Is Sex Still Sexy?

If you want to get a sense of how college students approach sex, the play Speak About It is a pretty good place to start. It's a series of skits written by students at Bowdoin, a small liberal arts college in Maine. The skits show students in a variety of sexual encounters, based on real experiences. Bowdoin students must watch the play during freshman orientation. It's meant to foster "healthy relationships" on campus by addressing the issue of consent and sexual assault.Speak About It has also been staged at colleges and universities nationwide, including Harvard, Brown, Williams, and Bates.

Think of the play as a half-baked mashup of The Vagina Monologues and Girls: blunt, confessional, lacking in delicacy. In one skit, a bisexual woman reveals intimate details of her sex life. She lets the audience know that she has "kissed big lips, skinny lips, vagina lips, and penis tips." In another, a male student confides, "Having sex with somebody you don't love just isn't worth it. That's why they invented whacking off."

In yet another scene from the play, we see two co-eds hooking up:

Female: We've been making out for a while now. I wish he would just ask me to take off my shirt.

Male: Really? That won't kill the mood?

Female: What mood? We're in a twin extra long bunk bed. You should just ask.

Male: So you think that...

Female: Just ask...

Male: Will you take your shirt off please?

Female: Sure if you take yours off!

The scene represents a normal sexual encounter between two students. There's moaning. There's orgasming. And yet, it falls flat. While the play wants to promote the idea that this kind of sex is hot and fun, in this scene, it is boring and banal. Erotic sex ideally involves mystery and an electric connection—longing—between two people. But the exhibitionism of Speak About It kills this mystery and longing—it leaves little to the imagination. As the writer and critic Cristina Nehring, author of A Vindication of Love, tells me in an interview, "Where there is no distance and no sense of transgression at all, where anything goes and everything shows, there is no erotic chemistry....continue reading at The Atlantic.

Eleanor Clark's Rome

But who shall analyze even the simplest Roman impression? It is compounded of so many things, it says so much, it involves so much, it so quickens the intelligence and so flatters the heart, that before we fairly grasp the case the imagination has marked it for her own and exposed us to a perilous likelihood of talking nonsense about it.

—Henry James, Italian Hours (1909)

Here Christ appeared to his fleeing Vicar; here Peter was crucified; here Paul beheaded; here Lawrence burned.
—Petrarch, Rerum Familiarum Librum Libri (ca. 1350)

When Eleanor Clark was sixteen, waiting for an admissions letter from Vassar, she spent a “head-over-heels” year in Rome. Her love affair with the enigmatic city grew even deeper when, as a grown woman in 1947, she went back on a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a novel. But Rome was too distracting. In an interview with the book critic John Barkham, Clark remarked, speaking generally about the modern world, “One lives under a variety of shocks and stresses: it is hard for the novelist to compete with what is going on around him.” How devastating, then, Rome must have been with its “impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn,” as she would write.

Clark’s Rome is terrifying to the “foggy modern eye.” To encounter this city, which contains the whole of Western culture, is “an assault on the senses” so “total and terrible” that, “for the delicate sensibility,” it is “all scandal and death”—a “sack from within.” How could so much be contained in one city, in one word, in one idea—Rome?

Consider the Basilica of San Clemente, named after St. Clement (92–101 AD), who was the third successor to Peter as Pope in Rome and the author of an Epistle to the Corinthians. Here, as elsewhere in Rome, history unveils itself layer by layer. The Catholic basilica that exists today, originally constructed around 1100 AD, was built on top of a Fourth Century church that was converted from the home of a Roman nobleman. That home was built on the foundations of a Roman building that was otherwise destroyed in the great fire of 64 AD. The Roman nobleman’s home had been, for a short period of time in the First Century, a forbidden site of Christian worship, while its damp cavernous basement, with its tunnels and running water, was used in the Third Century as a Mithraeum, a place where Romans secretly practiced the Persian mystery religion of Mithraism. Then, in 313 AD, Constantine’s Edict of Milan changed the world by allowing Roman subjects to practice Christianity and other religions in peace. “When we fall in love with Rome,” Clark said in a 1978 interview, “we are obviously in love with the past, with history.” Continue reading at The New Criterion. 

Career Advice: Be a Giver

In 1990, Jon Huntsman, Sr. made a business decision that most in corporate America would probably have called insane. He was intensely negotiating the biggest business deal of his life with Charles Miller Smith, the head of a British chemical company. Deep into the negotiations over the acquisition, Smith's wife died. She had been suffering from terminal cancer. It was unfortunate, but business is business and the negotiation was incomplete. On top of that, Huntsman had millions of dollars on the line -- money that would be his if he just pushed Smith further.

But he didn't.

"I decided the fine points of the last 20 percent of the deal would stand as they were proposed," he later wrote. "I probably could have clawed another $200 million out of the deal, but it would have come at the expense of Charles' emotional state. The agreement as it stood was good enough."

In his 2008 book Winners Never Cheat, Huntsman summarized his philosophy on business and life, writing, "Monetarily, the most satisfying moments in my life have not been the excitement of closing a great deal or the reaping of profits from it. They have been when I was able to help others in need ... There's no denying that I am a deal junkie, but I also have developed an addiction for giving. The more one gives, the better one feels; and the better one feels about it, the easier it becomes to give."

Huntsman is what organizational psychologist Adam Grant calls, in his provocative new book, a "giver." In Give and Take, Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, wields a large body of social science research, much of it his own, to challenge the idea that career success is a zero-sum game in which your gains equal my losses, a harmful idea that discourages people from helping each other out at work....continue reading at The Atlantic.

Is Life Still Good After Boston?

I’m currently enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania in positive psychology, the study of human well-being. This semester we’ve been learning about organizations and companies that contribute positively to their employees, their communities, and to the world. Our final assignment for that class is to find one such company and write up its story. Some of my classmates and I decided to write about the Boston-based company Life Is Good. You’ve probably seen their t-shirts at an airport or store.

The company mission, under the leadership of CEO or “Chief Executive Optimist” Bert Jacobs, is to spread the power of optimism to change lives. My classmates and I spoke to Jacobs a couple of weeks ago and, at that time, their message of optimism–and their philanthropic endeavors–were uplifting to learn about.

Then, after the Boston Marathon bombing happened, I began to think harder about the company’s message. Is life still good when there is so much evil in the world? What role can optimism play in the aftermath of the bombings?

To get to the answers to those questions, it might help to know more about the company. Its story is pretty interesting. It’s a story of resilience, a theme that seems particularly relevant today more than ever... continue reading at Acculturated.