White Weddings, The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

Papa Kass on the Mamas

The need to tell young women how to behave often comes over middle-aged men—it's an itch right up there with buying a flashy new car. And Mansfield's case for modesty is merely a new version of, say, Leon Kass' argument in "The End of Courtship," a 1997 article currently posted on the Public Interest Web site, which I happened to stumble across after reading Mansfield's remarks. One similarity between them is particularly worth note. Mansfield and Kass don't suggest that female sexual activity is immoral or wrong. They suggest that it makes women unhappy: "Young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused," Kass writes, voicing an avuncular worry about our "grim" lives. Like Mansfield, he goes on to express concern that contemporary sexuality isn't morally but erotically bankrupt. The best sex, he argues, is stimulated by reading poets like Shelley, and, "if properly sublimated, is transformable into genuine and lofty longings—not only for love and romance but for all the other higher human yearnings." Reading these two pieces back to back, one finds oneself envisioning conservative elders gathered over brunch with teary-eyed twentysomethings, Sex and the City-style, nodding and patting hands: I feel your pain, honey, they soothe. And I'll tell you how to really get your groove on. First, go get a ring.

Forty years after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the terms of the debate over sexuality have irrevocably changed, and it is curious to watch middle-aged male traditionalists trying to keep up. If they have not quite absorbed the notion that women need to have a voice in shaping their own sexual identity, they acknowledge that it is no longer permissible, or at any rate very popular, simply to pronounce that premarital sex is wrong. Thus they cast the sexual revolution as something that makes women unhappy, couching their critique in the fuzzy language of gratification and personal gain that we Oprah-raised kids can relate to. Beneath Kass' pronouncements on what is erotic is a struggle not to come off as a prude; beneath Mansfield's, a quest to establish his credentials as not anti-sex. By adopting a soft stance of empathy, they conveniently skirt the need to supply any facts and figures about just what is going on in the hearts and bedrooms of America's youth.

"Birds do it/ Bees do it ..."

In a way, this shift in rhetoric (from morality to gratification) makes it look like the argument about the criteria Americans should use to shape our ideas about relationships and marriage has already been settled. But it's more complicated than this. There's something slippery about the "sex will make you unhappy" position. It relies on a retrograde notion of female vulnerability while pretending to take women's side. It's offered in the name of an open-mindedness that is something of a pretense: Professor Mansfield does not exactly wish that sexual freedom had panned out for us—or recognize the extent to which it has. He presumes, for example, that all women have similar experiences and want the same things: love and marriage, the baby in the baby carriage, and so forth. Finally, this position holds women responsible for the supposed unwillingness of American young people to get with the marriage program and settle down. But what evidence is there that women are deeply unhappy in their sexual relationships with men? And if women really are, why is it up to them to "fix" what's broken by insisting on early marriage rather than on, say, serial monogamy followed by marriage later? If things are so bad, how do we explain the fact that social indicators are, for the most part, on an uptick over the past decade?

In fact, the evidence is thin that a woman should be concerned that giving out a "sample" will make a man less prone to marriage—or a future husband less likely to want to stay with her. First of all, according to the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, "only 36% of single men agree that 'single men have better sex lives than married men.' " And only 22 percent of unmarried men report feeling that marriage is "personally" not for them, even if they're not interested in marriage in their immediate future. Second, engaging in premarital sex with the partner you eventually marry apparently does not make you more likely to get a divorce, according to a 2003 study cited by the National Marriage Project. Kass complains that "the elite, those who in previous generations would have defined the conventions in these matters, lack a cultural script whose denouement is marriage." But is this the case? The majority of "elites" still get married, according to recent reports. And if they get married a little older—as Kass complains they do—this only seems to make their marriages more stable. The National Marriage Project reports that getting married after the age of 25 reduces the chance of divorce.

Fears of sexual anarchy and uncurbed licentiousness afflict every age. But the supposed sexual anarchy we live in is not as nihilistic and free of "family values" as these sorts of pieces make it out to be (just as the golden age of 1950s marriage wasn't as golden as it is retrospectively made out to be). A 1992 study (conducted before Kass wrote his piece) found that 79 percent of Americans between 25 and 29 had had zero or one sexual partners over the past year, and the same was true for a significant (often larger) majority of Americans of all ages. It also found that the majority of marriages are characterized by fidelity and do not end in divorce. Another study found that this is especially the case among white Americans who are educated and get married over the age of 25 (a category the majority of Mansfield's Harvard students fall into). A recent study of teen behavior actually found that intercourse was down and oral sex was slightly up—which suggests, in fact, that students are listening to sex ed messages that advocate postponing full intercourse.

Of course, there remains important stock-taking to do, and Mansfield and Kass assume with good reason that the results of the sexual revolution are imperfect. But if the men who assume they have their pulse on the female experience were really paying attention, they might realize they could entrust some of this work to women themselves. Mansfield is making his gallant argument at a moment when there are plenty of women raising concerns that he might well appreciate, among them Ariel Levy in her recent book Female Chauvinist Pigs. Levy argues that we do live in a culture that celebrates—in its magazines, TV, and movies—an unbridled sexuality that hasn't served women well. And she claims that the proliferation of pornography has posed some intractable problems. But her proposed solutions don't presume that experience follows a tidy script of wanting to get a ring on our finger right away. She takes into account lesbians (who mostly can't get married) and women who aren't looking for long-term commitment. Her willingness to rethink ingrained liberal assumptions—and to make women attentive to the consequences of promiscuous Girls Gone Wild-style behavior—is appealingly unpredictable.

The irony is that we seem only to have grown more demanding about what constitutes a happy marriage. And while marriage is undeniably less stable than it once was, it hardly seems on the verge of collapse. Recent studies show only a slight decline—5 and 8.5 percent respectively for men and women—in the reported happiness levels of married couples since the early 1970s, and we don't know what, exactly, accounts for this shift. Meanwhile, it remains unclear what role Mansfield and Kass think modesty actually plays in stable romantic relationships. Is Mansfield so sure everyone—not to mention today's 20-year-olds—finds it erotic? Take, for instance, the activist Havelock Ellis, an advocate of "trial" marriages, who in the 1920s—he was then in his 60s—was saying things about women that sound eerily familiar: "Modesty may almost be regarded as the chief secondary sexual character of women on the psychical side," he observed. But he went on to suggest that women would have to overcome this attribute before a happy sexual marriage—of precisely the type that Kass is advocating—could exist.

http://www.slate.com/id/2128818/

Can you be a fat female and also an object of desire? This is the question posed in different ways by both new plays. It's no surprise that for LaBute's characters, the answer is a brutal "No." But Ensler, a self-declared radical feminist, works herself into intellectual knots trying to come to terms with her own bodily obsessions. (For her, it's more about feeling fat than being fat.) The therapeutic mode doesn't make for gripping theater; here it also makes for a lot of wheel-spinning, particularly because there's a hard truth that Ensler can't bring herself to acknowledge about women's situations today, including her own: There's simply an irreconcilable contradiction between feminism and femininity, two largely incompatible strategies women have adopted over the years to try to level the playing field with men.

The reason they're incompatible is simple. Femininity is a system that tries to secure advantages for women, primarily by enhancing their sexual attractiveness to men. It also shores up masculinity through displays of feminine helplessness or deference. But femininity depends on a sense of female inadequacy to perpetuate itself. Completely successful femininity can never be entirely attained, which is precisely why women engage in so much laboring, agonizing, and self-loathing, because whatever you do, there's always that straggly inch-long chin hair or pot belly or just the inexorable march of time. (Even the dewiest ingénue is a Norma Desmond waiting to happen.)

Feminism, on the other hand, is dedicated to abolishing the myth of female inadequacy. It strives to smash beauty norms, it demands female equality in all spheres, it rejects sexual market value as the measure of female worth. Or that was the plan. Yet for all feminism's social achievements, what it never managed to accomplish was the eradication of the heterosexual beauty culture, meaning the time-consuming and expensive potions and procedures—the pedicures, highlights, wax jobs on sensitive areas, "aesthetic surgery," and so on. For some reason, the majority of women simply would not give up the pursuit of beautification, even those armed with feminist theory. (And even those clearly destined to fail.)

Why is this women's continuing plight? (Even minus financial imperatives, as women increasingly achieve economic independence from men.) Ensler trots out the usual suspects: unrealistic media images, capitalism, mothers. She also spent six years globe-trotting to 40 countries to interview other women on the subject. Lo and behold, everywhere she went, she found foreign counterparts of herself, women who loathe some part of their bodies. Much of the play consists of Ensler impersonating this Olympic village of self-abnegating women.

One problem with this brand of global feminism is how closely it resembles narcissism on a global scale: Women everywhere mirror me. Instead, Ensler should have interviewed a few anthropologists since according to Kulick and Meneley's Fat, bodily attributes like pot bellies actually have entirely different cross-cultural meanings. Fat connotes very different things in different cultures or in subcultures like fat activism, gay male chubby-chasers, and hip hop. Fat may be a worldwide phenomenon—and increasingly so—but not everyone is neurotic about it, or they're not neurotic in the same way.

Take the chapter by anthropologist Rebecca Popenoe, based on her fieldwork among desert Arabs in Niger. This is a society with no media influences or beauty industries, where women strive to be as fat as possible. Girls are force-fed to achieve this ideal; stretch marks are regarded as beautiful. Yet somehow this beauty norm doesn't create the same sense of anguish that afflicts Western women striving for thinness, leading Popenoe to suggest that it's the Western obsession with individualism and achievement that bears the blame—not media images, not a top-down backlash against feminism, as Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth has it. In Niger, failing to achieve the prevailing beauty standard isn't a personal failure; it just means someone has bewitched you, or you have a thin constitution.

But reading Popenoe won't reassure anyone seeking an exit route from female body anxieties. Where the Nigerois fatties and the dieting-obsessed Ensler find common ground is that all are striving for sexual attractiveness in the context of heterosexuality. The Nigerois women fatten themselves to be more desirable to Nigerois men. Women here may pant, "I'm doing it for myself" while strapped to their treadmills, but the fact is that the beauty culture is a heterosexual institution, and to the extent that women participate in its rituals, they, too, are propping up a heterosexual society and its norms. The problem for a feminist is that historically speaking such norms have worked out far less advantageously for women than for men.

The disadvantages can take rather subtle forms, though, as The Good Body itself unwittingly demonstrates, once a recurring character known as "My Partner" is introduced. As described by Ensler—rather reverently—this is the perfect man. He cooks, he adores her stomach, and he's so enlightened that when they get in a fight while on vacation (she accuses him of calling her fat), he tells her he can't compete with her stomach and leaves. In other words, the Partner's dramatic function is to articulate the feminist position—which he does far more adequately than Ensler herself, turning The Good Body into a feminist play that somehow props up the most traditional of sexual positions: man on top.

If even feminist theater ends up reinforcing masculine prowess, perhaps it's because heterosexuality requires asymmetry between the sexes. Heterosexuality always was the Achilles heel of feminism because the asymmetries involved usually took the form of adequacy for one sex, inadequacy for the other. And so things seem to remain: You may hear a lot of tough talk about empowerment and independence in women's culture today, except you hear it from women shopping for baby-doll outfits or getting Brazilian bikini waxes and double-D cup breast implants. ("I'm doing it for myself.")

Of course, masculinity has always been afflicted with its own bodily anxieties; it just compensates for them differently (or overcompensates). Check out Viagra sales if in doubt. Or those penis-extender spam ads. Only feminism-for-dummies defines body pathologies as a female franchise alone, especially since that just buttresses the illusion of masculine invulnerability all over again—traditional femininity via the back door.

Will femininity continue to beat down the feminist challenge? It's been remarkably tenacious to date. Or will women keep trying to reconcile the two through conflicted enterprises such as empowerment plastic surgery and bestowing men with feminist prowess? If only internal gymnastics burned calories! Then we could all achieve flatter stomachs with far fewer hours at the gym.

http://www.slate.com/id/2111753

No Backstreet Girls Allowed, Why aren't there any coed pop groups? We want it that way. By Dann Halem, Posted Friday, April 20, 2001, at 5:30 PM PT

By most critical accounts, Josie and the Pussycats is a grade-A rip on the music industry. Everything we've long suspected—subliminal messages in the lyrics, rampant corporate exploitation, a conspiratorial Carson Daly—comes to life as the Pussycats painfully learn the ropes of the business. But even as the all-girl Kitties are groomed to replace the film's boy band, one music-business conspiracy manages to pass through the movie unspoken: Pop groups don't mix boys and girls.

The idea of single-sex pop acts is so heavily ingrained in the music business you've probably never noticed it. But consider today's top pop groups—Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, Destiny's Child, Dream, 98 Degrees. Not one is coed. And look at pop groups from the '50's on: the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, the Shirelles, Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers. All single-sex. Even pseudo-documentary programs like Making the Band and Popstars, about aspiring pop groups, take for granted that viewers will understand why record labels cast all boys or all girls.

Oddly enough, coed bands are nothing new in rock and hip-hop. Smashing Pumpkins, No Doubt, Garbage, the Fugees, Hole, the Corrs, Save Ferris, A Perfect Circle, 10,000 Maniacs, and Arrested Development have all succeeded at differing levels using coed crews—not to mention the success decades ago of the Mamas and the Papas, the Pretenders, and Fleetwood Mac.

But pop acts operate under vastly different standards. For one thing, they don't play instruments onstage. (Well, the Pussycats do, but they have to conceal the fact that they're not actually singing.) Groups are assembled using the old barbershop quartet formula of mixing different vocal ranges in the hope of creating an overall sound. And these days there's a greater emphasis on a group's overall look. Pop star wardrobes are carefully coordinated and dance moves choreographed to reflect a subtle sexuality, racy enough for teeny-boppers, but not blatant enough to offend parental sensibilities.

So, why the segregation? For starters, it's hard to croon convincingly about the pop world's staple subject—teen-age yearning and heartache—if you're harmonizing with the object of your affection. That's why, when Boys II Men join with Mariah Carey or 'N Sync pairs up with Britney Spears (and that's yet to happen in a studio), the songs have nothing to do with young love. Boys II Men's collaboration with Carey, "One Sweet Day," is a song about death—not exactly how most bands would utilize one of pop music's sexiest singers.

Which brings us to the second problem with coed pop groups: They're not sexy enough. In pop music, ever conformist and eager to please, there are only two real pop acts: girl groups espousing "Girl Power" while trying to be your daughter's best friend, and boy groups with perfect hair and teeth eager for a place on her bedroom wall. Mix the two, and the result is confusion. The few coed pop acts today have all the edge of Up With People. Britain's S Club 7 (four girls, three boys)—created by the former manager of the Spice Girls—and Sweden's A*Teens (two girls, two boys) have found some success in Europe, but they haven't caught on in the States. S Club 7 have their own Monkees-style TV series airing in 100 countries, and A*Teens' album Teen Spirit peaked in the Billboard Top 50. But S Club's album 7 has slid to 90^th while A*Teens have fallen to 96^th—not a good sign that either group will become mainstays on anyone's list of big-time acts.

But really, could they expect to? Other than the occasional married duo (Sonny & Cher) or family group (Donny & Marie) there's not enough variety to know. Christina Aguilera and Ricky Martin's recent duet was a flop, showing that when men and women share a pop stage, they check their sexuality at the door. If Britney and Justin merely dating is outrageous enough for tabloid pages, would record executives ever be willing to let everybody's favorite Catholic schoolgirl take the stage with her hot honey and beg, "Hit me baby one more time?"

The collaborative result could be scandalous. Or—even worse—it might not be interesting at all.

http://www.slate.com/id/104666

The Star, the Born-Again Sinner, and the Gangster, Updating Constance Rourke's famous American archetypes. By Adam Kirsch, Posted Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Americans may explain themselves to themselves more than any people on earth. Ever since Emerson and Whitman, our native writers have come back to the old questions: What is an American? How are we different from our ancestors in Europe or Africa or Asia? And why can't we come to a conclusive answer after centuries of asking?

One of the best answers was offered 73 years ago in Constance Rourke's American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Rourke's is one of those books that is always being rediscovered. First published in 1931, it was issued in paperback in 1971 and reissued in 1986; and now it is available to another generation of readers, in a new edition introduced by Greil Marcus. Rourke was a pioneer of what was not yet called "cultural studies" and enjoys a cult status among critics and writers, but she deserves a much wider audience—especially now, when endless books and op-eds are being written to explain why our "national character" inspires such envy and mistrust around the world. For American Humor shows, like no other book, how much of that character has remained the same for the last 200 years, and, equally important, the ways we have changed.

Rourke, born in 1885, was part of a generation of critics—including Edmund Wilson and Van Wyck Brooks—that taught Americans to look at their culture in a new way. Instead of the genteel literary heritage of New England, which provided the official, schoolroom version of American culture, Rourke sought the essence of Americanness in folk culture and especially in popular comedy. Much like George Orwell, who in the 1930s searched boys' stories and seaside postcards for clues to the English character, Rourke studied what Marcus' introduction calls "old almanacs, newspaper files, forgotten biographies, songbooks, joke manuals, penny dreadfuls, the unreliable leavings of nineteenth-century American culture."

What she found there were three archetypal figures, emerging from popular comedy: the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel. Each member of "the trio," as Rourke often called them, took recognizable form in the 1820s and flourished until the Civil War. More important, she wrote, they remained at the heart of "a consistent native tradition," which she traced through the classic American writers—Whitman, Hawthorne, Henry James—and up to the modernists of her own day, including T.S. Eliot. "Humor has been a fashioning instrument in America," Rourke concluded. "Its objective … has seemed to be that of creating fresh bonds, a new unity ... and the rounded completion of an American type."

Each member of the trio contributed to that type. The Yankee, Rourke wrote, was "astute and simple, gross and rambling, rural to the core," hiding his sharp intelligence under a taciturn mask. He loved whittling, swapping, and practical jokes, and he always parried a question with another question. On the stage, where he was given outlandish New England names like "Jedediah Homebred" and "Jerusalem Dutiful," the Yankee was shown thwarting his enemies—especially the snobbish Briton—thanks to his sly rustic wit.

If the Yankee turned silence into advantage, the backwoodsman triumphed through sheer volume: "He shouted as though he were intoxicated by shouting." Born in the wilds of Kentucky and Tennessee, the backwoodsman—faced with hostile Indians and unforgiving soil—met adversity with comic self-inflation. Davy Crockett, the classic backwoodsman of legend, was "shaggy as a bear, wolfish about the head, and could grin like a hyena until the bark would curl off a gum log"; he could "whip his weight in wild cats" and "put a rifle-ball through the moon." The tall tale, with its deadpan exaggeration, was the natural idiom of the backwoodsman.

Third, and most intriguing, was the minstrel: the white performer in blackface, of whom "Jim Crow" Rice was the first and most famous. Rourke acknowledges that "blackface minstrelsy has long been considered a travesty in which the Negro was only a comic medium." But she honors it nonetheless, for providing a picture, however distorted, of genuine African-American folk culture: "[T]he songs and to a large extent the dances [in minstrel performances] show Negro origins," Rourke insists, "though they were often claimed by white composers." "The Negro," in this strangely mediated form, communicated African music and dance to America; a century before the Jazz Age, Stephen Foster took the tune for "Camptown Races" from a black folk melody. The minstrel's "humor" combined energetic nonsense-verse—what Rourke calls "unreasonable headlong triumph launching into the realm of the preposterous"—with the "tragic undertone" found in work songs and spirituals.

Rourke's achievement in bringing "the trio" to life is remarkable, and the quotations and anecdotes she gathers from her 19^th-century sources remain startlingly fresh. But reading American Humor in 2004, one can't help but wonder: Do these three figures still "induce an irresistible response," as they did for Rourke in 1931? Do the Yankee, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel still offer "emblems for a pioneer people" when the people aren't such pioneers anymore?

The answers, I think, are "no," "yes," and "sort of," in that order. Of the trio, the Yankee is certainly the least visible in today's popular culture. Partly this is because New England has lost its distinctive rural character, which could still be recognized as late as Robert Frost's North of Boston in 1914. But the vanishing of the Yankee is also due to our diminished taste for his virtues: self-deprecation and a poker face. Far more to our taste is the outrageous boastfulness of the backwoodsman, who finds descendants in the action hero and the rap star. In the superhuman feats of the first and the braggadocio of the second, we see the strutting of the figure Rourke called "the gamecock of the wilderness." And, of course, the baleful tradition of the minstrel can be seen in the relentless appropriation of black popular culture by white performers, from Elvis to the present. But the qualities Rourke admired in minstrel performances—the triumphant energy, the tragic undertone—are still very much a part of the American aesthetic. The difference is that now we can experience it in genuine African-American culture—from the jazz of Louis Armstrong to the prose of Ralph Ellison—as well as in hybrids and imitations.

Most interesting of all, however, is to speculate about what a contemporary version of Rourke's book might include. If a Rourke of 2031 were to use popular culture to identify our most common archetypes, what would she find? First of all, I think, would be the Star, a type unknown in 1830 but absolutely central today. The Star is our secular, consumerist version of the Greek god: The pinnacle of aspiration and the focus of fantasy, he or she gets to enjoy what the rest of us only dream about. The Star—whether he is an actor or singer or sports figure—is not simply admired for what he is done; he is worshipped for who he is, gratuitously. The intensity of our worship and need also gives rise to the subcategory of the Fallen Star, from Marilyn Monroe to Kurt Cobain. The Fallen Star allows us to mix pity with our envy, reassuring us that, while we may dream of becoming one, the Star is best seen from a distance.

If the Star is the American triumphant, the Born-Again Sinner is the American repentant. The Sinner can be born again in the literal, Christian sense—this has been a common American experience ever since the 1820s, though Rourke only touches on religion in American Humor. But the posture of repentance, with the corresponding expectation of forgiveness, has transcended its evangelical origin, and today it shows up just about every time an American does something wrong. Bill Clinton's lip-quivering apology for the Monica Lewinsky affair is the most famous recent example. On the other hand, Martha Stewart was widely blamed, after her conviction, for not giving a better performance as the Sinner—for failing to break down and ask forgiveness, as the archetype demands. Whether such contrition is genuine hardly matters; the archetype is so powerful that simply to act like a Born-Again Sinner is almost a guarantee of absolution.

Finally, there is the latest incarnation of an ancient American trope: the Gangster, whose ancestors are the backwoodsman, the cowboy, and the pirate. What defines him is not just his criminality or his violence, but the way he puts these things at the service of his own defiant moral code. The Gangster exalts personal loyalty and masculine power, in opposition to what he sees as an inhumane and hypocritical mainstream culture. Americans like to see the Gangster punished, in the end. But we want him to be killed, not imprisoned—his ending should be as outsized as his life. The Star, the Born-Again Sinner, and the Gangster account for a great deal of today's American culture. But they are notably less comic than the archetypes Rourke found in our national psyche; after 200 years, perhaps America's youthful high spirits have turned into something darker and more resigned.