Sexuality and American Culture 2012

Hi, just want to send along this article on changing attitudes about sexuality for teenage boys. Enjoy your break!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/opinion/caring-romantic-american-boys.html?src=rechp

Hi all!

The sociological term I was thinking of today is called dramaturgy (it has a different meaning than the one Colby explained).

From wikipedia:

Dramaturgy or Dramaturgical Perspective is a specialized symbolic interactionism paradigm developed by Erving Goffman, seeing life as a performance. As “actors,” we have a status, which is the part that we play, where we are given various roles.^[41] These roles serve as a script, supplying dialogue and action for the characters (the people in reality).^[42] They also involve props and certain settings. For instance, a doctor (the role), uses instruments like a heart monitor (the prop), all the while using medical terms (the script), while in his doctor’s office (the setting).^[43] In addition, our performance is the “presentation of self,” which is how people perceive us, based on the ways in which we portray ourselves.^[44] This process, sometimes called impression management, begins with the idea of personal performance.^[45]

Vita, have you studied this? It’s a theory from Erving Goffman, and I know we covered him in my Intro to Soc class.

Anyway–just another way to look at Lo!

Though I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, I wasn’t very shocked by the direction Nabokov steered his novel plot-wise. The foreshadowing of Clare Quilty’s increased significance was present dating back to Dolores’ poster of him when she was still a nymphet. In the foreword, we already know that Humbert is in some sort of legal predicament, so he either committed a crime or was perceived to do some type of wrongdoing.  Dolores wasn’t meant to end up with Humbert forever. I can go on stating the obvious…

Where Nabokov got me was as the novel progressed, Humbert’s inability to detach from his memories of Annabel began to take over his daily thought process. It’s odd because this reminds me of how a young child can’t get over his or her first ever relationship. And the irony with Humbert is that he uses his attraction for nymphet Lolita, not necessarily Dolores, to project his feelings. This sounds like more Freudian stuff, and it boggles me. But I think there’s more meaning on a psychosociological context. Humbert simply goes into an emotional downward spiral when Dolores starts mature past her nymphet stage, mentally then physically. And no one could have stopped him because he didn’t let anyone get as close to him as Dolores.

Weren’t some statistics in the Kinsey Reports fabricated? I vaguely recall something along those lines…
http://www.neatorama.com/2006/09/19/10scientific-frauds-that-rocked-the-world/
(See #5)

Though I dispute a lot of statistical declarations Kinsey states, he did make a good point that we must separate the normal and abnormal from the right and wrong in any scientific study (p. 369). Also he argues that people should not be considered strictly homoesexual or heterosexual, but by the amount of experiences they have had. The good points stop there.

I’m shocked that a lot of people to took heart what Kinsey wrote. High schoolers engage in more sexual activity than college kids? Over 60 percent of pre-adolescent boys engage in homosexual activity? How could he possibly come to these conclusions with his miniature biased sample population? That’s science for you.

I wonder what Kinsey’s guidelines are for what constitutes a homosexual act. I also think that if Kinsey were alive, he should have taken a visit to the Museum of Sex. I would like to see his reaction when he’d find out that species can have more than one gender, engage in homosexual activity like a pastime, and a male seahorse can be impregnated.

Also, coitus is a funny word.

In the “Sex Perverts” document, I was dying of laughter, “Furthermore, most perverts tends to congregate at the same restaurants, night clubs, and bars, which places can be identified with comparative case in any community, making it possible for a recruiting agent to develop clandestine relationships which can be used for espionage purposes.” (p. 377)

Did this document just attempt to vilify gay bars? Homosexuals hang out with homosexuals at social venues usually for the same reason heterosexuals would go out to places where there’s other heterosexuals: To get some love, not always meet with communists and plot a government takedown.

Another funny point was the fear that Nazi and Communist governments would attempt to blackmail “homosexuals and other sex perverts” performing their “abnormal sex activities,” thus posing a security risk. This report throws homosexuals in the same boat as sex perverts, and makes homosexual coitus synonymous with abnormal sexual acts. This country has come a long way, and still got a long way to go.

Note to self: late posts must stop now.

Hi everyone,

It certainly is a pleasure to read about your admiration of and enthusiasm for Nabokov’s writing. Your posts provide a great mix of responses to the various complex literary devices he has employed so brilliantly, and I am looking forward to tomorrow’s discussion—and potential debates! The documents for this week provide a telling cultural backdrop for the time period and we see a number of their key ideas and attitudes about normal or deviant sexuality expressed in the novel, though often obliquely or ironically. They help us grasp some of the novel’s humor around issues of sex education and psychological therapy as well as the poignancy of the period’s oppressive attitudes and practices.

Here is a possible order to direct our discussion:
Vita leading us through examples of the elaborate word play.
Tal on the relationships between HH and Quilty and the concept of fate.
Colby on the psychoanalytic implications (as diagnosis and as the brunt of Nabokov’s ridicule).
Whitney on the question of created reality (does HH’s solipsism extend to our perceptions?)
See you tomorrow!

See you tomorrow! Lee

Sorry for the late post! I wasn’t quite to the end of part two last night and wanted to finish it before writing.

First of all, wow! I have so much respect for Nabokov as an author! He has total mastery over language, mood, and his audience. I know there is no “real” author present, but I felt as though the work had total control over my responses.

After last week’s discussion, my rather ambivalent opinion of H.H. changed as I noticed that the novel was getting darker. In Part II, I found myself more and more upset by Humbert’s controlling, paranoid, and violent behavior. I felt more sympathetic to Dolores because I was able to separate Lolita from Lo, something that, as Professor Quinby said, is important for getting a more rounded perspective of what was “really” happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh Lolita, my Lolita, I have begun to feel for you! Dear Humbert was endearing and charming when his having Lo was but a fantasy. However, what I read in Part Two of Lolita eroded my warm feelings toward Humbert Humbert. How could they not when he admitted to threatening Dolores for sex? “I relied on three other methods to keep my pubescent concubine in submission and passable temper,” Humbert informs the reader (148). Not only does he threaten Lo and abuse her lack of knowledge (in terms of what would happen to her if she left him), but their arrangement also denied Dolores a normal life. She is left to using sex as a bargaining chip for human interaction. “Look, the McCrystals, please, let’s talk to them…I’ll do anything you want, oh, please” (157). At the end of the novel Humbert separates himself from his solipsism to admit that on their first trip together he knew that he was nothing but body parts to Lo, “not a boy friend, not a glamour man…not even a person at all” (283). Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of Lolita, I felt kind of regretful that I did not borrow/purchase the annotated version because of all the references and word plays I am bound to have missed. I appreciate that this novel was split up into two classes: after our initial discussion, I approached reading part two differently than part one. I approached part one primarily as plot-driven – just determined to see how Humbert Humbert’s, Dolores Haze’s, and Charlotte Haze’s relationship plays out. For part two, I was more up to catching the word plays up to a point where it almost became an obsessive game of my own and taking in Nabokov’s “love affair” with the English language (316).

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re able to paint a clear picture of the world’s sexual history with what we’ve seen in the Museum of Sex and read in Peiss this past week. I’ll get to Humbert later on.

I spent a lot of time in the first room of the museum reading about the gradually increasing push in the limits of what could be seen and said in film. I was surprised when I realized how lewd critics perceived slight sexual verbal innuendo in early black and white films. I always thought its reactions were to similar to when a child cusses in today’s moral standards, a minor slap to the wrist. But at the museum, I got the impression that soft dirty talk was comparable to a Christian taking the stones of the Ten Commandments and pounding them with a sledgehammer. After I read the Filipino’s impressions of America in Peiss’ first document I realized, though it’ll sound close-minded, that a significant number of people who lived in the nineteenth century have also lived in the century after. But with this obvious fact comes the realization that the values of the Victorian Era did not fade immediately. Just see the guidelines for an acceptable movie in document four.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lolita, Lo-lee-ta, Lo. Lee. Ta. I love it—I love this book! Vladamir Nabokov gets into your head and leaves behind Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. What a magnificent novel to read, especially in light of Foucault, and refreshing after the more restrained The Scarlet Letter. And yet, after visiting The Museum of Sex, there is no way I can judge Humbert Humbert too harshly. Read the rest of this entry »

After visiting the Museum of Sex in combination with reading Lolita and this weeks documents I have noticed a strong trend in sexuality -the attempt to construct some ideal that arises from an illusion/fantasy. In the museum I was struck by the simulator in the BDSM exhibit on the second floor. This sort of “create your own” sex encounter seemed an interesting reflection of technology’s impact on popular culture. After reading part one of Lolita and the documents in Peiss’ book, though, it became evident that constructing sex isn’t new and it certainly isn’t a direct reflection of technology’s ability to more accurately turn fantasy into reality. Read the rest of this entry »