The Fascinating Seventy Year-Old Virgin

The internet loves the news of the weird.  Apparently, a lot of web browsers are clicking over to a brief story about a seventy year-old virgin.  This isn’t that interesting at first blush, especially in light of the story from a few months ago about a woman who’d remained a virgin for over 100 years.  In the latter case, though, I got the impression that the woman may have simply been asexual.  She expressed an overall disinterest in sex and suggested that her longevity could be explained by her not concerning herself with that pursuit.  This seventy year-old woman who is in the news now, on the other hand, claims to have retained her virginity as a matter of moral commitment, as she doesn’t believe in sex before marriage, but never found a husband.

This story wouldn’t be that interesting except for the fact that by being limited to a one paragraph synopsis it opens up my mind to all sorts of speculation about the surrounding circumstances.  That speculation is made all the more intriguing by virtue of two unusual facts:  The woman, Pam Shaw, performed for many years as a cabaret singer, and she’s in the news now because she’s apparently hit her virginity’s breaking point at long last, being ready now to give it up to “a tall, dark, and handsome millionaire.”

This woman seems fascinating.  The image that I get is a tight bundle of lifelong contradictions.  I appreciate that because it’s something that I can relate to, even though there are aspects of it that I admire and aspects that I’m eager to criticize.  First the praise:  Good for her for maintaining her virginity amidst a career in which she was referred to as “The Sexational Pam,” in an industry in which loose attitudes about sex are presumably the recognized norm.

It’s a unique personality type that encourages a person to eschew particular experiences for herself at the same time that she flirts with the edges of those experiences and indulges an active curiosity about them.  As a deliberate virgin, and arguably an asexual, myself, I kind of want the life that she’s led.  I felt oddly comfortable when I had an opportunity to go to an art exhibit at an S&M parlor and when I followed a drunken friend into a pornography store.   So I applaud Ms. Shaw’s commitment to a strangely indulgent sort of chastity.

But here’s the thing that strikes me negatively about her story:  She spent, let’s say, fifty-five years maintaining a commitment to virginity on the basis of not believing in sex before marriage and now she’s announced her readiness to “take the plunge” if the interested part has enough money?  That seems like freakishly inconsistent morality.  Doesn’t the decision to trade virginity for a cash-rich lifestyle sort of betray the very sentiment behind Ms. Shaw’s lifelong chastity.  I would presume that if she didn’t believe in sex before marriage, she felt that love was more important than physical pleasure.  Am I to conclude that now at seventy years old she’d determined that money is more important than both?

On the other hand, I can understand the impulse underlying her statement.  The longer you retain something that requires consistent sacrifice, the more valuable in becomes to you.  Thus, even if you have decided that enough is enough, it can take an awful lot of incentive to push you to an actual breaking point.  It may be that after years of working so close to sex, and now approaching the end of her life, Ms. Shaw has simply decided that she wants to experience something that she’s denied herself for so long.  She probably feels that it can no longer be on the terms that she’d set, so instead she’s changing the terms, compromising the rigid morality in order to cease compromising the physical indulgence.

The woman has evidently lived her life amidst contradictions.  What’s one more?

My Contribution to the Obama Campaign

Last night, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign.  I didn’t do it because I believe in the transformative potential of a second term for the current president, or because I expect good things to come of an emphasis on small-donor contributions to political causes.  I didn’t even do it because I can afford it, because there’s some legitimate doubt about that, even at the three dollar level.

In fact, my donation wasn’t in answer to my conscience; it was in violation of it.  And given what three dollars might otherwise have bought, it was an irrational violation of my conscience.  That is characteristic of playing the lottery.  Yes, I donated three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign last night because that was the minimum amount and the deadline that allowed donors to be entered for a chance to win a trip to Los Angeles to have dinner with Barack Obama and George Clooney.

I put off the donation all the way to the last half-hour before the FEC fundraising deadline, because this involved a complex economic and ethical calculation for me.  It took until after 11:30 to hit that breaking point, but ultimately, I decided that even in the faces of virtually infinitesimal chances and the certainty of being left with a bad taste in my mouth, three dollars was well-worth the long shot of being chosen to be able to have a conversation with the president.  (I wouldn’t really care about meeting Clooney – I’d shake his hand and tell him I admire his body of work, but I want to talk to policymakers.)

The economic calculation was significantly influenced by what I know about the president.  The current occupant of the highest office in the land has an admirable sense of empathy, to the extent that he has been responsible for some instances of helping private citizens to get jobs when they had spoken to him of their difficulties.  He has also been known to occasionally write personal checks in response to letters detailing hardships which the president felt he had no other way of addressing in the moment.

I wrote about those facts in the past, and though they still impress me with regards to the kind of man that citizen Barack Obama is, as I expressed then, I don’t like what it says about him as an occupant of the presidential office.  And to be perfectly frank about my own motivations, I want to have dinner with President Barack Obama so I can exploit the ear of the man and criticize the actions and policies of the president.

Donating money to his campaign for the sake of a shot at dinner in L.A. constituted an ethical compromise for me, because I recognized that I was contributing to an unfortunate trend in American politics.  We complain a great deal about the influence of big money in campaigns and policy making, the quid pro quo involved.  But as with everything else, the broader tendencies, the impulses among the powerful, have their groundwork in private, on-the-ground attitudes.

Regardless of whether it relies on three dollar donations from across the country or one terrifyingly wealthy Super PAC, no campaign and no political apparatus should be set up to encourage people to contribute their resources to it in hopes that they will be delivered some personal reward in return.  And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

I didn’t donate my three dollars to the Barack Obama campaign because I believe that he represents my views and can be trusted to carry out the policies that I think would be legitimately best for the country as a whole; I did it in hopes of gaining access to the president so that I could try to influence his policies.  And more than that, I gave my money to the campaign in the interest of trying to influence a private individual to help me personally.

I want to have dinner with the president so that I can raise questions about his education policy, about the flawed common wisdom that government cannot create jobs, and about the victim-blaming rhetoric that dominates political explanations of joblessness, poverty, and loss.  But I want to have dinner with a man with a vast network of high-level connections so that I can impress upon him the desperation of my need for a decent job, the reality of my qualifications and talents, and the fact that nothing I do on my own can connect those thing to actual employment.

I know that there have been a handful of other people who have been in similar situations, found themselves in circumstances that allowed them to bend the ear of the president, and acquired job leads by virtue of his influence.  I think it’s wrong that anyone gets that chance, but the fact is that so long as someone does, I hope it’s me.

For the time being, money in politics is a reality that we have to work with.  But the money should follow the political causes, and the system that is accepted now by both parties and at all levels encourages money to precede politics and to demand that weakly malleable views on policy answer to purchased influence.  I doubt, though, that my three dollars will buy sufficient influence to demand that that system be questioned.

Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong

[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]

Skewed Financial Perspectives

There was a brief article put out by Yahoo! and Monster.com today, titled “Worst Paying College Degrees of 2011.” Followers of my blog will know that this is a topic that tends to get my dander up. I’ve already written fairly extensively on the methodological issues in assessing the value of particular majors, and the general problems involved in ranking them. The reason that this Monster article caught my attention is that it connects to a rather broader topic that’s been on my mind a good deal lately.

I was walking around another local street festival last weekend, where there was a arts and crafts show being held, populated by a variety of vendors presumably from the local area trying to sell a few instances of their hard work in order to support themselves through a livelihood about which they have a great deal of passion. In an environment like this, one presumes that the people you’re seeing must be struggling. It’s not necessarily a presumption based on careful observation. It’s a collective understanding that non-famous artists don’t make money from their art. I know that I was told that was the case all throughout my life. The term “starving artist” gets a lot of traction. I was also cautioned about the deficiency of money in my chosen profession. Writers don’t make much money, they said, and I’d have to be comfortable with that if I were to pursue that goal. I invariably told them that I was. But I also took them to mean that “not much” meant still being able to pay rent.

I’ve been to a lot of art shows and street fairs in my life, and it was only on this past Sunday that a certain line of inquiry triggered in my mind as I looked over the merchandise. Art’s not cheap. That fact applies not just to the price tag hanging off of a canvas or a sculpture, but to the various investments that go into its production. Every one of the people who were selling their work out on the streets of one of Buffalo’s suburbs had to have the capital for raw materials, printing costs, studio rental space, and such things as credit card machines. Every one of them had to have a couple hundred dollars just to purchase a slot as a vendor at the festival. But what really caught my attention as it never had before were some of the photography that was present. I’ve seen so much photography from far-flung places at the various outdoor shows, and it’s always been clear to me that the travel involved with acquiring and distributing beautiful foreign landscape shots required a great deal of money, at least by my standards. Looking over that work inspires me and yet makes me profoundly sad, because I certainly can’t go to witness its source first-hand, and in all likelihood I never will. But it was only this past Sunday that I attached the understanding of that relative affluence to the commonplace notion of the starving artist. When people say that artists don’t make any money, to what are they comparing their earnings?

As I think back on it, I realize I’ve encountered a skewed social perspective on wealth and poverty at every turn, all throughout my life. As a child I avidly read the annual almanacs, and I still remember looking through the figures for the median salaries of various professions. Teachers at that time apparently earned annual income in excess of thirty-five thousand dollars. Upon learning that information I was pointedly told that that wasn’t much money. And no, apparently it’s not much money by the standards of typical middle-class salaries, but it’s a goddamn lot compared to what a lot of people are earning, and any annual income I’ve acquired thus far.

I find that when people use phrases like “not much money,” they use it without a proper sense of proportion, an understanding of what that phrase means and what its use implies. When we discuss potential earnings or the outcome of a certain educational or career path, we tend to only start our assessment above a certain threshold. Thirty, forty, or fifty thousand dollars a year is conceived of as the low end of the spectrum for earnings, and salaries that approach and breach the poverty line are discounted altogether. That heavily skewed perspective allows us to talk about working artists as being in an ongoing struggle to keep their heads above water, even while they keep themselves in a strong enough financial position to support their art, often even traveling widely to create it, promote it, and sell it. That may not leave them with a heap of personal wealth at the end of the year, but describing anybody in such a position as struggling, or irresponsibly using the word “starving” trivializes the seriousness of genuine financial hardships in American society. Even saying that they make “not much money” is erroneous from the perspective of anyone on the bottom, and using that terminology belies one’s ability to genuinely empathize with the poor.

The same skewed perspective allows us to talk about the “worst-paying college degrees,” so as to suggest that people who acquire them and then actually obtain substantial employment in their field are paid badly. The Monster article lists the bottom ten disciplines, according to data from PayScale. The absolute lowest-paying item on that list is Child and Family Studies, which has a median starting salary of $29,600 and a mid-career median of $40,500. And if their data is to be taken seriously, the conclusion indeed ought to be that this is the “lowest-paying” degree, not the “worst-paying.” That may seem like a subtle difference, but it’s the difference between a quantitative observation of fact and a subjective statement as to the normative value of having a career that earns such a salary. Coming from his commonly skewed perspective, the author seems to be suggesting that those kinds of earnings will be part of a rather difficult life. But there are very many people who are craning their necks to look up at those sorts of earnings, and think that given their current situation, they could live quite comfortably in that range of incomes. I’m certainly one of them. And given that I have a degree that is not among the “worst-paying,” I’m tremendously embittered by the indications that by and large people in comfortable cross sections of American society are so poor at appreciating what they have.

Cash Only

The front page of Yahoo! grabbed my attention with a story titled “10 Reasons I’m Cancelling My Credit Cards,” a story which I was uncommonly thrilled to see. It’s not often that a piece featured on Yahoo! makes me applaud the author, especially when it is drawn from the personal finance section, but this is rare example of meaningful, forward-thinking advice being offered in a mainstream outlet, despite being against the so-called common wisdom.