The Dish

Julie Lyons pens a captivating profile of Larry and Marion Pollard, who perform exorcisms in their West Texas ranch home. Lyons describes witnessing the exorcism, or “deliverance session,” of a woman named Ruth:

“Get up and face me,” [Larry] commands, in a Texas drawl. “I want the one that is trying to intimidate, to act like the big boss. Get up here and face me right now. I call you to judgment.”

Genial, wisecracking Ruth vanishes. A metamorphosis takes place, with subtle changes in voice, movement, and expression. Her head begins to shake and bob. Her arms tense up and straighten. Her fingers stiffen and arch upward. Her head jerks to the left, avoiding Larry’s steady, unsmiling gaze.

Marion, 65, looks on beside them, praying quietly.

“Turn the head right now and look at me,” Larry demands. “Who are you?”

The head snaps forward and drops. The mouth lets out a long sigh—ahhhhh. A robotic, vaguely masculine voice responds: “What do you want?”

“What is your function?” Larry asks.

“I have no function except to torment,” the voice answers. The eyes are fixed in a way that is glaring yet vacant.

“Do you have a right to her? Yes or no?” Larry asks.

“Yes, I have,” the voice says, in a clipped, mocking tone.

“What is your right?”

“Her sexuality,” the voice groans, drawing out the consonants with a hiss. “I take all of their reproductive organs. Everyone gives to me.”

“How long have you tormented her?” Larry asks.

“Foreverrrr,” the voice says, breaking into a growl. “As long as I want to.”

“That ain’t the answer,” Larry interjects. “Do you want me to punish you?”

“No,” the voice says, growling again. “Noooooo.”

As he does many times on this April day, Larry calls on the angels of God to torment the demons with flaming swords until the spirits speak truthfully or depart altogether. After considerable interrogation, and after Larry repents on Ruth’s behalf for the sins that allowed this demon to take residence in her, the thing apparently leaves. Ruth bobs her head and exhales.

She plucks a tissue from the box and dabs a tear.

“I felt it leave,” Marion says, speaking for the first time. “Thank you, Jesus.”

 

In an excerpt from his new book, Why I am an Atheist Who Believes in God, Frank Schaeffer pulls no punches about how he approaches the message of Jesus:

Jesus certainly was not a “Bible believer,” as we use that term in the post Billy Graham era of American fundamentalist religiosity that’s used as a trade-marked product to sell religion. Jesus didn’t take the Jewish scriptures at face value. In fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking relativist who wasn’t even “saved,” according to evangelical standards. Evangelicals insist that you have to believe very specific interpretations of the Bible to be saved. Jesus didn’t. He undercut the scriptures.

The stories about Jesus that survived the bigots, opportunists and delusional fanatics who wrote the New Testament contain powerful and enlightened truths that would someday prove the undoing of the Church built in his name. Like a futurist vindicated by events as yet undreamed, Jesus’ message of love was far more powerful than the magical thinking of the writers of the book he’s trapped in. … Jesus believed in God rather than in a book about God. The message of Jesus’ life is an intervention in and an acceleration of the evolution of empathy.

In an interview about the book, Schaeffer unpacks what he means by its paradoxical title:

I do not always believe, let alone know, if God exists. I do not always know he, she, or it does not exist either, though there are long patches in my life when it seems God never did exist. What I know is that I see the Creator in Jesus or nowhere. What I know is that I see Jesus in my children and grandchildren’s love. What I know is that I rediscover hope again and again through my wife Genie’s love. What I know is that Mother Maria loved unto death. What I know is that sometimes something too good to be true, is true. …

Maybe we need a new category other than theism, atheism, or agnosticism that takes paradox and unknowing into account. I believe that life evolved by natural selection. I believe that evolutionary psychology explains away altruism and debunks love and that brain chemistry undermines my illusion of free will and personhood. I also believe that the spiritual reality hovering over, in, and through me calls me to love, trust, and hear the voice of my Creator.

One reviewer, an atheist, cautions that Schaeffer’s appropriation of the term isn’t exactly literal:

Frank sets forth a proposition in his book and it is this: Religious Fundamentalism sits on one side of his religious sweet spot, and Atheism sits on the other. Atheism is simply the co-evil twin of religious fundamentalism. He occasionally tries to back pedal from that premise and give some Atheists some credit; but it is clear Atheism brings to Frank a frustrated eye-roll. Which makes me wonder what prompted the use of the term Atheist in his title. He may be a theist who wavers on his opinion of who or what god is. He may be unclear as to whether humanity survives beyond the point of death, but none of those questions have anything to do with Atheism.

Reviewing Peter J. Leithart’s Gratitude: An Intellectual History, Wesley Hill looks back at the virtue’s ambiguous place in ancient societies:

Gratitude starts before the Christian era, with the ancient Greeks and Romans. A wealthy patron might offer a present to a friend, but such a favor wasn’t about establishing equality. On the contrary, the recipient of the gift was expected to demonstrate gratitude by returning the favor in a correspondingly concrete way. Greek and Roman moralists fretted over the elaborate maneuvering this system required. Aristotle and his followers suggested that return gifts should outshine their originals, allowing receivers to enjoy a certain independence. Meanwhile, Cicero and Seneca, the first-century Latin authors, counseled shrewdness. Better, they thought, to use the newly established patron-client relationship for one’s own advantage.

Demonstrating gratitude by giving return gifts was a way to climb the social ladder. If you heralded your patron’s generosity by publicly showing him your gratitude, you might stand a chance of benefitting from his gifts again in the future, and thus the cycle would be perpetuated. “Paganism did not have to learn gratitude from Christians,” Leithart concludes. “Paganism knew all about gratitude, the oppressions of gratitude included.”

Hill goes on to emphasize Leithart’s argument that Christianity changed what gratitude meant – and his call for “the church to reclaim its identity as a people of gratitude”:

All this was revolutionized when Jesus interrupted the dance of gift and return gift by focusing all the attention on the one divine Giver, the one whom Jesus called “Father.” “[T]he central theme of Jesus’ teaching on gift and reciprocity,” according to Leithart, “is the revelation of the Father as the generous Patron of all his children.”

What happens to the elaborate, delicately choreographed waltz of gifts and return gifts if benefactors can look to God rather than to their friends for any reciprocation they might need? If God is ultimately behind every gesture of generosity, then the rationale for lording it over others and enforcing servile relationships is undone. Suddenly the complicated dance becomes unnecessary. Opting out becomes a possibility. Benefactors don’t have to pressure their clients to return their gifts, and recipients don’t have to remain shackled to the expectations of their patrons. “The only debts [Christians] owe are to love one another and to give thanks to God.”

That’s how Maureen O’Connor describes The Dating Ring, a matchmaking start-up that crowdfunded a campaign to fly female New Yorkers to meet men in San Francisco. Along with 15 other women, O’Connor braved the trip. Here’s an excerpt from Day 3 of her journey, which she describes as “the night things get dark”:

Some of the men at this party are more eccentric than those we received as matches. A programmer who donated “several hundred dollars” to the Crowdtilt likens the donation to “giving $2 to a homeless person.” In an affectless voice, he analyzes the relative Asian-ness of each of my facial features, then explains his frustration with online dating: “I prefer to use reality as my platform. There’s zero latency, no lag. Do you know what lag is? When you do something online, you don’t get a response right away. Meeting women in reality — boom! — fully responsive.” As he says this, he begins to touch me. I flee. Soon thereafter, [Dating Ring co-founder] Emma Tessler points out a different man she believes to be “obsessed with” me. She offers to run interference, and I do not see him again. …

As the party grows, we become inundated with men. We are experiencing gender imbalance in the wild, and it is chaos. Every time I turn, there are men lined up waiting to deliver carefully rehearsed greetings or to initiate repartee. At this point, I am so exhausted from constant socializing — even Lyft rides feel like first dates — that I feel a breakdown coming on.

Meanwhile, Shaila Dewan considers dating sites as the quintessential online brokers (NYT):

The good news is that the more seemingly useless brokers are, somewhat counterintuitively, the more valuable they can be in signaling our interest – what [author Paul] Oyer might call the “money to burn” move. If anyone can wink at you free on a dating website, or for that matter beam in a job résumé, their actions don’t mean much. On the other hand, if someone fills out hundreds of questions and pays $60 a month – or in the case of a job applicant, researches a company and writes a detailed proposal – it signals a much deeper interest. Academic economists, in fact, use this sort of signaling in their own hiring process. When top-tier candidates are interested in working at lower-tier schools – for reasons of geographical preferences or spousal considerations, perhaps – they are encouraged to send a special “winking” signal to schools that might otherwise consider them out of their league. [One] Korean dating site has tried something similar, holding a special event in which most participants could send two virtual roses. The signaling worked. Not only was the response rate higher for people who received a rose, but the roses worked better on people of middling desirability, those who might not otherwise believe that someone of higher desirability was a serious suitor. So, on some level, an expensive broker does nothing more than indicate the level of your game.

Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work, explores the porn production studio of Kink.com. She describes the studio as a “rare accomplishment” that “aims to favorably represent a sexual subculture, that holds free sex parties and (paid) public tours, [and] that positions itself as a San Francisco institution with unironic civic pride.” In the studio’s penthouse, called the Upper Floor, Kink hosts live sex shows:

[F]or some of Kink.com’s community members, performing on the Upper Floor could feel more like a service Kink offered to them. There are probably more public sex play spaces in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else in this hemisphere, but Kink’s are certainly more lavish and, for some, come with a certain prestige that just having kinky sex in a homegrown dungeon—without the cameras, without the “fame”—does not. After the parties, [Upper Floor producer] Stefanos told me, he sometimes sends the guests still photographs that he thinks they’d like as keepsakes. They can post them to their online profiles on sites like Fetlife, on pseudonymous personal blogs, or slightly blurred on Instagram.

“This is almost the ultimate form of ‘do what you love,’” said Georgina Voss, a researcher and writer who examines how technologies are designed, interpreted, and regulated, particularly in the creative and culture industries, including the adult industry.

I rang her over Skype to ask her if the porn industry was going the way of all creative industries online: replacing the professionals with amateurs. With “do what you love,” Voss referred back to Miya Tokumitsu’s essay of the same name in Jacobin. It’s easier to direct porn performers to “do what you love,” perhaps, when even the producers who depend on it don’t readily regard the work of performing sex as work, but instead as sexual expression.

This reluctance, along with the various poor working conditions we’re supposed to absorb in exchange for “doing what we love,” Voss said, is in a way “almost the perfect storm of what’s going on in culture industries. Because what is more fun than sex—with someone you love in a really nice place?”

Previous Dish on Gira Grant here and here.

That’s the title Adam Plunkett bestows upon Patricia Lockwood:

Lockwood is famous—more than thirty thousand people follow her on Twitter—but the source of her fame is almost entirely owing to her tweets and not to her poetry. Even the exception, her most famous poem, “Rape Joke,” could read as a series of exceptional tweets. She’s made for the medium. It rewards her particular talents for compression, provocation, mockery, snark.

Her ongoing series of “Sexts,” an extended parody of sexual text messages, is disarming as well as unsettling, because it moves quickly between the dumb voice that Lockwood captures so well and something entirely different—something hectoring, obscene, and sinister.

“‘I’m so wet,’ you murmur. Marmaduke raises his glistening face. ‘That’s because I’m famous for drool,’ he laughs.” “I go up to heaven and open God’s Bible. It contains only a single sext: ‘Im hard.'” … Just as there are always followers to laugh along with her, there are always men who miss the joke. She has said, “It is so funny, still, when a man—and it’s usually a man—responds to you, going, ‘Yeah girl, I want to put soap on your boobies in the shower.’ You’re responding literally to a tweet about me riding down the neck of a brontosaurus until I come.”

Jesse Lichtenstein profiles (NYT) Lockwood, whose newest collection of poetry, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, was published this week:

“Whenever anyone asks me about process,” she said, “I’m like a cat stroked the wrong way: Get away from my belly!” But she is fundamentally a sharer, a poet for the age of sharing. “I’m verbally incontinent — anything just pours out of me,” she said. “My father’s that way. He doesn’t worry about it. My mother does. I got both. I say just the worst things the English language is capable of, and then later on I lie awake at night thinking, Oh, Tricia, you’ve done it again.”

Lockwood’s poems are most radical in their ability to convey the essential strangeness of sex and gender. “I consistently felt myself to be not male or female,” she said, “but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist. Maybe it’s a byproduct of reading a lot of books, of projecting yourself into different bodies. As an early teen, I thought I presented as androgynous, which was not true. But I had a short haircut, and I felt androgynous.”