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Nick Ripatrazone reviews the new anthology Unruly Catholic Women Writers:

A woman, single or married, can never become ordained. Many lapsed women have told me the Church’s treatment of women is the reason they have drifted from Mass and never returned. The anger the women in this anthology feel ranges from those who have sprinted from the Church and never looked back to those who long for a return home, even if that house feels broken. My gender precludes a complete understanding of this anger, this distance.

In that vein, when I posit that the best pieces in Unruly Catholic Women do not consider the Catholic hierarchy as a formless omnibus, I do not mean those words as an apologetic retort. One can hold such an opinion, of course, but it makes for thin creative work. Sustained critique is not possible with straw men.

Consider Kaya Oakes’s excellent recent memoir, Radical Reinvention. Oakes finds spiritual direction from both women and men in the Church; she notes its imperfections while finding its ultimate perfection in Christ. There are pieces in this anthology that perfectly capture the paradox of distaste and desire. Place a complaint of the Church delivered through caricature next to the earned wit of “Exile” by Colleen Shaddox: “To be raised Catholic and switch denominations is a lot like giving up Haagen-Dazs for broccoli. You miss the richness, even if you know it’s bad for you.”

Oakes reflects on her decision to remain a practicing Catholic:

[A] female Episcopal priest [told] me that the great feminist theologians are all Catholic for a reason, “because they’re still fighting. Because they’ll be fighting for some time to come.” We can’t bless the bread, or tear it with our hands. But look closely—in the pews, in the back, some of us are lifting our hands. We can’t read the Gospel. But we read everything else. We can’t baptize the children we might bear, lay our dead to rest with those words of grief and consolation; we can’t preach, we can only offer a “reflection” once in a great while. We can’t. We cannot. …

But in that “cannot” I have heard in my church, in the church I freely choose when it tells me all of the things I can’t do, I’ve never felt denied to the point of resentment. Because, vocation? My vocation isn’t behind an altar. My vocation is putting my ass in a pew, week after week. My vocation is the vocation of billions of people, in nearly every religion. It is the vocation of showing up.

Drawing on data from the site Pornhub, David Holmes considers how income affects porn-viewing habits:

The most pronounced differences were observed when comparing time-on-site and page views per capita. In wealthier communities, the average visit duration was 9 minutes and 54 seconds, whereas in less wealthier communities, the average was 11 minutes and 5 seconds. However, the pageviews per capita in high income cities was 9.44 while in low income cities it was only 6.74. It could be that high-earning pornhounds are simply more efficient in their consumption. More likely this is due to faster Internet connections and higher Internet penetration in high-income communities. In other words, the income gap has led to a porn gap.

As for porn preferences, while subtle differences exist between high- and low-income cities, the top categories and search terms bear striking similarities.

In fact, the top five search terms are the same across high-income and low-income cities, although the order is different. In high-income cities, the top five are 1. Gay 2. Ebony 3. Teen 4. Lesbian and 5. MILF, while in low-income cities they are 1. Teen 2. Lesbian 3. MILF 4. Ebony 5. Gay.

Other differences: “Asian” makes the top 10 in six high-income cities but in no low income cities. “Big Dick” makes the top 10 in all 10 low-income cities but only two high-income cities (Washington, DC and Trenton, NJ). Meanwhile, “Squirt” makes the Top 10 in seven low-income cities, but only one high-income city (Hi, New York City). Finally, the highfalutin’ folks in San Jose, Boulder, Thousand Oaks, Stamford, and Napa, like their porn in HD.

UK researchers have published the third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), which collected data from 2010 to 2012. Among the findings? Lesbian experiences are on the rise:

In Natsal-1 [conducted 1990-1991], less than 4 percent of British women aged 16–44 said they’d had any sexual experience or contact with a partner of the same sex. In Natsal-2 [conducted 1999-2001], that number rose to nearly 10 percent. Now it’s 16 percent. By any measure, that’s an enormous increase, more than doubling the reported rate among men. Even if you attribute most of it to changes in candor or interpretation, the willingness of so many women to admit to same-sex activity represents a big cultural shift.

Anal sex is also becoming more prevalent:

The British data confirm that anal intercourse, or at least willingness to report it, is spreading. From Natsal-1 to Natsal-2 to Natsal-3, the percentage of men aged 16-44 who reported having had anal sex in the last year rose from 7 to 12 to 17. The percentage of women rose almost in tandem, from 7 to 11 to 15. When you break down the Natsal-3 data by age, anal sex is the only act whose prevalence increases steadily as you move from older to younger cohorts.

On an annual basis, compared with other sex acts, the rate still isn’t very high. In Natsal-3, among all age groups (up to age 74), only 13 percent of men and 11 percent of women say they’ve had heterosexual anal intercourse in the last year. In the 16-24 age bracket, 19 percent of males and 17 percent of females say they’ve done it during that time. But the percentage who report having done it at least once in their lives is higher. Among the cohort born between 1946 and 1955, the proportion of men and women who said yes to this question by the time they were 35-44 was 20 percent. Among those born between 1956 and 1965, it was 30 percent. Among those born between 1966 and 1975, it’s nearly 40 percent. How high will it go? We just don’t know.

Reviewing Troubling the Line, a new collection of trans and genderqueer poetry, Stephen Burt revels in the freedom offered by verse:

I would, in fact, like to be several mutually incompatible women and girls: a techie tomboy; a confident professional woman whose palette is grey, gold and black; a girl who in several senses has not quite developed, who still puts hearts on her “i’s”; a reviver of colorblock tops, bringing back the New Wave. I would like to resemble the British pop star Clare Grogan, and the cute starship mechanic from the TV show Firefly, and Katherine Hepburn, none of whom resemble each other, and Kitty Pryde from X-Men, who doesn’t exist. I would also, at times, like to be, and I can see myself vividly as if I were, a point guard, and a ferret, and (like Shelley and Mayakovsky before me) a cloud. Sometimes I feel that I might as well be 75 years old; sometimes I feel that I’m “really” 12.

Some of those identities can be approximated, approached, even if clumsily, with makeup and wardrobe; some of them can’t, or not for me. But all of them could be, and some of them have been, explored in my own poems. I think (I have no way of knowing) that if I had been born a girl and had grown up a woman I would still have a profession in one of the arts that use words; I might even be a professor and a literary scholar and a cultural critic, doing much of what I do now. But I am not sure that I would have become a poet, not sure that I would have had the same motivation to make these odd, embarrassing, risky, intuitive, apparently useless art forms that can stand in for the bodies and faces we have, to eclipse or disguise the literal with figura, with artifice made up of language alone.

He steps back to consider the lessons anyone might learn from the poetry of trans people:

Whether or not its author is transgender, a poem is always an alternate self, an imaginary body, a form of transport: we make it from what we are and from what we know, from our immediate lived experience, from the examples we find in others, from what the culture and its words can give.

In this sense, Troubling the Line shows not just what all its trans writers share with one another, but how trans writing can illuminate one purpose of imaginative writing in general. Czeslaw Milosz wrote that “in the very essence of poetry there is something indecent,/ a thing is brought forth that we didn’t know we had in us.” I agree. The same poem by Milosz announces that “the purpose of poetry is to remind us/ how difficult it is to remain just one person.” There I think he was half-right: it seems to me that another purpose of poetry — especially, but not only, trans poetry — is to show us that we don’t have to be.

Elliot Hannon wonders who it will be:

The two industries are best positioned to take a billionaire to the next level are technology and retail, for the same reason: Both use a global labor pool to make affordable products, inexpensive enough that workers can soon become the consumers of the products they are making. Of course, the tech industry is building on Internet infrastructure to create billionaires faster than ever. In October 2010, photo-sharing social network Instagram came into being; less than two years and a mere 13 employees later, Facebook snapped up the company for a cool billion.

A look at the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest shows that the rise of technology and telecommunications has made a big impact:

Mexico’s Carlos Slim, who vies with Gates for the top spot on global-richest lists, made the bulk of his fortune in telecom. Lurking just below these technology magnates are Amancio Ortega, the founder of Zara; the Walton family and their ubiquitous Walmart chain; the Mars family of candy fame; Stefan Persson, chairman of H&M; and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. The rise of these individuals and families is perhaps more surprising than that of Gates, Slim, and their peers—and may be revealing about the clearest sustainable path to 10 figures. These magnates are best positioned, in different ways, to find and use available labor no matter where it is. That will help them sell their products at prices that a wealthier world will be able to afford most quickly. For that to happen, they’ll need emerging markets to continue emerging, creating not only employees but customers, too. If that happens, in two generations – about 60 years – Credit Suisse predicts there could be as many as 11 trillionaires walking among us.

Of course, forecasts can be way off; in 1999, Wired predicted that Bill Gates would reach the trillion-dollar mark by August 2015. He’s currently about $928 billion short.

Responding to the experiments of cockroach-controlling neurologists Backyard Brains – featured previously on the Dish – Brandom Keim looks at the evidence for insect sentience:

Before dismissing bug consciousness out of hand — their brains are so tiny! And, they’re bugs! — it’s worth recalling that one of the first scientists to seriously consider the notion was Charles Darwin, who spent most of his adult life, even as he completed The Descent of Man (1871) and On the Origin of Species (1859), thinking about earthworms. … Among the surprising — to me, anyway — facts detailed by [ethologist Mathieu] Lihoreau, [and researchers James] Costa and [Colette] Rivault about Blattella germanica (the German, or small cockroach) and Periplaneta Americana (the American, or large cockroach), found in kitchens and sewers worldwide, is their rich social lives:

one can think of them as living in herds. Groups decide collectively on where to feed and shelter, and there’s evidence of sophisticated communication, via chemical signals rather than dances. When kept in isolation, individual roaches develop behavioural disorders; they possess rich spatial memories, which they use to navigate; and they might even recognise group members on an individual basis. Few researchers have studied their cognition, says Lihoreau, but cockroaches likely possess ‘comparable faculties of associative learning, memory and communication’ to honeybees.

As to whether cockroaches possess a self, in the pages of Cockroaches: Ecology, Behavior, and Natural History (2007), co-written by William J Bell, Louis M Roth and Christine A Nalepa, I happened upon a reference to Archy, a popular early-20th-century cartoon cockroach who said: ‘Expression is the need of my soul.’ Archy’s inclusion was intended in fun, but there was a grain of truth. Cockroaches could very well possess a sense of self, and one that’s perhaps not entirely alien to our own.

James Parker reviews Deborah Solomon’s American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, which tells the story of how “this rather strange, marginal-feeling man contrived to represent the inner life of a mass audience” – a less straightforward portrayal of “simpler times” than you might surmise:

The secret, clearly, is that Rockwell’s productions, his tableaux of American innocence, are not simple at all. If they were, we would have forgotten them by now. Instead they are loaded with unconscious energy, with nervous hum and erogenous gleam. The grotesque, like some goblin field of gravity, seems to bend and warp even his most conventional subjects. Shiny noses, stringy throats, eyes too avid or too dull; a freakish quiddity in his rendering of shoes, elbows, baskets, bricks. Which to us, post-Freudians that we all inevitably are, can mean only one thing: repression! Rockwell’s preference for the company of boy models and rugged apprentices over that of, say, women is a recurring note in Solomon’s book. (“Draws Boys Not Girls” was the headline of a 1923 Boston Globe article.) He married unhappily, twice, and more happily a third time. And although his demons were not very sulphurous, not very rock-and-roll, they were demons nonetheless: shame, awkwardness, a cyclical sense of his own artistic insufficiency, and an enormous, hellacious self-imposed pressure to get everything right.

And about that repression:

If he was gay, he was never—on the evidence currently available—actively so. Solomon’s point is more that he wasn’t gay, he wasn’t anything. He hovered fraughtly, jamming his canvases with inference. Of his habit of placing a dog, person, hatbox, or similar item in the foreground of his paintings, between the viewer and the action, she writes: “It is one of the tensions in Rockwell’s art. He paints objects with the kind of fastidious realism intended to bring you closer to the touchable, handleable world. But then he paints a barricade in the foreground to keep you from touching. He cannot allow himself to touch what he wants.”

Ben Davis emphasizes the way the new biography shows the paradoxical relationship of the artist’s life to his work:

What drama there is comes not from the incidents of Rockwell’s life but from how, in Solomon’s telling, everything in his art actually represents its opposite. Rockwell created the imagery of the Boy Scouts—his most lucrative and long-lasting gig was for the annual Boy Scout calendar—but he was himself not particularly outdoorsy, a neat freak who couldn’t bear to get dirty. He created memorable images of piety (Saying Grace, 1951), but his clan was uninterested in religion; captured scenes of scampy rebellion (The Shiner, 1954) but was rule-bound and order-obsessed; and, most damningly, painted odes to family togetherness (The Homecoming, 1948) but was so affectionless that his own family despaired of ever knowing him. His first bride, Irene O’Connor, divorced him in 1930 on grounds of “mental cruelty;” his second wife, Mary Barstow, was driven to alcoholism and finally the mental hospital by his remove. Only his third wife, Molly Punderson, whom he met when he was 65 and she 64, seems to have been a fit, and they slept in separate beds. “At last he had found his feminine ideal,” Solomon writes: “an elderly schoolteacher who was unlikely to make sexual demands on him.”

Recent Dish on Rockwell here and here.

(Image of Scout at Ship’s Wheel, Rockwell’s first published magazine cover illustration, from the September 1913 cover of Boys’ Life, via Wikimedia Commons)

Amid the sleek uniformity of Twitter and Facebook, Joe Kloc longs for the Geocities era:

Geocities began in 1994, advertising an enticing 15 megabytes of free space to any homesteader looking to make their place on the Web. The World Wide Web was only a few years old when this digital Northwest Ordinance was issued, and so its users, often referred to as netizens, were necessarily having their first interactions with the Internet, learning to make a place for themselves in the newly discovered online world. Millions of netizens with little to no experience or understanding of how a webpage “should” look utilized the site’s built-in development tools to create clapboard homes spattered with stray GIFs, looping MIDI files, and busy backgrounds. It was the Internet’s Wild West.

It is easy to dismiss these pages as a sort of outsider art. But outside of what? There was no such thing as a personal page before Geocities. And, in almost every meaningful sense of that word, there is no equivalent today.

Consider a page from [Geocities’] Heartland neighborhood, where one resident wrote, “Hi! My name is Sherry, my husband is Richard. We have three children, Colleen, Alicia, and James and we are out here in the desert of southern California.” Further down on the page is a link to “Richard’s Original Bedtime Stories.” … Where today do families publish their homemade bedtime stories about giant pickles? Sites like these have simply disappeared.

Geocities was bought by Yahoo in 1999, during the height of its popularity. Then along came Myspace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006. And by 2009, Petsburg, Heartland, and the rest of Geocities had been shuttered. The world had chosen the pre-fab aesthetics of social networks over the 15-megabyte tracts of open land offered by Geocities. Jacques Mattheij, the founder of the Geocities archive site Reocities, explained this choice to me: “The Geocities environment offered more freedom for expression. Don’t like blue? Then Facebook probably isn’t for you.”

You’ll certainly find less comic sans. Update from a reader:

Know about Neocities? Started by a bitcoin “cyberpunk” dude named Kyle in Portland, Oregon.

From the About page:

I want to make another Geocities. Free web hosting, static HTML only, 10MB limit, anonymous, uncensored.

— Kyle Drake (@kyledrake) May 23, 2013

(Screenshot via Reocities)

Reading through the American Family Association’s annual Naughty Or Nice list, Alyssa rings in the War on Christmas. She calls the yearly panic “an opportunity to revisit how quick conservative organizations are to sell out their own purported values when the opportunity arises for them to get some publicity by doing so”:

First, the measure of whether a company is pro-Christmas is hilariously divorced from any theoretical Christian values or expression of the Christmas spirit, and determined solely by marketing. “BLUE: An [American Family Association] AFA ’5-Star’ rated company that promotes and celebrates Christmas on an exceptional basis,” the list’s key explains. “GREEN: Company uses the term “Christmas” on a regular basis, we consider that company Christmas-friendly. YELLOW: Company refers to Christmas infrequently, or in a single advertising medium, but not in others. RED: Company may use “Christmas” sparingly in a single or unique product description, but as a company, does not recognize it.”

The only stated value, in other words, is how much retailers talk about Christmas. By this metric, a porn company, or one that kills Bengladeshi child laborers it’s stolen from their families as part of its production process, could issue a statement declaring its belief that Christmas is the most important holiday of the year, slap the term “Christmas” on all of its products, and earn at least a Green rating (though in the former case, the AFA would certainly step in to intervene). …

I’d respect the AFA if it actually went after companies who tried to further the secularization of a fundamentally religious holiday by using it as an occasion to encourage people to consume, and sometimes, to consume beyond their means. I’d respect the organization if it acknowledged that Christmas has become a holiday celebrated even by non-Christians, and used the rituals around it as an opportunity to encourage members to buy trees, gifts, and decorations that are sustainable, or locally made, or sourced in a way such that income goes to support desperately poor or historically disadvantaged people. Instead, the organization’s rating reveals just how divorced its own worship of Christmas is from any sort of articulated Christian values, or any responsible values whatsoever. It’s just another marketing scheme.