Debate rages over what type of older women pair up with younger men:
In an April paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics, University of Colorado economists Hani Mansour and Terra McKinnish analyzed census, health, and cognitive data on thousands of married couples to test common stereotypes about cougars and their more traditional counterparts, sugar daddies (older, wealthy men who marry young, attractive women). They found that couples in which one partner is significantly older than the other scored lower on measures of attractiveness, income, education, and intelligence, than couples in which both partners were similar in age. …
But economist Melvyn Coles isn’t convinced. He and University of Essex colleague Marco Francesconi wrote in a 2011 paper that the cougar phenomenon, while still rare, has been growing since 1970 and is more likely to occur when the woman has higher levels of education and professional success. Looking at data from the United Kingdom and the United States, they reported that unions in which the woman is five or more years older than the man increased from about about three percent in 1970 to more than eight percent in 2000. Digging deeper into this subset, and including women who had divorced as well as those in their first marriage, they found that women with higher education and professional levels are 45 percent more likely than the average woman to be in what they call a “toyboy” relationship.
Richard J. Williams suspects that architects have underestimated a key component of human nature:
It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex. If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings frame and house our sexual lives. They tell us where and when we can, and cannot, have sex, and with whom. To escape buildings for sex — to use a park, a beach, or the back seat of a car — is a transgression of one kind or another. Most of us keep sex indoors and out of sight. …
According to [sex therapist Esther] Perel, sex wastes time, needs space, and (most intriguingly) is inhibited by too much intimacy. All these things have implications for architecture, which in the West has been coloured by the language of efficiency for at least a century.
His proposal?
For me, the ideal would be some form of co-housing, the best-known example being Sættedammen in Denmark, established in 1972 (with the founding creed: ‘Children should have 100 parents’). It occupies the right space between the wilder forms of intentional community, and market-dominated individualism. It doesn’t explicitly challenge sexual norms. However, by providing shared facilities (childcare, gyms, swimming pools, saunas, rooms for parties), it provides time and space to play, and addresses the deficits that Esther Perel identified as inhibiting our sexual lives (sex loves to waste time, remember).
But I’d add some sort of therapeutic role, too. If we were to live more communally, we would need help to resolve inevitable interpersonal conflicts. The odd thing is that we already strongly value co-housing, albeit in an occasional and time-limited form. University students live like this, and we do the same thing on holiday; both forms seem to provide a better emotional environment in which to explore and develop primary relationships — including sexual ones. If we can accept such communal living for some of our lives, why not the rest of the time? Then we might have an architecture that actually supports, rather than impedes, our sexual lives.
Fifty years after her suicide, Terry Castle reflects on the enduring controversies surrounding the life, death, and work of Sylvia Plath:
What to make of it all after half a century? From one angle Plath had only herself to blame for the rhetorical excess she provoked—and still does provoke—in readers. She was crazy, after all. Even fifty years on, the gruesome mental suffering that she wrote about continues to pierce and frighten and exasperate.
In her defense: Plath used the pain as best she could. Though attempts over the decades to see her as a protofeminist oracle fail to convince, it has to be said that Plath’s writing captured the central and most disturbing psychic component in the lives of conventional middle-class American heterosexual women of the 1950s and early 1960s: a toxic, typically unconscious longing—sadomasochistic in structure—to be both adored and degraded, cherished and abjected, by a powerful man resembling one’s father. The fantasy contaminates (and sickens) any number of now-canonical Plath poems:
“Electra on the Azalea Path,” “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” “Medusa,” “Cut,” “Daddy,” “The Jailer,” “Lady Lazarus”—all those kitsch near-masterpieces that make the poet a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates. Plath exposed, as no one had before, the quintessential “nice girl” sex-anguish of her time: a mode of female desiring as incoherent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, and self-canceling as it was misogynistic, daddy-obsessed, and morbidly heterosexual.
But one shrinks at the ugliness and hysteria of the vision. Most off-putting, to my mind, is the way Plath made a repugnant and meticulously curated longing for death feel sexy and sublime. At least, that is, for a minute or two. Like Sylvia and Ted [Hughes] colliding at St. Botolph’s, Eros and Thanatos not only lock eyes in Plath’s poems, they’re already so far gone—so mad and humpy with crazy love—that we know they’ll end up killing each other. One doesn’t wish to remain too long in close proximity.
Daniel Lende searches for a middle ground on neuroscience amidst a mounting backlash against the field. He tries to streamline current controversies by citing Professor Nikolas Rose, seen above:
One tension highlighted by Rose is whether the “psy complex” (the fields from the 20th century focused on psychology and mind) will be overtaken by a “neuro complex” in the 21st century. In one sense, that’s what the big fight going on right now is about. Will the autonomous self, with self-control and rationality and an accompanying unconscious, be replaced by a reductive brain? How will one century’s core understanding give way to a new type of materialism, united around ideas of circuits, whether those are neural or technological?
We like to think that our thoughts are inside. We reveal them to others by making them external in the form of action, words, writings, messages and the like. That’s all well and good for describing ordinary life. We can keep secrets. We can publicize our deepest yearnings. But actually, there is no inside. Or rather, use any device you like — from the scalpel to the brain scan — and you won’t find meaning, significance, value, in the head, just as you won’t find value in the coin’s material body. The very inside/outside distinction breaks down.
Lende asks, “Does this mean that, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message? That the circuit is the mind?”:
In my research, that conflict can boil down to whether addiction is primarily a brain problem or a societal problem. And yet all my years of work have convinced me time and again that addiction is both. And that’s the rub. If we take Noe seriously, and we break down the inside/outside distinction, then how do we still make sense of addiction? … One idea is to break the fundamental linkage of mind as defining person, this legacy of the 20th century. Addiction is not defined by the person, and thus the mind (and from there, now, thus the brain). Rather, addiction is a pattern of activity where brain and society meet, and relies on both at once. …
[F]or neuroscience, the funny thing is how much they’ve bought into the “psy complex.” Use the brain to explain the mind, and you’ve found the holy grail. But that’s last century’s holy grail. The middle ground isn’t the mind, whether explained by brain or by society. The middle ground is simply where we live our lives.
Previous Dish on the subject here, here, and here.
This year, we developed an ambitious aesthetic based upon the idea of double exposure, inspired by Alabaster’s amazing track and the conference’s program design. We worked around the theme of binary, juxtaposing the urban sprawl and nature, black and white, flight and fall, and unification and disintegration. It was a labour of love and we couldn’t be prouder with the end result.
The Guardian talked to seven well-known writers about their missteps in life and literature. Julian Barnes has refined his understanding of failure:
When I was growing up, failure presented itself as something clear and public: you failed an exam, you failed to clear the high-jump bar. And in the grown-up world, it was the same: marriages failed, your football team failed to gain promotion from what was then the Third Division (South). Later, I realised that failure could also be private and hidden: there was emotional, moral, sexual failure; the failure to understand another person, to make friends, to say what you meant. But even in these new areas, the binary system applied: win or lose, pass or fail. It took me a long time to understand the nuances of success and failure, to see how they are often intertwined, how success to one person is failure to another.
Lionel Shriver looks on the bright side:
I’m fascinated by failure, a far more difficult experience to ride out with grace than victory, which tends to bring out the best in all but gloating arseholes: magnanimity, generosity, ease, confidence, joy, relaxation, energy, festivity, and a positive outlook. In contrast, failure naturally elicits bitterness, resentment, dolour, enervation, listlessness, pessimism and low self‑esteem – a pretty ugly package. Yet, against the odds, it’s possible to fail well – to rise above the unpleasant basket of emotions that come with the territory and to not allow disappointment to sour one’s very soul. I am bowled over by the massive number of remarkable people who face down the fact that no, they are not going to be film directors, famous artists or billionaire entrepreneurs and still come out the other side as cheerful, decent, gracious human beings. As emotional achievements go, that is much more impressive than making a go of something and avoiding becoming a complete jerk.
A baby orangutan is seen during a birthday celebration at the Singapore Zoo. Home to more than 2,800 animal specimens from over 300 species, 26% of which are threatened, the zoo has attained a strong reputation internationally for its conservation initiatives and breeding programmes. The zoo celebrated its 40th anniversary on Thursday. By Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images.
The LARBcontinues its series on fairy tales, introducing Hans Christian Andersen’s 1836 story The Little Mermaid. Sarah Kuhn defends her motivations:
The Little Mermaid, no matter how her tale is told, is a heroine with the ultimate mundane dream: to be a boring human instead of the utterly fantastical creature she already is. She gets a lot of flack for transforming her body to pursue what is basically a crush, but I can’t help but feel her quest is bigger than that — a yearning for an unknown that seems fantastical to her because it’s the complete opposite of her daily existence.
A. N. Devers prefers the conclusion of Andersen’s original story – the mermaid dissolving into “a daughter of the air” – to the Disney-fied ending of the 1989 movie:
Andersen’s heroine may lose her soul, but Disney’s mermaid sacrifices her physical identity in order to claim her man. There’s no question that around the time this film came out there was a cultural shift. Is it a coincidence that the media started reporting stories about teens requesting boob jobs and liposuction for their birthdays around the same time as this film’s release? Maybe. Or more likely, Disney’s fairy tale reflected the contemporary culture that had already made a disturbing change. …
I wonder what the tale might look like decades from now, when it is adapted to reflect a new cultural moment. Instead of validating stereotypical gender roles and/or reflecting our culture’s acceptance and near-celebration of plastic surgery, I like to dream there will be a little mermaid who can have her man and keep her tail too.
If put my foot up your fucking ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much … I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna fuck…you…up.”
Nothing homophobic about that, whatsoever. Move along, Nothing to see here:
My anger was directed at Mr. Stark for blatantly lying and disseminating libelous information about my wife and her conduct at our friend’s funeral service. As someone who fights against homophobia, I apologize.
Well, if it had nothing to do with homophobia and a reporter’s sexual orientation, then why didn’t he threaten to punch the guy in the face than sodomize him with his foot? And why apologize at all? He has nothing to apologize for, according to him. Then the get-out-of-being-a-violent-gay-basher card:
I have worked, periodically, with numerous marriage equality organizations, especially over the past couple of years, to achieve the very rights that gay couples are earning by recent court decisions. I would not advocate violence against someone for being gay and I hope that my friends at GLAAD and the gay community understand that my attack on Mr. Stark in no way was the result of homophobia.
Many Thanks, Alec Baldwin.
I’m sorry but you have to be deaf, dumb and blind to say that his attack on Stark was “in no way the result of homophobia”. It was one of the purest expressions of violent homophobia you can have. Then this:
I would not advocate violence against someone being gay.
But you just fucking did – in your own words. You called a mob out to beat the crap out of a “toxic little queen.” And the threat of violence makes it, as I said before, a potentially criminal statement, not a gaffe.
This isn’t an apology. It’s bullshit. And if you want to know why I regard GLAAD as so awful, just read their response. It begins:
Alec Baldwin speaks out in support of the gay community
Seriously. GLAAD then responded:
His words yesterday do not match his history of actively supporting LGBT equality. While Alec’s apology is a first step, this should not be the end of the dialogue. There are now other visible actions that he should take to fight anti-gay violence and GLAAD looks forward to working with him.
So he’s now going to do the GLAAD Stations of the Cross and they will milk him for more and more money to account for his raw bigotry. They’d rather get his money than call him out for what he actually said.
The double standard is blindingly obvious. Conservatives would be crucified for saying something like this. A liberal is given an easy exit. I’m not for punishing people for speech; but I am against excusing the threat of homophobic rape against a specific individual because the bigot says he pro-gay. Sorry, Mr Baldwin, but we await an actual apology.
Assessing Paris France, Adam Gopnik describes Gertrude Stein’s “marked” writing style:
All marked styles—and any style that isn’t marked isn’t a style; what we call a “mannered” style is simply a marked style on a bad morning—hold their authors hostage just a bit. Stein’s style makes subtle thoughts sound flat and straightforward, and it also lets straightforward, flat thoughts sound subtle. Above all, its lack of the ordinary half-tints and protective shadings of adjectives and semicolons—the Jamesian fog of implication—lends itself to generalizations, sometimes profound, often idiosyncratic, always startling. It is the most deliberately naïve style in which any good writer has ever worked, and it is also the most “faux-naïf,” the most willed instance of simplicity rising from someone in no way simple. (E. B. White and Robert Frost were neither of them the simple Yankees their styles liked to intimate, but both were more like simple Yankees than Stein was ever like a simple San Franciscan, or a simple anything.) Stein’s style is to writing what sushi is to cooking—not so much an example as a repudiation of the whole idea that still manages to serve the original function.
Gopnik illustrates how Stein’s unconventional prose “can even be made to look normal”:
[A]ny sentence, no matter how many qualifications it contains, is almost always written by Stein in commaless, undivided form. This makes her thoughts seem plain even when they are very fancy. Reading Stein is a bit like reading Emily Dickinson before punctuation got imposed on her: both claim, in every sense, our undivided attention. Many of Stein’s sentences can even be made to look normal just by punctuating them normally. “It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.” Simply inserting a period after the first five words and a dash after the next six makes the writing seem much less eccentric: “It is nice in France. They adapt themselves to everything slowly—they change completely but, all the time, they know that they are as they were.”
