Category: The Dish

Melissa Dahl relays the findings of a new paper showing how “narcissists watch more online pornography, and the more internet porn people watched, the more narcissistic they tended to be”:

The researchers, from the University of Houston–Clear Lake, tested narcissism levels on the participants, most of whom were heterosexual women between 18 and 61 years of age, using a standard 40-item questionnaire. They found that the higher respondents scored on the narcissism scale, the more likely they were to say they’d ever watched pornography; this held true even when excluding answers from men, who in this study and previous ones cop to watching more porn. And among the people who watched porn, higher narcissism was correlated with more hours watching internet porn.

Past research has shown that the more control narcissists have over sex, the more gratifying the experience tends to be, the researchers note — and this could help explain the narcissism-porn connection. “The use of internet pornography offers this control,” write the study authors, in that the online-porn viewer is able to click around until he or she finds exactly their idealized sexual imagery.

In this midst of musing on what it feels like to be sixty, the British writer and critic A.A. Gill gets real about sex:

I’ve been making a list of the sex that I’m now too old to consider. I will probably never have sex again on a jiggling sofa with her parents asleep upstairs. Or in a skip. Or in the back of a stationary 2CV or the front of a moving Alfa Romeo.

I won’t do bondage, sadomasochism or erotic yoga or miss them. Neither will I partake in role play. I am too old to be a pirate, a policeman, a Viking or the Milk Tray Man (they don’t know who the Milk Tray Man was either).

And I realise with a sudden shock that I’m probably too old to sleep with anyone for the first time. The thought of having to go through the whole seduction, will they, won’t they, can I, can’t I, is far more terrifying than it is exciting.

Sex definitely changes. It is less athletic, more romantic, more intense, more a special event. Not because it’s rare, but because it’s finite. There is a point in your life when you stop counting up and start counting back. It’s not the laps run, it’s the laps that are left.

“Who owns the story, the person who lives it or the person who writes it?” asks Roxana Robinson, who ventures an answer (NYT):

When Leo Tolstoy wrote “Anna Karenina,” he was drawing on a local real-life tragedy: a young woman, jilted by her lover, threw herself under a train in despair. But he also drew on something more personal: His married sister had an adulterous affair and an illegitimate child. She was abandoned by her lover, who left her to marry another woman. She grew desperate and suicidal and wrote anguished letters to her brother. Did Tolstoy have the right to tell her story? He changed it to suit his literary needs, and used her desperation for his own purposes. But what were those purposes?

I don’t think Tolstoy was exploiting his sister, quite the reverse. I think he was voicing his own pain and desperation. He was driven, not by a narcissistic urge for literary gain, but by deep empathy for his sister. His response was not, “I can use this,” but “I can’t bear this.” Writing was a way to relieve his own pain. This was a deeply compassionate response. … A great writer like Tolstoy will feel a character’s life as his own; he’ll enter fully into that consciousness, and his responses will reverberate through his work. A great writer will use a narrative because she finds it moving, or compelling, troubling or heartbreaking or exhilarating. What drives her is empathy, not voyeurism.

Daniel Mendelsohn recalls how reading the author for the first time transformed his ideas of love and writing:

Discovering Proust was a real shock—it was the shock of recognition. I was twenty, and going through a rough patch in my love life. It gave me a shock that, I believe, is felt by every gay person reading Proust for the first time—the unsatisfied desires and the frustration I harbored had not only been felt by someone else but, even more extraordinarily, they were the subject of a great book. When I read Swann’s Way, it wasn’t the description of homosexual desire that touched me—because it’s practically absent in that volume—but something much more general, the description of unreciprocated desire, and above all, the astounding revelation that desire can’t endure its own satisfaction. We see that exemplified in Swann in Love. When Swann succeeds in physically possessing Odette, when she ceases to escape him, his desire for her vanishes. For me … that was a revelation as well as a recognition.

And then I had another kind of shock. Thanks to Proust, I found a certain consolation in thinking that all artistic creation is a substitute for frustration and disappointment—that art feeds on our failures. Back then, I remember thinking to myself, I can’t get what I want anyway, I may as well become a writer!

Tony Zhou pieces together a primer on how Martin Scorsese, famous for his use of music in films, applies silence to equally great effect:

Back in 2008, Roger Ebert highlighted Scorsese’s use of rock music in his book on the director:

Of all directors of his generation and younger, he may make the best use of rock music in his films. His first film was scored with rock records, he was a supervising editor on Woodstock, he has done documentaries on The Band and Bob Dylan, and was working in late 2007 on a Rolling Stones concert tour. He uses period music for New York, New York or The Aviator, and he evokes a time period with Dean Martin (who he once planned to make a film about), but you sense that he edits with rock in mind; it is worth remembering that he met his longest-serving collaborator, the great editor Thelma Schoonmaker, on Who’s That Knocking, and worked on Woodstock with her. Michael Wadleigh, one of the cinematographers on Knocking, became the director of Woodstock. I remember sitting next to them on the floor of a New York loft and watching takes of that film while they were both vibrating like fans at a concert.

(Hat tip: kottke)