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Is Sex Still Sexy?

2013-05-17T16:46:16Z

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

2013-05-03T16:07:12Z

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

2013-04-30T19:09:59Z

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?

2013-04-26T20:43:47Z

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.

Relationships Are More Important Than Ambition

2013-04-16T17:41:03Z

This month, many of the nation's best and brightest high school seniors will receive thick envelopes in the mail announcing their admission to the college of their dreams. According to a 2011 survey, about 60 percent of them will go to their first-choice schools. For many of them, going away to college will be like crossing the Rubicon. They will leave their families -- their homes -- and probably not return for many years, if at all.

That was journalist Rod Dreher's path. Dreher grew up in the small southern community of Starhill, Louisiana, 35 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. His family goes back five generations there. His father was a part-time farmer and sanitarian; his mother drove a school bus. His younger sister Ruthie loved hunting and fishing, even as a little girl.

But Dreher was different. As a bookish teenager, he was desperate to flee what he considered his intolerant and small-minded town, a place where he was bullied and misunderstood by his own father and sister. He felt more at home in the company of his two eccentric and worldly aunts -- great-great aunts, actually -- who lived nearby. One was a self-taught palm reader. She looked into his hand one day when he was a boy and told him, "See this line? You'll travel far in life." Dreher hoped she was right. When he was 16, he decided to leave home for a Louisiana boarding school with the intention of never looking back.

That decision created a divide between him and his sister Ruthie, who was firmly attached to Starhill. Leaving for boarding school was "the fork in the road for us, the moment in our lives in which we diverged," he writes in his new book,The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life.

In the book, he describes leaving his Starhill home to pursue a career in journalism -- a career that took him to cities like Baton Rouge, Washington DC, Fort Lauderdale, Dallas, New York, and Philadelphia. He was chasing after a bigger and better career with each move. "I was caught up in a culture of ambition," Dreher told me me in an interview....continue reading at The Atlantic.

Give Monogamy a Chance

2013-04-10T11:10:10Z

The hit HBO series "Girls," which is wildly popular with 20-something audiences, is also notorious for its frank portrayals of the dark side of the casual-sex culture reigning among America's young adults. In the first season of the show, the main character, Hannah (played by Lena Dunham), finds herself in a dysfunctional relationship with an actor, Adam, whom she regularly sleeps with but isn't dating in the traditional sense. She really likes him, though, so she asks him one day, during intercourse, "You want me to call you?" His response is to push her head down into a pillow.

For decades now, young women have been taught by popular culture that casual sex is supposed to be liberating. Shows like "Sex and the City" sent the message that promiscuity was at worst no big deal and at best empowering. But stories like those on "Girls," and those in Donna Freitas's illuminating new book, "The End of Sex," suggest that for many young women it proves instead to be dehumanizing. Using extensive survey research and dozens of interviews with young men and women on college campuses across the country, Ms. Freitas explodes the myth of the "harmless hookup." Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal.

Find a Man Today, Graduate Tomorrow

2013-04-05T11:47:47Z

In 2008, when I was a college junior, I went home to New Jersey one weekend to visit my family—and almost immediately regretted it. My mother seemed more interested in my romantic life than my academic life: "Have you found a boyfriend yet?"

I rolled my eyes and said no. With a healthy dose of young-adult arrogance, I explained that I was too busy studying, working on the college review, and helping out at my sorority. No time for men. My mother nodded, acknowledging that there was a lot going on.

Then she said calmly but forcefully: "You're in college. You're at Dartmouth. There will never be a better time to meet someone. I'm sure there are many interesting boys around. If you don't find one before you graduate, you might not find one at all—so start looking."

Fast forward to today....continue reading at the Wall Street Journal.

The Benefits of Optimism Are Real

2013-03-01T18:28:14Z

One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly.

Patrizio Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital, where he was sentenced to go after he nearly beat his wife's lover to death. Home from the hospital, living under his parents' charge, Pat has lost his wife, his job, and his house. But he tries to put the pieces of his life back together. He exercises, maintains an upbeat lifestyle, and tries to better his mind by reading through the novels that his estranged wife Nikki, a high school English teacher, assigns her students.

Pat takes up a personal motto, excelsior -- Latin for "ever upward." He tells his state-appointed therapist, "I hate my illness and I want to control it. This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."

Which is why the Hemingway novel, which is part of Nikki's syllabus, is such a buzz kill. When he gets to the last pages, and discovers that it ends grimly with death, he slams the book shut, throws it through a glass window of his parents' house, and storms into their room in the middle of the night, saying:

This whole time you're rooting for this Hemingway guy to survive the war and to be with the woman that he loves, Catherine Barkley... And he does, he does, he survives the war after getting blown up. He survives it and he escapes to Switzerland with Catherine. You think he ends it there? No! She dies, dad! I mean, the world's hard enough as it is, guys. Can't someone say, hey let's be positive? Let's have a good ending to the story?

Another best picture nominee, Life of Pi, employs a similar device. Pi finds himself aboard a lifeboat with a ferocious Bengal tiger in the aftermath of a shipwreck that has his entire family. Lost at sea in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days -- starved, desperate, and forced into a game of survival with the tiger -- Pi pushes forward, even though he, like Pat, has lost everything. Pi says, "You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. And as a result I perked up and felt much better."

Pi's resilience is incredible once you realize what happens on board the lifeboat and how Pi copes with the tragedy that he witnesses and endures. There's more to the story than the boy and the tiger. Though what really happened is terrible, Pi chooses to tell a different story. His parallels what really happened, but is beautiful not bleak, transcendent not nihilistic.

"Which story do you prefer?" he asks at the end.

***

This questions turns out to matter a great deal if you are trying to figure out who grows after trauma and who gets swallowed up by it, a question that each movie addresses and that psychologists have been grappling with for years. Think back to the last time you experienced a loss, setback, or hardship. Did you respond by venting, ruminating, and dwelling on the disappointment, or did you look for a faint flash of meaning through all of the darkness -- a silver lining of some sort? How quickly did you bounce back -- how resilient are you? . . . continue reading at The Atlantic.

Forget Feminism; What About Kindness?

2013-02-18T20:34:43Z

The Acculturated symposium, “Can Men be Men Again?” has evoked a very spirited and inspired response from our writers–and a rather passionate response from our readers. Our writers have argued that there has been a breakdown in manly behavior in our culture. So in the comments section and in some of our posts, a question has arisen: Whose fault is it? Men’s or women’s?

I think this question misses the point. At least part of what lies at the heart of the degeneration of manly behavior and the general breakdown in how men and women treat each other is, I maintain, selfishness, ego, and what results when those two things exist excessively in one person: a decline in compassion and empathy, or the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes....continue reading at Acculturated.

Why Do Chinese Parents Lie More?

2013-02-12T16:49:12Z

When Amy Chua was a little girl, her parents told her lies. They told her that if she did not get straight-A grades at school, she would wind up on the streets—or that if she got into the car of someone she did not know, she would be kidnapped.

In an interview with me, Chua elaborates. "They wouldn't so much lie as exaggerate... wild exaggerations to point of untruths," she says. Her parents, Chinese immigrants to the United States, "were paranoid about safety."

Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is probably best known today for being a "tiger mom." "Tiger mothering," a strict way of raising children, is why Asians have such "stereotypically successful children"—so Chua argued in her controversial 2011 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Unlike "your typical Western overscheduling soccer mom," Chua writes, Chinese mothers leave no margin for error: Schoolwork comes first; parents, teachers, and coaches are always right; children should not be complimented in public; and A-minuses and silver medals are unacceptable.

Chua wrote in her book that she did not allow her daughters, Sophia and Louisa (Lulu), to attend a sleepover, watch TV, or have play dates. Her strict parenting methods shocked Western parents. Now, there seems to be yet another difference between Chinese and American parenting methods. According to a new study published in the International Journal of Psychology, Chinese parents also lie more to their children to get them to do what they (the parents) want—and they approve of this practice more than American parents do...continue reading at The Atlantic.