I went on one last week. She was terrible. I bailed after an hour. System is fun, though.
Oh yeah? Maybe you were terrible!
Maybe she was terrible because you "went" on her. Ew.
She was terrible
Terrible how, you murderer? We need to know if the system skews for a particular kind of weirdness.
So AWB draws the line at water sports. Good to know.
My date for tonight just canceled for what sounded like a legit reason. We'll see if tomorrow night's date comes through, after which I will report.
I want to know how the double-date thing works. Do you have an assigned partner, or do both of one gender have to compete for the obviously cuter/smarter/funnier of the other gender? I'd rather do the latter, frankly.
Or you could sign up for a sort of pansexual pile.
Your so vanilla with your pairs.
I keep trying to divert myself from my spring cleaning. I just found (1)my college freshman yearbook --with a pic of me entwined with 3 shirtless boys! and (2) rob helpy-chalk's copy of the Bacchae in Greek, loaned to me in the early nineties. Not giving it back.
When I signed up on Thursday I said I was available Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday of this week and got a match for all three, which wasn't what I expected. I had only given multiple days so that one would work. So I canceled the Monday one and scheduled the Tuesday and Thursday, and then today the Thursday canceled on me. I'll report back about the actual date after I have one, using some clever pseud-of-pseud like "definitely not washerdreyer."
Also, winning a duel is in most circumstances easily morally distinguishable from murder.
I am assuming, in this case, that I'd set myself up on a heterosexual date. It's not necessary, but I can't imagine anything good coming of four women all out on a double-date together, except a rad lesbian orgy.
The foreign lesbian slave-keeping heiress used too many hyphenated words; I was dissatisfied.
Could you make that a rad lesbian Nazi orgy?
I mean it doesn't correct for what I see as the fatal flaw in all online dating systems (n.b., being from the nineteenth century, this was also my first online date ever) - the fact that people are self-describing themselves. She presented herself as being knowledgeable and interested in topics I'm pretty familiar with (e.g. dueling), and turned out to be pretty comprehensively ignorant and glib about them.
The situation turned from "bad date I have to sit through" to "MAYDAY! MAYDAY! Eject! Eject!" when referred approvingly to "The Alchemist" and mentioned having her tarot cards read recently...
So you got matched, you approved the match, but found that you wouldn't have approved the match if the self-description had been accurate? Ok, makes sense.
"The Alchemist" has shown up on many, many of the "deal-breaker" book lists popular of late.
People and their dealbreakers. So shallow!
Plus it turned out she had been a Trevian, and I learned that I won't accept anyone after all.
Dude, even in the 19th century, didn't you learn how to do a basic Tarot reading as an easily-faked element of seduction for the crazy art chicks?
My beloved is a Trevian and I excuse it.
But, Christ, he didn't "love the place" like some.
people are self-describing themselves.
Now don't go trailing hunks of w-lfs-n-bait through the water this early in the week.
Ah, the stereotypical pairing of the female new ager and the impatient male rationalist. Hard to avoid, no matter how much screening you do.
I'd actually much prefer being a guy dealing with a woman who liked the Alchemist to being a woman finding out the guy takes Tom Clancy seriously.
Also, when is the post on the Harvard virgins coming? That was an absolutely classic article.
She presented herself as being knowledgeable and interested in topics I'm pretty familiar with ... and turned out to be pretty comprehensively ignorant and glib about them.
I go on short near-blind dates like this all the time, but they are called "Qualifying Exams."
Well, not so much that the description was inaccurate; just that it wasn't useful. I am less interested in whether someone evinces an interest in, say, mercantilism. I'm more interested in whether they can say something more than facile lines cribbed from US Weekly.
19: say what you will about The Alchemist, whoever wrote this is clearly a deep thinker in tremendous need of love.
I think Aaron Burr is giving us a roadmap for how exactly the unfoggetariat is going to fail at crazyblinddate.com, and how, correspondingly, crazyblindddate.com is going to utterly, utterly fail the unfoggetariat.
The US Weekly position on mercantilism has always been distressingly shallow.
Unfogged needs crazyblinddatewithapottymouthedintellectual.com.
Don't get down, Gonerill. Someday you'll pass.
26: Sifu, I think you misspelt "life".
But, Christ, he didn't "love the place" like some.
I love honkies. (Although at least a third of the students there must be Jewish, and they're all ethnics in my book.)
28: randomized, double-blind two person meetups.
Then maybe you can ditch that arrogant attitude you have towards your profs. Pure reflex formation, that.
Don't get down, Gonerill. Someday you'll pass.
I'm working my way down through the disciplines, keeping philosophy as my safety option.
To their credit, the next day (after feedback), the website did send me a nice email:
"Hey, Aaron.
"After comparing your feedback with other data we have, we've determined you deserve better than your last date.
"We'll work extra hard to find you a good date next time."
"After comparing your feedback with other data we have, we've determined you deserve better than your last date.
That's actually very cool.
Gonerill's really up on my junk today.
I know it was a bot, but it was nicely programmed.
Even if it's a bot, assuming that they don't send that message to everyone who rates their date poorly, it's cool.
26 refined: the kind of people who are up for a date with all kinds of people (including stupid people) are also the kind of people who are up for all kinds of ideas (including stupid ideas). The only way this could possibly be less congruent with the aggregate opinion of the unfoggetariat would be if it were crazyblindthemedateintevas.com.
The Tevas conflict was that ogged does have them, and no-tevas lady didn't like them, Sifu.
Why would you assume that?
Because it would be naive of them to think that they could send that to everyone and not be found out, and they seem to be an experience and savvy bunch.
I did say aggregate. Who are we to assume the unfoggetariat would date ogged?
w-lfs-n is totally going to catch ogged in a bit of circular reasoning in a minute here. Sexy!
Based on my (yes, I'll cop to it) experience with okcupid, I'm not sure how savvy I'd rate them. But, as Sifu implies, what makes you think they're so experience [sic] and savvy? In part it's their having sent this cutesy-poo email to Aaron, no?
26, 40: Ye gods, I hope not. I finally got encouraged by one of my non-imaginary friends to try crazyblinddate out, and since my horrendous sinus fullness is subsiding, I may give it a spin in the coming week.
It still seems like a promising idea and execution, but any site of this nature can only be as good as its members.
In part it's their having sent this cutesy-poo email to Aaron, no?
No. I think okcupid is actually pretty cool (easy to use, fairly low-pressure environment, successful), and crazyblinddate is also easy to use and nifty and low-pressure. This is what you want in a dating site, they've managed it twice, and I conclude that they know what they're doing. Lord knows what you did to your poor dates from okcupid, but I'm willing to be open-minded about its shortcomings.
Also, when is the post on the Harvard virgins coming? That was an absolutely classic article.
Harvard virgins? Talk about a dog-bites-man story.
Unfogged needs crazyblinddatewithapottymouthedintellectual exceptgodforbidyoumakeasexistracistprisonrapejoke.com
Lord knows what you did to your poor dates from okcupid,
He told them he liked Aristotle more than Plato.
the Harvard virgins coming
by themselves, or with others?
I've never had any dates from okcupid. Ha!
Also, when is the post on the Harvard virgins coming? That was an absolutely classic article.
I dunno. I read that with a yawn (yet I still read all 7-odd pages, natch) because I couldn't help but think that I had read it before. Hadn't the NYT written about Ivy League virgins several times already, or was that just my imagination?
55: the general chastity angle was nothing new, what I found hilarious was the contrast between the female and male leader of the chastity group. You could tell the reporter was deadpanning it all through that part.
Of course, the article carries some small risk of detonating a 1000 comment thread on sexism.
If there's one thing the Times likes more than Ivy League Sluts, it's Ivy League Virgins.
...a rad lesbian orgy.
Is there another kind of lesbian orgy?
The Nazi kind, Flippanter. See various other threads.
There are gnarly ones too, full of surfer dudettes.
Small ones, full of Smurfettes.
Because it would be naive of them to think that they could send that to everyone and not be found out, and they seem to be an experience and savvy bunch.
Maybe it was designed by an incoming grad student in a commenter's department.
58: You know, it seems weird to found a group dedicated to not doing something, especially when the one girl asks what Princeton does for those who don't want to have sex. It's hard to think of what the answer could be, because 'nothing' surely would suffice.
it seems weird to found a group dedicated to not doing something
It's like AA.
Nazi, Gnarly, Rad: Adjectival Sapphic Braids
You know, it seems weird to found a group dedicated to not doing something
The sociology on virginity pledges is pretty interesting. In essence the thing functions like a self-defeating social movement. When few people participate the effect on delaying first intercourse is high. But the more people in your community who nominally are part of the group, the less effective the pledge becomes, and in short order it has no effect at all, other than the negative ones of making first intercourse more likely to be unsafe and to lead to pregnancy or and STD.
65: I believe in a higher power that can stop me from getting nookie?
When few people participate the effect on delaying first intercourse is high. But the more people in your community who nominally are part of the group, the less effective the pledge becomes, and in short order it has no effect at all,
In other words, when the chastity group consists largely of people who don't want to have sex, its members have very little sex. But when people who want to have sex join the chastity group, its members are more likely to have sex.
Just like anything when it becomes trendy.
I've read the study that says all the virginity pledges tend to do is delay when the kids have sex for the first time, and ensure that when they do, they don't use condoms.
I just really don't get the group. It's like a dance troupe that doesn't believe in dancing. Is Princeton that in your face about how every freshman must have sex? Is this just more of the same old 'they gave out condoms therefore they're insulting me' tripe?
54: Someone has been pwned.
Ah, the enduring appeal of Unfogged, deep eternal truths translated to the vernacular.
Every year I renew my Prom Promise vow, but it seems like fewer and fewer people care.
I just really don't get the group. It's like a dance troupe that doesn't believe in dancing. Is Princeton that in your face about how every freshman must have sex? Is this just more of the same old 'they gave out condoms therefore they're insulting me' tripe?
I don't see what's strange about the existence of the identity as such. In principle -- I mean, in terms of movement ideologues -- the virtue (chastity) is a positive, active part of one's identity, not a negative thing. Like being a pacifist in a country with a volunteer army.
On second thought, the NYT piece on dealbreaking books is more Unfogged-worthy.
It's kind of amazing that four different leaders of that Harvard chastity society have now been extensively profiled in the NYT. I predict a rush of new members; careerism is stronger than the sex drive among Ivy kids.
Still, this section of the article was priceless:
The one great difference between them seemed to be in their experience of abstinence. Fredell was unaware of that gap. Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. "The biological drive can be overcome," she said. "It's not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex.""And you don't go down the street thinking you'd like to have sex with him, him, him and him?" I asked.
"No!" she said, abruptly. "Is that what men do?"
It seemed a good time to talk with her about what else Keliher had told me. He described the act he has never experienced as something "breathtakingly powerful" that "lights all of your body on fire." He spoke of his lust as "this untamed beast."
Fredell was incredulous: "Leo said that?"
He told me that he struggles constantly against "physical lustful temptation" -- that he can be aroused just by a woman's touch, by even a look at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by "thoughts that just come out of the blue -- basically pornography in my head." They come to him when he's merely walking around campus, or even when he's alone in the library -- "like a fly buzzing around."
To the matter of masturbation, he said, "This was really tough for me . . . because when you have a habit that's so deeply ingrained, it's hard to stop."
Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, "Oh, God, no!"
I don't see what's strange about the existence of the identity as such. In principle -- I mean, in terms of movement ideologues -- the virtue (chastity) is a positive, active part of one's identity,
Right. Especially since the real purpose of chastity/virginity pledges is to encourage early marriage. You're harnessing the sex drive to force marriage. And early marriage vs. extended dating until one's career is established, you meet the right person, etc. is certainly a very active choice.
Also, winning a duel is in most circumstances easily morally distinguishable from murder.
Not really. Murder can be defined to exclude duelling, though.
I just really don't get the group. It's like a dance troupe that doesn't believe in dancing.
It's a recruiting tool. They're trying to convince people to refrain from sex, and they seem more legitimate when there's some organization to the scheme.
79. date rape in 3...2...1...
I'd be disappointed if someone expressed an interest in Aaron Burr and only knew about the dueling. What about the conspiracy? The (possible) treason? The "Got Milk?" ad?
76, 79: It gets better. The Leo Keliher guy is not actually her boyfriend, but the co-director of the chastity group. He wants to be a Catholic priest but is apparently confused, since he's heterosexual.
Anyway, the article goes on:
Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said -- that the real meaning of masculinity is "being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman." "To have that kind of self-control is really what it means to be a man," Keliher had told me. When he finds himself aroused these days, he endures it and waits for it to pass. In this way, he said he has "matured out of that more infantile need for a woman into a recognition of self-sufficiency." But some women, Keliher granted, continue to give him trouble.One of these is a freshman -- "a very gentle, caring soul," he said, who "works with little kids and stuff." Keliher can't help thinking about her glossy hair and beautiful skin.
Another appears to be Janie Fredell. Keliher smiled and said he was "a little bit" attracted to her -- "in very superficial ways," he added. "It's something we laugh about -- if we dated."
But Fredell did not laugh. "No!" she erupted, and with increasing volume, "No! No! No! I can't emphasize enough that there is nothing between me and Leo! It's just that we're not compatible in that regard."
The poor kid. I'd actually feel guilty if I were the reporter for embarassing him so badly in print.
I'll tell you what nytimes article is unfogged-worthy: this idiotic Scion review:
Whatever the xD's redeeming qualities, nobody will look at you behind the wheel and assume you're driving back from an all-night cemetery rave where you set your hair on fire as a performance piece and danced to your signature mashup of jackhammer noise and whale songs. The xD is about as outrageous as a share of Microsoft stock.
...I'll confess: I don't get it. I don't understand the appeal of the blocky, willfully ugly xB. But if I don't understand the attraction, perhaps the xB is right on target, because I don't have piercings or tattoos. I use proper grammar in text messages. I once attended a Dave Matthews acoustic concert. Frankly, Scion doesn't want me. The xB is for people who don't care what anybody thinks, which means fauxhawk-wearing 21-year-olds or grumpy retirees.
I... you... what?
I don't think Leo's urges would be any different if he were having sex. That's just what men are like at that age.
"It's not like it reaches a peak, and you have to go out and have sex."
If only this were a choice. It's more like temptation presents itself, and those desires surge to the forefront.
But yes, I can imagine some ackwardness at Fredell and Leo's next meeting.
Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said -- that the real meaning of masculinity is "being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman."
This is so awesome.
At least Fredell didn't argue with the interviewer based on her long-held but evidence-free assumptions of how people totally unlike her must necessarily behave in order for a post-gender utopia to be possible.
86: True, but I think it's a little unfair to hold college students accountable for these things. They've barely escaped the indoctrination bootcamp of their upbringing and don't know anything yet.
83: Any car that is endorsed by the Xtacles is not for Sifu T.
In the porno version, Leo awakens Fredell's smouldering volcano within, to the accompaniment of sax and bass guitar. Boom chicka wawa, indeed.
58: Fine, twice. (1, 2)
"Some choose abstinence, others have it thrust upon them" could have been used as a caption for either of those photos.
While I was flip with the AA comment, I have enormous sympathy for groups like the one described in the NY Times article. American culture is fairly obsessed with sex, and it's just the case that the atmosphere on many campuses is pro-sex. If you're not doing it, you're seen as a weirdo. It makes perfect sense for people who want to opt out to have a some institutional/cultural support.
If I may flagrantly break the analogy ban, consider an atheist group in a religious society. It's surely true that atheism isn't a religion, and attempts by unbelievers to have atheism play the role in their lives that religion does in the lives of sincere believers are likely to fail. But it's also the case that if you were an atheist surrounded by people who centered their lives on the church, you might want a group to help you live the kind of life you thought consistent with your intellectual dignity.
Not really. Murder can be defined to exclude duelling, though.
Take a paradigm of where killing another human being is not murder, such as fighting back in response to an unprovoked and ongoing attack with deadly force from which flight doesn't reasonably appear to be option. Consider what aspects of this situation are relevant ot the fact that a killing here is not-murder. Consider a duel. I contend that a duel shares enough of these aspects to make it "easily distinguishable" from murder.
Chastity groups for virgins are inherently funny (though not completely absurd), because the members necessarily know less about the groups' main concern than non-members.
I do find the fascination with these poor sods (by the NYT and folks here), more telling than the fact that the groups do exist and the confused attitudes that reign within.
Chastity groups for virgins are inherently funny
So I agree, but I think my agreement is ... socially conditioned. When do you think is the first year 50% of people would have agreed with that statement.
Stormcrow has a bullseye. And let's be clear: it's not merely fascination as it is -- so very often -- obvious ill-will.
You're not about to declare your second virginity, are you?
W/D: No, because you put yourself in that situation knowingly.
Ethically or legally, the variations on homicide, murder, and manslaughter are infinite. But getting rid of duelling was actually one of the main purposes of homicide law -- feud, vigilanteism, vendetta, and duelling were the earlier forms of justice that law and the church were trying to put a stop to.
Headline writers must love these virginity pledges. Schoolgirl loses "virginity ring" battle.
92
"... I contend that a duel shares enough of these aspects to make it "easily distinguishable" from murder."
Not according to current law.
The atheism analogy is a good one for at least two other reasons, too. It picks out how a pro-chastity movement is largely a consequence of a pro-sex or at least sex-obsessed social context: you can't be disinterested in sex, you have to be avidly against it, instead. Much like American activitst-atheists can't just get on and be non-religious, but instead are actively anti-religious. It also suggests other segments in the pro-religious population have structural equivalents in the pro-sex context: like the sort of religious person for whom anyone holding any kind of religious belief is better than or healthier than or ultimately preferable to someone who is anti-religion.
I kind of agree with baa here.
the members necessarily know less about the groups' main concern than non-members.
I don't know about that. For one thing, there is no one "sex" to know, the meaning of it is socially defined. So it's not so much that these virgins don't know sex as that they are working together to give it a different meaning than the wider culture does. The plumbing is of course all the same, but their sex is different. Those of us who participate in the dating culture might have a hard time "knowing" sex as something really uniquely paired with marriage.
Like I said above, I think this is about using the sex/marriage pairing to force marriage, not about denying sex. Chastity alone is a form of asceticism or rejection of the world and the body (which does have a long tradition as a form of extreme spiritual self-discipline, like fasting). That poor Kelliher guy has sort of been driven to that, but the general thrust of the groups seems to be different.
It's this bloody thing that does it,' she said, ripping off the scarlet sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League and flinging it on to a bough. Then, as though touching her waist had reminded her of something, she felt in the pocket of her overalls and produced a small slab of chocolate. ...Quickly, with an occasional crackle of twigs, they threaded their way back to the clearing. When they were once inside the ring of saplings she turned and faced him. They were both breathing fast, but the smile had reappeared round the corners of her mouth. She stood looking at him for an instant, then felt at the zipper of her overalls. And, yes! it was almost as in his dream. Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated. Her body gleamed white in the sun. But for a moment he did not look at her body; his eyes were anchored by the freckled face with its faint, bold smile. He knelt down before her and took her hands in his.
Orwell 1984
I thought the Chastity League sounded familiar
Getting back to Aaron's crazyblinddate report, I gather that "she was terrible" means that he was looking for a connection with her. As opposed to just a social companion for some activity.
I mean, in the other thread it was proposed that the crazyblinddate site could be viewed as a way to find someone who might like to do something you otherwise couldn't find a friend to go along to. I was liking that idea.
Question: is the feedback you provide made public? Or is it just for the site administrators to tweak their matching technology and whatnot?
At my son's HS one very cute girl wore a virginity locket. It as an actual lock with a key in it, and the idea was that her heart (euphemism) was locked up and only could be unlocked in marriage. (And then locked up again, I guess).
She was quite the flirt. I think that the locket meant entirely different things to her than it did to her folks. I think it was supposed to be their little secret, not something to tell every guy in the class about.
Does anyone disagree with baa? I have sympathy for the position as well, but it's still funny.
I don't know about that. For one thing, there is no one "sex" to know
Oh, come on. The rush of hormones, the way things feel, the emotions afterwards, etc. These are experiences to be had, in whatever context, and these people haven't had them, but construct a group (or an identity) around their meaning. Like I say, it's not absurd, but it's funny. Just like prison rape.
108: Stories like that always creep me out. For some reason, I always just assume Dad's got a spare key.
110 "My heart belongs to Daddy"
it was proposed that the crazyblinddate site could be viewed as a way to find someone who might like to do something you otherwise couldn't find a friend to go along to
Considering the word "date" in the site name, I doubt that that's the purpose.
Does anyone disagree with baa? I have sympathy for the position as well, but it's still funny.
I agree about the strictly experiential element, but it's not just that that makes them funny. They're also seen as figures of fun for much the same structural reasons that women's libbers were funny to men in your position in the 1960s.
113: I didn't think so, but some were arguing so vehemently for that view, I began to wonder.
but some were arguing so vehemently for that view, I began to wonder.
B was dicking around.
They're also seen as figures of fun for much the same structural reasons that women's libbers were funny to men in your position in the 1960s.
That's true; challenging prevailing norms (particularly when those norms aren't well-grounded) will always make you the butt of jokes.
They're also seen as figures of fun for much the same structural reasons that women's libbers were funny to men in your position in the 1960s.
I don't get that, quite. Libbers were all (or a lot) about a positive agenda for other people, weren't they?
particularly when those norms aren't well-grounded
Prude.
They tried to set up a chastity group in Riker's Island prison, but for a variety of reasons it didn't take.
No fuck you lot, it's funny. I don't make the rules.
The rush of hormones, the way things feel, the emotions afterwards, etc. These are experiences to be had, in whatever context, and these people haven't had them, but construct a group (or an identity) around their meaning.
I'm sure they feel lots, even without actual penetration. They would likely say that those who misuse sex by having it casually are unable to understand the true emotions involved, because they are forced to numb themselves to them.
I just read God's Harvard, which is a terrific book-length examination of a newly established Virginia college full of chaste born-again Christians plotting to take over the world through their dominance of the Republican party. Good stuff, really fascinating, lots on these kinds of issues and how it plays out to really live within this culture full-time.
it was proposed that the crazyblinddate site could be viewed as a way to find someone who might like to do something you otherwise couldn't find a friend to go along to
The only places you can suggest for a meeting are bars and coffee shops, and you can't communicate pre-date to plan for something else.
Considering the word "date" in the site name, I doubt that that's the purpose.
Ogged, you're adopting the Labs strategy of comment reading, aren't you?
I think that a lot of people, including more or less hip people, follow a virginity policy somewhat like that on an individual basis. Becoming a self-aware identity group is a second step, fraught with peril. But giving interviews to reporters was the disaster.
It should be no surprise that I think that choosing virginity might be the right choice, whether just to avoid the grief and bullshit specifically infesting in the dating world, or as part of some specific affirmative life plan.
Indeed, virginity groups could use selected Unfogged threads as part of their recruitment package....
I don't get that, quite. Libbers were all (or a lot) about a positive agenda for other people, weren't they?
So are the Chastisers. They want a healthier, truer set of norms about sex. Neither do they have much time for the mainstream of men who benefit from prevailing arrangements, nor for the women who enable them while laboring under a false image of sexual freedom.
Listen to the sociologist, people. And take a look at my vote for the the worst part of this article.
Also: I have enormous sympathy for groups like the one described
I'd argue that if you don't have sympathy after seeing how they were treated in the article, you're heartless.
||
To a considerable extent the goal of the American military presence in Iraq is simply to continue the American military presence in Iraq and that means forging alliances with whichever Iraqi groups are willing to have us.
Yglesias at the Atlantic. The boy shows promise.
|>
challenging prevailing norms (particularly when those norms aren't well-grounded) will always make you the butt of jokes.
Ha! Oh, damn, that's sad.
the women who enable them while laboring under a false image of sexual freedom
This seems the fatal flaw -- that "take my toys and go home" is the only empowered response. But I like your generous reading Gonerill.
The only places you can suggest for a meeting are bars and coffee shops, and you can't communicate pre-date to plan for something else.
I see. Thanks.
Ogged, you're adopting the Labs strategy of comment reading, aren't you?
Wasn't B saying that married people should be able to use the site that way? I don't recall any convincing arguments that that was the intent. But let us not rehash old topics. No, never. Anyway, I'm going to go have sex with the UPS guy.
These poor, deluded kids are the lost, goody-two-shoes product of abstinence-only sex education. Sure, I feel bad for them: the darling little moppets need to get laid.
131: she was arguing for a radically new conception of what "dating" might mean, yes.
This seems the fatal flaw -- that "take my toys and go home" is the only empowered response. But I like your generous reading Gonerill.
But as was pointed out above, the alternative is inherently tied to a general vision of gender relations and above all the institution of marriage, which is where the sex happens and is contained. There are all kinds of reasons the solution is both obnoxious and a failure -- if nothing else, many of its participants have already been formed by the wider culture, and it's much more powerful (and well financed) than them.
that "take my toys and go home" is the only empowered response.
I don't think they're especially unusual in this, though -- think of the politically disenfranchised folks for whom this is a compelling response. Don't feel represented by the Ds and Rs? Fine then, don't vote!
Is there a more horrible word than "empower"? (A word I use, as well.)
I wonder why the NYT doesn't regularly write smug, knowing pieces about Ayn Rand followers.
It picks out how a pro-chastity movement is largely a consequence of a pro-sex or at least sex-obsessed social context: you can't be disinterested in sex, you have to be avidly against it, instead.
Except that you can. It's really not all that hard not to have sex in college if you don't want. (It's sometimes hard to have sex if you want.) It's rather like choosing not to cheer at football games, or join the comedy revue. I could get this group if sex were like an alcohol addiction, or if it were part of a larger group identity with a larger mission. But Junior Anti-Sex League, indeed.
think of the politically disenfranchised folks for whom this is a compelling response.
Indeed, while it's a compelling response, it's not an empowered one. But as ogged observes, challenging existing norms makes you the butt of jokes (cf. Kucinich); better, one begins to think, to walk away.
I disagree with baa, but I'm having a hard time explaining exactly how and to what extent, just because the virgin/atheist analogy seems like just the kind of thing that the analogy ban was meant to address.
I'm sympathetic to some of what the Chastity types are trying to do, but viewed in the context of a wider abstinence movement that often resorts to fear and repression, my sympathy has limits. And yes, 'loathing' is increasingly how I would describe my feelings for the NYT.
I've always found the self-consciously "pro-sex" crowd to be naive and do-goody proselytizers, but maybe that's just me.
Which concert is the Junior No Sex League most likely to attend?
Cala's 138 gets at something important, which is that people don't just want to have their own beliefs, they want peer validation and a social world in which those beliefs are supported.
It's probably a little like being a nondrinker. It's not actually that hard to avoid alcohol yourself, but it can be an isolating step to take if most of your campus social opportunities don't just involve drinking, but are centered around it.
closure and cloture are both worse than empower. Zesty is worse as an adjective for food. "Daily" has turned into an unkind adjective for print news.
There's no norm in college that everybody has to have sex. There's a norm that everybody wants to have sex. You don't, you don't. Don't make it a dang hobby.
It's really not all that hard not to have sex in college if you don't want. (It's sometimes hard to have sex if you want.) It's rather like choosing not to cheer at football games, or join the comedy revue. I could get this group if sex were like an alcohol addiction, or if it were part of a larger group identity with a larger mission. But Junior Anti-Sex League, indeed.
It's an empirical question -- more or less a function of how strong the norms are and how institutionalized the response is to breaking them. One of the reasons that this crowd seem especially obnoxious -- and, yeah, like a look-at-me Junior Anti-Sex League -- is that they are at Harvard, where it would presumably be quite easy to opt-out in the way you describe.
Cala's 138 gets at something important, which is that people college students don't just want to have their own beliefs, they want peer validation and a social world in which those beliefs are supported. attention.
It's really not all that hard not to have sex in college if you don't want. (It's sometimes hard to have sex if you want.)
This is right. Virgins are sometimes pressured in the context of relationships, but the idea that they have to join some kind of resistance movement against implacable forces threatening their virginity is just bizarre.
the alternative is inherently tied to a general vision of gender relations and above all the institution of marriage, which is where the sex happens and is contained. There are all kinds of reasons the solution is both obnoxious and a failure -- if nothing else, many of its participants have already been formed by the wider culture,
An interesting side note here is how the evangelical/traditionalist view of marriage has in some ways been shaped by feminism and the sexual revolution -- there is a lot of emphasis on good sex and sexual technique within marriage, etc. Also, the men's crusades in the 90s pushed the idea of the sensitive, open-to-his-feelings husband (who is still the leader, however), etc. So fact that participants are "formed by the wider culture" is not necessarily a disadvantage. Some of that can be a useful counterpoint to what was a pretty narrow and unsophisticated traditional understanding of marriage. But the patriarchal underpinnings of the whole enterprise are always a big potential problem, of course. "God's Harvard" had good stuff on this, as have other books on the Christian right I've seen.
Cala, are you really having trouble understanding the group? It's about meeting like-minded people. It's about not feeling quite so alone, or quite so much like the abnormal freaks our culture generally tells them they are. It's about support for what is no doubt a difficult decision for many of them.
Sifu's long stretch of involuntary virginity has hardened him against this group.
Especially the girls in the group.
The answer to 142 is not obvious to me, though I might guess Panic At Your Mom's House.
where it would presumably be quite easy to opt-out in the way you describe
Well sure, but this is America, where the bedrock agreement is that we try to foist our beliefs on each other. It's not just a matter of not having sex, but of thinking that not having sex is the morally superior course.
It's about channeling your overachieving Harvardness into something that wannabe contrarians at the Times will take a shine to.
It's rather like choosing not to cheer at football games, or join the comedy revue
I joined the comedy revue because it seemed like the best alternative to watching the comedy revue.
I've gotta say, it doesn't seem weird to me that they'd want to socialize with other virgins who share a common set of life assumptions.
151: rock hard.
I've been kind enough to not link to a picture of Fredell, because no matter how much I might think so, the pictures of her online aren't funny.
I was resistant to the idea that this was about attention-seeking, but Sifu's 154 is swaying me.
Brock's 150 gets it right, I think. Not "putting out" is a social handicap, and I can see the appeal of wanting to socialize with people among whom it's not.
Just watch, people: Janie Fredell is the Bill Buckley of the next eighty years. God and Man at Yale, move over for Cock and Me at Harward. Or was that Douthat's book?
That's right, ogged, just ignore my 143. I don't need validation or social support, thanks very much.
Oh wait, they appear to be pictures of her designated antagonist. Never mind!
Sorry, Witt, I actually did completely miss 143. You're a good commenter.
You wouldn't need to throw out little validation biscuits ;ole 164 if you'd just let us thumbs-up each other's comments like they do on Plastic.com.
They don't bother me any more than any other Harvard student bothers me. Just the idea that virginity is somehow under assault from a writhing mass of sex-obsessed Harvard nerds is a faintly ludicrous one. Now, if you started a No Sex League at Northeastern, that would be something.
;ole s/b like. New ergonomic keyboard! My left forearm is in misery, but I did finish a screenplay draft.
It's probably a little like being a nondrinker. It's not actually that hard to avoid alcohol having sex yourself, but it can be an isolating step to take if most of your campus social opportunities don't just involve drinking having sex, but are centered around it.
Really?
At a faculty meeting in the cafeteria after school the next day, Kelly said that punishments for students would be severe--and then proceeded to castigate the faculty for engaging in "similar behavior" by logging on to the Websites surreptitiously, and instructed them to straighten their "moral compasses." "Your contracts are under review, and you're being watched by the kids," he said.
From the New York story about students who are the children of trustees putting up mean Facebook pages about teachers.
168: Isn't that the thing that drives 40 year-old Virgin?
I did finish a screenplay draft
Congrats. Time to fuck!
The gestures toward notions of social support, validation, and the foisting of one's beliefs on others isn't quite right. We live in an environment in which, in the absence of discernible dissenting voices, the dominant culture (yes, I said that) has a steamroller effect. Casting responses to this as a function merely of personal psychology (nobody's validating me! boo-hoo!) reduces the phenomenon to something slightly infantile, when in fact it's a question of just how tolerant we as a society are. Contestation in the civic sphere is a good thing.
The train for the civic sphere is departing the contest-station in ten minutes.
Brock's 150 gets it right, I think. Not "putting out" is a social handicap, and I can see the appeal of wanting to socialize with people among whom it's not.
Yeah, I don't buy this in the slightest. I didn't "put out" until the guy I married and I never found it to be a social handicap whatsoever. I had friends who put out, friends who didn't, nobody in my high school or college really gave a shit about who did or didn't. If, in a student population of under 1000, I was able to readily find fulfilling social networks despited my unrepentant prudery, I should think it wouldn't be so hard at Harvard either.
I buy it. I find it a relief to come to Unfogged, where people share a common set of assumptions about the world as I do. I can imagine that if I believed in the background religious noise, I'd enjoy the social group.
I think it's less about not "putting out" (which I don't agree is as much of a general social handicap as ogged seems to think) as just having a like-minded group of friends.
Having just finished the article I linked in 169, I'd like to make clear that it wasn't worth the time it took to read it and I recommend that other people not read it. It has nothing to say about anything other than the internal politics of Horace Mann, and it doesn't have anything interesting to say about those.
heebiewned.
And holy crap 176 came out mighty tangled, didn't it?
Hey, when all conversations are about sodomy, those who don't put out are handicapped.
I read the first page of the Times mag piece, and I'm even less sympathetic. "True Love Revolution"? If not having sex brings you kids together, good for you, but spare me the sanctimony. This, however:
She could hardly bear to see it ridiculed in The Crimson. An article about the group's ice cream social appeared under the headline "Not Tonight, Honey, I Have a Brain Freeze."is mildly funny.
So we're basically saying it's ok because it's really just a conservative christian group under a different name?
I mean, sure, but it's still kind of a funny thing to rally around. Why not name it something subtle like "Jesus Is Awesome Club (Not for Harlots)".
"Sure, Jesus accepted whores, but we're not Him"
I'm sympathetic to some of what the Chastity types are trying to do, but viewed in the context of a wider abstinence movement that often resorts to fear and repression, my sympathy has limits.
And has a lot of sway over government-funding. Do we know what True Love Revolution's explicit position is on sex education?
Dear Sir,
I would like to join your Jesus Is Awesome Club (Not for Harlots). May I apply directly or do you require the nomination of a member? If the latter, I call mine "The JLA Watchtower."
I mean, sure, but it's still kind of a funny thing to rally around.
Oh you think it's funny, do you? That these poor kids cross their legs in order to feel some semblance of warm pressure against their genitals? That they huff and puff in the backseat only to withdraw and say, "I musn't...I'm so bad..." Well, it's not funny to their testicles, Po-Mo.
Well, look, they have a message to spread as well. "People should wait until marriage...", or at least consider waiting, is a normative statement for them, right? It's not all about their own personal preferences. And they're doing what they can to spread their message.
And are they all even conservative christians? (I know they mostly are, but all?)
Not putting out is, I believe, a greater social handicap in some quarters than in others. Part of the criticism here seems to be that Harvard types, which I take to mean the comparatively privileged, don't have the right to complain, if that's what the group in question is doing, about social pressure over putting out.
It's interesting, this notion of having the right to complain. To put it in context, I noticed again, last time I had occasion to drive to the airport, a billboard campaign championing abstinence for inner-city black teenage girls. It was moving: girls pictured, accompanied by first-person text saying "I choose to design my own life, I choose to have a future" and so on.
That they huff and puff in the backseat only to withdraw and say, "I musn't...I'm so bad..."
But this kind of stuff is what keeps sex so hot, as opposed to just a pleasurable form of physical/emotional bonding. Where will future generations get their perversions if we don't make them guilty when they're young?
175: Sure, I'm not challenging the idea that people enjoy communing with like-minded people. I'm just challenging the notion that they must do so in this case because of the horrible social stigma otherwise attached to non-putter-outers.
because of the horrible social stigma otherwise attached to non-putter-outers.
I agree - it's pretty easy to keep a low-profile of your sex life such that no one concerns themselves whatsoever with your status.
horrible social stigma otherwise attached to non-putter-outers
Don't people in college tend to move on, as it were, if their partner isn't willing to have sex?
all you really need is one special person to concern themselves with your status.
This is bewildering to me. I don't get what seems so odd. Do you people find the straightedge kids this baffling?
Actually, I find the straigtedge kids to be super-baffling. What the hell are you rebelling against, punk?
It's probably a little like being a nondrinker. It's not actually that hard to avoid alcohol having sex yourself, but it can be an isolating step to take if most of your campus social opportunities don't just involve drinking having sex, but are centered around it.
Yeah, and you know what? The group that made a point of insisting 'our activities are non-alcoholic, because we are pure and we don't NEED alcohol to have fun' was lame, too. My social circle in college did not drink much. If my friends had made a point of insisting how awesome a time they were having because they weren't drinking, I probably would have found new friends.
I think it's less about not "putting out" (which I don't agree is as much of a general social handicap as ogged seems to think) as just having a like-minded group of friends.
I don't think so, because it's not a group of conservative Christians, or the Newman center or the Jewish center or the College Republicans or the Future MBA Tightasses or any other group that might have something in common. It's a group that's basically just about ensuring no one there is going to fuck anyone else. Look, I get wanting to have a social circle of like-minded people. I do indeed have friends. But this just seems a strange group identity, and one that I'm having a hard time believing is sooo out there.
I mean, I'm sure the ministers all rant about how Harvard forces its students to fuck, but the ministers don't actually know what they're talking about.
194: Hey man. I don't SMOKE and I don't DRINK and I don't FUCK at least I can FUCKING THINK.
Cala, did you miss every single comment where people teased Teo about being a virgin? The pressure is real.
Don't people in college tend to move on, as it were, if their partner isn't willing to have sex?
People in college move on from all variety of relationships that aren't matching what they are looking for in a relationship. I was with a guy for nearly a year who was deeply uncomfortable with slutty, slutty moves of mine such as allowing a hand to slip underneath a t-shirt. ("OMG, she touched my naked back!") It plainly wasn't my chastity that ultimately drove him away.
You make it sound like "No guy will ever date a girl who won't put out." (Or vice versa.) Virgins do in fact often date.
The pressure is real. And warm. And it envelopes you. And stop! stop! Cold shower! No whammies!
It's a group that's basically just about ensuring no one there is going to fuck anyone else
But I don't think it is just about that. It's also (and even more fundamentally) about spreading the message that it's okay not to be sexually active, that there are good reasons to wait until marriage, that not everyone is having sex (or trying to), etc. You might (strongly) disagree with all the reasons they think waiting for marriage is best, but that doesn't mean they don't have a message, or any purpose other than policing one another's chastity.
And how did we know teo was a virgin? Oh, that's right, we were able to divine it from his handle.
It goes beyond a social group, they're a consciously political/ideological group pushing an alternative lifestyle and set of values. There are all kinds of groups like that on campus. The social opportunity is not avoiding getting teased for being a virgin, but congratulating each other on how great their lifestyle is and feeling like an in-group who is vaguely superior to everybody different. This is a natural human desire. Teenagers who get laid a lot can be endlessly self-congratulatory about it. Pro-chastity virgins deserve the same opportunity.
The pressure is real.
You're kidding, right? People made good-natured jokes, and Teo has never played the victim. Plus, aren't there plenty of people here who, willingly or not, don't have sex?
I was with a guy for nearly a year who was deeply uncomfortable with slutty, slutty moves of mine such as allowing a hand to slip underneath a t-shirt. ("OMG, she touched my naked back!")
Are you sure he wasn't just "deeply uncomfortable" because you were getting him fired up with no place to go? Having once been a teenager who thought chastity was teh awesome, I can understand that response.
204: I can't keep up, can't keep up, can't keep up!
Next time Teo shows up, everybody pressure him to have sex immediately. Use lurid details to inflame him, and mockery to shame him.
205 gets it exactly right.
so does 194.
Now that I have read the article, I am also retreating a bit from sympathy for these particular groups (and the Anscombe Society in particular). Per ST somewhere upthread, there is a bit too much of a "look Ma, I can change the world!" sense to it. This is not the way, but I do think that there is a place for some manner of counter to the boastful crudeness and carefully constructed nonchalance of the public face of much of the college/high school sex scene, which in my experience generally involves a lot of peer pressure coercion and can even grade pretty close to condoning date rape and the like in some circles. (In fact I think "Abstinence Education" and the like, actually help drive that dynamic.)
I guess no surprise that a society as fucked up about fucking as ours is breeds these confusions.
Yeah, I haven't read the article, by the way. Please retroactively disregard anything I said that makes me look dumb, going back three years.
The article is obnoxiously condescending. It is clear the reporter doesn't think much of these kids.
Well, it's not funny to their testicles, Po-Mo.
But I understand that urge! This is a somewhat shameful admission, but I too am a member of Ballsitters Anonymous. It's a fun meeting, with good coffee and really nice cookies (a local baker is a member of my group, I highly recommend seeking this out in any support group you consider joining). The chairs have to be special ordered, though.
Pro-chastity virgins deserve the same opportunity.
Is this what I was arguing as well? I think so. And there's the question, then: to the extent that the highly-sexed are self-congratulatory and foisting their values on others, can't everybody do the same? Or is that a bad idea? Honestly, though, lifestyle pushers who happen to conform to the prevailing norm might want to recognize that they're still pushing.
Mostly this whole thread makes me really fucking glad I'm not an undergrad anymore.
213: The article is obnoxiously condescending, but that doesn't make the kids' sanctimony and sense of victimhood any less obnoxious themselves.
Anyway, aren't there likely several clubs at Harvard which are de facto chastity-promoting?
Mostly this whole thread makes me really fucking glad I'm not an undergrad anymore.
Fucking glad?!? Stop pressuring me for sex.
Of course, the not fucking part largely evaporated from straightedge in a heartbeat.
213: The article is obnoxiously condescending, but that doesn't make the kids' sanctimony and sense of victimhood any less obnoxious themselves.
Is this not, in fact, the essence of horrible New York Times lifestyle reporting?
that doesn't make the kids' sanctimony and sense of victimhood any less obnoxious themselves
I didn't pick up on the sanctimonious victimhood. I read quickly (and not recently), but they didn't come across that way to me.
Hell, was it important to have read the article?
By 220, I mean the general pattern in which one is moved to think both "oh god, these people being reported on sound incredibly annoying," and "wow, this reporter is being an obnoxious, condescending, lazy pain in the ass." The specific features of sanctimony and victimhood aren't specially prominent, I don't think.
I thought Janie Fredell was serenely clueless and Keliher was tormented and somewhat confused. Not really the full-on obnoxious victimization line you get from real movement conservatism.
Also, the reporter totally gutted them. There should be a minimum age of consent for getting quoted in the papers, and it should be older than the age of consent for sex.
"If there's grass on the infield, get quoted."
Also, the reporter totally gutted them.
Absolutely, and in a really dumb, sniggering way that was certainly much more mortifying to the subjects than it was amusing to the reader. Hey, reporter, what are you, twelve?
Honestly, though, lifestyle pushers who happen to conform to the prevailing norm might want to recognize that they're still pushing.
Bingo. I am finding people's incomprehension in itself incomprehensible. Were you never young? Of course there is pressure to have sex, because we know that people who don't have sex are losers. Now, it would be super if people were all strong-hearted enough that they could persist in the decisions that make them feel good in the complete absence of widespread respect for their choices. But people -- much less adolescents -- aren't like that at all. A better analogy -- while I'm breaking the ban -- would be gay pride. Is it a big surprise that when a many people claim you are defective for wanting the things you want you respond with a) a group of like minded people who help support you, b) a little bit of evangelism and 'consciousness raising.'
And let me add, there's a tone here of "those poor virgins just need to get laid, then they'll chill out." Just substitute lesbian for virgin and we're there. Or at least, we've replicated an attitude that should earn a punch in the nose.
But virgins are funnier than lesbians. At least, Virgins 4 Jesus are funny.
Anyway, aren't there likely several clubs at Harvard which are de facto chastity-promoting?
The first Theatre Style LARP group was the Society for Interactive Literature (SIL), founded in 1981 at Harvard University.
The sanctimony is inherent in, among other things, the implications that "True Love" means not having sex until marriage and that women having sex are less strong than women who opt not to. As for the sense of victimhood, some examples:
"The hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing," she said. "It's shocking! It's everywhere!"
"there is just one lifestyle that doesn't get recognition"
"It's an odd thing to see one's lifestyle essentially attacked in The Crimson"For crying out loud, I went to a college famous for flouting moral norms, and I never felt as though highly-sexed people were foisting their values on anyone else. Like I said, if not having sex is your thing, have at it. But for God's sake don't whine.
229: funnier than Lesbians 4 Jesus?
there's a tone here of "those poor virgins just need to get laid, then they'll chill out." Just substitute lesbian for virgin and we're there. Or at least, we've replicated an attitude that should earn a punch in the nose.
All the lesbians I know are getting laid. They're pretty chilled out, too. Except for the one who's having a lot of trouble getting laid, she's a little edgy, but she's pretty new at going after girls and I'm sure she'll get the swing of it in time.
funnier than Lesbians 4 Jesus?
Lesbians 4 Jesus is objectively much funnier than Virgins 4 Jesus.
230: You think so? The LARP groups I've known were wildly incestuous. Vast opportunities to try out flirting tactics you wouldn't dare use in "real life", with surprising results.
(one of these groups, of course, was the MIT "Society for Interactive Killing", formed in reaction to SIL)
Somehow, in all this discussion, the valuable public service being performed by these chastity groups is being overlooked.
Of course, I speak of the signaling function for the benefit of defloration fetishists who are scrupulous about respecting age of consent laws. It's not easy to find 18+ year old virgins these days, people! I for one say "Hats off!" to these plucky young people for helping out some needy folks who don't get a lot of attention from mainstream charities.
The real point that should be made here is not whether or not chastity groups are amusing (the fact of them isn't, some of their inherent inconsistencies are), but that groups like this are a fifth column for the Religious Right. Not a particularly effective one, perhaps, but a vital part of the whole, nonetheless.
Fredell, when asked about masturbation, just said, "Oh, God, no!"
I'm reminded of the plea one character makes to console another, a failed seminarian, in William Wharton's A Midnight Clear: "but masturbation is celibacy"
I highly doubt that many of these kids are legitimately asexual. We'll have them rolling in the mud with us in no time. (Pamela Moore reference.)
The world will little nor long remember this thread, but it has to be said that PGD, baa, Brock, and heebie have been on fire in their commenting tonight.
The sanctimony on this thread is far overamped. Talking to a reporter was stupid, not least because it got them featured on Unfogged, the homefield of smart, grumbly sexually active folk who ask interminably why things don't quite seem to be working out at the moment.
239: Pathetic: I can't even plagiarize famous speeches competently.
For crying out loud, I went to a college famous for flouting moral norms, and I never felt as though highly-sexed people were foisting their values on anyone else. Like I said, if not having sex is your thing, have at it. But for God's sake don't whine.
Jesus McQ, you know I love you, but I have to say that this reminds me of a woman I once had several online altercations with who told me in response to my references to sexism in society that she had never in her life been on the receiving end of sexist behavior, that it was all over long ago, so clearly I was whining. What can one say? Not much.
Is it a big surprise that when a many people claim you are defective for wanting the things you want you respond with a) a group of like minded people who help support you, b) a little bit of evangelism and 'consciousness raising.'
It's the first I'm denying. Maybe I'm just weird. I certainly don't know the pressures young men are under. Perhaps everyone really can see you're a virgin. Perhaps at all of these campuses religious and conservative groups where people could meet people who shared their morals have been banned and replaced by orgies.
Mostly what's bugging me is fake victimhood and the idea that a group for the express purpose, not of meeting other religious people or conservatives or even evangelizing, but of not having sex. People, just don't fuck. No one gives a shit.
Fair enough, parsimon. Kisses!
Further to 242, no worries, I'm laughing.
Reed valorizes all kinds of weirdness, including celibacy. Also, Jesus was fucking like a mink all during his time at Reed. The Jesus legend leaked out into the surrounding community as far as Cleveland High School.
Crude pivot to politics: At the risk of violating the letter of the analogy ban, I think the pro-chastity folks play approximately the same role in GOP politics as the anti-poverty folks do with the Democrats.
In their own self-conception, they are the heart and soul of the party and the movement. They are willing to follow their principles to their logical end, no matter whom it makes uncomfortable. If the majority looks askance at them, it only reinforces their conviction in the rightness of their cause. The party power structure feigns fealty to their agenda, and is eager to harness their energy every election season, but in private is somewhat embarassed to be associated with their laughable naivete. And when it comes to the actual business of government, it's a challenge to see how cheaply they can be bought off with symbolic gestures and token commitments of resources.
Jesus was fucking like a mink all during his time at Reed.
Do minks really as frequently as the folk wisdom would have it? I'm acquainted with the line from the old bluegrass tune Rocky Top that goes
Once I had a girl on Rocky Top / half bear, the other half cat / Wild as a mink but sweet as sodee pop / I still dream about that
Jesus was fucking like a mink all during his time at Reed.
This is how rumors legends are started. I won't let the truth get in the way.
Also, I mourn the analogy ban.
Mirembe Nantongo does not have a Wiki entry.
Ima Hogg does, however, and seems to have been the best thing to come out of Texas before Molly Ivins.
Mourn the suspension of the analogy ban? Oh, but it's been instructive in this thread.
NOTE:
Heebie did not come out of Texas. For that reason she neither is nor is not the best thing ever to come out of Texas.
Leno used Ima Hogg as a punchline the other night, and I was surprised at such ignorance. What are you, ten?
Aw, Emerson's just a big squishy puppy dog heart, underneath it all.
This is bewildering to me. I don't get what seems so odd. Do you people find the straightedge kids this baffling?
As El/ena Rit/chie of Ashes once said to me, "Straightedge kids fuck like rabbits." Krishnacore, man, that's where it's at.
With their two upper teeth hanging out over their bottom lip?
No fair peeking, Heebie
With their two upper teeth hanging out over their bottom lip?
Only if they aren't regularly given fresh wood to gnaw on. IYKWIMAITYD.
256: And having litters of 6 or more kids 4 or 5 times a year.
259: And fouling their bedding with really foul-smelling piss.
I haven't watched TV since before you were born TLL.
There was barely any tv when I was born, JE. Mostly repackaged radio shows.
Were you never young? Of course there is pressure to have sex, because we know that people who don't have sex are losers.
Perhaps I just matured in a bubble, but this rings totally untrue in my experience.
If the analogy ban is to retain its vitality, we must periodically flout and question it. J. S. Mill would agree, I think:
[W]hen it has come to be an hereditary creed, and to be received passively, not actively--when the mind is no longer compelled, in the same degree as at first, to exercise its vital powers on the questions which its belief presents to it, there is a progressive tendency to forget all of the belief except the formularies, or to give it a dull and torpid assent, as if accepting it on trust dispensed with the necessity of realizing it in consciousness, or testing it by personal experience.
I also think you misread my comment. Leno was acting like a ten year old, not you.
Who the hell wrote 263? You were raised in a bubble.
Best thing to come out of Texas? LBJ and Ralph Yarborough would have to be contenders. And barbecued brisket. And the TI-35 calculator. Beyond that it's a little thin.
You'll have to do a lot of persuading about LBJ.
267: what? No, not even close. Willie Nelson??
264: Oh good, delightful even! (But it's too late for me to reread it now.)
You'll have to do a lot of persuading about LBJ.
It's easier for me to overlook that trifling matter of escalating the war in Southeast Asia because I don't have any living memory of it. So it's with that caveat in mind that I say I think LBJ is overdue for rehabilitation. If another president in my lifetime accomplishes a legislative agenda equal to the Civil Rights Act + Voting Rights Act + Medicare + Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (VISTA, Head Start), I'll be shocked.
hey, where did the talk about crazy blind dates go? I just joined, and I'm getting cold feet suddenly and was hoping more people would dish on their experiences.
I signed up in Boston, and signed up for 3, in case the timing for some didn't work out, but so far I haven't been matched with anyone for any of them. Including one for tomorrow. Either they like to notify you at the very last minute (maybe?), or I am one undateable puppy.
Pretty thin pseud there, radium-lady.
Either they like to notify you at the very last minute (maybe?)
I think they do for some of them. That's why they have the text message feature, and why they ask how often you check your email and how long it will take you to get to various neighborhoods from your house.
263 was me, aka "bubble girl" I guess.
Surely the nuanced, and therefore correct, position is that while these groups in particular are sanctimonious, self-satisfied, and probably formed with no small part of mere self-promotion in mind, the phenomenon they've organized themselves around combating is real and the people who pretend otherwise, like Cala, are blind or something.
Even at Chicago, where I managed to keep my virtue intact through some really amazing feats with no harm to my social states deriving particularly from that fact, and where (IME, at least) the odds aren't even particularly good, it's still understood that one ought to be on the prowl, even if one is holed up in the Reg. (And I'm sure many were on the prowl in the Reg.)
242: For crying out loud, I went to a college famous for flouting moral norms
As was mine to some extent, but the irony is that it was much freer of the kind of pressures under discussion than the almost any other college or university scene that I have since become familiar with. Which is another thing that is a bit irksome about the whole attention to the Ivy kids on this one* , there may well be more of need for this at Your State U., Frats'R'Us Tech or Typical Hometown College. (Or at least for something along these lines not all wrapped up in religious BS. Then again, maybe the two invariably go hand-in-hand)
*And yes I understand why the Times focuses there, potential future thought leaders plus the desire by purveyors of real-estate pron in the Times to keep up with the actual and aspirational academic environments of their offspring.
Certainly Ben has never been ridiculed here because of his chronically single state.
(And I'm sure many were on the prowl in the Reg.)
Oh my, Ben, the grad students were fucking in the stacks (not me!).
I've read the article and some of the comments above, but I feel like the weird problem is that (a) lots of people feel pressured to "be sexually active" and (b) fundies have some fear (based on lots of propaganda about the joylessness of premarital fucking) that sex won't be "great" unless it's not depressing, which necessarily requires commitment and marriage.
Neither side is in the right, of course, in that people who actually want to have sex should be pressured to seek sex that actually makes them happy. Fucking around joylessly is depressing. But so is waiting until you and your appropriately-aged boyfriend are ready to devote your lives to one another. People who find sex depressing and not enjoyable should, by all means, stop having sex. But where's the step where we argue that sex should be fun? Not just "soulful" or "about love" or whatever, but fun? Mutually pleasurable?
Not just the grad students, I'm sure.
What a fool I was!
I suppose I shouldn't have outed Jesus. Someone would only have to google "Reed College" and "fucking like a mink" and his true identity would be revealed to all. Perhaps we should delete my post.
in that people who actually want to have sex should be pressured to seek sex that actually makes them happy
What if only joyless sex makes you happy? How do you go about seeking that, huh, smart gal?
Ben, if you weren't continually humiliating hott women with your razorsharp knock-down arguments, you'd have them languishing at your feet.
I did have one languishing at my feet for a few weeks, actually. It is really stunning how I managed to derail that one.
281: You and me both. I always assumed that the sex in the Reg thing was a myth, or at least that it hadn't happened much since the dawn of the free love era. I certainly never did anything other than retrieve a volume that I thought might aid me in my scholarship.
Then again, I was always more of a Crerar/Eckhart guy.
280: The girl in the one article does seem like she has put some serious thought into it. The oxytocin! The ecstasy!
And I Harper. Love those high ceilings and stained-glass windows! Though actually most of my studying I did in my room, now that I think of it, or, in the last year, in the linux lab in the Reg.
I did have one languishing at my feet for a few weeks, actually. It is really stunning how I managed to derail that one.
How many times do we have to tell you, w-lfs-n? Dehydration kills! Next time, keep plenty of water (and electrolytes) within easy reach of her manacled hands.
Well, to be humorless, I think part of the problem is that the pro-sex-type events that campuses hold tend very much to focus on joyless porny sex, and that undergrads do get some satisfaction from acting out these porny roles that are invented for (mostly) dudely pleasure, but not for women's pleasure. Most of us ladies have to make sex up as we go, if we want to find what we like, without much idea of what we could do to that end.
Maybe I was extra-clueless at that age, having been raised in a very Christian environment. (I told a funny story during my class's break tonight about how I was on a ski trip with my Christian youth group and fell out of the shower, busting my face open, and none of the girls would come into the bathroom to help me, because I was naked and that freaked them out. Apparently my naked, nearly unconscious, bleeding, screaming prone form mighta made them lesbians. No, I am not actually that hot.)
The girl in the one article does seem like she has put some serious thought into it been reading bullshit abstinence "research".
(The punchline to that story, of course, is me lying naked and bleeding across the bathroom floor, screaming "WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?")
288: Harper was lovely. I can't imagine how anyone could fuck in it though.
[OT: AWB and Sir Kraab, I posted the chocolate recipes from the Jamie Oliver cookbook on the wiki. I'm using a very old browser, so I couldn't figure out how to add tags and I may have made other goofs. The recipes are there now, though.]
::we now return you to your regularly scheduled abstinence discussion::
It's a group that's basically just about ensuring no one there is going to fuck anyone else.
That sounds kind of hot. Also, "True Love Revolution" sounds like it should be the name of an awesome disco act--like "Andrea True Connection" only more so.
The punchline to that story, of course, is me lying naked and bleeding across the bathroom floor, screaming "WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?"
Shame they didn't bus any Samaritans to your school.
Ah, Ben went to Chicago. Well that explains a great deal.
AWB's 'funny' story gets exactly to why these groups bug me. Whacked out on misguided religion, these kids deny their own natures, and abdicate their obligations to their fellow beings. All the while prattling on about the superiority of abstinence to generosity.
It's funny that they think this choice will help them in marriage.
Thanks, Witt! I just tagged them.
255 happened in my high school to my sister's year. All her friends were ninth grade militant skinhead vegetarians; then they were tenth grade hare krishnas. There even came out of this scene a band that was, I shit you not, big in Belgium.
263
""Were you never young? Of course there is pressure to have sex, because we know that people who don't have sex are losers."
Perhaps I just matured in a bubble, but this rings totally untrue in my experience."
It's more true for guys who are assumed to want sex.
291: Hey, they're just taking care of the lonely.
296: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?"
So they asked you to anoint their feet with oil?
304: Jesus was kind of a prick, huh? WWJD? Probably tell me to wipe my own damn self up.
This is more of a question for a divinity student, but I think Jesus probably wouldn't have gone on a ski trip in the first place.
Jeses took ski trips all the time, but the false Bible cooked up by the Romans doesn't mention. Not to worry, they'll all be revealed in my forthcoming Holy Book of Nordica.
306: You're probably right for snow skiing, but you can bet he'd jump at the chance to show off his mad water skiing skills
308: Heh. Look, Dad! No skis! No boat!
309 belongs on Standpipe's blog. I've been explaining jokes to undergrads all day.
309: Don't worry son, I see you. Trust me, I'm always looking.
Jesus' adolescence doesn't get much coverage. He turns clay into birds in the Gospel of James, but I don't think anyone covers the teenaged years.
he'd jump at the chance to show off his mad water skiing skills
Nordic style, of course. Getting pulled by a boat is easy.
I don't think anyone covers the teenaged years.
His Emo phase is chronicled in the little-known apocryphal Gospel of You're Not Even My Real Father.
313: Nordic style, of course
Racist!
I saw Jesus telemarking just the other day. Looked just like him, anyway.
I don't think anyone covers the teenaged years.
There is that "lost years of Jesus" theory that has him traveling to India and Tibet—nearly two centuries before the first Lonely Planet book came out. It's another friggin' miracle!
His Emo phase
When He famously turned water into whine.
Where do you think he learned to telly?
I think the Church Universal and Triumphant pushed that theory. Along with preparing for the End and running a restaurant that made the best damn pies ever.
317: You know that has to be a fake though, or else half of the New Testament gospels would say
Mark 4:15-19:
And Jesus came to speak again of his gap year in Tibet, and of how he had a total spiritual awakening when he rang this bell
"It was completely in the middle of nowhere, like, I saw no white people for weeks, and it was this amazing monastery way up this mountain"
"I had to walk up this narrow path for two days to get there! And I was just eating rice with the local villagers the entire time!"
"In one of the villages, they wanted to slaughter a goat for me, because I was such an honored guest and all"
"But I was all like 'Yay, do not slay that goat, but keep it instead and let it be fruitful', 'cause you know, they haven't got much there"
And John stood beside me, saying "Is he talking about fucking Tibet again?"
324: Yeah, that's it. I met some people—while backpacking in Asia, natch—who were really really into that. Jesus on the Magic Bus, man.
"Master, you're walking on the water" said Peter.
"I Just ate. You can't go into the water for an hour after you eat. What, none of you guys have mothers?"
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. (A lot longer and not as funny as Debbie.)
And somewhere on my new, unindexed DVD of NatLamp scans is a more germane piece written from the point of view Jesus's brother.
"Whoa, Jesus has invented canapés!" Love it.
I'm curious about teo's thoughts on what (or whom) Jesus would do.
Wanna do it (with someone else)?
I'm quite happy to keep doing it with the person I've been doing it with, thanks.
I'm curious about teo's thoughts on what (or whom) Jesus would do.
As a Jew, I am fairly indifferent to this issue. That said, he would do Mary Magdalen while skiing.
As a Jew, I am fairly indifferent to this issue.
Yeah, you say that now.
Will I be saying something different at some point in the future?
As a Jew, I am fairly indifferent to this issue.
Actually, I've been reliably informed by comment 1402 on the Immortal Thread that Jews are a reliable source. Real Jews, that is, I guess.
That said, he would do Mary Magdalen while skiing.
Congratulations! Real Jew status confirmed! Prepare for Level 2.
teo: all jokes aside, I'm happy things are going well. I look forward to the introduction of your partner to unfogged. That part was fun!
Wait, what? Teo has a partner? Where the hell have I been?
psst, teo: black Canadians aren't reading your blog. Racist xenophobe.
Actually, I've been reliably informed by comment 1402 on the Immortal Thread that Jews are a reliable source.
See comment 1403, however.
I look forward to the introduction of your partner to unfogged. That part was fun!
She's already been introduced to my own blog. It's only a matter of time.
Where the hell have I been?
Canada, I think.
Will I be saying something different at some point in the future?
I was thinking more the past.
Ahh, but see the further clarification in 1406.
And commenting from racist, anti-Semitic Canada, to boot. Good for you, teo! Right on.
I was thinking more the past.
No, I think I've always been fairly indifferent, actually.
Were you never young?
It's not totally clear who baa is addressing this question to, but I think I'm justified in assuming he's asking Of Montreal, who have already answered it.
Wow, teo, I hadn't checked in on your blog in a while. Glad to hear that things are going well.
Somehow, in all this discussion, the valuable public service being performed by these chastity groups is being overlooked.
LOf course, I speak of the signaling function for the benefit of defloration fetishists who are scrupulous about respecting age of consent laws.
You missed the bit where they're six times more likely to have oral sex? Six times. You can't argue with those numbers.
By the way, I haven't really read all of this thread, but is there some particular reason why we're talking about "True Love Revolution" as if it was a mutual support group for chaste-by-choice types, which it isn't, rather than a campaigning group with a pretty specific political agenda, which it visibly is? Is it like Hypotheticals Day or something?
Actually I just checked my desk diary and it's Saint Hubert's Day, the patron saint of taking obviously hypocritical professions of feminist credentials at face value, so sorry. It's also All Fools Day, but that's true of pretty much every day round here.
346: rather than a campaigning group with a pretty specific political agenda,
Well yeah, that's what I was saying back at 238. They did not understand me, they did not know how -- perhaps they'll listen now.
Let's take stock of recent developments, shall we?
- LB quits her soul-crushing job, stops commenting
- Ogged gets a girlfriend, goes on hiatus (which ends as soon as the girlfriend dumps him)
- Di Kotimy finalizes her divorce, stops commenting
- Teofilo gets laid, stops commenting
A few thoughts:
-Has there ever been better evidence for the Freudian theory of art as sublimated Eros and Todestrieb?
-I can plot my own descent into depression and subsequent (tenuous) recovery by the frequency of my own comments in the archives. Should I be disturbed by this? That is, is commenting a symptom, or a form of self-medication?
-I can envision plausible, Weltschmerz-alleviating scenarios for almost every individual commenter that would deprive the unfogged community most of its members. The exceptions I can think of are Apo, D-Squared, and McManus. Except that D-Squared wouldn't show up anymore if he didn't have the rest of us to needle. So if the 1,000 year reign of Christ commences and bliss prevails o'er all the earth, this blog will basically consist of Apo posting cock stories and McManus warning of the coming financial meltdown.
Is it like Hypotheticals Day or something?
Aren't nine out of ten discussions around here starting from the assumption "Suppose everyone involved was arguing in good faith..." even when it's really hard to justify?
there some particular reason why we're talking about "True Love Revolution" as if it was a mutual support group for chaste-by-choice types, which it isn't, rather than a campaigning group with a pretty specific political agenda, which it visibly is? Is it like Hypotheticals Day or something?
Maybe it's also false dichotomy day?
Has there ever been better evidence for the Freudian theory of art as sublimated Eros and Todestrieb?
I thought sublimation led to productivity of some kind.
I'm facing the prospect that my life work may consist primarily of Unfogged comments, but if that turns out to be the case I wouldn't say that the sublimation had paid off.
John, sometime in the future, bound collections of your Unfogged comments will appear in what will then pass for underground book shops. Generations of scholars will debate the meaning of "carp" in both the Heebie comments and the 'Fuck you, Carp' comments.
349
great developments
you forgot Blume and Sifu
see, i bring luck :), just pity people are not willing to collaborate on one important ongoing project
but i'll try to remind from time to time
is commenting a symptom, or a form of self-medication?
i do not comment if i feel down for example or too busy or have nothing to say on the topic
for example on the swimsuits thread my opinions is only that it looks like the grey parts are that high tech material, but in between blacks are basically pantyhose
the silver lining expression i learned first from the Coldplay's song and it's great to lose weight after illness
about catholic schools i have no idea
Read seems to be sabotaging my work with her counseling services.
Apropos of nothing but my twelve-step anti-asshole program, I feel compelled to apologize to Read for having been an asshole to her for a long time a while back.
Ah the titanic struggle between read and Emerson, between entropy and its antonym. I'd love to watch it play out, but I've got to go jumpstart the wife's truck. Later, y'all.
Hey, anybody who has a Gmail account (or even if you don't), www.gmail.com is good for a smile this morning.
352.1 gets it exactly right.
That said, the Freudian reading of unfogged is pretty funny. Hey, don't mind us over here! We're just trying to master the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction that disturbs our communal life!
Ah the titanic struggle between read and Emerson, between entropy and its antonym.
But which one is which? It's another one of those questions that seems obvious at first glance, but more ambiguous the more you think about it.
I rather suspect I wouldn't have had sex until later in my college life if I hadn't been so damned lonely. A chastity group wouldn't have helped with that, of course; the local LDS branch tried to fill the family-away-from-home bit, but I wasn't having any of it.
The life of the 18-year-old old maid, facing a lifetime of loneliness as she does, is a bitter one indeed.
JM, I asked before: any chance your Danish Mormon ancestors came from Bornholm?
I'm not sure. It was one great-grandmother and her son, my great-grandfather. She died when he was fairly young. I'll ask my mom if we know anything about where in Denmark she came from. (According to received wisdom, I got the "Danish eyes"---with a sort of Asian flatness.)
Bornholm is an island near Poland far from the rest of Denmark. If anything is remembered, Bornholm would be.
but is there some particular reason why we're talking about "True Love Revolution" as if it was a mutual support group for chaste-by-choice types, which it isn't, rather than a campaigning group with a pretty specific political agenda, which it visibly is?
Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how the argument for the necessity of the chaste-by-choice group is supported by all the anecdotes of people who wanted to get laid finding the social scene in college difficult.
368: "You're not a failure! You're an ideologue!"
It's the first step to breeding the next generation of National Review writers.
For some definitions of "breeding", obviously.
368: Different experiences of different people? The general hellishness of American life betweem age 15 and 20?
I'm still mystified by the mystification. Some people are saying they didn't feel pressure to have sex, and that's close to deafness isn't a disability territory for me, but let's chalk it up to the varieties of human experience. Assume a world in which there's a lot of peer pressure to have sex, and in which some people have a good-faith belief that pre-marital sex is either wrong or not for them. Does the group make more sense?
Does the group make more sense?
It would have embarrassed the hell out of the virginal version of myself to be associated with such a group, since having or even not having sex simply wasn't a really important part of my identity.
Sure, but some people are embarrassed by associations with groups, as such. Maybe you're one of us! Embarrassed?
I'm sure different student populations experience the sex problem differently. At a different college, people like the club's abstinent sorts might just blend into the sexless crowd by virtue of their sweater sets and Merrill loafers (nothing against sweater sets and Merrills, but for a 19-year-old, they signify something other than "raging sexbeast"). But at Harvard, it might be more difficult to dress upper-classly staid as a way of marking a desire not to get laid. So you have to form a club.
Yes. Come to think of it, I gotta go.
They've discovered a way to make sex transgressive again. If you think fucking while wearing a cock ring has lost its charm, maybe you should try it with a virginity ring on.
372: This particular group is not advocating that people would be happier if freed from peer pressure, they are advocating that the peer pressure work in the opposite direction. So unless 369 is the idea, then no, it doesn't make sense.
And we actually live in a world where funding for sex education is a political issue with real consequences.
372: I have never felt any particular desire to join a group for the half-deaf. When I was yet-unlaid, I felt no particular desire to join a group for the yet-unlaid.
Also, what about no masturbation, hm, hm? Where does that fit into your whole "hey it's nice not to have the social pressure to have sex" sophistry, eh?
Do they really preach no masturbation? (I haven't read the article, obviously.) I couldn't tell if that was just one member's squicky reaction. I can see that someone might think that the Great Release itself should be saved for that Special Occasion.
It sounded like the dude was saying that he'd had to give up masturbation and it was tough, whereas the girl just wouldn't do it, cuz like ew!
372: Assume a world in which there's a lot of peer pressure to have sex
Speaking just for myself, this is not really it, but rather a peer pressure to take a particular intentional stance towards sex and relationships in general*, one that is in part shaped by rebellious reaction to the official abstinence/purity BS from church (and now state in the US). So these particular groups, no (especially now that I look at the True Love Revolution website and see an upcoming program by culture war hack Jennifer Roback Morse), but I do find it understandable that there is an allure for some, or at least a desire for some alternative.
*And as I noted above, in my experience the mileu at the place that was most "noted" for sexual liberation and freedom was the place that had the smallest amount of this.
Does the group make more sense?
Look, as much as everyone's trying to paint me as the anthropologist from Mars even though I seem to be the only one who read the article, it doesn't make sense precisely because there is no lack of Christian or conservative groups on Harvard's campus that provide socialization with people of particular morals. So I'm not really buying the premise as 'just a safe space for we virgins', because it's not all that hard to find people of similar religious and moral values absent a Junior Anti-Sex League.
Which makes me think maybe it's not just about the social pressure or companionship, available through other places, or trying to find someone to date who won't pressure you, but actively about defining oneself through not having sex. Even my wingnut sister didn't have to do that in college.
Oxytocin!! Oxytocin! You might develop the sacred chemical "love bond" with your own self! Then no one will have you!
It would have embarrassed the hell out of the virginal version of myself to be associated with such a group, since having or even not having sex simply wasn't a really important part of my identity.
Really? It was definitely a part of my identity, albeit one I really really really wanted to be rid of.
Joining a group like the one in the article definitely wouldn't have helped.
It sounded like the dude was saying that he'd had to give up masturbation and it was tough, whereas the girl just wouldn't do it, cuz like ew!
I think that was part of his preparation to become a priest, not necessary to join the Junior Anti-Sex League.
Also, I'd just like it known that I can't see the title of this post without hearing Patsy Cline in my head.
383: Reading the article is for sissies, Cala.
384: I realize that one can't make statements like 'their first time will probably suck' without someone condescending insisting that their first time was wonderful and we shouldn't generalize, but ten bucks says she ends up very disappointed in a couple years.
389: My first time was wonderful and you shouldn't generalize.
389: Sex just isn't that important, Cala. She can always go for a run.
As I said above, these kids made a mistake starting an identity group, and a bigger one talking to a reporter about it.
But many comments here do confirm the group's founding beef, which is that sexual activity is the new norm and anyone who isn't sexually active is a loser or a fanatic. The denial that there is a norm and that there's social pressure is evidence for the new norm. That sounds like special pleading, but that's how norms work -- "Oh, no, no one here is prejudiced against fat people. Some of my best friends are porkers!" for a relatively non-cliched example.) And there are always the deviates who explain that they feel no pressure at all from their normal peers and everything's fine.
In short, people who fit norms don't even think about them, and those who don't fit make various sorts of personal adjustments one at a time, and even if they disagree with the norm they don't openly fight it. (In the old South there were lots of non-racist whites, but they didn't usually fight racism but just ameliorated it quite a bit).
Perhaps the new norm is a good thing, though it seems to me that it leads to lots of sort of cheesy sex and even worse, cubic miles of neuroticism of the Unfogged type.
I've been running into people complaining about the pressure to have sex, especially girls / laydeez but also guys, since before most of you were born. For me the threshold was about 1965.
s/b it's pity, not pity people of course
crazy
But many comments here do confirm the group's founding beef, which is that sexual activity is the new norm and anyone who isn't sexually active is a loser or a fanatic.
No, John. Anyone who would start a Virgin Club, and talk to the New York Times about it, and express a desire to pressure others to eschew sexuality, is a loser or a fanatic.
For example, we know you're a fanatic.
Also the pressure to have sex has been around for women since way before it was socially acceptable to admit the desire to have sex.
Which makes me think maybe it's not just about the social pressure or companionship, available through other places, or trying to find someone to date who won't pressure you, but actively about defining oneself through not having sex.
It's more than that, I think. What they're resisting/objecting to is not just peer pressure, but something much broader and more amorphous than that. Note Fredell's objection to the safe-sex pamphlets, which seems in part an objection to the assumption that one will and should have sex, and also to the assumption that everyone requires, just as a matter of course, an "education" in this area. Note the irritated response of the "expert" spokeswoman for the Sexuality Information and Education Council, who is "disturbed" by the chastity club's use of "inaccurate information" and "distorted data" (as if there really could be such a thing as "undistorted" data about the meaning and value of sex versus abstinece). What these students are challenging is a relatively new medico-moral norm of sexual "health" (=sexually active), which is every bit as value-laden and ideological as is opposition to the same.
Of course they're going to come off as kooks in an NYTimes article. And yes, of course there is something at least slightly ludicrous about a club that is organized around the principle of not doing something. But I don't think their analysis of the "pro-sex" environment in which they find themselves is completely crazy, or even halfway inaccurate.
This increasingly resembles the hooplah about the Antioch rules on proper dating behavior. Or the hooplah about the "hookup culture". I guess the hard young bodies of the nubile are irresistibly attractive to the old and worn out.
College kids do all kinds of dumb things. This group is but one of them. But, you know, anti-poontang is as exciting as poontang itself, under certain conditions.
What if only joyless sex makes you happy? How do you go about seeking that, huh, smart gal?
You get married, duh.
I find something repellent about a person who would wish to deprive others of information about safe sex, simply because he or she doesn't personally need it.
There's a lot more that people are talking about than that, MCMC.
I guess the hard young bodies of the nubile are irresistibly attractive to the old and worn out.
All of them, I mean. Not just me.
The rest of what's being talked about is of little or no interest to me. I don't care if people want to get together and congratulate each other on their purity, and whine about how everyone in the world is trying to get them to fuck. The part that's potentially harmful and even fatal to others is the part that concerns me.
BEWARE ANTI-POONTANG
IT WILL ANNIHILATE YOUR POONTANG
Assume a world in which there's a lot of peer pressure to have sex, and in which some people have a good-faith belief that pre-marital sex is either wrong or not for them. Does the group make more sense?
maybe, but in that world it doesn't have a name like "True" (as in, any other kind is false) Love Revolution (as in, movement aimed at social change)".
It's funny that they think this choice will help them in marriage.
Like all things, this is nuanced. I can easily see how waiting until you, individually, as a special and unique snowflake, feel truly ready and prepared for sex. And if that's when you are married, great. Having healthy, secure feelings about your sexuality seems like it would help.
Then again, having horrible, self-condemnatory feelings about the fact that, yes, you do in fact experience sexual desires, not going to be helpful even if you do manage to "hold out" for your one and only.
A group devoted to extolling ones virginity just seems to me to lean far more toward the latter than the former.
404: Not true, mcmc. They evidently annoy you quite a lot.
It's revolution like "inner Jihad" dsquared.
404: I have a hard time believing that anyone ends up without access to the information that they need.
391: The abstinence bit at my high school suggested that we should go bowling or ice skating instead of having sex. Even when I was a virgin that sounded like bullshit.
396: You know, that part was the part that struck me as the least insightful. The health center is going to be concerned about condoms, birth control pills, and STIs. These are all medical-related things; chastity isn't a disease. I'm not quite sure what they expect; health services to make moral pronouncements? No condoms? Condoms, but delivered with a strict warning and a severe frown?
It didn't look insightful. It looked like someone needed to get upset over something and decided that they were shocked, shocked that the medical center talked about medicine. (And note, the issue here isn't to get an abstinence pamphlet included with the other material.)
But many comments here do confirm the group's founding beef, which is that sexual activity is the new norm and anyone who isn't sexually active is a loser or a fanatic.
I haven't said that, to be clear.
anti-poontang is as exciting as poontang itself, under certain conditions.
At Big Mormon U., where premarital virginity was the ideal and the reality for most students, there was always a delicious sexual tension in the air. Crowded hallways between classes, chaste parties at our apartment complex's pool, ballroom dancing -- all opportunities for passing unseen sexual sparks back and forth. Bonus: chaste environments favor (mostly) unconscious homoeroticism!
Still, I would have been happier getting laid, I think.
I have a hard time believing that anyone ends up without access to the information that they need.
It's hard to believe, and it's irrelevant to this Harvard Bunch of Joy Of Sexlessness Thumpers, but here in Texas, there exists this breed. And they're pregnant at 15 in astonishing numbers.
But Bave, look at what a wonderful person you are now, compared to the people who were screwing like mink.
404: Not true, mcmc. They evidently annoy you quite a lot.
Excuse me?
A friend of mine who was raised in a mostly Mormon town in the West didn't know anything about Plan B; turns out it would have been very useful knowledge for him. Then again, his girlfriend, raised in Connecticut or someplace like that, didn't think of it either. Kids these days.
410: and that's because this group is marginalized. All hail the marginalization of True Love Revolution!
I don't care if people want to get together and congratulate each other on their purity, and whine about how everyone in the world is trying to get them to fuck.
You cared enough to be quite nasty.
I turned out okay, John, but I'm certainly no Jesus.
I would say that the phrasing "I don't care if people want to get together and congratulate each other on their purity, and whine about how everyone in the world is trying to get them to fuck." indicates at least a tiny, weak subconscious negative opinion of the people being described.
-Has there ever been better evidence for the Freudian theory of art as sublimated Eros and Todestrieb?
IIRC, at the time of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the locus classicus for the sublimation-n'-art thesis, Freud had not yet formulated the theory of the death drive, which wouldn't come until Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
394 was supposed to be a joke, John, about your anti-relationship campaign. I'll know better next time.
There's only one Jesus.
Actually, there are two Jesuses. Ours and Jesus Quintana.
Nobody fucks with the Jesus, except mink and, at one time, underage children.
420: Oh that. Well, in fact I do have a negative opinion of the people in the article, because I think they're attention seeking and self-righteous, and self-important.
But as for caring a lot, this is a blog comment section, so please.
I was objecting to 404 though. Yes, I am a fanatic of sorts.
411: Well, apparently health services issues a pamphlet entitled "Empowering You," which addresses, amongst other themes, that of "sexual health."
What she was told was the sort of thing found in a Harvard pamphlet called "Empowering You": "put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus. . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex."
Here's the "Empowering You" handbook [.PDF file], which informs students that "sexuality is an important aspect of your overall wellness," and also provides them with "10 Rules of Sexual Etiquette."
No way is this advice strictly medical. I'm calling it medico-moral, for lack of a better term.
413 emphatically, emphatically seconded. IME horrifyingly true in more secular, less rural environments, and among older people as well.
American culture's general distaste for "icky" topics translates into a huge amount of fanfare about Sex and a miserable amount of ignorance about your own actual body and the mechanics of getting pregnant (or not) and limiting exposure to STDs/STIs.
I wholly endorse Cala's comments on the Harvard University Sexless-Humorless Student Union.
Also, I eagerly await the inevitable follow-up article about former True Love Revolutionaries who have become porn stars/high-priced prostitutes.
426: I'm not sure what would count as "strictly medical," then, short of "don't die."
It didn't look insightful. It looked like someone needed to get upset over something and decided that they were shocked, shocked that the medical center talked about medicine.
The thing is, every year on every campus someone gets upset about the availability of condoms and birth control prescriptions. Without fail. That the Times is so into this -- and really, these people aren't any different than the ones at Brown or at Maryland or, I suspect, at Big Football University in your state, with the possible exception of being more articulate convenient to New York and modestly more media-savvy about their religious beliefs -- says more about class bias at the paper than anything else. It's important because it's Haahvuhd! Or Princeton, or another school you, the median Times reader, seek to have your children or grandchildren attend! And not someplace, possibly in the Midwest, that is filled with the vulgarly religious.
Seriously, Tim? You don't see a distinction between the clinical description of how to practice safe(r) sex in MC's 426.1, and the value judgments in 426.2?
(I know there are folks who think the clinical stuff is a value judgment too, but on that question I'm 100% in the pragmatic, harm-reduction camp.)
426 - You know, Mary Catherine, I'm reluctant to accept your characterization of a pamphlet that says "Sex can also be a part of sexuality" (and comes after discussing depression, alcoholism, and sleep deprivation) as "medico-moral" beyond the obvious point that any factual statements about a morally contentious matter might be held to be moral. I'm sure the pro-anorexia LJ community might object to the curiously pro-health slant of the pamphlet's treatment of eating disorders.
426: "Sexuality" is not synonymous with "having sex". If you'd read on a few sentences, you'd see "Decisions about whether or not to have sex with another person are personal and significant. Many students decide that this is an experience they will save for later. In making decisions about something as significant as entering into a sexual relationship, you should be as informed as possible."
I also note that rule one of sexual etiquette is "No means no."
I also notice that there are chapters on alcohol and eating disorders as well. I doubt if they encourage students to drink and starve themselves.
426: I love you, Mary Kate, please don't troll me. Page 119 in the shocking document you cite says "Sexuality is more than what you do with your body sexually....Decisions about whether to have sex with another person are personal and significant... Many students decide that this is an experience they will save for later."
Then it talks about diseases and how to use a condom.
And the 10 Rules of Sexual Etiquette, which says such anti-Christian things like 'No means no.' and 'Be considerate of others.'
I mean, seriously, this is really pretty tame. It's in the middle of a pamplet that talks about stress, eating disorders, and internet addiction.
It's something of a dereliction of duty for a school that's concerned about the overall wellness of its students to give purely medical information about sex and nothing more. Sex has certain medical consequences, it's true, but that's not how it primarily affects people. You really have to engage in a discussion of values, emotions, personal growth, and ethics, as fraught as all of that is. The virginity kids are part of that conversation, as annoying and wrongheaded as they are.
10 Rules of Sexual Etiquette
1 No means no.
2 Monitor your own and your partner's alcohol or drug intake.
3 Communicate openly.
4 Respect sexual privacy.
5 Be considerate of others.
6 In sexual situations, always be thinking ahead.
7 Be prepared.
8 Share responsibility in a sexual relationship.
9 Don't sexually harass other individuals.
10 Be sure sexual activity is consensual. If you're not sure, ask.
It's like those liberal fascists are concerned about helping their students avoid date rape. I'll admit that Mary Catherine is probably right that this isn't strictly medical advice and could safely be placed elsewhere in the pamphlet, but this hardly seems like a subtle way to lure chaste freshmen into orgies at Holworthy Hall.
And mcmc and snarkout pwned me. I therefore will start a group dedicated to not being pwned. We will have ice cream socials.
6 In sexual situations, always be thinking ahead.
"Two more times and I get a couch!"
"Two more times and I get a couch!"
What kind of sick coupon book is that?
I reiterate something I hinted at above: the idea that Harvard students, of all people, are lost in a froth of sexual licentiousness is hilarious. This is like starting a club to combat the rising tide of luddism at MIT.
431: I can see that it all might have values content. But I would think any pamphlet that addressed sex would have to say something like, "These urges are normal." I guess there is a higher value content in the expectation that some people are going to have sex, but that seems easy to characterize as the medical world taking the world as it finds it. People do have sex prior to marriage, even when there are strong taboos against it.
Oh, and I apologize for using the word "fuck" in an unfogged comment, and for being sarcastic and hyperbolic. Nasty!
I think I'll just go read fafblog.
435.436: Sure. Thing is, from Princeton's perspective, the kid not having sex is not the kid they're worried about. It's the kid who gets raped because her idiot boyfriend thought 'no' meant 'please' who is going to create the problem, or the kid who gets an STD, or the one that needs the morning-after-pill. The kid who isn't fucking anyone? Unlikely to lead to a lawsuit.
The trouble is, outside an explicitly religious context, there isn't much to say about abstinence. One doesn't need instructions on how not to do it.
I mean, if you're Catholic, you can go the whole theology of the body route and talk about how sex is holy and the philosophy behind the anti-contraception stuff, which is kind of fascinating but ultimately irrelevant from a public health standpoint.
mcmc, you don't have to leave. You can have ice cream! But no pwning.
We will have ice cream socials.
You know what that sort of thing leads to.
We're picking on 18-year olds, right.
Hard-bodied 18-year-olds.
You really have to engage in a discussion of values, emotions, personal growth, and ethics, as fraught as all of that is.
Right. I'm not saying the document is "shocking," Cala, and I'm not actually disagreeing with "no means no" and "be considerate of others" and etc. But I think it's disingenuous to present this as neutral medical advice versus ideologically skewed value judgments. It's two different sets of value judgments.
443: be careful! Fafblog is very, very angry.
Thing is, from Princeton's perspective, the kid not having sex is not the kid they're worried about. It's the kid who gets raped because her idiot boyfriend thought 'no' meant 'please' who is going to create the problem, or the kid who gets an STD, or the one that needs the morning-after-pill. The kid who isn't fucking anyone?
When I was there I remember a highly unusual bit of real reporting by the student paper about the secret, unhappy world of students sneaking off to have abortions -- there's no deviating from the 4-year graduation plan, so drunken hookups led to a lot of misery.
More routinely, Campus Health Services was located a few feet away from the main undergrad party zone, so it was easy to transport kids really the worse for drink to a bed for the night where they could be monitored.
But I think it's disingenuous to present this as neutral medical advice versus ideologically skewed value judgments.
I'm not sure there's a way to easily segregate value judgments from medical advice. Aren't there Christian sects that don't believe in medical intervention? Would you think that any medical treatment advice would therefore implicate value judgments?
Perhaps the current norm is better than the previous norm. I don't share the indignation against 18 year olds who object to it, though. If I thought that denying birth control and sexual health information was the real issue here, I'd support the Unfogged norm.
Why do we call good health "good" anyway? Isn't that an explict moral judgment? Damn insiduous language.
At Big Mormon U., where premarital virginity was the ideal and the reality for most students
Most? IIRC there's surveys that that put the Mormon "getting it on pre marriage" at lower the general population, but still something like 50 or 60 percent.
I also went to Big Mormon U for a few semesters, and did my part to contribute to those numbers.
You can have ice cream! But no pwning.
It will be hard, but ice cream will help.
Jeez. It isnt that hard to imagine the world without sex education or access to birth control.
Just go to the world of the early 1970s. Doctors refused to give unmarried women birth control back then. Lots of disease and pregnancies.
What's the value judgment that is ideologically skewed? (I'm enjoying the deliciousness of the fact that I'm playing the Whore of Babylon in this morality play.) Skewed, mind you. We're fighting the forces of the Beast here.
The assumption that students are going to have sex? That appears to match the facts on the ground. That sex is not merely part of sexuality, not the whole thing? That seems like something a Christian youth group would agree with. The fact that the pamphlet mentions condoms and thinks that students who have sex should use them?
I mean, I can see a case for it being ideologically skewed if you compare it to a school that nearly shut down the women's resource center over mentioning abortion in a pamphlet.
Would you think that any medical treatment advice would therefore implicate value judgments?
I wouldn't go that far. But certainly there are areas (sex, child-rearing, death) where everyday practice is now routinely placed under the jurisdiction of medical expertise, where the medical is all intertwined with questions of morality and social norms and etc.
I don't share the indignation against 18 year olds who object to it, though.
Ah John, what a gallant fellow you are, to be sure. I'm sure the wounded 18 year olds will appreciate your concern and feel better after my savage and no doubt unconsciously prurient attack.
456: It did strike me that the Harvard for which the girl yearned is one that wouldn't admit her.
6 In sexual situations, always be thinking aheadclosing.
The prurient attack is not a problem, mcmc. It's the prurient attack coupled with pretending that you don't have scorn for these people and are only concerned with the objective ramifications of their policy platform.
456: It did strike me that the Harvard for which the girl yearned is one that wouldn't admit her.
We're rolling back around to God's Harvard discussion now, aren't we?
458: if only there were some sort of ethics that specifically dealt with questions of medicine, then we could have people do some hard thinking about this before talking to (potential) patients.
462: your use of "pretending" is problematic there, coach. It's perfectly possible to have a problem with the outcome those people desire while not having scorn for them personally.
Now me, I find the combination agreeable, but that's not to say one must.
452: From page 2 of the online magazine article:
The Ivy League's abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity.
Isn't the whole premise behind denying people birth control and sex info that it's encouraging promiscuity and we need to close our eyes and cover our ears? Or is it just to be evil?
What's the value judgment that is ideologically skewed?
The value judgments of the chastity club are quite obviously ideologically skewed. What I'm saying is that the putatively neutral advice to which they object is not ideologically innocent, either.
I enjoyed how Fredell seemed so disgusted by the thought of sexual desire.
It is only a matter of time before she is outed as being bad girl who likes to be spanked by daddy because she has been naughty.
I also didnt look close enough to see if it was a hair shirt she was wearing.
458: if only there were some sort of ethics that specifically dealt with questions of medicine, then we could have people do some hard thinking about this before talking to (potential) patients.
Heh Heh.
What I'm saying is that the putatively neutral advice to which they object is not ideologically innocent, either.
It's not ideologically neutral. It is ideologically laudable.
Oh, and I apologize for using the word "fuck" in an unfogged comment
No apologies—the Blog Cuss-O-Meter is listening. (It seems not to be working at the moment, but last night it had Unfogged showing a respectable 27 percent.)
Don't know as I haven't read it. But she seems to be postulating a lost Utopia of no premarital sex. Doesn't seem to have existed.
A friend's mother in that lost to time utopia had to 'transfer' to another 'school' because of unexpected 'research interests.' She never spoke of that 'study abroad experience' again. Church makes for poor contraception.
Perhaps these kids will bring about a revolution in which the expectation that students will not have sex will obviate the need for pamphlets that tell them 'no means no', but I'm thinking we'd have to take the wayback machine further than 1950, and somewhere to slightly before the Fall.
459: Don't worry, Emerson's tenderness for hot nerdy 18-year-old virgins will surely fade when as they turn into dipshit Republican administration lawyers and policymakers, right?
t's the prurient attack coupled with pretending that you don't have scorn for these people
I didn't say I don't have scorn for these people. I did say I don't care what they do apart from their effect on other people. Is that incompatible with scorn? And to be perfectly clear, it's not their choice of celibacy I scorn.
I felt momentarily guilty for not having read the Harvard virgins article (not that I ever read the Modern-Love-type links) but apparently no one linked it. Innocent!
For me, there's no hors-Unfogged. Unfogged reality is reality simpliciter.
What I'm saying is that the putatively neutral advice to which they object is not ideologically innocent, either.
And I'm asking you to point to the skew. Emphasis on skew. It seems that it's either a response to the general cultural milieu (kids are having sex, and they should know about condoms), or that it's non-threatening (sex is only part of sexuality.)
I'll admit readily that expecting that college kids will have sex and that they shouldn't be whipped for doing so is an ideological stance, but it's not one that exists solely at [dark chords] evil liberal Ivies.
I continue to be mystified by the mystification. Are people denying that American culture circa 2008 posits teen sexuality as normal and good? It seems to me that it does, and that that goodness is debatable, and a group that takes issue with it is organized around a legitimate principle. That abstinence is also a weapon of the right wing is unfortunate, but doesn't invalidate all abstinence movements.
I have scorn for these people. Promote celibacy all you want. But not to the detriment of education about safer sex.
476: what about those that are, in fact, weapons of the right wing? Which is to say all of them, in this country.
They will be fed to hogs with the others if they are indeed Republican apparatchiks.
I would say that a policy of failing to provide accurate information to people who want to know about sexual health, and discouraging sexually active people from getting relevant medical care, is a policy that discourages (punishes) promiscuity, by attempting to make the negative consequences of their behavior more severe than would be necessary.
And therefore a policy of providing accurate information and medical care would be encouraging promiscuity, relative to the baseline of being actively anti-sex.
476: That abstinence is also a weapon of the right wing is unfortunate, but doesn't invalidate all abstinence movements.
No, but it invalidates this one. This may be clearer if you left all the details the same and replaced "Harvard" with "Kansas" or something.
Ogged, you Levantine coward. Making me and Mary Catherine do all the dirty work.
I continue to be mystified by the mystification. Are people denying that American culture circa 2008 posits teen sexuality as normal and good? It seems to me that it does, and that that goodness is debatable, and a group that takes issue with it is organized around a legitimate principle. That abstinence is also a weapon of the right wing is unfortunate, but doesn't invalidate all abstinence movements.
Yes, and the abstinence movement that is actually being discussed here is one of those which is a weapon of the right wing, in that it is trying to achieve abstinence-related policy goals instead of just banding together in mutual solidarity.
Are people denying that American culture circa 2008 posits teen sexuality as normal and good
Yes, actually. American culture is all about freaking out over teen sexuality while jerking off to pictures of Britney Spears and thinking Abercrombie is too sexy but that feminists ruined all their fun.
'Normal' and 'good' would be a much simpler message.
While a Harvard medical pamphlet based on the morality of Justine or the Brennu-Njáls saga might be interesting, I'm not sure it would fulfill the University's desire to see its students live to graduation without undue complications that might invite lawsuits.
476 - It may not invalidate abstinence movements, but this one shares some batshit arguments with the right wing. I imagine this is about step six in the twelve-part plan to see said batshit arguments become part of the background radiation of American discourse. (Also, why are you of all people surprised to see good old-fashioned freak-jeering on Unfogged?)
The article and I will remain as virgins, forever.
I've never been pwned by an elephant before.
I pwned an elephant! Albeit an elephant with an extraneous "r".
Relephant? Elepharnt? Elerphant?
Oh, I missed that. I get pwned by the βάρβαρος constantly.
I'm not actually an elephant but I don't mind the connotations.
Everyone talks about Babar all the time, and he doesn't deserve it. It sickens me. Now here too?
IIRC, at the time of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the locus classicus for the sublimation-n'-art thesis, Freud had not yet formulated the theory of the death drive, which wouldn't come until Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Freud makes the argument about art deriving from sublimated Eros & Todestrieb explicitly and at great length in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (somewhat awkwardly translated as Civilization and its Discontents). AFAIK this is Freud's most ambitious attempt to explain the origins of art as a hallmark of culture and of civilization (i.e. not just the origins of individual works of art).
Emerson's tenderness for hot nerdy 18-year-old virgins will surely fade when as they turn into dipshit Republican administration lawyers and policymakers, right?
By endorsing this generation's embrace of chastity and celibacy now, Emerson is trying to avert the generation of dipshit Republican lawyers and policymakers to come. He's like the Terminator that way, only in reverse.
"If all the girls that attended the Yale prom were laid from end to end... I wouldn't be surprised". Dorothy Parker
Obviously, there was never any pre-marital sex at the Ivies prior to co-education.
166: Now, if you started a No Sex League at Northeastern, that would be something.
My sister is a junior at Northeastern.
re: 224 and other comments on the people in the article, I had sympathy for both of them, but in different ways. For the guy, I felt really sorry for him, because he has big issues. I doubt an abstinence club and the more-or-less permanent choice of a monastic life is best for him in the long run, but I can't blame him for trying anything at all and I don't think I'd be handling his life any better than he is. (Yes, this is condescending. Oh well.) As for her, she seems naïvely innocent. I don't mean that in the antiquated sense of carnal knowledge or whatever, but she seems honestly, simply not interested in sex. Asexual, for a reason more complicated and intelligent, or maybe just more deep-seated, than the "sex is sinful" crowd. Maybe the story was misleading, but I can see why she would be put off by the focus on sex in modern culture.
All that being said, yes, if they aren't knowing participants in inaccurate portrayals of science and a harmful and retrograde political agenda, then they're being useful idiots to people who are.
snarkout was calling me fat.
"Elephant", dear! Chic and timeless like Phrace Kelly.
I just read the article and see no evidence that the members of these groups are rightwing militants or that they believe that birth control information should be unavailable. They don't seem to be abstinence-only. they're neutral on gay marriage.
High school abstinence programs are mostly imposed by parents and/or schools and are often abstinence-only anti-birth control, etc. This is a voluntary program for adults.
They just seem to have found a way of escaping from the dating game without getting married.
454: My understanding is that Mormon kids do get it on before marriage, but BYU students are more committed to the faith than the general Mormon population, so they fornicate less. My close friendships there included some fairly marginal Mormons, and very few of them were having sex. Sadly, I wasn't, either.
Ogged, you Levantine coward.
By my count, that's Emerson's second misuse of the word Levantine today.
We used the Babar books to teach English to Hmong, and they were annoyed because they knew that elephants don't talk. Elephants are a common draft animal in Laos.
Babar is an African elephant, JE. Your Hmong would have experience with the Asian variety.
They're all dark and devious, Knecht. Take your quibbling to the faculty lounge. I was sensitively avoiding the word "wog".
503: you should have used the Pooh books, with a special focus on Tigger. Hmong know all about devious tigers.
If we had only known. We could have explained that African elephants can talk.
Because of the easy vocabulary and syntax, we were using books for 6 year olds to teach students ranging in age from 14 to about 24. And that wasn't the stupidest thing we did.
500: yeah, they even came up with all sorts of scientific arguments why premarital sex is bad for you. Science is liberal, right?
She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone's "powerful bonding" effect can be "a cause of joy and marital harmony" but that outside of marriage it can create "serious problems." Released arbitrarily, it can blur "the distinction between infatuation and lasting love," the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult.
This is the part that starts the klaxon blaring, John. "Oxytocin" is the current flavor of argument from pseudoscience in the abstinence-only world, voles having replaced veldt-dwelling ancestors as the Science!™ reason women shouldn't be having sex.
OK I'm just being a dick.
I went to Harvard and brought back civilization to my small town.
They just seem to have found a way of escaping from the dating game without getting married.
Mmm, not really, given that the one couple is talking about how they want to get married. They're just not having sex, but they still want relationships. I mean, the group that's sending all Harvard girls Valentines telling them to wait? You really read that as 'we have adopted Emerson's no relationship policy'?
No wait, the Barbarian strikes again.
509, meet 291.
Should there be a community norm that pwnage doesn't count after a thread exceeds 500 comments, or something similar?
That would require a community norm that people actually read comments.
There are comments on unfogged?
It just seems more benign than it's been represented here. The group seemed to bend over backward to avoid dragging in other issues, though I suppose that could be interpreted as sinister and devious.
Sure, the oxytocin is probably a junk science cliche, but the rugby team and the gay-straight alliance probably pump out some BS too. It's not like this group is the only game in town in the ideological BS business.
the rugby team and the gay-straight alliance probably pump out some BS too
The rugby team at my school was always talking about how global warming was a myth and cigarettes don't really cause cancer, so I know what you mean.
the rugby team and the gay-straight alliance probably pump out some BS too
So that's what that is.
516: 'Oxytocin' is science-speak for 'pie.' And while other campus organizations can be blamed for BS, rugby teams, which are dedicated only to the uses of physical force and soothing alcohol, should be considered ideologically pure.
rugby team and the gay-straight alliance
redundant
rugby team and the gay-straight alliance
redundant
D-squared got there first.
That's where I got my information, KR. I should have linked.
I'm with 276 and 392. And, yes, this is what it feels like when the new sexual-ressentiment-fueled norm starts to succeed; that sex might become more awkward is the goal for those of us not planning to have any! Of course, I'd prefer the route of 103: disinterested in religion, sex, whatever.
And for what it's worth: Crerar > Reg > Harper > Eckhart. Harper is too warm for me, I just fall asleep.
Sure there's real pressure on college kids to put out, but the pressure isn't coming from the condoms or the pamphlets in the school health clinic.
523's flagrant disregard for approved commenting style makes me all warm and happy.
Below are the offensive things from the article. There is nothing about condoms or the health service one way or another.
"They posted the conclusions on their Web site -- the belief that " 'safe sex' is not safe"; that even the most effective methods of birth control can fail; that early sexual activity is strongly associated with all manner of terrible outcomes, from increased risk of depression to greater likelihood of marital infidelity, divorce and maternal poverty. Premarital abstinence, on the other hand, is held up by True Love Revolution as improving health, promoting better relationships and, best of all, enabling "better sex in your future marriage."....
Members had sent out cards to the women of the freshmen class that read: "Why wait? Because you're worth it."
She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone's "powerful bonding" effect can be "a cause of joy and marital harmony" but that outside of marriage it can create "serious problems." Released arbitrarily, it can blur "the distinction between infatuation and lasting love," the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said oxytocin could also bond people who didn't necessarily want to be bound, and "you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation."
The True Love Revolution Web site warns that bonding hormones are released during any "sexual activity that culminates in an orgasm."...." She once told another reporter that oral sex, while "disgusting and disrespectful," is not sex, but she now expresses clear approval only of kissing and hugging.
If they don't, and she never finds true love, she says she believes she could spend her life alone. Fredell saw too many women compromise themselves in order to have a relationship. And she also saw those women when their men walked away. The Web site warned what happens then to the sexually active; that oxytocin, in such cases, can cause "a palpable sense of loss, betrayed trust and unwelcome memories. This is information that you will rarely hear from sexual-health groups," because, the Web site says, "there is no condom for the heart."
I definitely feel pressure from condoms. Otherwise, they wouldn't work as intended.
I've been rather promiscuous over the past two years or so, slept with maybe ten different women. I actually have found it interfering with my emotional ability to seek a lasting relationship. I'm thinking of a little period of self-imposed chastity to sort it all out.
That's less because of the sex itself than all the inevitable emotional drama and conflict that comes from the partner's differing desires and expectations about what the sex is going to mean. But the emotional complexity of sex is a major argument of chastity proponents.
The step that chastity types take is to absolutize all of this -- it's not that you're seeking a mean in the inevitably complex and ever-changing negotiations of life, but that you're going to dramatically and permanently injure yourself or dramatically and permanently save yourself.
Harper is too warm for me, I just fall asleep.
Well, exactly.
526: As I said above, I feel a certain sympathy for these people. The bit you've quoted makes me feel a certain (kind, I hope) pity for them.
"there is no condom for the heart."
This is just repeating Socrates' lesson to whomever early on in the Protagoras, to wit, that the only way to take certain sorts of things home with you from the market is by admitting them to your soul.
I too don't see why people make fun of the invocation of oxytocin as the "bonding hormone". Oxytocin is, in fact, the bonding hormone. Whether we can become desensitized to it by bonding to too many people is another story, but it sounds at least possible to me. And we can definitely become desensitized to the feelings of others by having too many unexpected strong emotional interactions, as George washington notes.
I think Cyrus in 498 is completely correct about the personalities of Kelliher and Fredell. They seem rather eccentric, people with issues to work out.
Murray and Kinsella, the previous directors of the group profiled in an earlier Times piece, seemed to have a pretty healthy and functional thing going.
a heart in a condom would basically be a kind of haggis
Freud makes the argument about art deriving from sublimated Eros & Todestrieb explicitly and at great length in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (somewhat awkwardly translated as Civilization and its Discontents).
Civilization and its Discontents is a great title. ISTR reading somewhere about the difficulty of translating Das Unbehagen in der Kultur—I mean its title—and that Freud approved of its now-standard Englishing. Hardly literal, but awkward?
Anyway, you've caught me out. I've never read that.
Okay so how evocative is it that the previous directors of this group also got profiled in the Times? C'mon, this is a surer route to fame and fortune than joining the Lampoon.
535: and "The Uneasiness in the Culture" is too redolent of neurotic yogurt.
They seem rather eccentric, people with issues to work out.
Unlike you, me, and the rest of the Unfoggetariat?
I have known of a number of cases of asymmetric bonding, when one partner was made miserable for a long time while the other partner sailed blithely on to better things. (I was the sufferer in only one of these cases, and the bad guy in one). And often in these cases the sufferer was judged guilty -- of possessiveness or dependency or neediness.
As I said: a new norm, a new habitus, a new convention. Maybe better in some ways, but in other ways worse. There are plenty of us for whom the new regime was worse.
And we can definitely become desensitized to the feelings of others by having too many unexpected strong emotional interactions, as George washington notes.
Unless you're one of those people who is so attractive that others regard having sex with you as sufficient gift in itself, I think sex usually (not always, but usually) involves at least one partner having romantic expectations. The failure of romantic expectations generally involves cruelty in some way, deliberate or not. The experience of cruelty is desensitizing.
But experience with romantic bonding does make you much wiser about how the whole process works. I think there's value in that if you learn to use it right. I also think that people who marry young, in the first flush of romance, also have to go through some forms of disappointment, although the love often lasts it also often changes.
I too don't see why people make fun of the invocation of oxytocin as the "bonding hormone"
It's not the invocation of oxytocin as the "bonding hormone" that's being made fun of, it's the alarmist, pseudoscientific and ideologically driven conclusions drawn from it.
Unlike you, me, and the rest of the Unfoggetariat?
Well, of course.
I think Keliher is deeply troubled, more than the norm, and hopefully will be rescued by a really good and probably religious woman.
I think Fridell is perfectly fine on her own terms but is a rather unpleasant person. I guess that's different from having issues though.
See, I've seen lots of alarmist, pseudoscientific and ideologically driven conclusions stated by sexual liberationists too. Without sexual frustration there'd be no neurosis, psychosis, war or totalitarianism.
One way or the other, sex is a pretty heavily ideologized area.
the sufferer was judged guilty -- of possessiveness or dependency or neediness. As I said: a new norm, a new habitus, a new convention. Maybe better in some ways, but in other ways worse.
Basically, the dating life can be a cruel jungle, while the world of early, mandatory marriage can be a stifling prison.
When I was in Taiwan, men would get angry when their (Chinese) girlfriends became attached to them. That just seemed odd to me.
543: A basic no-relationship principle.
Without sexual frustration there'd be no neurosis, psychosis, war or totalitarianism.
Sadly, those pickup lines don't work any more, whereas there's a whole shitload of people out there convinced -- or willing to claim that they're convinced -- that the Silver Ring Thing with a healthy side of slut-shaming is going to keep their girl from gettin' it on.
A basic no-relationship principle.
except "can be" is replaced by "is".
See, I've seen lots of alarmist, pseudoscientific and ideologically driven conclusions stated by sexual liberationists too.
And that's equally worthy of mockery, but I honestly have no experience with pressure from anyone drawing those conclusions (I hasten to add that that's just my experience [/parsimon]). I didn't go to Reed in the 60s, when refusing to have sex with strangers on the front lawn was an honor code violation.
The physiological explanation of war and totalitarianism by sexual frustration is matched by the physiological explanation of war and totalitarianism by constipation. Bertrand Russell held both views, whether simultaneously or not I don't know.
Among the relatively few genuinely stupid things Nietzssche wrote were a bunch of attempts to explain thought by digestion, diet, etc.
548: as 546 points out, that stuff is pretty old hat by now. But sexual activity is now the default that doesn't need to be explained, whereas abstinence does need explanation.
Among the relatively few genuinely stupid things Nietzssche wrote were a bunch of attempts to explain thought by digestion, diet, etc.
Spoken, again, like a true alcoholic. Nietzsche's stuff about digestion is great. If you had a very sensitive and finicky stomach, instead of the insensate steel chamber of your anglo-saxon ancestors, you'd appreciate this.
Sexual frustration is a species of the genus constipation. "Constipation" is both the name of a genus and the name of a species of the genus. Most people, when they use the word, are talking about the latter, but Russell might have meant the former.
Martial Arts Iron Stomach Powers!
You could make a pretty good argument from early child development for awareness of digestion being key to brain development, I wager.
help! sorry to interrupt your conversation, but i want to derail back to the original post.
I just got offered a date with a 34 yr old (perfect age). These are the only other pieces of information I get:
You'll know me at the bar because I look like:
"Miles from Murphy Brown"
I spend a lot of time thinking about:
"I can be "
My ideal matchup is:
"Not sure whether this means of the venue or the partner...hmmm."
Before you go on a date with me you should know:
"Dog is my copilot."
wtf? I don't even know what the first two answers mean (well, I googled Miles from Murphy Brown and got an answer). Is this an insane person, or a boring one who can't answer questions, and, finally, would have a drink with him tonight, if you were me?
thx for having my back, imaginary internet friends.
He sounds toolish, as almost everyone does, but you should go anyway, because that's the spirit of the thing and you can bail after half an hour if you don't like him. We'll be here to validate your reactions afterwards.
Just carry a gun and don't turn your back on him. He could be loads of fun.
would have a drink with him tonight, if you were me?
Sure, why not. There's an easy out.
Dude, if you look like Miles from Murphy Brown, and contemplate "I can be..." you need to move out of your parent's basement. Level 34 Druid, IYKWIMAITYD.
"I can be" smells of motivational self-help, and I assume "Dog is My Co-Pilot" presumably refers to this.
I'm now remembering that there was some student organization at my school that flyered the campus with "101 ways to show love for your partner without having sex" around Valentine's Day. But, one of the 101 was definitely "dry humping" so I'm pretty sure this was the sex ed group & not an abstinence promotion group.
I assume "Dog is My Co-Pilot" presumably refers to this.
It could also refer to Dog the Bounty Hunter.
Ogged, you probably should drink more. A lot more. Bloody Maries go down easy, and you get vitamins.
Maybe he a charming dyslexic who wants to find someone who's also a really big fan of the mid-90s NYC queercore band God is My Co-Pilot.
Run, don't walk, away from the Dog is my Copilot dude. Come on, guys. That shit is scary.
A woman once told me I looked like Miles from Murphy Brown. Sigh. Other comparisons from the opposite sex: John Turturro, Tom Hanks. Pretty slim pickings there, I'd take Turturro if I had to choose.
Sifu, we should compare record collections sometime, IYKWIM.
STFU, Emerson. We need people to get out there and generate blog gossip fodder for us. It's not like you're going to do it.
567: what did you mean by the other answers?
crap. Thanks, that was helpful, JP Stormcrow, though not encouraging. I'll have to decide by 6. Maybe I'll decide it by how much I'm in the mood for a drink by then.
When the only thing appealing about someone is their age, that's probably a sign you shouldn't go on the date.
571: Aaaaah go for it. Spending a half hour with an unpleasant person isn't the end of the world: look at all the unfogged meetups people sit through!
Dear Shut-Ins,
Should I go out?
Thanks.
Scientist Lady
Silver Ring Thing with a healthy side of slut-shaming is going to keep their girl from gettin' it on.
And it's all targeted at the women. The freshman get the Valentine cards and advice not to sleep with that guy because they'll become pair-bonded and unable to fly on other dragons. (Or something.) It doesn't look so much like a quiet plea to not feel pressured into shagging everyone on the front lawn as much as the same old 'you wouldn't want to be a whore, would you?'
would have a drink with him tonight, if you were me?
Sure. It's just a drink and he sounds adorkably nerdy and likely to spring the 'dog rescue' line. Entertaining!
Also, what is less remembered today: Murphy Brown or Dan Quayle?
554: He doesn't sound like a tool. He sounds fine, as almost everyone does. There aren't any answers that would amaze you, and nothing he said should scare you. It's a go, I think. And "I can be" sounds like a Walter Mitty thing. Also pretty normal.
Anyway, you've caught me out. I've never read that.
You should read it, B-Wo; it's good. Has an interesting account of the origins of 'good' and 'evil', and also that famous passage in which consciousness is described as being layered like a city in which every age is still present.
Madame Curie, You should certainly go on the date and, if possible, you should liveblog the encounter for the amusement and instruction of your imaginary internet friends.
571, 573: I second Sifu, I realized too late that I might be discouraging, think of it as a test of the predictive powers of the Mineshaft. All new data is good data.
Just last year I got in a long argument with an idiot about what distinguished liberal criticism of 24 from Dan Quayle's criticism of Murphy Brown.
But, one of the 101 was definitely "dry humping" so I'm pretty sure this was the sex ed group & not an abstinence promotion group.
I had a hot makeout session in college with a girl in my dorm who was emphatically saving herself for marriage (we didn't have an abstinence movement as such, but she surely would have been part of it if such a thing existed). We aggressively dry humped on her couch with her on top for about 45 minutes. It was incredibly arousing at the time, but I learned some unpleasant things about the abrasive properties of cotton undergarments after things cooled off.
Mostly that it didn't look like Quayle realized she was fictional.
I especially like Freud when his metaphors stop making sense but he blunders onward anyway. Like the cave women braiding useless little penises out of their pubes, for example. (At my URL).
I think people are too quick to say no answers to those questions are better than any others. I thought the following was helpful, though I haven't met the person yet:
You'll know me because I look like
"Long hair, probably wearing jeans, flats, a scarf. Probably carrying some large, unwieldy handbag that may or may not contain a water bottle/several books/dirty yoga clothes."
I spend a lot of time thinking about:
"TV, animals, movies, food, the general state of the world."
My ideal matchup is:
"A few laughs, a two-sided conversation."
Before you go on a date with me you should know:
"I'm pretty well-rounded and into lots of different things. I keep up on the latest TV shows, movies, fashion, restaurants, music, etc. If you're not into that sort of thing, chances are we probably won't mesh very well (see: my previous CBD experiences)."
oh god, I can't do it. self-motivational dog books. especially not if I have to go to Davis Sq. for it.
I cancelled. There was a little option to say: "not a fan of Josh," and you are required to explain why. I wonder if that means a human being reads the answers to make the match-ups better? that would be cool.
In any case, have no fear. I still have 2 dates open & unscheduled on the site, so I am sure there will be fodder to make you laugh soon.
He sounds toolish, as almost everyone does, but you should go anyway, because that's the spirit of the thing and you can bail after half an hour if you don't like him. We'll be here to validate your reactions afterwards.
I agree with Ogged. Half the fun of dating is having horrible experiences.
Marie Curie, I think that if you're going to use that site, you have to set the bar for meeting very low. The point is to meet and then decide, not to mine profiles for clues.
589: Don't push. It should self-sort. If she isn't comfortable with that, she'll cancel a lot, and, presumably, won't end up using the service much. Which makes sense, as it won't really be for her.
I should go back and read the threads about that site. Although if this one is any indication, they don't contain much information about it.
I know, but there were at least three red flags there. I like the site because I like the idea of having a drink with a random new person even in a purely non-goal-oriented way, so I'm not that picky, and I'll end up out there, but he sounded mopey AND he's a dog person who identifies as a dog person.
591: Wait for the "I told you so" when her body turns up, broken and clearly offered to some huge statue mastiff, and her estate sues you for this state of events.
Does "dog is my co-pilot" mean dog person? If so, then of course you're right not to meet him. Stupid dogs.
595: I thought it meant "not a fundie, and mildly hostile to them."
I wasn't familiar with the book JP linked to, so I assumed the phase "dog is my co-pilot" was just meant to indicate irreverence towards modern pop Christianity or religion in general. I've been known to utter "I've found Jesus," doing my best to maintain a straight face, and follow it up with "Now it's my turn to hide." Emerson in 566 is probably right, though.
Spending a half hour with an unpleasant person isn't the end of the world: look at all the unfogged meetups people sit through!
I wasn't *that* bad, was I?
There was a little option to say: "not a fan of Josh,"
Apparently I was.
Good thing Marie Curie is not in Missouri.
I thought "dog is my co-pilot" just signified "dyslexic and vaguely irreverent about religion".
598: oh, not according to me.
(dischord: fomented!)
578: But I've already put in my Freud time! I think I do own it, though, so I probably will read it as a means of procrastination now that you've recommended it.
But I've already put in my Freud time!
Do you have plagiostomi available for associating?
President Washington 539:
I also think that people who marry young, in the first flush of romance, also have to go through some forms of disappointment, although the love often lasts it also often changes.
I haven't been married at all, much less for years and years, but doesn't all love change over time?
601: I'd already figured out SP's kid had no use for me.
I would guess "dog is my co-pilot" probably doesn't signify anything much except "I'm wacky"
I doubt it's a reference to anything, he probably just saw it somewhere on the internet and thought it was clever
607 is probably right.
Although maybe this is his homepage.
Half the fun of dating is having horrible experiences.
Funny how it's always non-single people who think this.
doesn't all love change over time?
The argument for serial monogamy.
Half the fun of having dated is having had horrible experiences.
Much like half the fun of having joined a fraternity is having been hazed.
Funny how it's always non-single people who think this.
Funny, like prison rape?
Would I have had a condom-dropped-in-her-car story for you if I hadn't taken a flyer on going out with the lifeguard?
Funny how it's always non-single people who think this.
Come on Blume! Don't you relish telling stories about those really bad dates? Having to go to Celtics games and pretend to care?!?!
Oh, I didn't have to pretend to care about the Celtics at all. I was so, so drunk.
You can't just say "the lifeguard" anymore, ogged. There have been so many lifeguards.
Half the fun of dating is having horrible experiences, which is why I always hated dating.
615: which was even better than pretending to care about the Celtics!
Half the m-fun of dating is calculating the exchange rate between horribleness and m-fun.
It was funny telling the story here about that ass who had gotten all of this information he was lording over me from articles I had translated, but that was because it was satisfying to hear everyone else affirm what an ass he was. Doesn't rehabilitate the crappy date.
Addendum to 615: then, days later, she got in my car and said "Hey! Somebody was drinking wine in here!"
Yes, somebody was.
that ass who had gotten all of this information he was lording over me from articles I had translated
I think I missed this the first time around, so let me just redundantly and non-rehabilitatively say that is fucking awesome.
So a lesson learned. Suggested future protocol, all blind dates are unconditionally encouraged. Predictions should be sent to a trusted source (that's the flaw) and only revealed after the date when they can be compared to the actual experience as related by the lucky commenter. Maybe someone can come up with a scoring mechanism like Fantasy Baseball.
there were at least three red flags there
women are so easy to scare off with words. Ready to shy off and bolt at the slightest excuse. For men, it takes photographs. Or the words "severely overweight".
Or the words "severely overweight" "full-figured".
remember, these are personal ads.
Blume's translation story is indeed awesome. I told it to all my friends.
the term of art is "full figured"
Again I sit in the pwnage box, and feel shame.
628: Several more active threads to try for TLL. Go for it!
Blume's translation story is indeed awesome. I told it to all my friends.
In a somewhat similar though more non-date, your-field-is-full-of-sexists setting, as a grad student my wife got lectured at a conference by a senior faculty member on how she really needed to read the work of "a guy in your department, who just published two great papers right in the same area you're working in. I'm surprised you don't know him."
Bad date: totally worth it!
Did I mention that this date's grandmother is Jewish, and he therefore has ideas about how he would change the history curriculum of German high schools? (No knowledge of the current history curriculum of German high schools, mind you. But he went there once! On vacation!)
631: Hold on to the good parts, Blume.
The secret to dating Blume: cheerful ignorance!
The secret to not being an asshole in Gonerill's wife's field: learning to read!
The secret to appreciating crazyblinddate.com: don't read unfogged!
Tweety, the Daniel Ellsberg of the internet.
The secret to appreciating crazyblinddate.com: don't read unfogged!
I thought we were all for it.
he therefore has ideas about how he would change the history curriculum of German high schools?
It's almost like the secret to getting a woman to appreciate your intelligence is not endlessly lecturing her about your brilliant opinions. I don't understand, how could that be? The fixed smile, glazed eyes, and nodding mean they like you, right?
The secret to rocking loafers with tassles: Seersucker trousers!
The secret to co- timing! -medy:
635: crazyblinddate for thee but not for me is no way to live, Tim. Better get crazy-blind-dating now if you want to have any hope of having a steady to dump next Valentine's Day.
I think we all agreed that live-action roleplayers are bad people who deserve to be mocked, and ditto people who re-enact historical battles. So why shouldn't a society of people dedicated to pretending it's the 1950s in their pants be treated the same; as a slightly embarrassing public health problem?
It's the 1950s in my pants! Elvis is in here! The young Elvis!
It's a sock hop in your pants and everyone's invited! Except the blacks!
It's almost like the secret to getting a woman to appreciate your intelligence is not endlessly lecturing her about your brilliant opinions.
That is correct. The secret is to strike a pensive pose, nod thoughtfully from time to time, and say as little as possible.
Hey, if you single people weren't so adamant about forbidding the rest of us from the crazy blind dates, *we* could go on some of those horrible dates and come back with amusing stories for *you*. But noooooo.
i don't understand anything 615, 620, 630
can you tell a nice, understandable, inspiring story?
i mean please, sorry to be too curious though
if you find so you can just drop the request
http://www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/zodiac/dog.html
i'm posting this for the arts vid only
coz i'm getting used to ogged saying me mean things :(
642, 644: The secret to making anyone think you're brilliant is to make them think *they're* brilliant.
not endlessly lecturing her about your brilliant opinions
Or at least confining your opinions to, you know, something that's not her area of specialty.
639: For my part, I'd mock none of them; nor would I mock their harmless hobbies.
Hold on to the good parts, Blume.
Next, Tim will point to his good parts.
I would have endlessly lectured you about the Celtics and NBA basketball, Blume. Did you know that Larry Bird inspired the young Dirk Nowitzki? That should definitely be in the German high school curriculum.
I'd mock none of them; nor would I mock their harmless hobbies.
Frequent blog commenters are in no position to mock anyone else's hobbies.
Wow, I had totally skipped over 630 on my first read-through. That's funny/awful.
You can endlessly lecture to Blume about subjects which she does not specialize in (such as the location of the original Dunkin Donuts) and she won't even necessarily realize that you're totally wrong!
I vote that we send B. to the site with our blessings. She wouldn't be a party pooper like Curie.
That's funny/awful.
It is funny, in retrospect (like that date). The awful thing is how easy it is to accumulate stories of this sort (hopefully unlike that date).
654: I don't think that anybody was saying she couldn't do it, just that she'd be a jerk if she did. Which, hey, no skin off my ass.
653: Well, to be fair, that particular example isn't restricted to Blume.
That wasn't really the New Balance factory either, was it?
It was! I swear! Also, the first Staples turns out to be in Brighton, too. They have a sign and everything!
German high school curriculum is like 25% Detlef Schrempf...
(such as the location of the original Dunkin Donuts)
Dude, I just didn't want to make you look bad in front of Josh.
Blume's specialty is Nazi authors like Goethe, Thomas Mann, et. al., right? Those guys are just dripping with homoeroticism, you know. And a lot of people don't realize that Klopstock was really a greater writer than Goethe, but his works are almost untranslatable because of their density and profundity.
Next, Tim will point to his good parts.
I'm bringing Apo along for my CBDs and introducing him as "my consultant".
Also because Klopstock wrote in the Bavarian dialect.
Blume is fascinated! Tell her more, John!
Klopstock
Popular in Southern Germany, a kind of cabbage soup base made from horse glue.
All those umlauts cause Germans to scrunch up their mouths funny, increasing their homoeroticism and constipation and making them kill millions of people for no very good reason.
Klopstock was really a greater writer than Goethe
Wolfi clearly knew it too, man. I mean, he had Lotte know about Klopstock!
I didn't get 630 at first. I gather that the senior faculty member was being sexist because it never occurred to him that your wife could have been the author of the two great papers? That seemed implausible to me because it would mean that he had remembered the name of the school but not the author, and also is so oblivious that he didn't notice any connections between the content of the papers and whatever your wife was saying that made him think of them. Which, come to think of it, I guess isn't that unlikely, but I had to think about it.
Next, Tim will point to his good parts.
They'll always have Paris, Apo.
Hey, I can't find Blume's translation story. Another thread?
"Oh, he's just for sex. I don't think all that highly of his work".
OT: Emerson, check DeLong. He's asking for info on Reed.
Hypothesis: Beyond satisfying your explicitly specified constraints (height, smoking, education, etc.), CBD seems to operate by simply looking for profiles that have words in common with yours.
Data: The canceled date from last night both had the word "charming" in our profiles. Another match and I shared "awkward." Tonight's date has "dorkybot," and I have "nerd," suggesting a thesaurus may also be in use. Finally, I just got offered a Crazy Blind Double Date. On this one I share "politics" with the dude, "awkward' with one girl, and "skiing" with the other.
Or at least confining your opinions to, you know, something that's not her area of specialty.
I related recently that my sister has an awful date-stalker guy that seems to think that the way to impress her is to try to lecture her about her own subject matter and use words like 'irreducible complexity.' Tool, tool, tool.
Goneril, I'm guessing your wife publishes with initials or has a masculine first name? (In a similar vein, I once sat through a class presentation which began with the female grad student waxing over how wonderful it was to read this Hilary in the philosophy of mathematics class because women were so underrepresented...ow.)
673: Someone clearly needs to come out with crazyblinddatewhacking.com.
Goneril, I'm guessing your wife publishes with initials or has a masculine first name?
Yes.
this Hilary in the philosophy of mathematics class because women were so underrepresented
Ouch.
At least the prof corrected her before she got too far in, and at least she wasn't a grad student in philosophy.
676: So what did your wife say? I hope she did something cheesy that made the other person feel awkward while being defensible as awkward attempt to deal with a bad situation. Like the "this guy" thumbs, with maybe a wink.
Another time she showed up 7.5 mos pregnant to comment on a monograph (by someone in a different discipline) that discussed and attempted to critique her work extensively while referring to her all the while as a "he."
676: So what did your wife say? I hope she did something cheesy that made the other person feel awkward while being defensible as awkward attempt to deal with a bad situation.
Not really. Just saying "I wrote those papers" was enough to make the other person feel awkward and we all know how that emotion gets channeled when someone is caught out being sexist.
Mind you, that was when she was in grad school. Now she's a senior faculty member, it's both much less common and if it does happen the perpetrators don't get off so lightly. The most recent time this sort of thing happened was when she was an audience member at a conference and some grad student on the panel obnoxiously brushed off a question in a manner that suggested she was some kind of idiot who didn't understand elementary aspects of the technical topic under discussion. A shower of molten logic subsequently rained down on his head, during which it gradually dawned on him whom he was talking to, and he was quite sorry.
In my experience, academics giving talks can be real dicks about taking questions from women during Q&As.
Geez, what (broad) field is your wife in, Gonerill?
You people are scaring me off the entire idea of grad school. I should find out what horror stories a couple of my PhD-seeking friends in ultra-male fields have encountered thus far.
You people are scaring me off the entire idea of grad school
Success! My experience is that in almost any workplace bad behavior imaginable, academics are worse than a normal place of business because the incentives for good behavior are so much weaker.
Philosophy, a field that has relatively few women compared to similar disciplines and within certain subfields of which there are even fewer again. Count up, for example, the number of senior women at the best dept in the country.
Logical thinking makes our female brains overheat.
684: Oh, well, I'd never want to do anything so daft as teach. My mom was a professor for a lot of years, and did a good job of scaring me off that path. Happy ending to the story though! She's now got a major grant, and so got hired as a Research Professor. She doesn't have to teach anymore and can instead spend all her time digging through the datasets and writing articles!
I just like the idea of taking the super-high-end courses, working closely with professors, and doing some interesting research for pure research's sake before coming back to private industry. But I'd kind of hate it if things were so openly bigoted.
685: I like to think that the women smart enough to be profs at the top faculty in the country are also smart enough to not try and live in Manhattan on a prof's salary. Unfortunately, deep down, I know it's not really the reason for that faculty page looking like it does.
686: Also, all the blood goes to the brain, which makes the female reproductive organs wither up and die.
And although that last sentence made sense in my head, I now realize it's incomprehensible when verbal emphases are dropped.
Actually, I suspect somewhat that you're not entirely off-base, PMP. Given the sexist attitudes and crappy career prospects, it wouldn't surprise me if many highly intelligent talented women decided to do something else with their lives on the grounds that if they were going to have to put up with such bullshit, they might as well get paid more money.
Also, all the blood goes to the brain, which makes the female reproductive organs wither up and die.
Bonus! Cheap, natural contraceptive.
My experience is that in almost any workplace bad behavior imaginable, academics are worse than a normal place of business because the incentives for good behavior are so much weaker.
There are a lot of problems with academia, but in my experience this isn't really one of them.
Academia in certain disciplines or professional schools can be a nice life -- pays well into the six figures with lots of free travel.
My experience is that in almost any workplace bad behavior imaginable, academics are worse than a normal place of business
IME quite untrue.
It's always seemed to me that sexist attitudes in much of academe -- and particularly the humanities and social sciences -- are pretty small potatoes compared to sexist attitudes outside it, unless you're working in the arts. Same with racism.
694: of course you'd say that, Mordecai Richler.
There are huge differences in culture between humanities and social science departments and hard science departments. You get some pretty hard core sexism in physics and engineering. Also, disciplines that idolize the sciences, like philosophy.
philosophy s/b analytic philosophy.
NYU bought its top-ranked philosophy department on the open market. The senior faculty there are no doubt at least as well-compensated as any in the field.
People at the high-end of humanities and social science actually tend to be better paid than their counterparts in the hard sciences, mostly because it is easier for them to credibly threaten to move -- they typically have no sunk-cost investment in, e.g, a lab.
700: on the other hand, they don't get any money from consulting or patents. The father of one of my daughter's playmates recently went from being an ordinary engineering researcher to being a multi-millionaire after the sale of his start up.
You people are scaring me off the entire idea of grad school
A friend of mine went on the market this year and is finishing up the dissertation. Three of the searches in which my friend advanced ended up going to senior faculty with one or more published books. Another position disappeared because of budget cuts.
700, 701: That's where business school and economics professors really score. They get to combine easy mobility with high demand for their consulting.
My philosopher was given tenure today.
My philosopher was given tenure today.
Hey, that's great!
Yipee for Oudemia and CA!
(This is CA, right, you don't keep another philosopher around the house?)
Thank you! He was going to have to start nailing students on the dean's desk not to get it. Non-consensually. Not because he is so great, but because he is too mild mannered* to say no to running every fucking committee at the place. He would never say no. He will say no now -- he'd better or I'll beat him.
*Yes! A mild-mannered male assistant associate professor of philosophy. Why I never.
I have a man-harem of continental philosophers. Kotsko and I are engaged, you know.
I've been rather promiscuous over the past two years or so, slept with maybe ten different women. I actually have found it interfering with my emotional ability to seek a lasting relationship. I'm thinking of a little period of self-imposed chastity to sort it all out.
Perhaps this is a gendered thing, but my experience has been just the reverse. Slept with several men over the last six month, with no intention going in of pursuing any sort of lasting relationship, and am finding it very difficult not to form the sort of emotional attachments I could really just do without. Probably the oxytocin.
OT: Emerson, check DeLong. He's asking for info on Reed.
I just looked at that thread and it unearthed a buried memory: talking to my high-school college guidance counselor, telling her that I was pretty keen on Reed and having her gently crinkle her nose and say "I think you should set your sights a little higher."
telling her that I was pretty keen on Reed and having her gently crinkle her nose and say "I think you should set your sights a little higher."
"That's more of an Evanston Township college, if you know what I mean."
693: One source of confusion in discussions about academic careers is the enormous difference between the best jobs and the average job. Being a research professor at a top university is heaven compared to most jobs, but to get there in most fields you have to at the very top of your class all through your undergrad and grad studies, and often you have to spend several years in less-desirable jobs in less-desirable locations too. Based on what he's said, some of PGD's data points are very lucky / talented people whose stories are not relevant to most people.
telling her that I was pretty keen on Reed and having her gently crinkle her nose and say "I think you should set your sights a little higher."
"I think we both know you'll be a stockbroker in the end, so why pretend now?"
Of the two stoner friends I had who went from ETHS to Reed, one was and is clever, PhD in solid state physics after Reed, then started a brewery. The other guy had a nice smile and a good heart.
Reed doesn't do well in the USN&WR rankings because it refuses to send data. The magazine tried to punish them by ranking them in the second quartile, but Reed has an established reputation within the scholarly community itself, and Reed's recruiting didn't suffer tremendously. At one time it sent a higher proportion of its graduates to PhDs than any other school, and I'm sure it still ranks high.
There was a dirty secret though. Reed graduated a low proportion of its freshmen, making the previous stat somewhat misleading. This and other stats (e.g. endowment / student) had already lowered Reed's USN ranking before Reed quit playing.
My girlfriend at the time actually did go to Reed. Absolutely hated it. But I visited and it was clear that it could be the right kind of place for the right kind of student--smart, independent, creative, disaffected with more traditional schooling. But there was also a hell of a lot of heroin use (at least at the time) and it does rain all the damn time, so not so great for people prone to depression.
Oh, meant to say: she transferred after a year.
There's a lot of separation between My girlfriend at the time and people prone to depression.
Well, yeah, if you think of heroin uses as a bad thing. {JOKE, if anyone's watching}.
IIRC that problem was big for a short time in the late 80s-early 90s. It may have just been one crowd of people. If I'm not mistaken some of my son's HS friends down the road knew some of the fucked-up Reedies, who along with everything else were very indiscreet.
Indiscreet, or, as the young people say, "way uncool".
or, as the young people say, "way uncool".
The young people of the late 80s-early 90s are now pushing 40.
early 90s
Yup, that's when she was there.
40-year-olds are so cute when they pretend to be adults!
723: The young people of the late 80s-early 90s are now pushing 40.
Way, way uncool.
it does rain all the damn time, so not so great for people prone to depression.
People who find rain depressing don't deserve to live.
People who find rain depressing don't deserve to live with oppressors who insist that it isn't.
Couldn't agree more.
But for the lack of a swim team, Reed would have been on my short list. There may well be some who would call the lack of such a team a feature rather than a bug.
Reed has a wading pool where you could have splashed happily around with the other kiddies.
Congrats oudemia and philosopher.
Wait, ten or so people over a couple of years is rather promiscuous now?
Well, for me it is. Maybe you should have signed yourself "Jack Kennedy", Abe.
Wait, five people a year is not promiscuous? Mere chaos is let loose on the world.
Emerson, the ceremony of innocence has long since been drowned. There is no such category as "promiscuity" any more, except when speaking in historico-sociological terms, of course.
Wait, five people a year is not promiscuous?
It is if you're killing them.
Or maybe that's "gratuitous." Words are hard.
775: I don't know if it's promiscuous or not, but sounds bigger than average. Perhaps not for today's youth.
I'm really looking forward to 775.
If it's both promiscuous and bigger than average, I bet a bunch of us are, but I've heard that kind of talk before.
739: Yeah, I noticed that. I never know whether to clutter things up with corrections, or just assume people will work it out. I meant "735." Though I feel comfortable asserting that 775 is a big number. Not Chamberlinian, but a good day's work.
740: I can believe that. There seems to have been a pretty big change in the last ten years or so. (Bill Simmons bitches about it all of the time in his column.)
Before, 775 was just a random milepost on this highway. Now, it's a destination with potential.
He was going to have to start nailing students on the dean's desk not to get it
I thought that was the post-tenure granting celebration?
Congrats to your man, oudemia.
755 is not so much a real and pragmatic goal as a vague but not-unladen-with-meaning aspiration. Not unlike the faux-antiqued finish for furniture in the Pottery Barn catalogue, after all.
This thread doesn't seem to be about much now - at least not until 755 and 775. So I have a question:
Why doesn't The American Prospect secure their subscriber login page? They secure the page when you order and when you create a login; why not when you actually log in later?
And would it kill the system to remember that I just logged in?
Supposed purpose of this thread: Date was all right, didn't feel any need to rush away from it. She had a really interesting, film-related job and that was good for conversation. Not particularly attracted to her, but I expected that for reasons mentioned in another context in 624.
My CBD went reasonably well. The date was cute and interesting and I'd say our personalities meshed well along a few dimensions. She worked for a big famous computer company in the area. Date started at 7:30 and ended at 10. I think it was headed downhill due to some of my behavior towards the end, but for me the whole point of this was to create numerous low stakes situations where I could work on my social skills, and so I'm counting it as a net victory.
Try as I might, I just can't read CBD correctly without first thinking "Central Business District." This is what I get for being interested in geography.
some of my behavior towards the end
"Now my pants are chafing me."
Central Business Districts are generally found in riparian zones.
751: Someone has to provide the low-hanging fruit around here.
we have a central business district in narnia, with big overhead gantries that automatically deduct varying amounts from your car's on-dashboard smart card depending on the time of day. the economist magazine has to go for a run whenever it thinks about it.
748: okay, fat.
749: ooh! What did you do? C'mon I want to know more. Were you super drunk? Did you drop your pants? Did you pick her nose?
okay, for those of you who were disappointed (and clearly have my best interests at heart!!), I do now finally have a crazy blind date set up for this week, that we've both accepted. He's a 31 yr old Indian guy (as in sub-continent). I said yes even though I know next to nothing about him except writing tone. In fact it's impressive how non-descript he keeps it! But it sounds mellow so I'm happy.
You'll know me because I look like:
"Hard to describe this... but have been told, I look younger than my age, and have nice eyes"
I spend a lot of time thinking about:
"Mostly anything but music... I am bad with music"
My ideal matchup is:
"For a first blind date, someone I can connect with"
Before you go on a date with me you should know:
"Lets keep it real and be honest and be ourselves."
also probably he's a secret lurker on this site, with my luck, so I will shut up for now!
but did want to say: congrats to oudemia and her man!
Go Marie! Don't say yes to an arranged marraige on the first date, though.
Merci, Marie! (Je regrette de ne pas ecriver en polonais.)
756: We Kanzlern are a secretive lot, you know. Really, though, my phrasing made the negatives sound more interesting than they were. I'll paint a bit of a picture, though:
My U of C undergrad experience came up fairly quickly. "Isn't that where fun comes to die?" she asked. I admitted it was, and that my time in college was in fact highly socially problematic. As in, I think that the environment there made if easy for me to pass through college while holding on to almost all of the social pathologies I had when I started. When I said this she praised my self-awareness, and contrasted me favorably with the socially challenged folks she knows at work, who she said largely are unhappy yet unable to identify the source of their unhappiness and its link to their poor social development.
From there we moved to a wider range of topics, and I think I passed as a fairly functional human being in those discussions. I say that I think I misbehaved at the end because I eventually found a way to get all emo again and self-deprecate and characterize myself as awkward. And I think that expressing my concerns about coming across awkwardly did more to create awkwardness than any previous social missteps that had simply been left unanalyzed. I think that an outsider viewing my performance might conclude that it was largely pretty good, but on the inside I've integrated the idea that I'm a social failure so deeply into my identity that it was hard not to let that idea out. Confidence: It's still sexy, kids.
I do still feel like I'm in a bind, because so much of my past has been marred by depression and social isolation and other things that I sense people don't want to hear about, since you don't date someone to be their therapist, yet anyone I meet is going to want to know about my past. My puzzlement is over how tell the truth about who I am without turning the date into a therapy session. My previous philosophy had been that I should wait until I am fixed and my "issues" had receded into the background before I started dating (my last relationship was in 2001, and I haven't really tried since then apart from a brief attempt in early 2005), but lately I've been getting lonelier and reminding myself to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Anyway, she just emailed to say she had a nice time and ask if I wanted to go see Jeff Sachs talk next week, so I guess I wasn't all that bad.
Good show, Kanzler! Hooray! You're going to go, right?
Anyway, she just emailed to say she had a nice time and ask if I wanted to go see Jeff Sachs talk next week, so I guess I wasn't all that bad.
Hell of!
Gooooo Der Eiserner Kanzler!
On the social awkwardness tip: have you considered drugs? Or, alternately, not talking about yourself?
Sifu, can you name a problem for which you would not propose drugs as a solution?
An upcoming drug test, depending on the circumstances.
so I guess I wasn't all that bad rocked the party
Sifu, can you name a problem for which you would not propose drugs as a solution?
But it sounds like drugs have a solid track record.
Anyway, she just emailed to say she had a nice time and ask if I wanted to go see Jeff Sachs talk next week, so I guess I wasn't all that bad.
Rock!
You're going to go, right?
Natürlich.
On the social awkwardness tip: have you considered drugs?
I actually think I was doing better before the second beer.
Or, alternately, not talking about yourself?
Yeah, I know, from my comment it sounds like I blathered on about me the whole time. I did ask her questions--many of which came naturally and of genuine interest--and periodically asked myself (internally) whether I had been talking uninterrupted for too long. But when something I don't think she wants to hear about or is too emo seems to be the honest answer to a question of hers, what do I do? Do I just not answer? Be vague?
Aha! I knew that was who it was!
when something I don't think she wants to hear about or is too emo seems to be the honest answer to a question of hers, what do I do? Do I just not answer? Be vague?
Deflect with a cock joke!
Oops, so much for my thin veil of anonymity.
I have no confessions to make, but this is a damn good veil of anonymity.
I gained the throne by killing the legitimate heir, you know. A small and innocent child?
Or did I? Nightmares haunt me.
My ideal matchup is:
"For a first blind date, someone I can connect with"
Before you go on a date with me you should know:
"Lets keep it real and be honest and be ourselves."
Sounds like Ogged!
But when something I don't think she wants to hear about or is too emo seems to be the honest answer to a question of hers, what do I do? Do I just not answer? Be vague?
Be honest about being honest: 'Well, to be honest, it's kind of {dull, personal, melodramatic, silly} so I'll tell you if you really want to know but I want to say first that it's {a thing of the past, not representative of day-to-day life, something I find embarrassing these days, something you said you really wanted to know}.
In other words, tell the whole truth.
And gods yes, go to the talk.
'Well, to be honest, it's kind of {dull, personal, melodramatic, silly} so I'll tell you if you really want to know
this is terrible advice, this will only make you sound weak
say, "I live in the NOW, babe, who cares?" and rev the engine of your harley
women respect that sort of thing
I'm not quite sure how long it took for me to figure out who "Boris Gudunov" was, but it was some unit of time less than a second? A femtosecond? However long it takes for a single neuron to fire, I think.
"Der Eiserner Kanzler", on the other hand, I wouldn't have guessed.
However long it takes for a single neuron to fire, I think.
Perhaps however long it takes to mouseover the name field?
No, I guessed, and then moused over to check the answer. I guessed right, because I am Enlightened.
"Der Eiserner Kanzler", on the other hand, I wouldn't have guessed.
Der Einerne Kanzler was well after the Enlightenment, anyway, so you're off the hook.
"Der Eiserner Kanzler", on the other hand, I wouldn't have guessed.
Der Eiserne Kanzler was well after the Enlightenment, anyway, so you're off the hook.
761: nobody will read this any more, but something about that woman sounds really promising. She sounds open and thoughtful and supportive. Don't get distracted or lost in your own internal recordings, just relax and be present and give her a try.
