Sexuality and American Culture

I’ve been staring at my computer screen for about an hour thinking about what to say about Middlesex. The book is a consummate force of Greek-American culture, carried by the development of the American City and glossed over by the story of Calliope Stephanides. But as it says volumes about Detroit, or the miseducation of yia yia, it doesn’t say enough about Cal himself. Though the book is full of sexual scenes, it just dawned on me that there is hardly an account of Cal or Callie engaging in sex with a partner that is fully awake, alert and reciprocating. The book’s collective silence

Take Callie’s first experience with Jerome. It is problematic because the experience suggests mere tacit approval of sex at best. It doesn’t help that both are under the influence of drugs and alcohol. And from her behavior the next morning (spurning Jerome’s advances), we see that Callie is largely unhappy with the encounter. Cal does not describe or intimate what Callie is thinking or feeling about it. We only have events and we are left to draw our own conclusions at the end.

Callie’s sexual relations with the Obscure Object only happen at night, where she is the active practitioner and her partner feigns sleep. Though Cal goes into great detail to describe Callie’s euphoria in consummating her romantic feelings for her inamorata, the relationship is peculiar because the Obscure Object is just that–an object. It is an object that is used with the utmost care and sincerity, but the girl is an object for Callie’s sexual affection. Like an inanimate object, the Obscure Object does not actively return any of the practitioner’s caresses.

Cal describes the shared sexual dysfunction between himself and his college girlfriend–a relationship that isn’t presented sexually. All we are left with is an image of commiseration between the two lovers. And at last, we have the relationship between Cal and Julie, which leaves sex to the imagination of the book’s readers.

When we string together Calliope’s sexual experiences in the book, we don’t receive enlightenment or clarity about sexuality, sex, dating or even the intersex movement. We are left with an understanding that sexuality is murky. Cal’s sexuality cannot be easily defined, but I got a vague understanding through his choice of words and his description of events. His older counterpart aside, I wasn’t surprised when Callie decided to run away when she did. Her descriptions of the crocus were poignant and it seemed as though she had an affinity, rather than an abhorrence to it.

Rather than feeling enlightened about my own sexuality, this book at the end of the course left me feeling aware that I am not very aware at all. Perhaps I should look to traveling west like Cal.

To be honest, I share Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov’s worries. Kushner encapsulates our collective obsession over finding a new political paradigm, and does it quite well in Angels in America. Aleksii adulates the tradition of his time and bemoans American Capitalism. (His fight with the American Cheeseburger as an image of an obsolete praxis hits close to home.) He waits for a new groundbreaking text, some singular fantastic writing that organizes the complicated worldview into a consumable and integrable idea. Kushner challenges a strict adherence to theory by transvaluing the most important aspects of political, sexual and religious thoughts. What results is a novel experience that matches the fervor of it’s time by theorizing only love and compassion as universal dictums for the observer.

As America’s religious theory, Mormonism involves Calvinist-like observances. Notably, Kushner refrains from rejecting them outright. He merely intends to question its foundation. Why else would he have Prior engage in hilariously erotic sex scenes with an angel with eight vaginas? Kushner provides relief and terror in one fell swoop. By including Prior’s sexual experiences and the revelations provided to him by the Angels, Kushner explores the possibility of religion sanctioning sexuality. The presentation of this proto-theory to religious sexuality is ad-hoc. Prior receives his understanding of Plasma Orgasmata as he has his huge orgasm. And as he explains it to Belize, note that there isn’t a sense of dogmatism or exclusion in the Angels’ work. Only bureaucratic creativity.

Kushner’s lesson throughout Angels in America is not “There are no rules”. Had that been the case, Kushner would have paid homage to Nietzsche by having Louis and Joe living happily in bliss as Prior endured his pain and hallucination alone. He could have possibly involved some racially tinged stabbing incident, where Belize destroys Roy Cohn for everything he’s got. But I digress. Each character, Joe included, is moulded throughout the play to become compassionate towards one another. Their collective interactions come out of general understandings of previously established theories. Finding their intersection in the prospect of facing the world with HIV/AIDS, the 1990s, Kushner intends that the characters move toward the future as Prior did in the throes of passion with Regina Vagina. He had an idea that something was up, but he didn’t have time to hammer out the details, exactly. (I know that’s not her name, but I enjoy calling her that.)

The call for compassionate experience alongside theory–that shouldn’t be deposed completely– resonates with me. I find myself grasping in the dark for an idea, a manual of sorts that can dictate and explain how exactly I should proceed to master the books I’ve yet to read, to adequately write my papers on a respectable level and to articulate my meager ideas in a world that seemingly begs for perfection. After reading Angels in America, I realize that the only way for me to know is to act first. But who says I can’t look before I leap?

The tragic story of Sula is a story of just deserts. Strangely enough, its themes of lifelong bonds, free love and the good of the community failed to satisfy me. Horrible puns aside, this is probably because I searched for understanding in the superficial, unlikable characters of Medallion, Ohio. Instead, I think it will serve me well to consider the novel’s themes from the perspective of the community as a lethargic self-catabolic animus. Collectively, the events, developments and eventual demise of Medallion present the community’s dominance over cultural and sexual customs. As a result, Morrison depicts the individual’s constant struggle for agency and power with the community.

At their strongest, Sula and Nel contravened the maxims of Medallion as companions. Morrison adorns Sula with many examples of their bond transcending the mood of the community. For example, the funeral scene after the death of Chicken Little is notable because the girls are briefly separated. The community’s mentality overpowers the girls’, in the form of Reverend Deal and his sermon. Morrison identifies the group and its mentality, “And when they thought of all that life and death locked into that little closed coffin they danced and screamed, not to protest God’s will but to acknowledge it and confirm once more their conviction that they only way to avoid the Hand of God is to get in it.” (Morrison, 65). Here, the presence of God compounds the group mentality and the girls are expected to follow suit. Instead, the girls reunite near the coffin, knowing that the faith of the community is unnecessary to keep the memory of the deceased alive. In this small way, Morrison has the girls defy the conformity that the community at large demands of them.

As Sula sleeps with Jude, the bond unravels, leaving Sula and Nel to challenge the conventions of their community as independent women. Yet the community is an entirely different monster by 1937. Most of Medallion’s citizens are united in their revulsion of Sula’s amorous ways. Morrison does well to note that wayward mothers, for example, return to their children as a form of personal critique to Sula. By rallying against Sula, Medallion thrives.

Both women make decisions in spite of the community’s activity. Nel’s decides to visit Sula as she’s dying, going against Medallion’s tradition of having its women silently ostracizing persons of interest. Sula actively sleeps with the many men of Medallion, much to the chagrin of their wives. Though we as readers are left to make moral judgements on these actions, they are notable in the development of Medallion as a community for their peculiarity. I imagine that as the events of the novel occurred, they were accompanied by the silent hiss of gossip, the hum of chatter fraught with the contempt that comes with “newsworthy” notoriety.

These Hands Hold the History

Sorry for the delay! Here is my poem, and my description:

I wanted to look at Fabio for this project because I always saw him has a kind of sexual conflict, even before this class – he is hailed as the paragon of masculinity, for his muscular physique and large jaw, but he is also a joke, a parody of himself. As  I thought about it further I realized Fabio wasn’t nearly as good an example of sexual objectification from an emotional standpoint as he was from a capitalistic standpoint. All of the attention he receives is for his looks, but in most cases its not driven just by physical lust for his body but emotional lust for what his body represents- the chin is strength, the hair is old fashioned romance, and the exposed, rippling muscles are safety, protection, and being easily swept up over the threshold of a pirate ship’s lovemaking cabin. In other words he has come to be more than a person, embodied by the fact that he only requires one name. How did the Fabio Lanzoni, mainly anonymous male model, become FABIO?  He was discovered at 14 in Italy, and became a model for photographers there. But I think the crux of his transition was in his travels to America. There he was a pleasant anachronism – the Italian Stallion, his long hair recalling fairytales with knights on white horses. His exaggerated masculine image became the perfect advertisement for romance (see: all the romance novel covers he’s done) and for attractiveness (see all the food and health products he’s endorsed). His life has been run on biopower since then – his livelihood fueled by his looks and therefore his trips to the gym and to the salon. And the other facet to his transition in to FABIO is that he figured out how to sell himself – he wrote his own romance novels, starred in a crappy but innuendo laden fitness video, and he even had a phone line where, for $1.99 a minute,  you could listen to wise romance-isms from Fabio himself: “A man should protect hees woman”. Yea. He’s been selling sex his whole life, while touting it as something more tender.

Ode to Fabio

Oh Fabio

When your looks have overtaken your soul

And your face has become a brand

No one will give you a serious role

*

I wondered if it was your fault

Or if some faceless corporate suit saw

one perfect pec daring to bare

in the quaint Italian countryside air

and said hey America needs some of that right there

and took you in his capitalist maw.

*

They say you were an Italian film star

but Hollywood has a gluttonous draw.

They said you would go far,

the handsomest handsome they ever saw.

*

Then they swept you off

to commercial after commercial

made you feel used, not special

When you asked them for a single penetrating line

They said Fabio! You’re doing fine.

Now inch a little into the light

so that it hits your hair just right

and turn a little towards the fan

so that it blows away not at you,

and stand very still, remember you’re

a statue.

*

Bio-powered vehicle, economically useful

fitted out like a machine

Infiltrating women’s homes

On the covers of romance novels

you made the sad, the chubby, the lonely women grovel

all while holding goddesses, giant breasted and lean.

You quickly figured out

with muscles bared and brash,

it was easy to to trade the beef for the cash

*

You called your self a simple man

A bard, a poet with a global message of ROMANCE

but with no thought,

only an empty and seductive dance.

*

And now you speak in innuendo and small talk

Thoughtless thoughts inching out

The corner of your mouth

Spewing romantic clichés and hackneyed phrases that you were taught.

You say men only care about visuals

Then you say you need something more intellectual, more profoundly beautiful

But you never go out with less than three buttons down.

*

And today you feel old

Owning 222 barely used motorcycles has taken its toll

And all your neighbors say, “Of all the people! Heavens above!

Fabio has a Lamborghini but he doesn’t have love.”

For my creative project I chose to create a re-interpretation of the small pornographic photographs that were circulated around the turn of the century and referred to as “French Postcards.” There were a few of these on display during our visit to the Museum of Sex, some depicting women in lingerie, others showing two people mid-coitus, even wearing innocent smiles in one particularly memorable image.

These images are a clear example of the sexualization of people, though in today’s world of ubiquitous pornography they can seem quite innocent at times. Inspired by these images, and struck by the vast development of the sexualization process in the past century, I attempted to portray the process of sexualization while critiquing it. by choosing images of settings or scenes without people, and writing a poem about a sexual scenario associated with the setting on the back. In this way, the seemingly mundane becomes sexualized when you flip the card over, mirroring the idea that there is essential truth to be uncovered by explicitly disclosing sexual thoughts and experiences.

As a critical commentary on this process of sexualization, I avoid explicit details in the scenes the poems describe to demonstrate that the search for essential truth through sexuality always leaves you wanting, and that truth is elusive and unable to be captured in explicit details. I do not attempt to untangle truth through my poems, but rather to make a statement that untangling won’t get you to the truth anyway, so you may as well just accept and enjoy what you have.

The pictures are not my own. I cropped and framed them, but the original photo credits go to the following people:

The image of the bed comes from Lore Ferguson:
http://sayable.net/2012/09/but-his-joy-comes-in-the-mourning/

The image of the road comes from Amardeep Singh:
http://amardeeps.com/post/46816812238

The image of the laundromat comes from William Lounsbury:
http://williamlounsbury.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/the-laundromat-open-24-hours/

The image of the brownstones comes from Nikki of Nikki’s Images:
http://nikkisimages.wordpress.com/tag/brownstones/

The “Lolita Vlogs” project was created with the intention of revealing Dolores Haze’s missing perspective from Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita. I wanted to explore some of what was going on in Dolores’ head during some of the key moments of the story. Each vlog takes place in a different location and time. The language was an intentional mix of modern day and 1940s slang, which I did to try to help straddle the line between Lola’s actual timeline and the modern use of technology. I also chose not to seriously reference Lola and Humbert’s sexual relationship, stemming from the point that Humbert said he would send her to reformatory school if she told anyone (in this case, her viewers).

Vlog #1: From her bedroom, Dolores introduces herself as Lola (not Humbert’s name “Lolita”) and mentions that she has a (fictional) YouTube channel, LolaWatches, where she reviews movies—a nod to her obsession with popular culture and film. She then discusses the arrival of Humbert Humbert and her frustration with her mother forcing her to go to summer camp. She obviously shows disdain for her mother, but already sees that Humbert is easy to manipulate, who in turn can manipulate Lola’s mother into doing what Lola wants.

Vlog #2: Sitting outside at summer camp, Lola describes her time at Camp Q with mentions of Barbara and Charlie (with whom she says she had sex with “for fun” and acknowledges that he wants to sleep with everyone at camp). She then talks about how her mother came to visit and failed to tell her that she and Humbert were getting married. Lola shows the same disinterest that Humbert notes over the phone in the book. Lola says she kissed him—once again just for fun—and that she knows Humbert doesn’t love her mother.

Vlog #3: Seven months later, Lola posts a video from a hotel room where she cannot even recall the date. She tells the viewers that her mother has passed away and she is now stuck under the care of Humbert, which she doesn’t like but acknowledges that she has nowhere else to go. She also says he “makes her do what he wants” by threatening to send her to reformatory school if she disobeys his desires. She ends the video saying that perhaps she treated her mother unfairly and that she no longer enjoys her life. Clearly upset, she ends the video.

Vlog #4: A full year and a few months have passed, and Lola’s vlog begins apologizing for the extreme delay. She mentions that she is still in a bad situation, but that it has gotten better since settling down in Beardsley, where she has started getting money out of Humbert and joined the school play. She mentions her love of drama and fawns over Quilty and mentions that once the show is done she’s going to tell Humbert she wants to go back on the road (which she later does in the novel—here it is implied that she has planned this out for a long time).

Vlog #5: This final vlog has a very different tone than the others. Shot late at night in the hotel bathroom, a dishevieled and miserable-looking Lola is about to enter the illness that lands her in the hospital. She tells her viewers that this is going to be her last video ever and that she has been planning this escape for a long time. She mentions that getting sick, but that it will be okay and it will actually “speed things up for her.” She thanks her viewers for their support and ends with her (this time somber) tagline: “Remember, Lola loves you!”

For my final project, I chose to portray the duality inherent in one’s identity. As this is a personal project, I highlighted the juxtaposition between growing up with a modern- Orthodox Jewish background, and attempting to reconcile that belief system with life as a modern American woman.

In addition to examining the bifurcation between Jewish and American society in regard to tradition and modernity, I also delve into what it means to be a young woman in both cultures.  As a religious woman, I am expected to pray and to dress modestly.  As an American, I am encouraged to express myself freely.  The issue of gender roles is exacerbated as I muddle my way through the passing of my father, and what the ramifications are once the male role of the family alliance is left gaping.

The clash of both worlds was brought into sharp contrast when I entered my freshman year at Macaulay.  Suddenly I was invited to restaurants with eager new friends, and I found myself explaining to them why I would love to go out with them, but I could not eat the food as it does not adhere to my Kosher diet.  When meeting new people, I was shocked when males reached out to envelop me in a hug.  Despite my jeans that marked me as a typical modern teenager, I did not know how to tell them that I was taught not to touch males.  I then began to ponder my own limits, wondering if the boundaries were valid or in need of adjustment.  Perhaps hugging has become the new way of meeting people, and is replacing the old- fashioned handshake.  In a professional setting, I always shake hands; there is no sexual connotation in this action, and is expected in the workforce.

While I debate these quandaries, I am cognizant of the fact that my religious community is watching.  I do not want to burn any bridges through a misconception of an innocent photo popping up on Facebook.  To solve my fear of creating an uncomfortable situation while posing for a photo, and the repercussion of what might be said if I am pictured with a male’s arm slung around me, I try to jump into a group photo next to a female and hope that the spot on my other side remains vacant.  Of course, this is just a temporary solution.  I know that the clock is ticking until I have to make up my mind as to on which side of the spectrum I regard myself, starting with the group photo conundrum.

Perhaps it is worth questioning whether there it is possible to live in both worlds.  At times, such as in the dating world, it seems as if I have one foot anchored in traditional Jewish culture, and another in American society.  The paradox rears its ugly head at times like when I am invited to a networking event at a bar; my future job prospects require that I attend the event albeit the setting, yet it is inappropriate for a religious Jewish woman to spend time in such an environment.  In my struggle to have one foot rest in both cultures, at times I fall between the cracks.

-Ariella Medows