More sequel thoughts

A sequel to the sequel post?

We had some friends over recently and talked about whether we are living in the golden age of television. It's not a surprising subject to come up; I think I've seen the thought expressed at several on-line publications. And it clearly is a golden age for our friends. Shows such as Mad Men are exactly the shows for them.

I love  Mad Men myself but I cannot believe that we are now in anything like a golden age. I doubt today's shows will age very well.

A big part of the failure is that whole problem of endings.

There was a great moment on The Simpsons years ago when Bart was reduced to despair at how badly things were going only to have Lisa say something to the effect of, "Don't worry, no matter what happens to us, everything will be back to normal next Thursday". And that is the problem really. Television is a static medium. Nothing ever changes on TV and nothing really can. To actually resolve the primary conflicts would be to render the show meaningless.

And thus the nonsense of saying that TV shows are novelistic. In a novel, movie, opera or ballet there is a definite arc to a story. A TV is more like a painting.

Contrary to what my friends and so many TV pundits think, I think the "greatness" of current TV shows is actually a function of the decline of TV. These shows rely so heavily on what they borrow from outside television—whether it be 1950s-1960s high modernism or zombie movies. Without those external references to give them depth, the shows would too obviously be soap operas where nothing ever changes no different really that The Days of Our Lives, 90210 and The OC, which is all they really are.

Nothing has really changed; television is the same cultural wasteland it has always been;  your success as a human being is measured in inverse proportion to the number of hours of TV you watch.

Sequels

There was a piece in the paper yesterday that said that we should all stop grumbling about sequels in the movie business because, like them or not, they are here to stay.

There is a certain sense to that.

But there is something else too. The sense of an ending—that is to say, the ability to let a story end—is something peculiar to a certain kind of writer and culture.

Samuel Richardson, for example, had a very hard time ending his book Pamela. The book concerned Pamela's attempt to overcome Mr. B's desire to use her as a mistress and have him accept her as his love and wife. But poor Richardson could never really convince himself that he had reached an end. Pamela could, and did, marry Mr. B but she could never be sure that he wouldn't put her aside for another woman more of his social stature.

One of the reasons a lot of us think Jane Austen is a better writer than any of her contemporaries is because she reaches ends that can stand alone. You don't worry that Darcy is going to get rid of Elizabeth. Not because it is impossible that this could happen. There is no love, no courtship, now vow that can ever guarantee that a marriage should endure. And no one person can so love another that they can be absolutely certain that that other person might not turn against them some day.

So, why are Austen's endings solid and Richardson's ending not? And, given my current reading, why is the ending to Brideshead Revisited satisfying while the endings of A Dance to the Music of Time and to A la recherce du temps perdu not satisfying. For, as I remember it, Powell's masterpiece is wonderful but gets less and less satisfactory as it comes to the end.

It seems to me that the reason may have something to do with the writer and something to do with the culture. For, if we consider Jane Austen, we can see that one of the things that distinguishes the current era is a desire to make sequels to her stories. People want to know how it goes on and some writers have dutifully produced sequels for publication. To have a satisfactory ending, you don't need just a good writer capable of writing a convincing ending, you need a culture that believes that people have real ends worth aiming their lives at.

So, if we live in an era in which there is no point in complaining about sequels because they are inevitable then we may as well stop complaining but we should also recognize that we live in a  debased culture and we should start looking at other cultures and other eras of our own culture to find something better.

Powell and Waugh on first loves

Reading the beginning of Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time last night I found an interesting example of Powell using a similar metaphor to one that Waugh uses to speak of early experiences of sexual love BUT, and this is fascinating, even in using the similar metaphor to describe the same thing the two novelists are clearly headed in different directions.

Here is Powell first. Peter Templer has just returned from London where he has had sex with a woman he picked up on the street and he has told Nick and Charles about this adventure that he has had and they have not. And Powell has Nick use the metaphor of a door opening to describe his feelings about it.

This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of a far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before.

These are young men, in the last years of high school in our terms, and the image of the door is meant to signify a leaving behind of the cloistered days of youth and entering the public world of adulthood—a particularly powerful image given that they are sharing tea in their private room at what Powell has described as the "medieval closes" of Eton as Nick experiences this moment. For Powell, sex is the ticket to admission to a ballroom full of shouting and music.

If we compare this with Waugh's use of the mysterious-door-now-open in describing how Charles reacts to meeting Sebastian for the first time, we can see the same metaphor used towards describing sexual experience toward a different end.

... I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find the low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Here the door opens on a  secret world of intimate love. A love that opens, not on and adult world of shouting and music, but on a secret garden that is like a new kind of childhood. A secret intimacy that contains intimations of a connection with God—"Suffer the little children to come unto me".

And the obvious question for our private reflections here is which of these two most closely corresponds to my experience of sexual love? Was sex for me a way to leave behind a protected world of childhood and enter into the risky rewards of adulthood? Or was it the way into a secret, intimate world of naughtiness that in some ways recreated childhood? Or was it one and then the other? Or was it one and, looking back, I wish it had been the other?

I would never discuss the answers to those questions publicly but they strike me as very important questions.


PS: I know some of you will wondering about a certain famous book about an enclosed garden. Well, Evelyn Waugh was just eight years old the year Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden was published. I have no idea whether or not he read it as a child but you do have to suspect he did.

Anthony Powell

I picked up A Dance to the Music of Time again. This has long been a favourite. It's twelve volumes long though so I don't think I'll blog my way through it (not this year anyway). But there were a couple of things in the opening that I think fascinating.

The first of these is the quality of the opening. This book is often compared to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and Waugh Brideshead Revisited. The comparison to Waugh irked Powell a bit because, while the content and style of his book is very similar to what Waugh wrote, his aim was very different. Waugh wrote in classic English novel style—a book with a beginning, middle and end leading up to a happy ending  (of a sort)—while Powell is a pagan through and through; his philosophy is what I call "Nietzschean Naturalism". It's plot runs in cycles with the same sorts of things happening over and over again.

Anyway, the thing that hits me every time I pick it up is this, Powell's opening is perfect. Really, if you are a writer or a fan of writing, you should do yourself a favour and read the first ten pages of volume one (it's called A Question of Upbringing). I think that Proust and Waugh outstrip Powell over the long haul but neither of them wrote an opening anywhere near this good.

One of the brilliant things Powell does is the way he introduces the character named "Widmerpool". Kenneth Widmerpool is Powell's greatest creation but it's rarely noted that Powell meant him to be. When Verdi needed a popular song for the Duke to sing in Rigoletto he sat down and wrote one. Some people can do that. Mozart could also say, "I'm going to write a popular song," and then just do it. Beethoven couldn't. Anyway, that is what Powell does he. He decided to create an unforgettable character and then he just did it. Amazing.

The third thing that hits me about the opening is something that will be familiar to anyone who followed the Brideshead Revisited thread here. The following is an extended bit of dialogue from the opening, see if you can figure out what is going on. The first speaker is a guy named Charles Stringham. He is telling Nicholas Jenkins something another boy named Peter Templer told him about Widmerpool:

'As we walked past the fives courts, Templer remarked: "I'm glad that ass Widmerpool fielded a banana with his face." I asked why he did not like him—for after all there is little harm in the poor old boy—and it turned out that it was Widmerpool who got Akworth sacked.'

Stringham paused to allow this statement to sink in, while he arranged the sausages in a new pattern. I could not recall clearly what Akworth's story had been: though I remembered that he had left the school under a cloud soon after my arrival there, and that various rumours regarding his misdoings had been current at the time.

'Akworth tried to set his room on fire, didn't he? Or did he steal everything that not nailed down?'

'He may well have done both,' said Stringham; 'but he was principally shot out for sending a note to Peter Templer. Widmerpool intercepted the note and showed it to Le Bas. I must admit that it was news to me when Peter told me.

'And that was why Peter had taken against Widmerpool?'

'Not only that but Widmerpool got hold of Peter and gave him a tremendous jaw on morals.'

I'll stop there but it goes on a while and every bit of it is magnificent.

It's very inside writing. "The school" for example: Powell tells us the style of architecture and describes the nearby town and the gasworks but never gives it a name. We're just to know that it's Eton.

And the note. That's a fascinating detail don't you think? No one gets thrown out of school for sending notes. It's what's in the note that does it. But what's in it? Something immoral. I know, I know, not with the boys with boys sex again and, well, sorry, but that is what it is but it's played so subtly you could easily miss it.

Great stuff and I recommend it highly.

Extra Brideshead bonus
Do you  remember Olive Banks whom Cordelia was devoting a decade of her daily rosary too? Charles asked about her and Cordelia explained:

'She [Olive] was bunked from the convent last term. I don't quite know what for. Reverend Mother found something she'd been writing.

We might also remember that Anthony brings the very same charge against Sebastian as Templer does against Widmerpool above:

'I left under what is called  cloud, you know—I can't think why it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light; the process involved a series of harrowing interviews with m' tutor. It was disconcerting to find out how observant that mild old man proved to be. The things he knew about me, which I though no one—except possibly Sebastian—knew. It was a lesson never to trust mild old men—or charming school boys; which?

The school in question is also Eton. It's amazing what comes along with a first class education. In any case, it doesn't reflect very well on Sebastian does it?

A long post about sex, sex, sex

There are some new numbers out from the US National Survey of Sexual Health and Sexual Behaviour. This, of course, means another great opportunity for Will Saletan to make a fool out of himself. Not just him of course, the whole thing is coated with euphemism from top to bottom. Note, for example, the title of the survey–this is a survey of sexual practices not sexual health but it has to be called what it is because the scientists responsible wouldn't want to have to admit to themselves that the primary reason for reading a study like this is prurient curiosity. (Relevant disclosure, I plead guilty, guilty, guilty.)

The other fascinating shift here is the way the survey refers to "men" and "women" throughout rather than "males" and "females". It does this even when age clearly indicates that the subjects are boys and girls. This tells us something about the degree to which science has been influenced by political correctness: "male" and "female" are objective facts whereas "man" and "woman" are now socially flexible terms.

While I'm at it, the Center for Sexual Health Promotion have put out a publication of articles analyzing the data. Funding for that publication was provided by a condom manufacturer. This, pardon me while I pick my jaw off the ground, didn't strike anyone at the Center as a conflict-of-interest problem! It didn't strike them even as they concluded that condom use needs to be further promoted. That is the same ethics the give-away advertorial publications in my neighbourhood use (and scientists wonder why people don't trust them as much as they used to).

The numbers are also interesting in themselves. The chart is here below, if you click on it you will be able to see it larger. (You can also open this link to get a more easily readable version.)

The key place to start is the second double-column of the first row. This deals with masturbation practices of 16-17 year olds. And you will see that Seventy-five per cent of 16-17 year old boys report masturbating at least once in the twelve months before the survey was taken. Now, to take those numbers at face value, you have to seriously believe that twenty-five percent of 16-17 year old boys made it through twelve months without masturbating even once and that is ludicrous.

Surveys of all sorts try to create an atmosphere where we won't feel any social pressure or shame. That is, where we won't decide to tell the person asking questions that we do or don't do such a thing because we hope to impress them and also that we won't deny being a member of the grey party because we are ashamed of it. There is a powerful limit on these things when the survey is about something such as sexual practices because we have a powerful need to impress ourselves with what sort of person we are sexually. And we will do this even though it means denying the effect of powerful needs reinforced by tens of thousands of years of evolution—only those people who reproduced got to pass on genes—so we will not triumph over them by a simple act of will.

Thus twenty-five percent of 16-17 year old boys will claim, quite possibly lying to even themselves as they do so, that they have not masturbated even once in the last twelve months.

So the survey results don't tell us about what people actually do so much as what they tell us what they would like to believe about themselves and what they would like to have others believe about themselves. The numbers are important anyway—what people want to think about themselves and have others think about them is important and some of the numbers are really interesting.

Sex is not the only thing people lie about. We lie about income and savings for very similar reasons. But researchers can compensate with income because there is separate data about salaries available from all sorts of sources. With sex there is no separate data. What we do have, and this is fascinating, is the contrasting reports of males and females and here we see an important and significant shift. The numbers in this graph match up pretty well. In the past, males, especially younger males, tended to report far more experience than was really plausible given what the females said. Or, alternatively, the females were up to a lot more than they admitted. Or a little of both. (You can still see the discrepancy if you compare what males 30 and older claim as compared to women in the same age range.)

A digression, at this point there is always some geek who thinks he understands stats who will leap in to say that the discrepancy doesn't mean someone is lying and will then offer a long argument about how Suzie, who really gets around, can raise the number for females generally. Get ten or twenty Suzies into the mix and no discrepancy. The problem with saying that is the sample size. The whole point of using a sample of a certain size is to make there are also Georges who really get around. Funnily enough, smug male geeks always seem to forget about about George who used to be "friends" with their girlfriend.

Anyway, the thing is that the sexual self images of younger males and females line up pretty well here and that is a significant new development. One of the more interesting, to stick with the youngsters a little while longer, is what 14-15 year olds report about oral sex. We can see that 12 percent of males report receiving oral sex from a female and, if we slide over to the other side of that double column, we can see that exactly 12 percent of females report performing oral sex on a man. That tells us that attitudes are lining up. In past years there tended to be a significantly larger number of males who reported receiving than females reported giving.

Attitudes, however, is all we can be certain of. At least 12 percent would like us to think they have done or have received. That means, lest we forget, that 88 percent either have not or would not like others to see them as the sort who would. I wouldn't sit around waiting for the rush of journalists rushing to their keyboards to report that the much ballyhooed explosion of teenage oral sex was just a fantasy.

There is also a small, but significant gap between what women claim to have received versus what men report giving. That gap grows up to age twenty five and then it evens out. Again, it's about attitudes here. Women want to see themselves as getting their share but in practice it may not be that way. Part of the gap may be explained by by male selfishness but I bet a lot of it is explained by female reluctance too; we should allow for girls and young women who want to avoid situations where they have less control.

Saletan's folly
What happens when we have a gap between what one sex reports giving versus what the other sex reports receiving? I suspect it's self image mostly and that is the big change. In the past, it was always men who reporting higher numbers than women. Here we have a growing equality and even a disparity the other way in an area that might shock some. What's happening here? Well, sometimes the prudes are right and I'm guessing this is one of those times.

Porn has changed women's self image by changing their ideas of normal.  And thus we get the result that in some age groups twice as many females report anal sex as the males do. Is this a reflection of what is actually happening? Well, I'm sure there is more of it but, I'll be honest, I don't want to know too much.

The eye-popping discrepancy in these numbers is the gap between the 18 percent of women between the ages of 18 to 19 who claim to have been on the receiving end of anal sex as compared to the only 6 percent of males who claim to have been on the active end. The gap closes somewhat with 20 to 24 year olds where 23 percent of women claim to have received and 11 percent of men claim to have given. Now, the obvious caveat here is that while teen-aged girls tend to have partners in the same age group, they tend to move to slightly older males as they enter their twenties. So the numbers don't have to line up to make sense. On the other hand, some of those guys reporting that they were on the giving end have to be gay.

But I would be remiss if I didn't suggest that at least some of these numbers reflect what women want thought of them rather than what they really get excited about. Without getting specific about it, I suspect most males who have been in a long term sexual relationship are familiar with the phenomenon of women who do things, seemingly with enthusiasm, in the early days only to later reveal that they don't like these things much. Women don't want to think of themselves as too easy but they also want to appear open and ready to do what they believe is expected of them. Given the influence of porn, I suspect that some younger women want to think of themselves as open to the idea of anal sex because they think this is important to men.

It would be fascinating to follow the 23 percent of women in their early twenties who report having had anal sex forward over time and see how enthusiastic they are when they get into more settled relationships.

Mr. Saletan, in case you weren't part of the snickering masses laughing at him, latched onto these anal sex numbers from young women in an article he wrote at Slate a while ago with a gusto that told the whole world more about his hopes and desires than anyone, other than any current or prospective partner of his, needed to know. As if to purposely compound the humiliation, Saletan wrote a follow up piece reporting that a number of women had written to tell him how much they enjoyed this. Now, leaving aside the obvious possibility that this is the Internet and he really had no idea that they weren't having him on or even if they were really women, this sort of thing tells us a whole lot about why journalists shouldn't be allowed near stories that rely on statistics. That there are some women who like any sexual activity you can name is no surprise—Rule 36, if it exists someone has a fetish for it—but to mix up self-reported anecdotes with statistical evidence is more than laughable.

(Saletan  doesn't seem to be the only male journalist with a major enthusiasm here: check out the photo Reason used to accompany their story, safe for work in most jurisdictions.)

Real-life Charles Ryders and Odette Crecys
The final thing of note is the number of heterosexuals who sometimes have sex with members of the same sex. This subject I have commented on before so I suppose I'm opening myself up to the same sort of mockery I've doled out at Saletan here. But I do think it interesting. As that reason article puts it:

While about 7% of adult women and 8% of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the proportion of individuals in the U.S. who have had same-gender sexual interactions at some point in their lives is higher.

This heterosexuals having sex with other heterosexuals of the same sex phenomena is the most under-reported aspect of human sexual behaviour.

By the way, notice that the researchers don't give us a breakdown of which of those above three categories people fitted into. You'd think, because it is what any honest writer would do, that they'd list the groups in order of size. You'd be wrong about that.

I just risked going blind reading the charts that accompany the study and found this additional break down. 1.8 per cent of adolescent males and 4.2 percent of adult males self identify as gay. Only two in a thousand or .2 percent of adolescent females self identify as lesbian and not many more, only .8 percent, of adult females do so.

Compare this to the number who self identify as bisexual and the contrast is fascinating, especially on the female side. 1.5 percent of adolescent males self identify as bisexual and 2.6 percent of adult males do so. That is one awfully large group, really, given how little press they get. But the female numbers will blow you away. A whopping 8.4 percent of adolescent girls self identified as bisexual and 3.6 percent of adult females did. That's a lot. Any honest writer and any honest researcher would have written the "proportion who identify themselves as bisexual, gay or lesbian".

And, as the writer at Reason notes, there are significant numbers of people who do not think of themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual yet sometimes have sex with members of the same sex. Reading the chart, this is most likely in late teens and early twenties. (And does anyone want to bet that summer camps and shared university dorm rooms aren't a bit of an impetus here?)

Okay, why do I care? Not, honestly, for the reasons you might snicker at. Girl on girl porn has never done anything for me. No, it's the academic and journalistic lack of interest that amazes me. This is one very large group. I recently blogged my way through Brideshead Revisited and I am amazed at the number of academics and reviewers who find the love between Charles and Sebastian to be simply implausible. Count newspaper articles that talk about gays or lesbians and compare them to articles that talk about bisexual activity and there is nothing. And yet the numbers above suggest that bisexual sex is more common than gay sex or lesbian sex.

I suspect the people involved have a lot do with this. They probably quite like their privacy than you. But, still, there is something going on among scientists and journalists here that smells just like denial if you ask me.

Soft and romantic again

Venus Day
To understand what I am talking about here you have to visit a wonderful blog called "The Sartorialist". He posts pictures of people he thinks look great whom he finds mostly on the streets of New York but also from big European cities and sometimes even small towns. I'd like to include the pictures here but he, as is his prerogative, asks that we not do this.

I love him for a number of reasons. First of all because he is positive. I can snark at stupid celebrities and the way the media fawns after them too but how many times do we have to be told, for instance, that Anne Hathaway is a shameless exhibitionist? The second thing I love about the Sartorialist is that he lets others drive his taste. He is always open to men and women on the street showing him beauty that he might not have noticed without their help.

Anyway, here are the two pictures I'd like you to look at..

I love that girl. Don't you? Anyone can look soft and romantic in a long, flowing princess dress but to pull it off in a sweater, jeans and clogs is a major feat. She manages it because of her hair, the colours she has chosen and her accessories. Her hair is full like only a young woman's hair can be. The colours are rich and full too. I love the socks. The funny thing is that those socks wouldn't look romantic on most people; goofy is the more likely result. Why does it work for her? Well, the answer to that is in the accessories. The scarf is an obvious romantic accessory but check out the Celtic-style ring on her left hand and the elbow patch on her sweater. Any of those details by themselves would not have been enough but just two or three together make a look.

Looking at the picture, you have no idea about her face and you can't even tell much about her body either but you really want to know don't you? That's magic.

I think every generation of women grows up watching the older generation with two, contradictory, sorts of feelings. That's because sex is like a chocolate dessert. It's the blatant, easy option.  If you have ever showed up at a potluck with an elaborate strawberry trifle you have ever laboured over for hours only to have someone waltz in waving a triple death by chocolate cheesecake you will know what I mean.

Every generation of young virgins looks at slightly older and more worldly women being too obvious with the chocolate cheesecake and they think, "I'm not going to be like that". The generation in their twenties now, for example, grew up watching slightly older girls flashing around their thongs that crept above waistbands and nipples that poked through bras and shirts. And they said, I'm not going to be like that. So, when their turn to push the older girls off the stage came along, they chose panties that didn't show and wore more elegant bras that teased with cleavage instead of hitting you in the eye with erect nipples. But, as time went along, they started pushing those bras and the cleavage to the point that it looked ridiculous.

And hard. The women who walked past my house on their way out of the nearby university the last few years have all looked like very hard women.

So now, we move towards soft and romantic. If you go to The Sartorialist, and I highly recommend that you do, you will see page after page of girls with romantic looks. Cleavage is much less in evidence.

I saw the same going downtown yesterday on the bus that had just left campus. I saw long, romantic boots everywhere and those boots were at the end of legs in leggings or in richly textured stockings. The hair I saw was long and full and skirts are creeping down. Tops were softer and looser than they have been and the hard lines where the waist of pants and skirts and necklines meet soft flesh were hidden. You could see the third year girls with their quadruple-pushup bras sticking out of their low-scoop tops looking at the first year girls with their soft, romantic looks and suddenly feeling cheap and past it by comparison.

But there is also the second of the contradictory types of feelings. At the same time that they wish to avoid the sexual excesses, the chocolate cheesecake aspect, of the generation they follow, the coming generation will also want to push them offstage sexually. They will want to underline that they are the ones that everyone wants now (and they are and should be). So they will push their youth and sexuality.

I don't know any better than anyone else which exact aspects of their sexuality they will push but my guess is that they'll push the softness simply because the women of 2000-2010 were sooo hard. I'm guess their younger rivals will choose fabrics that drape over bodies that are soft in a youthful way—if you'll pardon the contradiction, they'll push bodies that are soft in a firm way. You can see it already in the hair but soon we'll see fabrics and cuts that fall across thighs and over breasts in just the right way too. And those breasts will be held in bras made of thinner, softer and more elastic fabrics that allow them to take something closer to their natural shape (and size).

I, for one, am looking forward to it. I always have and always will love each new generation.

Anniversary

I promised something about sex advice columns today but I've realized that I need to do a bit more research first so maybe next Thursday. There will definitely be something about young women and fashion tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it was my blog anniversary on December 11 and I did nothing to mark it.

The funny thing, to me anyway, about that is that I later decided my very first post wasn't good enough to be a first post and later went back and backdated two others. Looking at them now, the two backdated posts seem trite and fake and the first post stands up pretty well. There is a lesson there. I will paste it into the bottom of this message.



Meanwhile, here are the most popular posts in the history of the blog:

We're flawed because we want so much more

This is about a Mad Men episode from last September. It was neither the best episode nor my best post but I did predict a number of then upcoming plot points correctly. This is by far my most popular post with 18 people coming in to see it this week alone. I have no idea why.

One more try on the Phillipa Foot post

One of a series of posts wherein I try to explain why the trolley problem is not morally or intellectually serious. I'm not sure I succeeded but several hundred people have read it. (Or two or three people have read it a hundred times each.0

Somewhat related to my earlier post

One of the rare ocassions when I thought Ann Althouse's judgment was flawed.

666?

This post looks into and debunks theories about a weird "666" that appears in the background of a Mad Men shot.

The Silent Generation 

A post that is ostensibly about a mad men episode but was really me thinking about my father's generation.

To read the post click on "Read More" below: