The fear of being turned into a utility has become endemic in the last decade. As the internet surrounded us with more and more widgets and toys to use the suspicion that we might be turning into some reduced plug-in for an advertising empire intensified. Not coincidentally, a culture of sarcasm appeared, debunking the self-evidently false personae of those who appeared to us through the media as discarnate apparitions. Gawker hurled stink bombs at celebrity, feeding the impulse to immediately interpret in the worst possible way the sometimes bizarre and sometimes humiliating things a person might do or say. The Daily Show and The Onion satirized the mannequin artifice of the news-making industry, as well as the ghastly veins of thought that could slip past a person’s eyes when framed with the right vernacular.

Yet, we can’t honestly say this is an age when we suddenly became aware of the media’s superficiality. Shakespeare never tired of questioning whether daily life was itself a theatrical hedge maze; George Bernard Shaw invented Eliza Doolittle as a reminder of our susceptibility to manipulation through carriage and appearance. And once the thrill of seeing moving images from far away places wore off, most people carried a pinch of skepticism about things they saw in film and television. Whatever was happening in front of the camera, there was always something happening behind the camera that went unseen.

No, this is not an age of media awareness but one of self-reflexive anxiety wherein we have begun to fear the media’s capacity to distort us against our will. The scandals and indignities are fueled by a secret fear that we would appear just as bizarre, inadequate, grotesque, or pathetic when transformed into a keyhole miniature. As we have begun to leave a caricatured trail of ourselves across the world’s server farms, enmity and paranoia have sprung up alongside the realization that the formerly anonymous me-and-you are also visible in these warping pools of coerced hallucination. It is as if we are watching ourselves become ghosts, and it is scary.

This effect has an eerie socio-political mirror, with the entrapping net of social fantasy selves coinciding with a decade of jobless stagnation in which corporate productivity accelerated to the financial diminution of most, a circumstance which was covered over by a slackening of lending standards. The compulsion to see one’s self as a thing that could be reinvented in a new hub or home, one’s consumption affiliations carefully curated to deliver an impression of desirability was widespread. In context, it was a compulsion that we could not honestly have acted on without accepting on some level it was self-deception. At a certain point the credit-leveraged effort to remake ourselves becomes a ploy that is more about manipulating other people into accepting our hollow coquetry as truth.

When we find in the media a tool to humiliate others for having been disingenuous in the creation and curation of their personae we cheer the loudest, unironically, and en masse. This burbling vitriol only further desocializes us. Paradoxically, our sneering indignation makes social networks seem less intimidating places to experience friendship and company. A recently published study from the University of Waterloo measured the self-esteem of a group of college students using a questionnaire. They found that those who had the lowest self-esteem were most likely to think of Facebook as their preferable way to socialize, giving them more control over their identities and statements.

A selection of 10 status updates from these low self-esteem candidates were shown to an anonymous group of evaluators and compared against those with higher self-esteem, who tended to view Facebook as less ideal than face-to-face interactions. The lower self-esteem subjects’ status updates were rated as the least likable and most off-putting. In essence, those most susceptible to taking Facebook as an ideal way of socializing are those least likely to appear likable through its exaggerated lens.

We could consider the rapid growth of Facebook as a parallel to the credit economy that reached a bursting point in the the mid-2000s, an environment that encourages anti-social behavior by making the implements of identity creation cheaply available. After the subprime collapse decimated the American economy in 2007, divorce rates dropped, as did the number of new marriages per year. Likewise the number of births dropped alongside the falling employment percentages, according to the 2009 U.S. Census. If marriage and parentdom are the two most fundamental identity shifts a person can make in society, the declining economy made people much more reluctant to commit to major social changes. Another study from Scott Hankins and Mark Hoekstra, “The Effects of Random Income Shocks on Marriage and Divorce,” found that women who experience positive income shocks were six points less likely to marry during the following three years.

The suggestion that marriage, the metaphorical standard bearer of our most commonly repeated social ideal–love is all you need–depends on money and circumstance as much as it does affection and magic will not surprise anyone. We know we are lying to ourselves when we talk about lifelong monogamous relationships as the optimal affirmation of civilized society. Certainly, life-long monogamous relationships are possible, but the idea that they are optimal, that the costs are outweighed by the innumerable benefits, which cannot be translated into a currency transaction without being desecrated, seems undercut whenever the flow of life-changing accoutrements is made freer. The trick of marriage is not to fall in love, but figure out a way to keep the love you have for a person from being crushed in the social vice of the institution itself–to participate in the marriage while admitting that, no matter how dramatically it might change your outward appearance, it does not make you a different person in essence.

Or rather, the security of having declared your identity, through a vow, or a carefully selected profile image is only temporary, an act whose comfort begins to dissipate almost as soon as we have finished it, requiring a constant stream of magical thinking to maintain. Is there any way to not respond with anger and mistrust, then, when someone brings up the fact that Facebook is using us? Our spouses are using us too, and the children perhaps most of all. But wasn’t that part of the agreement from the outset?

I’ll use you, you’ll use me–but let’s both agree to never let that compromising fact become the primary characteristic of our relationship. The more we recoil from the awkward truth of our circumstances, the more we try to smooth over our own self-images with objects we’ve taken on-loan, the more vulnerable, we become, guilty, secretly expecting the worst to happen at the first utterance of a simple truth that no one could deny having known from the start. Sell my Internet searches to advertisers, surveil my hodgepodge of pictures, decontextualized quotes, and social froth and draw from it whatever conclusion you’d like. You’re wrong about almost everything, it shows in your banner advertisements, and every other stab out into the ether you make, straining to make a sale before you’ve even said hello.

*Images via weelakeo

** “Facebook is Using You” via New York Times “Facebook Is Not Such a Good Thing for Those With Low Self-Esteem, Study Finds” via Science Daily “Household Formation: Divorces, Births Correlated with Unemployment Across States” via Rortybomb “Home Economics: Marriage Rates and the Lottery” via Slate

The post Your Spouse is Using You: Facebook and the Effects of Unemployment on Divorce appeared first on The Faster Times.

I can no longer watch scripted television without boredom and discomfort. You might say reality television is no less fictive with its coercing producers, prodding characters into staged conversations about whichever issue is meant to be addressed in an episode. This is a common but bizarre criticism, as if the absence of artifice might somehow make the art more valid. In traditionally scripted shows the artifice is savored, recapped, and enshrined with superlatives. Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, Heroes, Big Love–each comes pre-masticated, needing only ingestion to begin working. In the late 90′s HBO came upon an eerie formula for success by replicating in its serial dramas the gravitas and production value of two hour motion pictures.

When pressed for descriptions of why these shows are so worthwhile–The Wire, say–it’s uncanny how frequently people retreat to high/low categorization. It’s the best written show on television, or it’s a movie-quality drama–all discrete ways of saying a thing has value by virtue of its manner of production. They’re filmed with hand-me-down artistry, alternating variations of Godard’s handheld kineticism and Welles pregnant, packed frames. Likewise, the idea that mafia members lead mundane lives is something we know already, so too The Wire’s interrelated series of irresolvable social, political, and personal dramas unfolding against the collapsing scenery of bankrupt urban centers.

The point can be seen coming, however well intentioned and carefully produced it might be. One might hope for art to be always skimming the outer dark, in search of new aspects and views of ourselves, but in the case of scripted television, art has become an elaborate synthesizer of old truths, retelling fairytales about corruption, masculinity, consumerism, and sexual morality so familiar they’re actually comforting. They’re narcoleptic snuggie-dramas marketed as hollow agitprop.

Criticisms of reality television often come from the same line of thought, dismissing it because it’s trashy brain-rot, bereft of socially significance. The delusion contained in this is nauseating: the value of art derives from its ability to edify and pre-digest socio-political narratives. That which doesn’t hope to edify or, worse yet, stands outside of socio-political narrative are taken as trash.

Jersey Shore can be taken a self-contained psycho-drama about drinking, fucking, and enriching one’s self by taking part in an amorphous spectacle culture–the diametric opposite of The Wire or Mad Men. There are no morality plays to be worked out and, scarier still, there is no outside structure to impose morality on the shiny-faced shot-takers who always seem to be getting away with something. Reality shows are built around a faith that people, when prompted, will improvise an interesting spectacle. Scripted shows revolve around the idea that all spectacles must be followed by tragically punitive consequences.

I have recently been made aware of Sister Wives, a reality show about a polygamist Mormon family in the process of accommodating its fourth wife. The show, which airs on The Learning Channel(!), contains all of the best parts of art: voyeurism, remarkable circumstances, bliss, revulsion, and a central conflict that, even after repeated viewing, is impossible to process. One of the darkest moments I have ever seen on television comes in the show’s first season when the god-in-training Kody Brown is in the hospital with his third wife Christine, who was pregnant and had just begun labor induction. Kody asks Christine’s doctor about in vitro fertilization techniques for his first wife Meri, with whom he’s only been able to have one child.

The Browns are cheerful and modest people for whom the world is be reducible into three general categories: cool, awesome, and great. Kody and his four wives seem to operate by a kind of self-hypnosis, sweetly thankful for the benefits of sisterly solidarity, while having anesthetized the parts of themselves that might experience ecstasy, jealousy, and intimacy. I can think of no greater betrayal of intimacy than talking about maybe getting someone else pregnant while your wife is on the verge of beginning labor right in front of you.

Sister Wives is a profoundly unpleasant show to watch. The brightness of its tone and the darkness of its subject almost cancel each other out, creating a gaping emptiness. Optimistic guitars underscore pleasant vignettes of the kids getting up early to help make breakfast or playing with dolls. In one scene, one of Kody’s teen daughters tells his fourth wife-to-be that she won’t continue the polygamist tradition and wants a husband for herself. “I’m not against the lifestyle,” she says, “I just don’t think it’s right for me.”

Maybe it’s me who’s wrong about everything, I think when I watch this. If I had to squeeze all of my most cherished principles into a few simple lines while staring into a camera lens, blinded by its on-board light, wouldn’t everything seem nonsensical? And if someone cared enough to capture and log all of the events of my life and could cross-check my behavior against the balloon of ethics that I’d characterize myself by, wouldn’t it turn into a massive intellectual hallucination that, when viewed form the outside becomes pathetic, even funny?

The state of Utah begins an investigation of the Browns’ lifestyle and eventually prompts a move to Nevada, which seems like a cruel overreaction, even less just than keeping multiple wives, hounding a peaceful and happy family–hypnotized though they may seem–with criminal accusations. In watching reality television, I feel a great togetherness with those who endure in a stupid conviction that, to them, is self-evidently true. Reality show actors are perfectly convicted to an ideal whose flaws they cannot see. The serialized melodramas of scripted television reinforce the opposite view: it’s us who’ve failed our social ideals, and not the ideals that have betrayed us. They’re an elaborate guilt matrix, and totally boring.

“Boredom is an instrument of social control,” Saul Bellow wrote in Humboldt’s Gift. “Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”

When people call reality television trash, it sounds like a self-reflexive statement–an uncomfortable confession that they cannot control their impulse judge someone in an artificially manipulated posture. This is not a consequence of the spectacle, drunkenness, and unconsidered arguments that tend to play best in reality television, but because consequences rarely seem to come from any of it. Snooki blacks out, shows her vagina, to a disco of strangers, hits a police car the next day, and after a five minute segment of tears and drama, everything is wiped clean again.

In scripted television, a single action spreads a web of guilt-amplifying consequences. It’s a way of teasing our need to see retribution, and to secretly relieve some inner suspicion that we’ve done something similarly awful, which will, if we don’t keep up the moral seeming, lead to ruination. Imagine the opposite: most of the actions one takes in life, both cruel and kind, are equally forgettable. What consequences they do provoke are worse in the imagining than in actual experience, and they often evaporate as easily as they appeared.

Reality television is the conscious art of self-deception, and scripted television is the unconscious art of self-deception. Everyone can determine for themselves whether there is value in self-deception, but once the trick has been made conscious it is frightfully boring to see it made unconscious again.

*Images via Medhi and dchousegrooves

The post The Perfect Art: Reality Television and Polygamy appeared first on The Faster Times.

One set shows a three-way orgy, the product of a Polish immigrant who forced his son to pose in the photos with two other men. Several months later, the son killed his father. Another shoot shows a disturbed looking young man who was, Cooper claims, induced to pose for the photographs for money even though he had no sexual interest in men. The boy went crazy mid-way through the shoot, beat up his two fellow-models, and stormed out. In the coming months he was said to have turned tricks for men in Hollywood, earning a nasty reputation for his violent tendencies, until he was found dismembered in a dumpster several months later.

Cooper has an extraordinary ability to take vague unease and focus it into alarmingly lucid accounts that, for all their objective detail, are invented. In this case, he exploits the silent consensus view that the decision to participate in pornography must come from malaise. In whatever medium pornography appears, it is always accepted, given a category of its own. Its events cannot be taken as staged recreations of a universal human behavior but must be lowered into something beneath art and exuberance. It is narcofied, something we use and not simply consider. And like anything used for momentary pleasure, it is invisibly tied to the ghosts of negative consequences later on.

“I grew up right outside of Boston and I moved to New York to go to NYU when I turned 18 ,” Annika Angel told me. “I started modeling in college. I did a few shoots just to see if I liked it and was comfortable with it. Then I discovered there was kind of this whole sector devoted to alternative girls, which I thought was amazing. That made me want to do it even more and be a part of it.”

Angel studied Psychology and Music and is currently applying for graduate programs in design. She’s an artist with a predilection for watercolor pencil drawings and, more recently, digital drawings. Angel still models and sometimes poses for what could be called pornography.

“I usually look at it as a kind of athleticism, especially if it’s video work and S&M, which I see as a physical challenge,” she said. “I don’t see my modeling as an art. I think sometimes I’m an artistic instrument in a photographer’s vision.”

When posing for sexual material Angel’s scenes include spanking, bondage, forced orgasm, and flogging. “At first I felt like I was on an endeavor as an actor but then I started to feel more like an athlete because it was so challenging,” Angel said. “I usually look at it as a kind of athleticism, especially if it’s video work and S&M, which I always see as a physical challenge. It’s definitely more in the direction of endurance.”

One of the sites that features Angel’s sexual work is BurningAngel.com, which, like other internet-based media companies that focus on sex, has several varietals under its masthead. The site describes itself as alt porn, featuring “punk rock, tattoo, goth, and emo” women. The site has a thin layer of social networking connecting the various videos, photo shoots, and non-sequitur celebrity interview.

Each model has her own hub page where they list where they were born, what sexual preferences they have, and what their favorite books are. Members of the site can create a profile of their own, send friend requests to models and other members, tag models as favorites, write blogs, and write testimonials for others. Members can also comment on photo sets and videos, which point back to their own profiles, creating an illusion of proximity between the objects of fantasy and the crotch gazer.

The model is similar to the Suicide Girls community of homemade sex celebrities, but BurningAngel is closer in tone and substance to a traditional pornography company. Their models are all young and slender, and their shoots are presented from the familiar angles and postures designed for maximum exposure to the viewer rather than maximum pleasure for the participants.

User-generated “tube” sites have also helped break down the barrier between sex actor and sex viewer, making minor stars out of weekend hobbyists. Cole Maverick and Hunter, for instance, are a Boston couple that started posting their homemade sex videos online and were eventually able to earn a full-time living form it. Elsewhere, there is a fecund network of sex-based Tumblr blogs that harvest isolated pictures from traditional porn and interspersed with literary quotes, found text, and cropped reader photos.

Destroying the prejudicial barrier between sex actors and the society they serve is an old dream. This was the liberalizing hope of Deep Throat and the people who rallied around it four decades ago. That fight was lost, pushing porn into a niche of self-replicating dross. Ironically, porn became more and more familiar, with stripper-chic proliferating in the 80s and 90s and, by the early years of the 21st century, the idea of identifying with pornography became its own kind of unapologetic form of social rebellion. A porn star ran for governor of California, Girls Gone Wild transformed into an aesthetic, and Howard Stern became an admired interviewer for his sexual confessionalism and his willingness to ask celebrities if they were open to “third input.”

The embrasure of pole dancing classes and fully shaved genitalia became a sign of the crumbling social standards of earlier generations. Bill Clinton was thrice accused of sexual assault, a sundry list of congressmen and senators have discovered the pleasures of hetero- and homosexual adultery, Anthony Wiener showed the world his penis, and celebrity sex tapes seem to appear almost monthly. Cinema meanwhile has veered back to the gauzy dreams of convergence from the Deep Throat years with Chloe Sevigny’s sentimental blowjob in The Brown Bunny, Lars von Trier’s penetration shot in Antichrist, and, Catherine Breillat’s casting of Euro porn he-man Rocco Siffredi in Romance. All of which brings up the question of whether the idea of pornography is necessary anymore.

“I’m not anti-pornography, but I definitely don’t think my work is pornographic at all,” Tony Stamolis told me. Stamolis is a photographer with two book collections, Frezno and T & T & A (Tacos & Tits & Ass). His work has also been featured in Taschen’s The Big Book of Pussy and The New Erotic Photography. “I actually enjoy reading about a lot of porn more than I enjoy watching it. I think Fleshbot is hilarious, the way it’s broken down is not dirty and pervy, it’s really campy and funny.”

Much of Stamolis’s work involves topless or naked women in simple poses. Sometimes his work is seductive and sometimes the nudity almost incidental; a living texture in contrast with the crumbling stucco and drywall of Fresno, California. At other times his use of nudity is an indulgence unto itself, a naked laugh accompanying an overstuffed taco and its glistening clumps of roasted meat and guacamole.

“Whenever I see a great location I always think that adding a naked woman would make it that much better,” Stamolis said. “I take a lot of photos of women wearing clothes, but there’s like some weird need every now and then to just shoot a naked woman.”

“When I did Frezno the designers first layout of the book only had a couple of nudes and I had to tell him to put more in, I just felt without them it would be boring. Just a book of naked women would be boring, but within a context, if there’s something else to compare them to, that’s interesting. Being naked in front of the camera is both vulnerable and powerful at the same time, and that’s just Fresno to me.”

Even still it’s tempting to project into sexual media some superstitious darkness, ghost stories echoing from one porn performer to another. In Girlvert, Oriana Small’s memoir of her years as a sex actor called Ashley Blue, she recounts a simultaneously troubled and innocent beginning. She’d been raised by a single mother with a severe addiction, and then left home for Hollywood.

She fell in love with a slinky young fairyboy called Tyler, who had an appreciation for the rough porn made by the company Anabolic, whose extremely physical scenes often climaxed with a woman vomiting on a penis after having been “throat-fucked” to a point where her body would finally revolt.

“The sex itself wasn’t what dehumanized me,” Small wrote. “It actually made me feel more of a human being, while simultaneously connecting me deeply to an animal world. The dehumanizing happened outside of the scene, at home, in the hands of the ones I loved.”

If you look carefully, you can see a glimpse of Small’s life memorialized in abstraction by her work in sex films. “I had to soar,” she wrote. “I wanted to live fully, extraordinarily, not just eking by with some weekend gang bangs from time to time. I realized I had never pursued much in my life with pure gusto, courage, and passion, and often felt caged, dull, and bored. Now, considering the far reaches sex could be pushed to, I felt free.”

The idea of throat fucking became an especially personal one for her. Small suffered from bulimia and became known for her ability to put her fist into her mouth–part kink, part performance art, and part personal signature. “Only in porn would a person’s wretched habit of shoving her hand all the way down her throat be considered a talent,” she wrote.

“I was praised and encouraged to puke and fist my mouth. It was perfect. I loved myself and my eating disorder. Every time I sucked a cock, the hand had to go in first, laying bare the darkest part of my soul.”

Such confessions can trigger pious discomfort in some people, proof positive that pornography is undergirded by emotional sickness. Yet the presumption that acting something out sexually is worse than acting it out in some other form argues against itself. One could try and tame one’s ghosts through painting, fiction, or directing an allegorical bulimia movie, but seeing sex as a medium that reflects anything other than nerve-ending exaltation is a step too far. We have created the category of art to preserve this fantasy, we cannot encounter unidealized moments of sexuality without needing to subjugate them, separating them from the more flattering euphemisms that decorate our other media.

It’s sad to think of sex as private, a word that points us back to the Latin for single or individual. Considering sex as something inappropriate for public address prolongs solipsism, preserving the imperial narrowness of shame. When we do occasionally run across the alien ghosts of pornography, people who have no more embarrassment about having sex on camera than they would crying on cue, we place it in the most thoughtless context, a thing that’s used instead of seen. To use a thing and leave it empty in our wake is to exempt ourselves from ownership of the same thrumming machines we watch on the screen, speaking in tongues and chasing tails as if they had lives separate from our own.

*Images via Tony Stamolis and Annika Angel

** “Back from the Dead: 6 Ghost Stories” via Dennis Cooper’s The Weaklings (Contains nudity)

“The Geek Kings of Smut” via New York Magazine

The post Pornography & Superstition: A Genital Manifesto appeared first on The Faster Times.

Walking through the improvised shelters in Zuccotti Park it’s impressive how unaligned the interests seem to be. In contrast to the dull choirs of low taxes and no government in the Tea Party coalition, Occupy Wall Street is so far a bric-a-brac of ideas. There are those protesting corporate graft and CEO over-compensation, but right beside are boosters for wind-generated energy, environmentalists decrying the oil industry pollution. Others talk about the long-term unsustainability of for-profit healthcare, and others still bemoan the poisonous chemicals used in many mass-produced food products and candies. And then there’s the Christian Scientists promoting spiritual healing, someone offering free yoga instruction, and a woman in a marching band outfit striking up conversations with a vagina hand puppet. The movement has been derided by some for lacking an identifiable political purpose, but this seems to be the point.

The movement has a tidal quality willing to accommodate any and all voices who happen to momentarily pass through its briny gates. The nightly meeting that occurs, without the aid of electricity or projection, is almost like a piece of performance art embodying the no-kings spirit of anarchy. The group gathers in a ring and one person starts speaking in short statements that are then relayed from person to person. Anyone with something to say can have a turn speaking, and preference is given to those causes that have the least support to ensure that the whims of consensus do not overwhelm any individual. The collected body of people consent to relay one another’s messages–regardless of whether they accept them as true, they implicitly acknowledge the thoughts should at least be heard.

We’ve come to think of corporatism as a synonym for corruption, a phenomenon whereby the interests of impersonal corporations suborn governments and subvert the influence of the general population. Ironically, its original sense was very nearly the opposite, a view of society as composed of distinct organs of specific interest whose collected assembly was a kind of body, the healthy functioning of which required cooperation between its various parts. It is the waning of this principle of coequal cooperation that the neo-anti-corporatists of Occupy Wall Street seem to most oppose, as if the body has now been overwhelmed by the singular needs of its spleen, to the detriment of all other organs. These invigorated citizens are ironically the last line of defense for traditional corporatism and not really its antagonists.

These absurd discrepancies have come to define American politics in the last several decades. We very often have things exactly wrong. The Democratic Party is labeled liberal, even though it represents the explicitly conservative interests of supporting a reasonable quality of life for people in all professions–to flatten the discrepant material benefits between career paths so that the nobility of a school teach is conserved, given a similar material value as a banker. Republicans, likewise, cling to the proud emblem of conservatism when they are liberalizers in most senses, fighting for free markets, diminished government interference in business, and the preservation of individual rights. There are obvious exceptions in both cases–largely derived from religious prejudices against homosexuality, drug use, and the license for capital punishment–but we have generally divorced political speech from literal meaning. Republicans and Democrats are no more conservative or liberal than the men playing for the Atlanta Braves are Native Americans or Georgians. Language here becomes a kind of competitive tennis racket and not a medium for closeness and understanding between two people or parties.

Occupy Wall Street is beautiful because it is fundamentally apolitical. It is less a cry for systemic reform and more a rejection of systematicity and the bloat of scale that comes from it. This is a doomed but a noble cause. The wonders of modernity very often seduce us into thinking we’ve advanced further than we have. I remember in high school experiencing anxiety over the idea of living without a television. It’s now been shown iPhone use has a neurological footprint that is in some ways similar to human love. The pleasures of material evolution require scale and depersonalization that can only be done with a multinational corporation. Without them all creativity would be local, as film was in the late 19th century, projected by the person who created it in a setting they had personally arranged and on equipment they had had a hand in building.

Occupy Wall Street’s most sensical complaint is, paradoxically, for a more balanced corporate society, where people can benefit from the wonders of technical scale and commerce without being disenfranchised by it. The people with the most enduring point are, in fact, corporatists who have, through recession and managerial impropriety, been thrown out of the corpus. They are people who have lost their right to operate in the system and want to buy back in. And they will win, absorbed by the system, amending it to suit their own particularities, until the generations that follow them will discover the old way doesn’t address them with any specificity. In the same way the graying belly hairs of Clintonian liberalism has bequeathed upon us the phantasmagoria of the present day banking system–where complaints are parsed by machines directed to people in far-off countries reading from laminated binder pages–the future will be a new phantasmagoria of unintended disasters by the hopeful activism of today.

What will be lost–because every generation is bound to lose it as a rite of passage–is the idea that we can live with out intermediate systems to separate us. We can live without being brand ambassadors, party advocates and role models, we can reject the commercialization of our abstract obsession with beauty turned into form. We can accept music as an act of a community, not an elevated product of an individual. We can live without the one-way dramas of film, and instead find in sharing one another’s lives a performative diorama. And we can do without magical new computer tablets that allow us to converge all of these distanced forms of commodotization through one uniform portal.

This undomesticated and romantic vision seems to glitter in the eyes of a lot of people in Zuccotti Park, the ones laughing around the drum circle, the ones who bring a vagina hand puppet to a political demonstration, the ones who arrive at an improvised tent city and realize that for the first time in their lives they feel at home. They are the metonymic heart of our civilization and they have lost at every step throughout the course of human history. Yet, for a brief period, they have stood up to represent the corpus, one ugly little muscle designed to flex and not to think. They will lose again soon enough, celebrating in their tent cities of drums and drugs and entropy while the rest of us climb into the techno-womb of order, reason, and iPads, administrators of ordered systems 30 floors above the ground.

*Images via author

** “You’re creating a vision of the sort of society you want to have in miniature” via The Washington Post

“You Love Your iPhone. Literally” via The New York Times

The post Occupy Wall Street and the War on Metonymy appeared first on The Faster Times.

A community of mostly dissatisfied young people came to Christiania, feeling the “beating of the pioneer heart,” and in the midst of one of Europe’s most historic capitals they simply began again. People built new houses in the overgrown flora and reappointed the cement spaces of officialdom as shops and workrooms. Soon after the loosely anarchic schema was fused into that abandoned ventricle of the Danish society. Predictably, Christiania began to draw attention for its open acceptance of drug use. Though the neighborhood’s founder had a grand vision of direct democracy and the fusion of self-interest with community prosperity, the free use of drugs defined Christiania. There’ll be time for civics tomorrow, but it’s nice out today so let’s get high as fuck.

As this defined Christiania to the outside world it also made it a regular target for the Danish government, which, citing safety concerns and broken drug laws, would periodically stage raids on the neighborhood. Residents of Christiania were remarkably capable of defending themselves, however, and police were regularly turned back.

The persistence of this one freedom–the right to get high as fuck whenever–has also been the source of many of Christiania’s biggest internal challenges. As is often the case, pro-drug zones are always in danger of power-grabs and speculation. So the beneficent hippies of 1971 were soon faced with scary new neighbors, in the form of meth-making biker gangs and their hard-drug schilling competitors. The ideal of a free and open society was easiest when it only had to be free and open to peaceful folk who did yoga and grew marijuana, but when challenged to accommodate people with guns and freakier chemicals to do business with, tensions soared

There were gang wars, epidemics of heroin and speed addiction, and some horrifically violent moments, including a nightmarish grenade attack in 2004 that blew off a young man’s jaw. But Christiania has survived. This year it celebrated its 40th year with a proud display of flags, free cake, and a week-long party. The community earlier this year won the right to buy its freedom from the government. If the residents can pay 76 million kroner ($13.7 million) by 2018, they will be the official owners of their land and considered a semi-autonomous zone under Danish law. Property is robbery, as the Proudhonian war-cry goes, but in Christiania it is a collective vindication, a reclamation from the state of land that no one person should have ownership of.

My mother’s memory of the neighborhood goes back further than the anarchy insurrection of the 70s. Before it became a theme-park fantasia for the freegan-minded, it was a dumpy working-class neighborhood with high crime and bleak apartment blocks. Walking through Christiania with her I caught a glimpse behind the graffiti, marijuana, and drunken 40 year-olds gathered around someone with an acoustic guitar singing John Lennon songs in the wane and unreliable afternoon sun. To her it was the bleak land of out-of-work sailors and dockhands withering away in old cement buildings one mid-morning cigarette at a time.

I went to Disneyland the first time I took LSD. I ate a single dose on blotter paper and drove down the I-5 with some friends nervously waiting for everything to change. We stopped at a liquor store thinking some booze would keep the effects of the drug from being to distressing. I followed my friends into the narrow aisles of the store and noticed a small tingling across the skin of my upper body. As I moved to the refrigerated cases of beer I noticed that the aisles seemed to be leaning, almost on the verge of tipping over. Caution would be needed here, and so I slowed my pace, thinking I was being extraordinarily prudent. Surely this was what it meant to hold it together while on drugs.

Then I felt my friend grab me by the shoulder. “You gotta chill out,” he said,” you’re freaking out.” Apparently, I hadn’t just slowed my walk but had stopped completely and was in wobbily kneed crouch, like a frog made to look like it can walk, while staring at a can of olives with a depraved grin. He walked me back to the car, the sense that everything was slanted just to the verge of toppling over continuing. I started laughing as I leaned my arm on the roof of the car, the pleasantly cool tingle still running over my bod. This was funny! Things looked like they were about to fall over, I wanted to explain to my friend. Instead, I managed only to hold his glance for a second or two before succumbing to another diaphragm convulsion, emptying all the air I had in my lungs until the convulsions produced only a high-pitched squeak.

He pushed me into the backseat of the car and gave me a can of beer to drink, with clear instructions to stop freaking out. We drove into the open plain of the Disneyland parking lot, gnarled with the dingy colors of owned automobiles. We covertly drank more beer and I noticed the while elation of the liquor store had departed, the feeling of toppling over remained. The world was misproportioned and I felt emotionally parched, I had no feelings to frame this new view of the world as a good or bad thing. The tilted mini-vans simply tilted, and the neutrality of this fact made me sulky and suspicious.

When we finally adventured to the ticket booths and I handed the cashier my credit card it seemed like she held onto it for what must have been the lifetime of some lesser insect. In recognition of this fleeting life, I went through a dense strata of feeling, from relief to total despair when I looked behind me and realized my friends seemed to have disappeared. I could have spoken last words at that moment, “I’m sorry, I’ve always loved you,” to no one in particular. The counterwoman seemed indifferent to the coda I was considering and handed me a receipt to sign. I remember writing only the letter “X” on it and handing it back to her.

I took my ticket, walked through the gate, and found my friends on the other side. The rest of the afternoon was less remarkable, mostly comprised of standing in lines for rides, staring for slightly too long at the cheap-looking plaster walls that gave each fantastical subsection of the park its own character. On the Pirates of the Carribean ride I recall one of my friends deciding to get up out of our boat and climb across the plastic hull into the empty boat behind us. At this point the ride stopped and a voice over the speaker system announced that moving between boats was against the rules and would be cause for expulsion from the park.

Excepting the American triumvirate of booze, cigarettes, and caffeine I am not especially interested in drugs, but LSD is the one exception. Each of my subsequent experiences with the drug have been remarkably different, sometimes the effect is to pulverize rational thought into monkey syllables, other times it’s an ebullient giddiness that returns the vivid colors and newness of experience to the boring world, and still others it’s a hallucinogenic enfolding of one thought and image into another. The variability and duration of the drug also make it a difficult to do. It requires effort to put up with a high that doesn’t peak your emotional mechanisms but instead discombobulates your rational ones. It’s easy to be drunk but struggling through a 12 hour fit of acid takes work.

These are not the kinds of experiences one immediately thinks of in relation to parents. Or rather, they’re ones that both child and parent fight to keep in separate spheres– I’m reminded of another time in college when my roommate had just eaten a quarter ounce of mushrooms when his parents called and I handed him the phone without even thinking. “I didn’t think I’d need to tell you this,” he said afterward, “but next time my parents call and I’m high on mushrooms, tell them I’m not here, okay?”

There is a time when parent and child become more curious about the adult experiences of the other. The stresses of the custodian diminish, while the helpless incompetence of the child erode after each survived experience. There are many things I wonder about my mother now. She raised me with a lazy but pious sense of religion and the irrational taboo-avoidance it entails. Caffeine, premarital sex, pork, LSD, and jewelry were all sins against god (though she often excused herself from the jewelry prohibition, once sweetly confiding in me that her father would have disapproved of the necklace she’d worn to church).

This world seemed sensible, if sometimes inconvenient, in my pinhole view on it at eight year-old. 25 years later it is barely just a speck, into which it would be impossible to squeeze my most beloved memories. LSD is a fine rescue from the narcissism of past memories. There’s nothing ignoble about becoming enraptured with yourself (who else should it be, finally?) but that condition is an inevitability better saved for solipsistic mirrors and the spacious hours of workaday night. In the interim, we have the opportunity to aim the enrapturing impulse at other things.

The parental instinct is toward conservation, and how quickly does the child press against that constant sense of being safeguarded, watched over, governed. In the old anarchist romances, property ownership was not simply theft, but a sign of withdrawal, a drawing of lines to separate people, to create a safe threshold that can always be crossed, returning one to the pinhole of memory and reflection. These lines are necessary, if imperfect, but one hopes that they can be a little more permeable than law, civics, religion, and parental stubbornness sometimes make them.

And so, not even realizing I’d wanted to before, I asked my mother if she’d do acid with me as we walked through the graffiti’d corpses of the old embattlements. She said no. And then she quickly changed the subject, almost as if she hadn’t heard me ask the question.

*Images via Hunter-Desportes and Boris van Hoytema

**“Christiana: 40, Fresh, and Free” (via The Copenhagen Post)

“Copenhangen’s hippie neighborhood Christiania raises money to save commune” (via The Washington Post)

“Christiania – a small community with big ideas” (via The Guardian)

The post Trying to Do Acid with My Mother appeared first on The Faster Times.

Finding these old ghosts on my transcript was like discovering stamps in my passport from countries I can’t remember visiting, the record made official by capital letters commemorating that, not only did I pass through their borders, but that I performed well enough therein to receive commendation. I passed through me almost in a blackout, I took nothing from them and have no memory of even wanting something from them.

For a long time I thought the purpose of education was not to learn but to become disciplined. When I collected my Bachelor’s degree after 16 and a half years of school I felt mostly empty, discovering a dearth of useful facts to draw on in argument or professional advancement. At 14 my mother had told me about the final exam my cousin had gone through in a Danish high school, delivering a 20 minute oral presentation on the Spanish Inquisition and then standing for another 20 minutes of questioning by her teachers.

At 22 I’d never even studied the Spanish Inquisition. I’d graduated with a sprinkling of cum laude and college honors and hadn’t studied history since high school. Instead of a general understanding of the historical achievements in human intellect, creativity, and aggression, I’d finished school with an ability to fill a pipeline, to use my short-term memory and argumentative tendencies to create the illusion of a position, while meeting deadlines and managing my time between the tedium of pipe-filling and the more interesting, though not much less amnesiac, pursuits of drinking with men and trying to figure out how to be naked with women.

In my senior year of high school I learned an interesting idea about abortion in my Government class, which even today supplants any other fact I retained from that year. Our teacher was called Scoville and he was bitterly sarcastic in a helpless and defeated kind of way. This quality, in conjunction with his Francophone name, made me suspect he was Canadian. He wore his black hair in a flattop with the wispy tendrils of a mullet creeping down his neck. Big black-framed glasses that seemed only a few years out of fashion hung around his neck. He bragged once about having been given a free microwave after test driving a Cadillac. I thought he was pathetic and wanted to escape from his gloomy gray room as soon as class began. I’d picture him drinking imported light beer and retelling the story of his new microwave to one of Fresno’s bejeweled ex-wives who’d wait for some sign of desire in the sad bars that passed for posh in Central California.

Never trust a politician who talks about abortion, he told us. Abortion has nothing to do with civic bureaucracy, he said. It’s an issue whose primary effect is to incite anger, which makes it irresistible as a political weapon. In the four decades since Roe vs. Wade, we seem to be mostly content with this resting point, the private choice made by a person and their caregiver has higher standing than the enforced morality of politicians and their constituents. And while fetuses are indeed life, humans, babies in beginning, the contortions of logic and science required to prove they have sentience, feeling, consciousness, and independence separate from the womb they depend on for life, the distinctions are so unclear, morally and medically, that the choice of whether to kill this founding fetus before it wakes is better left to the individuals directly involved. I may already have had the materials to put this argument together for myself at 17, but hearing it from Mr. Scoville catalyzed it in terra firma. I still don’t know what the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution is, but I know that as a rallying cry for expanded government regulation, abortion is bullshit.

Last year I accompanied a friend to Planned Parenthood to have an abortion, the first such appointment I’d ever been to. Her pregnancy was unrelated to my pelvic history but I went for support. If it can be claimed that there aren’t any atheists in foxholes, it should likewise be said that there aren’t any assholes in abortion clinics. They are, contrary to the cryptic mythology of their political opponents, nurturing places. These are not halls where life is degraded and made light of, but places where people seem acutely sensitive to the grueling dilemmas one must choose their way through in the natural course of a lifetime. It was disconcerting that such a place should be locked behind a security door with a buzzer press required for admittance.

There were a surprising number of couples inside the waiting room. I don’t know why I should have been surprised to see couples at an abortion clinic. I didn’t think I’d been so influenced by the cultural superstition about abortion, always implying moral chaos and relational decrepitude as the precondition for it. Instead there were men and women holding hands, resting heads on shoulders, and whispering softly to one another. The women that weren’t encoupled were with friends, sisters, and, I presumed with one teenager, a mother.

Those opposed to abortion see the act in a particular way, taking place in a shadowy horrorbox with deluded victims tricked into having their bodies operated on. They transpose the identity of a toddler onto a fetus, seeing little angels with fully formed brains and organs wailing in their last moments of life. And sure enough, it has the beginnings of eyes and fingers, a brain, and even a heart beating in its sonogram ghost world. It’s alive, but not exactly awake, nor even conscious in any way we might recognize. Moreover, those little bodies, translucent prologues of a person and a history that might or might not act itself out, are indeed loved. No one understands this more than a woman having an abortion.

It always seems redundant when political apparatuses insert themselves into these rooms. The most recent example comes from Virginia, where a reclassification and re-regulation of abortion clinics has complicated access to a procedure that, very often, can be completed just by taking some pills. Virginia’s state legislature first moved abortion clinics into the same category as hospitals, then the Department of Health subsequently issued a new requirements for the dimensions of hallways, pre-op rooms and operating rooms in order for abortion clinics to continue legal operation. Elsewhere, states have mandated waiting periods and, in some cases, force women to be shown sonograms of the fetus before being allowed to fully commit to the choice. As if redoubling and amplifying the thoughts a woman will already have had by that point could do more than prolong their anxiety.

61% of women who have abortions already have at least one child. They likely know better than any bureaucracy what is being gained and sacrificed in the choice. Abortion is at all times a choice between equivalent futures. Every choice about a pregnancy is abortive, forcing a woman, and the people most intimately bound to her, to forgo one future for another. Anyone who has ever had a child will surely know that keeping a baby is its own kind of sacrifice. Which is why it shouldn’t be any sort of surprise that abortion clinics are places of compassion and kindness. These are the rooms where women are given to choose between two sacrificial futures. Women live with this, and men sit at their side and dumbly speculate about what it might be like.

There is an emerging argument in social science that logic and reason evolved in humans not so that we might learn what is true about our circumstances, but rather as means to acquire power and social standing. We argue not to be right but to win, and so to enjoy the benefits of being considered an authority. This explains our propensity toward confirmation bias and the tendency to remember facts that are familiar rather than facts that might be truer but are less personally recognizable.

In this light, I might consider my education a process of taming rather than factual acquisition. In my imperial adolescence I didn’t need to learn how to externalize my whims and hunches, every random thought was expressed, every mundane discovery was revolutionary, and every emotional storm was a cataclysm. Even after two decades of studying a mountain of forgotten books with disappearing facts, I’d barely just begun (in some ways higher education for an English major is like a second childhood, indulging whims of interpretation and mundane trumpetry not indulged in harder sciences).

In taming one side of my wild and selfish brain, I was becoming the master of another, capable of impressing people, vindicating myself at the expense of their beliefs and experiences. I was becoming simultaneously more civilized and more obnoxious. As a child I’d had the power to ventilate my thoughts and feelings, but I began to see they could also be weaponized, turned into battering rams that could move through any social impediment if constructed carefully enough.

Years later, a woman I’d been seeing missed her period. She’d spent almost a week privately considering the fact that she might be pregnant. She didn’t tell me until the day her period finally came, the spots of blood and contracting muscles agreeing with her hopeful thoughts. “No,” she told me. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

A few weeks later we were having sex without a condom. I knew we were going to break up soon. I loved her and didn’t want to let her go. As I drew nearer to coming I remember a thought ebbing upward: I could come inside her and then she would become pregnant. I could keep her there with me, the natural consequence of that runaway moment of our joined pelvic narratives. I could get what I wanted, if only I agreed to let go of all of the facts and reason I’d have in sober, clothed conversation. I’m free, I thought. I’m right. I’m so close.

And then I pulled out, unseen muscles spasming inside me, bringing forth a little spurt of white fluid that fell in a puddle on my inner thigh. I felt embarrassed for a moment, and thought maybe I should say, “I’m sorry.”

*Image via Wikipedia

**Are Virginia’s New Abortion Rules the Worst? (via Mother Jones)

Facts on Induced Abortions in the United States (via The Guttmacher Institute)

Reason Seen More As Weapon Than Path to Truth (via The New York Times)

The post Abort My Baby: The Role of Reason in the Fight for Fetuses appeared first on The Faster Times.

But then sex comes and overwhelms all of these small treasures, a sneezing tidal wave of slow motion levitation that reshapes the landscape of adolescence into a sultry place, filled with the coruscations of an alien sun and the sad murk of its accompanying questions. Was it really me who deserved these pleasures? Had I unknowingly stolen them from some private nook I was never meant to discover? Does that assfuck Ryan know how wonderful I can make myself feel, even after his orchestrated chorus of humiliation?

Surviving the transition from titillated child to mystified teenager is far from the most difficult one faces in life, but it is one of the first significant changes that we must all confront. It shows you something in a person’s understitching to see how they carry on whilst a mechanism for self-engineering tidal waves impatiently slumbers in one’s pants folds. It’s often claimed that politicians’ sex lives are of no importance to public discourse. Candidates and congressman defend themselves on matters of religious association, ideological conviction, spinning a loom of cottony stuffing, meant to fill out the insides of their prettily fabric’d casings. They can mystify their first meetings with John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan, but they cannot extend this sense of wonderment to their more bodily interests.

During the build-up Iowa Straw Poll vote, this parade of tedium (where nothing worth asking was asked and nothing worth knowing was offered as answer) a few surprisingly pleasant images emerged. Both Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann were caught appearing to anoint with oral felicitude the thick columns of Iowan corn dogs. In the stream of ventilator exhaust generated by these two (“one-term president,” “Texas miracle,” “submission….means respect”) a reminder that these instruments of rhetorical cement have a purpose not yet consummated by their public alms to small government.

In recent years sex has undone the reputations of witless politicians so the insinuation that a sun-wrinkled alpha male in cowboy drag might, in another life (or another room) use his mouth on a phallus is surprisingly sweet. I have no idea what he is talking about when enumerating why the federal government has no place in education, but I think I can see a little more of him when the curtain is pulled back and the socio-sexual mammal is seen pulling the strings and levers of the political dummy. Bachmannn, too, is sweetly transformed from a robot-eyed steamroller into a tenuous but willing servant. It might not be submission exactly, nor particularly respectful, but it certainly seems loving.

I’ve wished for years that anyone who runs for office would have to release a sex tape of themselves as a prerequisite. Not because sex tapes are scarce commodities but because it seems an effective filtration mechanism, separating the clean-eared approval seekers who learn to repeat a script from the people who can stand a little public embarrassment for the sake of serving their communities. It would also have the benefit of saving lots of downstream embarrassment when some sexual details inadvertently escape over Twitter or through an easily impressed intern.

In the dumbest cases, a politician’s sexual interests reveal them as hypocrites. Phillip Hinkle, a Representative from Indiana, is the latest anti-gay legislator to have been found keeping naked company with other men, joining the self-loathing ranks of Mark Foley, Larry Craig, and Ted Haggard. In the more tortured cases, inflated ego-centrists like Bill Clinton use White House staff to slander a woman as a crazed “stalker” for having allowed him to lick her sexual fluids from a cigar. Likewise, Anthony Weiner made his federally funded staff available to his internet playmates, encouraging them to lie about his needily coercive libido.

Sex is the stupidest thing a person can be embarrassed of, if only because its benefits are universal. There is always the possibility of over-interpreting its importance, “the crankish quest for sexual symbols,” Nabokov wrote, “and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.” And yet the fear of simply addressing one’s lower susceptibilities gives portentous material for the symbol-readers among us. The fear of discovering in each other the one thing that we all have in common is the first step toward building a society where petty exploiters like Bill Clinton can be turned into victims, where submission is a virtue, and where it’s not gay if it wasn’t in your district.

Shame for what we cannot help being pervades everything, even the loyal constituents of our sexless masters. Consider the recent case of a Long Island lifeguard who sued the state of New York because they declined his request to stop wearing Speedos while on duty. “At a certain point you have to stand up and say this isn’t right,” the 61 year-old Roy Lester told the NY Daily News. After 40 years of adhering to the skimpy dress code, the bewrinkled man decided his thighs were no longer appropriate for public display, as if the diminishing of a persons outer desirability should have any bearing on how he adorns himself.

Sex is important only in so far as it inspires fear of consternation, necessitating the creation of a phantom persona that can seem to hover above the groining howls of the plebeians. Yet, even the food a person eats can give them away, revealing not a mortifyingly diminished creature in the lurch of sex but a pale specter whose identity seems to have been invented out of soap and plastic, shameful keepers of those below, whose leaking organs desire only to endure, to begin again and again. Even a corn dog can show how much of a difference remains between them and us, the sexed and the shameful, our keepers and ourselves.

*Images via IowaPolitics.com and markn3tel

**“Michele Bachmann Enjoys Leading Iowa Pack, Foot-Long Corn Dog” (via Gothamist)

“Phillip: Hinkle: Craigslist Encounter A ‘Shakedown’: Report” (via The Huffington Post)

“Lifeguard, 61, sues state for firing him after he refused to wear Speedo” (via NY Daily News)

The post Sub-Erotic Politics: Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and the Corn Dog Blowjobs appeared first on The Faster Times.

When I was in high school I found a manilla envelope marked “Divorce” in the desk in my dad’s office. We should have a word to describe moments like this, when a number of powerful and previously unconsidered thoughts come flooding in, a reminder of the gap between the slow-moving conscious part of the brain and the athletically reactive subconscious parts. So they were getting divorced. The amorphous personas of mother and father that had circumscribed the limits of my known universe were about to split apart, leaving me vulnerable to a hoard of wild and unfiltered realities waiting to upend my tiny little life. I pulled out a few papers and read the words on them without understanding any of it, the legal jargon reflected none of my shock. And the idea switched almost instantly from inconceivable to unavoidable in my head.

The argument over how to raise America’s debt ceiling feels in many ways like a divorce proceeding. It’s less a debate of ideas and more a negotiation of an endpoint for the government’s support of those most in need, which encircled American society and keep it from having to confront the inconceivable over the last half century. Spending on the country’s three biggest social support programs–Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid–collectively account for the a majority of the country’s long-term deficit and so two and a half political factions are squirming to cut out these ballooning inconveniences while simultaneously retaining enough ideological dignity to squeak through one more election.

Two years ago there was an attempt at a debate about how to slow the increase of medical costs and use government-leveraged spending power to cut the oligarchic torniqueting of prices that are co-equal contributors to the untenability, not simply of Medicare and Medicaid, but the healthcare market as a whole. That debate was had by one side and boycotted by the other. It led to a perplexingly unpopular bill that is nonetheless mostly popular when broken up into smaller pieces. Putting things into a larger picture makes it possible to have irrational disgust for a thing that, when considered in individual qualities wouldn’t be possible. The time for appreciating good qualities is over and now the only argument is who gets a bigger percentage of the estate once it’s dissolved.

We have seen the furrowed faces of men irrationally entrenched in variations on the same position and yet insisting they are in conflict. Both sides want to be released from the cage of their former obligations and they both want to inflict the most amount of pain on the other side before co-signing the exit papers. It’s hard to imagine a stupider and more masculine expression of political duty.

In many of the White House meetings on the issue there are only one or two women among the rabble of collared negotiators. Nancy Pelosi is surrounded by Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Timothy Geitner, Harry Reid, and Steny Hoyer. It should be hard, in 2011, to find a room of such macho composition. Women presently make up 16% of congress, a figure that actually shrank in 2010–the first time in 30 years. Not surprisingly, 2010 was the election year in which entrenched antagonism to the opposite party was rewarded with a quasi-Republican insurgency in the House of Representatives. Candidates earned public admiration not because of interesting policy proposals but because of an exciting vehemence in dressing down the other party. It had the unintentionally pathetic air of two men nose-to-nose trying to induce the other to take the first swing, thereby absolving the one of responsibility for having turned himself into an attacking animal. It doesn’t matter if the insults are true, and they tend to be almost unanimously untrue, they only need to have a negative effect on the other person.

In a newly published paper on group intelligence, Anita Woolley, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT, found that the biggest contributing factor to raising a group’s IQ was its prevalence of women. Popular wisdom would suggest that the smartest groups are those with individual members of high intelligence, but there seems to be no real correlation between individual intelligence and the resulting group intelligence. But having women in a group, and especially in the majority, led to consistently smarter outcomes in two tests that asked groups to perform some basic tasks like brainstorming, decision making, visual puzzle solving, and finding a solution to one complex problem.

In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Woolley said “part of that finding can be explained by differences in social sensitivity, which we found is also important to group performance. Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do. So what is really important is to have people who are high in social sensitivity, whether they are men or women.”

Doubtless, most of the people involved in the argument over the debt ceiling and the national deficit have relatively high IQ’s, and yet they have made the pretext one of siding with either European socialist demagogues or an unheeled rabble incapable of eating their peas and getting their homework done. This is not a debate in any way, but an acrimonious fight for alimony and a bigger piece of equity in the house, which is inevitably going to be sold off in the dissolution of the relationship that neither side can stomach any longer.

Men are not destined to be natural drags on collective intelligence, but we tend toward a way of interacting with one another that favors aggressive crises followed by long periods of emotional detente. A 2000 study conducted at UCLA found that the neuroendocrine response to stress and threat are largely similar in men and women. In both sexes the specter of conflict causes the brain to release the same basic volume and variety of hormones into the bloodstream, and yet the behaviors that this causes are remarkably different. Men tend to view threats in terms of dominance, preferring to stay and fight if they perceive an advantage or else running away if they’re overmatched.

Women generally defuse conflict and try to create social bonds that stitch over a perceived offense. The male response can produce only two outcomes, forced submission through conflict or defaulting immediately to submission by retreating. Given that the biological prompts are shared between the sexes it’s reasonable to assume that whatever leads to such dramatic behavioral differences is a product of culture and social expectations of gender performance.

In our male dominated argument over fiscal debt, we largely have two outcomes, either one side will capitulate to the the other and demonstrate its political submissiveness, or else both will go through with the conflict, creating an economic implosion that will leave both sides beaten–though each side seems to think the other will be more hurt by the beating. All the particularities of a debate about why individual programs exists, why it will begin to operate at a deficit in the coming years, and whether or not it’s really an issue to have a government program operating at a deficit in the first place (it seems government programs exist to ensure certain basic social needs that cannot be profitable on their own in a free market) will not be had anymore.

Instead we have a masculine brinksmanship that will, in both possible outcomes, be unproductive. The only thing really at stake is whether or not real harm will be required to reach that outcome.

My parents never divorced for a variety of reasons I don’t completely understand. But they never fell back in love with one another and in the intervening years they conducted their lives in persistent emotional combat, alternating between moments of mournful tolerance and vicious outbursts of perceived betrayal. Growing up in that unrelentingly anxious environment I subconsciously came to expect this as the unavoidable end state of all relationships. There must always come a period when the loving and optimistic promises of years past suddenly seem unrealistic, debts that are impossible to pay off. Things we say to one another while naively building forward, hypnotized by the invisible witchcraft of our idealism and hormones.

At the end it’s not that the promises were impossible but that the will to go through with them while partnered with the disgustingly sack of aging organs and odors beside you goes away. We cannot let go until everything is torn apart and sold for scrap, until even the smell of you makes me sick.

*Images via Spec-ta-cles and Leader Nancy Pelosi

** “Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women” (Harvard Business Review)

Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend Nor Fight-or-Flight (PDF)

The post Men at Work: The Debt Ceiling and the Effect of Women on Group Intelligence appeared first on The Faster Times.

I admit to secretly wondering in each case how it was that each woman could manage the stress of living in both worlds without suffering for it. I had the luxury of living in one world alone and not needing to keep two sets of books. My instinct would always have been to confess immediately, to not keep from my partner experiences that I was having in another world, even if that would have revealed a betrayal.

In “Married, With Infidielities,” Mark Oppenheimer struggled with the idea–distilled in a consideration of Dan Savage’s sex columns–that monogamy is a secondary concern to marriage. The expectation of sexual exclusivity becomes a placeholder in many ways, narrowing the number of uncertainties a person faces in life. “…life before her was so confusing,” Oppenheimer wrote of his wife. “In all those other relationships, it was never clear when there was an exclusive commitment or who would use the L-word first or when a Saturday-night date could be assumed.”

If this is the best case that can be made for monogamy–that it filters out the confusing parts of one’s love life for a little bit–then my instincts for confession were utterly wrong-headed. When the core of monogamy is giving your partner pretext to filter out the most confusing parts of the sexual subconscious, then the illusion of faith is far more important than the act itself.

In a Daily Mail story in 2009, Maureen Rice argued that while men are slightly more likely to cheat in a relationship (20% to 15% of women, according a Manchester Metropolitan University study), women are far more likely to carry on long-term affairs that their partners will never find out about.

“There is something particularly humiliating for a man about being made a cuckold,” Rice wrote. “So [women] lie to protect ourselves from the judgements of others, and because sexual ‘reputation’ still matters more to women, whether we lie it or not.”

“But we also lie naturally and instinctively, as a way to manage and control our relationships, to protect our partners and our families, and to keep our options open. In fact we lie so much and for so many reasons that often we don’t even think of it as lying at all, but as ‘relationship management.’”

It’s with an ironic chill that Oppenhemer opens his story by questioning his wife whether she’d be more hurt by discovering he’d been having an affair or that he’d been emailing pictures of his penis to strangers. The emailing of pictures is, of course, the more offensive option to her. “An affair is at least a normal human thing,” she answered.

I have been capable of great moments of sexual obliviousness in my life, to blinker out all the sublingual energy floating through a conversation. This trick of thought has made it possible for me to say I’ve never cheated on any of my own girlfriends. It’s not that I declined any specific offers but that I have a knack of turning parts of my brain off for extended periods of time, living in a world of perfect literalness. Even a direct offer–”What say you and I slip into the bathroom and fuck right quick?”–would have seemed like a joking impossibility no more serious than an offer to ride through Central Park on a herd of elephants. Sure, totally, let’s do that.

One of the betrothed women I fooled around with was insistent her partner never find out. There was nothing especially romantic about our dallying–we’d get drunk and kiss into the early morning. We never had sex but a few times we ended up naked together, as mucha goofy play session as anything else. It seemed ridiculous that anyone might have felt hurt or threatened by these interludes, which had all of the romantic intensity of going to a movie with a friend on a Tuesday night.

I fell in love with another woman during this period. She never told me she had a boyfriend but I knew almost from the beginning from a mutual friend. I had the impression some mornings that she was staring through my apartment window at something that wasn’t there. Was I something cruel she was doing to him? Or was he the unsheddable weight holding her back from me? Or were both of us needful puppies nipping at her heels with casually intrusive text messages read in the private shelter of her purse folds?

On another occasion I met a friend who’d been seeing another man for a few months to have a drink and catch up. We stayed out till last call and ended up kissing against the wall outside the bar until people started hooting at us. Finally, a group pranksome kids came up and scrawled on my back with a black felt pen and ruined the mood in full. There was another time when I slept with an old friend visiting from out of town. In the hungover confusion of morning I remember trying to parse my own feelings for her (over-extended by sex) from the guilt I felt for having played a part in her infidelity. I asked her if she was going to tell her boyfriend, thinking maybe this could be an opportunity for them to get even closer by first confronting a real challenge. “There’s no point,” she said.

In the beginning I’d taken all of these experiences as isolated quirks of probability. We will all reach a test of faith in our various ideals and wind up failing, or playing some part in another person’s moral wandering. After a year this was less a hiccup of romantic fortune and more an emotional defect, a willing pleasure taken in situations that had no future. The larger pattern was not that everyone I was interested in had boyfriends but that I was interested in people who would inevitably leave me again and again and again.

Without this certainty I was romantically ossified. I wouldn’t have sex with the one single woman I dated during this period. I’d carefully insured all of our time together had been in bars or walks through neighborhoods, coming up with excuses when invited over to her place for cooked dinners and never inviting her over to mine. After a night at a bar she asked me to come back to her place and I backpedaled, saying I had to work early in the morning and it would be too much to spend the night. This wasn’t untrue, but it was by that point clearly not the reason I was declining. “You just don’t want to have sex with me, do you?” she asked, addressing to obvious truth.

“No, it’s not that,” I lied. “Maybe this weekend or something, but I really can’t afford to be lousy at work tomorrow.”

We spent the next half an hour sitting on a grimy curb in the lower east side with her trying to talk me out of my dishonesty, while I kept trying to spin the gears of logic into some configuration wherein my lies would seem viable. She was a very beautiful woman, a bootstrap philanthropist and former beauty pageant contestant. I realize now I probably have the distinction of being the only man in the world who has purposely talked a beauty queen out of wanting to have sex.

Philip Larkin once described sex as a process of trying to get someone to blow your own nose for you. It’s a juvenile kind of self-trickery to make a relationship hinge on such a lowly and absurd act. This is embedded in the words we have to describe our relationships. We are boyfriends and girlfriends, turned back into children by our having fallen in love with one another. There would be no meaning in being a manfriend or womanfriend. We would know by instinct that men and women do not operate on the same simple ideals that children do. Men and women are compromisers, with welded joints and broken bits that must carry the ever increasing–and increasingly incoherent–load of experiences on has in life.

While addressing ourselves as children we fall back on the obscure latinate “monogamy,” a word whose literal meaning goes unknown by most people but which can still stand in as an answer for the question of what it means to be in a relationship. If a boyfriend or girlfriend is not mongamous, how can they be a boyfriend or girlfriend? Is the persistence of childlike faith carried in the word not completely unbound the concession that it will inevitably be broken?

My fellow men, I have slept with your wives and girlfriends. I have seduced them. I have let them revive their imaginations and physical curiosities in the bars and secret bedrooms of my past. In some cases they lingered a while, but none of them stayed. They all left and returned to your company, and for reasons that were their own, the result of a private gravity that existed only between you and them. It was lucky too. I don’t think I could have handled it if any of them had stayed.

*Images via pb-n-james and Joe Shlabotnik (edited by author)

** “Married, With Infidelities” (via New York Times)

“Think men are the unfaithful sex?” (via Daily Mail Online)

The post Other People’s Girlfriends I Have Slept With appeared first on The Faster Times.

Anthony Weiner described his penis as surprisingly large in an email exchange with a woman he’d never met just before sending her photographic proof. This is the only issue ever at hand in penis pictures. To my knowledge no man has ever sent a woman a picture of his penis to prove that it’s more pink than purple. We can only speculate how the controversy surrounding Weiner’s exposure instincts would have gone if he’d just wanted women in various cities around the country to understand just how fully purple it was. You’d be surprised how purple.

This color-obsessed man would be a stranger, but we know a little something about a man who has expectations of others based on the size of his undercarriage. This man is not sharing a unique part of his body but announcing it as evidence of his performative superiority in the one act a man’s imagination can never escape from. A man can think about sex in the same way he can gaze on the ocean, infinitely the same and hypnotically in flux all at the same time. This way of thinking is the constant background noise that connects every meandering thought.

There seem to be two ways of rationalizing this incessant whooshing of one’s sex hormones. It can be either accepted as an intrinsic part of one’s nature that needs no further action, or else taken as a call to rattle one’s scabbard in an erotic quest of self-actualization. If one accepts the latter approach, it follows that a certain amount of saber admiration is appropriate. It’s rarely well enough, however, for a man to admire his own machinery without needing co-signage from a third party.

So then one doesn’t simply arrive at a moment of photographing one’s penis with a cell phone or web cam. One travels to that point by way of thought, experimentation, and reinforcement. “An erection isn’t a physiological act alone; it’s a narrative event,” Laura Kipnis wrote of Weiner’s scandalized unveiling. Thus forwarding a photograph of such a narrative event is an attempt to have the story taken up and continued, and there is no more erotic way to have a narrative reinforced than by relative strangers over the internet.

The first time I took a picture of my penis with a cell phone it was an act of curiosity, to see my sex organ without the warping tricks of mood and first-person perspective. Without a camera between me and it, I could no more evaluate the dimensions of my penis than I could the circumference of my waist band. With a picture I thought I could reasonably discern where in the big-small scale I fit and find some evidence for the insistent fear that I might be who people were referring to whenever “micro-penis” or “pencil dick” came up.

It seems obvious in hindsight, but having pictures of my penis disentangled from my larger self did little to answer these fears. I’d never looked at my penis and wondered if it was micro, but my fear was that other people would. Having a picture got me no closer to an understanding of how other people would react. It seemed to be both reasonably sized and confusingly inadequate, if such a thing is possible. This was the worst of all possible results. I could have bravely faced up to the challenges of leading a productive life while having a pencil dick, or I could have sailed proudly through society knowing I had a maestro’s wand. But what does one do in the middle ground? In either scenario my penis would have been extraordinary, but the picture seemed rather to confirm the fact that it was actually pretty boring–an erection without much of a narrative.

When I thought briefly–very briefly–about who I might send these pictures to for some independent corroboration I saw even more clearly how stupid the act would be. Even at maximum heft and with the most flattering of angles it would still have been an act of reductionism. Am I awesome because of my penis? Consider this as Exhibit A. It seems to me the opposite is true, that, irrespective of size and hue, one’s penis is awesome only in relation to the person it’s a part of.

“But who else is going to fuck me like that?” a friend once said of her lousy boyfriend who, nonetheless happened to have a large torpedo shaped member that slipped inside easily and then filled out dramatically the deeper it went. This question gives body to the root fear of all masculinity. That when confronted with physiological comparison we will have to demure, to decline. I won’t be able to fuck you like that. I can’t, and won’t ever be able to.

But the corollary of a man who has at least the right anatomy to make a case for being able to measure up to what another man has done–further lifted by an updraft of ego and career accomplishment, a YouTube legacy of grandstanding on liberal talking points in the lion’s den of Fox News–where might such a man find the border between land and ocean, penis and ego? Is there anyone who gets off on size more than this man?

In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the modern totem to male ambiguity toward coupling, Tereza falls asleep every night holding onto Tomas’s penis by instinct. Tomas is the author of the rule of three’s, a system of sexual encounter whereby he can have as much sex as he likes with one woman during a three week period and then never see her again, or else sleep with a woman no more than once every three weeks indefinitely. It’s a combination of dumb luck, pity, and love that causes Tomas to give up his bachelorhood for Tereza and she instinctually understands just what part of him is least connected to her and so holds onto it the tightest.

I have deleted all the photographs of my penis that I’ve taken over the years. They all appeared like intrusive endlines detached from their histories. The more I looked at them the less I remembered about why I had wanted to take them in the first place, the articulated sounds of thought inevitably overtaken by the dull, repeating roar of the ocean each time it fell into the shore.

*Image adapted by author via Incase

**Anthony Weiner’s Leaked Sex Messages

Why Did Weiner Do it? (via Slate)

The post Cell Phone Pictures of My Penis I Have Taken appeared first on The Faster Times.