers, on the other hand, are all-too-quick to forget their principles in service of either a political win or personal career advancement.

So while you wouldn't want to be married to Gov. Mike Morris, there's no reason, as the movie seems to suggest in its final scene, to feel that voting or working for him would be futile, or that either act lacks basic integrity. As cynical as I get about the filibuster, the electoral college, voters' lack of policy knowledge, and all the other terrible aspects of the American political system, I still believe it really does matter who gets elected president. Wars are launched. Judges are appointed. Regulations are made.

Reducing politics to a hackneyed sexual morality play might make for fun entertainment, but it is a fundamentally inadequate lens through which to view American campaigns, elections, and government--except to say that our political system (and political media) ought to be far less focused on politicians' (and American women's) sex lives. 

Should/Could All Teachers Make $125,000?

Check out my Slate review of "American Teacher," the new documentary co-produced by Dave Eggers and narrated by Matt Damon. It's moving, engaging, polemical...and totally ineffective at advocating for the policy idea it supports: Paying teachers much, much more--say, $125,000 annually.

Read it!

"Kings of Pastry," France, America, and the Vocational Education Debate

 

MOF finalist Jacquy Pfeiffer, cofounder of Chicago's French Pastry School, with sugar sculpture. Photo via "Kings of Pastry"

It's been awhile since I've had the chance to indulge my Francophilism on the blog, but last night I watched a fantastic documentary, "Kings of Pastry," that left me reflecting on the cultural differences between how Americans and the French think about intelligence, knowledge, and education. 

The film, which you can stream on Netflix, tells the story of the MOF--Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, or "best French craftsmen"--competition in pastry. Every four years, chefs, bakers, cheesemongers, florists, jewelers, weavers, woodworkers, and dozens of other French artisans compete to win this designation. It is considered one of France's highest civilian honors. 

The 16 pastry chef finalists--all of them male, a fact the film ignores--bring an absolute, overwhelming intensity to the MOF competition. Their wives and girlfriends speak of normal family life being on hold for years while their partners pursue the MOF doggedly, testing elaborate recipes and decoration techniques, usually at night after working a full day in a restaurant or shop. Some competitors devote decades to the process, competing every four years until they finally acquire a coveted MOF medal. 

The film shows President Nicolas Sarkozy speaking at a MOF award ceremony for chefs. I was really struck by how coherent his support is for what might be termed "vocationalism," and how out of step this would sound in an American context. Sarkozy said:

"Worker, artisan, apprentice. I affirm: There are not two forms of intelligence, two kinds of knowledge. Manual skill doesn't fall from the sky any more than intellectual skills. I don't want any more of that concept in our country. Because this idea is morally scandalous, and is insufficient economically."

The French education system is structured around such ideas. In the last three years of high school, or lycee, French teenagers choose to focus on the hard sciences, social sciences, or literature, or from among eight career-oriented "technical" courses of study, including the food sciences, health sciences, and hospitality. 

Americans are--and probably should be--skeptical of efforts to "track" 15-year olds into specific careers, especially given the vast inequities in children's educational and social opportunities before they ever enter high school. But some of the most thoughtful education reformers I've talked to in my reporting are Americans who are trying to seed workforce-relevancy into our own school system, by introducing young adults to possible professions in an intellectually rigorous way. This is important work, because we know one of the primary causes of dropping-out is that low-income students don't see how their education will help them land a job or build a satisfying, remunerative career in the future. 

I profiled two high schools that embody workforce-relevancy and academic rigor in my July Nation feature, but I'd say this remains a real minority movement in American education circles. So many of us--and I'd include myself--feel a real attachment to a romantic idea of the liberal arts, and of "college" in general.

"Kings of Pastry," however, romanticizes vocationalism in a way that is both enchanting and very foreign seeming. It's a delightful film -- but also also very relevant to the education debate.

My Take on "Gloria," the New Documentary about Steinem's Life

"Gloria: In Her Own Words" is airing on HBO Monday evening. I found the documentary pretty problematic. It refused to explicitly tackle race issues, either during the height of the Second Wave or more recently, when Steinem made a number of controversial statements about the relationship between race and gender during the 2008 Democratic primary. 

Though there are interviews in Gloria about how upper-middle class, straight feminists came to embrace lesbian rights and economic justice for poor women, there is no explicit discussion of an equally enduring and arguably more fraught issue: the relationship between feminism and struggles for racial equality. The film does feature archival footage of 1970s white feminists arguing that men’s only bars are the equivalent of Jim Crow lunch counters. Doesn't that contention cry out for debate, for analysis--for something? We see Steinem appear alongside her 1970s “speaking partners,” the black feminists Flo Kennedy and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, but we don't hear much about how these women (who were so often overshadowed by the more famous Steinem) navigated their dual identies as people of color within the feminist movement.

Steinem notes that her own brand of feminism was more radical than that of her elders, women like Betty Friedan, who were concerned mostly with the plight of white, college-educated housewives. Yet there are no interviews with either Steinem or other movement veterans that reflect explicitly on the relationship between feminism and Civil Rights. We hear about how Steinem’s sexy good looks helped propel her to prominence, but not about how her whiteness helped make feminism seem less threatening. We also learn nothing about the sophisticated set of critiques women-of-color, such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, have long made regarding mainstream feminism: that its focus on abortion detracted from their own struggle for maternal rights, and that the assumption that women represent a united interest group often downplayed the struggles of non-white women in overcoming racism.

I should note that Steinem herself, in my experience, is more than game to reflect on all these issues. I hold the filmmakers accountable for failing to explore them in the movie. In any case, read the whole review at The Nation.

Midnight Snack

This video looks too much like an American Apparel ad, but the new Sufjan Stevens album is much too great not to post it. Makes for great melancholy commuting music.

 

And because I have a little crush, some old acoustic Sufjan for good measure:

 

Happy Jewish Christmas

The song whose name I couldn't remember last night....duh...

Bruno and the Ick Factor

I saw Bruno this weekend, and while I laughed uproariously, I have to agree with Double X's Jessica Grose that the film was "deeply mean-spirited." Indeed, I spent a considerable portion of the movie turned away from the screen with my face in my hands, so difficult was it to watch a series of hapless stage mothers, B-list celebrities, and Southerners unwittingly humiliated on screen. That's not to say Bruno does nothing productive to expose homophobia. Two of the best scenes were the ones in which Bruno meets with "ex-gay" "therapists." The second of these men, who specializes in especially difficult cases, suggests to Sacha Baron Cohen -- whom he believes is an Austrian fashion personality -- that although women are "annoying," "we need them," and that he should allow women he finds "tolerable" to seduce him.

Yet because I was familiar with Baron Cohen's shtick from his previous film, Borat, what most shocked me about Bruno wasn't its exploitation of regular people, but its overt focus on the deviance of gay sex. Every single one of Bruno's sexual encounters is a sado-masochistic kink-fest. A running gag is an exercise bike outfitted with a thrusting dildo; when the bike is pedaled, the dildo, er...you get the idea. A sequence toward the beginning of the film features Bruno and his boyfriend putting all kinds of ridiculous objects in body cavities where they don't belong. In another scene, Bruno and a lover chain themselves together and can't find the key. The result is an audience groaning, "Ewwwww," during all of the sex scenes. And while a scene at a swingers party highlights that straight people can be awfully bizarre, too, it's a bad, old stereotype to present gay sex as particularly icky.

I mean, I get the joke. Bruno is an over-the-top farce. But a lot of folks seeing this film are going to come out of it thinking to themselves, "Wow, gay sex is GROSS!" And that's unfortunate.

cross-posted at TAPPED