Sexting and Gender

November 18, 2014.
Posted by Jay Livingston

I.

Much of Hanna Rosin’s recent Atlantic article “Why Kids Sext” plays on the generational divide. Parents get understandably upset about something that kids see as just another part of social life. Cops and prosecutors have an even more difficult time since a high schooler’s sexy cellphone selfie is a felony in most states.

The media too aren’t sure how to play it. “Massive teen sexting ring,” gasped the headline in a local paper  in Louisa County, Virginia. A couple of high school kids had created an Instagram page with about 100 photos of girls from the local high school and middle school. They hadn’t taken the pictures; they had merely consolidated the photos that were already circulating on kids’ phones. When Rosin asked kids in the local high school how many people they knew who had sexted, the “ring” turned out to be “everyone.”  (The kids overestimated. I think that surveys find that about a third of kids have sexted.)

Rosin’s article reveals differences not just of age but of gender, for despite the newest iPhone and Instagram technology, the ideas and attitudes, especially those of the boys, seem like something out of the 1950s.  The “maddening, ancient, crude double standard” is, unfortunately, alive and well. So is the idea of sex as conquest. Boys describe how they would sweetly cajole girls to sext. When the photo arrived, the boys felt a kind of egotistical pride (“I’m the man”) –  not much different from high school boys of sixty or seventy years ago bragging about “getting to second base” or farther.  (I guess a sext is somewhere between second and third – a sort of .jpeg shortstop.)  On college campuses, as Lisa Wade has said,  the order of the bases has changed. Maybe that’s true in high school too, but the game mentality – with all its attendant attitudes and assumptions – remains the same.

If a girl refused, the boys dismissed her as “stuck up” or a “prude.” And if she did send the photo . . .

How do you feel about the girl after she sends it?, I asked.     “Super thots.” [THOT - “that ho over there”]     “You can't love those thots!”     “That's right, you can't love those hos.”

Whichever the girl does – sext or refuse – the boys find a reason to be contemptuous.

For the boys, the  pictures were not about sex or stimulation; they were purely for narcissistic satisfaction and social status.

They gloat inwardly or brag to friends; they store them in special apps or count them. . . . “Guys would pile them up,” one girl who had graduated a year earlier told me, referring to sexts they’d gotten. “It was more of a baseball-card, showing-off kind of thing.” Olivia described it as “like when they were little boys, playing with Pokémon cards.”

The boys saw the sexts as a universalistic and utilitarian currency – something they could trade and use for other goals. That’s why the boys’ promises not to show the picture to anyone else can evaporate so quickly.  The picture has use value only if others see it.  It has meaning as an object; that meaning is not connected with the particular person in the picture.  She could just as easily be Charmander or Snorlax.

The girls, by contrast, were more particularistic. A picture was important for what it said about the relationship between her and a particular boy.  Girls have the relationship in mind also in those rarer instances when they ask a boy for a picture

It is kind of a marker that you have reached a certain point in a relationship or you are about to reach a certain point in a relationship. So it can be foreplay. It can be a kind of intimacy.[Rosin in a Fresh Air interview here.]

That “marker” comment suggests that the girls too had a “base” system in mind, but if so, the bases were the stages in the relationship, the level of intimacy with another person. They did not share the boys’ view of the sext as a bit of capital added to their individual holdings and separate from the person in the photo.

II.

Sex – universal commodity or special relationship?  Many years ago, long before cell phones and sexts, I thought I might demonstrate this difference by asking students to imagine a dream date. I was a genii, I said, and I will grant your wish. You can have a date with any person you choose. You can spend an evening doing whatever you want, and if you like, the evening can extend till morning.
But you must choose one of two conditions.
    A.  You actually have the date, but nobody will ever know about.
    B.  You don’t have the date, but everybody thinks you did.

I had them mark their ballots anonymously but asked them to indicate their gender. Then, as an afterthought – mostly because I wanted to keep up with popular culture – I also asked them to write down who they were thinking of.

I thought that more boys would choose B – the date as utilitarian currency.  I was wrong. Everybody wanted the actual date. But gender did make a difference on the second question. Most of the boys chose women from the media (as I recall, Heather Locklear got several votes – I told you this was a long time ago).  The girls’ choices were more along the lines of “this guy I knew in high school” or “this guy I went out with last year but we broke up.”

The boys did not want the date as a tradeable commodity. Instead it was an abstracted ideal, a fantasy. They had no idea what it would actually be like to spend a few hours with Heather Locklear the real person.  What the girls wanted was a real relationship with a real person.

Hope and Bugs, Of Course

November 15, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ever since I read Andrew Gelman’s list of words to avoid, I’ve been more conscious of the simple “of course.”  I still use it, but more sparingly and cautiously.  (Gelman’s list, here, includes obviously, clearly, interestingly, note that, and their variants like “it is interesting to note that.”)

But then there’s the ironic “of course,” the one that points to some gem that is far from obvious. Done correctly, the casually tossed in “of course” makes us admire the author for spotting this sparkling insight. Maybe it makes us feel a bit inadequate for not seeing it ourselves, especially since the author is saying, “Aw shucks, anybody would have seen that.”

Adam Gopnik’s essay on Bob Hope in a recent New Yorker  shows you how it’s done:

The real parallel to Hope—the great American comedian whose career most closely resembles his—is, of course, Bugs Bunny.

Of course. 

Even if you’re old enough to remember the “Road” movies with Bing Crosby and the Oscars, the USO tours and  the decades of TV appearances, you would not have come up with the Bugs-Bob parallel. Gopnik goes on to explain.

Like Hope, he arrived in Hollywood in the late thirties and became a huge star with the war. Like Hope, he was usually paired with a more inward character who loves to sing (Daffy Duck is Bugs’s Bing [Crosby], though blustery rather than cool), and, like Hope, his appeal rises entirely from the limitless brashness and self-confidence with which he approaches even the most threatening circumstances. Together, they are the highest expression of the smart-aleck sensibility in American laughter. Their fame in wartime may have something to do with the way that, as A. J. Liebling documents, the American Army itself was essentially an urban creature dispatched to deserts and jungles: Bugs, with his Bronx-Brooklyn accent, has somehow been sent out there in the countryside, among the hunters, as Hope ends up in the sands of Morocco with no weapon but street-corner sass.

Once Gopnik clears away the rough, we see the previously unnoticed diamond. Hope, Bugs – of course. 

But I wanna tell ya’, the entire essay is worth reading, both for Gopnik’s aperçus and Hope’s funnier lines.

Peter Freund

November 11, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last weekend we honored our colleague Peter Freund, who died in June. Peter and George Martin were the co-founders, in the 1970s, of our New York Walk – an unofficial, informal, and very loosely planned event for faculty, students, friends, anyone who wanted to join us.  It started as a one-off in the 1970s but became a semi-annual event. Our route usually took us to places like Grand Central Station (Peter loved showing students the whispering gallery there) and downtown sites (Lower East Side, Chinatown). But for Saturday’s reunion, we walked the High Line.  George Martin and Laura Kramer, both retired, were there.

Faye Allard, our colleague till last year, came in from Philadelphia. Here she is with Sangeeta Parashar.

On Sunday, there was a memorial service.  More former Montclair colleagues came – Gil Klajman, Barbara Chasin – and spoke. 

Anecdotes, admiration, and appreciation were offered also by Peter’s wife Miriam, his sisters and nephews, and several friends and colleagues who collaborated with him on his research and activism, all with the goal of reducing the dominance of automobiles, especially in our cities.  (Peter was a founding member of Auto-Free New York, and he never learned to drive a car – a decision that was both ideological and prudent.)

Food and beer, travel and cities, generosity and humor – these were the recurrent themes in people’s reminiscences. That plus a deliberate unconventionality, often as a gambit to get others to question their usually unquestioned assumptions. Like tearing up a dollar bill or two on the first day of class, and when students got upset, asking them why. Peter had a wonderful golden retriever. He had named her Igor. He said it was in tribute to Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, but I think it was also so he could delight in the reactions of those who insisted that this male name was just wrong for a female pup or, better yet, that the dog would wind up with a confused gender-identity.  In a way I cannot quite articulate, this fits with something else Peter loved – British entertainments like The Goon Show, Monty Python, and Gilbert and Sullivan.  A female dog named Igor – Peter’s own Python sketch.

Peter Freund
November 14, 1940 - June 12, 2014

The ASA Footnotes obituary for Peter is here.

As Others See Us – Maybe Not

November 9, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

National character has been sliding out of fashion for a long time.  Here is the Google nGrams chart for the appearance of that phrase in books since 1800.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Except for a brief comeback after World War II (there’s something about the Germans), the direction has been downhill,  perhaps because it sounds so much like ethnic or cultural stereotyping. Or maybe it was because valid research on it was difficult and unrewarding. Whatever. Ordinary people, though, have no difficulty in attributing personal characteristics to entire nations. But as is often true among individuals, people do not always see themselves as other see them. And in some cases, they view themselves and others with ambivalence.

Pew recently asked Europeans what they thought of the EU countries. (The report is here.) Things are not going well economically in the EU, and the three traits Pew asked about have little to do with economic policy; instead they tap into people’s feelings about other nations and nationalities. 

Germany is doing best economically, so it’ s not surprising that the five countries doing worst see Germany as the most arrogant. (The Germans themselves modestly ranked their country as the least arrogant.)  Greece too suffers from discrepant perceptions and self-perception, especially in trustworthiness. All other countries rate Germany as the most trustworthy, but Greeks see Germany as least trustworthy.

Presumably, Europeans have concluded that the profligate public policies of Greece and Italy were, if not a prime cause of the collapse, then at least a drag on recovery. These countries could not be trusted to run their economies with honesty and prudence. The Italians seem willing to concede the point. But Greeks rank themselves as the most trustworthy, though on what basis one can only guess.

In two countries, the survey turned up bi-polar reactions. Poles ranked Germany as both most and least trustworthy. The Economist suspects a generational divide between “older Poles with memories of war and younger ones who admire its reputation for prudence.”  Even more puzzling are the French, who give themselves both the highest and lowest ranking on arrogance.  Two other countries agree on the former; but nobody else thinks the French are least arrogant.

Finally, while six of the eight countries identified Germany as least compassionate, every country saw itself as the most compassionate.  Why Germany?  People may see compassion as the opposite of self-interest, with non-Germans thinking that Germany should be willing to do more for other EU countries even at the expense of its own prosperity. At the same time, people in each country, including Germany, are thinking, “We’re being as generous as we can.”

So there is a remarkable similarity of responses here. Ask “Who is the most trustworthy, most arrogant, and least compassionate?” “Germany.”

Ask “Who is the most compassionate?” “We are.”