It's official: I'm obsessed with Lena Chen

A few weeks ago, I wrote this post about the cult of virginity and my mixed feelings about it-- not wanted to judge it but still thinking it's kind of tragic that these kids torture themselves with their inborn desires.

Lena Chen is mentioned in the article as the ultimate anti-virgin. She's a junior at Harvard and has a blog. She's also something of a sex-columnist-extraordinaire. Her blog ostensibly began so that she could write about her lush and prolific college sex career, but now it seems much consumed with dealing with the tractor beams the public eye seems to have locked upon her.

Last week, she posted this picture on her Tumblr, The Ch!cktionary. She's ruffled quite a few feathers with it because she is not, by any stretch, a porn actress. She's a 20-year-old sociology major at arguably the most prestigious university in the land. And yet that is a very... very... VERY dirty picture.

And what do I think of it? As if you really had to ask. Of course, I think it's probably the hottest thing I've ever seen. Oh, wait-- I mean, I think it's a beautiful expression of human sexuality.

Regardless, the photo fascinates me in that it's acquired an even more connotatively palimpsestic aspect than most photos ever could -- sexy or otherwise. She says that she never expected it to be controversial or incendiary at all... and yet she calls herself "a living, walking, subversive abomination" in a more recent post. The photo, in and of itself, is so simple-- just a close-up of her little urchin face. As she says, she's not even naked in it. And perhaps it's nothing more than the fact that her face is so very child-like that throws us all for a loop. But I (*wink*) doubt it.

The photo suggests so much. This is a debauched woman. A woman who is happily so. Look at her eyes. She looks like she's never been so turned on in her life. She's staring straight at the camera with all the defiance of the "Demoiselles D'Avignon". She owns that cum -- she caused it and she's proud of it and she looks like she could eat the guy behind the camera alive.

And yet it winds up on Gawker, being called an "overshare" and she tells us some concerned soul wrote a letter to her parents, advising them to find help for her. But then, Susannah Breslin, of Reverse Cowgirl fame says this: "The fact of the matter is that writing about sex isn't easy. Chen is a human being. And while I won't be posting photos of myself with a pop shot on my face anytime soon, you gotta respect the girls who have the balls to do it. Why? Because you don't."

So, folks, what is it? What is it about little Lena's face all smeared with seed that has some of us worried for her mental health and/or her immortal soul... and some of us cheering her as a feminist icon? In case you hadn't notice, I'm in Susannah's camp, of course. But more interesting than taking sides is figuring out why exactly the photo is controversial at all.

Is it because, deep down, we think porn-ishness should be left to its own arena? Is it because we think girls who are smart enough to gain admission to Harvard shouldn't be flashing their semen-stained panties all over tarnation? Is it because we're relieved when they do? Because, if a "smart" girl is such a "slut" (usually I use this word positively, but here I mean for it to carry its heaviest, ugliest connotation), she's not a threat? Or because she's all the more threatening for being both brilliant (which you can deduce rapidly from only a smattering of her writing, whether or not you agree with her) and depraved? Because no one can deny that a girl with that kind of fire in her eyes has AT LEAST as much self-respect as the most chaste among us, thereby defenestrating that why-don't-you-respect-yourself-enough argument?

Oh, I think she knew the photo would catch her some flack when she posted it. She had to have known. I mean, she'd just got done quoting Camus on The Ch!cktionary: "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." She's just owning her red harlot/"subversive abomination" nature, after all. She can hardly help it. My psychic once told me I've got a little bit of natural "fuck-you!" in my personality. Lena's got it in spades.

Truth be told, Lena seems to be having the college experience that I was far too big a kid to have had myself-- but always wanted. Yeah, I messed around with a few handfuls of boys-- and a couple girls. But, sadly, my sophomore year, I fell madly, nihilisticly in love with the boy who lived across the hall from me. He had a girlfriend, with whom he'd periodically break up and then come knocking on my door. But I always knew my white-hot, juicy love/lust for him was mostly unrequited. And when he finally told me (in so many words-- he was 19-- he basically just avoided me-- what else do 19-year-old boys do?) that there were no more hook-ups to come, I launched myself into a tortured three-year practice of brahmacharya. That's celibacy, for those of my readers not fluent in Sanskrit. Yep. It's true. Sexual bravado aside, I spent the latter two years of my college experience as an everything-but, re-virginized sad little mess. There was still kissing, of course, but I got called a cock-tease more than once.

Let this be a formal apology to all those boys I didn't fuck senior year in college-- I'm sorry! If I could go back and do it all again, I would have taken full advantage of every one of your sexual peaks. It's just that, at the time, my head was just too fucked for me to properly process being properly penetrated.

Three days after I moved to DC, I ran into the aforementioned heartbreaker. We hadn't really spoken since the opening reception for my senior art show-- he'd come up and clinked his beer bottle against mine. I didn't even know he lived in the area. It was the week before his wedding. He was still cute, though with far less hair (is it bad that I gloated a little that I hadn't gotten fat?). I was so glad to see him! In those first seconds of re-meeting, I felt a huge release of all the amorphous wistfulness I'd always felt every time he ambled into my head. His wife is lovely, by the way. I see them every now and again. He's a fantastic person-- and I recall so well why I was so enamored. But, blessedly, 10 years eroded the sexual charge and now we are free to be friends. Sometimes, it's good to be a grown-up.

Regardless, though, it's clear that my collegiate sexual education got derailed by the first of many boys who'd be destined to tell me that I'm cute, smart, fun and great in bed, but also that they were never gonna fall in love with me. I should put quotes around that. It's a real thing that people (yes, plural) say. To me. Fuck. Anyway, before I palsy off into self-pity...

What I mean to say here is that I'm obsessed with Lena Chen because she's yet another sex blogger whose life I envy. I'll be adding her to my blogroll because I think she represents a sort of logical outcropping of the type of feminism I've been espousing-- sex-positive, self-deprecating, funny and audacious. And heartfelt. I'm eager to watch as this woman develops a career for herself, post-Harvard. She says she's unmarketable. I think that's a crock of shite.

It would be tempting to think of her as a little sister of the spirit, but I have a hunch she's far more worldly-wise than I. Cum-faced or otherwise.

UPDATE: In strange six-degrees-of-separation news, a picture of Lena's current gray-area entanglement wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the name of my own high school (which is tiny, single-gendered and located in Nashville) can be found here. ...Wonder from which former Harpeth Hellion he might've filched such a thing...?

yeah, yeah, yeah, 9/11. But also...love and the lost self

It seems that a number of typically snark-jock movie critics really seem to like Reign Over Me. It's true, the real allure of Adam Sandler resides in his characteristic cocktail of rage, self-loathing and soulfulness. And, at last, this film is a real showcase for those aspects of his soul. He's subtle and funny and furious and it really works. For once, viewers can, perhaps, put Opera Man out of their heads while watching... not that I really have anything against Opera Man, per se. I'm of the camp that concedes that some of Sandler's deconstructionist comedy in the SNL Weekend Update segments were really fairly innovative. However, this piece is about character, not rule-breaking, and he carries it pretty well. It's no doubt he won some critic-fans with the role-- and the film.

However, all the reviews discussed the barely-scabbed-over lives of those whose families were affected by 9/11-- and how sensitive a story this movie is... blah, blah, blah. Sure, I guess it IS sensitive, but, just for the sake of argument, let's take 9/11 off the table. What if this were just a story about a couple of guys who've conceded some portion of their selfhoods to their relationships?

I've oft heard a very female lament about the girl who marries her dreamboat of choice and then winds up "losing herself" to the relationship, sacrificing her identity, her soul, her likes and dislikes, for the purpose of being the wife HE wants her to be. Oprah is a big pusher of the notion of the tragic narrative of the just-can't-say-no girls. I've had friends complain about having lost track of some aspect of identity when ensconced in a romantic relationship-- and I think I might even have phrased my own complaints similarly (though, in retrospect, I know I have most often been the one to force concessions from my partners--having a strong personality sometimes breeds some curious obliviousness), but I've wondered: what of the men who no longer recognize themselves, so lost are they in the daily morass of gesture and habit and ritual? Surely, assimilation into a relational unit couldn't possibly be a single-gendered activity, could it?

And along comes this movie. In it, we've got two guys. One guy loses his wife and three daughters (it's significant that all three kids are female, I think) to one of the passenger projectiles that have since entered our lexical commonality. As a result, he devolves into some crazy amalgam of automaton, ghost and rabid wolf. Simply put, without his family, his female flotilla, he has no real self left. When they were alive, his life was full because of them. And without them, there really isn't much man to spare. And the other guy, well, he still has his wife-- and two female children. But as a result of his "putting family first," he's manifested such a disconnect with his own desires, his own identity, that he begins to foment a fairly expected variety of resentment towards his wife.

Now, the solution to this problem is really the hinge of the plot. Both men seek refuge from domesticity in each other and, because they each adopt this outlet, they are able to return (or at least begin to heal in order to return at some point in the future) to some modified version of the family fold. Easy. Total cake. It's a reasonable and real-life solution to the emotional deprivation experienced by some men. And it works. But, it's also not all that interesting to me.

What is interesting, however, is the set of social constructs that create the types of ravenous hunger so readily apparent in these men. To be fair, I'm sure this aspect of the film's emotional tenor stuck out to me because I've been reading Laura Kipnis' book Against Love: A Polemic of late. This is a book that would be incendiary if it were required reading for the population at large, but, as it is, it's more like a flagpole sporting some tattered rag outside a seedy bar on the fringes of town. It rages about the ways in which conventional companionate co-habitation squelches our emotional lives and lulls our libidos into sad little stupors. The book wants more for us than so-called wedded bliss. It wants actual bliss. And I suppose I'm reading it because I, too, want actual bliss-- for myself and for the people (plural) with whom I fall in love. And so I read books that swear up and down that that which is packaged as blissful (love, stability, monogamy) is actually the enemy of the temporality and flightiness of real, mindful fun. I keep hoping that if I resist that which feels like it might entrap me or own me, I'll find a new transgressive joy. So far, so good. No, wait: so far, so occasionally good. It's a trepidatious mountain passage at best.

But anyway, I look at the stories of these two men-- one who is a veritable wraith of loss without his primary relationship and one who can barely speak, so gagged by the confines of being a "good father" or "good husband" or even "good man" is he-- and I am fascinated by the meandering avenues through which their marriages lead them-- and deposit them squarely in their respective marital miseries. Sure, they find their ways out again (via the flip-side of the self-same love that drove them to despair in the first place, mind you), but it is the insularity of love that is the problem for each. I can't help but wonder: if these two men dedicated a little less of themselves to their primary relationships-- and a little more to a legitimate pursuance of bliss? Would they feel so stranded and without recourse when those primary relationships wind up NOT being the be-all-end-all? Would they feel so alone, were they not so protective of their own emotional fidelity? If they put a couple of eggs in other baskets? Who's to say?

I would like to understand more about men's emotional lives. Though male actors continue to dominate the screen, rarely do we find filmic plumbings of male loneliness, detachment, estrangement, and ache for simple human connection of the nature found in Reign Over Me. I won't say that it goes this distance flawlessly-- it occasionally waxes maudlin and, frankly, it overshoots in terms of subplots and connectivity of narratives-- but at least it's trying. At least it's attempting to represent the ways in which the conventional social institution of marriage fails these guys in terms of their rawest, simplest emotional needs. It's supposed to be another diary page from the post-9/11 New Yorker. Ultimately, national tragedy is just a backdrop here. Because I came to this film with Kipnis in my head, I'm having a hard time seeing the real subject matter as other than how these men fight for stability in a landscape in which the bedrock of relational love swims in and out of their reach.

Another concession: the time-change has hit me like a brick. I'll acclimate soon, surely. But for now, I've had a week of imagined heartbreak and utter listlessness. Oh, sunshine! Oh, serotonin! How I miss you. This Seasonal Affective bullshit is a bitch. Time to fire up the Happy Lite again. So, apologies if I, too, am waxing overly maudlin. It's been a weird and weepy week. At least I can blame it on body chemistry, rather than real problems.