Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - Posts
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So does that gal attempting to auction off her virginity to the highest bidder remind anyone else of the young woman at Yale who was supposedly documenting her multiple self-induced miscarriages as a senior art project a while back? Not that I have any trouble believing that lots of people would cash that check. Yet something about the whole enterprise seems fishy to me. And I dunno about those "housewives'' either; are they for real or just hideously conforming to expectations? (I wouldn't know, of course. Not because my tastes are so refined but on the contrary because I have to either limit my intake of trash TV or else become one of those people whose life revolves around it. Which I realized years ago when while crossing the street on the Upper East Side, I ran into actress Ruth Warrick, who for years played Phoebe Wallingford on All My Children, and absent-mindedly greeted her—"Hey, Phoebs''—like I thought I was in Pine Valley. Halooo, she called back.) So there it was, my last digression on this blog—but only, of course, because it's also my last post. Honestly, if I have ever had more fun in print than here on XX Factor, it was so long ago that I don't remember. So I'm going to be your biggest fan over at AOL News, where as of next week I'll be writing a column and helping to launch their forthcoming political Web site, PoliticsDaily.com. (My first story—on Hillary's confirmation hearing, as if you had to ask—went up yesterday, and oh, those commenters are way scarier than you guys. My favorite outraged observation: "Hey, this is nothing but your opinion!" Tuh-rue.) So knock 'em dead with Double X, as I'm sure you will, and thanks so much for the great conversations, XX!
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Torie, I agree that last night's Housewives trainwreck was difficult to watch.However, I object to your characterization of Gretchen as so very helpless. Yes, she's going through a rough time with her fiance in the hospital, but you're not allowing her any agency in this situation. While Tamra et al. were certainly encouraging Gretchen's drunkenness, as you point out, Gretchen is a grown-ass woman. She's ultimately responsible for her own intake, and while Tamra's behavior was completely deplorable, Gretchen doesn't need our hand-wringing because she was three sheets to the wind on camera.
I am sympathetic to Gretchen's current situation, as it's crap to see a loved one sick. However, she could have dropped out of the filming at any time, and yet has chosen not to. But yeah—it's definitely trash TV, and I'm probably losing multiple brain cells every time I tune in to watch their orange-hued antics. While Bravo's editors are masters at getting their viewers to empathize with these frivolous ladies, we need to remember that they're not being shoved in our faces against their will. Gretchen, Tamra, and the entire bleached-blond crew is getting well-compensated for their televised trials.
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The more a reality-TV show makes my jaw drop and leads me to ask, "What must his/her parents be thinking right now?" the more I relish it. But today, I've got a wicked guilty-pleasure hangover. On last night's episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County, a cast member, Tamra, who was hosting a party, set out to get her younger blond rival, Gretchen, drunk—"naked wasted," as Tamra put it. Usually, I relish drunken reality-TV shenanigans, but last night, I wanted to change the channel when I saw the way Tamra's twentysomething son pawed at the blitzed Gretchen, whose much-older fiance was hospitalized and dying of cancer at the time of filming. I couldn't bring myself to turn it off, alas. (Watch some of the lowlights here, thanks to Jezebel.)
Usually, the reality-TV stars I laugh at are my age or younger—part of the "everyone is famous," social-networking, watched-Survivor-during-my-formative-years generation. The Real Housewives of Orange County may be neither real nor housewives, but they are all older than 30; all but one are over the age of 40. They should know better than to a) maliciously get someone drunk; b) continue to encourage her to take shots when it's readily apparent that she's drunk; and c) commit the crimes of (a) and (b) in front of cameras—while giggling behind their hands about it. Mean-girl behavior in fully grown women is stomach-turning. Real Housewives used to be fun fare to watch while unwinding after work. Now, I find myself wondering how much farther up the generation chain the look-how-badly-I-behave genre can climb. A reality show about catty nursing-home residents squaring off in their separate cliques, perhaps?
I wish I could promise I won't watch anymore, but I can't: The episode ended on a cliff-hanger, and I'm dying to know what will happen.
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Why is Barack Obama writing an open letter to his daughters? I guess when you become president, you talk to your kids via Parade magazine. Parts of Obama's letter to Malia and Sasha, 10 and 7, are the usual empty-ish rhetoric ("I want all our children to go to schools worthy of their potential"). In the part that's more real, he charges them with "righting the wrongs that you see and working to give others the chances you've had." Lovely, yes. But also a sentiment he could get across at a family dinner or bedtime. By doing it in public, doesn't he put a huge burden on them, adding to the one they're already shouldering? And isn't he using them, too? This combined with the release of those photos from the girls' first day of school at Sidwell Friends makes me wonder.
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Regarding the news that Natalie Dylan, a 22-year-old women's studies major, is selling her virginity to the highest bidder (currently, the top bid is at $3.7 million), Samantha wondered how selling one's virginity is, as Dylan claims, "empowering." For the expert opinion on the tricky relationship between sex, money, and empowerment, I asked Audacia Ray, a former sex worker and author of Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration, to weigh in with her thoughts on the matter.
I'm a former sex worker (the put-myself-through-graduate-school kind) and a vocal advocate for sex worker's rights and the ability of women to make their own choices about their bodies and sexual expression both inside and outside of the sex industry. That said, I find the trope of "empowerment" a bit tiresome and oversimplified. The spectrum of conversations about female sexuality (commercial or otherwise) doesn't seem to actually be much of a spectrum: women can either be empowered or degraded about their sexuality. When I get asked about whether or not I felt empowered by my work in the sex industry, I always feel compelled to say yes, but I say it without much conviction. If I don't affirm that I'm empowered, that means I've been a victim—or that I'm about to hit the inquirer with a heady dose of semantics.
Jobs in the sex industry are often seen in a roughly hierarchical way by both people inside and outside the business, depending on the degree of nudity and sexual interaction and the amount of money one gets paid for the work. Stripping and modeling (sometimes even including porn) work seem to be increasingly acceptable, perhaps because they give the impression of flirting with naughtiness while the woman doing it is a good girl in bad circumstances. The stigma and the social price of crossing the line into sex for money is a bit different—and also viewed differently by law enforcement. The hierarchy tends to be enforced by "Never would I ever..." statements that sometimes enforce norms that aren't even all that logical but are driven by emotional reactions.
I'm all for people making money off of their assets and a bit of cunning marketing. If a girl can get $3.7 million for her virginity, why the hell not? But let's also step back a minute and separate sex and money. When the sex industry gets discussed, it's usually the sex part that is emphasized. The notion of empowerment that gets kicked around is solely about the sex act, not about the money. Maybe this is part of a cultural seduction that people want to buy into: the idea of the prostitute who is compelled to do her work because she's brimming over with sexual desire and the money is a nice side benefit. But the reality is that most sex workers, like other members of the work force, do their jobs because they get paid. So if you want to talk empowerment, maybe it's time to talk about money, too. Do Wall Street workers feel empowered? Well, maybe not in this economy.
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Dahlia, I loved your piece imploring Elena Kagan to abandon the solicitor general's "silly" uniform, the morning coat. But our sartorially sophisticated language columnist, Jesse Sheidlower, e-mailed me to clarify that we shouldn't call it a "frock coat," as you did at one point in the piece. He writes: "A frock coat is not the same as a morning coat. They are both longish, but a frock coat is the same length all around, while a morning coat tapers evenly from the front to the rear tails. (A tailcoat, such as is worn with white tie, also has long rear tails, but the upper part cuts straight back to the long
tails.) A frock coat does not have tails." This explains so much that I never understood about arcane elements of formal menswear that I thought I'd share it with you all. Here's hoping we don't see too many of these at inauguration events next week!
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