-
sponsorship
Well, Jess, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I wondered whether it was healthy for anyone if adolescents lived with their parents. I guess I need to either improve my written tonal control (is there a personal trainer for that?) or learn to use emoticons.
But I was thinking of precisely such parental traumas as The Sex Talk. Meghan, I love how your mother spoke to you! Very early on, my mother told me (this would have been, oh, 1973?) that If People Needed Planned Parenthood, It Was A Good Thing To Go There. I had no idea what she was talking about yet. She was clearly uncomfortable. Then she took me to her gynecologist, a very stern woman who gave me The Contraception Talk. By the time I was in college—and I got out of high school like a bat out of hell, at age 16—my dad implied jokingly that I must be getting plenty of exercise in bed, and told me flat out that he assumed I was using contraception.
It was the anti-virginity era, and what I wish is that someone had said to me: if you never have sex with a boy, that would be just fine. Later I learned that they all suspected that I was heading toward the land of Sappho: my parents, my little brothers, and probably passersby as well. So parents, here's a tip: It sure would have saved me years of misery (and a lifetime of pap smears) had someone said: You don't have to have sex with boys. Ever. Liking girls is just fine. You could even grow up to marry one.
-
sponsorship
I hate to interrupt such a thoughtful discussion with yet another micro-dissection of what was in Michelle Obama's Grand Tour steamer trunk but I couldn't resist this item from the Times of London pointing out her false eyelashes. And not just any false eyelashes, but "full-on, all-out diva lashes, the kind you normally find on D-list celebrities or in drag-act dressing rooms." The Times says it was part of her plan to seduce Europe (easier to bat your eyelashes at a whole continent when they're industrially made!) but I wonder whether the thing Mrs. Obama is flirting with is the line between icon and camp. Of late, she's seen herself represented in wax at Madame Tussaud's and Barbie-fied on the cover of New York. Someone is ghostwriting a Tumblr as her arms. I might amp up my makeup routine, too. But is she purposely feeding our frenzy by becoming an ever-more bombastic version of herself, intoxicated just as much as we are by the whirlwind pace of her style canonization? Or are the eyelashes just a tacit, down-to-earth admission that, hey, we all need a little help in front of the camera? (A sharp contrast, I might add, to Carla Bruni, who's undermined every woman in the world other than Carla Bruni by saying makeup makes us all look bad after age 25).
-
sponsorship
Hanna,
you said you tear up remembering Tami's sex talk with Julie from Friday Night Lights. But the television
teen-sex talk that always gets me is the one that wasn't. In a truly
spectacular episode of My So-Called Life,
Angela, under pressure from Jordan Catalano to, you know, go somewhere, cries out silently—futilely—for someone
to intervene. The family doctor is too distracted by delivering the "safe
sex" message to tell Angela that she shouldn't have sex—even with two forms of birth control—until
she's ready. The dad's too oblivious to pick up on her
desperate offers that maybe she should just stay home that night. And her proudly slutty best friend Rayanne is too excited for her to join the
post-virgin club to whisk her away from the abandoned house where Jordan
has taken her to do the deed (and where Rayanne has gone, we assume, for
something similar). One of the trickiest parts of being a teenager is
admitting when you need boundaries—and one of the trickiest parts of raising
one is decoding that need. That's an arena in which Tami shines: she often
butchers her shot at being the "cool mom" (or cool principal) by
being stern and saying no. In Angela's case (though she surely wouldn't have admitted it aloud, especially not to her mother), a stern sex talk was exactly what she wanted.
I don't actually agree with Emily
that Tami's message about sex is inconsistent. She told Julie to wait
until she was ready. It's pretty clear Julie followed that advice by the calm,
mature way that she describes to Tami her loving relationship with Matt—a far cry
from her cold affect two seasons earlier when, while squeamishly thumbing
through sexy underwear, she tells Tyra she just wants to get the first time
over with. Still, I'd say risking inconsistency by switching from a mantra of
"don't" to a reassurance of "it's OK" is a far better play than being
consistently silent.
-
sponsorship
Emily, Jess, Hanna, when it comes to teens and sex, the language of "condoning" doesn't seem that useful to me. After all, it just reinforces a kind of pressure and rebellion, a dichotomy that takes authority and security away from the girl (or boy) trying to figure out how she feels about sex. And sex is, finally, extremely personal. That's part of what makes it so hard to agree about. So, Emily, rather than condone or disapprove, I think parents need to cast the discussion about teen sex in terms of autonomy and making good choices. (Also: Protection!!!) Basically, I think you say what my mom said to me, which is actually similar to what Tami said to Julia. In the midst of some crisis, I had mentioned that a friend of mine was having sex. My mom's response made me stop and think (even if it was awkward, too). She said, pretty simply, that sex was a very special thing that could be beautiful (yes, she used that word!), but sometimes wasn't. And that for my sake, she hoped I would make sure it happened in a way I felt good about. A lot of her meaning was conveyed in her tone and in her attitude, which was direct, inclusive, and not embarrassed. It had as large an impact on me as her words. It made me feel that having sex was my choice (which took it out of the realm of rebellious activity) but also that she had motherly hopes about how I'd feel about my choices.
Because sex is so personal, the idea of assigning an abstract age at which it is "OK" for kids to have sex doesn't feel terribly useful to me. (I grant that under 15 seems too young.) Put it this way: I had sex for the first time when I was 17, with a boyfriend I absolutely loved. In college a year or so later, I briefly went out with someone I liked but was much less close to. I am confident that if I'd "waited" and had had sex for the first time with him, I would not have felt as good or as secure about it. In other words, older is not necessarily better. Kids have to choose for themselves. They can only do this if they truly are choosing for themselves, if parents are helping them see that choice is a way out of peer pressure, and that their choice is valid. Talking openly--rather than handing down rules--has an additional boon: some studies show that countries or cultures where parents routinely talk to their kids about sex have the lowest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs.
On a side note: As a non-parent, it often seems to me that parents focus on the issue of age and sex because later always seems better to them. It means that much more time when they don't have to confront their own rightfully ambivalent, complex feelings about their kids having sex.
-
sponsorship
As we try to craft the Platonic ideal of the teen sex talk, I have a few thoughts. Like Hanna, I’m all for mixed (or, to be more precise, layered) messages. I don’t think there’s anything hypocritical or unloving about delivering up a combo platter of threats and promises: Having sex in high school is a lousy idea (but if you’re really going to do it, make sure you use protection.) If you get pregnant in high school, your future is screwed six ways from Sunday (but if it happens anyway, I’ll stick by you whatever you choose to do.) After all, much of adult life functions on this kind of more-than-binary logic: For example, most marriages operate on the assumption that cheating is intolerable, but when infidelity does happen, it’s often worth working through the problem and staying together.
God knows Levi and Bristol could have used a bit more negative capability (the capacity to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time) as they embarked on their ill-considered journey toward parenthood. What’s most maddening in their press appearances is the way that, enabled by fatuous interviewers, they blur together their crappy decision-making with its, in some sense, happy outcome (a baby, even an unplanned one, is bound to be a source of joy.) I could have throttled Tyra Banks when she said to Levi, “If [Bristol] could wave a magic wand, she’d have preferred to wait ten years.” Magic wands are notoriously ineffective as a means of birth control. Like Jessica's mom, I’d rather arm my daughter with a stern warning, an implied promise, and a five-dollar box of condoms.
-
sponsorship
Hanna, I think you hit the nail right on the head. Most modern moms are profoundly ambivalent about their daughters' sex lives (sons too, but we'll get to that in a second). I would find it incredibly creepy if a mother told her barely legal daughter, "I'd love it if you were sexually active!" And what about from a daughter's point of view? I didn't want my mother's approval or disapproval when I became sexually active; I didn't want her involved at all. This is something that young adults need to navigate for themselves, for the most part, but of course parents should be there for questions and problems should they arise. My own mother handled this situation well, I think, and of course it still mortified me. I was a freshman in high school and was quite far from wanting to have sex. My mom came into my room bearing a brown paper bag and said, "Your father and I don't condone you having sex in high school, but if you're going to have sex, we want you to be safe." With that she opened the paper bag and left me with a pack of condoms. The message was certainly mixed; but it didn't sway me towards continued virginity or desire to lose it. All it made me want to do was bury my head in my pillows and die.
Emily, I wonder if mothers' attitude to their sons' sex lives is the other side of the Tami reaction: they worry, not just about their sons getting hurt, but also (assuming their sons are heterosexual) about their sons being insensitive towards their girlfriends. They remember all the jerks they dated and pray that they have not spawned a scumbag. Would any mothers of sons care to weigh in?
-
sponsorship
Slate "Pressbox" columnist Jack Shafer likes to catalog bogus trend stories—articles strewn with anecdotal data points and expressions like "growing numbers" or "a handful" instead of hard statistics. (See "Dudes With Cats" for a particularly hilarious takedown.) He's on vacation this week, but I'm sure he'd find fault with a story in today's New York Times: Motoko Rich's "Recession Fuels Readers' Escapist Urges."
The problem with Rich's column, which argues that sales of romance novels are up due to the recession, isn't a deficit of hard numbers: Harlequin Enterprises' fourth-quarter earnings were up 32 percent over the same period a year earlier; while sales of adult fiction overall were flat last year, the romance category was up 7 percent. Rather, I take issue with her assumption that sales are up because of the recession—an assumption for which she has no proof.
"In a recession, what people want is a happy ending," she writes, as if people wanted sad endings during boom times. And then there's this rather deceptive line: "Like the Depression-era readers who fueled blockbuster sales of Margaret Michell's "Gone With the Wind," today's readers are looking for an escape from the grim realities of layoffs, foreclosures and shrinking 401(k) balances." It's true that readers, during the Depression, turned "Gone With the Wind" into a bestseller. But did the Depression itself contribute to the book's success? Would it have been a flop if it had been released 10 years earlier?
What we have here is an observation in search of a thesis. Why are romance novel sales up? Must be the recession! All we know for sure, of course, is that the recession is fueling trend stories like these.
-
sponsorship
"The threat of population decline," writes Michelle Goldberg at the American Prospect, "is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies.... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones!"
I wrote a Reason feature on this issue for anyone who is interested in sociological and economic analysis of natalist policy. But for now I'll just say: Liberals ought to be very, very cautious about engaging natalist rhetoric in the promotion of social welfare policies. The claim that Western Civilization is on the brink of extinction might help sell universal daycare or any other policy that can be cast as an incentive to motherhood, but population alarmism lends credence to a number of wildly illiberal arguments. Once you've bought into the idea that a nation-state must defend its existence through native population growth, you've come uncomfortably close to arguing that a particular subset of women has a patriotic responsibility to reproduce. You've also legitimized some legislator's attempt to bribe women into using their bodies in a particular way. There is a reason that the producers of Demographic Winter are traditionalist Christians.
Gradual population decline of the kind we are seeing in Germany and Japan is, I think, manageable. But even if we insist on addressing population decline as some kind of crisis, it's not at all clear that liberal policies like paid family leave are going to turn the tide. The most obvious difference we see between developed countries with relatively high birth rates and developed countries with relatively low birthrates is cultural. Swedes and Americans are relatively more likely than, say, Singaporeans or Koreans, to believe that work and motherhood are compatible. The countries with the lowest birth rates in the world are countries in which childless women are integrated into the workforce but women with children are expected to stay home.
Such attitudes are distinct from redistributional social welfare policies. It may be that Sweden's welfare state is responsible for its near-replacement birth rate, but the evidence for this is not terribly compelling. In order to frame the story this way one needs to cast the high-fertility United States as an anomalous outlier rather than part of the general, culture-driven trend.
I am sympathetic to Goldberg in that population alarmism might be a useful way to argue for policies I happen to support; more open borders, for example. But there are better arguments for a humane immigration policy, and there are better arguments for an expansive welfare state.
-
sponsorship
Emily, Jessica, I'd like to stand up for inconsistency. There are many questions that would be settled if the American political dialogue only allowed a box for inconsistent, or ambivalent, or contentedly hypocritical. Abortion, for example. Polls show that most Americans settle at the I'll-shield-my-eyes-for-the-first-trimester-but-no-later position. But our Hardball culture insists on keeping this debate alive into eternity. I think something like that is true for mothers and teenage daughters having sex. This is why I felt Tami's speech on Friday Night Lights was a model in its disappointed, elated, tender ambivalence.
Tami: So do, you love Matt?
Julie: I love matt
[Tami smiles]
T: Does he love you?
J: Matt loves me
Then she asks about birth control, despite Julie's resistance. Then, through her tears, she says:
You know, just because you're having sex this one time doesn't mean you have to have it all the time. If ever you feel taken for granted, you can stop anytime. And if you ever break up with Matt, it's not like you have to have sex with the next boy.
J: Why are you crying?
T: Because I wanted you to wait. Not just because I wanted to protect you. Because I love you and I want to make sure nothing bad ever happens to you.
God, I tear up just typing it.
-
sponsorship
E.J., Bonnie, let me be the voice of dissent. What a teen is missing when he or she boards is the joy of belonging to a community with deep roots. I lived in the same small, suburban town of 6,000 residents for my first 18 years, and even though I was quite ready to leave at age 18, I found great pleasure and solace in our little village. I loved being part of the town sports teams with girls I had known since I was five; I loved biking to my friends' houses and being welcomed by their parents, who knew my parents, who all attended town hall meetings together; I loved sneaking through the woods at night to clandestine keg parties, knowing that ultimately there was little danger in our experimenting.
Yes, Dayo, boarding school may let teens have deeper relationships with teachers, but actually when kids go to boarding school and college, they end up interacting exclusively with their peers much more than they do when they are at home or in the workplace. E.J., I think it's a little histrionic to ask whether or not it's "healthy" for anyone to live at home while they're minors. I was a reasonably mature, well-adjusted teen, and I know that I wasn't ready to leave home before college. I have friends who discovered cocaine for the first time at their tony New England boarding schools, and because there was no adult checking in on them and only them, they really drifted into some dangerously unfettered behavior. I guess what I'm saying is that when teens are sent away and don't rise to the occasion as Bonnie's daughter did, it could do more harm than good.
-
sponsorship
Great points, Jessica, about the many and complicated ways in which teen sex plays out. Agreed that broader questions, like whether kids can imagine good futures for themselves, can matter more than what parents say to them about sex per se. Still, I want to probe this a little more. OK, so we encourage teenagers to wait 'til college (I'll go with that timeline for the sake of argument) and then give them access to birth control if they ignore us. But what else do we say when that happens?
In writing our way through this season of Friday Night Lights, Meghan and Hanna and I were all struck by the great sex talk the mother character on the show, Tami, has with her daughter Julie when she finds out that Julie has slept with her boyfriend. He is sweet and kind. They love each other. They are 17 and in high school. Like many parents I know, Tami dealt with sex by saying don't do it, don't do it--and then reassuring her daughter that it was all OK after she went ahead anyway. Isn't that sort of schizophrenic, or at least incomplete? Is there another more consistent set of talking points for parents here? And shoot me for asking, but is the answer different depending on whether you're talking to a son or a daughter?
-
sponsorship
I'm glad Dayo commented about public boarding programs. I once had a particular affection for the Baraka School, a now-defunct boarding program, sponsored in part by the Baltimore Public School System that boarded at-risk 7th and 8th grade boys at a school in Kenya. Baraka eventually closed in 2003 because of political instability in the host country but, while it existed, it had a good record of graduating students to academic and personal success. Baltimore was sufficiently impressed with the results to encourage the D.C. SEED School to open a campus in the harbor city. I agree with E.J. that the boarding school model has strong historic traditions and want to add another argument in favor of distant education: the great opportunity for personal development. For a certain personality, the time away from home is a wake up call for maturity, at least as effective as outward bound.
Our 1-year experience with boarding school when my daughter was a teenager had the salutary effects of reform school with fewer of the negative influences. I married when she was 12 and there was a period of "acting out" that was particularly disruptive at her private 7-12 school. I have mercifully forgotten every detail of the many trips to the stern but genuinely concerned school head mistress's office before my daughter was invited not to come back for 10th grade. It was 1987 and the D.C. public school system was not a good fit for a girl who naturally gravitated to the least challenging environment. We hired an "educational consultant" who steered us to a friendly, low admission threshold, residential school in upstate New York. It was a tough year. I missed my daughter insanely, and the tuition was twice as much as we were paying at the day school. Despite a dip in her academic performance, the year away did a world of good for her however, and, incidentally, for the family. So good for the family, in fact, that during the nine months of her sophomore year of high school away, I incubated and delivered a new member to it. My 16-year-old came back in the spring to a new brother and her parents in the last steps of moving into our new home.
Life moves on, with or without you in it. To my great joy, she wanted to be in it. She contacted the headmistress of her former school and asked politely, could she come back for 11th grade? To my surprise and deep relief, the formidable educator unblinkingly enrolled my newly respectful headstrong teenager in with her old classmates. I never asked but I think what persuaded the director was that my daughter went on her own to ask the favor. In that year away, she had learned to be both self-sufficient and deeply appreciative of the support of loved ones. The coda is when she graduated with her class in 1990, the faculty honored my girl with a "Phoenix Award," named for the mythical creature that emerges from her own ashes. They created the tribute just for her, but kept the tradition alive for future self-reinvention cases.
-
sponsorship
Dayo, you write that you were sent away to boarding school at age 14. In that, you
had a more traditional upbringing than most Americans.
Contrary to popular opinion, American children now spend far more time
living under the same roof with their bio-parents than have most children in
Western history. Traditionally—by which I mean, until capitalism separated work from home—children were sent away to live
with others somewhere between ages 8 and 14 (at the latest). The aristocracy
sent adolescents off to be pages and maids-in-waiting, to get an education in manners. Working folks sent children off to be apprentices (boys) or domestics
(girls—although some girls might instead work in laundry, spinning, or
weaving). They'd work for about 7 to 10 years, when they'd finally be paid (no
weekly wages!), giving them a lump sum that was enough to marry and start a little shop of their own. Working through adolescence was how
most girls earned their dowries and boys learned their trade...and how most
working women (and aristocrats as well) avoided being their own children's
nannies. Adult women ran the house and shop, in partnership with their husbands. Diaper-wiping was the work of teenagers.
That was the system even if you were lucky enough to have two
bio-parents who survived until you were an adult. Most lost at least one parent
before then, and had to live under a step-parental regime (cf: Cinderella), or,
for impoverished gentry, were sent off to be governesses or law clerks.
Which makes me wonder: Is it a healthy system for anyone, parents or children, to
keep adolescents home until age 18? But I agree that boarding schools
for poor children whose parents are in flux and financial distress might be a good—or at least, a very traditional—idea.
-
sponsorship
A high school student gets caught popping a pill at the lunch table. Had she been taking an illegal drug, Fairfax County's "zero tolerance" policy would have called for a 5-day suspension. But she was taking birth control prescribed by her doctor and purchased by her mother. A student who brings a "controlled substance" into a Fairfax County high school is subject to the same penalties as a student carrying a gun. So the girl was suspended for two weeks and "recommended for expulsion." Last Thursday, The Washington Post reports, "a long table full of school officials weighed her case at a hearing."
I don't doubt that Ortho Tri-Cyclen is extremely dangerous to a certain social order—far more so than is, say, heroin. But it seems like the kind of thing public high schools should be encouraging.
-
sponsorship
Emily wasn’t particularly pleased with the Where The Wild Things Are trailer when it came out a few weeks ago, but at least it inspired a fantastic spoof: this make-believe trailer for the kids' book/gag gift Everyone Poops, a jokey picture book that teaches all of us that…everyone poops. The trailer sends up Wild Things perfectly, using large furry animals, the same font, and Arcade Fire’s propulsive, undeniable indie rock anthem "Wake Up" to get its message across: “Inside all of us is…poop.”
-
sponsorship
So I'm reading the most recent issue of the Economist (April 4-10, 2009), and on Page 9 is an ad for Fidelity Investments, which reads like so:
In medium-size bold type at the top:
Retirement income guaranteed.
In very large bold type in the top-third sweet spot:
There are no guarantees in retirement. Except maybe this one.
In medium-size bold type below, in the middle of the page:
Guaranteed income for life.
In regular-size, nonbold type below that:
With an income annuity through Fidelity, you can rest assured that you, and your spouse, will always have income.
It's all sounding pretty good, right? Safe, secure, steady, guaranteed for chrissakes, just like old times. But then comes the kicker in parentheses but the same type size immediately below that:
(Guarantees are subject to the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurance company.)
And my bubble deflates.
This is how ads are supposed to work: Each line of text, each image is supposed to make you say and feel "Yes!" in your head. There should not be a "No!" in there. And if they need to put in a No for legal reasons, they put it in way at the bottom of the page in tiny type.
But no longer.
So really, there are no guarantees in life. This ad reveals its own lie. AIG, your reach is far and wide and nightmare-inducing! Or maybe it's good that they can't baldly lie to us anymore.
-
sponsorship
It’s a great day to be a gay American. I’ve never been prouder or felt more integrated into the fabric of the life of the nation. What has gotten me so giddy? It’s not the Vermont marriage vote or last Friday’s Iowa court decision; it’s the news that President Obama’s favorite character on The Wire is Omar, the outset, proudest gay American stick-up artist Baltimore never had.
I also hope Obama, who has struggled to give up cigarettes, learned a lesson from Omar’s sad demise: Smoking is very bad for one’s health.
-
sponsorship
Your question is a good one, Emily. The flip side of the purity pressures are well-drawn in Ariel Levy's excellent Female Chauvinist Pigs. I remember one girl Levy spoke to in particular—a pretty, leggy California high schooler who had sex utterly without pleasure. She did it to keep up with her fellow popular Janeses; she did it because she felt it gave her a measure of power over the men in her life. Sex didn't make her feel good, not one bit.
For me, one of the biggest problems with Valenti's book is that she makes the personal political to an outrageous degree with vignettes about her adolescent sexcapades. Her attitude is essentially, I had sex in high school by choice and it worked out, so having sex in high school is a positive thing. For many, many women this is not the case. From what I observed when I was a teen, most of my cohorts were happier when they waited until 17 or 18 to become sexually active; it is a rare 14 or 15-year-old who is secure enough in herself to have sex without regret. I think we should encourage teens to wait until college, but supply them with the proper contraception if they choose not to. As we all know, encouraging people to wait until marriage is completely unrealistic.
However, teens are so woefully undereducated about sex in this country that the first step should be to get them proper information from the get-go. The next step after that is more difficult because we cannot remove teenagers from their own social ecosystems. While a teenager in rural Alabama may be pressured by the so-called purity myth, a teenager in San Francisco may be pressured by her sexually active friends. The best bet is to encourage internal traits—like self-confidence—that help teens make the right choice for themselves. Again, I will return to Margaret Talbot's point in the New Yorker article Red Sex, Blue Sex: teens who feel they have a lot at stake will delay sexual intercourse and when they do have sex, have it responsibly. If I knew how to make all teen girls feel like they have a future worth waiting for, I would be a trillionairess.
-
sponsorship
Over on Talking Points Memo Cafe, I posted this week as part of a discussion of Jessica Valenti's new book, The Purity Myth. Jessica makes a strong and convincing argument against fetishizing virginity and judging how ethical girls and women are based on when they first had sex, or how many partners they've had. Amen to that. She also says that some of the time, there's nothing wrong with teen sex. This opens up a host of questions: If we quit cautioning kids against having sex, what do we say instead? From my TPM post:
Jessica cites a survey showing that "47 percent of teens who had experienced some form of sexual intimacy said they'd felt pressure to do something they didn't want to do--and young women were more likely to have had this experience than young men." I would bet that a disproportionate number of those girls are low-income and not white, exactly the girls who Jessica and many of us are particularly concerned for.
Will taking away the taboo take away the pressure, or even reduce it? Again, I'm not sure. I'd argue that we want teenagers to have sex lovingly and safely--or not at all, because sex can, sometimes, explode with meaning. Probably, we want teenagers to have sex sparingly, because a lot of their relationships aren't especially loving and safe. That's not necessarily what the testing of adolescence produces. And so I think there's a lot of work to be done to figure out what should replace the purity myth--the details and multi-faceted layers of what kind of sex ed makes sense for what kind of kids, and how parents should weigh in.
Thoughts?
-
sponsorship
The New York Times
this week ran a new map of the geography
of buzz. Researchers Elizabeth Currid of USC
and Sarah Williams of Columbia mapped the
hotspots of creative culture in New York City
and L.A. by tallying
the locations of the flashy parties chronicled in Getty images. In Manhattan, the big buzz spot winners: Times Square, Lincoln Center
and Rockefeller Center. Um, for real? Those areas only
pulse with energy if you have a couple hundred bucks to go watch a show; off the
stage, they're mostly crammed with tourists, overpriced restaurants with awful
food, and a repeating loop of Gap, J. Crew and Pottery Barn. Is that what it
means to have buzz?
Pardon the rather obvious web 2.0 refrain, but in my mind buzz happens in the
online forums like Twitter and Facebook where people connect and scheme and set
trends and define the latest iteration of cool. (It's unclear whether the
study's co-author Currid would agree with me, based on her unsatisfying attempt to define
the term in the article: "As vague a term as ‘buzz' is, it's so socially and economically important for cultural
goods...Even though it's like, ‘What the heck does that mean?,' it means
something." Right.) The Times' Twitter watch during the
Superbowl seems a far better display of buzz—look at that explosion of Springsteen
chatter!—to me than an analysis of stagnant Getty images. The idea of tracking
where buzz starts and spreads is fascinating; I'd just like to see it done in a
way that doesn't ignore the very relevant role the Internet plays, and by
people who can start with an actual definition of what it is they're studying.
-
sponsorship
Answer: Very. Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to this map of the relative neurosis of different states in America. New York, no surprise, is high on the scale. Though if Woody Allen ever moves to Vermont, we may become a lighter shade of gray. Click on the links below the map to get to some other fascinating research about the psychology of geography.
-
sponsorship
The New York Times published an interesting story on Monday about the role of pride in the recession. One psychologist said he has a laid-off patient who nonetheless “commutes” to Starbucks. This may sound foolish (anyone see the film Human Resources?), but apparently it's pragmatic. Studies show that acting proud has a palpable effect on how people around you see you. There are certain cross-cultural signals of pride (hands on hips, head tilted) and when you display them, people “read” you as being more likeable than others. They also ascribe higher status to you. So there’s something to the Starbucks commuter's magical thinking; the prouder you allow yourself to feel, the better you may do in that next job interview. (I do wonder whether the effects the psychologists described are maintained over time.)
The piece got me thinking about the psychology of the recession—how far beyond economics the recession begins to go. For one thing, I realized that my way of dealing with the recession is riddled with magical thinking—irrational behaviors I follow in the superstitious hope that somehow they will ward off disaster. To take one small example: I am hopeless at budgets, and bad at letting go of anything. So rather than ditch cable, say, which I barely ever watch and don’t really need (I can always watch news clips on the internet), I have become fixated with keeping the heat in my apartment at a bare minimum. (I pay for my heat.) It will save me some money, sure, but choosing this way of "saving" has more to do with my conflicted relationship to asceticism than with good financial planning. I bet a lot of us are like this. How we think about money is tied to our childhoods, our biases, neuroses that have nothing to do with money itself. So join me in the confessional: Tell me about your magical recession thinking, or send me news of any studies that seem to reflect this kind of thinking, at morourkexx@gmail.com. I’ll be writing about the subject in a few weeks. (Emails quotable unless you state otherwise.)