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?

California: Teaching Discrimination Through Good Intentions

Shortly after I heard about the new California law mandating the teaching of gay and lesbian contributions to history, I heard that it had passed largely along party lines, and then it was pointed out that many Republicans objected to the bill on the grounds that it required the teaching of subject matter that “many parents may disapprove of.” Really? That was the primary argument against it? The opposition didn’t discuss the bill’s possible effects on the quality of education? No one objected to it on the grounds that it cheapens the presentation of history, or that it ridiculously supplants existing laws against discrimination in textbooks and teaching? No one thought to consider how the law would be enforced, and argue against it on the basis that it might make the writing and publication of decent textbooks substantially harder by cluttering them with absurdly irrelevant content? The major argument against a law mandating that educators reference the sexual orientation of contributors to history and that they leverage in such persons where such contributions are not evident or sexual orientation is not known was that it might make some people uncomfortable?

After signing the bill into law, Governor Jerry Brown remarked that “history should be honest.” Well, no kidding. I heartily agree, and so I’m genuinely curious as to whether Governor Brown really believes that the best way to make history honest is to impose artificial requirements onto what must be taught in any given subject. You see, in my view, whether the cause is noble or not, mandating a specific narrative in history is not honest education, it’s propaganda. By contrast, laws preventing discrimination in education, like the one that has just been overturned, are better positioned to promote honest education, because far from imposing a narrative on history, they work to prevent any such imposition. I’m an extremely liberal guy, but I don’t think it’s any more beneficial to skew the presentation of history in favor of my worldview than it is to skew it in the opposite direction. There are two roughly equivalent ways of limiting children’s understanding of history: You can gloss over aspects of it that don’t fit the rhetorical narrative you want to convey, or you can wedge in elements that do, regardless of their actual significance, historical relevance, or unbiased truth.

The unfortunate truth about American history is that property-owning, married white guys have always held a hell of a lot of power. As a consequence, though, they’ve done a lot of great stuff. That shouldn’t be grounds for blacks children, gay children, poor children, or girls to conclude that their role in history yet to be written won’t be just as significant, but I think there are better ways to convey that belief than by making such efforts to demonstrate the role of people like them in history that they impair their understanding of the progress that society has made.

I’m not implying that there haven’t been enormous contributions to history from gays and lesbians, or any number of other minorities. Certainly there have been, but presenting a particular kind of agent of history should never take precedence over simply presenting history as we understand it to have happened. The sexual orientation of a particular historical personality is usually not relevant unless, say, their historical contribution is in the area of gay rights. The sexual orientations of many historical figures are simply not known. Will California teachers and textbooks now be expected to go out of their way to assert that this long-dead person or that might possibly have been gay, or will they have to search all the back pages of history to find those who we know were? There is plenty of speculation that Abraham Lincoln and William Shakespeare were gay, but there is no way to retroactively prove that assertion, and besides, it doesn’t really matter.

In light of that, this new law is in danger of having the opposite of its intended effect. Specifically delineating the contribution of gays and lesbians – as if they stand in contrast to normal people – only serves to solidify the impression that they are a separate class of people, with their own culture and history, which the government must officially force into the existing narrative. But within a narrative that prohibits exclusion of any class of people without decreeing that they must be represented regardless of the extent or clarity of their contribution, it doesn’t matter whether a person was gay or straight if he signed the Magna Carta or fought in the Civil War, it just matters that he contributed to history. If we avoid discrimination, rather than teaching to it we can present historical figures simply as people, not as sub-classes thereof. And then any child in the classroom, whether gay or straight, white or black, can believe that he or she too might play a similarly powerful role in history, because he or she is just as human as they were.

Andrej-yny

I’ve just read about the fashion model Andrej Pejic, a fascinating story of glamorous androgyny.  Pejic’s particularly notable claim to fame is now having been ranked number ninety-eight on FHM’s list of the 100 Sexist Women in the World, in spite of being a man.  I already commented on last month’s Maxim Hot 100 list, and called attention to the masculine features of their number one pick.  But in that case, I used the observation to make fun of meatheads and their repressed homosexuality.  The case of Andrej Pejic and FHM, however, speaks to something deeper.  After all, since Pejic is identifiably male, the readers who voted him in had to be conscious of the impulses driving their decision.  Either significant numbers of FHM readers believe that the shape of a model’s genitalia does not affect the attractiveness of his or her feminine features, or they voted Pejic in as a joke of some sort, or else a bunch of frat boys genuinely didn’t know the gender of the person they were looking at and have spent the entire time since the release of the magazine trembling in horror and confusion.

Ladies' Night

A friend of mine made the very poor decision to go see The Hangover II yesterday. She later pointed out to me that apart from her brother and two other young men, the entire audience was female, the vast majority of them adolescents. That got me wondering over what the reason for that demographic appeal would be, and as I considered the point I recalled watching the DVD special features accompanying a season of the FX series Rescue Me. In an interview, one of the show creators relayed that a number of female fans of the show said that they watched it primarily for the sake of the all-male firehouse discussions that take place regularly, because they thought this would give them some earnest insight into what men talked about when women weren't around, and consequently how they thought.

I wonder if a similar impulse could be at play in the minds of young women who decide to attend a showing of a film that follows three men after a night of wild debauchery and forfeited inhibitions. In particular, this case would be an audience of teenaged girls on the cusp of adulthood watching a movie about adult males, ostensibly stripped to their most basic characterization.

I'm not saying that I believe this is why my friend observed the audience demographics that she did. I haven't considered the matter very closely, and I don't know whether her experience was anomalous or not. What I am prepared to say, though, is that if these were the factors at play, it is a terribly foolish idea in the minds of women to think of media like this as representing male experience or male thought, or as presenting characters that should be thought of as true men of the first order. It's entertainment, and generally low-brow entertainment, and its insight does not extend farther than that. Thinking that base humor speaks to an understanding of the male psyche depends upon already being committed to the notion that the male psyche is first and foremost a subject of base humor.

If there are women who really do watch gross-out comedy and other things of that class as a way of better understanding men, I hope that a failure to gain in that understanding brings these women to a breaking point whereby they realize that what that tendency of theirs should really teach them is a better understanding of themselves.

But as I said, I don't know if this impulse driving feminine media consumption is actually commonplace. Does anyone else have a better explanation for why young women would be attracted in large groups to films like The Hangover?

Film Comment: Dracula (1979)

Last night, I had the pleasure, for the first time, of watching the 1979 version of Dracula, with Frank Langella in the title role, and Laurence Olivier as Van Helsing. I was quite taken with the stylistic presentation, as well as with the performance of the cast, particularly Langella’s sympathetic portrayal of the Count.

I am rather familiar with the 1992 Dracula film by Francis Ford Coppola, as I first saw it when I was about eight, and now, having seen another version that predates my very life, it does not escape my attention how much the Dracula of my childhood owes to this one. Aspects of the atmosphere and certain shots like the creepy image of Dracula crawling down a wall are reflected from one into the other. And more significantly, the romantic emphasis is present in both, and with it the impulse to humanize the character.

I noticed the interesting choice made in the screenplay for the Langella film, deviating slightly from a well-known line from the iconic 1931 version, which was in turn taken from the book. The original Dracula listens to the baying of wolves and comments, “The children of the night: What music they make!” But in 1979 he says instead, “what sad music they make,” and this prompts a few moments of dialogue during which the humanized vampire expresses melancholy at being unable to walk in the daylight. The scene deftly suggests a Dracula who is an outcast and a tragic character, and more than that, it gives voice to the contrasting impulses and experiences of human existence that are vitally important to understanding the vampire mythos.

It is extremely interesting to me to observe how much art and media has evolved in its treatment of the archetypes that our culture has created and let develop for periods of decades or centuries. The first impulse, I think, is always to give the most simplistic, one-dimensional reading to these things, and so Dracula has traditionally been interpreted as something that is purely and simply evil and threatening, and on that reading, subtext is not a major concern.

The same impulse to simplicity persists today, in the vampire mythos and in all shared folklore. In the case of stories with their genesis vaguely placed in the Dracula story, however, the impulse works towards the exact opposite side of the character, making the archetype exciting and attractive, and forgetting the rest. But the best vampire will always have an element of both: the sexual and the deadly, the thrilling and the terrifying. I think the 1979 version gets the balance of elements almost spot on.

Not all treatments of the character or those of his kind are so thoughtful, however. I daresay very few are. And we’ve had well over a hundred years of Dracula during which to refine the way we perceive him, and centuries more with the folklore on which he is based. I usually thumb my nose at remakes, but there’s something remarkable about culturally shared intellectual property like this story. Part of what’s remarkable about it is that it may take dozens of reinventions of a character or storyline to help us effectively draw out the meaning behind them, and to prompt good dialogue about metaphor and interpretation.

Or, put in a much more derisive way, we really might be so dumb as a culture that it takes us years to turn our interpretative eye toward character development, and many more years of phasing between emphasizing and ignoring it before we reach an intellectual breaking point and recognize that such a thing really is important to the story, no matter how it is otherwise being presented.

Hot Analysis

My friend Lisa, despite being female, receives a trial subscription to Maxim, which she never signed up for and can’t cancel, so she tends to just hand them off to me when she gets each issue. I accept them gladly, but I don’t really read them, because this particular magazine doesn’t generally seem to contain words. I took a definite interest, though, in the one that she got yesterday, because it was the issue containing the Maxim Hot 100, “the definitive list of the most beautiful women in the world.” I was dubious of the self-aggrandizing subtitle, but intrigued to know what the mainstream standard of attractiveness is, and how I would feel about it. It provides me with another great opportunity to be overly-analytical about something that most men would simply look at and not give a second thought.

The vast, vast majority of the entries on the seemingly excessively long list were names, faces, and bodies that were not at all familiar to me. I think I am entirely too divorced from pop culture. But I don’t think that reconnecting with it would put me on the same page as the editors and readers of maxim, into whose presumably base characters I try to gain some insight by evaluating the mode of presentation of a list of a hundred beautiful women. Among the names that I do recognize is Kim Kardashian, who comes in at number thirty-five, and any list that includes in its top half somebody whose shallow character is so clearly reflected in her shallow features is bound to meet with some criticism from me.

But generally speaking, what puts me ill at ease with the list is not the women who have been chosen for it, but the ways in which they have been photographed and otherwise displayed to the readers, if I may so loosely use that term to describe the people who regularly buy Maxim. That is what really speaks loudly of the impulse to objectification and the lack of self-awareness, and it gives us a top-ten that includes Anne Hathaway looking like a corpse, Cameron Diaz made to look as though her legs make up fully two-thirds of her body, and Mila Kunis arranged in such a disheveled position as to reach way over the top in amplifying her sexuality, and consequently making her look like a crack addict.

But obviously the greater share of analysis needs to be reserved for number one, and it doesn’t take too much reflection for me to arrive at a set of conclusions as to what the image says about the publishers and the consumers. Their number one slot goes to Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and the accompanying photograph is decidedly unappealing to me, on account of three identifiable factors. I stress again that this is not a judgment of the appearance of the actress herself, only a judgment about the particular photograph chosen to represent her.

Firstly, despite clearly defined cleavage, her overall appearance suggests that she could be jailbait. Exactly how that comes across I cannot quite tell; it is just a general impression I get from her facial features and expression, and from her posture, which has her extremities kept close, but held in a loose way that to me could be indicative of naïvite, a lack of assertion, and if I may go so far, victimization. It is an appearance probably befitting the appetites of a stereotypically heterosexual man, with the sort of aggressive, unthinking sexual drive that Maxim seems to consider its bread and butter.

Also befitting those appetites is another evident feature of the picture. To phrase this indelicately, she looks mentally handicapped. Her eyes are extremely narrowed, and her lips unnaturally parted, her overall expression entirely vacant. The basic impression, at least beyond the simple observation, “she’s hot,” is that she looks as though she must be either very dumb, or highly inebriated. And I suppose that your average jock would find great appeal in that, because it also means submissiveness, and the kind of girl who is easily bedded, easily deceived, and again, easily victimized or objectified.

And finally, the very clear presentation of a strong jaw-line and wide-spaced eyes amplifies features that, in this photograph, look very masculine. I think that that, too, was an unconscious factor in the Maxim staff’s decision to install that girl, and that photograph of her, at number one, because I think it provides an outlet for repressed homoeroticism in your typical insecure, intellectually limited, sex-obsessed man. It may seem like I strive a little too strongly to set myself apart from that group by making this all a point of public record, but really, I see a lot more on that page than a hot chick.