Why Do I Care About The Gender Of Elena Ferrante?

When I first encountered the kerfuffle around the true identity of the novelist Elena Ferrante, I had two immediate and diametrically opposed reactions. First, smugness: I never concern myself with the autobiographical details of authors I love. So who cares? Second, freak out: wait, "Elena Ferrante" might not be a woman?

Normally I use mental discipline to avoid finding out about fiction writers. If I love a novel, thinking about which parts might be based on real life leads me down a mental rabbit hole of pointless philosophical questions. "If that part is real, did it really happen like that? Or is the author changing the details to manipulate me into feeling one way or another about a thing?" Then I'm like "What do you mean, 'manipulating,' anyway"? Talk about pointless and dumb.

However, I have also been shaken to learn certain facts about books I love, especially books representing the experience of women, especially books representing the experience of women and sexuality.

As a young person, I fell in love with Colette, the early twentieth-century French writer whose work and life challenged gender norms and all other kinds of conventions. Colette is best known now for the book that inspired the movie Gigi, but if that's all you know about Colette then you have the wrong idea -- as so often happens, the novel is darker, weirder, and more interesting. Colette is also famous for her many short stories. But the books I feel hardest for were the Claudine series.  

Over the course of the four Claudine books, Claudine grows from a precocious and rambunctious fifteen-year-old into a comfortably bourgeois but also free-thinking and unconventional adult. The first book, Claudine at School, gives an amusing side-on look at French social life in the provinces and the complex emotions of mid-adolescent feminine life. Among other complexities, Claudine has a massive crush on her young school teacher Aimée; they have a budding sensual romance when Aimée throws her over for the head schoolmistress, mystifying Claudine and giving her minor heartbreak. Aimée's younger sister Luce develops an unreciprocated love for Claudine, who doesn't understand her own desire to hurt Luce and cause her pain.

The way Claudine has romantic feelings for women and men and the way at fifteen she is both highly sensual and also a child both profoundly resonate with me. So I was disturbed to learn that the first version of Claudine at School may have been a more chaste and childlike story, and that Claudine's husband -- the writer Willy, who first told her to write up her memories and initially published the Claudine books under his own name (!), may have told her to tart them up, to liven them up with sex. I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but the idea that my favorite things were in there because some guy wanted them in there made me feel sad and weird.

Then a similar thing happened with erotic novel Story of O. That's not a book I loved (and the kind of submission/dominance thing in that book is not my kind of thing), but I always appreciated Story of O as a frank and explicit presentation of a certain version of positive sexuality from a woman's point of view. How many stories depict a woman being sexually adventurous and just basically enjoying it and having a great time? It's not a lot.

So, again, I was unsettled to learn late in life that while the author is a woman, the book may have been originally written for a man. That is, the author was in a relationship with a man, and wanted to get his attention, to turn him on, and to flirt with him. Again, I don't have sophisticated thoughts about this, but I find it disappointing to think that this, too, like so many things depicting women's sexuality, was ultimately crafted to appeal to a man's taste.

I loved Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, and I found The Days of Abandonment conveyed vividly what if feels like to be trapped in your life and in despair. Like Claudine at School, The Lying Life of Adults shows a textured experience of girlhood-womanhood adolescence.

It's been suggested that Ferrante may be a woman, or may not be a woman, or may be a woman and a man writing together. I feel like there's some sense in which I shouldn't care: the books are the books whoever the author is, and Ferrante herself has suggested that it's misogyny and sexism that makes people want to know.

But I also can't shake the feeling that the thoughts and feelings of people who aren't women so often affect what gets presented as the truth about women. It happens in pornography, it happens in movies, and it happens in books; given the way social gender norms work, it probably happens whenever there is an audience. While the books are the books whoever the author is, I also don't want the books by Elena Ferrante to be another example where the tastes, attitudes, and feelings of people who are not women are shaping narratives of our woman- and girl-hood experience.

What Compelled Me to Reread Dracula During Lockdown?

I don't know how it started, but I think it was something in the NYT crossword, something to do with Keanu Reeves. My partner said, "Keanu Reeves was in Dracula." Wait, what? From the miracle of modern self-surveillance, I know that I looked it up and learned that Keanu Reeves did not play Dracula (thank god) but rather Jonathan Harker, the lawyer. Whether Gary Oldman is any less WTF as Dracula I leave as an exercise to the reader.

I have a long history with Dracula, a book that obsessed my father when I was a kid. My father was the kind of guy where a lot of things were like 80 percent jokes and 20 percent serious and others were 20 percent jokes and 80 percent serious and it was always a little murky, probably even in his own mind, where we stood on things. After his annual rereading, my father would sleep with garlic under his pillow out of fear. You might think that's the 80 percent joke, but this was a man whose nightmares tended to actual devils actually chasing him, so I'm not so sure.

Later, I had the widely shared adolescent girl experience of being "into" vampires, whatever that means. I watched the movie The Hunger over and over, and read a lot of Anne Rice. My first reading of Dracula, around that time, I had a vivid sense of the erotic in the vampires' ways -- you may not remember this, but these are literally described as "voluptuous" in the book. Poor Jonathan Harker, on meeting the women in the castle who want to drink his blood, describes their voluptuousness as "both thrilling and repulsive." I remembered the book as basically anti-vampire, but not in any particular way.

On this rereading, by contrast, I felt the full weight of the Christian anti-sex moralizing. As Lucy's appearance begins to shift toward the vampiric zone, her friends are disgusted by the new sensuality of her face; after they destroy her body to free her from Dracula's spell, they're thrilled to see her previous sweet, pure expression and physiognomy return. A "diabolical sweetness" allows vampires to express love and desire to seduce new recruits. I guess I'm as against killing people and sucking their blood as anyone else, but this framing struck me as depressing and dumb.

Rereading Dracula during lockdown, I couldn't help but notice that it's partly a travel book. The best part of the story is when Jonathan Harker first goes to Transylvania, ostensibly to help the Count with some clerical matters, and slowly gets caught up in Dracula's web. There are trains, and ships, and transfers to carriages, and rides on horses. I was like, "Oh yeah -- travel!" Of course, so much of that late nineteenth-century mode, of going to truly unknown places and being completely cut off from anything familiar, is totally lost to us now. These days, Jonathan Harker could read on Yelp, "Castle looks interesting but they will kill you and drink your blood. One star."

The most melancholy aspect of my reading experience was the way that it was stupidly mediated by all the ridiculous parodies, take-offs, and remakes of the Dracula story that I've encountered in my time. Chief among these was the 1979 film Love at First Bite, which as a kid I saw on TV multiple times and found hilarious and awesome. How could I not love a vampire movie that featured the classic disco song "I Love the Nightlife"? There's also Young Frankenstein, which takes place at a castle in Transylvania for who knows what reasons. Memories of those films made me see Renfield as an annoying twerp, the horses and wolves under Dracula's command as side-shows, and even the Count himself in the light of a ridiculous show-boater.

Overall, the whole thing was a sadder and less fun affair than I'd hoped it would be, though whether that's because I'm old, or because of lockdown, or because the book isn't really that good is totally unclear.

A Trip To The Sex Machines Museum

When I was in Prague recently, I went to the Sex Machines Museum. It was small and it could have used more in the way of historicizing information, but it was interesting. I was excited to get a professional discount for being a professor and I considered requesting reimbursement for my ticket as a research expense -- but honestly the price was so low it would have purely been symbolic and not worth the hassle.

I don't know what you think when you think "sex machines," but the first thing I think of is the vibrator and its amazing history. If you don't know anything about the history of the modern vibrator, you owe it to yourself to find out about it. We live in an era where we think that the way we see things is the only obvious way to see them, and this -- very recent! -- period in Anglo history can really shake up your complacency.

I learned about this years ago from Rachel Maines's amazing book, The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, but you can get a good quick overview here.

Basically, it was common in the Victorian era to think that women were not sexual beings -- that they tolerated sex for the sake of their husbands and to have children. Especially since women do not typically have orgasms from intercourse alone, women in this context would sometimes develop a nervous irritability accompanied by a feeling of heaviness in the abdomen, wetness between the legs, and erotic fantasies. We would call this sexual frustration, but because this wasn't a concept, it was understood as "hysteria," -- a medical ailment that needed treatment.

Medical treatment involved a physician rubbing the woman between the legs until "hysterical paroxysm" occurred. Again, we would call this an orgasm, but it wasn't understood as sexual, it was understood as medical. Though it brought in good money, the treatment was considered a pain: boring and time-consuming. It also gave the doctors achy cramped hands. Maines calls it "the job nobody wanted."

So the vibrator was introduced as a labor saving device for doctors, something they would use on women to treat them. Not long after, technology evolved to the point where vibrators could be designed for use inside the home; at the same time their connection to sexuality became more obvious and so they were marketed blandly as "massagers."

The sex machine museum did have vibrators from this period, and it had some other interesting things I thought I'd share. First, here are two characteristic vibrators:

 

An early vibrator.

A later vibrator.

One of the things that surprised me the most at the Sex Machines Museum was the number of machines using electricity -- I mean, not just powered machines but machines that would deliver current. Yikes! Here is a picture of some complicated contraptions where a "soaked ring" would be slipped onto the penis allowing electrical current stimulates erections:

"Portable electric device" for the penis.

Another thing I was surprised by was this enormous wooden contraption:

German "erotic device."

The information card for it reads "A faithful copy of the instruments used by a female prison in Germany to calm the 'restless minds' of some prisoners. The penis moved by stepping on the pedal."

So many questions. I don't know if you can see in the photo but the "penis" in this thing is huge, especially at the base. Is the implication that it was intentionally painful and abusive? If not, how did penetration from a wooden penis avoid the same problem the vibrator was meant to solve -- that women don't usually have orgasms from penetration?  Was "calm the restless minds" a euphemism? Or is the whole thing just fake? I have no idea.

Another thing I learned was about chastity belts. I always had the same cartoon thought that most moderns have about this concept, that it was a thing a jealous or possessive spouse or parent would put on a person to make sure they didn't have sex. In fact, they were often used by women to protect themselves from rape! Check out this amazing picture:

Chastity belt.

Most of the machines in the museum were for having a good time, but of course not all. The "anti-masturbation" belts for male adolescents were to prevent nocturnal masturbation; in the event of an erection, sharp spikes would dig into the penis.

To me the most disturbing of these devices was the one below, meant to alert parents to nocturnal erections: as the placard explains, "there was a ring on the boy's penis, and when an erection would occur, it rang a bell placed in the parents' bedroom."

Anti-masturbation device for boys.

OMG.

The "Surrendered Person" As A Model For Us All

My mother raised me to be a feminist (thanks, mom!) and so when I see a headline like "I Am a Surrendered Wife," I know there's going to be trouble. When I think "surrendered wife," I think a person who has agreed to sublimate her own will and well-being to that of her husband, to give up on shared decision-making, and to have sex on demand.

But when I read the article I got a little weirded out, becuase a lot of what she was saying seemed to me to be ... like normal relationship advice. In fact, a lot of what she was saying seemed to me to be good advice for just being a person and relating to other people.

For one thing, the author describes constantly hectoring her husband, disagreeing with him, trying to change him, and not respecting his opinions. Um -- that's not equality, that's being an annoying pain in the ass. For another thing, most of what she was recommending seemed to be about respect for others and being kind, receptive, and grateful.

Let's look at the "six principles" of being a surrendered wife. The surrendered wife:

• Relinquishes inappropriate control of her husband
• Respects her husband's thinking
• Receives his gifts graciously and expresses gratitude for him
• Expresses what she wants without trying to control him
• Relies on him to handle household finances
• Focuses on her own self-care and fulfillment

Leaving aside the financial business, aren't these all things everyone should be doing for everyone else all the time? Don't try to boss other people around. Respect others' opinions and views. Be grateful for the kindnesses you receive, and try to be kind in return. Don't try to control other people.

One of the more interesting items on the list is the last one: that the "surrendered wife" needs to make happiness for herself instead of expecting her spouse to magically provide the happiness and meaning in her life. This is a bit weird, because it's like the opposite of being "surrendered." It's like, "Take responsibility for your own happiness! Your relationship isn't the end-all-and-be-all!"

One of the more potentially contentious aspects of being a "surrendered wife" that doesn't come up on this list has to do with sex. Part of the idea is usually that even when you don't feel like it, you should have sex with your husband even when you're not in the mood.

Of course, there is a way of understanding this in which it is awful and sexist: that no matter how you're feeling your feelings don't matter, you just have to have sex when the other person wants it. But there's another way to think of it that seems to be completely normal and good advice for everyone, both men and women: if the person you love wants to have sex with you, and you don't feel like it, you don't have to say "no" immediately. Maybe try it out a bit. See how it goes.

In fact, recent research into women's sexuality has raised the idea that maybe expecting desire to arise "spontaneously" is a male-centric model of sexuality. For many women, desire is "responsive" and emerges in connection with sexual activity itself. To think spontaneous desire is "better" is just another form of taking women to be "lesser."

So that just leaves ... money. And no, of course partners should engage in shared decision-making about money. So that one, I think, doesn't translate over. But frankly, it seems an odd fit with the rest of the list anyway.

I don't know how normal relationship ideas got so strange that respecting the other person's opinions and being grateful and not trying to control them became "surrender" rather than just, you know, normal life, but I guess that's just another one of those insane things about the early 21st century.

Portrait Of An Artist As A Woman: Saint Phalle, Subversiveness, and Sex

Lifesaver fountain by Niki de Saint Phalle in Duisburg, Germany. Photo by JuergeunG, reproduced here under Creative Commons License.

I don't know if you happened to read Ariel Levy's recent New Yorker profile of the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who built gigantic sculptures in the hills of Tuscany in the 1970s.

Personally, I read the piece with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the gigantic sculptures really speak to me. They look so cool, looming out of the countryside. Plus, during the twenty years she worked on them, she lived in the sphinx sculpture, with her bedroom inside one breast and her kitchen inside the other. How cool is that?

On the other hand, as I read more about the artist herself, I felt ... annoyed. Saint Phalle lived a life full of self-created drama. She had a lot of "personal charisma," which helped to get people to pay attention to her art. She did a lot of pieces involving shooting a gun at stuff. About those pieces, she said, "I mean, it isn’t as beautiful as war, it isn’t as beautiful as seeing someone killed or the atom bomb, but it’s the most that I can do!" She had children, whom she then completely ignored.

But even these things, which are annoying to me, are complex and multifaceted. The shooting paintings, which she started in the early 60s, began as an attack on domesticity and the suffocating lives women were expected to live. Properly irritated that the way male artists could go around doing whatever they want while women were expected to cook dinner, she decided she would, herself, just start doing whatever she wanted. Part of that, obviously, was prioritizing her art over her children -- as so many men have done before her.

Levy puts it this way: "If American radical feminism of the time was about rewriting the rules of society, Saint Phalle had a different notion: she felt that the rules simply did not apply to her." I can really resonate with this. Because while it's important to change the rules, it's also important to have people just going off and doing something completely different. That's what art -- and artists -- are all about.

So the fact that she made a point of living, and doing art, in ways that challenge gender norms -- well, that's cool and kind of heroic.

And yet. The art historian Catherine Dossi is quoted here as saying that the more successful Saint Phalle got, the more her "challenge" to the establishment shifted away from "blowing up" domesticity, and more toward being a "femme fatale. "Always an extraordinary beauty, she starting doing more than making paintings -- she started putting on tight white jumpsuits and inviting people to watch her look amazing making them.

Frankly, on one level this is just depressing. Because making yourself hot and then inviting people to watch you do what you're doing? Not so much in the "challenging gender norms" category. Watching a sexy and beautiful woman do something is stereotypical.

And to me, even the mere fact of her beauty itself is frustrating. Do you realize how often when you read a story like this about a woman that it turns out her beauty and sex appeal is an important part of the story? Um -- always? Do you know how reading these stories over and over makes young girls classify themselves from the get-go -- the beauties, who can do the things they want, and the non-beauties, who have to play nice, find their way through, make people like them in other ways?

So I admit that when I learned about the white jumpsuits, my first reaction was disappointment and frustration. Really?

And yet -- however. The truth is that the link between beauty and subversiveness for women is real -- and even if it's a link they don't want it, it is put on them by the rest of the world. Saint Phalle says it herself:

"Here I was, an attractive girl (if I had been ugly, they would have said I had a complex and not paid any attention), screaming against men in my interviews and shooting."

She's right. And it's the same thing Courtney Love said -- correctly -- about getting cosmetic surgery (including a nose job) in her youth:

"I have to be pretty if I’m going to get over. And I have to get over if I’m gonna fuck [the system] up. And I’m gonna fuck it up."

And really, on top of everything, there's just the girls who want to have fun aspect. As women who have sex with men and men who have sex with men and everyone who has sex with men knows: if you want to have sex with men, and you want them to find you attractive, it's usually going to matter whether you look the part.

In this interview, Courtney Love lays it out with characteristic bluntness:

"When you’re fat like I was ... you do not get to fuck the boys you want to fuck. Right? Right? ... I swear to God, Lisa. I was a fat girl my whole life. No one would fuck, and when they did they’d do things like fart in front of me ... The minute I got skinny and got a nose job and became photogenic, and all of a sudden I had a bidding war, and every boy I ever wanted, wanted me."

Thinking about the matter this way, if you think it's important for women to get to enjoy life's pleasures, and if it's true that in our world a lot of those pleasures are more easily accessed the cuter you get -- well, I can't blame anyone for wanting to be as cute as possible.

So I guess all in all, if Saint Phalle wanted to wear white jumpsuits, and sleep around, and pal around with Jean Tinguely, and make giant Nanas -- big, bright female dancers with small heads and huge hips and breasts -- well, more power to her.

Extreme Commodification

When philosophers talk about the extensions of markets into new domains like surrogacy and sex work, one of the concepts they use is "commodification." The idea is that by subjecting things like reproduction and sexuality to market norms, we are "commodifying" them: valuing them in the wrong sort of way.

I don't know if that's the right way to think about these issues, but this post isn't about that. This post is about commodities themselves, and about whether it's possible to commodify them. More broadly: can you apply market norms inappropriately even to things to that are normally subject to market forces?

I think the answer is yes. In fact, the last time I was reading about commodification as a concept, I got to thinking that in some ways it's because of the way we've gotten so extreme about commodification itself that to "commodify" something feels like such an utter disaster. 

When we talk about "market norms" in the context of commodification, it's something like the following: you think about how to get the best thing for yourself at the least cost to yourself; you think about what exact qualities you want instead of taking an open-ended and unconditional approach; you think "instrumentally" in terms of using the commodity just for purposes of your own.

But with respect to these norms, there's commodifying and there's commodifying. Because it depends on how far you take it -- that is, it depends on whether you also value in other ways or whether you see commodities purely in the conditional and instrumental way. Increasingly, with commodities, I think we're taking it all the way -- and everything else goes out the window.

Take labor as an example. Sure, from one point of view, any capitalist system will inappropriately "commodify" labor -- but setting that to one side, you can see the different ways that the labor-wage situations appeal to market norms.

Paying someone to do something doesn't require you to take up a purely commodified view of them. You could pay them to do something, but also regard them as a fellow citizen with needs and interests of their own. You could think about an appropriate wage in terms of fairness and not just cost-benefit-analysis. You could think of making exchanges of mutual benefit.

But it feels like our rhetoric and practice around labor has gotten so far away from this, to a place where labor isn't just commodified, it's completely and utterly commodified. For example, the increasingly common "just-in-time" scheduling in service jobs means you never know from week to week when you're working, or how many hours. You can't arrange child care, you can't go to school, and you can't keep a second job. It destroys your life.

And it's not just poor people. This article reports on doctors who were trying to negotiate for quality of  life issues, to avoid burn-out, and couldn't even communicate with their managers, who thought that the only question on the table was "How much are you asking for?" The doctors could not even communicate that there was something else at stake other than dollar amounts.

Similarly, employers don't want to hire normal people with general good attributes then train them -- they want workers who already have the exact specific skills they are looking for. As this Washington Post piece says, this means no one can get the relevant experience: it's not a "skills gap" as much as a refusal to do any of the giving in the give-and take.

Maybe it's not all that surprising that labor is increasingly commodified, but I think there's actually something weirdly similar happening at the level of literal commodities -- the objects we buy as part of the consumer culture saturation society we're all part of.

Because of the way everything has become temporary and disposable, it's no longer necessary to relate to an object by getting attached to it, caring for it, or taking the bad with the good. The commodification of commodities means that any object is just seen for its potential to suit just the specific ends we have -- until it doesn't. I remember last time I went to get eyeglasses, and there was something about the frames that didn't seem perfect, and my friend said, "Don't worry about it. Just get these, and then next year you can get some new ones." And that's what I did.

It's really very speculative, but I got to wondering: is it possible that the fear of "commodification" in debates over surrogacy and sex work has something to do with the specific way that commodification has become such a crazy all or nothing thing in our society?

Because if a "commodity" is a thing or person you'll squeeze everything out of and then throw away at the first sign of dissatisfaction --- well, yeah, for heaven's sake, don't commodify.

But doesn't it seem possible that it doesn't have to be that way? That you could have a market that co-exists with normal human emotions like care and respect? That you could pay someone to do something and also, at the same time, care about them as a person? 

I don't know when it happened -- and I don't think blaming individuals makes any sense -- but somehow we seem to have systematically made this less extreme state of affairs an impossibility for ourselves.

Gutting The Social Commentary Of Opera: The Case Of The Marriage Of Figaro

From the COC production.

 Over the weekend, I went to see Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at the COC. It is an amazing opera, dealing with sex, love, and the fickle nature of the human heart. It's also about class, gender, power, and the relics of the feudal system in the eighteenth century -- but unfortunately you wouldn't know that from the staging of the COC production.

Do you know the story? It's the eighteenth century,  and the Count's loyal servant Figaro is about to marry the lovely Susanna, the Countess's maid. The Count is bored with his wife the Countess, whom he once loved passionately. He not only flirts with his more attractive female underlings, he also abuses his position of power to badger and coerce them into reciprocating his sexual attentions.

Even though the Count says he is all about abolishing "feudal privilege," in fact he is plotting and scheming to prevent the marriage so he can have Susanna all to himself. Through plotting and scheming of their own, Susanna, the Countess, and Figaro subvert his plans, and make a fool out of him.

Like so many works of artistic genius, the opera works along multiple dimensions. It's a comedy, with ridiculous disguises, mistaken identities, people hiding behind curtains, that sort of thing. It's also a love story, with all the modern rom-com conventions. And, on top of all that, it's a social commentary.

One of the more interesting social commentary aspects is reflection on the "sexual double standard." Why does the Count get to fool around with impunity, while his wife's briefest admiring glance brings censure and rage? Yes -- it turns out that people have actually been thinking about this problem for over two hundred years.

But the main social commentary has to do with power. The Count gets to do whatever he wants, because -- well, because he's the Count. If this includes sex with Susanna -- well, what are Figaro and Susanna going to do? They're servants. They're under his orders and under his protection. It's not like they can up and leave, wander the countryside for other options.

The opera takes you to the brink of horror -- is the Count really going to rape Susanna and prevent Figaro from marrying her, thus ruining both of their lives? -- before bringing you back to a happy ending through antics and absurd plot devices (literally "OMG, that's actually Figaro's long lost mom!").

Of course the Director chose to showcase how relevant a story of class, power, and sex is to our modern era -- Oh, just kidding! In fact the staging was such as to undercut the social justice commentary and to "psychologize" the whole thing.

Infuriatingly, the physical direction showed Susanna sort of willingly going along, as if it's a kind of half-hearted flirtation on her part and not a case of control of the weak from the strong. The Count is presented not as a menace, but just as a kind of bossy and irritable guy. There's a scene where in the story, the Count is going to kill someone out of jealous rage. The way it was in this production, you find yourself thinking, "Well, he'll just shout a lot and then he'll get over it." It changes the whole point of the story.

In the program notes, the Director says that in his interpretation, the characters are "completely torn between morality, desire, and impulse," and that this was why he wanted to "follow the characters into their darkest psychological depths, but at the same time leave space for exploring the utopian moments in Mozart's music."

Could any artistic statement be more of its time? I mean, for all the ridiculous hand-wringing about political correctness, so much art has become de-politicized. Or -- you can make political statements these days, but you can't put politics and entertainment together. Somehow it's like people think the Venn diagram of "entertainment" and that of "thinking about society" should be empty.

There's a trend of focusing on individuals, and what's in their hearts and minds, instead of the social structures and context around them. The forces of of individualism have become so deep and pervasive, it's like people find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of "social justice" as "social." The director thus sees only individual characters, torn between their own sense of morality, dignity and obligation, and their own desire, eros, and impulse.

As longtime readers know, this keeps happening to me with opera. I thought it might be something to do with the COC, but many of the productions with the same problem were created in other places and then brought here. So it's some kind of widespread phenomenon.

With all these productions, you'd think we were all living in a post-class and post-gender paradise, where everyone is equal and no one can exert absurd control over one another, where the idea of coercion and sexual assault through power dynamics was somehow past us.

As if you'd say to yourself, "Well, this opera is partly about power, gender, and class. But we don't have those problems in our society, so ... Wait, I know, I'll make it about the characters' 'darkest psychological depths!'"

When Life Is Work, Who Can You Flirt With?

With whom is it appropriate to pursue a sexualized or even just flirty relationship? Who is in and out of bounds for hooking up, asking out, and so on?

We know from sexual harassment law and from intuitive reflection on sexual autonomy that there are some obvious guidelines. Don't do it with the people you supervise at work. Don't ask anyone over and over, because that is harassment.

There are, however, more complicated cases. Recently MathBabe had a very interesting discussion about "Romance and math meetings," prompted by a question about asking people out on dates at math conferences. A woman was at a math conference talking to a fellow mathematician, a guy, about math. The guy mathematician asked her out. She was upset, because she'd hoped to be regarded in the light of a mathematician instead of possible date material, and hoped to be able to collaborate with him in the future -- something she felt was off the table if she turned him down.

MathBabe initially said she didn't think the issue was so serious. Why can't you collaborate with people who've turned you down? And given that many couples meet under similar circumstances and live happily ever after, wouldn't it be a shame to put the kibosh on such activities?



This, of course, generated a lively discussion, which you can read all about here. People pointed out that if you're one of a few women at a conference with a lot of heterosexual men, then even if no one asks you out twice, you might get asked out a zillion times. You feel like you're at a bar, not a conference, and you feel like you're of interest only for your potential as a romantic partner. Plus, in that case have to micro-navigate every situation to avoid giving someone the wrong idea-- added to all the other burdens of being a woman in a professional and guy-centered environment. Bad.

Other cases, including colleagues who aren't in direct power-relations, can also be complicated. Some times people who work at the same kind of thing you do can seem like equals one minute and gate-keepers the next. Suppose A and B flirt or have sex and then A gets a prestigious job while B remains under-employed. Now A is, in a sense, in a position of power with respect to B. What if A starts rewarding the people who continue to respond sexually and shunning people who reject their advances?

What if, as happens so often in the modern world, there happen to be a bunch of hetero male As and a bunch of female Bs? You know what happens. Women don't get hired unless they're willing to play along, flirt when they don't feel like it, or worse. Indeed, MathBabe ends her discussion with just such a warning: it's not OK to be sexual with someone "whose career you influence."

But here's the thing: in the modern world of 24-7 work and the "entrepreneur of the self," the people who work in your area or who could influence your career somehow ... well, isn't that almost everyone you ever meet? I don't know how your life works, but I feel like unless I went way out of my way to take a flower-arranging class or something like that, I would seldom meet people who are neither "colleagues" in the broad sense of doing what I do nor people who could in some way "influence" my career.

It's like there's a collision course between some sensible-sounding restriction on who you flirt, date, and hook up with, and the culture of modern life in which every relationship is kind of a work relationship. Put the two together and BOOM: there really isn't anyone in the green light category.

What's the answer? I don't know, but like MathBabe, I have a pro-love, pro-flirting, and pro-sex personal orientation, and from a larger perspective, wouldn't it be sad and bizarre if no one could ever flirt or hook up with or find true love with someone who shares their professional interests just because they do, in fact, share professional interests?

It's like, given the omnipresent nature of work in so many people's lives, a broad interpretation of the out-of-bounds rules would come down to no flirting ever. 

I don't know what to say except maybe, like so many things in modern life, it's not the sort of thing you can figure out by looking for general principles you can apply across the board. Maybe it depends on context, and tone, and particulars. We humans aren't always so good at deploying contextual and variable norms. tending as we do toward a love of commandments and categorical imperatives. But maybe with the nature of modernity, we're going to have to evolve into the next level.

Sexual Liberty And Its Discontents

I was thinking recently about sex in the modern world, and particularly the particular rage and indignation that people have related to issues about sex. And I got thinking about how maybe, in unseen ways, some of this bad feeling has to do with deep and unrecognized value conflicts.


Specifically, I found myself wondering about the conflicts between sexual liberty, on the one hand, and sexual equality and justice on the other. All these values are, I think, things that people care about. But -- much more than I think is typically recognized -- these values don't always fit together. More of one often means less of the others.

When I talk about sexual "liberty" here, I'm not thinking of the manifestation of liberty that has to do specifically with LGBTQ rights. Actually I think that form of liberty doesn't create value conflicts.

What I'm talking about is the more general idea that everyone gets to craft their own vision of the sexual good life. If you're into monogamous marriage, do that. If you're into hook-up culture, do that. If you're into polyamory commitments, knock yourself out. If you don't want to have sex at all, that's fine too.

I would say in addition that an important component of sexual liberty is that everyone has a kind of unchallengeable right to decide when and with whom they want to have sex. You don't have to give a reason or justification. In a deep sense, it's your right to choose however you want.

As I've touched on before, if that's sexual liberty, then in some ways more sexual liberty means less sexual equality, in the sense that some people are going to have way more of it, and way more of the kind they want, than other people. Hot young women, rich status-y men, and mysteriously cool people are going to get lots, while a socially awkward 7-11 clerk may get nothing. There are going to be sexual winners and losers. There may even be, effectively, a sexual 1% and a sexual 99%.

Is that a bad thing? Is there a value of "sexual equality" that is thus transgressed? I think the answer is yes. If sex, and especially having the opportunity to have the kind of sex you want to have, with people you want to have it with, is one of the good things in life, then it's pretty sucky if some people don't get any of it. And it's even worse if the have-nots have to deal with the existence of the sexual equivalent of trust-fund children.

The idea of sexual justice might be a bit more multifaceted and complex, but I think one idea out there is that it seems especially egregious if people who are good, kind, and sexually generous turn out to be the ones not getting any sex and people who are unreciprocating assholes do great. It doesn't seem fair.

But sexual liberty does seem to lead to sexual injustice, because the reasons people find other people attractive are complex and mysterious. They often track aspects of ourselves we can take no credit for: looks, or status, or being charismatic. As is often wryly noted, sexual success itself makes people more sexually successful. The result is that there's this great thing in life, and whether you get a lot of it often has little to do with your generosity, or hard work, or other virtues.

As much as I love sexual liberty and wouldn't want any less of it, I think it has to be acknowledged that certain forms of social sexual constraints block some of these effects. When sex takes place only in monogamous marriages (gay or straight), there's a huge levelling off.

With respect to equality, in that context, most people get one or maybe a handful of sex partners. There isn't that sense of huge winners and losers. Plus there's a cascade effect. If everyone has to pair off, this removes the more attractive people from the pool of partners. So if you're one of the people less likely to be found attractive, there will be others around of your preferred sex/gender who might want to pair off with you.

With sexual justice, too, monogamous marriage means that you're only going to want to pair off with people you'll want to spend the rest of your life with: the ones you'll bring into your family, eat breakfast with, share bank accounts with. Of course in that context, all things being equal, good and generous persons will get more sex than self-centered jerks.

If this is at all on the right track, then I wonder if some of the indignation and unhappiness people feel around sex is related to these values conflicts. I'm sure you've heard heterosexual men complain bitterly about being a sexual have-not, and about women having sex with assholes instead of nice guys. It drives straight women crazy when men choose women who are young and good-looking.

Sometimes I feel like there's an attempt to explain what feels wrong about these things in terms of sexual "shoulds": people shouldn't be so shallow, they should want to have sex with these people, in these circumstances, they should have reasons for why they find certain people sexually attractive at certain times in certain contexts.

But for all kinds of reasons I find these shoulds of sex suspicious. Often they're presented as if they're moral truths. But to me they often feel like a sneaky end-run around sexual liberty, an ad hoc way of moralizing to get an end result that seems right.

Why not just acknowledge that, as so often in life, there are trade-offs? Then maybe we can talk about other ways to increase sexual equality and justice, ones that don't require a return to ubiquitous monogamous marriage and don't require the ad hoc moralizing either.

Female Super-Slenderness Beauty Norms: WTF?

I often find myself thinking about the role of super-slenderness in female beauty norms and thinking, WTF?

When I say "female super-slenderness beauty norms," I don't really mean the general thing that women are constantly evaluated on the basis of their appearance, where those evaluations often track sex appeal as the main important thing -- so that a woman's worth is tied up with her looks.

That is interesting and complicated too, but I feel like there are a lot of useful concepts out there already to analyze it -- having to do with the patriarchical roots of our modern social situation and things like that.

What gives me the WTF feeling has to do more with the specific thing, having to do with being really really really slender. There is something mystifying about this particular thing that I think transcends the general analysis about the relation between women's worth and appearance, and definitely transcends the women-valued-for-sex-appeal business.

For starters, as is often noted, what people find sexually attractive in a woman's appearance is very often not super slender. It's not a straightforward thing to measure, and obviously there's no "one thing," but wouldn't you agree that on balance, the shape of a woman in pornography is very different from size zero shape of a woman in fashion? Even in a wide range of pornography types? So I think that while there are obvious relations and overlap areas, the "super-slender" norm is not a sexiness norm.

It'd be one thing if the super-slender norm had to do only with high couture or fashion-fantasy or something -- but that is so completely not the case. The norm of super-slender is associated with high status in such a deep and pervasive way. Women in movies have to be super-slender, almost regardless of role. A person looking for a girlfriend who reads as "high status" has to date a super slender woman. Even in business, the more slender, the more professional.

In many clothing brands, I wear a size ten -- and I'd guess overall I'm near average size for women in North America. And yet if I go into Banana Republic or Ann Taylor -- stores that sell professional clothing for women -- there are literally no clothes there that fit me. They're cut in a way that no matter what the official size, they are seriously too small somewhere. It's crazy.

Somehow, this "status" norm which is not a sexiness norm has become engrained in people's attitudes. What I don't get, though, and what I think needs deeper and further analysis, is why, exactly? Why this?

People talk about the problem being the fashion industry and how they use so many super-slender models. That's certainly a thing -- but do you think that is a sufficient explanation? Like, if tomorrow morning Vogue had people of different sizes and shapes that would change things?

Much as I'd love to see the fashion industry change, I find it hard to believe that they are the main movers behind this status trend. Many of the people most invested in it -- like businessmen with high-status super-slender wives -- don't even seem like they would encounter fashion magazines.

It's often said, and certainly it's true, that beauty norms reflect what-money-can-buy, so for instance when there's not a lot of food around, bigness is more appreciated. In this way of looking at the problem, it's because money can buy you slenderness that slenderness seems attractive.

Again -- does this really seem like a sufficient explanation? For one thing, for many people slenderness -- and especially super-slenderness -- are not things money can buy. They're just things you're born with a tendency to. It's seems more like slenderness is rewarded with money than that money buys slenderness.

It might be that the answer has something to do with imperialism and racism. Like, the body that becomes the status body is the one that is highly correlated with life in western colonizing hegemony: thus white, blond, and thin.

This, I think, is among the most promising explanatory directions, but it leaves a lot still unexplained. Why, for example, do we have the current trend, away from the size six models of the 1980s, and toward the size zero ones of today?  Why are models often so thin they have to be airbrushed to remove signs of ribs and bones? And this while the actual bodies of the western imperialist countries are getting bigger and bigger?

I think there are deep things here about femininity, and differentiation from men, and power, all linked up with the the other matters already mentioned. In my darkest moments, I think it seems like a hatred of femaleness itself. But really, I don't know.

Since I can't shop at Ann Taylor I often go to LOFT which is owned by Ann Taylor but creates clothing with a different cut -- a cut that happens to fit me. More than once I've been told by salespeople that the relationship between the stories is that Ann Taylor is more "upscale," more elegant, dressier, while LOFT is casual. And I'm always like, "How does having a certain body type translate directly into not being "upscale"? 

It's a seriously strange situation.

Addyi, Desire, And The Social Control Of Women's Sexuality

This week I'm writing about Addyi, which I realize makes me like two months behind the targeted moment for writing about things, but what can I say? Speed is not the philosopher's main strong point.

Addyi, of course, is the libido pill for women, the "female Viagra." You don't need Forbes.com to explain why the particulars are likely to make it less than a blockbuster. As the NYT says, "In one trial, women who took the drug had an average of 4.4 “satisfying sexual experiences a month” compared with 3.7 for women given a placebo." On average it might increase the number from 2-3 per month to 3-4.

No one is more in favor of one more satisfying sexual event per month than I am, and if that were the end of the story, I'd be like, Great, knock yourselves out. But Addyi comes with serious potential side effects, including severely low blood pressure and loss of consciousness. Plus, you're not supposed to take it while drinking alcohol. And on top of everything else? You have to take it every day, at a cost -- to someone anyway -- of 400 dollars per month.

As I understand it, for some women the drug is much more effective than "one more per month" and overall it's good news that women will have the option of taking this drug. But so much about the way this drug is described, promoted, and understood is annoying.

First, there's this constant reference to "libido," "desire," and "sex drive." As is frequently pointed out, Viagra doesn't directly cause desire: it just enables more blood flow to the penis so a man can get an erection. Addyi targets the brain, the aim being to create an effect of desire. The implication is that lack of desire is the problem.

But many women don't experience sexual desire as a drive, a hunger from nowhere. They experience it in response to things. This is called "responsive desire" -- as opposed to "spontaneous desire" -- and there's nothing wrong with it at all. Unless, of course, you think the way men do things is the only appropriate way to do them.

Second, this point about desire really brings home the weirdness of measuring success in terms of "satisfying sexual encounters." In women with responsive desire, this makes it seem like the success of the drug is basically that you get to skip the activities that cause responsive desire -- like, I don't know, talking quietly, snuggling, foreplay, clean sheets, whatever -- and get straight to the action. 

This reminds me of Rachel Maines' great book The Technology of Orgasm. Maines tells an astonishing story about how vibrators were introduced as labor-saving devices for physicians to treat female hysteria: instead of having to repetitively rub their hands between a woman's legs for ever and ever -- so boring! -- doctors could use the vibrator. Voilà! Hysteria cured in minutes. I think Haines describes the vibrator as doing "the job that no one else wanted."

Speaking of vibrators, does "satisfying sexual encounters" include masturbation? I don't know.

Finally, I don't know if you read this article by Daniel Bergner in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It's about the ongoing search for the female Viagra. And much of the article fits with what I've already said: women seeking out out the drug in clinical trials describe feeling deficient because, while they have responsive desire and pleasure in sex, they don't have spontaneous desire -- that "drive" associated with the masculine pattern of lust.

Bergner has a fascinating discussion of the interplay of issues having to do with long-term monogamy and the drive of lust, pointing out that empirically, while women and men both tend to experience this drive at the start of a new relationship, that drive fades for women much faster than for men: a new partner is often something that reignites that feeling of spontaneous desire for women.

As an aside here: it kills me how these facts are not interpreted as challenging the standard socio-biology idea of women as naturally monogamous and are taken instead to prove that men's drive is just that much stronger overall. Your theory predicts P and the evidence says not-P, and you're like, Well, P anyway, just something else is going on. Obviously, social investment in the natural monogamy of women is intense.

Toward the end, Bergner talks about social views of women's sexuality, and how they affect development of these drugs. Basically, the aim is for the effects to be "good but not too good." Bergner describes one researcher being "a bit stunned by the entrenched mores that lay within what he’d heard" in discussions, concluding that "there’s a bias against -- a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman."

One day, you're mechanizing the process of treating hysteria by rubbing women between the legs in doctors offices. A few years later you're psychopharmasizing to get the perfect female desire: not too much, not too little, not for the wrong people, and not requiring time consuming interventions like conversation, attention, and a light sense of touch.

Plus ça change.

Sexual Intrusion And Sexual Harm: How Bad Is Bad?

One time ages ago I was listening to a podcast, and this guy told a story about how his wife had been shown some pornographic pictures and how he, the narrator, had completely lost his shit.

As I recall it, they were at some kind of large event -- selling small items or something, at some large theme-oriented fair, or something like that. They'd been separated when the guy went to get food for lunch, leaving the woman in charge of their area, and a stranger, another guy, had approached the woman and started talking to her. Then, just a couple minutes in, the stranger had taken out his cell phone and said "look at this" and showed her some pornographic photos, including, if memory serves, some of naked men with erections. Then he had run off.

At least as the narrator told the story, the narrator's wife was very, very, very, very upset. She was frightened and disturbed. She felt violated. She felt like she'd been the victim of a kind of sexual attack. When the narrator found out what happened he flipped out. He tore off to find the culprit, with the intention of physically attacking him. 

The rest of the story was about how the narrator had come to terms with his rage before he hurt the stranger, and the point of the story was about anger and self-control and not hurting people. But the part that stuck with me was the part about the woman feeling so violated.

It stuck with me because I couldn't imagine feeling so upset about something like that. I'm not judging her reaction or anything -- she has the right to her feelings and worldview. It's just so different from my own feelings and worldview.

I just can't picture dirty pictures having that effect on me. I suppose if there were no people around and a guy did that and then stuck around I'd feel frightened. Certain guys in certain sexually charged situations can become scary pretty fast, as I wrote about in this post about being in a lingerie store with a nervous guy, because they give you the feeling they're going to fly off the handle. But this story didn't seem to have those aspects at all. They were in a big crowd. He showed the pictures and ran off.

Together my friend and I run the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love, and occasionally people send us things that are weird or inappropriate or whatever. One time someone sent a long series of photos of himself in various poses, in various themed bits of costume, showcasing his penis in a variety of moods. Far from being shocked and upset, I was inclined to view this email somewhat in the light of a gift: it made me laugh, and when I showed it to my friends it made them laugh.

The wide range of different reactions people have to things like this is, I believe, one reason we find it so hard to come to conclusions about the moral quality of actions like the stranger-with-the-phone. I mean, what he did was wrong, and not nice. Sure. But was it a little wrong? Or very very wrong?



I feel like people often a sense there should be some kind of general answer to these kinds of questions, like we should be able to work out a moral principle, with a clear and justified bright line, and apply it across the board. But I doubt that's possible, partly because what causes sexual harm to people is so variable.

What Is Femininity, Anyway?

Back in July, Laura Jane Grace was the guest on Marc Maron's WTF podcast, and one of the things she talked about was her "experiences as a trans woman in a punk rock world." I'd never heard of Laura Jane Grace and I don't know much of anything about her music -- but as usual it was an interesting discussion.

At one point Laura Jane and Marc got talking about gender dysphoria. Laura Jane described being a little boy and seeing -- I think it was Madonna? -- on TV and hoping to grow up into that kind of person, and slowly becoming aware that that wasn't the way things were heading.

Later she described how much more recently she began hiding her gender dysphoria experiences. She talked about how she was trying to keep it a secret, and so she would hide that part of herself away from people, and act on it only when she was alone, on tour or something. 

Marc asked about what that was like -- like what texture did that experience have, what did it involve? And she talked about wanting to wear women's clothing, and how sad it could be to have to settle -- to settle for the first thing you could grab at Target or whatever, instead of being able to have things you really like, in your own style.

And at one point she was elaborating on the clothing point, and -- I'm just recounting this from memory of course -- she said something about how she would want to wear feminine clothing, like either specifically feminine items like a dress or clothes styled in a certain way. For example, if she was going to wear a tank top, she'd want it to be a tank top cut in a particularly feminine way.

When she said that, I felt like I knew just the kind desire she was referring to. I love to wear feminine clothing, and sometimes I feel a strong desire to do so. And I've had just that feeling. Sure, a tank top. But can it be cut in a certain style, please?

There's something about this kind of desire I've never really felt I understood though, and that is: What's femininity got to do with it? What is femininity anyway?

I mean, if someone has a strong desire to wear one kind of tank top rather than another, what is that about?

Is it just that we live in a world that socially constructs gender strongly through clothes, so that a desire to feel like a woman manifests itself as a desire to wear certain kinds of tank tops?

That could be it. But that answer's never felt sufficient to my own experience. I'm a cisgender woman with a pretty curvy bod. Even when I wear jeans and a hoody, I feel like a woman and I look like a woman and people -- usually -- respond to me as a woman. But I don't feel feminine. And sometimes I want to feel feminine, and I want to wear the clothes associated with that feeling. So for me it seems to go beyond gender identification.

Another answer that insufficient to my personal experience is the "sexiness" answer. When I want to wear feminine clothes, it's not the same as wanting to wear a sexy outfit. On me, a low-cut shirt and snug pants often conveys way more sex appeal than a dress. But that outfit is not feminine. And it's the dress I often find myself wanting to wear.

About a year and a half ago I was on a plane coming home from Paris and I watched this movie "Les Adieux à la reine" -- "a fictional account of the last days of Marie Antoinette in power seen through the eyes of Sidonie Laborde, a young servant who reads aloud to the queen." This movie, incidentally, passes a double-secret reverse Bechdel test: as far as I can recall, there are no scenes where two men talk to one another at all. It is all women all the time.

From Les Adieux à la reine

The clothes in this movie -- the clothes! I haven't felt so stirred by a something on a small screen in a long, long, time. Yet even as I was filled with strange emotion and longing, I was unclear what exactly the emotion and longing were about. Why did these lace gowns, elaborate hairstyles and cinched waists speak to me in this way? What were they trying to say?

I don't know the answer. I think it's something about femininity, but what, exactly, I have no idea.

None of this, of course, is meant to speak to Laura Jane Grace's experience -- it's just my story. But if the bridal gown industrial complex is any indication -- I am not alone.

La Dolce Vita Bella Donna, Or, The Problem Of Narrative Female Promiscuity

A week ago I went to see La Dolce Vita at the Bell Lightbox. I'm a huge Fellini fan and I can't get enough of Marcello Mastroianni so of course I loved it and thought it was brilliant.

Among the themes of the movie is our modern celebrity-obsessed, reality-TV drenched, pictures-or-it-didn't-happen culture -- which, given that it was made in 1960, really shows the crazy prescience and brilliance of Fellini himself. This is the movie that literally created the concept of "paparazzi."

Paparazzi in La Dolce Vita

 Among the other themes of the movie is the ambivalence of our hero -- also named "Marcello." Our hero flits from party to party, photo-op to photo-op, babe to babe, with a vague sense that he ought to be doing something deeper and more sensible with his life. On the other hand, his one sensible intellectual friend is suicidally depressed with the boredom of family life. And Marcello is tormented by his fiancé and how she only talk about what they're going to have for dinner, what kind of house they're going to live in some day, and how mad she is that he isn't at home.

Marcello and Maddalena go for a drive

I feel like when a woman says she loves a movie that deals with themes of male sexual promiscuity and big-breasted babes like Anita Ekberg, there's always suspicion. Isn't the movie sexist and misogynistic? What's a woman doing liking a movie like that? Is she really engaging in some misogyny of her own? Is she really just crushing on Marcello Mastroianni and wishing she was Anita Ekberg-- thus exemplifying her own sexist bullshit?

Marcello and Sylvia

But I think this kind of suspicion is deeply misplaced. Women, too, struggle with ambivalence, with the dilemmas of the boring versus the stupid, with the attractions of vapidity. God knows they struggle with being turned on sexually by qualities and people they would otherwise find revolting. Of course they want to see these themes explored in movies and art.

So what's a girl to do? You might think, Well, why can't there be the female version, and why couldn't you go see that? You know -- like how they're doing Ghostbusters with an all female cast? You could have La Dolce Vita starring Catherine Deneuve as Marcella: a beautiful but conflicted journalist who traipses around Rome having sex with rich and famous people, going to their parties, apologizing to her cute but boring guy back home, going with her mother to a strip club --

Oh wait. No, you couldn't actually have that movie. I don't just mean that that movie would never get made -- which is of course also true. I think it goes deeper than that -- because I think you actually could not make a movie about a woman who acts like that and have the movie be about the same sort of things at all. No matter how you tried to do it, it would not come off that way.

For one thing, in our time and place you simply cannot present a promiscuous woman and have her story be about the human condition. Because of our various modern cultural obsessions and because of the meaning we assign to women's sexuality, promiscuity in women just can't be interpreted that way. 

When it comes to narrative female promiscuity, there are several common interpretive tropes.

-- There's the obvious reactionary trope: "What a slut, she deserves to have something awful happen to her."

-- There's the surprisingly common damage trope: "She runs around like that because she was hurt as a child/is desperate for love/wants to get back at someone/is looking for attention.

-- There's the objectification trope: "The author/filmmaker/director is just pandering to the desires of male audiences to see sexy and sexualized women."

Obviously these are different: it's often true, for example, that the author/filmmaker/director is just pandering to guys in the audience. As useful as this can be to point out, however, it basically guarantees that a story about a "Marcella" could never be understood as a story about the conflicts between glamor and home life, about the attractions of the awful and the stupid, or about whether it's worth trying to do something with yourself or whether it's all pointless anyway. It would be interpreted as being about something else.

So that movie -- about the female Marcella -- is a movie that couldn't really exist.

This means if you're a woman and you want to watch a movie about those things, you have to go see one in which a guy experiences them, and then project yourself into the main Marcello Mastroianni character instead of into, say, the Anita Ekberg ingenue character or the Anouk Aimée bored heiress character.

If you are doing that, you'll thank the Forces That Control The Universe that not only does Marcello have beautiful, soulful eyes with luxurious lashes, he also wears amazing clothes, rides occasionally in the passenger seat, and likes to sit around cafés drinking and talking. It's not so far away, after all.

Sexual Liberation And Sexual Inequality

Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq. I love that The Independent called the book "funny, terrifying, and nauseating."

I was reading MathBabe the other day and she linked to this piece by a professional dominatrix who was arguing that greater sexual liberty would make the world a better place. Especially, she said, if men felt free to be themselves instead of being laced into some absurd masculinity, then they might relate to women in a better way.

Here's a passage I find appealing:

" ...in the majority of my sessions, I am creating a space for men to explore areas of their sexual lives that society feels are unmanly; they come to me to be penetrated, to be used, to serve, to submit, to worship, to be taken. A client might have any or all of a bewildering array of fetishes, but they mostly come to me to experience something well outside the very narrow confines of what society says that it means to be a man."

As she goes along, she develops an idea that feminism, if it rejects a certain kind of sexual moralism and narrower views about sexuality, might contribute to men's well-being in wide-ranging ways, including sexual liberation of a kind that would allow men to be themselves and perhaps be less caught up in problematic kinds of masculinity and aggression.

Basically, I agree with this idea. Years ago I on TKIN I wrote a post that said, "You know how they say, 'If you want peace, work for justice?' Well, if you want sex, work for feminism."

Really, nobody is more for sexual liberation than I am. One of my philosophical research projects is devoted to developing theoretical concepts of sexual freedom and autonomy that go beyond the crude kind of "you can't tell me what to do" -- concepts that can articulate a sense of positive sexual freedom, the freedom to be yourself sexually, which surely goes beyond the right to be left alone and not told what to do. So, yeah.

And yet. I think it's important to acknowledge that there are certain problems that sexual liberation will not solve, and could plausibly exacerbate. And I think that some of those -- contra to the spirit of the essay -- are linked to anger and aggression.

First, as one of the MathBabe commenters said: "Unfortunately there is tension between liberty and equality, and complete sexual license would probably increase sexual inequality rather than diminish it."

Here is an elaboration of that idea, expressed in what I take to be the canonical text on the matter: the novel "Whatever" by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq:

"It's a fact, I mused to myself, that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market.' In an economic system where unfair dismissal is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their place. In a sexual system where adultery is prohibited, every person more or less manages to find their bed mate. In a total liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced to masturbation and solitude."

If that's too wall-of-texty for you, here's the Cliffs Notes. Basically, if sexuality is constrained by commitment and monogamy, then roughly speaking each person gets one -- or maybe a few -- sex partners. That is, it's something like "each person gets one person," with a little wiggle room around the edges.

If you're at the top of the sexual hierarchy -- the most attractive, rich, accomplished, fit, sexy -- commitment and monogamy mean you might attach yourself to one person and have a few affairs or see a few prostitutes. At most.

If you're at the bottom of the sexual hierarchy, commitment and monogamy mean there will be other people of your preferred sex/gender for partners who will also be at the bottom of the sexual hierarchy, and you can form commitments and marriages with them and then have sex with them.


So with commitment and monogamy, the people at the top and the bottom would be having some sex with not too many people. Once things open up and those constraints go away, you get immediately into a more sexual "haves" and "have-nots" situation. And what's more of a trigger for male aggression than being a sexual have-not?

Gendered attitudes about sex are obviously complicated, but even leaving all of that aside, I guess I'd want to say that sexual inequality could be, in itself, a bad thing, and that the fact that some people never get to have sex at all would be, in itself, a very bad thing, and that even just the concept of "hierarchy" in sex is a bad thing. Bad, that is, for women and men alike.

I don't think any return to the constraints of commitment and monogamy are what we should be aiming for. But I wish we could talk about sexual inequality in a constructive way that wasn't all caught up in anger, aggression, indignation, and blame.

Lifehacking: WTF?

Adriaen van Utrecht (1599-1652), Still Life. Via Wikimedia Commons

You heard about Soylent, right? That new thing where you mix a powder with some oil and some water and you shake it up and it replenishes your body with a mix of nutrients so you can .. um, do all the things people want to do when they can't be bothered to eat food?

You know -- like, Ensure for hipsters?

You can read about it in The New Yorker ("The End of Food"). I guess some young guys were trying to do a start-up thing, and their idea wasn't working out, and they were trying to come up with another idea, and they were eating a lot of ramen, corn dogs, and frozen quesadillas, and eventually one of them thought to himself Ah, If Only We Didn't Have To Eat. Food seemed like "a system that’s too complex and too expensive and too fragile."

Soylent can be bought in a package but the formula is online and there are a lot of people DIYing their own. The concept of many enthusiasts is that Soylent replaces any eating you do to survive, so that the remaining eating that you do is "recreational." You might subsist on only Soylent for a few days, then go to Nobu with your friends and "eat" -- and really make an occasion of it. Woo-hoo.

This is an application of the approach to life associated with the "lifehacking" movement: as the New Yorker says, this is "devising tricks to streamline the obligations of daily life, thereby freeing yourself up for whatever you’d rather be doing."

This is interesting because -- well, how can I put this nicely? It seems to me fucking insane?

What is "whatever you'd rather be doing" that is so great and so important that you can't be bothered to eat some food? I mean, we're not talking laundry. We're talking eating. It's fun. It's pleasant. It isn't all that time-consuming. What's so great that you have to get back to it in thirty seconds instead of twenty-minutes?

It's a perfect instantiation of the problem of the previous post -- of The Great Fun Crisis of the Twenty First Century. If you structure everything as either a cost or a benefit, you define out of existence the "just sort of nice and fun in a mild healthy sort of way," so it's irresistible to reduce costs and maximize benefits.

It's like a digitization of an analogue life. Sorry: sitting down to a baked potato or some pasta and a salad, talking with a friend or family member, what are you doing? It's neither the 0 of costs minimized or the 1 of pleasure maximized. So it comes out as irrational.

The New Yorker author, Lizzie Widdicome, after a few days drinking Soylent, finds on waking she's at a loss: she doesn't want to settle down to work yet, so what to do? She goes out for coffee. She sees someone order a bagel at her neighborhood place. She's envious: "Mmm, bagel with butter." But of course, she's not hungry, and she doesn't need the calories -- she's already had her Soylent. She concludes the experience this way:

... I knew that I was better off than the bagel eater: the Soylent was cheaper, and it had provided me with fewer empty calories and much better nutrition. Buttered bagels aren’t even that great; I shouldn’t be eating them. But Soylent makes you realize how many daily indulgences we allow ourselves in the name of sustenance.

I get what she's saying. But what are we, training for the apocalypse? Every moment, maximizing efficiency? It's like, bagels: not a perfect food! BUT: also not a good enough indulgence! Like if you're going to get your pleasure, you have to max it out.

The whole thing makes you wonder what the point is, in the whole meaning-of-life way, like what are we doing all of this for?  Honestly, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that for most people, the bagel with butter, and similar foods, especially if you eat them with other people, really are the meaning of life.

Enthusiasts of lifehacking clearly feel another call: they have things they need to get back to, STAT.

So: If lifehacking is about getting back to "things we'd rather be doing?" what are those things exactly? Sex? Dancing? Making music? Painting pictures? Taking care of children? Taking care of sick people?



Honestly those are answers I'd sort of understand. But they're almost never the ones that seem to come up. What comes up a lot is work.

I get that some people have to work all the time to make ends meet. And that is a serious social problem. The solution to this problem is not Soylent -- what, so rich people can eat food and poor people can suck it? No, the solution to this problem involves spreading the wealth around, more sensible social organization, investment in infrastructure. As is frequently mentioned, the world is making more food than ever. The problem is in moving it around appropriately.

And that, friends, is not a problem with a "start up" solution.

I get the impression, though, that a lot of people drinking Soylent just want to get back to studying, or coding, or playing video games. Why? Are those things really so great? Or is the problem competition -- that in a competitive society you have to do all the ridiculous time-saving things other people do if you're going to keep up?

Toward the end of the article the main creator of Soylent says admiringly, "Bucky [Buckminster Fuller] has a very important idea of ephemeralization, which is something almost as a ghost -- as pure energy or information."

Like the whole post-human thing, I am always mystified by this. What is it you're so eager to do that doesn't involve bodies, senses, being in the world, laughter, or romance? Is Minecraft really that fun?

Uncooked Thoughts On (Half) The Hunger Games

I'm just getting around to reading The Hunger Games. I know, I know what you're thinking: if you're going to read a book like that, why not read it when eight zillion other people are reading it? Why wait?

I don't have an answer. All I can say is: I seemed to always have something else to read. I'm still in the middle of book 2 -- so these thoughts are raw, and they're only on half the trilogy.

You probably know the basic story. It's a dystopian future; every year the powers-that-be run the Hunger Games, in which teenagers have to fight to the death -- partly as an expression of political power, partly as reality-TV-to-the-max; we follow the story of Katniss, a tough, fatherless, no-nonsense girl from a poor part of a poor district who hunts illegally to help feed her sister and mom.

These thoughts aren't about the political aspects of the book -- interesting as those are -- but more about the personal aspects. The Katniss aspects.

One thing about the story I think is really good is the depiction of living under the gaze of public opinion. In the story, this aspect of life is carried to an extreme, because in The Games, public opinion can make or break you. In The Games, if you appeal to people they'll donate or sponsor you, providing you with medicine or food you need to live. Katniss ends up having to present particular narratives not of her own choosing -- a romance narrative, a personality narrative, an emotional narrative -- just in order to survive.

This seems to me an interestingly exaggerated form of something absolutely characteristic of human life. Because we all make decisions with an audience of public opinion. Its easy to think of this as a particularly modern problem -- with social media and all -- but I think it's just that form that is particularly modern. Really, people have always had massive and intense opinions about how other people live, and just like Katniss we are living among those opinions the way we live among air and water.

One of the things I thought was really perceptive about the way Katniss has to construct her public identity is that her public identity is not necessarily opposed, or even really distinct from, her own identity. It's more subtle that that.

A cruder novelistic investigation into this issue would present the-true-Katniss, and then the-fake-Katniss, using interior thoughts to show us the difference and opposing them in stark contrast.

But what these books do is more subtle. As you maybe know, Katniss has to play up and often simply fake her romantic feelings for her fellow Games participant Peeta to engage her public in the right way. But instead of the cruder version, which might be along the lines of "I don't love Peeta and I have to pretend to love him and that's an awful trade-off" Katniss often says she isn't sure how she feels, that sometimes it's real and sometimes it's fake and sometimes she can't really tell the difference herself.


I thought that was smart. Because isn't life sometimes like that? If not about romance, then about other things? You make these choices, about your career or how many kids to have or where to live or whatever and you're making them for yourself but you're also making them in the context of a social world -- and who really knows the degree to which those things feel right because they feel right in context or because they reflect some true inner self. It's not like the two things are really separate.

A second thing I was struck by, though, is that when it comes to one of the central conflicts of many people's lives -- people young and old, and especially girls and women -- the story kind of avoids the whole thing and evaporates the issue. I'm talking about appearance.

Having grown up often not having enough to eat, Katniss is quite thin. It's a ritual for The Games participants to be fed the most luxurious foods in the few days preceding competition ... and of course it's in Katniss's interest to put on a few pounds. So Katniss prepares for being in the public eye by sensibly stuffing herself full of food and sweets. It makes sense in context, I just thought it was an interesting choice, given that in 21st century North America this is the complete opposite of what most girls and women would be doing to get ready to have the eyes of the world upon them.

It's also worth noting the way most of Katniss's decisions about her appearance are made for her. Again, it makes sense in context: Games participants have teams of handlers who make every decision: what to wax, how to do the nails, what to wear, what hairstyle to have. Again though, I thought it striking that decisions many of us would be agonizing over -- how to dress for just the right form of necessary feminine attractiveness and also for essential freedom of movement -- aren't even things Katniss has to think about.

One last thing: sex. WTF? How can a book have multiple scenes in which two teenagers sleep all night in the same bed together and this is not an issue? If you interpret the book literally, they're not having sex (so far, anyway). How can their not having sex not be an issue in some way for either of them? Am I being naive? Is there metaphorical sex happening? Are we supposed to interpret the kisses and "time alone," as sex, as we might do appropriately do when encountering novels from past centuries? I don't think so, for various reasons. But isn't this weird?

OK, I'm getting back to reading. And no, I'm not planning to see the movies. Are you kidding me?