The Politics of Penis Shots

June 10, 2011 By Max Lindenman 6 Comments

So help me, this country needs more sex scandals. Every time a famous man does something untoward, every cultural critic fires back with an article on What Women Really Want. I’ll bet that also happens when a famous woman does something untoward — and, for that matter, whenever the Phoenix Cardinals lose. The mystery of What Women Really Want is so deep, it’s never the wrong time to show up with dynamite and a backhoe.

Yesterday in Salon, Tracy-Clark Flory gave Anthony Weiner’s hairless chest an emphatic thumbs-down. Duly noted, and fair enough. Today in Slate, Annie Lowrey confronts a gordian, um, bulge of opinion on Weiner’s boldest piece of performance art: the unveiled crotch shot. Do women find them sexy?

Among the nay-sayers is Cindy Meston, former president of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health:

“We spent six years of research on why women have sex,” Meston says. They compiled 237 reasons. Duty sex. Revenge sex. Pity sex. Bored sex, engaged in because women simply had nothing better to do. “Of the 237 reasons why women have sex,” Meston says, “not one was looking at a man’s genitals.”

Women, research increasingly shows, are nuanced sexual beings whose arousal depends on context, mood and a whole bunch of things they aren’t even aware of. Men are different. Men do tend to find the equivalent naked pictures of women titillating. When they send women photos of their genitalia, they are engaging in a sort of sexting golden rule: I think it’s hot, so you should, too. (If women also employed this rule, they would text pictures of themselves taking out the recycling.)

From there, Lowrey launches what she calls her “earnest, if lonely, defense of the erotic potential of the crotch shot”:

Many women might admit—when not giving silly quotes to publications trawling for tangential Weiner stories—that content matters, too. Penises might not be the most empirically beautiful things to look at. But they are erotic implements. Some women surely welcome the sight, and a few of them have admitted as much. As for what science has to say about it: Studies have found that women self-report and actually experience arousal in reaction to a great variety of sexual images. Plus, just because a photograph does not compel a woman to have sex, using the bar set by the Austin researcher, does not mean she does not find it sexy.

Then there is the more important, more complex matter of context. A decontextualized, unsolicited phallic photograph seems unlikely to send shivers up any given woman’s spine. But it would be absurd to deny the possible potency of a meaningful, contextualized shot sent to a game recipient. And Weiner’s photographs, for better or worse, do seem to have been those sort of I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours pics. They were sent with permission and reciprocated, save for one picture mistakenly sent to the wrong person.

While these titans are busy clashing, let’s pause to remember that women aren’t quite the only people on the planet; Guy-erdämmerung is still sometime in the future. There’s another, equally important question that Lowrey, along with her team of experts, appears to find beneath consideration, and that is: What do men expect to get out of sending crotch shots?

To arouse women? Maybe some do, although I would hope that, for these men, the crotch shot doesn’t represent the only prong, so to speak, in their attack. To create a sense of quid pro quo? (To use the common English translation here would be too tasteless, even for me.) In many cases, certainly. I don’t think that’s the only motive, though, or even the most important. To illustrate, let me relate an anecdote.

Once, on a break at work, I saw a female friend pick up her cell phone and let out a long sigh. “He’s at it again,” she muttered, to nobody in particular.

I asked who was at what again. “My friend Jeff,” she said. “He just sent me another picture of his penis. They show up in batches. I won’t hear from him for months, then one day — whoosh! — five penis shots before dinnertime.”

It emerged that she and Jeff had never been lovers. “I’m sure he’d like to sleep with me, but he’s out in L.A., so I don’t think anything’s going to happen, even if I wanted it to, which I don’t.”

Let’s examine the data here: a man is separated from a woman by a six-hour car drive; he’s probably figured out by now she considers him no more than a friend; she’s never sent him any risqué photographs of herself. And yet, at lengthy but regular intervals, he persists in presenting his member for inspection. Why?

To me, it’s obvious: he craves appreciation. More than anything, he wants to hear some variation on “My, that’s quite a penis you’ve got!” Some men would settle for “That’s a perfectly adequate penis you’ve got.” None of the other perks — the reciprocal photograph, the hookup — would be half so easy to enjoy without that initial nihil obstat.

In Jonathan Ames’ Wake Up, Sir!, the hero, Alan, manages to get the lovely Vivian into bed, only to lose heart when she tells him her last several boyfriends were Yoruba. When she assures him he doesn’t fall short of her expectations, he’s ready to perform. Magic words, you might say.

You’re probably curious, so I might as well tell you: no. I’ve never sent out my resume, Weiner-style. Why not? Well, among other reasons, I’ve got a blog. If anyone wants to feast her eyes on my potential for creation — voila. For that kind of advertising, paragraphs are safer than penises. They probably won’t land you in the headlines, and what’s more, you can make them as long as you want.

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Sex Tweets First Step to Tyranny?

June 8, 2011 By Max Lindenman 1 Comment

According to the Times, “a small group of determined, self-described conservatives” must have thought so. Banding together and dubbing themselves the #bornfreecrew, they “took it upon themselves to contact young women they believed to be ‘schoolgirls’…urging them publicly to stay away from [Representative Anthony Weiner]“:

By early May, members of the group were also speculating that Mr. Weiner would be caught in a sex scandal. The leader, a man who identified himself on Twitter as Dan Wolfe and used the handle @PatriotUSA76, is the same Twitter user who discovered the photograph that Mr. Weiner took of himself and sent to Ms. Cordova. He shared it with his followers and the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who made it public the next day.

As Democrats and Republicans embrace Twitter and other social media tools as a way to interact with their constituents and woo voters, many have discovered a downside to online communication: cyberstalkers, who track and criticize their every move.
But even by the standards of modern politics, Dan Wolfe and other members of the #bornfreecrew watched Mr. Weiner’s account with particular ferocity, and a sharp focus on his interactions with women. In several instances the congressman dropped his online contact with women after they were identified by the crew, suggesting that Mr. Weiner might have been aware of its actions.

There were at least two female high school students among the 191 people Mr. Weiner followed. There is no evidence that he engaged in private discussions with them, and he has said that to his knowledge he has not had any online sexual communications with under-age women.

Mr. Wolfe, whose account vanished from Twitter last Friday, has been one of the more mysterious characters in the congressman’s saga, refusing to reveal his real name even to the other members of the #bornfreecrew. He joined Twitter on Jan. 6 and began posting multiple messages criticizing both Mr. Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

By March, Mr. Wolfe had more than 1,000 followers and was actively befriending fellow conservatives. Group members joined him in scrutinizing those whom Mr. Weiner was following and their Twitter profiles, and commenting if the person he followed was a young woman.

On April 14, for example, Mr. Wolfe tweeted, “Weiner’s new follow is a high school girl. LMAO! Freak!”

Michael Stack, 39, of New Jersey, who describes himself on his Twitter profile as a “Republican who believes in the principles that made this country great,” said he befriended Mr. Wolfe on Twitter (they never met in person or spoke on the phone). “Soon, Dan told me Weiner was following a bunch of girls,” Mr. Stack said. “I thought it was kind of weird.”

Mr. Stack said that Mr. Wolfe had told him in a private message that Mr. Weiner had been following a porn star who was later identified as Ginger Lee. “He tweeted about it and then the porn star was gone,” Mr. Stack said. “He was paying attention,” he said, referring to Mr. Weiner.

On May 5, Mr. Wolfe told him that he had a friend who knew Matt Drudge who had said that a scandal involving a member of Congress was coming soon. The same day that Meagan Broussard, 26, of Texas, said that she had received an e-mail from Mr. Weiner with a photo she had asked him to take, while holding up a white piece of paper that said “me.”

In fairness, what they did wasn’t bad by any means. Although there’s no evidence Weiner exchanged any private messages with the two high school girls he was following, well…he was following them. One of the #bornfreecrew called that “creepy,” and he’s absolutely right. If the parents and faculty of St. Pat’s Elementary deserve props for their watchfulness, then in all fairness, so do these people.

But I have deduct points for the use of Revolutionary War imagery. Taxation without representation is bad; following high school girls on Twitter is bad. But they’re bad for completely different reasons, and deserve, therefore, to be fried in separate tar barrels. As General Putnam ordered his troops just before Gage’s men began their assault on Breed’s Hill, keep your freaking powder dry already.

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Weeping (A Little) for Weiner

June 7, 2011 By Max Lindenman 4 Comments

Alas, poor Anthony

I weep for Anthony Weiner — not a big, blubbering flood of tears, mind you, but one or two. Picture a Native American contemplating a crumbling ecosystem, and you’ll get the idea.

All the evidence of Weiner’s cyber-flings — the pec-flashing photos released by Andrew Breitbart, the the explcit Facebook messages now in the hands of Radar and the Star — show him doing something that few people can do with real dignity, and that is make love. I use the expression “make love” both in its current sense, meaning “to have sex with,” and in its traditional sense, meaning “to flirt, to pitch woo, to talk someone into the sack.” On cyberspace, the two meet, collide, and stagger off arm-in-arm.

Think about it: only given the physique and stamina of a sex industry professional is it possible to complete the act of coitus in such a way that will favorably impress an audience. For many, approximating the act in words is even harder. It requires not only a lowered set of inhibitions, but also an inventive mind and a facility with words. It also requires a sense of taste and timing that spies the line that separates daring from cheesy. A kind of social IED, this line has a way of concealing and disguising itself until it’s too late — especially, so to speak, in the heat of battle.

As Sandra Tsing Loh writes: “We see talking dirty as a leap across the abyss. If you make it, well, you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time, and had some chuckles in the process. If you don’t, you plummet to a humiliating death.” Think of Prince Charles telling Camilla Parker-Bowles: “I’ll just live forever inside your trousers or something”; or, for that matter, Bill O’Reilly spinning fantasies about showers and brown women. You’ll just have heard the sound of a body going splat.

Another way to say this is that it’s hard to look or sound sexy when you’re actually sexed up, hard to look or sound cool when you’re hot. For many, I suspect, this is the real draw of l’affaire Weiner — not the chance to cluck the tongue at a faithless husband, but the chance to giggle at a middle-aged man making like Tarzan. God, what a dork.

A friend of mine — a woman of deep mind and great heart — recently told me, “Those pictures of Weiner shirtless really skeeve me out. I have no fondness for sickeningly skinny men.” An honest response and a reasonable response. Weiner might just have a build and a cyber-sex style that only a lover could love. How many of us could really say differently? Would a shirtless webcam shot of Chris Christie go over any better?

Now, it’s possible to argue that anyone who entrusts any potentially embarrassing words or images to the Internet deserves whatever humiliation awaits him upon its general release. Spoken like Hammurabi’s AG. It may soon be hard to find someone who hasn’t exploited the ‘net for that purpose — a purpose for which it is admirably designed. Last year, when racy photos of Congressional candidate Krystal Ball made the rounds, Ball shot back a response that was pure common sense: So what?

So what indeed. For political candidates, restraint around enticing technology is key when the technology consists of nuclear or chemical weapons. But the internet? To exchange hot text or pictures with a consenting adult? Come on. To put a twist on Andy Warhol’s prediction, soon, many of us will be porn stars or writers of erotica (if we’re not already). Only a few will become famous, but they’ll represent the tip of a very big iceberg.

Now, Ms. Ball complained of sexism, and she may have a point. In certain quarters, any woman spotted in suggestive photos may be judged a slattern. But I would argue that the old double standard has more than two dimensions. If that woman is young and conventionally attractive, she will never look quite so pathetic as a middle-aged man attempting the same feat. The question of whose political fortunes will suffer more is hard to answer in the abstract; there are too many variables to consider. The social penalties for a woman are too arcane for me to weigh — hopefully, some gender insider will help me out. But with those caveats in mind, I argue that to be seen and judged not just wanting but silly, represents a special kind of blow to a man’s sense of manhood.

For a while now, members of the so-called Men’s Movement have been carping that their gender is falling behind — 57% percent of all college undergrads are women; young female professionals earn more than their male counterparts. Me, I’m not completely sure I’m on board — I don’t like viewing relations between the sexes as a zero-sum game. But in holding Weiner up to such elaborate mockery, we have an instance where masculinity really is being devalued. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that much of being a man amounts to a painful series of clumsy attempts at being a man. Once society starts marking men down so brutally for each shortfall, then society will have started thinking like a chick. And when that happens, an awful lot of us will have to throw in the loofah sponge.

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