Monday, November 24, 2008 - Posts
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Melinda, it’s a fine idea to tell teenagers to wait. Except that it really doesn’t work. This is not liberal wishful thinking. Researchers have pried into the sex lives of abstinence-pledgers and discovered that at best, taking the pledge delays sex by 18 months. But it also encourages more of them to have unprotected sex. (See my review of the book, Forbidden Fruit, for Slate.) Teens who have pledged don’t really admit they are having sex until they’ve already had it, which is kind of too late for the condom (Witness Bristol. Also read Margaret Talbot on the messy realities of red state sex.) My other favorite sexy virgin of the screen is Lyla Garrity, the True Love Waits hottie on Friday Night Lights. For the first couple of episodes, she is snuggling with her boyfriend and dreaming about their wedding. Then she stumbles into an accidental kiss with her boyfriend’s best friend, and one scene later we see her getting up from his couch, pulling on her underwear. This is reality. It’s only in the vampire version that what the preacher said comes true: Go beyond the kiss, and you’re risking your life.
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Emily, Larry Kudlow and I don't agree on much, but we seem for now to be equally satisfied with the appointment of Christina Romer to chair the Council of Economic Advisers. Larry—and yes, the CNBC is still on; it's gotten to the point where I feel anxious when it's not on—is convinced on the basis of Romer's critiques of the New Deal that she is a "secret supply-sider" who believes cutting taxes, not using them to fund public programs that create jobs, is the way out of recession. I like her because of what she told the Times last month about the distinctly horrifying nature of this particular credit crisis: "If you told me we were spending like crazy to build schools and send everyone to college," she said, "that would have infinitely different implications than borrowing like crazy to finance current consumption.” Hmmm, interesting thought!
I'm pretty sure Kudlow's honeymoon with Romer will be short-lived unless he's intellectually honest enough—"audacious" thought but one can hope!—to recognize that while federal debt as a percentage of the GDP has shrunk steadily and considerably since the post-Depression era, consumer debt has rocketed from the mid-single digits in 1943 to 250 percent today in a phenomenon wonks call the Great Risk Shift that, along with the fact that "tax hikes on the rich" under FDR meant a 90 percent tax bracket, render most cautionary fiscal policy tales learned during the New Deal sort of completely nonapplicable.
I take these statistics, incidentally, from a Carlyle Group Power Point presentation forwarded to me by an i-banker friend; Wall Street recognizes this stuff—that's why they're so scared. Yesterday I was flipping through old clips from the Korean economic crisis in the late '90s to see if there wasn't anything America —or its auto companies—might learn from that country's astounding bounce back from a devastating nearly 7 percent GDP contraction it sustained in 1996, a recovery that, among many other things, catapulted ailing Hyundai Motors to bona fide auto brand greatness. And … not much, it looks like! Korea had sort of the opposite problems as us. Like … a fundamentally robust manufacturing sector that just needed a little fiscal discipline applied to it. And a somewhat stodgy cluelessness about marketing, design and other things "cool." And … too many households saving too much money.
Those problems, mercifully enough for the Koreans, turned out not to be insurmountable! I am happy to say I do not worry that Christina Romer would be so glib in describing ours. That is about the only thing I'm happy about.
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Welcome, Moe, and a question: Last week, Megan McArdle of the Atlantic expressed furious dismay that Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist and former Slate columnist, would not be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers because the Obama team wanted a woman in the post instead. McArdle was worried because she thought Cecelia Rouse was going to get the job, aruging that as a labor economist, Rouse was the wrong speciality. Maybe this is moot because, as you say, it's Christina Romer of UC-Berkeley who's chairing the CEA instead. Her expertise looks all too relevant: It includes "identification of monetary shocks" and "causes of the Great Depression." Meanwhile, Goolsbee has been out in front plenty for Obama, I'm glad to see, for one thing, because I had a great time editing him when he wrote for Slate.
So to get to my question, can we simply revel in the well-deserved rise of women to the top of Obama's economic heap, or do we have to worry that Romer leapfrogged there?
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Good afternoon, XX-ers! I am Moe, and I come to you today from my couch in New York's Lower East Side, where I am watching CNBC as usual, because nothing is more uplifting to the recently downsized employee than frenetic up-to-the-minute coverage of the collapse of the American economy! The big story today is the Treasury Department's massive bailout of Citigroup, about which I don't have much of an opinion, other than it seems more specific and tailored toward protecting the taxpayer than previous massive bailouts. This is no thanks, I presume, to our lame-duck president (who just actually managed to fail, during his brief statement on the matter, to correctly identify the bank whose $300 billion worth of assets his administration just guaranteed, stumbling over the word "Citigroup" and finally, lamely, sputtering "Citicorp.") But it most assuredly did involve the one unimpeachably capable Bush appointee that has been involved in this disaster: FDIC chairman Sheila Bair. Sheila Bair was Barney Frank's recommendation for the role of Obama's treasury secretary, and if nothing else we can be fairly assured she didn't get to be his favorite regulator by flirting with him, which is to get to the point I'm trying to get to: Sheila Bair is a woman! So, as it happens, is the newly appointed chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Berkeley prof Christina Roma, and the (superpretty) Princeton labor economist pictured here, Cecilia Rouse, reportedly a shoe-in for a CEA spot, along with alleged solicitor general shoe-in Preeta Bansal. Not to mention hedge fund manager Sandra Manske, who just wrote an angry e-mail excoriating the greed of her peers in the industry, many of whom have closed down their funds or suspended redemptions altogether while pocketing huge fees and passing the losses on to their investors.
Women, in other words, are a lot more visible in the job of cleaning up the disasters of the past 10 years than they were perpetuating and profiting from it. Certain women are outraged that this appears to be by design. This woman is not. But this week I'll shine my Google search field on the careers and personalities of some of the women likely to play major roles restoring our capitalism/democracy to working order and try to assess there gender has been a help/hindrance to their missions.
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True Love Waits (and waits and waits) was also the theme of my favorite show as a kid: Dark Shadows, starring the tortured, sorta good-guy vampire Barnabas Collins, who loved eyeliner, juggled relationships, and mostly kept his baser instincts in check. His girlfriends included trashy fellow bloodsucker Angelique—see what giving in got her?—and Josette, the love of his 18th-century life, who had only one dress and it was white; get it? Though long dead, Josette did sometimes walk out of her portrait to hang out with Barnabas. He was also much taken with, but never put the bite on, her modern-day doppelganger, Victoria WInters, the governess at Collinwood—played by Alexandra Isles, for whom I named my dolly in the first grade. (Sadly, Alexandra's later career included a real-life stint as Klaus von Bulow's mistress; Victoria would have known better.) Did the True Love Waits abstinence movement really fail, though, Hanna? Or is it more like AA, which doesn't work all that reliably but is still the best option we've got? Not saying sexuality is a medical condition, but if these programs help kids wait even a while, until they're maybe not ready but readier, isn't that a good thing?
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Hanna, I haven't seen Twilight, but I confess I'm dying to. I heard about the books for the first time this summer. A few 13-year-old girls I was around were obsessively devouring them, lounging on one another and gasping periodically. I asked them what made the Twilight saga good; they liked the story, they said. The marketing must have helped too: Target had HEAPS of the books on sale for a sticker price of $9.99. (Now it's on sale for $6.04.) I probably will see the movie, if for no other reason than to have a séance with a previous self—all those shots of pale, earnest teenagers in the preview sent me right back to yesteryear's adolescent yearning.
More meaningfully, I am struck by how many vampire-related cultural artifacts are cropping up around us, from Twlight to True Blood and more. Why? Your theory—that Twilight paradoxically advocates for safe sex by describing dangerous sex—is ingenious. But to me, the trend in vampires also has something to do with what I take to be a broad cultural anxiety about sex. Namely, this: Are we reaching a kind of sexual end point—a point of total saturation? At this point, our screen culture is so oversexed that liberals and conservatives alike are getting fed up with it. Turn on the TV, open a magazine, or take a walk, and you'll find that sex is everywhere. So what makes it sexy? (The other day a friend and I passed a subway ad that read "Bad Girls" and featured a clutch of skinny girls wearing cheap satin dresses. My friend rolled his eyes and said, "Bad girls are such a cliché—they're not bad anymore.")
I also wonder, though, if True Blood and Twilight might be read as an economic metaphor. Like Twilight, the vampires in True Blood mostly drink nonhuman blood (synthetic, in this case). But they still have to exercise a hell of a lot of restraint. Is there some coded message here about Americans and decadent materialism? It's as if the shows secretly convey some note to self: Too much appetite will get you fleeced. What looks sexy (a great mortgage) is actually deadly. I don't mean it's that literal, of course; but the subterranean anxiety of True Blood does seem to me to be as cultural as it is sexual.
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I have to say, I never saw the appeal of vampire cinema. Classic Dracula lit, steeped in metaphor, or even Anne Rice variations on a theme, OK, but I missed the cultural wave of Buffy and never saw the draw of bloodsucking dudes on-screen, even cute ones. Hanna's observation that the movie Twilight, a giant hit, by the way, is a template for Christian tenets of sexual abstinence, has changed my perspective. For sexually developing young women of all religious persuasions, timid about the physical and emotional risks of early sex, I suddenly see the allure of a nice safe vegetarian vampire.
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I know none of you are 13-year-old girls, but did any of you see Twilight this weekend? It's a movie about vampire love based on the Harry Potter-for-girls blockbuster series by Stephenie Meyer, a Mormon mom. I loved it, but what struck me most is how much it's an advertisement for the True Love Waits movement. High-schooler Bella Swan falls in love with Edward Cullen, who it turns out is a vampire. He thirsts for her blood, gives her desperate yearning looks. But he controls himself. He is part of a clan of "vegetarian" vampires who have taught themselves to live on animal blood and pass in the human world. In one amazing erotic scene, he shows up in her bedroom and says he will kiss her if she holds really, really still, because if she moves he won't be able to control himself. (By which he means kill her.) They kiss once, and then spend the night talking and snuggling in her room. The problem the True Love Waits movement could never solve is how to get teens to stop after one kiss. This is why the movement failed, except among a small minority of the super committed, who saved even the first kiss until after marriage. The answer, which never seems to have occurred to conservative Christians, is to date a vampire.
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