On occasion a number of disparate news stories come together in ways which illuminate aspects of our current cultural and societal tensions. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the Oscar nominations last night. There were few surprises among their announcements. As The New York Times described them, themes that are championed by "liberals" dominated the nominations :
In a year when size has counted for less than serious intent among voters, Oscar nominations were divvied up on Tuesday among mainly small films with deep political and social themes, from gay romance to the abuse of government power to racial relations to the cycle of vengeance in the Middle East.
"I think this year is the year that small movies get attention because they deal with complexities, they go to the gray area," said Ang Lee, the director of "Brokeback Mountain," which garnered the most nominations, eight, including best picture and best director.
"They deal with issues, and they ask questions; they don't really give resolution," he added. "That's the mood this year."
"Brokeback Mountain," a love story between two ranch hands set over several decades, continued a run that has put it in lead position as the awards season unfolds.
I am less interested in the political resonance than in the cultural significance of the films nominated and the effect such films have, and are meant to have, on the most vulnerable among us.
Fortuitously, this week I received the January issue of the CNS News. An article on the front page (not available on-line) was titled "Pro-Eating Disorder Sites Glamorize Diseases, Make Treatment More Difficult". A brief excerpt:
Pro-anorexia Web sites-meeting places for young people with eating disorders-have become increasingly prominent on the Internet, fueling concerns that they glamorize serious diseases and affect willingness to seek treatment. They generally present the disorders as lifestyle choices, referring to anorexia as "ana," and using "mia" for bulimia and "eddie" for eating disorders.
Created by and catering to an audience mostly of teenagers and young adults, the sites may support the disease by alleviating loneliness, satisfying the anorexic individual's desire for competition over weight issues and providing anorexic role models, said Jean Petrucelli, PhD, director of the William Alanson White Institute's Eating Disorders and Compulsions and Addictions Services in New York City.
Anorexia is a serious, potentially deadly, illness which affects a great many young women and is often extremely difficult to treat. As with any illness, the first step requires the patient recognizing that they have a problem. If anorexia is a "life style choice," can treatment re-defined as "abuse" and patient re-defined as "victim" be far behind?
Words help organize our perceptions:
University of Chicago researchers have found that language affects perception, supporting the Whorfian hypothesis. The effects were noted in the right half of the visual field, but much less, if at all, in the left half.
This is not actually new information; in reality, it represents further neuro-psychiatric support for the efficacy of advertising and marketing. What we call things affects how we see them and what we think of them.
In the current issue of New York Magazine, the cover features two pictures, one of a young girl cuddling with a bare chested boy and another of the same girl in close contact with another girl. Superimposed on the pictures is "Love and the Ambisexual, Heteroflexible Teen." Inside the magazine is the feature article:
The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School
Researchers find it shocking that 11 percent of American girls between 15 and 19 claim to have same-sex encounters. Clearly they’ve never observed the social rituals of the pansexual, bi-queer, metroflexible New York teen.
Over the course of 9 pages, with pictures, reporter Alex Morris sets the scene:
Alair [the girl on the cover-SW] is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.
He points out that Stuyvesant High School is one of New York's elite High Schools for the very best and brightest of our students. These are "sophisticated" young people.
With teenagers there is always a fair amount of posturing when it comes to sex, a tendency to exaggerate or trivialize, innocence mixed with swagger. It’s also true that the “puddle” is just one clique at Stuyvesant, and that Stuyvesant can hardly be considered a typical high school. It attracts the brightest public-school students in New York, and that may be an environment conducive to fewer sexual inhibitions. “In our school,” Elle says, “people are getting a better education, so they’re more open-minded.” [Emphasis mine-SW]
That said, the Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger.
I must admit that I am uncertain what "a better education" means and what it has to do with the situation described, though if the implication is that an inability to make distinctions is part of being more open-minded, it might be worth re-thinking our educational system.
The article includes all the usual points: These are a small group of kids, many from broken homes, with exaggerated notions of teen angst, pushing the limits; they are closer to the "cool" kids than the nerds; their parents don't understand them or feel they can control them; worse, some parents condone their behavior because they are ex-Hippies themselves, free spirits who would not want to impose their old fashioned notions of morality on their kids. One marvels at this. Isn't transmitting notions of moral behavior one of the essential jobs of parents?
Of course not everything goes:
To these kids, homophobia is as socially shunned as racism was to the generation before them. They say it’s practically the one thing that’s not tolerated at their school. One boy who made disparaging remarks about gay people has been ridiculed and taunted, his belongings hidden around the school. “We’re a creative bunch when we hate someone,” says Nathan. Once the tormenters, now the tormented.
And then there is this attempt at an explanation:
If you ask the girls why they think there’s more teenage bisexual experimentation happening today, Alair is quick with an explanation. “I blame television,” she says. “I blame the media.” She’s partly joking, giving the stock answer. But there’s obviously some truth to it. She’s too young to remember a time when she couldn’t turn on Showtime or even MTV and regularly see girls kissing girls. It’s not simply that they’re imitating what they’ve seen, it’s that the stigma has been erased, maybe even transformed into cachet. “It’s in the realm of possibilities now,” as Ritch Savin-Williams puts it. “When you don’t think of it as being a possibility, you don’t do it. But now that it’s out there, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that could be fun.’ ” Of course, sexy TV shows would have no impact at all if they weren’t tapping into something more innate. Perhaps, as research suggests, sexuality is more fluid for women than it is for men. Perhaps natural female intimacy opens the door to sexual experimentation at an age when male partners can be particularly unsatisfying. As one mother of a cuddle-puddle kid puts it, “Emotionally it’s safer—it’s difficult in this age group to hold onto your body. You’re changing. There’s a safety factor in a girl being with a girl.” Then, laughing, she asked that her name be withheld. “My mother might read this.”
Children, and adolescents are children, differ from adults in many ways, one of which is that they have not yet established a completely stable sense of identity. Adolescents typically experiment with all sorts of personal styles, looks, affectations, all in the process of trying to figure out just what kind of person they are going to be, and want to be, when they grow up. Too many of our adolescents have grown up in a hyper-sexualized environment, which is over-stimulating and confusing. Adolescents also have very little real sense of cause and effect. The article, right before ending with a vignette of frustrated adolescent sexualized infatuation, tries to minimize the impact of what has been described:
In the end, the Stuyvesant cuddle puddle might just be a trickle-down version of the collegiate “gay until graduation.” On the other hand, these girls are experimenting at an earlier age, when their identities and their ideas about what they want in a partner are still being formed. Will it affect the way they choose to live their adult lives? Elle is determined to marry a man, but Alair and Jane are not so sure. Maybe they won’t get married at all, they say, keep their options open. “I have no idea,” says Alair. “I’m just 16.”
These are the kinds of children I often treat as adolescents and young adults. The confusion on how to approach each other, the way early sexual involvements turn potential relationships into impersonal "hook-ups" and the poignant despair at ever finding a true love are almost invariably part of their sadness and anxiety. Many have only seen failed relations among their peers. They know that all possibilities are open to them yet cannot tolerate that adulthood requires voluntarily relinquishing the fantasy that they can do whatever they want without penalty or responsibility. It is not only their personal future ability to function as adults in the world, but a prerequisite for our civilization to function, that requires adolescents to make the painful choice of giving up the free expression of all their instinctual desires.
Our cultures move to define deviancy downward, in Patrick Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous locution, has a real impact. As Gagdad Bob pointed out some time ago, Psychoanalysts have some culpability in these developments:
Psychoanalytic gurus such as N.O. Brown (who thoroughly misunderstood Freud) taught that we could achieve a sort of sexual nirvana by eliminating repression and freely expressing our primitive instincts, with the implicit message that our primitive aspects are more "real" than the civilized parts. You can see this phenomena in today's leftists, who clearly long for the "magical" 1960's, which represented a high water mark for a resurgence of romantic merger with the group, free expression of the primitive, and idealized notions of recreating heaven on earth: "All you Need is Love," "Give Peace a Chance," "Sing a Simple Song of Freedom," etc. As the scientist E.O. Wilson put it in another context: Beautiful theory. Wrong species.
What gets lost in the type of pan-sexuality celebrated by Hollywood, trickling down to these children, is that sex, and the holy orgasm, are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Without a meaningful relationship, sex ends up feeling empty and lonely, a quintessentially narcissistic experience; each partner (or partners) are involved in their own, estranged, masturbatory fantasy rather than approaching each other in intimacy and joining together in a loving relationship.
I recall a young women several years ago, early in her treatment, proud of all her sexual conquests; no one could withstand her powers of seduction. One day I asked if she ever felt loved and she dissolved into tears. She could have sex with anyone she wanted but she could never feel loved. That was the day her treatment truly started.
The unfortunate young people in the article will be well versed in the mechanics of sex, heterosexual, bi-sexual, and homosexual and many more permutations; they will yearn for the connection they so clearly want and it will remain just out of their reach. They know how to use each other as sexual objects for momentary pleasure, but relating to each other as fully fledged people is a much more problematic endeavor.
Hollywood has done its part to help "normalize" pan-sexuality and will celebrate their open-minded tolerance in March (one of the nominees for best Actress is for a film about a transsexual); whether you believe this was wise or not, it is hard to argue that such re-definition of what at one time was considered deviant behavior comes at a high price. There is also a vast difference between teaching our children tolerance and teaching that "anything and everything goes" and all sexual behavior is equivalent and represent mere "life style choices."
[I might add that the moral relativism of films like "Munich" and the PC inherent in "Syriana" are reflections of the same mind set that refuses to make distinctions between healthy sexuality that furthers intimacy and unhealthy sexuality that damages.]
Tomorrow, I plan to present a wonderful illustration of what it means to give up a bit of one's narcissism in order to find intimacy with another person.
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