A little light culture: Should you answer that booty call?

File this one under the long list of if-women-are-doing-so-well-why-do-we keep-seeing-stuff-like-this posts.

Instapundit linked to a piece called "Five reasons to answer that booty call" yesterday. Just read what the people who claim to be promoting purely recreational sex as a good thing have to say for it:

It's 2 a.m., and you still haven't heard from him. You wait to wash the makeup from your face hoping to see your phone light up with a text from him, begging you to come over. You want to look hot, like you've had the night of your life. You don't want to reveal that you've spent all evening wondering if you're going to hear from him or not.

And then, like clockwork, he sends a text "What r u doing?" 

Okay, let's think this one through. She doesn't have a date. She already knew she wasn't going to have a date before the night began. So did she make alternative plans to go out with friends, watch some video, catch up on her reading, wash her hair, call her mother and chat? No she didn't. Instead she got all dressed up as if she had a date and sat around all night just in case he texted. And we know that this is a regular occurrence in her life as indicated by the words "like clockwork".

The guy meanwhile DID have plans and he was too busy with whatever they were until two in the morning when he found himself having to choose between just masturbating or texting her.

If this were you, would you be thinking, "I am one of life's winners!"

This first appeared at GALTIME: A Gal's Guide to Love and Life and they want you to think that you are doing just fine if this is you. In fact, they are counting on this piece pulling women into their site because a lot of women will read that opening and identifying with it. And they are right for reasons I'll get to below.

The piece is the work of  "Tyger Danger", who seems to be a real person. Now your first thought may be to simply dismiss this stuff as irrelevant but there is big money in it. Not for poor Tyger, Tyger burning not so bright (she says her mother was  William Blake fan), whose website makes it pretty obvious she needs work, but the owners of the website are doing very well out of it as are a number of nearly identical sites such as YourTango and The Frisky. (Incidentally, all these sites feature a significant portion of feminist content, which is meant to function like the articles in Playboy used to.)

But the thing is that these websites are based on some pretty deep insights into human nature. If you didn't do something desperate and stupid in search of the chance to be with someone sometime, then you probably aren't human. Even as you get older there will be odd times beyond that when you find yourself alone and lonely and desperately needing some sort of sexual contact, even just someone to flirt with, that you will consider letting your standards go. But when did it become a good idea to promote actually letting go to women as good for them?

The booty call is as old as time. It's late, you're looking for some action, and then he rings. If you're looking to mix things up and you have your expectations set right, you may be interested in a night of sex without strings. 

Well, actually, there was a time when the vast majority of women would have considered it demeaning to answer a booty call and most people still alive today are old enough to remember that era as it was still true in the 1980s!

There's a telling phrase in the bit I quoted above: "if you have your expectations set right".  Setting your expectations correctly is an important part of success in life. We might wonder, however, if there are any other concerns that might apply. With the right "expectations" a girl might, for example, become a call girl. That way she could be sure of male company and sex every night.

(The second of the five reasons the article gives for answering that booty call is "To Save Money: When there's no dinner and a movie involved, there's no cost. It's a great way to save money for you frugal people out there". Hell, why stop with just saving when you could make money?)

But the real lesson is in the tail, reason number 5:

There's No Peer Pressure: If your girl or guy is anything less than a "hotly," [sic] who cares? With a booty call, there's no worry about being seen by your friends with someone who may be less than ideal. 

 Think about that for a while because it's based on a very deep understanding of human nature. It matters a whole lot to us what other people think about the people we have sex with. It often matters far more to us than it does to those other people. Weird isn't it? Our standards for who we'd have sex with are actually much lower than our standards for what we would like others to think about us based on who we'd be willing to have sex with.

The status question is even more complicated than that for women because there are guys they might like to have sex with even though he doesn't particularly care for or value her. And the limiting factor here, the thing that might make her stop, is that others might think she is making a joke of herself by putting out for this guy even though he doesn't care for or value her. There is a difference, between letting yourself be being used when nobody knows you've done this and being used when others might find out.

BTW: Think of how much of the content of sexual fantasies is driven by this sort of thing. That strikes me as perfectly fine. I can even see how a woman might do herself some good by, once or twice in her life, actually live a fantasy out by having casual sex with a guy who just happens to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and how this could be good for her, how it could become a cherished memory and an experience that makes her feel good about herself. But if you are on call at two AM, all made up and wearing your nicest dress and underwear just in case he texts you with a booty call, you're making yourself into a loser.

And there are other ways she might think about resetting her expectations. She might reset them to value how a potential partner treats her and how she treats herself more than the real or imagined status that comes from being seen on a guy her peers will envy. She might even wonder if her concerns about what others will think isn't really driven by something deeper than simply what others will think; that maybe there are some higher moral standards driving her fears about being watched and judged that transcend status in the eyes of her peers.

Waugh's Rossetti book

I've finished it now. It's uneven. There are bits, especially when Waugh moves from straight narrative to critical analysis that are weak enough to justify his embarrassment. But it's a treasure trove for Brideshead fans. Here are three examples.

1. In Brideshead we get Collins' refulation of modern aesthetic theory:

Collins had exposed the fallacy of of modern aesthetics to me: '... the whole argument from Significant Form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cézanne to represent a third dimension on his two dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel's eye'...

In Rossetti we get not the same argument but one that closely parallels it. Waugh defends the literary quality of Rossetti's painting. What he means by that is that Rossetti's paintings often refer to some "literary" moment. This need not be to some particular existing bit of literature but just the sense that there is some story behind the image. Our grasp of Rossetti's painting The Beloved, for example, to some extend depends on our grasping that this is a painting of a bride and her attendant women.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Roger Fry would have us look at a painting like that oblivious of any content and merely study the form. Our considering that this is a woman, that she is a bride, that she is not any bride but the bride from the Song of Songs et cetera would, in Fry's view, only cheapen our appreciation, would make it impure. That is what Waugh means by literary painting. With that background, you can see how this argument from the Rossetti book is very close to what Collins says in Brideshead:

It seems to me that the defence for 'literary' painting, if defence is needed—and not only for Rossetti, but for the sermonising of Hunt and even the chattiness of Frith—lies in the very word used in its condemnation. Why of the Arts should literature alone be expected to be 'impure'? Why, because we are accustomed to expressing our daily wants in words, shall poetry be allowed to traffic with other emotions besides the aesthetic emotion? If I may legitimately be frightened by The Ancient Mariner, why may I not also be by Wiertz?

2. At the very end of the Rossetti book Waugh condemns Rossetti and then finds some sort of special inspiration at work in him.

There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organization about all that he did. ...

... The problem is that here and there in his life he seems, without ever feeling it, to have transcended this inadequacy in a fashion that admits of no glib explanation. ... so Rossetti's art, at fitful moments, flames into the exquisite beauty of Beata Beatrix. It is the sort of problem that modern aesthetics does not seem capable of coping with.

A bit earlier he says,

The truth, as has been suggested before, is that Rossetti was unrestrained, as no artist of importance had been before, by any adequate system either devised by himself or imposed on him by convention. He was guided entirely by his own momentary preferences for a face or piece of patterned stuff, and by those of his clients, but there was in him errant and erring, streak of the purest genius, and it is typical that his next work ... [Emphasis added]

Let's leave his next work on hold for a moment and return to Brideshead and Charles' description of his experience painting Marchmain House just before it's destruction:

I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberative painter; that afternoon and all the next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palate; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.

That is a painter who is very like Rossetti in some ways. Charles has an errant and erring streak of genius. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it leads him to produce good art, other times it leads him to South America.

3. Saving the most obvious parallel for last, there is the next work from above, the Beata Beatrix:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Waugh quotes Rossetti describing his painting,

"You will remember how Dante dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her [Beatrice's] death ..."

That probably feels familiar to anyone who has read Brideshead. Dante quotes a passage from the Lamentations of Jeremiah and Rossetti had these words carved into the frame of the Beata Beatrix:

Quomodo sedet sola civitas! 'How doth the city sit solitary that was so full of people; how she is become a widow that was great among the nations.'

In the novel, after sitting watching Charles paint Marchers, Cordelia describes the chapel that is no longer a chapel using the same quotation.

"... I stayed there until he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't a chapel theer any more, just an oddly decorated room, I can't tell you what it felt like. You've never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?"

"Never."

"well, if you had, you'd know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas ... it's a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it."

Of course, Charles is also a very different painter. His passion turns to buildings and the reasons they were built. Rossetti, and I'm with him on this, always turns to women.

Neo noir Thursdays: The Long Goodbye

It's the lazy, hazy days of summer again and that means neo noir. Well, actually, not quite neo noir. This movie tends in that direction but it hasn't got it quite. It mostly hasn't got it because Robert Altman didn't mean for it to. He came not to praise Chandler but to bury him. Unlike Antony, he meant no irony in that. He really didn't get Chandler. Neither did screenwriter Leigh Brackett. But, despite his best efforts, the movie, as Roger Ebert put it, almost works. And the parts that almost work are magic. It's because of films like this that other, smarter directors saw the way to making real neo noir.

So it's a good place to start.

The good starts with the title song. Musically it's lame which, given that it was written by John Williams, is what you'd expect. But Johnny Mercer, a man's man, wrote the lyrics and there is just enough of the old magic there to make it worthwhile.



He started with the title and then he proved it. One of the things the movie does right is to use this song throughout in a series of different arrangements, each appropriate to the setting.

The movie begins with a long but brilliant sequence in which Eliot Gould as Philip Marlowe is portrayed as pussy whipped. Don't get excited. he is whipped by the four-legged kind of pussy. His cat will eat only one kind of food and he runs out in the middle of the night. This is very 1970s but has nothing to do with Marlowe. It is, as I say, a brilliant sequence, but it has no place in this movie. It's not just that it isn't in the book, it's completely out of character for Marlowe.

He also lives next door to a bunch of drug-taking women who do yoga in the nude. That's also very 1970s and uttertly pointless.

But, as Marlowe is on his way out past the nude neighbour chicks on his way to try to find the only cat food his finicky cat will eat, something magical happens. He puts his tie on. Marlowe, the romantic, the devotee of chivalry and moral standards, puts his tie on to go an all-night grocery store. And here we have the theme of the movie. Marlowe the old-fashioned guy still believing in old-fashioned virtues.

Robert Altman means for us to see this and think Phillip Marlowe is a ridiculous, outdated figure. But he achieves the opposite. Nowadays, Altman looks like the guy who represents values that have stopped making sense. Marlowe, on the other hand, is timeless.

And that is why it almost works. The magnificent thing aboput this movie is Marlowe the anachronism floating through 1970s Los Angeles in a way that is emant to demonstrate that he doesn't fit, doesn't make sense any mote. But oh how he does. Here, for example, is his car.

The other thing that is going for this movie is the entire history of Hollywood. Catch this shot, for example:

A man walks into a bar. Shot brilliantly by Vilmos Zsigmond. Go ahead and click on that and see it full size. You could be in that bar seeing the man's face lit that way because the door is open and the bright outdoor light in on him.

The thing is, as I have said before, those places were still around in the 1970s. "Those things" being the artifacts of a certain manly way of living. They were fast disappearing and would completely disappear if it were up to guys like Altman. But they were still there. Traces of the manly thing we were all nostalgic for were all around us.

Marlowe's drink choice is interesting, "CC and Ginger". That's a highball with Canadian Club. A good choice. In the book Marlowe drinks gimlets and makes a big thing of it. Canadian Club was probably picked here because Altman thought it represented the past. (I'd have one right now only I've already had a couple of Mai Tais to celebrate the fourth of July.)

Almost works!
Here is why the movie fails. Altman thinks he is making a brilliant critique of Chandler but failed to notice that Chandler had already made the critique himself. Chandler had had to rethink Marlowe before writing this book. He'd had to do that because Mickey Spillane had written a book called I, The Jury in which a private eye in the Marlowe tradition named Mike Hammer literally acts as judge, jury and executioner. The book was everything Chandler despised. But here is the problem: Marlowe is a guy who makes things right, seeks justice and is willing to go outside the law to do it. To a point anyway.

Okay, so what is the difference between Marlowe and Hammer? The first Hammer book was published in 1947. The Long Goodbye  was published six years later. It's Marlowe's attempt to draw the line between the two characters.

Is at a good attempt? Well, it isn't perfect but I think it's a pretty good shot at it. Altman, however, doesn't even see it. He is so blissfully unaware of the deeper issues of the book that he can't see it. In this movie, Marlowe himself ends up acting as judge, jury and executioner. You couldn't get it wrong more profoundly than that.

The problem is not that Altman isn't smart enough to have seen it. The problem is that he was too busy being cute to even bother looking. Watch it yourself and see if you don't agree.

And so to bed.

I sense a theme for the day

Over at The New York Times, Kurt Andersen is bummed out about liberty:

What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won. 

What got him started on this was a question asked at, I'm not making this up, the Woodstock  Writers Festival:

Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm, with old-school free-market ideas gaining traction all the time? 

Like Rebecca Traister, Andersen's argument is all based on a rhetorical trick. He paints the pursuit of self fulfillment as selfishness*, thereby hoping to shame you into surrender.

But there is a whole other way out of this and that is to focus on virtue. Not all paths to self-fulfillment are equal. As a consequence, the  pursuit of happiness can be the doorway to virtue.



By the way: look at that list of "victories" and think about it for a while.

*ADDED: Catch this from Andersen,

The document we’re celebrating today says in its second line that axiomatic human rights include “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” — individualism in a nutshell.  

I think he actually might believe that.

Sorta political: This question isn't going away

My title is the journalist's favourite threat. What it really means is, "We are going to keep asking this question because we know it's hurting you." Thus the New York Times keeps finding ways to do stories about Mormonism.

But what happens when a question that journalists wish would just go away keeps coming back? For instance, "Can women have it all?" Even if you think it's a stupid question, and I sympathize if you do, the damn thing keeps coming back and that is significant.

To really grasp what is at issue you have to scale the question back. Because the people who ask it don't really mean "have it all". What they mean is that they want personal fulfillment in three areas. And everyone knows what they are. Here, for example, is Rebecca Traister responding to the Slaughter piece that most recently asked the question that won't go away:

After all, if feminism is supposed to provide women with complete fulfillment, and allow them to have it all, then anyone who’s less than fully pleased by her lot – who works long hours, struggles to pay bills, spends more hours over dirty dishes than her mate, who’s guilty about missing her kid’s play or her business partner’s PowerPoint, who feels tugged in ways that she perceives her husband does not – is not simply experiencing firsthand the ways in which sexism, the economic divide, the wage gap and patriarchal models for public and personal life persist. She’s not even simply experiencing the human condition of dissatisfaction and yearning.

 What I want to call your attention to is the thing Traister takes for granted. Because there are a whole lot of things that might make up personal fulfillment but Traister knows that the issue is really about three things. And you can see them in that paragraph: career, children, husband.

And could I remind you that there is an even easier argument to make here than the one Traister makes. Because feminism was never supposed to be about those things. Go back and read the manifestos that early second wave feminists wrote and you'll see that none of those three things mattered very much. Career? Second wave feminists were radicals. They wanted to remake the capitalist system. Children? They wanted to free women from the sense that having children was necessary for fulfillment. Husband? Another "need" the founders of feminism wanted to free women from.

That we got to where we are was the result of a compromise: feminists needed to win women over and women weren't listening to Shulamith Firestone talking about the "dialectic of sex" and the dangers of over populating the planet and the need to free women from childbearing. So some feminists switched tactics and started listening to women and found that the sacred triumvirate of career, children and husband was what women wanted. Only not necessarily in that order!

Thus it was that feminism started focusing on changing the office, the family and marriage.

So guys, sit back and relax: this isn't our problem. We didn't create it and we can't solve it. This is a debate that women are having with other women about what fulfillment for women is and what it should be.

Again, read the Traister piece carefully and you can see that she knows this. She wants the question to go away, so she mocks the women asking it but, in so doing, inadvertently makes it clear what the question is really about:

What does “having it all” even mean? Affordable childcare or a nanny who speaks Mandarin? Decent school lunches or organic string cheese? A windowed office or a higher minimum wage? Public transportation that reliably gets you to work or a driver who will whisk you from kindergarten dropoff in time for the board meeting? Does it mean never feeling stress or guilt? Does it mean feeling satisfied all the time?

Good questions. But if you stop mocking for a moment, it will quickly become obvious that overcoming stress and guilt so they can feel satisfied is the thing that concerns most women. To make it all go away, Traister is just pulling a cheap rhetorical trick here in inflating one side to the point it seems ridiculous. "How dare you complain the caviar is too salty while other women are working for minimum wage!" Meanwhile, the woman reading her piece is actually sitting at her desk in her cubicle eating a tasteless, and slightly damp, sandwich she picked up at the place downstairs and feeling guilty that she isn't working, guilty because her child is struggling at school and she can't help her, and worrying that her husband is dissatisfied with their sex life because she is so stressed out she can't do anything more than go through the motions.

And there is the problem for feminism: affordable childcare, school lunches, minimum wage and public transit are abstract issues for the college-educated, career women who are most likely to support feminism. But feeling secure and loved, having and raising children who can also succeed, and working at a job where they will feel they are doing something productive and useful and where they feel that their work is respected by others matters a whole lot.

And all Traister can do is try to distract them by, wait for it, making them feel guilty for daring to want what they want for themselves.

It is a trap, a setup for inevitable feminist short-fall. Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the “have it all” formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism – as opposed to persistent gender inequity – that’s to blame.

It's irresponsible to conflate "liberation with satisfaction"? Really? Here is the question: could any sort of liberation that didn't bring satisfaction be worth it? Hey feminism, you told women that you could revolutionize their lives, do you really believe, even for a second, that they didn't take that to mean you'd enable them, as individuals, to lead more fulfilling lives?






PS: From the archives,

There is a hilarious video below of the Rolling Stones lipsynching and miming there way through a recording of Satisfaction. Watch it but listen to the lyrics carefully and ask yourself, is Mick describing a male experience or a female one? Whoops, doesn't make sense. It is obviously meant to be male but I mean is it convincingly male? Did men in 1965 worry how white their shirts could be? The ads at the time about white shirts were aimed at women not men. I think that whatever the surface meaning, the song really comes off more convincing as a description of a woman's experience. I think that is why only the Rolling Stones could have had a hit with this in 1965. A male singer whose sexuality was less ambiguous than Mick's would have come off sounding like a loser.

Slow brain day

Yesterday was a holiday here, thus no posts.

But I got a comment on an old post that had me heated up for a while. The comment started with a brief compliment and then said that I'd made numerous spelling and punctuation errors. Well, I do make my share, so I started reviewing it. And found there was only one typo and one repeated word in a fairly long post. Punctuation is harder to judge as there are different schools on comma use and an awful lot of people have simply been taught incorrectly. Again, although I do make punctuation mistakes pretty regularly, there just weren't enough mistakes in the piece to justify the comment.

Anyway, I was just about to get huffy about it when I noticed that the commenter had signed himself "Bo Gus". Normally, I delete trolls but I'll let that one stand for having a sense of humour about himself.

Waugh's Rossetti book ...

... is finally available again. This is cause for celebration among Brideshead fans everywhere.

Rossetti: His Life and Works was Waugh's first book. It was published because Waugh had a connection to a publisher through Anthony Powell. Waugh had no special qualifications to write the book and it is highly unlikey that he would have been chosen to write it without that connection. Even within the circle of Waugh and Powell's friends there were several people better qualified to write the book.

Not surprisingly, Waugh was embarrassed by the work once his career was established he never allowed it to be printed again.

But now Penguin is setting about publishing the complete Waugh and volume one is the Rossetti book. I got an electronic copy.

It's better than you would think reading Waugh's own assessment of the book. It's not the best book if you want to know about Rossetti but you won't go far wrong in reading it either.

And it is a great book if you want to know how the young Waugh thought about aesthetics and art. And that is something really useful if you want to deepen your understanding of Brideshead Revisited.

Anyone who has read Brideshead more than once will have noticed that there is an aesthetic argument underlying the whole thing. When Charles says he went from the puritan asceticism of Ruskin to that of Fry, he (and Waugh) are assuming a whole language, a language that is drawn from aesthetic arguments from Waugh's youth.

Short version, Waugh didn't like the moderns but he didn't like classicism either. He liked art that was passionate and Rossetti was a key figure in the story for him. He doesn't revere Rossetti but he sees something very right about him. And Rossetti was clearly a major figure in Waugh's artistic development.

I'm on the second last section but I can already concluded that this book is well worth the time of anyone who loves Brideshead.