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I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.
But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.
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You probably wouldn't have known it by looking at him, but your Dunkin' Donuts clerk this morning wasn't thrumming his fingers to the latest Soulja Boy bastardization. According to John Parker's sprawling piece in the Economist's quarterly offspring, Intelligent Life, he was probably pumping a little Pavarotti—maybe a This American Life podcast, a choice bit of Faulkner, or some Sartre on the side.
Or it could have been Soulja Boy, but only if he'd already finished Atlantic.
We know this is true because Parker says, thank God, that we're all getting smarter. It's the age of mass intelligence, where high culture reaches low IQs, transforming the ignorants into erudites—or at least ignorants with erudite taste, as in the piece, intelligence seems to be quantified by cultural consumption:
"Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts," Parker writes, and a festival director notes that her "audiences increasingly want 'the buzz you get from working that little bit harder.' "
Parker quotes Ira Glass, This American Life creator, to reassure us that it's not as bad as Paris Hilton & Co. have led us to believe. "When people talk and write about culture,” says Glass, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”
Glass lost me when he cited the fact that there are "really interesting things going on" as evidence for the fact that we're all doing just fine, but nonetheless, I'd love to believe Parker. I'd love to side, like he does, with Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met, who apparently "is fond of saying 'the public is a lot smarter than anyone gives it credit for.' ”
Which is why I was willing to stick it out for Parker's reasoning:
"It’s unlikely people are more intelligent than they used to be. [Blogger's note: Yes. Yes, it is.] Perhaps the elites that enjoy high culture are now bigger for some reason? Perhaps popular tastes have changed in such a way as to benefit high culture? Or perhaps it has nothing to do with changes in the audience, and more to do with the artists and institutions, who have become more skilled at attracting people? Answer: all of the above."
Unfortunately, Parker doesn't figure his explanation along the lines of his "all of the above" but instead goes on to note, among other things, that "educational standards have risen appreciably over the past 40 years" and that (shock!) people with degrees are more likely to visit museums than people without degrees.
He does take a paragraph to point out that the smartest among us often make stupid—blissfully stupid—choices when it comes to culture, which explains many of my otherwise brilliant friends' addictions to Gossip Girl, which I totally cannot relate to at all, ever. *cough* Apparently, Parker's "elite market" is more likely to be nondiscriminating "cultural omnivores," rather than "univores," devouring both high and low culture with unquestioning enthusiasm. "One of the features of the market for mass intelligence," says Parker, "is its heterogeneity.
Which is exactly what de Tocqueville, who basically predicted this entire phenomenon, found so terrifying—that the consumer would begin to consume art produced at the lowest, most consumable level, and that art would deteriorate accordingly. He writes in Democracy in America:
"Many of those who are not yet rich begin to conceive [ a taste for the fine arts ], at least by imitation; and the number of consumers increases, but opulent and fastidious consumers become more scarce.... No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant; and appearance is more attended to than reality."
And this is why I don't share Parker's self-described "Pollyanna-ish" outlook on the revitalization of mass intelligence. Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we've learned—that we're cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.
Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you've got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.
So, my question to you ladies: Are we, the masses, getting smarter, or are we just omnivorous culture frauds—plain-bellied Sneetches who sewed on our own stars?
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Hanna, I haven't seen Twilight, but I confess I'm dying to. I heard about the books for the first time this summer. A few 13-year-old girls I was around were obsessively devouring them, lounging on one another and gasping periodically. I asked them what made the Twilight saga good; they liked the story, they said. The marketing must have helped too: Target had HEAPS of the books on sale for a sticker price of $9.99. (Now it's on sale for $6.04.) I probably will see the movie, if for no other reason than to have a séance with a previous self—all those shots of pale, earnest teenagers in the preview sent me right back to yesteryear's adolescent yearning.
More meaningfully, I am struck by how many vampire-related cultural artifacts are cropping up around us, from Twlight to True Blood and more. Why? Your theory—that Twilight paradoxically advocates for safe sex by describing dangerous sex—is ingenious. But to me, the trend in vampires also has something to do with what I take to be a broad cultural anxiety about sex. Namely, this: Are we reaching a kind of sexual end point—a point of total saturation? At this point, our screen culture is so oversexed that liberals and conservatives alike are getting fed up with it. Turn on the TV, open a magazine, or take a walk, and you'll find that sex is everywhere. So what makes it sexy? (The other day a friend and I passed a subway ad that read "Bad Girls" and featured a clutch of skinny girls wearing cheap satin dresses. My friend rolled his eyes and said, "Bad girls are such a cliché—they're not bad anymore.")
I also wonder, though, if True Blood and Twilight might be read as an economic metaphor. Like Twilight, the vampires in True Blood mostly drink nonhuman blood (synthetic, in this case). But they still have to exercise a hell of a lot of restraint. Is there some coded message here about Americans and decadent materialism? It's as if the shows secretly convey some note to self: Too much appetite will get you fleeced. What looks sexy (a great mortgage) is actually deadly. I don't mean it's that literal, of course; but the subterranean anxiety of True Blood does seem to me to be as cultural as it is sexual.
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In the spirit of post-election adventure, Slate is starting to work on a new Web magazine: Double X. A magazine by women but not just for women, Double X will spin off from our "XX Factor" blog, where we've started a conversation among women—about politics, sex, and culture—that both men and women enjoy listening in on. The new site will do all this and more. It will take the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and apply it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We'll tackle subjects high and low with an approach that's unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending. The blog will be at the heart of the site, but we'll also publish essays, reporting, and other features.
We believe this is the right moment to launch a women's magazine that doesn't resemble any other in existence. The new site will tap into a crossroads moment in feminism, when the 1970s are firmly behind us but no one knows what's next. (Generational cross-fighting, post-feminist indifference, proof of biological sex differences?) We invite you to help us work out the new dispensation and to have fun doing it. At the moment, we're looking for ideas and writers and also for a managing editor. If you're interested, please send us a note at doublex.slate@gmail.com. And if you'd like to sign up to get e-mails about our launch this spring, please send a note to the same address.
We look forward to hearing from you.
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Why is the New York Times still flummoxed by the idea that women might embrace technology? The paper's Technology section today ran a "trend" story marveling at how women are expected to buy the new iPhone in record numbers (sample quote: "'Companies need to be careful to not think that to sell smartphones they just need to be pink," she said. ‘There are other things women want.' " Gosh, really?) It's not even been a year since the paper wrote another color-schemed piece on the breaking news that women had really gotten behind improvements in technology, with the headline "To Appeal to Women, Too, Gadgets Go Beyond ‘Cute' and ‘Pink.' " In February, it delved into the world of girls who create Internet content (quoting an expert as saying that to these girls, hotlinking is "the digital equivalent of arriving at a party wearing the same dress as another girl).
To affect surprise that women are using technology and the Internet in an era when it's nearly impossible to be engaged with the world and ignore either one is a rich bit of condescension for the paper that endorsed Hillary in the Democratic primary. Was the editorial board expecting her to receive those 3 a.m. phone calls on a hot pink Swarovski-studded BlackBerry Pearl? This feels a little like hearing someone express surprise that women might want to play sports or enjoy sex. The notion that using technology would make you a geek is also a straw man argument that's years out of date—can't remember thinking that way since perhaps middle school, which was right around when IMing became cool, not just the late-night pastime of pimpled anime enthusiasts. (And besides, haven't pimpled anime enthusiasts become cool since then?)
Despite the price scale-back and functionality improvements, the iPhone is still at least as much status symbol as useful tool. The Times is clearly no stranger to the commodity fetishization beat, especially when it comes to women, so you'd think they'd be all over the digital desideratum angle. But I guess the paper thinks this recent story sheds some light on how technology is changing the way women live.
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Sorry to be so late to the party on Slate V's Bonking, but oh my, what's next on Slate After Hours? (Or our spinoff site, Slate Blue?) OK, maybe aspirations of primness run in my family; my dad took that Kinsey class at Indiana University where they were assigned to do field work asking couples about their sex lives, and he swears that a lot of them made up stuff up to avoid the embarrassment of doing the interviews. (Never was clear on why a history major had to take this class, however, hmm...) But while we're on such XXX-y topics as grandma hookers having career-enhancing plastic surgery, can you think of anything more embarrassing than death by liposuction? And re: Emily B.'s story about the prisoner with untreated penile cancer, I once saw a guy interviewed on Oprah who had had his penis removed by accident. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment; why oh why would this poor man have put himself through the humiliation of chatting about this on national television? From Roseanne talking about her vaginal rejuvenation surgery to the furious national conversation over whether kids need any sex ed beyond "Just Say No,' this moment in our culture is one strange combo of exhibitionism and Puritanism, which I guess are two sides of the same coin. What ever happened to the happy medium?
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Judith, I agree that the right messenger (at the right moment) could deliver most of your speech on gender. But maybe it would be easier for a woman to achieve liftoff. Anybody else remember Nicole Hollander's Sylvia cartoon on the wage gap? From her classic, Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (A: Sure, just like you can be a vegetarian and like fried chicken.) In it, four people respond to the question, How do you feel about equality for women? "I feel that women should get equal pay for equal work,'' says the white guy. "I think it's only simple justice that women get equal pay for equal work,'' says the Hispanic guy. "I think if a woman's doing the same job a man is doing, she should get the same pay,'' says the black guy. "Equality for women,'' says the Hillary stand-in, "means that our potential for physical, intellectual and emotional growth be supported and nurtured. It means being recognized as full and valuable members of this society. It means being given a chance to risk, to grow, to make a contribution to a better world, side by side with men.'' I think about this not infrequently. (Though perhaps not as often as I do my very favorite Sylvia, in which two hookers walk into a bar. One tells the other, "So he dresses himself up in this chicken suit, covers himself up with mostaccioli ... and then looks around real scared. He says: 'How do you feel ... about Title IX?' And I say, 'Senator, anything that turns you on, turns me on.'' And then I trigger the hidden camera.'')
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That's funny Ann, the one thing that never occurred to me was that Megan Meier's parents had struck an impossible bargain with her over MySpace. Perhaps because my kids still believe that Dora the Explorer actually lives inside my laptop I haven't yet thought through what a parent should be doing about monitoring social-networking sites. One of the ironies of the Meier story, beyond those we've already mentioned is that all these parents are simultaneously described as over-involved "helicopter" people and tragically checked-out.
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Dahlia, I'd say one of the most poignant lines in the New Yorker article-and there were plenty of them-comes from Mrs. Meier, Megan's mother, maturely drawing stark age distinctions. She feels for the teenagers who posted messages posing as "Josh Evans," the fake boyfriend. "If you don't think that child wishes she could go back and change that . . . It could easily have been Megan doing that." It's the adult involvement that she cannot forgive, not just her neighbor's but, I suspect, her own as well: she gave into her daughter's pleas for an account, imposing a rule she knew she couldn't enforce-that Megan never be on MySpace without a parent present. Part of what is so disturbing about this story, I think, is the image of a world ensnared by social networking technology, making middle schoolers of us all: needy, insecure, anxiously voyeuristic, socially hypervulnerable creatures for whom being alone, ever, is insupportable-is death.
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Just read Lauren Collins piece on the Megan Meier MySpace/Suicide story. We haven’t really covered this story at Slate, largely because it’s virtually impossible to wrap your head around it all. Collins doesn’t try to make sense of it all either, just sort of lays it out there in a read-it-and-weep piece that paints the kids involved as somehow old beyond their years and the parents as young beyond theirs.
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If early sex isn't necessarily bad sex, could we agree that it's usually a bad idea? I'm agnostic about calling parents, because it seems so case by case to me, in terms of the kids and the parental relationships involved. And I'm all for the release of a 17-year-old like Genarlow Wilson, whose case exemplifies the worst intersection of adult prudishness and prurience. I also remember from my middle school years a couple of cases of kids having sex at 13 or 14 that didn't seem harmful. But I also remember other kids who seemed confused or taken advantage of, and yes, they were girls. Juliet, do we really want to veer closer toward a norm that sweeps up young teens? You were in 8th grade a lot more recently than I was--what in your experience makes you think differently than I do?
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This weekend, a friend showed me artist Edina Tokodi’s incredible moss
graffiti, which features moss in the form of animals like rabbits and deer
and abstract compositions mounted on walls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tokodi’s
work is a whimsical surprise, green and playful. But I think moss will be creeping up on us more and more.
Last week, the New York Times announced it was installing an
“open-air birch and moss garden” in the lobby of its new building. It was about
to import seven ginormous birch trees and “several tons of moss” from New
Jersey, according to incredulous accounts from NY
Mag and Gawker.
Moss has also shown up in designs for green rooftops. And a few years ago, a
“moss laboratory” was created in a shed at a minimum-security prison
(because working with plants is apparently good for inmates and moss
cultivation does not require sharp objects.)
Where else will moss spread? I’m betting yoga studios, table
arrangements, and fancy facial cleansers. Maybe moss is the new lemongrass. Still, tooling around the web, I realized its new uses couldn’t possibly be more creative
than its traditional ones: some kinds of moss were included in wound dressings because
of their antibacterial properties. Some were even used as diapers because they
can absorb up to ten times their weight in liquid. Any takers?