Friday, July 25, 2008 - Posts
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Your Friday firestorm watch: After NPR (NPR!) published an audio essay titled "Sex Without Condoms Is The New Engagement Ring" (which prompted a heated debate) Moe Tkacik of Jezebel responded with a wistful ode to the joys of barebacking. "[H]ere is the irrefutable," she writes: "it feels awesome." The biggest downside, as Moe sees it, is the increased likelihood that you'll have to have some very awkward conversations with your future partners.
The post has generated a lot of comments, both on and off Jezebel, ranging from people who agree with Moe to those who find her sentiment to be glib at best, flagrantly irresponsible at worst. Moe—who’s about to leave Jezebel for Gawker—seemed to take all the hubbub as one big don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out, and a few hours later posted a bitter, rambling non-apology.
Ignoring her ill-advised detour into STD statistics (the apparent point being: Lighten up, ladies. Chances are you’re white, which means you probably don’t have AIDS!), she touches on some issues that we’ve been mulling over here on "XX Factor," particularly with regards to Jezebel—namely, what’s the line between honesty and indulgent oversharing? Can you still be a feminist if you sometimes have very un-PC desires and opinions? Should young female public figures try to comport themselves with more decorum and propriety, or is that a condescending point of view?
In this case, at least, I’m more offended as an editor than as a feminist—Moe’s second post, in particular, flirts with incomprehensibility. As far as the charges of irresponsibility go, I’m tempted to say: Meh. Frankly, if you’re going to take sex-ed advice from a Web site whose best writer goes by the moniker “Slut Machine,” well, you have bigger problems to deal with. I’m mostly disappointed that the NPR story’s initial thesis—that deciding to go mano-a-mano with your partner can be considered a serious expression of commitment, especially when skyrocketing divorce rates mean that a marriage certificate isn’t the signifier it once was—got lost in the shuffle. That idea has a kernel of weird, gross, uncomfortable truth about it. I'm a big fan of Jezebel’s dedication to airing “Id-level truths,” as Moe put it in her second post. Sometimes I just wish they let their ego do a bit of cleaning—not for decorum’s sake, but for clarity’s.
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Hmmm. What must Yoko Ono, herself a formidable artist and media force, think about her de facto daughter-in-law's performance art in New York magazine this week?
Charlotte Kemp Muhl, apparently Sean Lennon’s girlfriend and Sarabeth DeLeury (a "philosopher and actress"), Charlotte’s "best friend," are pictured in the magazine’s weekly portrait essay called "Look Book." The best friends are "trying to create a new way of moving forward as a collective." How? "We eat watermelon and make art."
There was no age listed for them in the piece, but they appear to be teenagers pictured provocatively touching tongues and spouting inanities ("We're friends with Sean Parker, who invented Napster, who just sold his business for, like, a billion dollars and always carries around a syringe full of antidote"). The “best friends” met at a party, where someone noted to Charlotte, "Hey your breast is hanging out." When Sarabeth heard her reply, "That's OK, I have another," the two became soul sisters. The two later “went to Europe and L.A., where … we both had mental breakdowns.”
I suspect the women are not total nitwits (despite one blogger calling them "culturally parasitic members of the human race") and were instead engaging in high-octane preciousness and self-parody. After all, Ono's art usually contained a deep bed of irony.
Even if it was a satire, two gratuitous mentions of the iconoclastic artist struck me as odd. Isn’t there some code among Gen Y not to discuss friends in the context of their well-known forebears? Perhaps the iconoclastic Yoko is in on the joke (it's not clear whether NY mag is ... ), or maybe young Charlotte represents some kind of cosmic karma messing with the older artist's oeuvre.
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Last year, when he was running for president, Rudy Giuliani explained his thinking about the courts. He complained that "civil litigation consumes 2.2 percent of America’s gross domestic product" and argued that "to reduce the impact of the trial lawyer tax, we should reform the system by adopting rules that discourage frivolous lawsuits."
This week, Rudy's son Andrew, 22, filed a suit against Duke University, where he is a student, because he was cut from the golf team. The suit "accuses the university of bad faith by aggressively recruiting him to play golf for Duke and then dashing his dreams by taking steps to remove him from the team," the NYT writes. Andrew G. wants damages and "the right to use Duke’s golf center for the rest of his life." This is such a genius exhibit of self-parodying entitlement that I almost wish Rudy were the GOP candidate, so he'd have to answer for it. As is, he's getting away with no comment. I will have to content myself with the service Andrew does himself by including, in the court filings, that "he may have misbehaved in February when he tossed an apple in a teammate’s face, flipped his putter a few feet, threw and broke a club and gunned his engine in a parking lot."
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This week's renewed discussions about women "opting out" of the work force—or being forced out—make me think of Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That." It's about her life in 1950s New York as a twentysomething, when the city emblematized endless possibility, even though she was making very little money. She loved her career and reveled in the sensory experiences of just being there. And then her attitude toward the city soured with age, when she realized "that not all of the promises would be kept."
I was reminded of Didion's journey to disillusionment when I came across a couple studies about women's success and happiness this week. The first (which is new only to me) was a New York Times article from last summer about how young women in their twenties actually out-earn men in New York, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and several other big cities. These women have more education than their male city peers and are less likely to be married and raising a family than their suburban female counterparts.
The second study (by USC's Richard Easterlin and Anke Plagnol of the University of Cambridge), forthcoming in the Journal of Happiness Studies, found that women overall are happier than men—until the age of 48. The authors measured happiness as a combination of financial and family satisfaction, and men exceeded women in the first category at the age of 41 and in the second at 64. This seems to suggest that somewhere between 41 and 48, women are more satisfied with their family situation than with their finances. Now add in the conclusions of the previous study of urban women—are young women happiest when facing bright prospects unrelated to their family situation or marital status? Or has the availability of greater professional opportunities simply postponed women's frustrations with the working world?
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On Thursday, the usual taping of Slate's Political gabfest turned into a smackdown on the question we've been debating on "XX Factor"—should the National Enquirer have published its John Edwards story. Here's the resulting slugfest, from Slatesters John Dickerson, David Plotz, Bill Smee, and me. Go to minute 29:00 (about two-thirds of the way through) for the Edwards bit (the earlier segments are about Obama and McCain). Forgive the profanity—don't listen to it with the kids!
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