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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.”

Reihan wants to raise alcohol taxes significantly:

Great Britain has seen a staggering increase in alcohol consumption since the 1990s, much of it among teenagers. Tim Heffernan, writing in the Washington Monthly, has attributed Britain’s binge-drinking crisis to its laissez-faire alcohol market, which has allowed for the vertical integration of the liquor business. America has been shielded from U.K.–style liquor conglomerates by those post-Prohibition regulations that inflate the cost of making, moving, and selling booze, but that’s now changing thanks to big multinationals like Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors, which are working hand in glove with national retail chains like Costco to make alcohol as cheap and accessible as they can.

Why would I, a great lover of the free enterprise system, want the alcohol market to be more heavily regulated?

Precisely because I’m a believer in the power of the profit motive, I understand how deadly it can be when the product being sold is intoxication. For-profit businesses exist to increase sales. The most straightforward way to do that is not to encourage everyone to drink moderately, but to focus on the small minority of people who drink the most. That is exactly what liquor companies do, and they’ll do more of it if we let Big Liquor have its way. In Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know, the authors estimate that at current beer prices, it costs about $5 to $10 to get drunk, or a dollar or two per drunken hour. To get a sense of what the world would look like if that price fell significantly, go to a typical town square in England on a weekend night, where alcohol-fueled violence is rampant, or to Russia, where the ruling class has used cheap vodka as a tool to keep the population drunk, passive, and stupid for generations.

Kleiman generally agrees but nitpicks:

At some points, I would differ in emphasis. It’s hard to judge how much alcoholism is a cause of the rotten Russian polity and the decrepit Russian economy and society, and to what extent it is an effect, with people drinking because there’s nothing better to do.

Amanda Hess peruses a sociological study showing that slut-shaming has little to do with actual sexual behavior:

The researchers interviewed more than 50 women (all of them white) from the start of their freshman year and followed them to shortly after their graduations, asking them questions about, for example, their perceptions of ‘‘a girl who is known for having sex with a lot of guys.’’ That question was an unexpected dud, yielding few thoughts from the young women in their sample. Then the college women realized that the researchers weren’t really asking for their opinions about promiscuous women. They were asking for their thoughts about “sluts”—a campus stigma that had almost nothing to do with students’ real sexual experiences, but everything to do with their social class. …

As the sociologists got to know these women, they watched as they stratified into what they defined as “high status” and “low status” social groups, with high-status women typically emerging from affluent homes around the country and rising through the Greek system, and low-status ones coming from local middle- and working-class backgrounds and coalescing into friend groups boxed out of sorority life. They found that the groups had different conceptions of what constituted a campus slut, with the low-status women pinning sluttiness on “rich bitches in sororities,” and the high-status women aligning sluttiness with women they perceived as “trashy,” not “classy.” This class-based construction of the campus slut allowed both groups to deflect the stigma of “sluttiness” onto other women and away from themselves, establish hierarchies among social groups, and police everyone’s gender performance—including their own—along the way.

Olga Khazan’s takeaway is that sluts, like hipsters, are basically anyone you don’t like:

One of the most striking things [sociologist Elizabeth] Armstrong learned was that, despite the pervasiveness of slut-shaming, there was no cogent definition of sluttiness, or of girls who were slutty, or even evidence that the supposedly slutty behavior had transpired. In the study, she notes that though “women were convinced that sluts exist” and worked to avoid the label, some of their descriptions of sluttiness were so imprecise (‘‘had sex with a guy in front of everybody”) that they seemed to be referring to some sort of apocrypha—“a mythical slut.”

“The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that,” she told me. “It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.”

In a Paris Review interview we recently flagged, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner cites the influence of John Cheever, saying that the writer “is in every aspect” of the show. Elisabeth Donnelly elaborates:

Cheever is the closest thing that Mad Men has to a spirit animal. In his life and in his work, Cheever was a faker, a man trying very hard to fit into a box, and completely aware of it. His spirit infuses the edges of Don Draper’s American story. References abound, of course: Don and Betty lived on Bullet Park Lane — Bullet Park was the title of one of Cheever’s later novels — in Ossining, New York, the suburb where Cheever lived for much of his life. I think Cheever would be delighted to see where Matt Weiner is taking Don Draper, and the flights of profound beauty and weirdness that color Mad Men.

Rebecca Makkai also explores similarities between the show and Cheever’s fiction:

Cheever’s stories often end not with action but in a tangential and meditative fugue; Weiner’s episodes end with music, arguably the filmic equivalent. The perfect discord of Betty eating ice cream to the strains of “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” ended a dark Season 5 episode better than any cliffhanger, any plot development, could have. As with a Cheever story, we haven’t wrapped things up neatly – to do so would be an insult to the complexity of what has come before – but we’re given a tonal riff on the story, plus time to absorb it all. We’ve already seen the splash of the rock in the pond, and now we’re watching the ripples. At the end of Cheever’s “A Country Husband,” the protagonist stands in his garden after a series of social and marital humiliations, and watches a neighbor dog prance “through the tomato vines, holding in his generous mouth the remains of an evening slipper.” A lesser writer might have stopped there, but Cheever takes off for outer space: “Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.” If, next spring, “Mad Men” ends on a note half that strange and sublime, I’ll be satisfied.

Court Merrigan defines the literary genre of “country noir,” which is all about “the small, the local, the defiant and the defeated”:

Over and against the overweening hubris of the American Dream, country noir looks to the broken-down farmhouse, abandoned in a pasture, with its dreams long gone and broken. It flips the bird to social conscience, ideology and utopian hopes, turns to the bar for another red beer, contemplating the tottering of social order against the meth epidemic, the plight of returned veterans abandoned by their country, the fate of fugitives. There is no epic sweep to these stories, no recourse to a mythology which sweeps us all along to a manifest destiny.

Country noir occurs beyond the aegis of the city and the suburbs. Its rural settings bring the actions and characters into sharp relief, stripping away social context and revealing its humans as naked, trembling, and very horribly fallible. Eschewing social commentary and symbolism, country noir prefers to dwell in the more homely environs of story.

No crusaders appear. Characters may be victims, passive or flailing, of vicious social circumstance, but while there may be a good deal of awareness of the haves, they will remain have-nots. The swindling Bible salesmen in Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” for instance, certainly has some idea what he’s missing out in the pleasant homes he visits. Many lives in country noir works are worn out over amounts of money that would be beneath the notice of the prosperous; from Rueben Bourne accidentally murdering his son in the wilderness after going broke in Nathanial Hawthorne’s “Roger Malvin’s Burial” to the unnamed fugitive in Scott Wolven’s “Atomic Supernova” eking out a living in the Nevada badlands recycling metal and running drugs, the characters of country noir works are generally not economic winners.

(Image: Genealogy of country noir via Electric Literature)

Saira Khan introduces the recently developed procedure of clitoral reconstruction, which promises to reverse at least some of the damage done to women who have been subjected to clitoridectomy:

The surgery itself is fairly simple.

As the science community has recently learned, the clitoris is much larger than the small accessible part. An unerect clitoris can be up to 9 centimeters long, meaning that most of the clitoris is actually within the body and inaccessible without surgery. So theoretically, underneath the scar tissue on a woman who has experienced female genital mutilation is more clitoris.

To restore part of the clitoris, the doctor opens up the scar tissue, brings some of the clitoris back up into position, and sews it in place. The recovery process for the surgery is long, painful, and arduous; it can take up to a few months for skin to grow on top of the newly restored clitoris leaving the woman very sensitive for some time. [Dr. Pierre] Foldès says he cannot guarantee orgasms from the restoration but it does have the potential to bring back some sensation.

Still, the surgery has not gained much traction in the U.S. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists believes there is not enough research to support the surgery yet.