Author: Andrew Sullivan

Our Father Issues In Heaven

Robert Hunt takes aim at Mary Eberstadt’s contention in her recent book, How the West Really Lost God, that the breakdown of the conventional family has led to secularization, offering an alternative account of the institution’s ambiguous place in the Christian tradition:

It is hardly surprising that the biological family is a key assumption of both Jewish and Christian scripture. Yet scripture also understands that the family can also be a broken and even oppressive institution. The most memorable families in the Bible are the most dysfunctional. Indeed, with the exception of Ruth and Boaz all the families in the Bible are dysfunctional. Even Jesus was raised by his stepfather.

It is precisely in God’s care of the widow, the orphan, the childless, the outcast, the adulterer, the prostitute, and even the murderer that God’s full nature as lover and redeemer of the world are revealed.

Thus it is these for whom care is demanded by scriptural ethics, and these are among the first gathered into the family of those who call God father and Christ brother. Only God’s love for all these broken and incomplete families rescues the common trinitarian symbolism from itself being exclusive and oppressive. It isn’t the family that brings (or pace Eberstadt fails to bring) these refugees from the family to God, it is God that makes family a possibility even for them.

The root of this failure in Eberstadt’s analysis may be that she does not consider the role of fictive kinship and its importance in the formation of the early Christian community. Her promotion of the specifically biological family as fundamental to healthy Christianity leads her to ignore the ways that Christians have understood what Jesus means by “being born again by water and the Spirit.” And so she also fails to consider alternative families that are so central to Christian history, and particularly Catholic and Orthodox history. Convents and monasteries, and even though she doesn’t see it, brotherhoods like her oft mentioned Opus Dei are surely as critical to the church as the biological family unit, something which even a sociologist can see and any historian should note.

Previous Dish on Eberstadt’s book here.

Hangover Helper

Researcher Richard Stephens offers the straight dope on your morning-after misery:

Do we know what causes hangovers?

Not completely, but there’s definitely some fairly good evidence. One component is the way that alcohol is metabolized. When you drink alcohol, there’s an enzyme in the body that breaks down the ethanol in alcohol into metabolites – after you’ve had a drink of alcohol and felt drunk, once you start to feel sober again, that’s because your body has metabolized the ethanol. But once the ethanol has been metabolized, there are usually other alcohols in smaller quantities in alcoholic beverages. One such compound is methanol, and when the body metabolizes methanol, it metabolizes it into toxins – formaldehyde and formic acid. And those make you feel ill, sort of poison you a little bit.

So one part of a hangover is the production of formaldehyde and formic acid, which comes online about 10 or so hours after you’ve been drinking. And the interesting thing about that is that the enzymes in your body that break down alcohols would prefer to break down ethanol first and methanol second. And it means that when you’re in a hangover phase, if you drink more alcohol you’ll actually stop your body from breaking down methanol and the things that are making you feel ill, and instead go back to working on the ethanol and leave the methanol intact. So there is a biological basis for the hair of the dog. And that’s one of the possible risk factors for why hangover might be a risk factor for alcoholism rather than a natural block for it.

Alcohol Up Close

dish_microtequila3

Michael Davidson uses his microscope to capture images of alcoholic drinks (like tequila, seen above):

Michael Davidson used a high-powered microscope at the Florida State Research Foundation to photograph your favorite beverages and cocktails. Who knew that alcohol could be so incredibly beautiful?

We have been assured that the images have not been retouched and the crystallized drinks on the microscope slides haven’t been dyed, which we admit is a little unbelievable, considering the vivid colors of the images…. It’s all in the cross-polarized light microscope, which refracts light through the crystal, creating a mixture of gorgeous colors.

See more of these images here.

Sex With Benefits?

Jesse Singal breaks down the breaking news that casual sex may be beneficial “… if you like casual sex”:

[R]esearchers had a bunch of undergraduates take a survey that revealed whether they had so-called restricted or unrestricted “sociosexual orientations” — that is, whether or not they viewed casual sex in a positive light and had a tendency to seek it out. (How someone’s sociosexual orientation develops is complicated — it’s “determined by a combination of heritable factors, sociocultural learning, and past experiences,” the researchers write.) Then they tracked the participants’ sexual activity via self-reporting over the course of an academic year.

Undergrads who viewed casual sex in a positive light “typically reported higher well-being after having casual sex compared to not having casual sex” — “well-being” meaning higher self-esteem and lower depression and anxiety. Those with negative attutides toward casual sex reported a hit to their well-being, but this wasn’t statistically significant. (The researchers didn’t have a lot of data to work with because, unsurprisingly, people who don’t like casual sex don’t tend to have a lot of casual sex.) There were no identifiable gender differences.

Picking up on Isha Aran’s takeaway of “whatever floats your boat,” Amanda Hess challenges the study:

But whose boats are being floated here, exactly? [Researcher Zhana] Vrangalova told Pacific Standard that people who rate high on the sociosexual scale are generally “extroverted” and “impulsive” men who are more likely to be attractive, “physically strong,” and “more sexist, manipulative, coercive and narcissistic” than their peers. The people on college campuses who are the most likely to engage in casual sex—and to reap its benefits—are also dudes who are high in social status and low in character. For college students like them, ‘‘not all casual sex is bad.’’ But is that actually good news for anyone else?

It may be that attractive, manipulative, narcissistic, and sexist men are simply naturally inclined to enjoy no-strings-attached sex. Or it might be that only these men have acquired the status necessary to not suffer any social consequences for doing so.

Update from a reader:

As a younger man, I had many, many partners and tons of casual sex (but please, let’s not conflate “casual sex” with a one-night-stand with someone I just met – though that happened, too). I’m not extroverted nor impulsive (OK, maybe a tad impulsive), and definitely not sexist, manipulative, coercive nor narcissistic.  I can say, however, and without hesitation, that before I entered into a monogamous marriage, some of the very most joyful moments in my life were associated with casual sex experiences.

I struggled with that realization for a long while because I had inevitably absorbed some of the societal bullshit that makes us think that casual sex is automatically wrong.  After pondering on it for years, I came to the conclusion that experiencing joy through casual sex is A-OK. Again, I never manipulated, coerced, nor deceived, and I tried my very best to be considerate of everyone’s feelings.   At various times, these encounters were loving, healing, confusing, awkward, bittersweet, angry, sad – the whole human range of emotions. Further, those moments of joy often weren’t necessarily about the sex itself, but rather the situation around the encounter, the run-up to sex.  Had I not met and married my spouse, I would be happily living a life that involved lots of joyful casual sex and I wouldn’t feel a nit of guilt about it.

Softcore Soviets

Joy Neumeyer recently investigated the long-secret Soviet-era erotica of the Russian State Library:

It was the kinkiest secret in the Soviet Union: Across from the Kremlin, the country’s main library held a pornographic treasure trove. Founded by the Bolsheviks as a repository for aristocrats’ erotica, the collection eventually grew to house 12,000 items from around the world, ranging from 18th-century Japanese engravings to Nixon-era romance novels. Off limits to the general public, the collection was always open to top party brass, some of whom are said to have enjoyed visiting. …

One of the most stunning items seized from an unknown owner is “The Seven Deadly Sins,” an oversized book of engravings self-published in 1918 by Vasily Masyutin, who also illustrated classics by Pushkin and Chekhov. Among its depictions of gluttony is a large woman masturbating with a ghoulish smile.

Nick Davies elaborates on who frequented the collection:

The biggest boost to the [old special storage collection] spetskhran’s naughtier items came from librarian Nikolai Skorodumov, who was allowed to maintain an extensive erotica collection under the guise of “the discourse of communist ideology,” though the truth might be that he was protected by Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, “a pornography aficionado whose apartment reportedly held a dildo collection.” …

While it’s no longer secret, the collection still isn’t readily available to the public, though [collection overseer Marina] Chestnykh points out that this hasn’t prevented a few stray items from going missing over the years, at the hands of “unscrupulous librarians, or even heads of state.”

View the Moscow Times‘ disappointingly unsmutty gallery of the library here.

(Image of illustration from The Seven Deadly Sins by Vasily Masyutin via ARTINRUSSIA)

Maybe Spitzer Was Onto Something

Melissa Dahl pulls some fun facts from a new book about sex myths by Aaron Carroll and Rachel Vreeman:

It’s totally cool to leave your socks on during sex. Okay, nothing sounds less sexy than that, but hear Carroll and Vreeman out. They cite a study by Dutch scientists that found both men and women were more likely to have orgasms … when they were given socks. Eighty percent of the participants with socks on were able to have orgasms, but for the unfortunate sockless participants their ability to come was reduced to a coin-flip.

In this particular study, the researchers did brain scans on men and women while their partners attempted to get them to orgasm by stimulating their genitals. So, yes, okay, we’re talking about a laboratory setting, not an actual bedroom. But the real point here is that comfort and relaxation is key, and that may be especially true for women.

Book Club: A Conversation With Alexandra And Maria, Ctd

In our next clip, Maria and Alexandra discuss the idea that a writer is a “professional observer”:


Meanwhile, on her blog Brain Pickings, Maria quotes Alexandra, a professor at Barnard who specializes in dog cognition:

I am, professionally, an observer of animals — by which I mean nonhuman animals. I actually have been less interested in looking at people… But of course, as it turns out, the human animal is also infinitely more complex than I give us credit for. And I appreciated — a lot — the fact that, at the end of this book, I could take a walk with anybody — it didn’t have to be an expert… — and I became more appreciative of anyone’s perspective. If you can bookclub-beagle-trjust get somebody to talk about what they see when they’re walking down the street, they will almost inevitably be seeing something different than you. Because they are a different person, and there’s a whole background there. And, actually, I think that is a kind of writerly trick — it’s sitting in the restaurant and making up stories about the people who sit around you… being interested in [them] and being able to imagine, backwards, their stories.

Follow the whole book club discussion here, and email your thoughts and observations to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com. You can listen to the entire conversation from Alexandra and Maria below:

A Black Market For Black Lungs

Keith Humphreys checks in on shady trading practices for cigarettes:

The global black market in tobacco is estimated to supply 11.6% of the world’s consumption, a startling 650 billion cigarettes a year. And there are two components to this market that have drawn the particular scrutiny of law enforcement: fake cigarettes and tax avoidance. The reason why fake cigarettes are big business will be obvious to anyone who tunes in to Mad Men. Cigarettes have arguably been marketed internationally more effectively than any other American product.  The resulting worldwide recognition of the Marlboro Man, Joe Camel et al. means that hundreds of millions of smokers are willing to pay a premium for famous Western brands. This has created a lucrative opportunity for criminals – overwhelmingly based in China — to repackage over 100 billion cheap cigarettes a year as marquee Western brands. While not enthusiastic about the amount of revenue being generated by fake cigarettes, U.S. policymakers have been even more concerned about smugglers avoiding taxes for selling genuine cigarettes.