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With how many people did people used to sleep? It’s hard to tell. Language changes, and there’s the problem of bragging. Take the French. Stendhal in his treatise on love is expansive on the seduction strategies of his friends (hide under the bed; announce yourself so late in the night that kicking you out would already be a scandal), but in The Red and the Black Julien Sorel sleeps with exactly two women—and for this they cut off his head! A generation later, the dissipated Frederic Moreau hardly does any better in Sentimental Education. Flaubert himself mostly slept with prostitutes. In Russia, one could always sleep with one’s serfs, as Tolstoy did. (He felt terrible about it.) But peers, acquaintances, members of one’s own class? America was the worst. Henry James in his notebooks wonders if he should write a story about a man, “like W. D. H. [Howells], who all his life has known but one woman.” James had known zero women! Twenty years later, there was Greenwich Village. Edna St. Vincent Millay, riding back and forth all night on the ferry, was the most promiscuous literary woman of her time. But her biographer puts the grand total of her conquests at fourteen, and some of these, according to a rival biographer, are questionable—and three were “well-known homosexuals.” So ten. For the modern college senior, this is a busy but not extravagant Spring Break.
But the price for our liberation has been high. It has been: Dating. Has any generation before ever had to go on so many dates? The economies of major metropolitan centers are now almost wholly reliant on the dating industry—in the bistros, bars, nightclubs. At every turn, the dater finds himself flattered: advice books, reality television shows, an infinite selection of white striped shirts to wear untucked over jeans…Every culture produces its paradigmatic social situation, and the date is now ours…
Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it’s an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner. Keep Looking, says dating. You’re Not Done Yet. What About That One? And That One? Dating, like the tyrant, seeks perfection (within a certain price range). Whereas the heart, like the eye, can only cling to imperfections: her funny stride, and the way her voice breaks, child-like, on the phone. And so the dater, self-baffling, seeks what the heart cannot understand.
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Harper’s have started posting a lot more of their content online. I wonder if this is connected to Lapham’s handing over editorial responsibility? Anyway, here’s an interesting piece on the mail order bride business:
Shyly, slyly, hopefully, the men around the table smiled; these damaged guys, so desperate to believe.
In one form or another, the so-called mail-order bride has been part of American life since colonial days. Even today, many of New Orleans’ older families claim to be descended from the “casket girls” Louis XV sent from France to wed Louisiana colonists in the early eighteenth century, the term derived from the chests the women were given to carry their few belongings. And although westerns and Harlequin novels have perhaps oversold the ubiquity of mail-order marriages on the frontier—much as the role of gunfighters in those days has been oversold—such unions, whether organized by religious groups or entrepreneurs, did take place throughout the pioneer era. Bachelor farmers wrote in search of wives not only to their support networks back East but all the way to the old country. The men’s magazines of the day advertised the services of marriage brokers right alongside ads for snake-oil miracle cures and such cutting-edge mechanical marvels as the chain-driven bicycle. In turn-of-the-century Chicago alone, police broke up as many as 125 fraudulent marriage agencies, seizing and burning “wagon loads” of photographs of fictitious brides.
During most of the twentieth century, however—what with manifest destiny having been achieved, and the focus of American life having shifted from mining camps and cattle ranges to cities, suburbs, and malls—the phenomenon all but died out, except for a small traffic, impossible to quantify, which seems to have focused on women from Southeast Asia. Companies like A Foreign Affair (AFA) have sprung up only since the mid-1990s, when their founders spotted vast opportunity in the contemporaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Internet.
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Getting all Tom Wolfe on your ass for a second…
Since YouTube doesn’t have immediate review of uploaded videos (unlike Google video), it has a ton of home made softcore porn. There seem to be at least two main categories - hot girl strips, and hot girls kiss. There is definitely some sort of editorial control, as you will rarely find actual full nudity (although occasionally boobs will be uncovered,) but almost anything else goes. Lots of moist panties and thongs, plenty of wiggling butts. It’s true that there are a sizable proportion of promotional videos among these teasers, mainly advertising other websites, porn or not. However, the majority is definitely home grown. 3rd wave feminism? Britney-hop ho culture? Bored teenagers with internet and a webcam?
Particularly interesting is the male teenager response in the comments sections. Here’re some actual quotes: “if only u were with me i could have sex with u”; “OMG SHE WAS FINALLY NAKED AN IT WENT OFF!!!!”; “i wat to fuck her”; “i would root her”; “I saw her nipple on a diferent vid”; “i would even eat this bitch’s tampons, wow this is a goddess”; “i want 2 put whipped cream in ur pussy n lick it”; and so forth. By the time they’ve grown up, and google has learned to connect user names to real identities, they might well regret their hormonal candor. Or maybe not.
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Not really too surprising, but interesting nonetheless.
Having a lot of money is good for attracting e-mail messages, at least for men. Those men reporting incomes in excess of $250,000 received 156 percent more e-mail messages than those with incomes below $50,000. Women like men with a higher income than they have but men do not want to date women who earn more than they do.
The stated goals for using the service make a big difference in how many e-mail messages are received. Men who are “hoping to start a long-term relationship” receive substantially more e-mail than those who are “just looking/curious.” The worst thing a man can say is that he is “seeking a casual relationship,” receiving 42 percent fewer e-mail messages than he would otherwise. A woman, by contrast, gets 17 percent more e-mail messages by reporting this goal.
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