Tag Archives: Sex

Shitty things happening in Virginia and other internet broadcasts

Internet Hate/Love

The Village Voice foresees social media platforms that won’t invade user privacy:

But as the business press and slavering investors look on eagerly at Zuckerberg’s coronation, many believe that the seeds of Facebook’s downfall have already been sown. The company might have brought people together like never before, but exploitation is woven inextricably into its DNA. Facebook makes its money by commercializing personal information, watching its users, analyzing their behavior, and selling what it learns.

. . .

“I like to compare Facebook to communication in preschool,” [Sam] Boyer says. “The Facebook wall is an incredibly unsophisticated social space. People just spew stuff out. In adult social situations, we read cues, we create norms, we create rules that are there for the purpose of creating conversations that move us forward. That’s what we want to build.”

Omnivore urges us to “Think of the Internet,” especially its corrosive effect on our sex lives:

In offering her rules [for how to manage a romantic relationship], “Rose” was introducing a theme that would emerge time and time again as I spoke to other students who also told me that using Facebook could lead to a break-up. Several students said that they had deactivated their Facebook accounts either to preserve their romantic relationships or to make future relationships possible. . . . [T]hey believed that Facebook transformed them into anxious, jealous, and monitoring selves that they did not want to be. After disconnecting from Facebook, they felt they shed these unwanted selves. Facebook was constantly providing information about their identity and others’ identity that they believed should be a basis for relationships, and yet was too vague to determine the actions which should accompany this information.

The New York Times encourages my solitary confinement. You are always welcome in my apartment, just not in a physical sense. I am not accepting corporeal visitors (nor cats) at this time.

New communications technologies make living alone a social experience, so being home alone does not feel involuntary or like solitary confinement. The person alone at home can digitally navigate through a world of people, information and ideas. Internet use does not seem to cut people off from real friendships and connections.

Speaking of hermitic caves, this is probably my next career move:

. . . I invented a simple scientific protocol. I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn’t have the right to call me, so that I wouldn’t have any idea what time it was on the outside. Without knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology.

Non-scandals and Society

W magazine covers Swedish nannies and America’s most expensive mansion in “Revenge of the Billion Dollar Divorcee”:

“I’m the most insecure person you could ever run into in your entire life,” [Suzanne Saperstein] says, taking a sip of white wine. “When I’m watching a football game and the players get into a huddle, I think they’re talking about me. They’re saying, ‘Oh, God. Did you see that dress? That hair?’”

Gawker tries and fails to make a scandal, unless the scandal is how frumpy we William & Mary girls can be on school days. From the comments section:

A few years back Sam Kashner wrote an article about his exploits with half the W&M student body. His book was such hilarious bullshit and the details didn’t make sense to anyone who’s ever even been there. He claimed that there were scantily dressed young coeds hanging around campus trying to seduce him everywhere he went; most W&M students wear leggings/skinny jeans, baggy sweatshirts, and fake Uggs during winter and shorts, baggy t-shirts, and flip-flops in the summer. For some bizarre reason they all have Middleton hair or attempt Middleton hair but otherwise you’d never see a group of people who gave less of a fuck about appearences.

Books and Authors

Amazon’s new imprint is the bete noire of the publishing world:

Established authors, for the most part, do fine selling through online bookstores. It’s new authors who lose out if browsing in bookstores becomes a thing of the past. Advances for unproven and non-bestselling authors have already plummeted, by all accounts. Literary diversity is at risk.

Six creative writing teachers defend their calling:

In law school, students analyze past cases, construct arguments, and write opinions, so that eventually they can do these things well enough to practice law. Could they do this outside of law school? Yes, but law school facilitates the process, and the law professor offers guiding thoughts along the way. Writing instruction is no different. The goal is to offer the occasional guiding thought or idea, the craft lesson, a few instructive models, and the occasional critical nudge, while all the time encouraging the student to practice writing, practice revising, and practice, practice, practice as a means to improvement. It works.

Simone de Beauvoir gets naked.

Ben Marcus gets interviewed:

Up until this book, I wrote in a very, very laborious way. Maybe 100, 200 words a day, not that I ever counted. I was interested in the sentence as a work of art, as a piece of sculpture, as something that was a kind of technology to open up huge feelings in people. I still love and believe in that as a pursuit. Some of my favorite writers do that.
But I think maybe I felt disgusted with all of my own limitations and wanted to try to outsmart them, or sneak around the kinds of things I had been doing to exhaustion and to boredom. So, one of the big things I could change without changing anything — meaning an adjustment I could make that would not necessarily impact my actual aesthetic in anyway — was to write quickly and not necessarily give a shit if I wrote really functional, almost deliberately bland, language. Like, “Denny got up out of his chair and left the room,” or, “He got a cup out of the cupboard.” These were the kinds of things that in the past I would just fucking agonize over.

Shitty Things Happening in Virginia

Our legislature has some notably alarming ideas about women’s health. After a thorough reading of the Virginia Code, Waldo Jaquith points out that under the new personhood law, “Fetuses may be put to work on the family farm, perform domestic work, or volunteer for the rescue squad.” (§ 40.1-79.01) If only to keep these fetuses from stealing our jobs, you can sign a petition here.

Lastly, the trial of former University of Virginia lacrosse player George Huguely is about to enter its third week. A few blocks uphill from my apartment, stricken families gather together in a courthouse while impersonal satellites beam updates to the rest of the nation. My mother learned how to use Twitter so she could follow the daily courtroom feeds. I also find that it’s difficult not to be voyeuristic during this trial, especially since my little sister and two of my brothers played lacrosse in college. But of course all this outside interest accomplishes nothing. No matter what the jury’s verdict, the ultimate case remains: this afternoon an adored young woman is to be found not at home with her family or hanging out with her new boyfriend or goofing off on the playing field, but rather on a Wikipedia page entitled ‘”Murder of Yeardley Love.” And George Huguely, whose name will always be associated with his dead lover’s, will have to live with that. And both sets of parents will continue to bear the weight of the tragedy.

In order to horrify my mother, I have devised the following reality TV show

Way back in 2003/04, when my college girlfriend and I were living together in D.C. and bearing witness to all sorts of bad behavior on the infrequent occasions when we’d go to the Black Cat to drink Diet 7Up and meet with our napkin folding club, we devised the following concept for a reality television series. The concept has come a long way since then, in that I finally wrote it down, and I hear that other people are actually filming it for HBO. I’m going to wait and see if the HBO thing makes money before I inform Lena Dunham that I registered Poor Girls with the Writer’s Guild seven years ago. In any event, I now bring you…

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POOR GIRLS

a derivative, tragicomical, reality-based television series about a trinity of emotionally needy, financially impoverished, artistically confused, professionally aimless, aged-twenty-something female roommates in the big city

Treatment by

Wistar Murray

LOGLINE: Sex in the City meets Little Orphan Annie.

SYNOPSIS: We document the various Brooklyn-themed misadventures of three attractive, charismatic young ladies at the height of their seductive powers as they struggle to keep money in their pockets, get consistently laid, and preserve their dignity in a metropolitan setting. All three heroines issue from middling-class suburban families, but appear to relish being poor, slutty, and bohemian in their Five Boroughs personas. They also view their penury as crucial to maintaining their increasingly slim figures. Series includes an undercurrent of competition to reveal who can debase herself the most for free drinks, as well as some elements of frenemy. From episode to episode, we watch the girls largely succeed in getting by on their charm and sexual appetites, but they occasionally surrender to a valley of tears (see E. 5, a.k.a. “The Heartbreak Episode”). All three heroines are actively looking for the Oliver Twists to complement their Pippi Longstockings, with a preference for the former to play an Instrument and/or write first chapters of novels while waiting to claim his family inheritance.

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS:

We fall in love with Eleanor when we see her updating her private sex diary in a cubicle at FedEx/Kinko’s, where she writes regularly because the staff there doesn’t force her to buy anything, such as bubble wrap or Post-It Notes.

We fall in love with Ashley when she entertains a rare doubt about the long-term propriety of sleeping with so many assholes, and wonders if her new blanket should be electric, like a fence.

We fall in love with Mary-Katherine when we see her make a pit stop in a Midtown cathedral during a Sunday morning walk of shame. We soon gather that she is not there to atone for her sins, but rather to seek the refuge of a clean lavatory, where she can pee and check her hair for cum without having to a buy a Starbucks coffee.

SEVEN EPISODES:

1. We open on frustrated sex between Principal Character Ashley and an unnamed hipster on her air mattress (see Example #1 of Snappy Dialogue). After the gentleman leaves, Ashley plans her search for a real mattress to replace her erotically disappointing Aerobed™. We see an extensive monologue in the confessional room (Eleanor’s closet) about Ashley’s terror of bedbugs, evinced to the degree that she once abstained from casual sex for two months to avoid catching them. “Bedbugs are the AIDS of the 21st century,” she often tells the camera. She texts last night’s unnamed hipster to find out how he feels about street mattresses. She wonders aloud if she can avoid buying a comforter for her bed by investing in thicker pajamas.

2. We see Principal Character Mary-Katherine embrace a new sexual identity as a Craigslist Unicorn. This endangered species is willing to hook up with couples to indulge the wife’s last-ditch efforts to save the marriage. The couple is typically so grateful to its Unicorn that the husband will shower it in gifts and free restaurant dining experiences, often without the wife’s knowledge. Mary-Katherine is empowered by her humanitarian role and we see a montage of her flirting quietly on the internet at a neighborhood cyber-cafe.

3. We watch as Principal Character Eleanor is forced, for an entire week, to wear the whorish boots she bought last Sluttoween because her more practical winter boots are in the boot repair shop and she doesn’t have the cash to get them out. She feels awkward going babysitting in three-inch, transparent heels, although she has to admit that the boots do a fine job of protecting her feet from inclement weather. In this episode’s psychodramatic subplot, Eleanor is disappointed to discover that her new crush’s adult Asberger’s also manifests itself in lovemaking. She had wrongly assumed that her new crush would land on the higher end of the orgasm spectrum.

4. We watch as Ashley copes with the daily trials of being cold and hungry and bored with all her outfits. In this episode she discovers that if she sweet-talks a junior associate lawyer she’s been seeing (“Ryan,” a recurring minor character who fits awkwardly into the Poor Girls universe except on the nights when he’s doling out gratuit lines of coke), she can exchange fitting room blow jobs for cute clothes from Topshop. In a series of rapid cuts, we see Ashley order nothing but hot tea at expensive restaurants and then take the complimentary creams and sugars home to make her lunches with later.

5. Informally known as “The Heartbreak Episode.” When Mary-Katherine meets a man who is poorer, sluttier, and more beautiful than she is on the subway platform, we are right there with her. Three days after their steamy makeout session in the rear of a Dunkin’ Donuts, when he doesn’t respond to her flurry of obscene text messages, she is comforted/vindicated by finding his indie band’s CD in the dollar-bin of a used record store.

6. We watch as Eleanor goes on a quest for cheap condoms, finds Truth along the way.

7. We watch as the girls prepare for an elegant dinner party hosted around their dumpster-dived coffee table. Mary-Katherine, who is responsible for the salad (and bad at keeping up with her laundry), pats dry the romaine lettuce with the same towel that she’d earlier used to dry her hair. We watch with horror as the dinner guests pick damaged, dyed-blonde strands out of their first course. But then the night is redeemed by cheap karaoke around the corner and we rejoice along with the girls, who have by this point become our dear friends.

EXAMPLES OF SNAPPY DIALOGUE:

1.

“This mattress needs more juice,” Ashley says to her latest one-night stand.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” says the one-night stand.

“Don’t worry, doll,” says Ashley. “It’s not as uncomfortable as it looks. It’s like sleeping on a water bed, except with air.”

We hear the roar of the bed’s engine when she plugs it into the wall.

“Voila,” says Ashley, disposing of her bra and panties. “Inflated and ready for fucking.”

2.

“That douchebag came all over my t**s last night,” says Mary-Katherine.

“I thought you were into that,” says Ashley.

“Normally, yeah, but he stained my sheets and you know I just went to the laundromat. Quarters don’t grow on trees in Brooklyn.”

3.

“Who the fuck took my earblugs?” screams a wasted Ashley at 7am after she returns home from a long night of partying.

“Your what now?” says Mary-Katherine, who is making ramen dinner in the kitchen/living area.

“My earblugs! I can hear the family in the wall!”

“Why don’t you just have an orgy with them?” screams back Mary-Katherine. “You do with everyone else!”

Cut to Eleanor’s bedroom, where she’s straddling a groggy, half-naked bartender.

“We’ve got time for a quickie before I have to shower and go to work,” she purrs as she fiddles with what could either be a mole or his third nipple.

The bartender stares up at her blankly, stupidly, as if she is a ceiling tile.

“Did you hear me?” says Eleanor. “I said wake up and fuck me before my babysitting job.”

At his leisure the bartender removes the earplugs one by one from his ear sockets.

“Hm?” he says. “Are you talking?”

“Jesus Christ,” says Eleanor, and jumps up to borrow a condom from one of her roommates.

THE CLINCHER:

Eleanor’s Truth (see E. 6) turns out to be scabies.