a little faith in me

This Spitzer thing's been bugging me. It's been bugging me since it broke and I've been wanting to write about it, but I seem to be having a problem forming any kind of substantive opinion about it. And wishy-washy-ness doesn't make for compelling blog posts. But I'm going to try anyway. This post might be unwieldy, disorganized and prone to tangential jaunts and it's likely to head into even more personal terrain than I generally like to examine in this forum. But it's bugging me. So what else am I supposed to do?

Firstly, I should say that I find all the hoopla that arises when a politician has sex outside of the socially-sanctioned strictures of the marital default setting of monogamy to be a gigantic waste of a media spotlight. I'm certainly not the first person to opine that a person's bedroom activities do not correlate with his or her abilities to function in a position of public service. Honestly, so long as everyone involved is consenting (and yes, I realize it's debatable whether the wives are consenting, but I'll get to Silda in just a sec), I couldn't give a fig about who these guys fuck.

The truth is that we have absolutely no insight whatsoever as to the arrangement between Eliot and Silda Spitzer. True enough, her countenance during umpteen press conferences did not exactly convey a particularly laissez-faire attitude regarding her husband's assiduous trysting with call-girls, but it seems to me that any among us might don a grim, blanched mask if the necessity of discussing, on a national platform, any of our sexual activities that might fall out of the range of matrimonially-sanctioned, missionary congress were to arise. I've read quite a few articles in which commentators say this exact thing-- what business is it of ours what was going on in that marriage? But I'm also reading a lot of articles that are either condemning poor Silda for being a doormat or are busy perching halos on her head for "doing the Tammy Wynette thing" (really, the journalistic article's Tammy Wynette reference is SO frickin' cliched at this point that I'm wondering what sort of effort I would have to put forth to stage a boycott on both the song and on reporters who refer to it.). Some chide her, saying she should build a bonfire out of his golf clubs. Some question her commitment, as an extremely high-powered attorney in her own right, to feminism, wondering why she would display her "servility" to her husband subsequent to a public "betrayal." And some say that the whole point of marriage is that you're supposed to stick it out, regardless of brand of strife (um, yeah, that's appealing, hot and romantic... 50-odd years of "stickin' in out!").

But I'm wondering, where the eff do these pundits get off? This woman chose her role, alternately described as "stoic" or "pathetic," for herself. As we can expect that she's a highly intelligent and self-contained person, why can we not all respect both her choice and her ability to make it? Doubtlessly, she has her reasons for throwing herself to the blackbirds of the press and who am I to have an opinion about what kind of person that makes her? Obviously, she knows more than I do... and more than bajillions of professional opinion-havers do. Let's just give her a rest already, how 'bout it?

Now, I want to talk some more about biology and monogamy. With an extensive backlog of research, many evolutionary biologists agree that there's not a sexually-reproducing species on the planet (with the notable exception of the Diplozöon paradoxum, a parasitic worm that lives in the intestines of fish. Apparently, the genitals of the male and female actually fuse together during intercourse. This seems like a reasonable arrangement if your lifespan is a day or two. If these worms were expected to spend a a few decades in such a state, well, just imagine the bickering! And the chafing!) that actually maintains life-long monogamy. Sure, there are much-mythologized species of birds who pair-bond for life, but they've been observed having numerous twinkies on the side. Hey, if you could have your swan-cake and eat it too, you would, wouldn't you? This article discusses the biology of monogamy so that I don't have to go into any further detail here, but it comes out on the other end of it than I do. Here's what the author, David Barash, says:

"Some readers may bridle at this characterization of Homo sapiens as EPC [extra-pair copulation]-inclined, but the evidence is overwhelming. That doesn't justify adultery, by either sex, especially because human beings -- even those burdened by a Y chromosome and suffering from testosterone poisoning [testosterone poisoning? Is this dude kidding me? Having a sex drive is now a symptom of toxicity?] -- are presumed capable of exercising control over their impulses. Especially if, via wedding vows, they have promised to do so. After all, "doing what comes naturally" is what nonhuman animals do. People, most of us like to think, have the unique capacity to act contrary to their biologically given inclinations. Maybe, in fact, it is what makes us human."

ARGH! True, being biologically predisposed to feeling a need to produce spawn with anything that moves doesn't justify the aspect of adultery that involves LYING and betraying our loved ones, but is sure as hell does justify a greater acceptance of polyamory. Yes. We have control over our impulses. But we also have an obligation to our partners and to ourselves to own up to the fact that picking one person to fuck for the rest of your life does little more than establish one of those proverbial uphill battles. Beyond that, I think I have a bigger question about the idea quoted above. Why does my sentience confer upon me a necessity to deny my animal nature? Just because I'm capable of analyzing, fretting, moralizing and freaking out about my expenditures of of sexual energy, I'm somehow OBLIGATED to do so? This concept is based in the faulty, dualistic (Judeo-Christian) thinking that the body should be subservient to the mind. Why are we so intent upon privileging one above the other when we can't exist without either? Ugh. See? I told you this was going to get big in a hurry.

From a biological perspective, the meaning of life is to produce more life. That's right, folks, I said it. No matter all my gnashing of teeth about my anxieties about actually using my own body for said project, I think reproduction IS the meaning of life (put that in your fortune cookie and smoke it!). So, it makes SENSE that our bodies do everything in their power to convince us that we need sex all the time, with as many people as will have us, in whatever positions we are creative enough to think up, with variety and orgasms for all!!! Holy hell! Yes. But David Barash thinks this makes us LESS than human? What?

OK, I know advocating wild orgiastic fornication is slightly polemical. I'll come back and mitigate that stance in a minute. First, however, I have to take Dr. Barash to task on something else.

While he doesn't come right out and say it, there's an underlying implication behind that article that men are more predisposed to non-monogamy than women are. And indeed, the conventional wisdom backs this up. The fact that the male of our species produces billions of sperm cells to every one of the female's ova provides for the seemingly logical extrapolation that the male desire to "spread seed" far and wide (as opposed to, say, all over the bare ass of the one and only one female of the species, perhaps) differs from the female's desire to nab a babydaddy and lock him up and force him to play house. And hence, this idea accounts for a differential between male and female "fidelity." And further hence, women who enjoy scratching itches with numerous partners are thought to have some sort of pathology or psychosis (see my discussion of Christina Ricci's character in Black Snake Moan for more thoughts on that), rather than "doing what comes naturally." Sheesh, that's frustrating!

He also talks a little about the "power-as-pheromone" concept-- and this is yet another idea that makes me feel like a freak of my gender. The argument is that it's widely observable that, across species, females are more attracted to those with power and or social status. Hence, Spitzer, with his perpetual "bitter-beer" face, is given copious opportunity to bag any hot chick he feels like because he's (was) governor of the most populous state in the union. So why then, does this not work for ME? Money and power don't impress me. If you are a guy who drives a fancy car, you can bet, not only will I feel less attracted to you than I did before I knew you drive a fancy car, but I'm likely to lecture you about your contributions to the war effort via petroleum purchases and the fact that your carbon footprint is substantially bloated. (Yes, I own a car. Yes, I feel guilty about it every time pull up to the gas pump. And no, my guilt doesn't mitigate my hypocracy. I know. Let's not talk about it.)

So, case in point: I know a man who is fairly prominent in his field. So prominent, in fact, that he is called upon to speak up on The Hill--even in front of Congress--fairly regularly. Unfailingly, he shows up in the threshold of my office to allow me to admire his schmancy suit after each of his presentations. Given, I had (past tense) a MAD crush on this man for other reasons, but even at my crushiest, I found his preening to be uproariously funny. He is handsome and brilliant and overtly sexual and that's quite enough to win me over, thank you. So why the hell would he need to put on a show so that I would see him as something of a big deal? Because women are drawn to power and money, right? Perhaps this is nothing more than another example of how I'm a poor specimen of my gender, in terms of living up to proscribed conventions. Of course, calling myself a freak on this point is a little bit disingenuous. I don't actually think I'm such an anomaly. Not every girl demands her johns--uh, I mean dates-- leave gold coins under her pillow.

On a almost related note, there's significant documentation of the scientific basis for the "seven-year itch." Although, apparently, it's really more like a four-year itch. And it affects people of both genders. Four years is the span of time it takes to raise a child out of infancy. It makes good sense that all four eyes begin to wander when a sexual pair-bond approaches its fourth birthday. I recently read an article (I'd link it, but can't seem to find it again) that talked about female infidelity having its basis in emotional disappointment, as opposed to the male biological-diversity-of-mating justification for non-monogamy. It said something about how women are more likely to mistake infatuation (defined in the article to mean "powerful sexual attraction") for love than men were and then, when the hot sex part burns out, women think they've fallen out of love and begin to stray. Not surprisingly, this tends to happen right around that four-year mark.

Now, first of all, who's to say that a waning of sexual attraction ISN'T what falling out of love means, at least in part? Beyond that, it seems ridiculous to me that this article wanted to assert that female infidelity is psychological while male infidelity was biological-- when reasons for both genders' dalliances exist under the auspices of both disciplines. It's almost as insulting and reductive as the notion that female sexuality is motivated out of pedestrian greed and power-hunger, while male sexuality is motivated out of a mindless, doltish yen for the indiscriminate dissemination of DNA. Is there anyone of either gender who could emerge from either of those lines of reasoning smelling like anything vaguely resembling a rose?

Furthermore, I'm troubled by that model in which infatuation = sexual attraction but does not = love. Putting aside the sheer subjectivity that we are bound to encounter if ever we try to define what makes love love, what are we to make to the early stages of romantic relations? You know what I mean: those days when you somnambulate through your workday, bow-legged, slitty-eyed and hungover from your night-long fucking binge. You're so tired and so punch drunk that you catch yourself grinning like an idiot at your food spinning behind the microwave window. Or staring dreamily into space when the red light turns green... True, you can have a sex hangover after a night with someone about whom you could care less, but you're unlikely to audibly giggle and blush whenever you recount memories of the night back to yourself. This is eros, my friends, in its most etymologically pure sense. To discount sexual love as though it's not "real love" seems like such a shame, don't you think? And embedded in that dismissal is the idea that "mature love" or "companionate love" is somehow superior. Obviously, I'm not so sure that's the case.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to write a few capsule reviews for new and forthcoming poetry monographs for the UofA Poetry Center newsletter. One of the books I reviewed was Eavan Boland's Against Love Poetry. I began my review with the line, "What's a poet to do when the first flush of love goes the way of a 30-year marriage?" Indeed, this is the question central to Boland's book. Ultimately, the accumulated voices of the speakers of her various poems decide they prefer the comfort and affection and sacrifice of a companionate relationship to the stimuli and precipices that are to be found in the jungles of new love. It's true. We distrust hot sexual passion. For good reason-- it fleets and we know it. If we're lucky, it'll chug along for a full four years... and then will ultimately smolder into a warm, if staid, affection.

It's been nearly four years now since I was last in love, not counting a few almost-loves that I sloughed off fairly painlessly. Four years. For the first three, I suppose I was slitty-eyed-ecstatic about my single-hood. I was so pleased to be free of my very trite four-year itch (well, it took me five years, actually). And I was also pleased to be free of the humiliating little ritual in which my ex and I would engage-- the one in which, after six weeks of near-nightly wet dreams, I'd forgo my pride and begin to cajole her into fucking me. After another several days of her calling me "demanding" and "needy" and "oversexed," she'd relent. And then we'd go another 6 weeks before I became a whiny brat again. And I was pleased, too, to be free of her surveilling eye. It was so watchful, so wary that I was not a lesbian ( I wasn't), that I was out on daily cock-hunts, scouting or something (I wasn't... well, I was and I wasn't). The last two years with her exhausted me.

So, I felt euphoric when I got single again.

But lately, my infatuation with single-hood has been wearing thin. That's right. You heard me. For the last 6 or 8 months, I've been wondering what it would be like if I broke up with being single.

Dare I say I'm thinking about wanting to be in love again?

The sentence above is probably the single scariest I've written in the history of this blog.

I submit it for your consideration, fair readers. I submit it while feeling wholly pessimistic about love lasting for more than four years. OK, sure, that's an arbitrary cut-off point, but I don't see too many relationships that can sustain the swell and thrust of true eros much beyond that. My own surely didn't. No, I don't think that "mature love" is superior, but rather, it is the thing for which we settle because we know erotic love is temporary. But I LOVE erotic love! Most of us do, don't we?

And I'm scared of falling in love again not just because the desire for love renders me more vulnerable than I ever care to be but because I'm scared of committing to monogamy. It's not that I'm not capable of it-- I am and I've proven it under less than optimal conditions (as described above). It's just that I'm not sure monogamy makes me happy in the way that erotic love does. It's easy being monogamous when all your sexual fantasies pertain to the person with whom you are currently having sex. It's actually not all that difficult to be monogamous even when other people manage to meander into your fantasies-- you just don't engage. Inertia is ultimately far easier than following more proactive trajectories anyway. But it's not easy feeling happy, stimulated, not bored, and sexually satisfied once a relationship has long since weathered the throes of new lust. And who wants to swear to god, a congregation of friends and family, and your beloved that you'll never want to feel all that excitement of newness again? And who among us is truly capable of making good on a promise that we'll forgo all lures toward such excitement? Forever?

Maybe I wish I was capable of that kind of promise. I'm not sure than I am. But then again, I'm not sure that I'm not, either.

But I want it. I do. I want so desperately to be proven wrong. I don't want to believe that monogamy is futile, based on our biological imperatives. I don't want to believe that established relationships all become sexless and sterile.

I also want to never again feel the sense of failure that you encounter when you renege on the promise that you're gonna be in love forever. Mine is not a pretty sort of shame. It tends to flounce itself out of mouth of my emotive duffel bag and land gracelessly at the feet of anyone who cares to read this blog. Or wants to know me on an intimate level. I'm not proud that I failed her. Even four years later.

Or maybe all I really want is a compassionate companion who appreciates the comforts of long-terming it, but is as disinclined as I am to swear off those first flushes, too.

Surely there is compromise to be had?



Gracious. Maybe it wasn't Spitzer that's been bugging me after all. Hey, surprise! I'm worried about the feasibility of relationship. Or rather, the feasibility of myself in relationship. Apparently, I can't even read the news without devolving into sad self-involvement. Me & Spitzer: wanting cake while simultaneously gorging ourselves upon it. Oh, that's nice. I'm a disaster.

Crap. I never did get around to talking about prostitution. Ah, well. there's always the next post.

I DO care enough to hit send!

This is SO much better than Hallmark. God bless all that is snarkilicious in the world.


Here are some favorites (or, rather, ones for whom I can think of exceedingly appropriate recipients):














The internet is so good to me.


And an extra-special thanks to Laura for cluing me into this delicious resource for (in)appropriate cards for every occasion. So, Laura is also so good to me.

Heartbreaking

Sad news!

Here's why this is so sad to me: not only do the evolutionary findings described in the article indicate that more, um, inclusive attitudes toward relationships exhaust the body and soul of any given animal, they'll eventually leave the girls of the Geritol set--of any number of species--lacking in a male peer group. Not good statistics at all. Gender diversity is a GOOD thing, after all.

Not only that, but it indicates that my slutopian dreams might encounter difficulties in terms of sustainability... especially if the boys just can't keep up.

I feel daunted.

Despite to shortages at the Big Red "A" Store, there is still pain to be administered, or Marjorie meditates on the subject of adultery

This weekend, I caught the end of one of my favorite movies of all time: Grand Canyon, the Lawrence Kasdan film about interconnectedness, community, responsibility and the psychic pain we all inflict upon one another while grappling towards the interconnectedness, the community and the responsibility. I hadn't watched this movie in a while and I'd forgotten Mary-Louise Parker's oration to Kevin Kline (her boss, who'd fucked her and then refused to do so again, on grounds of, uh, being married) about how, despite the fact that he was kind and caring and well-meaning in virtually every aspect of his life, he was still an asshole because he'd created a situation in which he was oblivious to the inevitability of her very particular hurt. I suppose what I love about this scene and the movie in general is that the characters are continually putting themselves in positions where they transgress social boundaries--and sometimes they face consequences for those transgressions, and sometimes they don't--but the film doesn't ever demonize them for doing so. Neither the homewrecker, nor the cheating husband, nor the otherwise-occupied wife could ever be wholly exculpated or wholly blamed because these events are, in the context of this film, just part of negotiating the world as an adult. Interestingly, though, Parker's character is the one to bear the deepest wound from the aforementioned transaction, because she is the one not chosen--and the wife never knows. This, I find to be the saddest thing about this movie--and one of the most interesting things because the pain of the interloper has been so minimally explored. But wouldn't we always consider it a "best-case scenario" when The Other Woman is the only one who gets hurt, no matter what? Certainly, she is awfully low on the morality totem pole (on which we also find innocent children, innocent wife, and fallible-but-well-meaning husband in descending order), poor girl.

Coincidentally, when I arrived home on Friday night, I had a long-ago-ordered box from Amazon (man, that free super-saver shipping option didn't always take this long, did it?) which contained, among other books, Daphne Gottlieb's (queer, post-punk, guttermouth, San Francisco poet) anthology entitled Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (see my new subheading quotation above). Though I haven't yet had much time to read a whole hell of a lot of the stories and poems therein, there seem to be quite a few accounts of already unstable marriages, rendered more so by the inevitability of extramarital desire. Really, though, I particularly interested in Gottlieb's own introduction to the book. She rather succinctly sums up pretty much all my reasons for being interested in and buying this book to begin with:

After Homewrecker's call for submissions went out, I received a number of fevered, upset emails. Over and over, they said: You're not in FAVOR of it, are you? I want to believe (but rather doubt) that this same question would be asked of me as the editor of an anthology on motherhood, cancer, or swing dance. But mothers, the ill and dancers do not have to lie to nurture, heal or perform. (On a side note, if cheating is as rampant as even the moderate statistics suggest (Earlier in the intro, she mentions that "statistics vary widely, from a marginal 15 percent to a whopping 80 percent of married couples cheating."), it strikes me as odd that we're still blaming the "homewrecker" rather than questioning the system. What would it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity?)

OK, so, what WOULD it look like if we prized honesty and love instead of pair fidelity? Well, firstly, it's not at all as simplistic as that. And I think part of the faulty system is that we do, in some problematically idealistic way, prize love above all.

For myself, I tend to see marriage as a rather futile endeavor. Much research has shown that the average lifespan of a pair-bond between two human animals is roughly four to seven years--i.e., the amount of time it takes to raise a child out of infancy. In other words, we're biologically predisposed to feel the proverbial 4-to-7-year-itch because any given sexual attraction is designed to peter out somewhere within that range. That's how it WORKS! This idea that we're supposed to be in love for life is one devised purely by the heavily restrictive social mindset. In this way, how can marriage be anything but such an extreme uphill battle? It is not what our bodies' instinctual drives to propagate the species want for us.

And if my belief system about the unnatural-ness of life-long companionhood-contracts is too antiseptic, skeptical or extreme for you, how about the fact that we've invented a legislated civil institution, that once was originally devised as nothing more than a way to manage personal assets and to sanction certain bloodlines, but is now based solely on what we must admit is often a whimsical predilection for one person over another. Sure, marriage is still quite often about nothing more than money, convenience, and/or stability for the children's sake (and there's certainly nothing wrong with these things--or, really, even basing a relationship on these things), but if we want to marry for love? Love is tenuous, fragile and flighty. Love is irrational. It would be a problem for one such as myself, who is made uneasy by such irrationality, to make a lifelong commitment based on a state that I have only known in its temporary aspect. As Gottlieb says, "Love does not conquer all."

My skepticism about marriage did not, however, prevent me from attempting one such commitment. Nor does it prevent me from believing in falling in love. My longest relationship to date was with a woman, and because our government has deemed such relationships to be unworthy of tax breaks, property rights and power of attorney (thus, incidentally, reinforcing the notion that the civil institution of marriage remains little more than a financial arrangement--and one not afforded to all citizens--which, in my opinion, renders our lofty aspirations of "sanctity" and "love" within marriage wholly secondary, thus devaluing the system entirely. Thank you, U.S. government, for commodifying love, along with everything else!), I was not able to make my commitment official. Do I see some silver lining there, because I would obviously now be divorced? Well, no. The creation of a second class of citizens through denial of civil rights is nothing to celebrate... but, yeah, I guess I am glad I never married her.

However, I must admit, I entered into that relationship with every intention that it would last me a lifetime. Never had I met someone with whom I could laugh and cry in equal share. Never had I met someone who opened herself to me with such abandon and ferocity. Never had I doubted my own lovable-ness less. Never had had I encountered someone of whom I did not get bored or annoyed. I do not doubt that I was in love with her. But love doesn't conquer all. I can confirm that this is true because I was still in love with her the night I left.

I will spare my readers the sordid details of why I had eventually had to leave her, this woman who was supposed to be the love of my life. My real point in relaying any of this is just to say that there is no greater feeling of failure than that which one experiences at the moment at which one realizes that one can no longer abide by a commitment that was intended to be lifelong. It does not compare to failing a class in school and it does not compare to getting fired. When you, once and for all, abandon a pair-bonded relationship in favor of sex with another or singlehood or whatever it is that has led you astray, you feel utterly irredeemable. And strangely enough, this horrible feeling is not great enough motivation to stay.

And some might ask me, in this post that is supposed to be about adultery, was I unfaithful, there at the end? Sure, in some ways, I absolutely was. Sometimes, when you need to get out, you engage in activities so as to force your own hand. So, there's that.

And now I can come 'round to my recent viewing of Little Children. Man, I could never make it as a real movie critic. I just want to talk about myself too much, now, don't I? Well, anyway, I should just say that I think this movie is one of the best I've seen in a couple years. Really, I watched it a couple weeks ago and it's gotten so under my skin that haven't been able to wrap my head around how to write about it.

One review that I read discusses how, early on, when the two main characters, Brad (the knock-out, despite receding hairline, Patrick Wilson) and Sarah (Kate Winslet), kiss in a park in front of several other soccer-mom-types, despite being strangers. The review says that the horror of the soccer moms establishes that we are not in the landscape of the swingin' suburbs, such as is portrayed in movies like Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, wherein there is still a sort of detached discomfort that accompanies one of those parties at which all the husbands throw their keys in a fishbowl in spite of the social bravado implied by writing such a scene into a script. In a movie like that, sex is not intimate and no one is expected to fall in love as a result of it. In Little Children, though, it's a different story. Sarah, the former English lit PhD candidate, is bored and disenfranchised with her little domestic life. And Brad, the football star and would-be lawyer who can't pass the bar, is emasculated and a chickenshit, while his gorgeous, creative wife (still uber-hot Jennifer Connolly) is the successful documentary filmmaker that their son insists upon favoring. In other words, these two are ripe for the distraction and drama of falling in love with each other. Brad is still probably in love with his hot wife, even though he despairs at his life with her, but once Sarah finds her husband jerking off in front of the computer with polka-dot panties stretched over his face, well, I just don't think she was really feeling it anymore. Regardless, these two seek refuge from the lush-suburban-cum-bleak-and-vapid narrative landscape of this film in each other. And, maybe because we do not want to associate ourselves with the prudish suburbanites, we are glad for them.

But, though it would be great for the purposes of this post if this movie was really about nothing beyond adultery, it isn't. Adultery is, by far, NOT the most sinister of the topics broached in Little Children. Jackie Earle Haley plays Ronnie McGorvey in probably the most disturbing portrayal of a child molester in the annals of cinema. He is both sorrowful and repugnant. And the thing is, you want to love him and forgive him, until you just can't love or forgive him, not even remotely. Most indicative of the heinousness of this character is the sequence of scenes in which he goes on a date with a young woman. As it turns out, she's depressed to the point that she's made a couple attempts on her own life and, during their dinner together, he listens to her confessions of craziness and despair in such a way that he leads her to believe she's finally found a sympathetic ear. After their date, however, he asks her to drive him to a quiet street where he has a view of the neighborhood playground. While staring at her lap, she tearfully begins to tell him how he seems to be such a nice person and how she's so glad he listened to her, but when she looks up at at, he's gazing out the window of the car at the top of a swingset, vigorously masturbating. And he tells her that if she tells on him, he'll punish her. It's horrendous. It's horrendous, not only because he's given into his destructively deviant drives but because he's used this broken sad-sack of a woman to do so. After all, he's not allowed within 100 yards of a playground, unless he's hidden in some stranger's car!

Really, throughout the movie, it is McGorvey's story that serves as context for all the psycho-sexual unrest amongst all the characters. I'm particularly curious to note, though, that here, American suburbia is portrayed as a place simultaneously so full of castration-anxiety and so full of castration-lust. Male and female characters alike profess a desire to lop off McGorvey's dick. And yet all the men are stymied by their own in ability to live up to the expectations of their gender. Their sadness and frustration about all this is palpable. As are the resulting sadness and frustration the women. And in the face of all this batting around of this castration-as-a-metaphor-for-the-futility-of-domestic-life, it is finally McGorvey who takes the initiative and LITERALLY performs the gruesome deed upon himself. And so, in the end, none of the characters have dicks. And none of them are particularly good at performing... anything.

And so, if these ineffectual folks are representatives of those who've achieved the general American goal of upper-middle-class privilege, I gotta say, I'm both trepidatious and disappointed. I mean, I'm interested in the idea of male virtues being valued in and of themselves, so long as they don't denigrate or infringe upon female virtues, right? (And I guess so long as any virtue can be considered applicable to either gender...) But what of the men who wrote and directed this film? Tom Perotta wrote the novel on which it's based, and co-wrote the screenplay with director Todd Field. I wonder, are these men feeling these sorts of anxieties? What cultural rivulet of thought have they tapped into? I mean, is the fear that men are no longer entitled to their gender identities really so prevalent? I'm thinking back, now, to when I saw Byron Hurt's documentary, Beyond Beats and Rhymes, which talks a lot about the overcompensation inherent in the hyper-masculinity of hip-hop culture. So, surely this concern regarding metaphoric and literal castration is not one specific to rich white guys... and surely it is not new, but nonetheless, does it not point to some great societal illness? And because women are often both direct and indirect receptacles, if not victims, of this sort of psychological unrest in our male counterparts, well, shouldn't we have equal vestment and cause for concern?

I suppose, Little Children is not really a movie about adultery at all. It's a movie about how helpless people are when faced with their own unadulterated fucked-up-edness. And what does the movie present as the cause for said fucked-up-edness? Why, the frustration and demoralization that accompanies our inevitable inability to live up to whatever it was we were supposed to live up to, whether that be society or self-inflicted expectations-- of goodness, of tangible success, of beauty, and of course, of fidelity.

So, why, exactly is it that we just want so damn MUCH from ourselves? What would it look like if we valued questioning the system and coming to terms with our nature as human animals over aspiring to some obsolete American Dream?

UPDATE:
(Disclaimer) I don't suppose I can really stand 100% behind all the anti-marriage assertions I made in this post. It just seems that I'm getting bombarded with an awful lot of information about this topic lately and, apparently, I've got some processing to do. I don't know. Maybe I do mean it. But maybe not. Too soon (young, unattached, out-of-love) to tell yet?