Good wholesome family entertainment from the old days [flexible women]

From the YouTube page:

I am sorry there is no music, but I doubt I could share this with you uncut, but this is all real with no CGI or trickery whatsoever. These are The Ross Sisters performing and dancing to, though I know you can’t hear it, “Broadway Rhythm” (1944). Do a search to find it.

It actually doesn’t seem nearly as freaky after you have seen it a few times, but for some they might find it to be nightmare fuel. It kind of reminded me of a scene from the remake of Susperia or Bryan Yuzna’s cult classic Society. Someone could do some great intercutting between this and applicable scenes from the film have mentioned above. Maybe I will, but if you beat me to it, please give my channel a shoutout. Either an ‪@genreonlinenet‬ or #genreonlinenet please. 🙏🏼 Thank you.

Rambling into April: 4th Arena, Patriotism, Mystery Box + stuff

Lot’s going on. Time to sort things out.

The Fourth Arena

I’m committed to writing a book with the tentative title: Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising. Here’s my current elevator pitch:

"Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising" charts humanity's next great leap - not toward obsolescence, but toward unprecedented forms of existence. Just as life emerged from matter and culture from life, we're witnessing the birth of entities that transcend traditional boundaries between human and artificial. Drawing on complexity science and cultural evolution, this book offers an optimistic vision of how human-AI partnerships could create genuinely new forms of consciousness, relationship, and being. For readers seeking a fresh perspective on our technological future that goes beyond both utopian and dystopian clichés.

I contacted my agent from Beethoven’s Anvil, but he’s getting out of the business so he can’t take me on. But he’s agreed to help me with the proposal. I’ve got a chapter outline (17 chapters) and a decent idea of what goes in each chapter. I’m in the process of putting finishing touches on a draft of the introduction, “The Four Arenas,” which is based on an article I’d published in 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve started work on drafting Chapter 14: “Science Fiction Imagines the Future.” That will use some material from an old 3QD piece plus some new material. This working paper contains early pre-draft material for the final chapter and background material for the two preceding chapters: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising.

My New-Found Patriotism

I’m sure you’ve heard a saying that goes something like this: You don’t understand the value of something until it’s gone. Well, sometime during the last week, as I was thinking about the damage that Trump, with the help of Musk and a bunch of others, is doing to the country, and the world, I felt patriotic in a way I’d never felt before.

It’s MY country these people are destroying! NO.

I’ve decided that’s the topic for my next article for 3 Quarks Daily. Tentative title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Apollo.”  From a note I sent to friends:

Patriotism is an abstract thing, like justice, gravity, charity, evolution, and dozens and hundreds of other phenomena. All of these things have definitions, which are easily enough learned, and stories associated with them. But at some point, these things must resolved into often complex patterns of concrete events. So this article is about some of the (more or less) concrete events which give meaning to my patriotism. For someone like Trump, “patriotism” is just a word, a powerful word, he uses to get what he wants. It’s detached from any meaningful committee to and participation in the large collective effort and experiment that has been America to date.

So, the piece will be largely autobiographical, with a concentration on my years in Baltimore, when I got bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins, protested against the war in Vietnam, got drafted, and performed alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins.

I’ll also be talking about my trip to Goshen College to talk about my book on music. Why? First, because I was invited. Beyond that, Goshen College is a Mennonite school and Mennonite men are pacifists. During WWII many Mennonite men went to prison rather than serve in the army. Consequently, in order to avoid the expense and bother of criminal proceedings and imprisonment, the government decided to allow pacifists the option of performing some kind of civilian service as an alternative to going into the military. That’s what I did. I owed a debt to the older male relatives to the students I would be speaking to.

The Mystery Box Show

I’ve discovered a very interesting YouTube channel: The Mystery Box Show. Here’s how the channel describes itself;

Take a bit of The Moth, a bit of TED and throw a lot of sex into the mix and you've got The Mystery Box Show, a storytelling podcast where people tell their true stories all about sex. From the vanilla to the kinky, from hilarious mis-adventures to inspiring sexual revelations, our storytellers bare their souls and deliver their sexy secrets directly to your ears.

I’ve watched a bunch of them and have enjoyed most of them, some more than others. I’ve included one of the videos in a recent post: Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

Other things I’m working on

I’ve still got to finish my commentary on Harold Bloom and then gather that whole series together into a single document with the (tentative) title, A Quixotic Essay about Literary Criticism: Thinkers, Methods, Authority.

I’ve got to prepare some working papers. There’s that literary critics one. I also want to do something with my series on melancholy and at least one more Claude conversation: Dialog with Claude 3.5 on the Intellectual Potential of Man-Machine Interaction.

Finally, I’ve decided to write some more about my years in Baltimore, which was a very important period in my life. Between a number of posts here – most recently, Breaking down monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s – and at 3 Quarks Daily, I’ve already written quite a bit about that period. I’ll be writing more in the course of my patriotism essay. Then, I suppose, I could gather them all together into a single document.

And so it goes.

Can there be (sexual) pleasure and freedom in bondage?

A month ago, I mentioned Fifty Shades of Grey in a post about expressions of eroticism. As you may know, the novel centers on an evolving BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) sexual relationship between a recent college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a wealthy young businessman, Christian Grey. The novel was enormously when it came out, in 2011, had two sequels, and was adapted into a film in 2015. The audience was largely women.

I was puzzled, and curious. So, I took the book out of the library and read my way through 220 pages or so (out of 500). Yes, the sex is explicit, involves bondage and discipline, and the scenes are fairly long, eight or nine pages. I can’t imagine that such a book would have been a best seller in my youth, the 50s, 60s, and 70s. In some sense that is neither here nor there. Obviously, though, times have changed. What had me a bit puzzled was that this sexually explicit book depicted kinky sex. How popular is that?

I did a bit of looking around and found an academic article from 2015 reporting the results of a study in which 1,519 adults were asked to report on their sexual fantasies: What Exactly Is an Unusual Sexual Fantasy? It turns out that submission and domination themes are common for both men and women, at least in this sample, which was self-selected. In particular:

The proportion of women acknowledging submissive fantasies is not negligible. Being sexually dominated (64.6%), being tied up for sexual pleasure (52.1%), being spanked or whipped (36.3%), and being forced to have sex (28.9%) were all reported by significant proportions of women. Interestingly, the same sexual fantasies were also reported by significant proportions of men (53.3%, 46.2%, 28.5%, and 30.7%, respectively).

That settles that. Fifty Shades of Grey plays to the fantasies of a large part of the population.

But why? I found some remarks in a 2021 article by Jill Schildhouse in Oprah Daily that spoke to that:

Looking for a Christian Grey to your Anastasia Steele? Nearly 65 percent of women fantasize about being dominated sexually, according to a survey of more than 1,000 people that was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. “There's a reason 50 Shades of Grey made such an impact!” says Channa Bromley, a relationship and dating coach. “BDSM is alluring because one partner relinquishes all sense of control. They’re submissive to the person touching them, but subconsciously give themselves permission to be wild, to be orgasmic in response—she doesn't need to hold back.”

I can understand that. And the following video lets me feel it. No, it doesn’t depict sex, but rather shows a woman, Madison Young, testifying about a particular sexual experience:

The experience is about being an actress in a bondage film, her first. Here is what she says starting at about 10:40:

And my body starts to shake and I can feel myself riding these waves of total ecstasy. And I am melting into this rope. This rope is holding me, it is saying you are safe to let go, it is safe to surrender. Just do it. You are home. And all of a sudden it starts rushing back to me. Home, home, the best parts of home. The smell of autumn leaves and the first time that I felt rope in my hands, working in a summertime with my father, doing landscaping for Madison Tree Service, our family business. And I knew, Madison. Madison I am, I can feel it through my body, and the ropes, they were holding me. And it was a safe place. I was becoming Madison. I was grinding my cunt into that nice vibrator, and I felt it, I felt it, I felt that energy flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing through my body, up through, my crown, into the whole [??] I lost myself. I lost myself and I found myself at the same time, right there.

This is not the world I grew up in. That world would not have had a public venue where stories like this could be told. For that matter, such venues are certainly not common now. But YouTube is available everywhere.

Young obviously was talking about an experience she had. I wonder how many of those men and women who reported such fantasies have actually enacted them in whatever degree?

For some loose corroboration you might want to look at these posts from a few years ago:

• Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked] (December 28, 2017)
• Araki and His Models (August 16, 2013)

Notes on the erotic: Pole dancing, ballet, Fifty Shades of Grey & a conversation with Claude 3.7

Back in February I posted, What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge. That line of thought led me to take Fifty Shades of Grey from the library so I could evaluate the sex scenes against those in The Story of O, which I read back in the late 1960s. And that led me to a conversation with Claude about those two books, women, and romance novels. Perhaps I’ll post bits of that conversation in another post, but not here. Then, a couple of days ago, YouTube fed me a video featuring Aurora. I’ve just posted about that video.

So, what’s going on? What’s going on is that I am once again looking into things that have interested me off and on throughout my entire intellectual career, from my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins to the present. It looks like things are on again.

Since Aurora’s dance was the ‘trigger’ for the Claude conversation I report below, I want to start with some remarks about ballet in a paper by my teacher and colleague, the late David Hays, The Evolution of Expressive Culture (1993). Hays spent the last decade and a half of his life in New York City, where he became interested in the ballet. He bought season tickets to performances by the New York City ballet. While his article is about expressive culture in general, he takes ballet as his central example.

He asked:

Why and how does ballet achieve its powerful effect? At a typical performance of the City Ballet, a large part of the audience are naive. They are not familiar with the pieces being danced; many have never seen them before (the intake of breath that can be heard when the curtain rises on an effective stage set is evidence enough). They are not much expert in the art; the accounts that tie published in newspapers and magazines are generally superficial, often in my judgment missing the essence of the work altogether. Audiences give ovations for performances that seem to me mediocre. Yet the difference in the crowd between entrance and exit is almost tangible. Watching the ballet has changed their mood in a favorable way. Is such a change to be seen between those entering and leaving a great museum of painting or sculpture?

A clue appears in a work that is highly idiosyncratic in both substance and form, Peter A. Bucknell’s (1979) Entertainment and Ritual 600 to 1600. He deals only with England, and says (p. 189):

The ‘magic’ contained in these dances was something that even the dancer could not explain or understand. Because there was something outside the world around him which only dancing seemed to contact–like private prayer–so dancing was pursued in secret.

In secret, but not in solitude. The people of a village would go into the woods at night to dance together, as the people of bands and villages have danced, probably, through the whole history of our species. Bucknell quotes Stubbes (Anatomy of Abuses, 2nd ed., 1583) to the effect that two-thirds of the girls who spend the night in the woods around the Maypole are “violated” (p. 185). Such activities are not acceptable to Catholic religion, or to the Anglican Church that followed it in England; and the Church was inordinately powerful in England at the time. But, reports Bucknell, the Church could not stop these dances (p. 186).

My intention is not to emphasize the sexuality; ‘magic’ is what I think is most important. Balanchine captured that magic, brought it under artistic control, and the New York City audience came into contact with something “outside the world around.” For an audience that probably cannot achieve that contact by prayer, the effect is truly spectacular. Without the artistic control, and the creative genius, Balanchine’s predecessors and contemporaries achieved effects of a much lower order.

Hays then asks, “what is that ‘magic’, what is it outside the world around us” and how can we bring it under artistic control? Good questions. Hays spends the rest of the essay answering them. I recommend it to you. But I want to quote one more passage, the opening and conclusion of a paragraph about Balanchine:

The recognition that Balanchine holds about the same place in the history of ballet that Michelangelo or Leonardo holds in the history of plastic arts came quickly. [...] To put the matter more directly, he converted a somewhat disreputable amusement into an art. (After all, the female dancers are practically nude, and frequently take positions with their legs spread far apart, the bodies grossly exposed.)

That’s what interests me, the way ballet walks a fine line between the artistic and the pornographic, a line that is under continual revision.

That’s what the following conversation with Claude 3.7 is about. As always, my prompts are set in bold face while Claude’s responses are plain, though some subheadings will be bolded.

* * * * *

What can you tell me about the demographics of the audience for ballet?

Ballet audiences tend to have some distinctive demographic characteristics, though these can vary by region and type of performance.

Key demographics of ballet audiences typically include:

• Predominantly female (often 60-75% of attendees)
• Higher education levels than the general population
• Higher income brackets
• Older age skew (typically 45+ years old)
• More likely to be white/Caucasian in Western countries
• Often have personal experience with arts education

There are several notable trends in ballet audience demographics:

1. Aging audiences: Many traditional ballet companies struggle with attracting younger audiences
2. Urban concentration: Ballet attendance is higher in metropolitan areas
3. Digital expansion: Streaming performances have somewhat broadened demographic reach
4. Education correlation: Those with advanced degrees attend at higher rates
5. Cross-generational patterns: Ballet attendance often follows family traditions

Ballet companies are increasingly focused on audience development strategies to diversify their demographics, including educational outreach programs, community engagement initiatives, and digital content to attract younger and more diverse audiences.

Would you like me to explore any particular aspect of ballet audience demographics in more detail?

OK. Now let’s switch to a different topic, though one that’s still about dancing. I believe that there’s been a trend of women taking lessons in pole dancing. What can you tell me about that? When did it start, what’s the motivation, the ideology, and demographics (married, single, ages)?

Aurora, exploring & extending the limits of the erotic in dance

 

Art video: Grande Duello Dance by Aurora. EDSA content

Description from the YouTube page:

Prepare to be captivated by this artistic dance performance set to Unholy - Sam Smith, Kim Petras. 💃🔥 With every graceful move and expressive motion, this choreography brings the raw emotion of blues and rock to life. The haunting guitar melodies and soulful rhythms guide the dancer’s fluid yet powerful storytelling, evoking passion, pain, and resilience.

I believe that this is the first video I watched by Aurora, only a couple of days ago. I've since watched another half dozen or so across her three channels.

I was struck by a number of things: her ballet technique and costume, though her legs are not covered with a leotard, but also the obviously erotic nature of some of the poses and moves. “They allow this on YouTube?” I thought to myself. After all, some people are likely to consider this pornographic and report it to YouTube – I’m assuming YouTube does not host pornography; I’ve certainly never seen any there, nor looked for it.

That’s obviously what the “EDSA content” designation is about. It stands for “Educational, Documentary, Scientific & Artistic” content. If you scroll though YouTube’s help system – there is no direct link that I can see – you’ll get an explanation. For example:

How content gets an EDSA exception

We assess whether content gets an EDSA exception on a case-by-case basis. First, we check if there’s a Community Guidelines violation in the content. If there’s a violation, we review if there’s enough context in the content to make an EDSA exception. We review WHAT context is present and WHERE the context is.

And so it goes. There's more if you keep scrolling.

Watching Aurora's videos prompted me to have a discussion with Claude 3.7 about pole dancing, ballet, and Fifty Shades of Grey, which I will post a bit later. & here it is!

 

* * * * *

 

ADDENDUM 3.12.25: This video is no longer available: “This video has been removed by the uploader.” Aurora's channel is empty. I don't know what's going on. 

Later in the day: It seems that YouTube thought her “videos are too spicy” and so banned her for two weeks. I suspect that implies that people complained. She's opened another channel that currently has one video.

Nina Paley on sex and life

Nina is a wise woman. I'm bumping this to the top of the queue on that account.

Nina Paley reflects on sex and her complex experience of it: My Sex-Positive Memoirs, 4W, January 14, 2020. It's mostly about her years in San Francisco in the 1990s. Near the beginning:

A horny, childfree, sex-loving, non-monogamous (that’s another story) heterosexual young woman should have had no trouble finding sex partners, yet this was not the case. I did find a few men to have sex with—once. They would have sex once, then I’d never hear from them again. Even finding such men was difficult.

Why was I pursuing non-committal, “empty” sex anyway? Sure I loved sex, but I didn’t understand it.

I had received plenty of sex education: my mother worked for Planned Parenthood, and my childhood was filled with earnest Liberal sex-education books like “How Babies Are Made” and “What’s Happening to Me?” Throughout my teens and young adulthood, I was encouraged to talk about sex, to “communicate,” so I would be spared the repressive hang-ups of my mother’s generation. I was naturally drawn to the Sex-Positive circles of San Francisco, where we talked and talked and talked about sex. But this “sex education” - all the Liberal discourse around sex - unwittingly encouraged dissociation: we could only talk about the body as a thing that does acts. Much of our intellectualism was a defense against vulnerability and what we dreaded most: shame. We separated sex from love and relationships; we thought that was progressive and empowering.

Overall, I wish we had shut up about sex more, and mediated it less. Mechanics aside, sex is a mystery, to be experienced directly and personally. Talking about sex is as useful as talking about God. Mediating spiritual experience does nothing to enhance such experience, but it does allow manipulation of seekers, giving rise to cults.

Toward the middle:

Was I supposed to save myself for Love? I’d already been in love, several times, and my lovers imploded and left me. Men found me “too intense.” No one wanted my love, not even me. The idea of men loving me for who I actually was was long gone. No one wanted my soul, but some wanted my body, which was thin at last, and with makeup, a wig, and high heels was literally a hot commodity.

I was well aware I was supposed to be cautious, and took precautions; I only responded to solicitations specifying “no nudity” and “no sex” (both of which turned out to be laughable, and are tactics still used to this day to recruit young, vulnerable women). I was also aware that I was supposed to feel ashamed. I spent a lot of time considering shame, and rejecting it: I wasn’t harming anyone (ha!), my choices were informed, my eyes were open. Sex was nothing to be ashamed of. Objectifying my own body was nothing to be ashamed of: all the strippers, prostitutes, and porn models/directors who spoke at SFSI [San Francisco Sex Information] made that clear. It was work, it was art, it was expression. No shame in objectification: we are all objects, we live in a material world. Nothing wrong with exchange for money, either; we exchange all kinds of goods and services for money, why are bodies and sex any different?

Now-me knows sex is different, and bodies are not commodities. Then-me simply wouldn’t have believed it. The body is sacred? Nothing is sacred in this world. Was I supposed to just cloister myself, be abstinent until Mr. Right came along? There is no Mr. Right, there was no one who would understand and respect and love me the way I needed to be loved, and time was ticking away while my very temporal body was at its peak of beauty and my hormones were screaming “fuck! fuck! fuck!” [...]

A hot body is often the biggest asset many young women have. We are lucky if we have hot, conventionally attractive bodies. All my years developing my mind and talents meant nothing compared to my brief moment of hot-boddedness. Men who were never impressed by my art would fall over themselves to buy me drinks and otherwise attend to me when I went out in a wig and makeup. I actually felt sorry for these men, so helplessly conditioned they were to respond to stupid gender cues, their feeble minds taken over by mediated programming. Do I pity them still? As much as I pity anyone who surrenders personal responsibility and critical thinking in favor of unexamined social programming. Such people are pathetic—and authoritarian, dangerous enablers.

For about a year, I enabled them myself, by dressing up as the male idea of a sexy woman: drag.

Toward the end:

Life is all about making mistakes. No one has figured out how to get it right. If you keep sex sacred and private, your kids grow up repressed and ashamed (or so my elders have told me; I wouldn’t know). If you make sex casual and public, it becomes a commodity and we lose our souls. Radical feminists rightly criticize porn, but banning porn outright is repressive — and almost certain to backfire, given the willful misapplication of porn regulations thus far. (In the 1990’s, alternative comic books were regularly seized at the Canadian border because they were “mistaken” as porn. This effectively turned me against any and all porn regulation, but only later did I consider the border guards’ frequent “mistakes” may have been on purpose, to manipulate people like me into opposing regulation I would otherwise support).

My 20’s were hard. So was my childhood. So is right now. I’m not entitled to a do-over of childhood, youth, or last week. Do I regret the choices I’ve made? Yes, in the sense I wouldn’t make those same choices again. But no in the sense that all of those choices made me who I am, and I like myself. I did stupid things because I didn’t know any better, and the only way for me to learn was to do the stupid things I did. It’s not like “sex work will hurt you” was any secret. Warnings against it were plentiful but not persuasive, and besides, I’d found my way into a kind of cult. The herd I homed to was all about sex work, porn, objectification, and “non-judgement”; who was I gonna listen to, them or a bunch of repressed prudes?

Now I’m in menopause, and have hardly any libido anyway. Whether that’s due to the permanent scars of my “sex-positive” 20’s, or the natural exhaustion of my ovaries, I do not know. Many or most women slow down a lot sexually in their 50’s, yet sex is still worshiped throughout our culture. Much of our population couldn’t care less about sex, even while it permeates all media as the be-all and end-all of life. Sex in advertising, sex in novels, sex in movies, sex on television, sex, sex, sex — and most women over 50 don’t give a damn. Many women under 50 do, but we have to see sex from the male perspective all the damn time, because men still make most media. We objectify ourselves.

It is a relief to not be horny all the time any more. It’s also unnerving, because in this society we’re supposed to be horny. Except when I was horny, men didn’t like that either. Women are either out-of-control nymphomaniacs, or dried-up prudes.

Or maybe, just maybe, women’s sexuality doesn’t exist to please men.

I just wish it had pleased me.

Confabulation, Dylan’s epistemic stance, and progress in the arts: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”

I continue to think about the tendency of LLMs to confabulate, that is, to make stuff up that is simply not true of the world. As I have remarked here and there, I tend to think that 1) confabulation is inherent in the architecture, and 2) that this “confabulation” is the default mode of human language. We just make things up.

However, we must live with one another and that requires cooperation. Effective communication requires agreement. It turns out that the external world is a convenient locus for that agreement. We agree that THAT tree over is a pine, that THAT apple is ripe, that THAT bird is a cardinal, that the stew is too salty, the earth is round and that the moon travels around the earth every 28 days. Some of these agreements may come easily, others are more difficult in the making.evolu

However true that may be, it does seem a bit odd to think of external reality as a vehicle for grounding agreement on language use. And, if I thought about it a bit, I could probably come up with some account of why that doesn’t seem quite right. But I’m stalking a different beast at the moment.

Consider this observation that Weston La Barre made in 1972 in The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion (p. 60):

... the Australian Bushman themselves equate dream-time with the myth-time that is mysteriously brought back in ritual; myth is as timeless as the unconscious mind. It is the delectability of dreams that makes them desirable, and it is their desirability that (along with lowered critical threshold) that gives them their intense “reality” and conviction. The fact that he dreams first force on man the need to epistemologize.

Let’s pretend we’ve just gotten up from a dream. What do we make of it? Or perhaps, how do we make anything of it?

We tell it to others, and they tell us their dreams. We talk and arrive at some agreement about what transpires in those dreams, about the nature of those events and their relationship to the waking world. I am thus reminded of Bob Dylan’s line in “Talkin’ World War III Blues”: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”

Is that what expressive culture is about, religious myth, ritual, folktales, drama, epics, novels, not to mention the visual and plastic arts as well? Are they vehicles for allowing us to reach agreement about certain of our, shall we say, confabulations?

This brings up a post from February, What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge. Using three novels as examples (Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Lady Chatterly’s Lover) I suggested that as we move from one to the other in historical order, we’re moving from shared knowledge of sexual matters to common knowledge. Those are terms from game theory. We talk of shared knowledge when everyone knows something, but aren’t aware that the others know that same thing. Once everyone comes to know that everyone knows that thing, whatever it is, that knowledge has become common knowledge.

I have thus begun to wonder: Is that how the arts function over time? I recently discussed the matter with Claude 3.7. Here’s its response:

It's not just that artistic styles change, but that art gradually makes explicit what was once implicit across many domains of human experience.

This pattern extends beyond sexuality. Consider how literature has treated:

• Mental illness (from metaphorical to explicit)
• Social class tensions (from coded to direct)
• Religious doubt (from allegorical to overt)
• Political criticism (from veiled to unmistakable)

In each case, what begins as shared knowledge eventually becomes common knowledge through artistic expression. This does suggest a kind of progress - not necessarily aesthetic progress, but progress in cultural honesty and transparency.

It is by no means obvious that this is the case. But I’m certainly sympathetic.

What is undeniable is that in the last 15 years or so digital humanists are found empirical evidence of unidirectional trends measured attributed of literary texts over long periods of time. Perhaps the most interesting example is in Matthew Jocker’s Macroanalysis, where he shows a unidirectional trend in a corpus of 3000 Anglophone novels from the 19th century. I discuss this in a number of posts. This working paper might be the place to start: On the direction of literary history: How should we interpret that 3300 node graph in Macroanalysis? There’s another working paper: On the Direction of 19th Century Poetic Style, Underwood and Sellers 2015. You might also look at this blog post from 2016, From Telling to Showing, by the Numbers, which is also about 19th century novels.

More later.

Women of the year: Middle-Aged and getting more action than ever before

Mireille Silicoff, Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex, NYTimes, 2025.

A whole new cultural type seems to have landed. It feels worlds away from the traditional view of older women’s sexuality — which, if you look at the lion’s share of studies, you would conclude is incredibly depressing. Until the late 20th century, academic studies of aging women were dominated by what sociologists call the “misery perspective,” which emphasizes how people’s lives get worse as they age, burdened by factors like chronic illness and financial distress. [...]

But this year I looked around at the women I know and saw a completely different plane of existence. “The women I know” is, by definition, not a representative sample, but still: Two of my friends ended marriages because of their own sexual dissatisfaction. Another divorced and became a card-carrying polyamorist. Two of my friends in their 50s are seriously dating people in their 30s, and a few others are, like me, divorced and engaging in sex practices they’d never tried before. [...]

I’ve come to think of this cadre of women as something like hardy garden perennials. Year after year, with the right conditions, perennials continue to flower. Likewise, the sexual Perennial finds herself still well rooted in an erotic life at an age when she may have expected it to fade or wither.

In contrast:

This is all the more remarkable because, for the culture as a whole, physical sex really is withering and fading. Among the most defining ongoing stories about sex in America today has been the drop-off in activity among Gen Z and Millennials. Blame for that decline has generally been placed on the way we live in the 21st century: the atomization of our social lives; the antidepressants that can kill the libido; the phones and social media that provide endless fascination, even on boring evenings when other things could be happening; the always-available porn that offers both problematic expectations of how in-person sex happens and a far less demanding alternative to it. For young parents, the intensity of modern child-rearing shrivels sex lives. For teenagers, a growing obsession with personal and psychological safety, a desire to be immune from discomfort, can flatten eroticism in some of the places it might flourish.

There's much more at the link.

What is it about depicting sex in writing? From shared knowledge to common knowledge.

Just around the corner at 3 Quarks Daily, Gary Borjesson had an interesting post about love: Can Love Last? A (mostly) encouraging story about the fate of romance over time, which dealt with love and sex, security and adventure. Here’s a comment I made:

Western culture has worked very hard to integrate these things. As a quick example, start with Pride and Prejudice early in the 19th century. Sex is just barely there. You have to look hard to find it. But why do you think Lydia ran off with the handsome charming soldier? Late in the century we have Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which seethes with sexual energy, a peasant seduced by her master, a birth out-of-wedlock, a just-married husband who deserts his wife when he learns that she'd been with another man, a reconciliation...and then Tess is hanged in the end. Yikes! But we don't see sexual activity depicted on the page. That's confined to under-the-counter pornography, which was plentiful. Then, early in the 20th century we have Lady Chatterley's Lover. At last, sex on the page, but rather tame by today's standards. When the unexpurgated version of that book was published in 1960, the publisher was tried for obscenity in the British courts.

And now! Now, dear reader, I blush to think about it.

Think about that for a moment – and that trial is hardly the only obscenity trial the 20th century has seen. The courts are an instrument of the state. The state was asked to make a determination about whether or not the verbal description of sexual intercourse should be permitted to become common knowledge.

Here I’m using “common knowledge” as a technical term in game theory. Common knowledge is knowledge, not only that everyone has, but everyone knows that everyone else knows it. It is thus distinct from shared knowledge, which is knowledge that everyone has, but they don’t necessarily know that everyone shares that knowledge.

The distinction between shared knowledge and common knowledge is important in the folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When the naked emperor proudly parades his “new clothes” before his subjects, all of them can see that he is naked. They share that knowledge. It isn’t until the little child blurts out, “he’s naked!” that the knowledge becomes common knowledge. Everyone hears the child’s cry and everyone knows that everyone else has heard it. Above all, the emperor has heard it. If the kid hadn’t cried out, the charade could have gone on indefinitely. But once he blurted out the truth, the deception was finished.

Getting back to those novels, let us assume for the sake of argument[1] that everyone who read Pride and Prejudice was aware of sexual intercourse and so everyone knew that, upon marriage, Elizabeth Bennett would have intercourse with Fitzwilliam Darcy, just as they knew that, when Lydia ran off with Wickham, they would be having intercourse. So why not put it on the page?

I think that question requires a more subtle answer that I am prepared to provide, more subtle and certainly longer. In Elizabeth’s case, the marriage doesn’t happen within the compass of the story (why not, pray tell?). But why not Lydia and Wickham? Tricky. It’s possible that they had not actually “done it” within the compass of the story, how convenient, but maybe they had, who knows? On the one hand there is the actual effect that reading such a depiction would have on readers. That’s one thing. That’s beyond the scope of this post.

What this post is about is the difference between shared knowledge and common knowledge. If Jane Austen had actually written such a scene – would she have been capable of doing so? (are you? are you sure?) – that act would have transformed shared knowledge into common knowledge. That’s what interests me.

By the time we get to Lady Chatterley’s Lover the act, sexual intercourse, is there on the page. We have no choice but to acknowledge it. And the state was forced to ratify that knowledge. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is intermediate between the two, but much more can be depicted than was in Lady Chatterley. Think of Henry Miller, heck, think of Fifty Shades of Grey, which I hear is quite explicit, but I’ve not read it – though I must admit that I’m now curious, you know, like I used to buy Playboy for the interviews (Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre) and not the pictures.

One of these days I’m going to have to think and write about this at greater length. This is enough for now. I just wanted to put the issue on the table.

How many degrees of sexual detail and explicitness are there? When have they shown up in fiction? I suppose one could write about those millions of sperm swimming toward the egg – and surely someone has done it, as Woody Allen has put it into a movie – but that would kill the eroticism, wouldn’t it? 

* * * * *

[1] Back in the previous millennium I read all five volumes of Peter Gay’s The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984-1998). I have a vague recollection that some (middle and upper class) women may not have known about sexual intercourse by the time they got married. Alas, my library is in storage so I can’t provide a citation.

* * * * *

My post on sexual shame is relevant here: In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans.

In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans

As far as I know, there is no standard account of why humans find sexuality so problematic. It’s not as though no one’s thought to investigate it. They have. But so far no one’s come up with a good account, at least not in thoroughly modern terms, not so far as I can see. So I decided to ask Claude 3.5 Sonnet about it and to suggest my own speculative approach to the problem. 

* * * * *

I query Claude about present thinking

I believe that sexual shame is unique to animals. Our primates, monkeys and apes, do not insist on copulating in private. They are willing to copulate where others in the group can observe. Is this correct?

From a scientific perspective, this is an oversimplification. While many non-human primates do engage in mating behaviors openly within their social groups, the relationship between privacy and mating varies significantly across species and contexts.

Research in primatology has documented that some primate species do seek varying degrees of seclusion during mating. For instance, orangutans often mate away from other group members, and some gorilla groups show preferences for more secluded locations during breeding behaviors.

The concept of "sexual shame" as we understand it in human terms is complex and involves cultural, psychological, and social dimensions that are difficult to attribute directly to other species. What we observe in other primates is better understood as different patterns of social organization and mating strategies that have evolved to serve various biological and social functions.

Additionally, privacy-seeking behaviors in human societies show considerable variation across cultures and historical periods, suggesting that much of what we consider "sexual shame" is culturally constructed rather than being a universal biological trait.

Would you be interested in learning more about the specific mating patterns and social behaviors observed in different primate species?

That’s OK for now. And I understand that privacy-seeking behavior varies across cultures. In a culture where everyone lives in the same tent, for example, finding privacy is going to be quite different from a culture where everyone has their own sleeping room. Is there any standard reason why humans usually insist on privacy of some sort?

The human preference for private sexual activity appears to stem from several key factors that emerged during our species' development. From an evolutionary perspective, privacy during mating likely provided advantages in mate selection and pair bonding. Private sexual encounters allowed pairs to strengthen their emotional connections without interference or competition from other group members.

From a social perspective, humans developed complex systems of kinship, marriage, and social organization that regulated sexual behavior. These systems often included norms about appropriate contexts for sexual activity, which typically emphasized privacy. This privacy served practical purposes: it helped maintain social order, reduced conflict over mates, and supported the formation of stable family units.

Additionally, humans developed sophisticated cognitive abilities that include advanced theory of mind and heightened self-awareness. This led to complex emotional responses to being observed during intimate activities, which may have further reinforced preferences for privacy.

These biological and social factors appear to have co-evolved with human cultural development, resulting in widespread (though not universal) cultural norms around sexual privacy. While the specific manifestations of these privacy norms vary significantly across societies, the underlying tendency toward some form of privacy during sexual activity appears to be a common human trait.

Would you like to explore any particular aspect of these evolutionary or social dynamics in more detail?

OK. This is consistent with what I’m thinking: “humans developed sophisticated cognitive abilities that include advanced theory of mind and heightened self-awareness. This led to complex emotional responses to being observed during intimate activities, which may have further reinforced preferences for privacy.” Is there a standard reason why sexuality is so problematic for humans?

Human sexuality's complexity appears to stem from several interconnected factors. The development of advanced cognitive abilities that you referenced has made human sexuality uniquely intricate compared to other species.

Our capacity for complex emotional attachments and social relationships means that sexual behavior becomes deeply entwined with personal identity, emotional well-being, and social status. This creates multiple layers of meaning beyond the basic biological drive.

The human brain's sophisticated ability to process symbolic meaning and create cultural narratives transforms sexuality into something that carries significant social and psychological weight. Sexual behavior becomes linked to concepts of morality, identity, and social standing in ways that can create internal conflicts and anxieties.

Additionally, the extended period of human development and the importance of stable family units for child-rearing has led societies to develop elaborate systems for regulating sexual behavior. These cultural systems, while serving important social functions, can sometimes conflict with biological drives, creating tension between instinct and social expectations.

Furthermore, humans' heightened self-awareness means we can anticipate others' judgments and internalize social standards about sexuality, potentially leading to psychological stress that other species likely don't experience. Our ability to imagine future consequences and remember past experiences adds layers of complexity to sexual decision-making.

Would you like to explore any of these specific aspects in more detail? 

I speculate about why humans are bedeviled by sex

Here’s my highly speculative explanation. It has to do with the nature of human development. When humans are born a whole range of biological ‘drives’ and ‘desires’ are active. They’re necessary for the infant to live and thrive.

But cognitive capabilities are quite primitive. They develop relatively slowly, over a matter of years. As that happens the basic biological drives remain active. The way they are dealt with, organized into behavior, will change as cognition becomes more sophisticated. And then adolescence hits. Two things happen.

On the one hand abstract thought emerges (Piaget). On the other hand, adult sexuality matures. But it’s completely new. It hasn’t been a part of the process of behavioral elaboration and maturation that the other biological ‘drives’ and needs have been, hunger and thirst, sleep, exploration, etc. It’s just there. I’m thinking that if it emerges significantly after abstract thinking, the abstraction system (if you will) is more likely to conceive of it as some foreign object, some strange Other, but an Other that’s trapped there inside the body. That makes it very problematic. If on the other hand sexuality arrives first, then the abstraction system can more easily treat it just like any of the other biological motivations.

Your hypothesis presents an intriguing developmental perspective on human sexuality's unique challenges. Let me analyze several key aspects of this framework.

Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked]

Ove four years ago I went to an exhibition of photographs by the Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki. Many, but by no means all of them, were of women, often naked, sometimes outrageously so, and sometimes intricately bound in what, I gather, was a traditional Japanese style – though not the sort of tradition widely on display. I wrote three blog posts about Araki, one based on a documentary about his working which included footage of photo sessions with female models, many/most of whom where not professional models. It was fascinating stuff, especially his (often jovial) relationship with his models during a photo shoot.

I was reminded of that while reading about a Chinese (art) photographer who died this year, Ren Hang (Jenna Wortham In The NYTimes). Here's the first paragraph:

Jun Sui didn’t plan to get naked for the Chinese art photographer Ren Hang. But as the day wore on, she loosened up, and the clothes came off. Ren’s shoots could become electrified with the illicitness of being nude, especially when they were in public, where such activity in China guarantees arrest or worse. The atmosphere of adventure created trust, as did the spirit of rebellion. “There was a sense of being free,” Sui told me. In person, Sui is demure, inconspicuous; in Ren’s photographs, her eyes blaze from her crouch between two upright women, her arms snaking between their thighs. “We hide the body in our culture,” Ren once said; in China, it is “a demoralization to show what they think should be private.” Ren, Sui said, encouraged everyone around him to shed that conditioning.

Yes.

“He repeated over and over that nothing was ever planned for photographs,” said Dian Hanson, an editor at Taschen who worked with Ren on a monograph of his photographs that was published earlier this year. “Nothing was planned in his life. He was determined to live in the moment always. There was no thought for the future. In retrospect, one sees that as a plan not to be around for very long.”

While you're at it, you might also look at this brief portrait of Jane Juska, by Maggie Jones.

Also, this post about a Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki. 

Sexual Shame (aka Araki 2)

This topic, sexual shame, was once again on my mind. So I thought I'd bump this old post to the top of the cue. Why's the topic on my mind now? I've been thinking about Darwinian literary criticism and evolutionary psychology. I'm not aware that either have really addressed this issue, though I assume that the evolutionary psychologists have something to say. I'd think it would be front and center with the critics, but I'm not holding my breath.

* * * * *

Thinking about the Akaki exhibit set me to thinking about something that’s puzzled me for a long time: sexual shame. Why are humans secretive about our sexual activity? Animals are not. In particular, our primate relatives are not. But we are. Why?

(To be sure, the way sexual privacy is staged depends, in part, on physical living arrangements. But not matter how sparse those arrangements may be, privacy is honored in one way or another.)

I assume that there are non-theological answers to this question here and there, but I’m not aware of any. Nor have I come up with any that I like.

I approached something like this topic in an old post on Sex and Metaphysics, where I said this:

The basic circuits for sexuality, like other biological drives, is located deep in the core of the brain in the limbic system. Except for sexuality, those drives are active from birth. But much of the brain is quite immature at birth, especially the neocortex, which is phylogenetically the newest part of the brain. And it’s where our ‘higher’ capacities are more or less localized. All the other emotional and motivational equipment becomes integrated into the ever more sophisticated patterns of thought, desire, and action that are realized in the maturing cortex.

Along comes adolescence and WHAM! the whole system becomes unglued. All of a sudden distinctly new feelings and motivations have to be integrated into one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions. Even if you grow up in a culture that more or less “makes room” for sexuality, it still comes as a shock. Knowing it's going to happen, play-acting at more adult behavior when you're a child, that doesn't really prepare you for having to deal with a whole new hormonal riot. What’s new and confusing is the riot itself.

This leads me to the notion that there is some subtle instability in the overall dynamics of the human nervous system and that sexual privacy is a way of protecting us against that instability.

I go on in that post to speculate about the developmental timing as between the emergence of sexuality and the emergence of abstract thought (in Piaget’s sense). Perhaps that’s where the instability lies. Or maybe it has to do with specifically human sociality which, as I’ve argued in Beethoven’s Anvil, is a bit different from, in addition to, the sociality we’ve inherited from our primate ancestors.

Araki’s sexual imagery, then, stresses these neurodynamics. The images are on public display. We are with others when we see them. But they call for privacy.

Just where ARE those images in social space? What's the connection between sexuality in our lives and in our notions of art?

Araki and His Models

Almost two months ago I saw the Nobuyoshi Araki exhibit at Mana Contemporary, in the post-industrial hinterlands of Jersey City (and subsequently blogged about it). I walked into the gallery and found myself surrounded by large photos of Japanese women, some in traditional dress, some naked, some in schoolgirl sailor suits. Most of the poses were erotic, some with legs splayed wide open. Many of the models were elaborately and precisely bound. Some were suspended from the ceiling.

I was...well “shocked” isn’t quite the word, certainly not “horrified”, nor does “surprise” quite fit, though I wasn’t expecting what I saw, heck, I had no particular expectation at all beyond checking out Mana Contemporary. Whatever mental state I was in, once I was able to set it aside, one question emerged: How did Araki work with his models?

Does Araki objectify women? Sure. Are the photos sexist? Why not? Is he playing to male fantasies of domination? Undoubtedly.

But, in order to get those photos, Araki the photographer cannot dominate his models. I suppose he could try, but it wouldn’t work. Why not? Because the models cannot dominate themselves, not in a way that yields those poses. The mind and body don’t work that way.

For example, the mind can order the face to smile. And the face will obey, after a fashion. But such a deliberate forced smile is different from a spontaneous smile. Anyone can see it. The camera would pick up on it.

Not that smiling is particularly germane here; most of the the women weren’t smiling. But the principle applies. Araki may or may not have a specific expression and attitude in mind for a particular shot, but he cannot order the model to assume some specific expression, even if he had the words. Nor could she order herself to assume it. 

 

Somehow Araki has to evoke the attitude in the model (and then snap the shutter when the evocation works). That’s what I was wondering: How does he do it?

Arakimentari (see it on YouTube), a documentary by Travis Klose, has many clues scattered about in scenes from various photo shoots. Some involve models Araki’s worked with over some period of time, some are housewives he’s shooting for a magazine series. He works with two or three assistants, one handling cameras, another lighting, perhaps someone on make-up. He’s quick, matter-of-fact, playful, humorous, as the occasion requires. You see him moving pubic hair to get it just so, or moving the labia this way or that. Deftly, quickly.

It’s not the sort of thing that can be readily described. You have to see it.

The point is, first, he has to do it. Without it, no picture. Second, the women are comfortable with his doing these things. They say so, on camera. He makes them feel secure, safe, they can relax. Yet they’re naked, bound, genitals exposed. Secure, safe.

How’s Araki do it?

And what does this imply about the whole history of portraiture, both photographic and in older media (drawing, paint, sculpture)? It’s unnatural, this business of posing. How can you reveal a person’s essence when they’re not doing anything BUT posing?

What did Rembrandt see when he looked at himself in the mirror those many times for those many self-portraits.

What of the Mona Lisa smile? Where’s in coming from? Where’s it directed?

 

Check out this more recent post, Women posing for a photographer and having (delicious) fun [#naked]. 

Nobuyoshi Araki at Mana Contemporary

The other day Greg and I decided to check out Mana Contemporary. We had nothing particular in mind, but we’d read about the place in The New York Times and decided to see for ourselves. One of “the art world’s best-kept secrets” in the industrial wilds of Jersey City? Sounds interesting. After all Greg had spent five years curating a somewhat different seKret Art zOne in a different region of Jersey City’s industrial hinterlands.

So we hopped into his white SUV, headed South on Kennedy, turned West on Newark, and drove right past it–all those old industrials look alike, dontchaknow?–but not by much. We found our way to the magic button, got buzzed in, signed-in on an iPad–the place, after all, IS contemporary–and were delivered to a tour guide, Amanda.

And she took us to the Araki exhibit, which occupies two galleries (three if you count the small galley where the documentary played) on the first floor. She took us other places too, including several galleries showing stately videos of Palestinian women; but let’s stick with Araki-san. He’s more than enough for one blog post.

Araki is a photographer, one of Japan’s best-known and most prolific. Never heard of him. Which is neither here nor there.

The flower close-ups, yes. Lush. Even when partnered with a desiccated salamander. Cloudscapes. Yes. Cityscapes. Yes.

But Araki is about the women. Some entirely naked, some only partially so. There’s the school-girl sailor suits. But also traditional kimonos.

Some black and white. Some in color.