Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Dating & Relationships

  • Scary Information – Should I be posting this?

    Some psychologists have figured out that women have more orgasms with wealthier men.

    For female readers of this blog, my net worth at the moment is $1.4 billion.

    I wonder: does sexual excitability result from the perception that a male partner is wealthy or  from the prolonged  enjoyment of an affluent lifestyle?

    An affluent person might be in a  better position to appreciate metropolitan opera, but that does not make this person more musical, nor does it make a poor person incapable  of singing an aria from  La Traviata.

    I certainly will not begrudge a woman’s efforts to find the most sexually compatible partner.  But identifying this biological trigger seems to explain why so many people prize material wealth for its own sake and why those who don’t do this are generally ignored.

    2012 Postscript When I wrote this piece my net worth was peanuts; I was seriously underemployed and swimming in poverty. (Things are much better now).  I just wanted to point out that a blogger may have deeper motives for blogging about something than it may seem.  Sometimes abject poverty provides a good perspective for writing about certain things and pointing out  the inequities of the world. The freedom to speak about these things on this blog arises from the certainty that whatever I write will generally be overlooked. And if my future wife is reading this, the wealthy man you know and the poor man who is blogging here are one and the same….

  • Martha Nussbaum: Intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation

    Here’s a great mp3 by Martha Nussbaum on desire, passions and Hellenistic philosophy.  An excerpt from the transcript (same link):

    Interviewer: There’s an Epicurean doctrine regarding death which finds perhaps its fullest exposition in Latin in the work of Lucretius. It goes like this, ‘It is irrational to fear that which we will not experience, death being non-existent, cannot in the nature of things be experienced, therefore it is irrational to fear death.’ I have to ask, is this really therapeutic? Are we really meant to be comforted by this?

    Martha Nussbaum: You know, the first thing that Lucretius felt he had to do before he could comfort you, is to prove that there’s no afterlife. So before we get to the argument you’re talking about, there’s a whole long series of proofs of the mortality of the soul, because he thought that what most people are afraid of is being tormented in the afterlife. And so then once we get rid of the afterlife, then we still have people thinking that they fear death, and he thinks he can convince them that this fear is based on an irrational imagining that you are surviving yourself. So he thinks you’re standing there in your mind, watching the dead you and thinking ‘Oh, poor dead you, you’re missing all the good things of life.’ And so he thinks that if you can point out to the person it’s quite irrational, there’s no spectators gonna be there, there’s just nothing at all, then that will take away the fear.

    At that time, people were just as divided as they are now and I’ve had a terrific argument about that recently in our law school at the University of Chicago, because I had a new paper on that topic. And you know, you can see that some people find this argument very appealing. If there’s nothing at all, well then it would be quite irrational to think that that’s a bad that’s happened to you. But because there’s no you there for whom something bad could happen.

    Other people think differently and at the time people thought differently and at the time, people thought differently. Plutarch wrote a whole treatise talking about how bad this argument was. And I think to me, the way of attacking the argument has to be to think about what makes life worthwhile, and I think what makes life worthwhile are activities that have a structure, that persist through time, that go on into the future. And what death does is, it cuts off those activities and so it changes their shape so to speak, it’s like making them empty and vain because they never reach a completion, and it’s for that reason that even though there’s no you, it changes what you were in your life, if you see what I mean.

    That is, suppose you’re in the middle of trying to build some elaborate structure that you attack great importance to you, and then put all your energy into that and put your time into that, you get your friends to help you, and in the middle of that before your thing is complete, you die, well then it’s not just the time after death that’s the bad thing, it’s what it’s done to the life, it cuts it off in the middle. Now I think what that shows is not that every death is bad, but that death would be bad whenever it does that, whenever it cuts off activities that are in the middle and people are still attaching value to their completion.

    Here’s a terrific book review essay Nussbaum wrote about a book on romantic love and sexual politics. (The book being reviewed was Vindication of Love:
    Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century By Cristina Nehring). Let me say that this is one of the most thoughtful (yet devastating )  reviews of a nonfiction title I have ever read. Here’s the meat of her philosophical disagreement (pardon the length):

    But, says Nehring, love thrives on inequality. Here, of course, we have the two-theses problem. The first says, wisely, that real love should be prepared to overcome inequalities of power, class, and station. (That is the plot of more or less every Victorian novel.) The second says, foolishly, that real love requires inequality of power, class, and station. So confused is Nehring at this point that she interprets Pride and Prejudice as confirmation of her second thesis rather than her first: it shows, she says, that people always eroticize class difference and would never love people of similar station. What a trivialization of Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy! Their deep moral and intellectual affinity, and their strong romantic attraction, gradually manage to surmount the obstacles imposed by rigid social norms and the internal dispositions (prejudice and pride) that they engender. It is true that there would be no novel without the distance: after all, there has to be a plot. It seems obviously untrue, however, that there would be no love without the distance. Far from social distance being eroticized, it is, until late in the novel, a source of erotic blindness. At this point Nehring’s argument loses all clarity, as, seeking confirmation for her anti-feminist thesis, she begins to treat any qualitative difference at all as “inequality”: the very fact of heterosexuality, she now says, shows that sexual desire thrives on inequality.

    But does passion even require qualitative difference? Here Nehring appears to endorse a view of sexual attraction that Roger Scruton popularized some time ago in his book Sexual Desire. Really valuable sexual passion, Scruton said, requires qualitative differences between the parties, because sexual love, when valuable, involves a kind of risky exploration of strange terrain, and we should think less well of those who stick to the familiar. Scruton could not advance this claim as a descriptive thesis about sexual choices, for nothing is more obvious than that people tend to choose people close to themselves in all sorts of ways–religion, class, education. But he did put it forward as a normative claim, and he used it to argue that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality, because it involves greater adventure and risk. Something like this is probably what Nehring has in mind, although she has no disdain for same-sex passion.

    What should we think of this? Do people who choose qualitatively similar partners really lack courage? The most obvious problem with Scruton’s thesis was that it was capriciously and inconstantly applied: to sexual orientation, but not to romances between adults and children, between Protestants and Catholics, between the virtuous and the immoral. A more subtle problem with his argument is that it is not even clear how it could be assessed: for, as the philosopher Nelson Goodman showed in his great essay “Seven Strictures on Similarity,” the concept of similarity is so slippery that it has basically no content. Any two things are similar and dissimilar to one another in manifold respects.

    But the real problem with Scruton–and Nehring, who speaks, Scruton-like, of the “enigmatic Other”–is that they both mislocate erotic risk. What is risky is not getting in touch with some trait that is dissimilar to some trait of one’s own. It is the whole idea of becoming vulnerable to an inner life that one cannot see and can never control. It is not qualitative difference, but the sheer separateness of the other person, the idea of an independent source of vision and will, that makes real love an adventure in generosity–or, if one is like Proust’s narrator, a source of mad jealousy and destructive projects of domination and control. And this has nothing at all to do with class difference, or gender difference, or even temperamental difference. It has to do only with the fact of human individuation–that minds and bodies never merge, that intimacy is not a fusion but a conversation.

    There is a grain of truth in Nehring’s thesis about personal qualities: it is at least plausible to maintain that loving someone who is complicated, opaque, and in some respects concealed can be of particular interest or value. At any rate, we often think less well of people who are willing to love only people who are altogether obvious and lacking in complexity. Rightly or wrongly, we think that such lovers are refusing some challenge, or lacking in curiosity. And yet an erotic attraction to psychological complexity does not require pursuing class difference, career difference, power difference, or some other obvious kind of difference. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how one could ever pursue a relationship with persons as complicated as some of the artists and writers adduced by Nehring without a context of shared activities, commitments, or aspirations that would generate the kind of friendship and openness that make insight into another person’s complexities possible. The way she tells the stories of those complicated artists and writers, they understood this well.

    I plan to read both Nehring’s book as well as Nussbaum’s book on Hellenistic philosophy and desire. (see a thorough review of it here by John T. Kirby). I definitely will report back.

    As an aside, let me say that Nussbaum’s tone throughout the essay is a tad condescending but still respectful. She seems to be criticizing the author’s naiveté rather than the ideas themselves (as though Nussbaum herself had considered most of those ideas already, but had discarded them.

    That said, I have to admit that Nussbaum’s book has sparked my interest in the two thinkers she criticizes.  I’d heard of Roger Scruton before, and his Sexual desire: a philosophical investigation sounds provocative at the very least. So do his other books: Beauty, Death-Devoted Heart, etc.  (Here’s a website of his published essays. He’s a resident scholar for AEI and has published lots of articles on various online journals and mp3 lectures). 

    I like the idea that thinkers like Scruton and Nussbaum are able to write so generally. Of course, they rest at comfortable academic positions, and that must certainly help. But even tenured professors tend to write about their niche without addressing the world at large. I guess philosophers by definition need to be relevant and comprehensible (and so do writers).  It always is interesting when an academic type tries his hand at a book in a totally different field. With a complex subject like climate change, a generalist approach can render your arguments laughable, but in other fields. the cross-pollination is fruitful. What if a priest wrote a treatise on prestidigitation? Or a surgeon wrote a book about classical dance? Or a comedian wrote about Civil War slave owners?  The outsider can uncover assumptions which were never questioned by those in the field. I think I shall write a book about musicology.

  • Male Poaching, Psychology of Breakups and Shoe-Buying

    Melissa Burkley on male poaching: (PDF)

    What were the main results?

    Single women were more interested in the man when he was described as attached (90% interested) than when he was described as single (59%). Men showed no difference in interest between a single and attached woman.

    Why are single women more interested in men who are attached?

    There are probably several reasons why single women engage in mate poaching. The current study did not address this, but some possible reasons include: A taken man may be seen as more of a challenge, Women may be socialized to compete with other women for men’s attentions and this chase for a taken man’s attention is thrilling, they may see themselves as “saving” the man from an unhappy relationship, taken men have already proven they have resources and are willing to commit. For Jessica Parker’s dissertation, she is examining if self-esteem is a motive for mate poaching, specifically among women who base their self-esteem on their appearance. If this is the case, women may use mate poaching as an attempt to protect and restore self-esteem. A woman who successfully lures a man away from his partner may use this “success” to convince herself that she is better than his current partner and it may be that these feelings of superiority provide a boost to her self-esteem.

    David Buss has published a lot of research about mate selection and evolutionary biology.

    David Buss concludes that this poaching effect differs markedly between men and women (PDF):

    Women rated men more desirable when shown surrounded by women than when shown alone or with other men (a desirability enhancement effect). In sharp contrast, men rated women less desirable when shown surrounded by men than when shown alone or with women (a desirability diminution effect). Study 2 (N = 627) demonstrated similar sexually divergent effects for estimates of the desirability of same-sex competitors. …men will judge their same-sex rivals as being more desirable to women when depicted with other women and (b) women will judge their same-sex rivals as being less desirable to men when depicted with other men.

    This effect suggests that sexual promiscuity may in fact increase a man’s desirability in a woman’s eyes.

    In a study that tries to explain how women compromise on qualities in a mate, Buss lists some “desirability qualities” and then ponders why intelligence isn’t seen as one such quality:

    We propose that women should value at least four clusters of characteristics in a long-term mate: (1) good genes indicators (Buss and Schmitt, 1993), (2) good resource acquisition indicators (Buss, 1989; Symons, 1979), (3) good parenting indicators (Buss, 1991), and (4) good partner indicators. These clusters may or may not covary—an empirical issue yet to be determined. A man good at acquiring resources that can be channeled to a woman and her children, for example, may or may not be a good dad or a good partner. On the other hand, it is possible that these clusters covary.

    …

    One other puzzle remains, centering on the trait of intelligence. Intelligence has been hypothesized to be one of the cardinal indicators of good genes (Gangestad et al., 2007; Miller, 2000). The current study, however, did not find that attractive women express a stronger preference than less attractive women for intelligence in a mate. Furthermore, Gangestad et al. (2007) failed to find the hypothesized female shift in valuing intelligence more around ovulation. Although Gangestad and his colleagues state that readers should not reject intelligence as a good-genes indicator based on their single study, the current study may raise an additional doubt or add to the puzzle. If intelligence is indeed a powerful indicator of good genes, as it should be on theoretical and empirical grounds, then attractive women should value it more according to the hypothesis articulated in the current article (which they do not) and women should value it more around ovulation (especially in short-term mates) according to the trade-off model (which they do not).Future research could profitably be directed to resolving puzzle of why women’s preferences for intelligence do not shift in the predicted directions according to a woman’s ovulation status or mate value.

    Buss points out why women are attracted to high testosterone men (PDF)

    And attractive and feminine women show stronger preferences for masculinized male voices than do less attractive and less feminine women (Little, et al., 2001; Feinberg, et al., 2006). The studies on masculinity are based on the premise that the trait of masculinity is a good-genes health indicator. The rationale is that testosterone, which produces masculine features, compromises the immune system. Consequently, during adolescence when facial features and voice take their adult form, only those males who are extremely healthy can “afford” to produce high levels of testosterone.

    David Buss on the various reasons women have sex:

    Researchers discovered 28 tactics women use to derogate sexual competitors, from pointing out that her rival’s thighs are heavy to telling others that the rival has a sexually transmitted disease.  Women’s sexual strategies include at least 19 tactics of mate retention, ranging from vigilance to violence, and 29 tactics of ridding themselves of unwanted mates, including having sex as a way to say good-bye.  Some women use sexual infidelity as a means of getting benefits from two or more men.  Others use it as a means of exiting one relationship in order to enter another.  When a woman wants a man who is already in a relationship, she can use at least 19 tactics of mate poaching to lure him away, from befriending both members of the couple in order to disarm her unsuspecting rival to insidiously sowing seeds of doubt about her rival’s fidelity or level of desirability.

    From a snide comment on a game/evolutionary biology blog (warning: adult language):

    the cool thing about scientists is how they manage to find that, say, 89% of women have sex outside marriage and are totally incapable of concluding that also applies to the women around them in the labs.

    Finally, a study about the costs and coping strategies involved with breakups by Carin Perilloux and David M. Buss. (PDF) Some conclusions: rejectees experience more sadness than the rejectors (duh!), women rejectees experience more negative consequences than men rejectees, and that women are more likely than men to cope with post-breakup blues by going shopping (aka the “Carrie Bradshaw shoe-buying binge.”). Also, there was no statistical differences between genders about who did more stalking (“this may be attributable to the small proportion of participants who had actually experienced stalking”).

    Based on my admittedly limited personal experiences, I have to say that women are more inclined to label any unwanted male interest as stalking. (I once was labeled as a stalker on a discussion board for females merely because I had the temerity to email someone I was having a rather heated argument with). Ooh, email! I feel so violated!

    Also, I question the use of the word “breakup.” What exactly is a breakup? In many cases, a relationship doesn’t end because of a quarrel. It ends between one person wants the status quo to advance to more commitment, while the other person refuses. Alternatively, one person accepts a job in another city and ends up choosing the job rather than the boyfriend or girlfriend. In my cases, there is no breakup, merely abandonment.

    I have three  personal beliefs (which I really cannot verify).

    First, I believe that when breakups do occur, most of the time,  it is the women who initiates them.  Even though ultimately the male’s behavior or attitude may be the cause of the breakup, the woman is forced to take action in response. Men, on the other hand, are lazy bastards who are less conflict-oriented than the stereotypes indicate.  One explanation for this behavior is that men are more likely to be considered wrong when doing the breakup. Nick Fielding comments:

    One of the hardest positions a man can be in is when he’s involved in a relationship that is about to end. Whether he’s dissatisfied with his woman or is about to get blindsided with bad news, there is little doubt he’s stuck. Why? Because, for some reason, our society seems to dictate that no matter what happens, the man can never walk away smelling like roses. If she ends the relationship, it’s because he’s a jerk, and if he ends it, it’s because he’s a jerk. Talk about being wedged between a rock and a hard place…

    Second, often people label the partner as having “cheated” when in fact the relationship was already over to begin with (and the person never caught the signal from the one who did the “cheating”). I have met so many women who complain about the cheating boyfriend, and after talking to them further about the cheating boyfriend,  I start to wonder why the complaining women ever believed the relationship still existed in the first place.

    Third, even though I’ve seen examples on both sides, women are more likely to ignore the ex (regardless of whether the woman was the rejector or rejectee).  Men are much more civil than woman towards ex’es. Women are much happier with the idea of never hearing from an ex again. (Men, on the other hand, are more charitable about keeping in touch). Partly, this may stem from women’s fear of encouraging stalking behavior (although genuine stalking happens a lot less frequently than people think).  Men seem to have less to fear (emotionally or physically) from the idea of staying in touch with an ex; because they feel more in “control,” they feel they can handle it.

    I realize that these personal beliefs are shaped by my own experiences. Perhaps a woman with a different romantic past or an older person or younger person may reach totally different conclusions. Finally, I have to wonder how much sexual incompatibility plays a part in breakups (and by “breakups,” I really mean divorces. This topic isn’t really addressed in these studies, but it would be interesting to pursue (because longterm sexual compatibility becomes a more important problem for a couple married for over a decade). Maybe the “breakup” concept is too tied to adolescent relationships than dissolution of marriage itself.

    ….

    (I am providing complete citations in case the links stop working):

    Male Poaching, July 2009 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

    Buss, D.M., & Shackelford, T.K. (2008). Attractive women want it all: Good genes, economic investment, parenting proclivities, and emotional commitment. Evolutionary Psychology, 6, 134-146.

    Buss, D.M., & Shackelford, T.K. (2008). Attractive women want it all: Good genes, economic investment, parenting proclivities, and emotional commitment. Evolutionary Psychology, 6, 134-146.

    Perilloux, C. & Buss, D. M. (2008). Breaking up Romantic Relationships: Costs Experienced and Coping Strategies Deployed. Evolutionary Psychology, 6, 164-181.

  • Depressing Marriage, Depressing Life

    Amanda Fortini on the perils of realizing romantic love in marriage:

    As with most Americans, my own ideas about love were formed not only by books — “Jane Eyre” and “Pride and Prejudice,” “Emma” and “Wuthering Heights,” yes, as well as the incestuous “Flowers in the Attic” series, “The Thorn Birds,” and the Andrew Greeley books with their fornicating priests — but by soap operas and romantic comedies: the tempestuous on-again-off-again affair of Bo and Hope on “Days of Our Lives,” the jaunty repartee of “When Harry Met Sally.” “Almost everything in modern society militates against our falling in love hard or long. It militates against love as risk, love as sacrifice, love as heroism,” writes Nehring. This is not entirely true. Even if the self-help establishment promotes romance as an “organized adult activity with safety rails on the left and right, rubber ceilings, no-skid floors, and a clear, clean destination: marriage” — and I’m not sure it does — tension exists between the domesticated romance of relationship manuals and the many depictions of outlaw love in the culture around us.

    As a result, most people long to experience love, especially love of the wildest, most complicated sort. And I would venture to guess that many have — romance born of mischief, with a co-worker, perhaps, or a professor or student; obsessive love characterized by vigilant waiting for calls and e-mails, or a humiliating inability to stop calling even after the relationship is broken. Most of us have not consciously or categorically banished passionate love from our lives, we just can’t seem to make it fit. Indeed, if being in love is such a stimulating and gratifying state — and it is, of course — why would we do without it unless, in some sense, we had to? One of the reasons that we have resigned ourselves to a certain dearth of passion may be that we can’t seem to afford it economically or temporally. Here is Cathi Hanauer, editor of the bestselling anthology “The Bitch in the House,” describing her typical day: “nursing a baby at the computer while trying to make a deadline; sprinting home from my daughter’s nursery school, both kids in tow, to return phone calls; handing the children off to Dan [her husband], the instant he walked in at night so I could rush off to a coffee shop to get my work done.” And here is Loh, on her inability to cram romance into her life: “Which is to say I can work at a career and child care and joint homeownership and even platonic male-female friendship. However, in this cluttered forest of my 40s, what I cannot authentically reconjure is the ancient dream of brides, even with the Oprah fluffery of weekly ‘date nights,’ when gauzy candlelight obscures the messy house, child talk is nixed, and sexy lingerie is donned.”

    When the bureaucratic nightmare that is everyday life has become so intrusive, when both parents work out of the home, the circumstances that allow for intimacy and passion are imperiled. (Sandra Tsing-Loh tells us that her musician-husband traveled 20 weeks a year.) When are we to form deep connections? How and where is this hot sex supposed to happen? You can’t stay up all night when you have to wake up and go to work the next day; no one is going to grant you a leave of absence for passion. (In an interview with the Telegraph, Arianna Huffingon once discussed sleep deprivation as a negative byproduct of love affairs. “So I’ve gotten to be a good breaker-upper,” said Huffington.) We have, you might say, been forced to adapt to a world that is hostile to romance, our lives full of ever-clamoring responsibilities: bills to pay, BlackBerrys to monitor, e-mails to answer. Talk to almost any therapist, and he or she will tell you that the primary reason people don’t have sex is that they’re too tired, or have built up a little mountain of resentments over the difficulty of running a household together. If you want an intense, consuming passion, you’re probably not going to be as productive…

    Linked to from the above article, a great article by Don Gillmor about the evolution of the Harlequin romance genre:

    It is the vast, barren landscape between these two fantasies that has given rise to separate empires: romance for women and pornography for men. That there is so little intersection between the two helps explain why each has grown into a multibillion-dollar industry. Male fantasies remain inherently adolescent (the paper boy growing into a plumber, the housewife more desperate and inventive), but the underlying premise remains wild sex without responsibility. The Harlequin fantasy is meaningful sex that symbolizes a lasting emotional connection, and often an end to financial responsibilities. The heroine’s only real responsibility is to her man and to love itself, whereas the loveless world of porn is driven by submission and anonymity.

    Nevertheless, critics have highlighted similarities between the two worlds. In the Guardian, Julie Bindel recalled the romances of the British publisher Mills & Boon — which celebrated its centenary last year and was an early partner of Harlequin — with alarm. “In every book, there was a scene where the heroine is ‘broken in,’ both emotionally and physically, by the hero,” she wrote. “My loathing of m&b novels has nothing to do with snobbery. I could not care less if the books are trashy, formulaic, or pulp fiction…But I do care about the type of propaganda perpetuated by m&b. I would go so far as to say it is misogynistic hate speech… This is what heterosexual romantic fiction promotes — the sexual submission of women to men.”

    Whether it was technically porn or not, Bindel was saying, men came out on top. The late feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, for her part, once wrote that romance literature was “rape embellished with meaningful looks.” But if the romance genre is a form of porn, is it as psychologically enslaving? Certainly the fourteen-year-old paper boy staring glassily at the Drunken Moms website knows, in his dark, pimpled heart, that he isn’t holding the moral high ground.

    He ends with a profound question about the role of romance in our society:

    You might think the passivity of the women and the Bond-like qualities of the men would work as male fantasy. Yet they don’t. That’s likely because Harlequin narratives are driven by misunderstandings and foggy interior monologues that express, more than any other feeling, doubt. “Why did she want him so? Why? Her brain told her to walk away. To walk away and not look back. But her body whispered something else.” And all this uncertainty is wearing.

    How is it, then, that these quaint, patriarchal tropes work so well on a female audience? In 1984, Janice Radway published Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, at the time the most comprehensive study of romance novels and their readers. When she interviewed women for her book, it wasn’t the content of the novels they talked about, but the act of reading them. She argued that though the books may be meticulously unsubversive, reading them can be a subversive act. When the reader picks up a romance novel, she is spending time on herself, escaping the very thing that may be giving her her social identity. For those few hours, she is getting rid of her children, and ditching her husband for a masculine icon who loves her deeply (though he may have difficulty expressing it).

    Radway’s study was conducted twenty-five years ago, in the pseudonymous Midwestern American town of Smithton, presumably a fairly traditional society. A majority of North American women were married then, and still worked in the home. So the fantasy offered was essentially quantitative; readers were presented with a fictional husband who was richer and sexier than the one they had. But now most women work outside the home, and a smaller percentage are married. The stated target market for Harlequin Romances is someone in her forties with a college education and a career. What’s in it for her?

    It may be that as society drifts further from the norm of a happy, stable marriage, the books have more currency as fantasy. The idea of surrendering to a gravely rich man whose forearms ripple sexily every time he picks up a spatula has appeal in part because it is so far removed from actual aspirations (getting a raise, a promotion), and from the actual middle-aged men women know (paunchy, anniversary-forgetting toads for whom a handful of condoms is a year’s supply). Women can even read the books with a sense of irony, dismissing the stock characters and plots while still indulging in the emotional jolt. Harlequins succeed, in this light, because they are brilliantly forgettable one-night stands that blur, slim 178-page companions that vanish by the next day. Each morning, you wake up a virgin.

    (By the way, sorry about the long quote; I just wanted to convey the full thought here).

    Here’s an interesting commencement address  by a novelist/philosopher David Foster Wallace:

    The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

    By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

    But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

    Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

    David Foster Wallace killed himself last September at the age of 46, and the commencement speech he gave at the age of 43. I am somewhat familiar with his fiction (in fact I remember reading his first published short story in 1988 or 1989 anthologized somewhere, which he won in the Playboy fiction contest for college students).

    DFW had a wildly successful literary career, received a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1997 and had a tenured position at Pomona. These are accolades  wildly beyond my reach; in fact, so few kinds of writers  have these awards thrown in their laps. Ironically, a big break for him came in 1992 when literary editor Steve Moore got him a teaching position at Illinois State University (this was at the same time I was communicating semi-regularly with Steve Moore to do freelance book reviews–which I did for a while). By this time, the Playboy award had already gotten him his first book deal and a good agent.

    To call my reaction “professional jealousy” would be insufficient. Wallace took for granted a lot of successes that many writers struggle for years, even decades for. In this speech he talks about the boredom and routine of living, and yet the genius grant gave him substantial free  time not to have to suffer the drudgeries of full time work. I hate to use the man’s suicide act to criticize his fiction or his life, but his critiques of modern life seem unusually brutal; so all we’re supposed to do is to use our brain to entertain ourselves.

    Still, we need to separate the person’s life from the imaginary worlds of his fiction. Maybe I will judge Mr. Wallace severely, but I am perfectly willing to give his novels a try. See also D.T. Max’s New Yorker article about DWF after the suicide.

  • Wierd Dating Openers

    Pick Up Artists (PUA) have a fetish about opening lines—although the most polished usually prefer the simplest opening line –which is, “Hi.”

    (note: these two links are mildly NSFW mainly because of profanity and explicit sexual language).

    Some openers are in fact hilarious. Here are two:

    “Hi, my name is Thursday. I thought you were cute and wanted to meet you. But, before you talk to me, you should know that I have, like, no friends and an extreeeeeeeeeemly small penis.”

    …

    YOU: “Hey do you like horses?”
    GIRL: ”HUH? ummm yea i guess.”
    YOU: “Hmm, I thought so. OK check this out, when I was in the 6th grade, there was this girl who loved horses. She used to run around the playground for an hour straight at lunchtime. She’d be galloping and making horse noises. We used to call her the weird horse girl.”
    GIRL: “Yeah, so?”
    YOU: “well…you look JUST LIKE HER!”

    With these openers, I inaugurate a new blog category: Dating & Relationships. Will this madness never end?

    From the Fast Seduction Community, a FAQ about who should pay on a date: (edited slightly to remove profanity).

    The default rule (for PUAs) is to not pay for anything except yourself. “No play, no pay.” However, this rule can (and should) be superseded by whatever the circumstance entails but not to the extent that you are going out of your way to impress or supplicate to her.

    ### For newbie AFCs ###

    Not paying for chicks is SECONDARY. The main thing is to seduce them with your mental game and this  “rule” about paying is just to prevent you from doing what that that guy from the article “How not to PU” on Maniac’s site did… You DON’T pay for trips to Paris and you DON’T buy them clothes and jewelry! As for coffee, it’s too insignificant an expense to risk putting her in a bad state from which AFC newbies can’t pull her from.

    …

    ### For AFCs/RAFCs miscellaneous situations ###

    Co-workers having coffee: It is the expected that each person pay for their own drink.
    Co-workers having drinks: It is the expected that each person pay for their own drink. Or to take turns buying drinks.
    New HB + you having coffee: Play it by ear, but expect to pay. No big deal. Coffee & a snack is usually only a few dollars.
    New HB + you having drinks: Play it by ear, but expect to pay the first round. Let her pay the second, then play it by ear from there.
    First date: PUAs don’t “date” girls they aren’t already fucking.

    (FYI: AFC= Average frustrated chimp, RAFC=recovering average frustrated chimp, PUA=pick up artists. HB=hot babe. Here’s a glossary. By the way, reading the glossary can be instructive in itself).

    Speaking of paying, here’s an amusing exchange on Craig’s List between a 25 year old golddigger and her wealthy prospect (found on Snopes, probably spurious).

    Postscript about Opening Lines: A guy at work just thanked me for an opening line to give an Albanian girl. I advised him to ask, “Are you Tosk or Gheg?  (referring to the language dialect in Albania). My friend came back and told me, it worked like a charm!

    This reminds me of another first line I heard from a woman at work. Her husband worked at the same office building but in a nearby hallway. They passed each other regularly without really saying anything. His office had a glass door, and so one time he was on the phone, she passed by and he motioned for her to come in the office. She did, while he finished the conversation. Eventually he hung up the phone and said, “hey, are you married?” It turns out he had to attend some social function and needed a companion.  They hit it off and had a great marriage.

    I don’t have any good first line stories except one. One girl I  knew in Eastern Europe came over to me and announced, My name is ——- and I am your secret Santa.” (It was true; I was involved in an afterschool group where we were doing all sorts of things; she had drawn my name and had sent some  small sweet  gifts).  It was love at first sight for me.

    By the way, reading the  Mystery Method book made me aware of the “anti-bitch shield” which all young females apparently wear when they go out in public  (where they ignore any small talk from men when in a public place). He made the point that sometimes the initial response from a strange woman  may be unintentionally bruque–it’s more pro forma than genuine.   So maybe having a magical “opening” is not so important after all.

  • Are men good for anything?

    Roy Baumeister on Is there anything good about men?

    Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

    I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

    Right now our field is having a lively debate about how much behavior can be explained by evolutionary theory. But if evolution explains anything at all, it explains things related to reproduction, because reproduction is at the heart of natural selection. Basically, the traits that were most effective for reproduction would be at the center of evolutionary psychology. It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences.

    For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe.

    For men, the outlook was radically different. If you go along with the crowd and play it safe, the odds are you won’t have children. Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends. Hence it was necessary to take chances, try new things, be creative, explore other possibilities. Sailing off into the unknown may be risky, and you might drown or be killed or whatever, but then again if you stay home you won’t reproduce anyway. We’re most descended from the type of men who made the risky voyage and managed to come back rich. In that case he would finally get a good chance to pass on his genes. We’re descended from men who took chances (and were lucky).

    The huge difference in reproductive success very likely contributed to some personality differences, because different traits pointed the way to success. Women did best by minimizing risks, whereas the successful men were the ones who took chances. Ambition and competitive striving probably mattered more to male success (measured in offspring) than female. Creativity was probably more necessary, to help the individual man stand out in some way. Even the sex drive difference was relevant: For many men, there would be few chances to reproduce and so they had to be ready for every sexual opportunity. If a man said “not today, I have a headache,” he might miss his only chance.

    The whole article is worth reading and digesting. He makes a lot of other interesting points about sociology and evolutionary biology. Such as: men are just as social (if not more social) than women, but they have shallower relationships. Males are more apt to help strangers (and to inflict violence on them). Females are more likely to help/inflict violence on family members. See also Geoffrey Miller’s Mating Mind.

  • Dating Tips from the Pros (but not from me!)

    Sometimes I read sites with dating tips. I always find them fascinating.  One subtext of these male-centered sites is that it is ok for a man to hook up with strangers once in a while. It’s a necessary part of growing up (so the argument goes).   Once you lose your naiveté about romance and detach yourself emotionally from the outcome, it will be easier to find a healthy and long-lasting relationship.

    Here’s Roosh V’s maxim’s about dating. Highlights: Always let a girl ask you for your name first.  Sometimes the best way to get into a girl’s place is to say nothing and just follow her in. It’s easier to pick up when you are the exotic one. If you look around and all the guys look like you, you might want to try somewhere else. The less educated she is, the more direct you can be. The more educated you are, the harder it is to believe that game works.

    Here’s another piece about why coffee dates suck. That is something I have observed on my own. 7 Things Men can do to improve their game. (See also a compendium of links by relationship coaches about meeting women . And  Ovid’s Art of Love which is an extraordinary and entertaining guide).

    I recently finished the Mystery Method book. Despite the prurient subtitle, I found the book’s suggestion subtle, flexible and not formulaic with the more modest goal  of trying to explain the sociology of dating.   Highly recommended (Ovid couldn’t have done better).  It’s amazing how many male sites have coopted the language and the acronyms (LJBF, etc) from Mystery.  Of course, by now Mystery is a commercial empire, with DVDs and seminars. But more power to them. (Here’s more links to the fast seduction community).

    Roissy in DC (warning semi-NSFW) . He expounds a philosophy about how men can have more success with women by behaving more dominantly.  Roissy is a  great writer with great insights into dating psychology. He represents one of the leading thinkers  of the neo-chauvinists (the social movement that unapologetically seeks to restore some more control in the romantic relationship.  Roissy harps on beta males too much  (as though simply strutting around like an alpha would make him one). But he is correct about how some males take themselves out of the dating game by being too willing to live up to the woman’s ground rules.  Unfortunately, his writing is  hyper-obsessed with putting women in their place that it begins to resemble misogyny. Also, he seems a little too obsessed with both social status (and how to attain it) and  physical attractiveness. Yes, both are important (especially the latter), but  I don’t think you can explain all the sexual hangups of the world merely by saying that women are too fat. Highlights: 16 Commandments of Poon, a long discussion about an offensive JC Penny sales campaign (see the video here).  Roissy posts regularly and at length, but don’t view the stuff at work; many of his commenters use a lot of NSFW vulgar remarks.

    Finally, and more obscurely, here’s a geek who wrote a philosophical treatise about male-female relations. Here’s the meat of his ladder theory. It’s a cynical paradigm, but at least coherent. In fact, I think Mystery Method and ladder paradigm share the same  assumptions and goal: to disabuse men of  conventional romantic notions about how to court a woman. Unfortunately, with Intellectual Whores, the answer seems only for the man to achieve higher status. With Mystery at least, there is the hope that a well-schooled man can use biological/evolutionary tricks to game the system. Update Dec 26: Here’s a wiki dedicated to fleshing out the ladder theory.  The main purpose of the ladder theory as presented here is to help the man avoid no-win situations and recognize them when they come. Ironically the key to success (they argue) is  to avoid becoming too fixated on any one woman and to detach themselves quickly from no win situations.

    (A question for the ladies: is there any equivalent method about  mate-seeking for women? I’m only familiar with the trivial book The Rules and Sex and the City (which has a tremendous influence on woman’s attitudes toward dating).

    The more I read these kinds of texts, the more I see that how strongly I identify with the Romantic school of thought. We are supposed to think that the Romantics had it all wrong by putting women on a pedestal; but it was a way of showing respect as well as a way of acknowledging the abstract qualities we see and admire in people of the opposite sex. I don’t think one needs to be super-serious about matters of the heart, but one can go the other extreme and treat everything as a kind of game  where the winner is the one who extracts pleasure from the other without needing to reciprocate.  Romanticism is about saying: we don’t have to keep score because we trust one another. The problem with these dating guides is that they spend too much  time focusing on how to maneuver in a social atmosphere. Now that I have read Mystery Method, i will certainly keep it in the back of my mind when talking with a woman, but I don’t think I will behave that much differently. The aim of these writers  seems less to change your behavior than to help you see the unspoken mechanics of desire (and possibly to derive advantage from this knowledge).

    Of course, most pick-up artists talk about the need to spend hundreds of hours perfecting one’s  craft, as though the ability to pick up woman was something akin to a football play or video game maneuver.   Seriously, who has the time for all that?  And wouldn’t your time be better spent reading a good book (I say this seriously).

    Because of my own inexperience, I don’t have much advice to offer except two obvious points: try to relate to the other person as  an equal (don’t think that one person is entitled to any feeling of superiority for any reason). Don’t denigrate your partner’s ambitions or feelings. Love is about sharing; if you or the partner are unwilling to share freely, then there is a problem.  A small amount of subterfuge is needed to preserve at least the appearance of harmony, but about the big things there should be no reason to lie. The joys of passionate  love have their place in any relationship (never forget that), but ultimately they pale before commitment and honesty and respect. We use the word “love” to describe lots of relationships and friendships.  Partly this is semantics, but I also think it reflects the fact that  nonromantic relationships have just as many emotional resonances as a romantic one.   If the way you treat a romantic partner is significantly different from how you treat a parent or child or good friend, what does love really matter?  I remember reading a simple but profound book by a nun about how to be happy. One point she made, “Think about nuns” was revealing. People (she said) often viewed a nun’s life as one of deprivation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Nun’s have an active circle of friends and family; their position may even afford certain intimacies not normally granted to a friend. Yes, her commitment to the nun’s lifestyle interfered with her normal and natural desire for romantic relationships. On the other hand, it simplified her life and made it easier to win friends. Ponder this choice: Would you rather have  a)have a gorgeous and loyal  girlfriend who would love you unconditionally  or b)the ability to make instant friends with any person on the planet?  Not wrong with satisfying those passions, but will it sustain contentment with your life over time?

    One point I took away from this book was that solving the romantic problem won’t automatically make your other problems  go away. Would the love for a beautiful woman still be awesome if you were 1)sick or 2)estranged from the rest of your family or friends. If the only way for you to succeed in sleeping with a beautiful woman was 1)to treat her horribly 2)ignore your other obligations 3)abandon your dreams, would that make you  happier in the long run? If the supermodel was in love with you, but treated you like crap, would that future make you happy?

    (Keep in mind I am saying this as a single unattached man).

  • Lowered fertility rates

    Kay S. Hymowitz on Fertility rates and Carrie Bradshaw:

    Demographers get really excited about shifts like these, but in case you don’t get what the big deal is, consider: in 1960, 70 percent of American 25-year-old women were married with children; in 2000, only 25 percent of them were. In 1970, just 7.4 percent of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried; today, the number is 22 percent. That change took about a generation to unfold, but in Asia and Eastern Europe the transformation has been much more abrupt. In today’s Hungary, for instance, 30 percent of women in their early thirties are single, compared with 6 percent of their mothers’ generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40 percent of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14 percent only 20 years ago.

    At the end there is an interesting conclusion:

    That raises an interesting question: Why are SYFs (single young females) in the  United States—the Rome of the New Girl Order—still so interested in marriage? By large margins, surveys suggest, American women want to marry and have kids. Indeed, our fertility rates, though lower than replacement level among college-educated women, are still healthier than those in most SYF countries (including Sweden and France). The answer may be that the family has always been essential ballast to the individualism, diversity, mobility, and sheer giddiness of American life. It helps that the U.S., like northwestern Europe, has a long tradition of “companionate marriage”—that is, marriage based not on strict roles but on common interests and mutual affection. Companionate marriage always rested on the assumption of female equality. Yet countries like Japan are joining the new order with no history of companionate relations, and when it comes to adapting to the new order, the cultural cupboard is bare. A number of analysts, including demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, have also argued that it is America’s religiousness that explains our relatively robust fertility, though the Polish fertility decline raises questions about that explanation.

    (NYT did a similarly longish piece on European fertility; can’t find the link). The Hymowitz article talked about the cultural reasons behind the trend, linking it to Sex and the City (a show I find to be of immense social significance).

  • When is public lewdness not lewd? Answer: when it’s police entrapment

    I don’t normally care about sex scandals with US Senators, but the Larry Craig incident reminded me of an incident that happened to a friend.

    Cats and Dogs doing it! Appalling!

    Larry Craig, for those of you who don’t know or care, was a Republican Senator who was trapped by an undercover policeman in a airport bathroom. His crime was tapping his neighbor’s foot in the adjacent stall, which apparently was a signal to engage in homosexual activity. Larry Craig pled guilty to avoid publicity, the charges were merely a misdemeanor, which in the U.S. is pretty much equivalent to a traffic ticket.

    When it was exposed, the Republican Party pressured Craig to resign, and Craig, while initially resisting, finally agreed. A few days later, he changed his mind again. He intended to appeal the initial guilty plea even though to do so is highly unusual.

    People jump to the conclusion that Craig’s motive was lewd and that Craig’s agreement to sign an admission of guilt meant just that..an admission of guilt.

    I don’t know if Craig was gay or if Craig intended to have sex with this stranger. But a few years ago a friend from the East Coast related a story that is strikingly similar.

    This friend (Let’s call him E.) worked with a small publishing company in the East Coast and was gay by his own admission. E. never advertised the fact, and in fact he never discussed it except among old friends. E. was not in a relationship at the time, but he visited a park known to be a place where gay men picked each other up. E. visited the park for precisely that reason (he later told me at the time). I considered E. a decorous and basically law-abiding person. Yes, this sort of hanky panky initially surprised me, but I knew that E. would have done it with maximum of discretion.

    E. stumbled upon a man whom he found attractive, and they struck up a conversation. They were both seated and talked for a while, and then in a somewhat forward gesture, my friend put his arm on the other friend. I can’t remember the specifics; maybe they were in some indoor part of the park, or maybe they were in a park bench; maybe they were standing; these details are not crucial to the story. I vaguely remember the policeman claiming E. touched him on the leg while E. claimed he touched his arm.

    At that point, the man showed his police badge and brought E. to the squad car to write up the citation. I can’t remember if he was actually under arrest. But my friend was absolutely furious; though he was certainly polite and soft-spoken and articulate, the policeman basically cut him short and told him to take it up with the judge. For E., the situation was a nightmare. He didn’t mind admitting he was gay to close friends, but rarely if ever publicized it or talked about it to acquaintances.

    I wasn’t there at the event, and I can’t read E.’s mind, so I really can’t say exactly what  may have happened. But even though E. was looking for some sexual dalliance, he would have never dreamed of having sex in a public place…and certainly with no one around. And yet the entrapment situation accused him of doing precisely that. E. felt convinced he was in the right…and I agreed. But the process of having to hire an attorney and debate it in a public courtroom was highly embarrassing to him. Later, E. learned the citation was only a misdemeanor and could be handled entirely through the mail. It would never appear on his permanent record. In other words, he could pay the fine and never have to worry about it again.

    So he paid the fine. Yes, he had to plead guilty. And yes, he wouldn’t have a chance to fight this injustice. But he recognized that the low cost of this offense decreased the incentive for people to fight the charge. He discussed the matter over the phone with me for about an hour, and my friend twirled around all sorts of arguments about the illegitimacy of the charges. He was furious and resigned…but still would not fight it. I urged him to write an anonymous letter to the paper or the City Council. But no, my friend thought it would be futile to do so. That area of the country was conservative, and besides, nobody has sympathy for people looking for quick gay pickups (even if their rights were violated).

    But imagine if the genders were reversed. Imagine the undercover cop were a beautiful woman hanging out at a bar or at an informal public setting like the beach. Imagine that this woman were especially friendly and responded to your attentions. If a man were to put his hand on hers or to touch her shoulders, isn’t that also public lewdness? I consider myself a sheltered person when it comes to sexual adventures. I honestly don’t know if pickups happen as often as people  suppose. But it certainly seemed reasonable to think that two ordinary strangers would touch one another on a first meeting in a public place; that didn’t mean they were intending to have sex on the spot! More than likely the real action would take place off in a car or an apartment bedroom. Maybe some people get off on doing it in public…and I guess that needs to be stopped, but in most cases, the culprits are not strangers but boyfriends and girlfriends having a crazy time.

    This raises an interesting question. Is there something lewd about groping in a car? Cars can be in public spots (on streets, for example) and yet be relatively isolated. Inside a car you have a degree of privacy while occupying a public space. And what about on a train or bus? It is confusing.

    The problem with the charges to Craig or to E. is that no public lewdness actually took place. All that took place is ambiguous touching. I believe police officers should concern themselves only with those people who are actually having sex (and where the evidence is incontrovertible). By stopping these entrapment exercises, one can avoid pointless arguments about what might have taken place and concentrate on what what did.

    Fun and embarrassing personal anecdote. After writing this, I just remembered a very embarrassing incident from my high school days. My girlfriend and I were — how shall I say? — affectionate sometimes in my car. We parked in remote parking spots and were paranoid about being caught. That never did happen except one time at the Rice University parking lot. A Rice U. police scared us to death by banging on my car window. Yes, he caught us in flagrante delecto. We were in the middle of — I kid you not — playing Dungeons and Dragons! We had our rulebooks and dice and graph paper laid out across the seats. Now at other times and places we did other things in that car, but on that occasion, we were playing Dungeons and Dragons and nothing else. (A geek girl who plays D&D was every man’s dream!)

    I don’t know what I found more embarrassing — being caught or being caught NOT making out with her. I think the police officer viewed me with pity.

    Postscript: Seinfeld describes the Larry Craig incident as one of the greatest things ever to have happened in the history of comedy.

  • Go, Mantras!

    After looking through dating profiles at match.com, I have decided I just hate gratuitious exclamations of fidelity to some sort of athletic team. So, I’m supposed to be impressed that a)you follow a sport and b)have some kind of preference about which multimillion dollar sports franchise you prefer? Hey, maybe sports…just isn’t that important?

    Henceforth, I am going to end every post with a mantra to some nonsensical sports team.

    Go, Rockets!

  • Dodos on Marriage

    Jeffrey Meyers on Married Life and the Artist:

    All writers need solitude. But celibacy often means loneliness, and a tranquil marriage can be dull. Many authors seem to thrive on personal conflict, which stimulates their work. Their lives show that the intense egoism essential to creativity was frequently fatal to marriage. For geniuses, the best marriage potion was love compounded with a dash of hate.

    This is an issue that I’ve thought about, but frankly have no profound thoughts about.

    Practically speaking, being/staying married as an artist is useful when trying to balance dayjobs vs. your art projects. Having a fallback income to survive on while you take 6 months to work on your project is extremely helpful. If a couple can do this fairly (i.e., taking turns), this can be a case where married life is definitely superior to single life.

    Artists are focused inward and can be blind to outside realities. Competition for how to spend free time can be intense. Like any creative person, I work myself to death on weekends and occasionally weekend nights. Weekends become my salvation, and are really the only time I can get anything done. To be more precise: Sunday mornings and afternoons are practically the only time of the week I accomplish anything Heaven help you if you call me up or suggest an outing on that day. I will certainly bite your head off.

    I can be outgoing and gregarious; I like fun stuff, meeting people, that sort of thing. I’m a family guy and would love to go out more, meet more dateable people, volunteer. But I can’t–I simply can’t. Leaving aside the fact that it’s so hard for artistic dodos to locate other members of own species, there isn’t enough time in the weekend to search for compatible people to enjoy life with.

    Should artists date other artists? It isn’t necessary, but practically speaking that may be the only viable option. Men who have erratic sources of income are not viewed as “financially stable” or as “good providers.” Other people in the arts are better equipped to appreciate the difficulties of balancing the dayjob with projects and more accepting of material sacrifices. I can’t speak of the future, but my artistic enterprises pretty much guarantee that a)I won’t own a house and b) my car will always be old. What percentage of females can live with that fact?

    Marriage changes people. I’ve spoken to a number of women who became mothers and found that the experience (while reducing the time for creative projects) actually enhanced their artistic visions. We all need to be properly grounded, and marriage/parenting helps you to see things from another’s perspective and to confront singular issues of growing up and staying connected with people. Artists more than anyone need this. And yet, where is the time?

    Those lucky enough to make some money off their writing (either through royalty checks, or indirect methods like teaching fellowships) don’t feel the time pressure as much. They can treat writing as a kind of “job” even though we all know that it bears little resemblance to one, both in terms of working hours and expectation of reward. If you fund your projects on your own sweat and time, that is one thing; you are responsible only to yourself. On the other hand, if your project burns up time and money that would otherwise have gone to your children or spouse, that is almost heartless. What is the value of producing great art if it improverishes your family (both monetarily and emotionally) in the process? In some way women have it easier; they are expected to retreat from the world of paychecks during early motherhood to raise the kids. For a time in their life, they don’t have to worry about money (and cases where mothers support a household and manage still to be productive are in my mind nothing short of miraculous). On the other hand, women invest so much emotionally in the welfare of their children that they often end up abandoning their creative dreams (at least until their kids are old enough not to require babysitting).

    The marriage question becomes significantly less urgent when artists are actually making some kind of living from what they do. In modern times, that isn’t easy.