More on STDs and promiscuity

I suggested a while ago, to some push back, that antibiotic-resistant STDs were going to shake up our sexual mores a bit. Here (h/t Instapundit) is more evidence:

Using nationally comprehensive vital statistics, this study found evidence that the era of modern sexuality originated in the mid to late 1950s. Measures of risky non-traditional sexual behavior began to rise during this period. These trends appeared to coincide with the collapse of the syphilis epidemic. Syphilis incidence reached an all-time low in 1957 and syphilis deaths fell rapidly during the 1940s and early 1950s. Regression analysis demonstrated that most measures of sexual behavior significantly increased immediately following the collapse of syphilis and most measures were significantly associated with the syphilis death rate. Together, the findings supported the notion that the discovery of penicillin decreased the cost of syphilis and thereby played an important role in shaping modern sexuality.

Sorta Political: the media party

The premier of Ontario has resigned only one year after winning re-election. He is not a terribly bad leader by Canadian standards but , let's be honest, when someone resigns one year into a four-year mandate it's not because things are going well.

He is not uniquely or unusually bad and and many of the problems on his watch predate his coming to power. They are also big, big problems. For the benefit of non-Canadians, Ontario has long been the economic powerhouse of Canada and it's now in serious decline. And the worst is yet to come. Dalton McGuinty might have been an okay premier had been elected at some other time but he just wasn't up to the challenge. And now he is gone.

But the really fascinating thing is the media response. Guy resigns suddenly and unexpectedly from a position where he has been embroiled in scandal. This is not a good news story. So how does the press respond? By asking him if he has plans to run for an even higher office:

When asked specifically if he was interested in the federal Liberal leadership race, Mr. McGuinty said he "has no plans whatsoever." However, he did not specifically rule out entering the race, insisting only that he has no plans beyond serving as premier until a new leader is in place.

Mr. McGuinty was pressed repeatedly on the federal leadership race but only smiled and said he has "no plans."

You'd think he'd been a great roaring success. And he wasn't. He leaves behind him a number of huge steaming piles that will take years if not a generation to clean up. The province is heavily in debt and the  structural debt looming in the future will be crushing. It's economy is in decline and the government has massive debts because of social services it cannot afford to deliver. Public education is a disaster and McGuinty made it worse and discouraged any efforts to make more alternatives to public schooling available to parents.

The media, faced with the failure of its darling, has simply refused to report on his failures. As if it wasn't real as if they didn't report it.

It's hard to figure out why the Canadian media are so enamoured of the Liberal party but they are and have been for decades now. It's not a left versus right thing. The media are unquestionably left of centre but that doesn't seem to drive this love story. It's primarily cultural. The media look at the Liberals and see "people like us".

And they are going down. People like them I mean.

Maybe it's much too early in the year ...

... but what are you doing starting New Year's Eve?

Here is one possibility:

2013: The Year of Reading Proust

2013 will be the year for reading—or re-reading—Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time.

The culture in Proust

When people read Proust in English, or when English-speaking people read him in French, one of the reasons they do so is an admiration for some quality they see in French culture. It because of a sense, as the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik once put it, that France produced the greatest common place culture ever.

This is probably less true today but if you went to France sometime in the last five decades you could see something most countries don't have today: a culture that runs deep. Everything—from the food people ate and the clothes they wore to the politics and history they argued about—drew from a shared culture that everyone participated in in a deep way.

A friend of mine and I saw a fascinating example of this in the late 1980s when we too some visitors from France to a restaurant in Chinatown. He took them there to give them an experience they couldn't have at home. He told them, what is quite true, that you simply cannot find the kinds of restaurant you can find in a North American Chinatown anywhere in Paris. And they loved the idea. They were looking forward to a new experience.

But the second they picked up the menus, they unconsciously set about transforming the meal into a French meal. They ordered not spring rolls but hors d'œuvres and they insisted on discussing and picking a wine that went with the main course. They were not disappointed but pitying when they learned that the restaurant had no cheese course to offer and stunned when they learned that coffee was unavailable said, with a tone of charity, "Oh well, we can have coffee elsewhere".

My friend was offended but I loved it. They weren't imperialistic about it. They didn't see themselves as imposing any judgments on anyone. They simply had this whole rich culture to draw on so they drew on it.

And the thing is they weren't cultured types. They were computer geeks here to talk about microchips. Think of it this way, you wouldn't be surprised if you met a computer geek from Cupertino who could was deeply interested in New Orleans cuisine but you'd treat him as unusual just as you would treat a computer geek who was deeply interested in new Orleans jazz. If, however, you found yourself treating a group of computer geeks at a conference who were a only together because they all happened to come from the United States, you'd be more than a little shock if they all shared the same deep interest and knowledge of a particular cuisine.

That is what France has that most other countries don't. And even other countries that have it, say Ireland, for example, don't have the depth and richness that France has.

That is a big part of the reason people from outside France read Proust. You get a detailed look at French culture at two levels. You get to see the aristocracy who were living their last gasp and you get a detailed look of the rising middle class who were seeking something like what the aristocracy had but also managing to create something new in the process.

You see this last in two women—Mme Verdurin and Odette de Crecy. The first is a member of the upper middle class, possessed of as much wealth but not the status of the aristocracy, who maintains a salon. Odette, on the other hand, is a courtesan who aspires to join the same social class as her lovers. And both largely succeed in their ambitions. (One of the biggest mistakes you can make in reading Proust is to disdain or hate particular characters, you must love them all to get this work.)

In order to show us their lives and their rise correctly, Proust must, and does, give us a highly detailed picture of their culture. As I've said before, it's a huge mistake to read Proust for his psychology. It has its moments to be sure, but, to paraphrase what Rossini said about Wagner, Proust's explorations of psychology does have some wonderful moments but it also has some terrible half hours. No, it is the outside account, the la belle epoque as you will find it nowhere else, that is the primary reason for reading this.

Cocktail #1: The White Lady

I was in the liquor store today and noticed that they'd stocked a whole bunch of Lillet and wondered why for a moment. Then it hit me, there is a new Bond film coming, which means that every poseur in creation will be buying Lillet and making that God-awful cocktail Bond drinks. An antidote was needed and here it is (the first of a series).

According to some sources anyway, this was Somerset Maugham's favourite cocktail. So let us read some Maugham to get in the mood.

One of the many inconveniences of real life is that it seldom gives you a complete story. Some incident has excited your interest, the people who are concerned in it are in the devil's own muddle, and you wonder what on earth will happen next. Well, generally nothing happens. The inevitable catastrophe you foresaw wasn't inevitable after all, and high tragedy, without any regard to artistic decency, dwindles into drawing-room comedy. Now, growing old has many disadvantages, but it has this compensation (among, let us admit, not a few others), that sometimes it gives you the opportunity of seeing what was the outcome of certain events you had witnessed long ago. You had given up the hope of ever knowing what was the end of the story, and then, when you least expected it, it is handed to you on a platter.

Love that stuff. It's from a story called "The Romantic Young Lady". Maugham wrote great short stories and some novels that are good enough if you are willing to put the efforts into them. As a result, he is not read much anymore.

As you can see in the above, every line, every word in Maugham is doing real work. There are no sections where you can just coast along. That's good in a short story but less so in a longer work. Drinking a White Lady is sort of like that. There is a certain thrill that comes from saying, "I'll have another white lady please," but this is a cocktail for those who want just one before dinner.

How to make it? Well, there are four ingredients:

Gin
Cointreau
Lemon juice
Egg White 

I've decorated mine with a nasturtium.

I'm not saying anything about proportions because it's best not to know if you want to learn how to make cocktails right. Roughly speaking, more gin than anything else, no more than half as much Cointreau as gin and less of each ingredient as you go down the list. Experiment and figure out what tastes best. Learn to trust your own taste and, most important, educate your sentiments such that you change the recipe as you learn more about the art of living.

Put all ingredients, except the flower, in a cocktail shaker and shake it hard until the outside of the shaker is cold enough that it hurts to hold it. The whole point of shaking is to chill the drink not mix it. That's why you have to shake hard.

A couple of caveats.

1. The final result should be tart. How tart is up to you but on no account should this cocktail taste sweet. If you look the oldest recipes, they made them really tart—it was a drink to make you pucker up.
2. Dried egg whites don't work. It's the real thing or nothing. You can substitute a small dollop of cream. Not so much that you can taste cream but more so that it changes the colour and texture of the drink. However, the cream will tend to separate so you will have to swirl it around occasionally as you drink it.

A little light culture: Jenny McCarthy's hot dog

Did you hear about this? Ms. McCarthy has a book out and in it she says she and two friends made a trip for spring break with hardly any money and that, along the way, she did the "worst thing" she ever did for $20. She pointedly did not specify what that worst thing was in the book however.

Okay, let's pause a moment here. Anyone care to take a wild guess what a teenage girl might have done for gas money that she later describes as the worst thing she ever did? Are you thinking maybe she held her breath until she turned blue? That she deliberately stepped on the sidewalk cracks? That she ate a spider on a dare?

Me neither.

Next step, do you think that maybe a woman with a long-established reputation as a shameless exhibitionist maybe left the question unanswered in her book precisely because she wanted to be asked to explain further on television?

When she was (inevitably) asked she said, "I ate a truck stop hot dog," for the twenty bucks.

Now, here is the real stretcher: the guy who asked her, some dweeb named "Billy Bush", then goes through an elaborate act of pretending he doesn't get the allusion. And then he looks shocked, like he didn't see this, if you'll pardon the expression, coming.

I mention all this because I want to make it clear that the whole thing was a set up. Everyone already knew that McCarthy had committed some act of prostitution. And everyone knew that she was just being coy in not revealing the final detail until she was on television. And everyone knew she'd wet her panties in gleeful anticipation of the moment when she got to tell the whole world that she'd once sold herself for twenty bucks to fill the gas tank of the car she and her friends were driving. (Probably literally wet her panties as she is an exhibitionist.)

All of which means that our host Billy Bush had already thought about, and probably practiced, his reaction and response. So what did he say to her?

I just want you to know something – you’re worth more than $20.

Yup folks, that is today's pop culture. Confronted with the revelation that the young starlet once committed an act of prostitution, Billy Bush plumbed the moral depths and told her she didn't charge enough.

The thing is she probably charged just the right amount. In terms of pure monetary value, a blowjob is worth the price of filling a gas tank.  Just a few years later, she posed nude for Playboy for $20k. Is this later development in her story morally different because her price went up? She could. of course, have charged much more for the blowjob too on the grounds that she was "Jenny McCarthy" but she wasn't that yet, just plain old Jenny McCarthy. (The other thing is that some of us prefer not to think of such things in terms of monetary value but of love—as a loving gesture one person does for another.)

I doubt very much that Jenny McCarthy needed that twenty bucks that badly. I suspect that she needed the validation more. She needed to know she was attractive enough and daring enough to pull this off. As the price of mutually satisfying some want, she and her truck-driving accomplice both got exactly what they wanted.

And now every truck driver who purchased oral sex for twenty bucks some time in the late 80s, early 90s is getting a secret thrill at the thought that maybe it was Jenny McCarthy who serviced him at the service station. And the thrill is for free and it is with "Jenny McCarthy" now and not some anonymous teenager. But still no love. And I don't think the truck driver in question could get a repeat performance now. If he has, as it were, rock solid proof that it was him, he could probably sell his story to some journalist and use that money to buy the services of a whole lot of budding Jennys. But I suspect that "recreating the moment" while thinking "it really was her" is probably thrilling enough for a lot of guys, most of whom never paid for anyone's hot-dog-consumption services at a truck stop or anywhere else.

I also doubt very much that what Ms. McCarthy did is terribly rare. I don't mean the trivial fact that prostitution is common. I mean rather that I suspect that just about every girl does something sexual that she thinks of as "the worst thing" she ever did only she doesn't feel any shame at all about it. It won't be prostitution in most cases. But it is something that she likes to think of as the sort of thing she never guessed she was capable of. 

The overall context matters a whole lot here. If McCarthy was a hooker promoting a book about her years of  hard life and drug use and how she finally broke free that anecdote would have a whole other sense. It matters a whole lot that she got away with it. Most girls do something wild only once, or twice, or three times, or four at the max because most girls know that the odds will eventually catch up to you. Most girls also know that it stops being wild and thrilling if you do it too much and too much comes a lot faster than you would guess.

That said, most girls would brag about it if the circumstances were right and she could trust the person she tells it to react the the way she hopes. She even wants the same reaction McCarthy got (only from a much more exclusive audience)—that we pretend we're so shocked when we're obviously thrilled.

On being manipulative

A friend sent me a link this morning to an article about "managing your social media personality". She didn't really send it to me so much as she sent it to everyone who is linked to her through LinkedIn.

The gist of the article was that you shouldn't use social media solely to promote your business interests. That you should also let your personal interests show through so that people get a sense of the whole you.

And you should do this because ... wait for it ... then your efforts to promote your business interests will be more effective!

I don't mention this because I think it's especially or obscenely manipulative, although that is clearly what it is. No, it's that it is so casually manipulative. It seems to have never occurred to the woman who wrote the article that this is manipulation. She seems utterly unaware of any moral dimension beyond the effectiveness of what she promotes.

There is nothing wrong with being manipulative. The other day I went to the bank and the woman I dealt with made friendly chatter and based on what I told her while we chatted she casually mentioned a service the bank offered that might be of use to me. That is manipulation and it is, as far as I'm concerned, perfectly fine.

Kissing and hugging someone so they will get aroused is manipulation too and a darn good thing. If married couples only had sex when they were both spontaneously in the mood at the same time all marriages would be doomed. Wives and husbands have a duty to manipulate one another into having sex.

Maybe you'd prefer some other word that didn't seem so harsh as "manipulate"? But harshness is our friend here because it forces us to be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. Getting someone enthused about something is serious business and you can hurt them. Having to recognize that you are being manipulative when you do these things—when you dress, and talk and act in certain ways—is to recognize that you are doing this to them.

The danger is when we are casually manipulative. When we don't think of any higher needs.

One of the most important books in my life is, as I have mentioned before, After Virtue. One of the points that MacIntyre makes is that if moral argument is entirely about personal preferences then all moral argument is simply moral manipulation. That is the problem with broadening your social media personality to include more than business. We need truth. Not "the truth" because no one can be sure of having that.

We are always trying to change outcomes. We are always trying to manipulate others to do some things and not do others. Even when we decide to consciously step aside so someone else make up their own mind, we do so because we think they should be making up their own mind; we are manipulating them into thinking for themselves. This can be done for the most selfish of reasons. I can encourage Trish to learn how to use the database because I think it will help her in her career but I can also do it so she will be grateful to me and have sex with me. I can even do it because I just don't like Trish and I'm fed up with having to talk to her every time she needs help. Both these reasons can be good reasons. Seduction has its purposes and being seduced can be very good for someone. It's also perfectly justifiable to make efforts to reduce occasions that cause you pain. But these are only good reasons if I honestly consider that I am doing something to Trish in both circumstances so that I confront the moral dimension of what I am doing.