Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Those that follow me over at All Consuming know that I use the service to catalog some of the media I partake in. It will also show up in my shared items feed when I remember to note that I've watched a movie or read a book. I'm currently reading two books, one sent to me for free by its author and another lent to me by my girlfriend. The first is Dumbocracy: Adventures with the Loony Left, the Rabid Right, and other American Idiots by Marty Beckerman and the second is Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach.

Beckerman, you'll remember, is the author of Generation S.L.U.T., a fictional novel of teenagers and sex in middle America, read at a time when sex wasn't a part of my life. Having three years of experience, now, I know a little bit about how complicated that can make life, yet in the book love did not inform many of the decisions and actions taken by the characters. In his non-fictional account of spending time with extreme liberal and extreme conservative forces in the United States, it's clear a chapter or two in that he exposes discrepancies between what those forces propose and the methods they use to enact what they propose. Based on a little bit of interaction with both Beckerman himself and reading interviews and his other writings, he projects a high intensity that calls into question his belief that he speaks for the political centre. This, keeping in mind, after only having read a tiny portion of the book so far.

Radical Acceptance, on the other hand, picks up for me where Buddhism Plain & Simple by Steve Hagen leaves off. In Hagen's book, we get a sense of what Buddhism is, where Tara Brach relates Buddhism to our daily, psychological life. Karen, who lent me the book, recognized I was struggling with the way I was dealing with some strong emotions in the last few months during this, the current episode of my life which people close to me are familiar with. While Dr. Brach's prescription—such as it is prescription—has much for me to in turn struggle with in understanding, putting some of them into practice, particularly the acknowledging and naming of emotions when they are particularly strong, has improved my mental state over its previous state. Some concepts and approaches to explaining them fall short of my full grasping, as I resonate with some of it and outright reject—more like fail to let myself grasp—other parts. More full sentence than two-word phrase, "nothing endures", from Hagen's book, resonated so much with me when I read it that it became a tagline for this website. While the brain fully understands it, the heart needs some convincing. It's with Radical Acceptance, having read half-through, that I've found ways to deal with some of the changes up until the 30th year of existing on this planet that I refused to believe are could happen in my life.

Ariel Levy: “With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than anti-pornography feminism. In the late seventies, when a prominent faction of the women's-liberation movement—including [Susan] Brownmiller, [Andrea] Dworkin, Audre Lorde, Robin Morgan, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Steinem—turned their attention to fighting pornography, porn was still something marginalized, as opposed to what it is now: a source of inspiration for all of popular culture. (See Jenna Jameson, almost any reality-television show, Brazilian bikini waxes, and go from there.)”

Levy argues that the anti-pornography movement and its failure “divided, some would say destroyed, the women’s movement”.

The article is about Andrea Dworkin, anti-pornography activist and, a woman that Marty Beckerman regrets not being able to “masturbate all over the wrinkled/twisted face of her rotting corpse before dancing upon her freshly dug grave and singing 'Joy to the World'.”

Some commentary on the article at Noli Irritare Leones and One Good Thing.

Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, interviewed by Marty Beckerman: “we’re not robots, because if we were robots, we would do everything that we’ve ever read or seen in a movie. In that case, nobody would be alive. That impulse to assume people are robots is factually ridiculous. I don’t see it. I think that pop culture and books have an impact for sure, because sometimes people dress like a movie star or whatever, or talk like that person or quote certain lines from that person. However, the severity of the reaction that people think occurs, I just don’t see. When it comes to the Left and the Right, extremism of any nature for any reason leads to these things. It could be for moralistic reasons, or devout Christian reasons, or devout feminist reasons, or devout anything. No matter who they are, I just wish that people were not so severe.”

Marty Beckerman, author of Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-up Session with Today's Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace, has written an article on the 2004 United States Presidential election and it would be an understatement to say that he dislikes both candidates:

George W. Bush: Fuck you. You are an insane Jesus Freak, and I'd rather have a million Catholic priests in a million little league locker rooms than you as my president. You believe God literally tells you what to do, and this is how you decide your foreign policy. You confessed to the former Palestinian prime minister that Jesus told you to invade Iraq. You don't know jack shit about anything. You hate the Constitution, you're no better than the Taliban, you spent your life doing coke and drinking until your wife finally threatened to pack her bags, so you chose pussy over coke and booze at the reckless young age of forty. (How noble.)

Beckerman solidifies his position as the voice of Twentysomething America in the sentence that follows the above quote.

Later, about John Kerry: “You voted against Gulf War I, a war that you praised in your debates with Bush, while you voted for Gulf War II, which you've said is "the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time." You keep saying, "I defended this country as a young man, and I will defend it as president of the United States," but after your four-month tour of Vietnam, you claimed that you (and your fellow soldiers) committed atrocities to advance imperialism. So how the fuck did you defend America (unless you were defending it from Richard Nixon)? You have no consistent positions on anything. You are a man without a soul, just as Bush is a man without a mind.”

Michael Hastings: “When [Bill] O'Reilly gets to talking dirty like this on the air, it's usually in the name of protecting America's youth from "corrupting influences." He says he wants to make sure American parents know how to defend against smut. Yet the topic of porn is a regular tease for his 8 p.m. audience—and kids don't go to bed that early, Bill. By my count, O'Reilly has vastly out-porned the hardly prudish Keith Olbermann and easily beats out Paula Zahn. As the folks over at Adult Video News Online, a porn industry site, astutely noted last year, "He sells sex, even as he condemns it."”

Don't believe him? Jim Gilliam, co-producer of Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, has video evidence (with a brief appearance by Marty Beckerman).

Dave Pollard: “no where in school sex education programs are students told that all healthy sexual activity is fun. This seems to me an absurd, Victorian omission. This is an important message. It's a fact, not a moral judgement. Not only would this message make it easier to teach the subject, it would go a long way to erasing many of the stigmas and guilt feelings that impede healthy sexual development.”

This reminds me of something I wrote in university back in 2000—before I knew what a weblog was—that may potentially disqualify me from holding any high-level elected office. I'll quote a bit of it here: "sex is treated by our education system as sterile. It focuses on where the different reproductive organs are, how a baby is created and where the pieces, so to speak, fit. Let's not forget the Learning Channel episodes on how sex works. Interesting enough, but not once in high school did we learn how to get laid. We are supposed to figure that out by ourselves." Dave Pollard is saying something similar, but he is more interested in teaching that sex is a pleasurable, exciting and as he also emphasizes, fun.

Jeremy Lott: “MTV Books published Marty Beckerman's raunchy anti-sex book Generation S.L.U.T. (when I interviewed him for a story that never quite came together, Beckerman rejected that characterization, though I doubt people who read the book will disagree with me) ”

I've read the book, and is against the type of sex that is anonymous and unfulfilling—or "cheap and tawdry" to use a phrase that those who follow current events would recognize—as well of the type of sex that happens around page 163 or so. (It was Beckerman himself who "warned" me about that part when I emailed him to let him know I had started reading it.) It does not comment much on lazy, easy, fun sex with many different, enthusiastic partners, so to claim that it is anti-sex is only half true. It is anti-unhealthy-sex, and as Pollard notes, finding the balance is hard, but responding to the negative so extremely, by teaching what sex is and then telling kids not to do it, just reinforces the negative. Outlaw something fun and only the outlaws will have fun.

crazyjackie after being told by her father to investigate online dating, but before calling bullshit on Marty Beckerman: “crimeny, father, i'm not nearing 40 and desperate for marriage. i'm just looking for a good kisser who'll tell me i'm pretty before i find a better kisser with some smoother lines.”

Benoit Denizet Lewis: “It's not that teenagers have given up on love altogether. Most of the high-school students I spent time with said they expected to meet the right person, fall in love and marry -- eventually. It's just that high school, many insist, isn't the place to worry about that. High school is about keeping your options open. Relationships are about closing them. As these teenagers see it, marriage and monogamy will seamlessly replace their youthful hookup careers sometime in their mid- to late 20's -- or, as one high-school boy from Rhode Island told me online, when ''we turn 30 and no one hot wants us anymore.''”

Near the end of the article, more adults telling teenagers not to have sex.

See also:

• Generation S.L.U.T. by Marty Beckerman
• Defining "Having Sex"
• ...With Privileges?

Glenn Parton writes a daring essay called Love Politics: A Case Against Monogamy which Dave Pollard accurately says echoes the radical and remarkable ideas of James W. Prescott's ideas on the origins of violence. Parton argues that the origin of our environmental crises as well as political crises orginate not in Western Christianity as Lynn White suggests, nor does it originate in totalitarian agricutlure as Jared Diamond suggests, but in the first man's decision to "own" a woman.

First the weaknesses of the essay, and they are debilitating ones. The last sentence of first paragraph (“That Americans do not see the obvious truth is amply demonstrated by the popularity of George W. Bush.”) effectively dates the article, making it a 2004 polemic rather than a timeless critique. This error—and it is my intention not to defend George W. Bush or Americans by supporting the man and people being criticized but rather to dismiss the device of criticizing a contemporary (and temporary) figure to make a larger point—is not the most eggregious, however. If Parton's intention was to engage the people's whose behaviour he wants to change, he could not have picked a worse way to write the following paragraph:

Education is not the primary path for social change because the biggest obstacle we moderns face is not widespread ignorance, but manufactured stupidity, the arresting and distortion of human nature by culture. Americans are arguably the stupidest people on earth, informed and entertained by the infantile and adolescent nonsense of TV and Hollywood. We have forgotten what our tribal ancestors knew, and not (yet?) broken through to high/integral reason that surpasses but also preserves old knowledge. Our knowledge is more and more manipulation of nature and each other, in terms of which we are the very best, the number one country in the world.

Instead of making an excellent point about so-called "education" that treats teaches the same information in the same way over and over, which he does in the first sentence, Parton loses everything he could have gained from pursuing a nuanced argument and calls the people he is trying to convert to his point of view idiots. And far be it from Parton to use the media of TV and Hollywood to his benefit: instead of using the "installed base" of either media to spread his message, he not merely dismisses them entirely but ridicules those who "use" the media.

A third weakness is the use of mysticism, exemplified in the following sentence: “Monogamous couples are, for the most part, sexually asleep, not alive, not sensitive, to the secret stimuli of Gaia and the dance of the cosmos.” "Secret stimuli"? "Gaia"? "Dance of the cosmos"? Please. Fourth, Parton cites at length from Frederick Engels. Since Engels is strongly associated in the American mind with communism, and add that to the multiple negative references to private property and the over-use of the word "social" (an adjective that often reverses the meaning of the noun following it), the result is an rather large obstacle for Parton—largely of his own construction&mdsah;to overcome. If all that wasn't bad enough, I fully expected Parton to cite science fiction writer Robert Heinlein so that I could nod in knowing agreement of some of the ideas Heinlein had about marriage and sexuality. Instead, mysticism, partisanship, and anti-Americanism.

The essay make strong points in other areas, as the ideas of monogamy as boring and as encouraging isolation and lonliness are compelling. Parton directs significant effort towards focussing on the appropriateness of loving multiple people. This may not be as radical an idea as either Parton or Parton's readers are led to believe: we all love our friends, but the stigma is in the declaration of that love, not in its actions—which include but are not limited to opening up about one's secrets and speaking passionatly about what you believe in. The ultimate expression of love—or so we are led to believe from the diffusion agents of Western culture—is sex, but Parton here is arguing that sex is a natural expression of both our love and attraction to the people around us. An excellent recent discussion about sexually-attractive friends has led me to reconsider how I appreciate the company of my sexually-attractive friends and the appropriateness of the one-time sexual advance as well as the appropriateness of mutual pity sex.

Parton unfortunately weakens what should be an easy sell to many people. Teenagers, for one, have already bought into the idea that one or no sexual partner is something to be avoided. The problem is not that monogamy is increasingly (but not fully) discredited among teens, but rather the anonymous nature of hook-ups and the nature of sexual education, which preaches either safety or abstinence, but not how to do it right or how to get it in the first place. Parton fails to cover this generation which, as Marty Beckerman is fond of noting, is our future. Parton, in short, makes an interesting argument worth considering seriously. He just does it badly.

al3x, in reviewing Generation S.L.U.T. by Marty Beckerman, covers most of the points I could cover in any review of the book. The only parts I didn't find believable were the TV interview Trevor did while on his book tour, nor did I believe the conversation that happened during his encounter with Paul McCartney—then again, most of the people we think of as friendly because of their image on TV are assholes in real life anyway.

From al3x's review: “It's not a brilliant work of fiction, nor even a brilliant hybrid story-plus-essay collection-plus-collected statistics-plus-plus. It is, however, a brilliant vehicle for a very important idea: that something is seriously wrong with Generation Y, and that there are some readily identifiable causes for this. What S.L.U.T. doesn't offer, somewhat to my chagrin, is solutions. One can infer, of course, that some decency and moderation is well in order. But Beckerman suggests through the story's end that this generation's chance for redemption was (figuratively) yesterday, and we didn't take the opportunity. What's more upsetting than a lack of solutions is that he may well be right.”

What struck me while reading the book is that the characters other than Trevor were very believable. I remember bits and pieces of what it was like to be a teenager, and Max is the character I most identify with, except for the fact that Max got to sleep with the high school slut. Max is a shy kid who likes the Beatles and meets Julia, a girl who shares his prediliction for intellectuality—except for the fact that she's smarter than him—then falls in love with her. (Yep, I fell in love with a girl like Julia too.) I never got to have sex with the high school slut—okay, a high school slut, but she ended up being voted valedictorian—although her friend told me to bring a condom on the date that never happened, because she was "sick" that night. (Best I got from her was a slow-dance on the grad cruise, and then a high-five afterwards from my "Julia".) Then there was also the girl who threw herself at me, but I said something stupid like "I have to do homework tonight" because her hockey-player boyfriend was bigger than me. My best male friend in high school was even a Brett: the guy was friendly around me—we were always the best 2-on-2 team during lunchtime pickup basketball because we always had a sense of what the other was going to do—but away from me he was a king asshole and ended up getting his girlfriend pregnant and never once mentioned it to me. We went our separate ways after a year or so of college, and the decision to do so wasn't explicit, but I'm sure the feeling was mutual. Just like the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know, the best fictional characters are the ones that we already identify with.

I've seen a few documentaries on high school life since leaving high school myself (I turn 26 in the summer), one of which is the excellent Go Tigers! about a high school football team and the pressures placed on teens to succeed. Michael Lewis recently wrote an excellent article on how his high school baseball coach is doing with the current team, and describes how parents are making life for their teenage boys too comfortable for them to grow up into real men. It's a world I no longer know and never really knew for that matter, and besides, Generation S.L.U.T. isn't even a book aimed at me, nor, evidently, is it aimed at parents of teenagers. It's evidently meant to create a dialogue amongst teens—as well as help pay Beckerman's bills—but as al3x mentions, if offers problems but no solutions. The only way I can this as having an effect on teens is that two teens will find out that they've both read the book and say things like "yeah, I did that once"—a teammate from my high school basketball team once said to me that he had slept with the "slut" I had tried to get a date with, and the shocking part was how he said it matter-of-factly— or "wasn't that party last night fucked up?" punctuated, as the book is, with moments of uncomfortable silence. Beckerman is right in saying that teens don't need to be lectured by adults or, even worse, high school counselors about any lack of morality. It's going to be an intra-generational conversation rather than an inter-generational one. A suburban Vancouver high school recently held a forum led by the senior class who were worried about the younger students' sexual behaviours, and privately I complained to a friend that it was probably the uncool kids telling the cool kids to stop not fucking the uncool kids. But it's a step forward when teens not only decide amongst themselves that there are problems that need to be addressed, but decide amongst themselves what the possible solutions are. Written by a college student, Generation S.L.U.T. may not have had the same effect as if it were written by a high school student, but the fact that Beckerman has been writing since his teens is evidence enough for me to suggest that there are bright lights among a generation only marketing executives seem to understand.

Finished reading Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-up Session with Today's Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace by Marty Beckerman.