[ week 28 | 42 ]
A half dozen of the other.
Thursday, 22.24
So it’s been six years since I slipped the cop fifty bucks in the lobby of the B and B. “Do you want obey, or not obey?” he asked.
“Not obey,” we said, in unison.
So he didn’t ask her to swear to obey me. (She has to honor me, instead. I have to cherish her. Most days, we figure it’s pretty much one and the same.) For fifty bucks he could have just done a bare-bones kind of ceremony—think Abe Vigoda from Joe Versus the Volcano—but instead, he took a minute to tell us a lovely anecdote that was charming and unexpectedly touching from a cop who’d once been a minister of some Baptist sect or other ten years back. For the life of me, I can’t remember it. (It had something to do with a flower.) Our witnesses—one was the proprietor of our B and B, and the other was from a B and B down the street—smiled and signed whatever it was they had to sign, and we were married. Just like that.
It’s going on ten years since I first leaned over to kiss the back of her neck, and in some ways I remember the thrilling terror of that moment, the sudden step off the cliff into the unknown, far more vividly and sharply than I do the susurrus of that cop’s forgotten story, rendered soft and strange by the melting summer’s heat in that dark wood-paneled dining room. But I kissed her in December, crisp and cold, and it’s July, now; you toast the milestone you’re at, and we did end up with some pretty nice Fiestaware.
So here’s to Spouses: legal or illegal, with papers or without, tightly wrapped or hardly there, wherever they may be. Bottom’s up and mud in your eye.
[ # ]
God bless you, Vinnie Tesla.
Wednesday, 21.12
“So you know about despair.com,” says Vinnie to me this morning.
Well, I hadn’t, but now I do. And somehow it makes skimming bad PowerPoint presentations on “The Audit Comfort Process” for relevant data more rewarding. (It’s not as up-to-the-minute or sexy as it sounds, but still: reflect on this: boards of directors sit in their conference rooms around those black plastic conference-call phones like squashed caltrops while some middle-management guy who’s been Peter Principled into a sales-flack front job runs them through a PowerPoint presentation called, and I swear on the Ifa Oracle here, and the Book of Mormon, and Israel Regardie’s The Golden Dawn—it’s called “The Audit Comfort Process.”)
Anyway. Here, then, an utterly unrelated tidbit I saw the other day and thought was funny: Supermodels are lonelier than you think.
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Getting our war(s) on.
Tuesday, 23.14
We Yanks like our wars, don’t we. The War on Drugs, in whose name we’ve sacrificed our dignity and our privacy and our Fourth Amendment (I had to piss in a cup last year for a three-month gig editing a magazine; had I not been desperately hard up with a couple of mortgage banks feeling my pockets for change, I’d’ve stuck to my guns and told them to, well, piss off). The War on Terrorism, of course, which threatens to take a number of other amendments with it, and which is used far more often to threaten uppity Senators who dare to question the Bush administration than to, well, threaten actual terrorists (most recently in the hotly contested arena of judicial appointments: the Traditional Values Coalition is attacking Sen. Patrick Leahy (D. VT) as “an out-of-control chairman leading an out-of-control committee in a time of war.” (Fire your own shots in this fight, if you would.)
And although these wars rarely have any effect on their ostensible targets, I’m nonetheless looking at recent stories about prosecuting kids as adults for a crime that wouldn’t have been a crime had they actually been adults; sending a 16-year-old girl to boot camp for having sex outside of marriage; allowing random drug tests (that don’t work ) for any extra-curricular high school activities just because we’ve gotta, you know, try something (and then shit-canning a kid’s hopes of college if she gets unlucky); blocking high schoolers’ access to history because the facts are deemed “inappropriate,” and getting in an uproar over the idea of tolerating kids whose parents are gay (and then trying to destroy stable, long-term families whose parents are gay)—and we’ve barely brushed on the long-term and pretty much successful campaign to destroy a minor’s right to abortion, mind—well. It certainly seems like a War on Kids, doesn’t it? (I must go get a copy of Dijkstra and re-read it. He kicks around some interesting ideas about fears and hatred of women and children in the late Victorian era, and the resultant eroticization of women and children in the popular culture. Blame the victim...)
Of course, they’d never actually declare such a war. Political suicide. (And anyway, these sorts of wars are never against their ostensible subjects. Remember that.)
So I guess it must be more of a police action, or something—
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Permit me my geekishness, as I permit the geekishnesses of others.
Monday, 22.19
First:
Cast your mind back to the premiere episode of the most recent Star Trek franchisee. Did you watch it? Or did you at least catch the inescapable promos for it? Do you remember the latexed butterfly-tongued stripper girls? (You must. They were prancing through every single one of the promos, rather jarringly: Scott Bakula looking starry-eyed up at the wonders of space; cut to: latexed butterfly-tongued stripper girls prancing through smokey bar.) —Far from adding a light-hearted note of sexy fun to the franchise, as a number of reviewers seemed to think, they added a note of leering, gawky wouldja-lookit-that prurience; the crew gawped at these two blue and green practically nekkid latexed butterfly-tongued stripper girls like a couple of froshling pledges just off the farm. Sexier than Riker’s season one hologram bimbette, perhaps—but we’re not advancing much beyond green slave girls from Orion with this stuff, and that’s not nearly enough to cut it in the post-Buffy, post-Xena, post-Scully age. (Not with Farscape’s everybody-into-the-pool pan-sexual over-the-top-and-back-around-for-another-bite pathos-and-leather-and-Warner-Bros. snogfest kicking out a whole new set of jams.)
So there’s that: latexed butterfly-tongued stripper girls. Got it? Good.
Second:
There’s these Coors billboards that I’ve already mentioned in passing a couple of times, linked to a television commercial that’s not been showing up lately: “Here’s to twins.” (Twin sisters, but you’ll note the “sisters” goes without saying. Who wants twin brothers? Or fraternal twins? Hmm? Speak up...) You might have seen the commercial, but the billboards seem (for the moment, at least) to be limited to the Portland area; odd, that. —Now, the commercial was charming enough in a rude sort of way; it was one of those crunchy preformed punk songs the kids like to listen to nowadays, reeling off cool stuff in an adenoidal rasp: “Here’s to burritos at 4 am, parties that never end—and twins!” And in the context of the commercial, the twins are just one of the things going on—a bit of a leery frat boy joke, yes, sisters, huh huh, but at least it realized how dumb it is (we hit them again in a second verse, when the singer runs out of cool things to think of: “And, uh—and twins!”), and it’s at least in a bigger picture of people in general (okay, young [though drinking-age!] people) having, you know, fun. There’s a girl in a baggy sweatshirt at that never-ending party, and girls scarfing down their 4 am burritos as they giggle at the cute guy across the booth. (There’s even dogs and cats nuzzling each other. It’s a very inclusive commercial.)
But when those twin sisters are yanked out of that context and slapped all by themselves on a billboard—’tis a bit odd. The frat boy leer no longer recognizes its basic stupidity, and is privileged way, way bigger than life on dozens of major intersections throughout the Portland metropolitan area. It’s so unsettling, in fact, that it’s prompted a couple of billboard “actions” by Operation TITS, who plastered the word “sexism!” over “to twins!” and did a fine job matching font and color, to boot. “Here’s sexism!” might seem an odd choice for protesting the borderline taboo-teasing wink-wink nudge-nudge here, but keep in mind “Here’s incest!” is perhaps too shocking and (strangely enough) too diffuse—or rather, so potent that it’ll push hot buttons all over the console, which, come to think of it, is a roundabout way of saying “too shocking”—while “Here’s to the errantly foolish and reductive dominant-paradigm conceptualization of women as narcissistically willing participants in the pervasive male gaze!” wouldn’t have fit in the space available. —And anyway, the billboards were rapidly cleaned up. (Though TITS darkly promises future actions.)
So: Coors twins caressing each other on billboards. That’s the second data point.
Because (let’s put ’em together now): what’s so drolly amusing is that the Coors twins were those latexed butterfly-tongued stripper girls.
Okay, maybe it’s just me.
But hey—if I wanted to get really geeky, well. I’d look to Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity, maybe, and cf. some fins de siècle, some Ages of Gilt; I’d throw in the creeping prevalence of twin sisters in another arena, and maybe get all magical on you, wondering at what weird ripple in the Zeitgeist this augurs, maybe spin out some Tim Powers plot about pairs of twin sisters criss-crossing the country from variety show to music video shoot to strip club to B-movie genre flick set to Star Trek-comics-gaming convention, posing for glamour shots and standing patiently under some maquilleuse’s latex brush, vying with each other for the power of some unseen Tarot card, the distaff side of Gemini—or maybe collaborating, on a massive working to distract that lumbering male gaze from something important and vulnerable and terribly necessary—
Waitaminute. That’s just weird enough—
I’m gonna go scribble some notes. Talk amongst yourselves.
[ # ]
No harm, no foul.
Sunday, 19.44
So the librarian wrote to say she’d just larked off from the book convention with a copy of Harmful to Minors and read far more of it while her cappuccino went cold and her cigarette burned itself unnoticed down to the filter than she’d ever meant to in one sitting and that really, no, really, I’ve got to read it for myself. —Sigh. I know. It’s on hold at the library. I’m probably going to buy a copy of it for myself real soon, but I couldn’t find one on the shelves the other day and didn’t feel like asking and anyway I already had my hands full with Charles Brockden Brown and John Updike and Helen DeWitt and Neil Gaiman and John Leonard and Paul Hoffman and John Carter and Laurie Colwin and I’d just splurged on the Colleen Coover comics and so anyway I was pretty much tapped out already. (Bookstores are dangerous places. You ever notice that?)
But until then, I’ll happily riff on what other people are saying about it.
Daze Reader points us to a couple of relevant pieces in the Village Voice: first, a piece by Sharon Lerner, summing up the contretemps thus far, and second, a piece by Levine herself: “Summer of Love: the Romance a Teenage Camper Couldn’t Have Today.” Both of them are worthwhile; go and read them. It’s where they intersect that’s pricked up my ears.
Levine sighs heavily a lot in Lerner’s overview, and she’s got reason a-plenty, what with the libel and slander that’s been tossed about, averring that Levine is some sort of apologist or advocate for pedophilia. (Were it not for the fact that such smears have called attention to the book, boosting its sales and spreading her all-too-sane message much more rapidly than had she merely been left alone—O, the Censor’s Dilemma!—she could probably make a pretty penny suing Dr. Laura, the Concerned Women of America, and Smashmouth O’Reilly for defamation of character. For starters.) —But I imagine Levine would sigh as well upon reading “Underage and Under Siege”: not so often, or so heavily, no, but she’d sigh nonetheless. Two-thirds of the way down through Lerner’s (sane and intelligent and reasoned and appropriately if genteelly pissed) overview, Lerner suddenly swoops to take Levine to task for the above-linked reminiscence of a summer camp love: “Talk to three female friends and you’re bound to turn up at least one story of getting bedroom eyes and back rubs from the camp counselor (or friend’s older brother, or windsurfing instructor, etc.),” writes Lerner. “The problem is, it’s almost as easy to hit upon the version in which the older guy doesn’t refrain from sex with his camper (or student, or the baby-sitter). And often these stories have fairly messy endings.”
Which is true, yes—but what does it have to do with Levine’s personal account of what happened specifically to her in her 14th summer?
Lerner seems to think it’s a sign of a flaw in how Levine handles her approach, or at least an insensitivity: “Levine’s lack of sensitivity for the real problems—from crushed emotions to pregnancies—wrought by these relationships is partly to blame for the frenzied response to her book.” But this is a strange accusation to make, given the tone of Levine’s Village Voice piece, and what her book is supposed to be about, and given what Levine has said in other interviews on the subject: “I don’t want to minimize the very real dangers that young people face from sex, but I also would like to try to move the discussion of child and teen sexuality out of the realm of ‘problem.’ That, to me, is really the crux of it.”
I mean, does writing about any situation which could conceivably result in a “messy ending” confer upon the author some sort of obligation to acknowledge those messy endings? Some sort of legal disclaimer, for liability purposes? (Perhaps the Surgeon General could draft some boilerplate?) —Of course not. And yet it’s somehow expected of Levine. Who insists that dwelling on those messy endings is precisely what’s harming minors. And yet Lerner—who champions Levine, and her argument—tsks that not dwelling on those possible, conceivable messy endings is precisely what weakens Levine’s point...
We’ve mentioned before how topics involving sex, sexuality, and desire tend to haywire critical faculties. Another, more concise example from Lerner’s piece: she then tackles the subtitle of Levine’s book: “The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex” is “provocative” and helps to leave “unnecessary room for panic”: “since she never approvingly writes about young children having sex, she could have just as easily used the less provocative words teen or adolescent instead of child in the subtitle.” But “The Perils of Protecting Teens from Sex” would not have been accurate or true, as Lerner herself points out in the very next paragraph: “Levine does write about young children’s sexual pleasure through masturbation and touch, though, defending the exploration of their bodies as natural and—gasp!—good.” Nor would using “Teens” instead of “Children” have meant diddly-squat in protecting Levine, her book, or the University of Minnesota Press from the howling depredations of the Rev. Dobson and his dastardly ilk. —And anyway, blaming the subtitle even in part for the resultant high-tech lynching smacks just a tad of claiming that anyway, her skirt was too short, and she licked her lips provocatively—
Hyperbole? Perhaps. (I do have a tart reputation to live up to, it seems.) But there’s more than a little “blame the victim” logic at work in how we—no, fuck it, not “we”—how the current Yankee Zeitgeist deals with kids’ sexuality. For all that you don’t usually have to stretch so far to find it as I did just now, in circumstances so innocuous and unconscious and well-meaning as Lerner’s piece.
Follow along with me a moment here.
It usually (classically) expresses itself along the gender split, of course: we all know that women are the more level-headed sex when it comes to matters of love and lust and the heart, right? Us dumb ol’ men are just slaves to our dicks. Or, to give the Devil his due on this one, let’s quote Spider Robinson, who’s put it more eloquently (if no less odiously):
Darling, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin... and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for—is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.
—Mike Callahan to Lady Sally, from On the Wall at Callahan’s
(At least, as cited in this almost 3-year-old Usenet debate.)
Or, as Lara Riscol somewhat more succinctly puts it: “Boys must try, girls must stop them.”
At first glance, this philosophy seems oddly reductive, colorless, simplistic (despite its occasional happy side effects)—but look at what happens when something goes wrong. Because boys are just doing what they’re supposed to, and the onus has been placed on girls to hold the fort and keep the gate to their “inexhaustible supply,” well, any breakdown, failure, fuck-up is her fault, not his...
No wonder it’s so popular.
But this sort of logic is pretty much what you can expect from a fearful knee-jerked first response to the scary uncertainties of desire. —Desiring something puts you at risk of doing things you wouldn’t normally do; things you might under other circumstances think are wrong; immoral; evil. Rather than taking responsibility for your own actions (even under such trying circumstances), or re-examining your morality and your concepts of right and wrong, how much easier it is to blame the object of your desires. It was her fault. She controls the supply; she awards the prize; I never would have joined with my buddies and yanked off her shorts if she hadn’t been flirting with us; make her wear a burqa, her ankles are tempting me—
(It’s not a coincidence that all the potentially messy examples Lerner cites involve girls and older male counselors or friends’ brothers; it’s not a coincidence that Levine is able to criticize age-of-consent laws as originating to protect a girl’s virginity considered as the property of her father; and it’s not a coincidence that whenever it’s a case of a woman involved with a boy, they usually just end up as bad freak-show jokes on Jay Leno.)
Of course, when you add kids to the mix, and the concept of youth, and innocence, and that “épanouissement” that “intellectual,” “ivory tower,” “media-elite,” “New York liberal” Levine insouciantly tosses into her Summer of Love reminiscence—well, it gets explosively weird explosively fast. It isn’t nearly so easy, say, to blame kids as the object of desire; kids are innocent, after all, and can’t play the tempting, teasing gate-keeper in the current Yankee Zeitgeist. (Not unless that kid has somehow been corrupted by an overly sexual media, say.) But the Zeitgeist can look to the uneasy, troubling issues raised by desire across and beneath the arbitrarily drawn line of 18 years of age, and it can look to all the messy endings that it so desperately wants to protect those innocent kids from (King Canute in the storm, staring out in horror at the onrushing tide), and it can in one swell foop demonize the very idea of teen desire: desire for teens, for good or ill, and the desire that teens themselves may (do!) feel...
So much easier than taking responsibility; so much easier than making tricky moral judgment calls. So much the safer course for all concerned. And if you’ve internalized this to any degree, then of course it’s irresponsible to write about your own 14th summer, when nothing bad happened, when you grew as a person, when beneficial insights were gained because of the affection and eroticized attention from an older person without pointing out and being sensitive to and hammering home the all-too-messy endings that might very well have occurred, that could so easily have taken place, if and always if—
And if you’re trying to fight this mentality, if you’re trying to show what we’ve already lost to twenty years of this sort of fearmongering, well, you sigh (heavily), and you take up your pen, and you try again.
—But this is getting too long and is overly messy and lumpy and bits of it stick out oddly and it’s self-indulgent and anyway I’m tired and I’ve got to go finish this week’s Ruthie’s Club (Selena Jardine is in the house now, y’all!) and what the fuck, this is just a blog journal thingie. (We need a new word for that maybe, I’m thinking. Jog? Blournal? Shoot me now.) Maybe I’ll stew over it, file it away under “needs work,” come back to it later with a fresh eye and more coffee and cigarettes. (Lord knows there are far more deserving targets than Lerner’s essay.) I could maybe do some further reading on the subject; wouldn’t hurt. That Harmful to Minors book I’ve heard so much about, heck, it might be a good start...
