writing well exposed in a funny way.
press box: Media criticism.
The Best Writers at the New York Times
They write better by writing shorter.
By Jack ShaferPosted Tuesday, July 25, 2006, at 7:05 PM ET If you want to write better, an old mentor of mine once said, write tighter. Pick the fewest possible words, he said, and rely on compression to make your ideas explode off the page. He wasn't thinking about the film capsules in the New York Times' daily TV listings when he shared this wisdom with me, but he could have been. Outside the Times classified pages, nobody does more with the English language with less space in the paper.
The capsules spend 20 words—and usually fewer—to pass informed judgment on movies. Even if you never intend to watch any of the films, the capsules make for good morning reading. Consider this taut kiss-off of The Matrix Revolutions: "Ferocious machine assault on a battered Zion. Stop frowning, Neo; it's finally over." Appreciate, if you will, the efficient setup and slam of the 2 Fast 2 Furious capsule: "Ex-cop and ex-con help sexy customs agent indict money launderer. Two fine performances, both by cars." And for compression, it's hard to better the clip for the Julie Davis feature Amy's Orgasm. It warns potential viewers away with just four syllables: "Change the station."
Howard Thompson invented the Times capsule style in the 1960s and continued to write them on contract after his 1988 retirement, according to his 2002 Times obituary. Among his greatest clips cited in the obit were assessments of The Guns of Navarone ("Allied commando mission. Strong on scenery but weighs 10 tons."); Matilda ("A boxing kangaroo. What the world needs now."); and The Wrath of God ("They said it, we didn't and it's pretty close.").
Former Deputy Television Editor Jody Alesandro and freelance critic Anita Gates composed the mini-reviews after Thompson moved on, and today Lawrence Van Gelder is the primary wielder of the critical eyedropper. Whereas Thompson actually saw the movies he capsulized, his successors base their mini-reviews on the tone and spirit of Times movie reviews, adding up to 25 new ones to the database each week. Here are a few of my recent favorites:
Before and After: "New England couple's son charged with murder. Needs more in between."
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason: "Makes the first one look like a masterpiece."
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers: "The usual holiday fare."
Suspect Zero: "So preposterous it may kill the whole genre."
Rivaling the Times for succinctness and cheek are the Web smarty-pants who contribute to the Four Word Film Review (www.fwfr.com). As I write this, the site boasts 205,614 reviews composed in four words (or fewer) of 15,320 movies. For 2001: A Space Odyssey, its writers offer "Talkative computer Strausses out"; "Arthur C., monkeys do"; "Callow HAL"; "Dave should've installed firewall"; and 260 others. Somewhere Howard Thompson is whittling his miniatures down to three words apiece.
Writing pans of books, movies, and plays is always easier than writing raves, and this immutable rule of journalism applies to Times capsules. The brevity of the form generally prevents wit and praise from occupying the same place at the same time, so Times writers tend to alert readers to good movies by dropping the sarcasm and sticking to description. Hence, they tout Jules and Jim with this: "Three in love. Truffaut's classic. Charming and circuitous." Of Rashomon they write, "Kurosawa thunderbolt that put Japan on the world movie map."
I don't mean to imply that every or even most capsules soar off the page. The most pedestrian ones merely pun off—or sass back at—the movie title. "Futuristic man of justice. Judged dreadful," reads the Judge Dredd capsule, while Kicking and Screaming is rendered, "More like bumbling and mumbling." I also advise you not to read too many of them in one sitting. The writers depend too much on the words predictable, winning, contrived, credible, jolting, and scattershot.
Yet like all outstanding genre work, the Times capsules carry the freight assigned to them by entertaining readers and conveying a sound critical assessment.
Can you do better in 20 words or less?
******
You think so, punk? I dare you to write a more accurate and more entertaining capsule than the Times did for Truly, Madly, Deeply: "A kind of British Ghost. Gooey, faddy, weepy." Send your best 20 words to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Shafer's hand-built RSS feed.
Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large. Photograph of television monitor on the Slate home page by Ryan McVay.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAG
This commercial is pure genius. Be forewaarned - and enjoy !ad report card: Advertising deconstructed.
Head Case
The mesmerizing ad for headache gel.
By Seth StevensonPosted Monday, July 24, 2006, at 12:00 PM ET The Spot: A woman rubs what appears to be a glue stick across her forehead. The voice-over repeats one sentence in triplicate: "HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead." We cut to an image of the product in its packaging, while the voice-over tells us that "HeadOn is available without a prescription at retailers nationwide."
When I first saw this ad, I was convinced it was a viral prank. Everything about it—the woman serenely rubbing stuff on her forehead; the lack of explanation as to what this stuff is; and, of course, the mind-numbing repetition of that weird catchphrase—just seemed too bizarre to be an actual commercial for an actual product. When I logged on to HeadOn.com, I expected a jokey Web site that would eventually redirect me to a promotion for Burger King or Axe deodorant or something.
But no, it turns out HeadOn is for real. (That is, the product does exist. I'm not sure I can use the word "real" in any reference to a topical homeopathic health remedy.) HeadOn is meant to treat headaches and is a gel suffused with various plant extracts that you apply—say it with me—directly to the forehead. I am told that doing so creates a cooling sensation. HeadOn is available at Wal-Mart for $5.24 if you care to check it out for yourself. Caveat emptor.
As for this ad campaign, it is utter genius. With this one 10-second spot, the makers of HeadOn have torn down all the pretenses that have gummed up the advertising industry for years. Production values? Persuasion? Emotion? Humor (of the intentional kind)? These are stalwarts of the old, outmoded advertising paradigm. The new, head-on (or HeadOn) approach holds that advertising is about blunt force.
It really is sad when you think about the hard work that gets done inside advertising agencies. All the writing and rewriting, the late-night brainstorming, the mining of creativity from the deepest recesses of one's cortex. And then there's the casting, the directing, the high-budget locations. The question we must now ask is: Why bother with any of this? The HeadOn ad is more effective at reaching its goals than 99 percent of the ads on television. And it succeeds on the strength of a few, bare-bones tactics that most advertisers carefully shun:
Repetition: According to Dan Charron, VP of sales and marketing for HeadOn, the company used focus groups to test all sorts of marketing tacks. One experimental approach maxed out on repetition, and the results were incredible. The focus groups' recollection of the ad, and of the product, was light-years better than with any other method. Which, of course, seems completely obvious—how can we forget something when it's being jammed into our brains? And yet I've never seen an ad embrace this insight with so much gusto.
I suspect most advertisers avoid the broken-record technique out of fear that it will annoy people. Which it does. But so what? Maybe a small percentage of us will snootily refrain from buying HeadOn—as an act of protest against an ad we find irritating—but this is a small price to pay when millions of other folks are now familiar with HeadOn, curious about it, and unlikely ever to forget its name. The repetition method serves no purpose for a well-established brand ("Coca-Cola: Pour it down your esophagus. Coca-Cola: Pour it down your esophagus"), but for a new product fighting to get noticed, it makes a lot of sense.
Kitsch: This ad was made in-house by HeadOn, and it boasts production values so bad they may seem intentional. (They're not.) That green, graph-paper background. The way the volume fades and surges on the voice-over loop. The big, yellow-arrow graphic in the middle of the screen. And above all, the very image of this chick rubbing goop back and forth across her noggin. It's mesmerizing in its cheesiness and also eye-catching because it looks and sounds like nothing else on television. (Though a past ad for Overstock.com similarly benefited from low production values.)
Mystery: We all know how to use the product. (My understanding is that it's meant to be applied to the forehead. In a direct manner.) But the ad never tells us just what HeadOn is for. I had assumed this was in compliance with some kind of FDA regulation, the way pharmaceutical ads never say just what a pill does. But in fact, according to Charron, HeadOn (being an over-the-counter product) is not even subject to these regulations. The omission of a key detail here is a purposeful marketing technique.
"A good way to get attention," says Charron, "is to not say what the product does. It touches on people's curiosity." Indeed—curiosity is what sent me to the HeadOn Web site, and it no doubt sent millions of other people there, as well. If some percentage of those people are headache sufferers, and also gullible, they might well be moved to buy some HeadOn.
Ubiquity: Charron says they've spent "tens of millions of dollars" on this HeadOn campaign. "If you watch any TV at all," he says, "chances are you've seen the ad in the last three weeks." It's airing on networks, on cable, and in syndication. During the day, prime time, and late night. It won't stop airing until mid-August, so you'd better get used to it.
If repetition within the ad is effective, why not extend this insight to repetition of the ad? Just keep airing it so often that it can't be escaped and can't be ignored. The ad is already generating tons of talk on the Web and has inspired a parody involving rapper Lil Jon. It's everywhere.
Grade: A+. And I haven't even touched on yet another powerful theory: These ads give viewers headaches, thus spurring demand.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
I love tool belts, and this article partially explains why. Enjoy. The Allure of the Tool Belt
Published: July 20, 2006
THE evening he made the awkward toast, David Mager was not aware — not consciously, at least — that his longtime girlfriend was involved with the contractor. As far as he was concerned, it was just a joke, a teasing reference to the amount of time the two were spending together during the renovation of the 18th-century house in rural Massachusetts that Mr. Mager and his girlfriend shared with their two children. But what is the unconscious in the fixer-upper that is man but the cesspool? Letting forth with a stink when one has struggled so hard to make things presentable.
Skip to next paragraph 
Getty Images
Nancy Palmieri for The New York Times
David Mager found his girlfriend was involved with the contractor renovating their Massachusetts home.
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
Ronald Brannan, a contractor in Southern California, has been impressed by the power of his job to attract women.
“Maybe I should just get you two a hotel room,” Mr. Mager said, laughing, as he raised a glass over dinner with his girlfriend, the contractor and the contractor’s wife. “It would be cheaper.”
Some time later, Mr. Mager, a vice president of an environmental technologies firm, left his unhappy but wonderfully renovated home on the Saw Mill River, with its five recently exposed original brick fireplaces, and his girlfriend. She and the contractor have been living there for the last 12 years.
Mr. Mager, now 52 and happily married himself in Hatfield, Mass., is not sure how long the affair had been going on before he discovered it. (His ex and the contractor did not return phone calls.) But he is fairly certain of the amount he paid the contractor for his services: $30,000. There was additional money outstanding, although he cannot recall how much.
“I remember saying, ‘I’m not paying for the work,’ meanwhile I’m feeling like I want to feel his face imploding on my fist,” he said.
There was never a problem with the contractor’s work. “I seem to remember his last project was a very beautiful marble counter,” Mr. Mager said. “It was just bad form. It’s like a shrink-client, or a student-teacher relationship. It may not be jailable, but in many respects it’s similar. Contractors and women at home, it’s shooting fish in a barrel.”
Renovation, according to the National Association of Home Builders, is at an all time high. And with the warm weather, which marks the peak of renovation season, come the contractors in their tool belts, which, for many a client, carry a romantic charge. (Men who don’t get it might want to consider the garter belt.) They invade still-occupied houses, taking charge of renovation projects and spending several weeks in close proximity with their owners.
Often, even today, it is the woman of the house who is home all day long; in summer resort areas like the Hamptons, she is sometimes there alone with the children from Monday to Friday. Who can blame her for harboring dreams of the contractor?
“They’ve been totally sexualized, like the U.P.S. man,” said Stephen Drucker, the editor in chief of House Beautiful. “I can’t tell you how many times when I hear somebody give a recommendation for a contractor it inevitably ends with the four words, ‘And he’s really cute.’ ”
Which only makes sense, he added. “It’s all very intimate. You’re making plans for how you are going to live your life with this person in enormous detail. And let’s face it, they take off their shirts a lot and that doesn’t hurt.”
R. Couri Hay, the society editor of Hamptons and Gotham magazines, says he has heard more and more stories of client-contractor romance stories in the last few years.
“It’s fast, sexy, hot, but it doesn’t mean a lot — it’s like sexual chocolate, like sneaking out and getting that double scoop of ice cream in the afternoon,” Mr. Hay said. He added that client-contractor affairs are relatively safe: there is no need to worry about the contractor’s car being seen in a woman’s driveway in the middle of the afternoon; it’s supposed to be in her driveway. And client-contractor love, from what he’s seen, rarely threatens marriages because when the job is over, the affair is over.
“Nobody knows,” Mr. Hay said. “The contractor isn’t going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn’t going to tell, and you get a better job because she’s providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins.”
Clients and contractors agree that the attraction between them is generally about more than just sex. It seems to stem largely from the emotional importance of the home to the client, and from the contractor’s ability to listen to her. Husbands may not be willing to discuss the aesthetic merits of polished chrome versus stainless steel or clam casing versus colonial casing, but the contractor, if he is to be successful, must.
The contractor will accompany the client to the marble distributor, expertly moving slabs of marble with one hand. And if there’s nothing at that distributor, he will take her to another. The client has finally found that ideal — the heterosexual man who will go shopping with her.
David Guido, a contractor in Woodstock, N.Y., says that while the first thing he does is to have a husband and wife draw up separate wish lists, 60 to 70 percent of his working relationship ends up being with the woman.
“Say you have a woman who’s a baker or likes to do her own vegetable canning,” said Mr. Guido, 53. “You’re setting up special counters, you’re going over what’s involved in making it. When someone gets that much attention, it’s like when you’re getting your hair cut and the person is talking just to you. My clients’ wishes are the center of my attention.”
Sandra Slater, 54, an environmental designer in Palo Alto, Calif., has lived with her former contractor, Drew Maran, 50, of Drew Maran Construction, for 10 years. They share an interest in green building. But the relationship began with Mr. Maran’s talent for listening.
“When my husband left, I didn’t know a divorced person at all,” she said. Then she remembered that Mr. Maran, whom she had consulted for renovation work, was divorced. “I called him up crying for an hour and a half and he was fine with it,” she said, laughing. “He was a contractor — he was used to hysterical women calling in the middle of the day, and holding hands with neurotic women.”
And there was also the matter of Mr. Maran’s skill around the house. Although he was not macho — “he’s not a hammer swinger,” Ms. Slater said — he did have what she calls “a confidence with the physical world.”
“There’s this really primal thing of, this is your space, this is your cave,” she said, speaking of the home. “Nothing fazes Drew. I get baffled when I turn on the light and it works or that the plumbing works properly. Feeling safe in your own space, that’s pretty primal.”
Was her ex-husband, an entrepreneur, handy?
“Once a light bulb broke and the glass part was still in its socket,” Ms. Slater said. “I didn’t know how to get it out and I asked my husband and he said, ‘I don’t do light bulbs. Go hire somebody.’ That would never happen with Drew.”
Mr. Guido, too, has noticed how attractive the ability to do household repairs and construction is to women. “They say, ‘That door was sticking 10 years. Why couldn’t my husband do that?’ ”
Mr. Mager, who acknowledges that there were problems in his relationship long before the contractor came on the scene, believes that his successor’s building talents, combined with his girlfriend’s love of their home, were deciding factors in the breakup.
“I think I know what a hammer is,” Mr. Mager said, but the contractor had “a skill she respected and loved. And she loved the house. I used to tell her when you talk about the house, you smile; when you look at me, you scowl.” Certainly, he added, the issue was not physical prowess.
“I’m 6-foot-4 and I actually am very, very strong,” Mr. Mager said. “He’s a very small guy. At parties, when we were friends, I would pick him up and spin him around.”
WHETHER client-contractor romance is a good idea from the contractor’s point of view is another matter.
Of a dozen contractors interviewed, most said it was not. They said it could only lead to problems, including lawsuits, a tense workplace, the expectations of a discount or no payment at all. Even if the client was aggressively interested, romantic entanglement was considered unprofessional and unethical.
“I have been at design meetings where you feel the toe under the table or the hand lingering on my hand a little too long,” said Alan Bouknight, 48, who runs Azzarone Contracting in Mineola, N.Y., and does a lot of work in the Hamptons. “If you are not someone with honor and scruples you could probably keep playing that, but in my instance this is a family business — I’m third generation and I’m not going to jeopardize that reputation.”
“There are plenty of young guys out there who play this to the hilt, especially in warm weather,” he said. “The Timberland boots scuffed just so; the thick white socks scrunched down ever so; the shorts frayed, the tool belt that hangs strategically. None of my guys are like that, I won’t have guys like that.”
Richard Mander, a married 56-year-old New York contractor who does much of his work on Park and Fifth Avenues, speaks skeptically about the motivations of some of his more forward clients. “Those things do happen, the ‘Wouldn’t you like to stay and discuss the job and have a glass of wine?’ ” he said.
“It usually comes with, ‘Don’t you think you can put an extra coat of shellac on the Mozambique cabinetry you’ve just built? Don’t you think this will go better with an extra coat?’ ”
“They’ve only given you one glass of beer and then they expect the world,” he concluded.
Mr. Mander’s friend Robert Gobright, of Gobright Electric in Sag Harbor, takes a lighter view. Mr. Gobright, who was once named a Hamptons Hunk in Hamptons Magazine, had an affair with the daughter of a client on a job he did two and a half years ago, which ended amicably, he said.
Mr. Gobright is now engaged to Heather Buchanan of Sag Harbor, who writes the Kiss & Tell column for The Independent, a Hamptons weekly. They met when a mutual friend invited Ms. Buchanan to see the house Mr. Gobright had built for himself. Ms. Buchanan, who had flipped two houses in Sag Harbor, was impressed with his sense of design and detail. “Every last design element was carefully chosen and was beautiful.”
Ms. Buchanan had never had affairs with contractors who worked on her houses (though she did once date her landscaper). But she has used seduction techniques of a sort with contractors, she said, for decidedly unromantic purposes.
There is so much work in the Hamptons that it is very difficult to get a contractor to show up, she said, and since she could not compete with money, she created a “fun” atmosphere, baking blueberry muffins in the morning and inviting a friend who gave Hula-Hoop lessons to use her front lawn.
Ms. Buchanan added that if you are a single woman, the contractor can become your “de facto guy’’; the man you call instead of AAA if you get a flat tire — something she did before meeting Mr. Gobright.
One can imagine how a contractor could misread the signals.
But there are some signals that seem pretty clear: the greeting at the door in a T-shirt and nothing else, the steaming hot tub, the walk into the bedroom to “look at the closets” — which seems to be the female client equivalent of “Don’t I know you from someplace?” They all spell trouble, contractors say. Though it takes some fellows a while to figure it out.
“I was a kid, much younger, working for another contractor, who left me to do a deck on a house,” said one upstate New York contractor, now middle-aged, who begged anonymity. “The woman was divorced, the door to the deck is four feet off the ground.”
So you’re — ?
“ — Right. I’m looking at her crotch. She’s bringing me breakfast, lingering in the doorway in her bedclothes and one thing led to another and I end up in bed with her and when the boss came back from vacation she made a row and threatened not to pay.
My boss was a little upset that I had sex, but I was 19 at the time, and it was a new experience for me, the older woman. When you’re 19 and you have a woman like that, you don’t ask questions, you go for it.”
What did he learn from this experience?
“From that I learned — I really did not learn anything,” he said.
Years later, he had figured out a few things. “I learned you get paid before, you don’t mess in your own backyard, you keep your business separate from personal relationships.”
Ronald Brannan, 48 and newly married, heads R. B. Builders in Manhattan Beach, Calif., close to Marina del Rey and Redondo Beach (communities, he said, where $1.5 million would get you a little shack). He recalls a $35,000 job in Santa Monica in the mid-1980’s, when he made the mistake of telling the divorced client — a woman who “was a lot about drama” — how nice she looked when she was dressed up and going out to lunch.
By quitting time, he said, the candles were lighted and the wine had been poured, and he had to think quickly to avoid a difficult work situation (the five-month-long job was only half done). So Mr. Brannan, after telling the lady that she was very beautiful and he was very flattered, did what any honest man would do — he lied.
“I told her I had a girlfriend,” he said.
On another occasion around the same time, he said, he did an estimate at a woman’s town house in Century City. “I came into her house and she was wearing high heels, hot pants and a tube top, and she was just coming on to me like gangbusters and she was gorgeous,” Mr. Brannan said. “I think she had some sort of lounge act. Believe me, all sorts of ideas were running through my head.”
Despite the passage of time, Mr. Brannan’s memories remain remarkably sharp.
“She led me over to her aquarium where there was a little fish, a sucker fish that hung on to the aquarium and cleaned the inside. She showed me how; she puckered her lips. Then she showed me her bedroom and sat down on the bed.”
Mr. Brannan was concerned that if he had an affair, there could be “a huge conflict,” including the expectation that he would do the work free or at a large discount.
“Believe me, when I went home that night, I was totally enamored with the idea, it was very romantic and very alluring,” he said, “but at the end of the day it wasn’t something I wanted to get involved with.”
So what did he tell her?
“I didn’t call her back; I more or less just ignored it.”
Would this be typical contractor behavior or just typical guy behavior?
“I think it’s typical guy behavior,” Mr. Brannan said. “And I was in my late 20’s. I’ve matured.”
Even Sandra Slater’s boyfriend, Mr. Maran, whose story had a happy ending, is conscious of the hazards of sexual tensions between client and contractor.
“I’d say 75 percent of the projects where I have constant contact with the homeowner’s wife I get the feeling of some level of sexual desperation,” he said. “I don’t think ‘Desperate Housewives’ has helped this cause at all.”
Mr. Maran added that clients’ nannies and baby sitters represent another common danger. “Sometimes they’re very attractive,” he said. “I remember one in the early 90’s, a 19-year-old Swedish au pair. It sounds like something out of a video, right? She was just constantly around, though the kids weren’t.
One day I’m standing on the ladder and she’s asking me about the label of my jeans. I’m thinking that the label is on my back pocket and that’s where she’s staring. Which is why one of our company’s mottos is, ‘Don’t touch the wife, don’t touch the nanny and keep your hands off the husband.’ ”
Wait a minute, Mr. Maran — you violated your own rule.
“That’s how we came up with the motto,” Mr. Maran said. “And, in fairness, at the time Sandy was not the wife, she was divorced.”###
That opening line by Dan Ackroyd during the first few years of Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970s made us laugh. NOw it's part ofthe lexicon. Enjoy ?
The Taming of the Slur
Published: July 13, 2006
WHISPERS follow her like so many eyes. She is the one who will go home with you, the sure bet, the kind of girl you can lie down with and then walk all over. She is ogled, envied and often ostracized. She is the slut.
Skip to next paragraph 
Anne Taintor Engagement Calendar/Chronicle Books, 2006
For the undemure, an unapologetic page from an engagement book.
Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
Kim Cattrall as Samantha on “Sex and the City.”
Everett Collection
Lillian Gish as the scarlet-letter wearer in the 1926 film.
The word, which originated in the Middle Ages, has emerged from a schoolyard barb to become commonplace in popular culture, marketing and casual conversation. In his duet with the rapper Eminem, Nate Dogg describes his hunt for “a big old slut” in the single “Shake That.” The ample-bosomed puppet in the Broadway musical “Avenue Q” is called Lucy the Slut.
Novelty shops and Web sites sell Slut lip balm, bubble bath, soap and lotion. A cocktail is known as the Red-Headed Slut. A teenager on MTV’s “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County” demanded that a rival admit she was a slut. (She did.)
“Slut’’ is tossed around so often and so casually that many teenagers use it affectionately and in jest among their friends, even incorporating it into their instant messenger screen names.
Like “queer” and “pimp” before it, the word slut seems to be moving away from its meaning as a slur. Or is it?
“It’s definitely a term of familiarity with teens,” said Karell Roxas, a senior editor at Gurl.com, a Web site that addresses issues that affect teenagers. “They’ll say ‘Hi, slut!’ the way my generation would say ‘Hi, chick!’ or ‘Hi, dawg!’ ”
Even among adults, the word is used to demonstrate voraciousness: “coffee slut,” “TV slut.”
“Today, ‘slut,’ even ‘ho’ — girls use it in a fun way, a positive way,” said Atoosa Rubenstein, the editor in chief of Seventeen magazine, adding that a phrase such as “you little slut” has become a way for girlfriends to bust each other’s chops.
Beyond the word itself, cultivating an exhibitionistic, slutty appearance — donning the trappings of promiscuity as opposed to actually being promiscuous — has been a growing influence on fashion and popular culture for a decade.
Women wear T-shirts with provocative slogans. Stripping and pole dancing is an au courant way to exercise. Paris Hilton is called an “American cultural icon” on Sephora .com, where she sells $49 perfume.
Ariel Levy, the author of “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,” said a girl in California told her that she and her friends compete to see who can look “the skankiest.” Ms. Levy told the girl that when she was in high school, girls wanted to be known as “the prettiest” or “the most popular.”
“How did you get the guys?,” the girl replied. “Charm?”
Given all of the slut-posturing, one may be inclined to think that society’s attitudes about women and promiscuity have changed. But it’s not entirely so, say authors who have studied popular culture. An entrenched sexual double standard is not easily uprooted. A promiscuous single man is lauded for being a player or a stud, but a woman who sleeps around rarely is.
Still, “slut’’ stings much more for girls than for women. Teenage girls get the cultural message that they should look provocative. Their social circles are small, so everyone knows who is doing what with whom. And those who do acquire the slut label have to face up to it daily in school and endure snickers about the very thing girls at that age are most embarrassed about — their sexuality.
“All of our pop icons look like porn stars,” Ms. Rubenstein said. “However they’re all virgins, quote unquote,” she said, referring to Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears. “That’s a very complex message to send to girls.”
For junior high and high school girls, said Leora Tanenbaum, the author of “Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation,” being labeled a slut is still painful and humiliating, despite pop culture’s semi-embrace of the term. Ms. Roxas of Gurl.com said teenagers often inquire about it.
They ask, Ms. Roxas said, questions like: “I’ve acquired the reputation of being a slut, how do I get around it?” or “If I have a boyfriend and I perform a certain action, does that make me a slut?” (Ms. Levy said that even the girl who competed to dress “the skankiest” made it clear that having sex with someone who is not a boyfriend is unacceptable behavior.)
A slut, according to the primary definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a woman of dirty, slovenly, or untidy habits or appearance; a foul slattern.” The second entry defines a slut as “a woman of a low or loose character; a bold or impudent girl; a hussy, jade.” For decades, the second definition has reigned.
Ms. Tanenbaum, who interviewed more than 100 women between the ages of 14 and 66 who had been pigeonholed as sluts, found that the label can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to greater promiscuity. But, she said, it can also act as a brake, leading a woman to shut down sexually. As for the liberal use of the word today, “It’s still too hurtful,” she said.
There is no way to know if more women are being saddled with the dubious distinction now than in the past. What seems to be true, at least anecdotally, is that it is primarily girls who are pinning the label on other girls. They do it, Ms. Tanenbaum said, because of their confusion over the contradictory messages they receive about their sexuality and how to conduct themselves.
“The way they deal with their anxiety is pointing their fingers at other girls,” Ms. Tanenbaum said, adding that more than 90 percent of the people she interviewed were given their slut label by other girls.
Often, she said, the label has nothing to do with sexual behavior. Among teenagers, the word has been attached to girls whose bodies develop more quickly than those of their peers, Ms. Tanenbaum said, as well as to pretty girls, girls who are somehow different, even girls who have been raped.
“Girls wouldn’t feel the need to do this if we had one sexual standard,” she said. “It’s because we have the double standard that this phenomenon occurs.”
Whether they condone promiscuity or not, adults, who have an easier time than teenagers keeping their sex lives private, do not seem to feel as anxious about being labeled sluts. Nor are they as prone to calling others names.
“Once you get into your 20’s and 30’s, you just have better things to do,” said Susan Schulz, the editor in chief of CosmoGirl! magazine. “Everybody has that one friend who’s kind of loose and takes somebody home.”
But as Carrie Bradshaw might type on her laptop: Is there such a thing as going too far any more? Does society allow single women more sexual partners than it once did, before they get a “bad reputation?”
Jamie Breitman, 27, of Manhattan, has a friend she characterizes as promiscuous, a woman who, when they were in a bar in Spain, ended up singing on a stage and eventually making out with the bass player.
“That’s just the way that she is and we just love her for that,” Ms. Breitman said. “It makes her more interesting and fun and she always has good stories.”
Indeed, many women admired the fictional libertine Samantha Jones on “Sex and the City’’ because she had all of those qualities, not to mention confidence and an unapologetic attitude about satisfying her desires. Enjoyment was always mutual.
But viewers often commented that such a woman could not exist in real life. That attitude, Ms. Levy said, “goes to show we can’t accept a woman who’s promiscuous because she wants to be.”
Some men, especially, seem to have strong feelings about the matter.
“When I think of the word slut,” wrote Don Reisinger, a student doing accounting and law work in Albany, in an e-mail message, “I think of a woman who has been around the block more times than my dad’s Chevy. I might date a slut, but I certainly wouldn’t marry one.”
For that reason, perhaps, women sometimes feel pressured to downplay their sexual experience. “Women still have a script for their future that involves marriage, that involves children,” said Dr. Susan Freeman, an assistant professor of women’s studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. “It governs a lot of choices they make, how sexually active they can be, what risks they are willing to take in terms of alienating a possible marriage partner.”
There seems to be a mysterious line between being experienced and being a slut, and no one can put a number on it. According to a government report released last year (“Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures”), men age 30 to 44 have had a median of six to eight sexual partners in their lifetimes. The women’s median was about four.
Many women steer clear of the numbers conversation entirely, but as was pointed out several times in interviews, it would be more unusual for them to be virgins.
The fact is, Ms. Levy said, “I think there are a lot of women who want to have a lot of sex because they enjoy it.”
This piece is SO good I re-printed it here in the humor blog. Enjoy. Then pass it on.
June 25, 2006
Modern Love
What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
By AMY SUTHERLAND
AS I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human's upset.
In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the faucet and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides like, "Don't worry, they'll turn up." But that only made him angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog.
Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I don't turn around. I don't say a word. I'm using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.
I love my husband. He's well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage.
But he also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercurial. He hovers around me in the kitchen asking if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker when I'm trying to concentrate on the simmering pans. He leaves wadded tissues in his wake. He suffers from serious bouts of spousal deafness but never fails to hear me when I mutter to myself on the other side of the house. "What did you say?" he'll shout.
These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce, but in sum they began to dull my love for Scott. I wanted — needed — to nudge him a little closer to perfect, to make him into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn't keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love.
So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.
We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn't understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.
Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.
I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.
I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.
I also began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal. Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't. For example, an elephant is a herd animal, so it responds to hierarchy. It cannot jump, but can stand on its head. It is a vegetarian.
The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much. He has the balance of a gymnast, but moves slowly, especially when getting dressed. Skiing comes naturally, but being on time does not. He's an omnivore, and what a trainer would call food-driven.
Once I started thinking this way, I couldn't stop. At the school in California, I'd be scribbling notes on how to walk an emu or have a wolf accept you as a pack member, but I'd be thinking, "I can't wait to try this on Scott."
On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.
Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.
At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.
I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.
In the margins of my notes I wrote, "Try on Scott!"
It was only a matter of time before he was again tearing around the house searching for his keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. His temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if I should throw him a mackerel.
Now he's at it again; I hear him banging a closet door shut, rustling through papers on a chest in the front hall and thumping upstairs. At the sink, I hold steady. Then, sure enough, all goes quiet. A moment later, he walks into the kitchen, keys in hand, and says calmly, "Found them."
Without turning, I call out, "Great, see you later."
Off he goes with our much-calmed pup.
After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love. I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.
I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.
PROFESSIONALS talk of animals that understand training so well they eventually use it back on the trainer. My animal did the same. When the training techniques worked so beautifully, I couldn't resist telling my husband what I was up to. He wasn't offended, just amused. As I explained the techniques and terminology, he soaked it up. Far more than I realized.
Last fall, firmly in middle age, I learned that I needed braces. They were not only humiliating, but also excruciating. For weeks my gums, teeth, jaw and sinuses throbbed. I complained frequently and loudly. Scott assured me that I would become used to all the metal in my mouth. I did not.
One morning, as I launched into yet another tirade about how uncomfortable I was, Scott just looked at me blankly. He didn't say a word or acknowledge my rant in any way, not even with a nod.
I quickly ran out of steam and started to walk away. Then I realized what was happening, and I turned and asked, "Are you giving me an L. R. S.?" Silence. "You are, aren't you?"
He finally smiled, but his L. R. S. has already done the trick. He'd begun to train me, the American wife.
Amy Sutherland is the author of "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers" (Viking, June 2006). She lives in Boston and in Portland, Me.
My sister Zhockueleenah (ok - to be fair - that's phonetic) is a fizzicks whizz. To her, this article makes perfect scents. Enjoy.
July 4, 2006
Essay
Physics Awaits New Options as Standard Model Idles
For most of us, any physics is new physics.
Having stopped paying attention somewhere back around "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" or the discovery that you can make sparks by shuffling your feet on the carpet and then touching a doorknob (or another person), we amateurs respond with the same glazed mixture of wonder and incredulity to the latest abilities of computer chips or the expansion of the universe.
For us, the world is constant naïve novelty. The same cannot be said for professional physicists, the ultimate insiders.
Forget the lifetime tenure, the travel, the six-figure book contracts — what professional physicists live for is the tsunami moment when they know something that nobody else has ever known, the revelatory flash of a new glimpse into the workings of what Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University cosmologist, called "the Mind
of God."
Alas, God, as reflected in the known laws of physics, hasn't gotten any smarter since the 1970's. It was then that particle physicists put the finishing touches on the Standard Model, a collection of theories describing all the physical forces except gravity.
They have been stuck in that model, like birds in a gilded cage, ever since. The Standard Model agrees with every experiment that has been performed since. But it doesn't say anything about the most familiar force of all, gravity. Nor does it explain why the universe is matter instead of antimatter, or why we believe there are such things as space and time.
"Is there physics beyond the Standard Model?" runs the refrain often repeated by David Gross, the director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and a co-winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for his part in constructing this mathematical edifice.
Physicists presume that the answer is yes, that some more overarching theory should explain these and other mysteries. But lacking any loose ends to grab hold of, no discrepancies from the predictions wrung from the Standard Model, they have no experimental clues as to what that theory might be.
Every once in a while there is a hint of progress and revolution in the air — new physics that would impress the professional as well as awe the layman — like a faint jingle of music drawing you down the street. You briefly feel young and limitless. You feel as if you might walk past an open window and hear "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" playing again.
Then the feeling vanishes. It happened this spring when two teams of physicists at Fermilab succeeded in measuring a particularly odd schizophrenic particle, known as the strange neutral B meson, that flips back and forth between being itself and its own opposite antiparticle three trillion times a second. Weird as that behavior is, it was right on the money as predicted by the Standard Model.
"Our real hope was for something bizarre," admitted Young-Kee Kim of the University of Chicago and a spokeswoman for one of the Fermilab teams.
In an e-mail message later, Dr. Kim said that she was undaunted. "We are explorers," she said, "and I cannot imagine how exciting it will be when we get even one step closer to true nature!! This belief and this desire is so huge that we will never give up."
Physicists have high hopes that some new physics will begin to reveal itself when they fire up the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN outside Geneva in November next year, although the laboratory just announced that the accelerator would not be running at full strength, colliding protons with seven trillion volts of energy, until 2008.
If the physicists are lucky, in addition to the last piece of the Standard Model, a character known as the Higgs boson, new particles not produced since the Big Bang could eventually come spitting out.
Now you may think that the last thing the world needs is a new elementary particle with another cute annoying name, and physicists agree. What's exciting about the particles, they say, are not the particles, but the new laws of nature they manifest. If you are of a certain rock 'n' roll age, you might not think the universe needs any new laws either.
Unlike, say, in the tax code, however, in physics new laws are more elegant and economical than the ones they replace. For the last century they have usually involved new symmetries that nature seems sworn to uphold — things that don't change when we view the universe from different perspectives.
Physicists have one more symmetry card to play, a concept known as supersymmetry. If this notion is right, there is a whole new population of particles, so-called superpartners to the ones we already know and puzzle about waiting to be discovered.
The problem is that according to some versions of supersymmetry, the effects of these particles, if not the particles themselves, should already be showing up in delicate experiments like the flip-flopping meson. There are thousands of versions of supersymmetry, but the fact that nothing has shown up yet has caused "a growing tension in the field," said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at Harvard.
Dr. Arkani-Hamed admitted, "My nightmare is that we see nothing at all besides the Higgs," in the new collider.
Meanwhile, something bizarre really has shown up. It just hasn't been in a form that physicists can test and play with. Eight years ago two teams of astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, in defiance of cosmic gravity and of what might be left of common sense. The universe apparently is its own antigravity machine.
That might be weird enough, and deserving of tabloid headlines, except it apparently happened before. New studies reported last spring of relic radio waves left over from the waning days of the Big Bang have reinforced, but not yet conclusively proved, the idea that a violent antigravitational force known colloquially as inflation held sway in the first moments of time, stretching and bubbling the cosmos into roughly the shape we see today.
Whatever bubbled and stretched the cosmos is beyond the ken of the Standard Model. Inflation is new physics, Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago explained in a recent e-mail message, adding, "Anything other than inflation would be even newer physics!"
So, yes, there is new physics out there. The question is whether it will ever be put it together into the neat mathematical package that would have impressed Einstein.
It may be asking too much of a theory of physics to explain the world. I don't expect physicists to tell me the meaning of life, I just want something to tell my kid.
In words that still haunt me, Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, once wrote, "When a child asks, What is the world, we literally have nothing to tell her."
Some theorists think they have an answer, namely that the world is made up of tiny vibrating strings. As of now, however, there is scant evidence other than the beauty of their equations that the string theorists are right.
My own daughter, Mira, just turned 4 and she is not asking me what the world is made of, quite yet. I've managed to keep ahead of her so far, if only by reading a page ahead in the dinosaur books that occupy bedtime, but the time is coming when she will be calling me and the world's physicists to account.
When she does, I would like to have something to tell her, and myself.###
Addendum: Editorial
How to Educate Young Scientists
Published: July 3, 2006
The United States could easily fall from its privileged perch in the global economy unless it does something about the horrendous state of science education at both the public school and university levels. That means finding ways to enliven a dry and dispiriting style of science instruction that leads as many as half of the country's aspiring scientists to quit the field before they leave college.
The emerging consensus among educators is that students need early, engaging experiences in the lab — and much more mentoring than most of them receive now — to maintain their interest and inspire them to take up careers in the sciences.
Some universities have already realized the need for better ways of teaching. But this means revising an incentive system that has historically rewarded scientists for making discoveries and publishing academic papers, not for nurturing the next generation of great minds.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the country's largest private supporter of science education, is well ahead of the curve, and has been pushing universities in this direction for several years under the leadership of Thomas Cech, a Nobel laureate. The institute recently announced its latest batch of 20 "million dollar professors," who will use their grant money to explore and expand innovative approaches to teaching science.
The institute has also awarded grants to 50 universities aimed at providing richer undergraduate science education as well as mentoring and early research experiences with working scientists. Many of the grants will be used partly to advertise the virtues of scientific study not just at universities but also in high schools and middle schools.
These programs send a powerful message at a time when the country needs to be paying attention to remaking science education. Congress, which has been casting for ways to address this problem, would do well to emulate them.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
