Month: November 2013

“The Porn Gap”

Drawing on data from the site Pornhub, David Holmes considers how income affects porn-viewing habits:

The most pronounced differences were observed when comparing time-on-site and page views per capita. In wealthier communities, the average visit duration was 9 minutes and 54 seconds, whereas in less wealthier communities, the average was 11 minutes and 5 seconds. However, the pageviews per capita in high income cities was 9.44 while in low income cities it was only 6.74. It could be that high-earning pornhounds are simply more efficient in their consumption. More likely this is due to faster Internet connections and higher Internet penetration in high-income communities. In other words, the income gap has led to a porn gap.

As for porn preferences, while subtle differences exist between high- and low-income cities, the top categories and search terms bear striking similarities.

In fact, the top five search terms are the same across high-income and low-income cities, although the order is different. In high-income cities, the top five are 1. Gay 2. Ebony 3. Teen 4. Lesbian and 5. MILF, while in low-income cities they are 1. Teen 2. Lesbian 3. MILF 4. Ebony 5. Gay.

Other differences: “Asian” makes the top 10 in six high-income cities but in no low income cities. “Big Dick” makes the top 10 in all 10 low-income cities but only two high-income cities (Washington, DC and Trenton, NJ). Meanwhile, “Squirt” makes the Top 10 in seven low-income cities, but only one high-income city (Hi, New York City). Finally, the highfalutin’ folks in San Jose, Boulder, Thousand Oaks, Stamford, and Napa, like their porn in HD.

A Modern Architectural Battle

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In February, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted unanimously (8-0) to deny landmark status to Prentice Women’s Hospital, the iconic Bertrand Goldberg building. Demolition on the building, owned by Northwestern University, began in October. Recently Alexandra Lange lamented the loss:

It was a sad day for Modernism, and a sad day for common sense: Northwestern University’s insistence that they needed that site and no other for a new biomedical lab never held up to scrutiny. It would be nice to think that Prentice would be the last structurally daring, imaginatively conceived concrete building clawed to rubble, but it probably won’t be. …

Prentice hospital was not beautiful. Its cloverleaf top is weird, even to an admirer like me. Its glassed-in bottom, as architecture critic Blair Kamin wrote in the Chicago Tribune, was “boxy” and “unremarkable.” You can tell people a building is important as often as you like, but unless they feel it, they won’t cry over its destruction, and they won’t organize so that it never happens again. Preservationists (and architecture critics, myself included) can learn to tell better stories about buildings: their secret spaces, their best angles, their relationship to history and use.

For a captivating look at the debate leading up to the demolition, watch Nathan Eddy’s short documentary “The Absent Column,” seen above.

Sizing Up Sex

UK researchers have published the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), which collected data from 2010 to 2012. Among the findings? Lesbian experiences are on the rise:

In Natsal-1 [conducted 1990-1991], less than 4 percent of British women aged 16–44 said they’d had any sexual experience or contact with a partner of the same sex. In Natsal-2 [conducted 1999-2001], that number rose to nearly 10 percent. Now it’s 16 percent. By any measure, that’s an enormous increase, more than doubling the reported rate among men. Even if you attribute most of it to changes in candor or interpretation, the willingness of so many women to admit to same-sex activity represents a big cultural shift.

Anal sex is also becoming more prevalent:

The British data confirm that anal intercourse, or at least willingness to report it, is spreading. From Natsal-1 to Natsal-2 to Natsal-3, the percentage of men aged 16-44 who reported having had anal sex in the last year rose from 7 to 12 to 17. The percentage of women rose almost in tandem, from 7 to 11 to 15. When you break down the Natsal-3 data by age, anal sex is the only act whose prevalence increases steadily as you move from older to younger cohorts.

On an annual basis, compared with other sex acts, the rate still isn’t very high. In Natsal-3, among all age groups (up to age 74), only 13 percent of men and 11 percent of women say they’ve had heterosexual anal intercourse in the last year. In the 16-24 age bracket, 19 percent of males and 17 percent of females say they’ve done it during that time. But the percentage who report having done it at least once in their lives is higher. Among the cohort born between 1946 and 1955, the proportion of men and women who said yes to this question by the time they were 35-44 was 20 percent. Among those born between 1956 and 1965, it was 30 percent. Among those born between 1966 and 1975, it’s nearly 40 percent. How high will it go? We just don’t know.

Hunting By Ski

Mark Jenkins visits the hunter-skiers of the Chinese Altay Mountains:

Serik describes a hunt when Tursen skied down on a bounding deer, leaped on its back, grabbed its antlers, and wrestled it down into the snow, the animal kicking and biting. It is a scene that has been repeated for thousands of years in these mountains. Within the Altay, a handful of petroglyphs have been discovered depicting archaic skiing scenes, including one of a human figure on skis chasing an ibex. Since petroglyphs are notoriously hard to date, it remains a controversial clue in the debate over where skiing was born. Chinese archaeologists contend it was carved 5,000 years ago. Others say it is probably only 3,000 years old. The oldest written record that alludes to skiing, a Chinese text, also points to the Altay but dates to the Western Han dynasty, which began in 206 B.C.

Norwegian archaeologists also have found ski petroglyphs, and in Russia, what appears to be a ski tip, carbon-dated to 8,000 years ago, was excavated from a peat bog. Each nation stakes its own claim to the first skiers. What is widely accepted, however, is that whoever first strapped on a pair of skis likely did so to hunt animals.

Meth In The Medicine Cabinet

You’ll find it in North Korea:

[A defector] spoke of a doctor administering Ice to a friend’s sick father: “He took it and could speak well and move his hand again five minutes later. Because of this kind of effect, elderly people really took to this medicine.” A South Korea-based NGO worker, who claims to have interviewed over 500 defectors, told me “People with chronic disease take it until they’re addicted.” Unlike heroin, crystal meth is mostly smoked or snorted, and a threadbare medical infrastructure means it’s difficult for North Koreans to find needles, Hazel Smith, a North Korea expert at Cranfield University in Britain, told me.

Laughing At The Border Of Sanity

Paul Auster celebrates the humor of Samuel Beckett with a close-reading of a passage from Watt:

Watt conceived for Mr. Graves a feeling little short of liking. In particular Mr. Graves’s way of speaking did not displease Watt. Mr. Graves pronounces th charmingly. Turd and fart, he said, for third and fourth. Watt liked these venerable saxon words. And when Mr. Graves, drinking on the sunny step his afternoon stout, looked up with a twinkle in his old blue eye, and said, in mock deprecation, Tis only me turd or fart, then Watt felt he was perhaps prostituting himself to some purpose. …

I was 19 years old when I first read this paragraph, and I remember that it was the next sentence, the fifth sentence, that turned my growing laughter into a full-throated roar and convinced me that the book I was holding in my hands was the work of a master writer. “Watt liked these venerable saxon words.” It struck me then, and still strikes me now, as a perfect sentence. The crucial word is “venerable.” Think of all the other adjectives Beckett might have chosen: filthy, pungent, earthy, delightful, bawdy, resonant, blunt—the list is endless. “Venerable” avoids the obvious. It defies expectations with its dignity, its somber bow to tradition, to the long historical life of a language, and yet how funny it is, how deeply funny when you stop and think about it, to call “turd and fart” venerable, to call any word venerable, for that matter, and yet because “venerable” is therefore slightly off, and yet entirely apt at the same time, it is magnificent.

Auster remarks on the broader context of the work:

It is useful to know that Watt was written in France during the German occupation of World War II. On the run from the Gestapo, which had broken up the resistance cell in Paris that Beckett had belonged to—and led to the arrest, deportation, and death of his closest friend—Beckett found refuge in a small village in the South, where he spent the last two years of the war working as an agricultural laborer in exchange for food. He worked on the pages of the-never-quite-finished Watt at night. He said he wrote the book to keep himself from going insane. The novel itself often borders on the insane. But you laugh. Again and again, you laugh.

The Poet’s Many Personas

Reviewing Troubling the Line, a new collection of trans and genderqueer poetry, Stephen Burt revels in the freedom offered by verse:

I would, in fact, like to be several mutually incompatible women and girls: a techie tomboy; a confident professional woman whose palette is grey, gold and black; a girl who in several senses has not quite developed, who still puts hearts on her “i’s”; a reviver of colorblock tops, bringing back the New Wave. I would like to resemble the British pop star Clare Grogan, and the cute starship mechanic from the TV show Firefly, and Katherine Hepburn, none of whom resemble each other, and Kitty Pryde from X-Men, who doesn’t exist. I would also, at times, like to be, and I can see myself vividly as if I were, a point guard, and a ferret, and (like Shelley and Mayakovsky before me) a cloud. Sometimes I feel that I might as well be 75 years old; sometimes I feel that I’m “really” 12.

Some of those identities can be approximated, approached, even if clumsily, with makeup and wardrobe; some of them can’t, or not for me. But all of them could be, and some of them have been, explored in my own poems. I think (I have no way of knowing) that if I had been born a girl and had grown up a woman I would still have a profession in one of the arts that use words; I might even be a professor and a literary scholar and a cultural critic, doing much of what I do now. But I am not sure that I would have become a poet, not sure that I would have had the same motivation to make these odd, embarrassing, risky, intuitive, apparently useless art forms that can stand in for the bodies and faces we have, to eclipse or disguise the literal with figura, with artifice made up of language alone.

He steps back to consider the lessons anyone might learn from the poetry of trans people:

Whether or not its author is transgender, a poem is always an alternate self, an imaginary body, a form of transport: we make it from what we are and from what we know, from our immediate lived experience, from the examples we find in others, from what the culture and its words can give.

In this sense, Troubling the Line shows not just what all its trans writers share with one another, but how trans writing can illuminate one purpose of imaginative writing in general. Czeslaw Milosz wrote that “in the very essence of poetry there is something indecent,/ a thing is brought forth that we didn’t know we had in us.” I agree. The same poem by Milosz announces that “the purpose of poetry is to remind us/ how difficult it is to remain just one person.” There I think he was half-right: it seems to me that another purpose of poetry — especially, but not only, trans poetry — is to show us that we don’t have to be.