At Gawker this morning, Max Read did a thorough job of explaining why Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who appears to have shown considerable disappointment in real life that he’s not attractive to some of his very young colleagues, is perhaps not the person best fit to decry Daniel Craig’s chiseled physique and to praise retro, older sex symbols like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant as Cohen did his column yesterday. But reading through Cohen’s lament that ladies of roughly my age seem to dig Craig more than we do grizzled syndicated columnists, I think that Cohen, without intending to, is expressing an anxiety that’s worth examining. James Bond’s being treated like a Bond girl. The ascendance of young adult literature means that pop culture has more and more gorgeous young men who are offered up like a dessert tray for heroines’ pleasures. And as images of what makes a man attractive and successful as determined by female desires and standards proliferate in our culture, it makes sense that the guys watching at home would start to worry if they measure up, and to think about what would happen to them if they started facing ideals as rigid as those imposed on women.

That Cohen, whether he recognizes it or not, is not alone in his anxiety doesn’t exactly make his critique of James Bond in comparison to older, less athletic, but still super-rich and super-white guys thoughtful or incisive. Desirable masculinity, as Cohen outlines it, is a pretty great deal for men, or at least, men of a certain financial position and class upbringing. A world in which men can take the things they learned when they were young about how to “handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin,” or about how to be the kind of man who “knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning,” buy some style along the way, and have beautiful women fall into their laps is one that doesn’t force those men to suffer much in the way of anxiety or upkeep. There’s no female gaze or female judgement here—nor any concern for female pleasure, the question of what those male bodies might be good for. Men present the standards for manhood, and women effortlessly—gratefully, really—accept them.

Cohen dismisses the current crop of sculpted hunks that Daniel Craig represents as “some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer,” but the standards for what makes a man sexy that he’s describing are no more natural or objective. And I’m curious if he’d identify the beauty of the women he cites in his column, like Ingrid Bergman and Mary Astor, as effortless and natural, rather than the product of beauty standards and the punishing regimes and restrictive clothes that helped women accomplish them. One of the earliest contradictions I understood as a young teenage girl reading fashion magazines was that I was supposed to look “natural” and “effortless,” but that it took an enormous amount of work and money to recreate the looks that I was told embodied those standards. I learned that my own lip color and texture was less natural than a glossy pink, that the blush of my unadorned cheek looked less vital than a layer of foundation, powder, and blush. I’m glad I had that education so I could see the distance and the contradiction, enjoy wearing bright red lipstick for its artificiality and sense of performance, not because I believed that my own hue was an error or imperfection. But it’s not an easy education to acquire, or to shake off in favor of truly discerning what I want to look like and feel, and I don’t envy someone like Cohen coming to his own version of it later in life, or reckoning with the work he’d have to do to meet the standards laid out for him. I feel a lot more concern, however, for teenage boys who are turning to steroids or working out more than is actually healthy to meet those standards

In a way, I think we’re at an interesting tipping point in our culture, but one that still involves men and women (when those are the parties to the conversation) talking past each other. What’s interesting to me about Daniel Craig’s body is less how it looks than in what he does with it as James Bond. The contrast between the force he’s able to exercise (as James Poulos put it on Twitter, “Soooo to be clear, CraigBond’s muscles are things you have to have if you are a blunt instrument. Get the causal arrows right.”) and the tenderness and sensuality Craig in particular shows women is what’s attractive about him. Watching him curl up under a running shower with Vesper or bowl her, laughing, over a hospital bed, the delicacy of the way he unbuttons Eve Moneypenny’s blouse, or the rough hurry with which he pushes his unnamed paramour up against a wall in their lean-to on the beach—these all speak to an attentiveness to and experience with women’s bodies that’s far more relevant to the question at hand than Bond’s ability to deal with a formally trained waiter, though in Casino Royale, he seems to navigate fancy restaurants just fine. While neither Edward Cullen nor Christian Grey does it for me, I can understand why those archetypes are so attractive to some of the women who consume them, and not just because they’re described as very handsome: these are men who are bringing considerable physical power or substantial sexual experience to bear in service of their partners’ pleasure*.

The question of how we want our bodies to look, and how we want other people to react to them, has long stood in for how we want them to feel, how we want them to be touched, and treated. This isn’t to say that looks don’t matter, but they’re intertwined with a set of issues we’re much less capable of having productive public conversations about. I’m glad, to a certain extent, that more men are coming to an understanding of how culture contributes to this nasty bit of sleight-of-hand for women, particularly after what’s felt like a particularly intense decade of Beauty And The Slob pairings. But this is a case when turnabout isn’t fair play for people on either end of the equation.

*More thoughts on this tomorrow.

This is maybe the most delightful thing I have ever seen in my entire life: Pat Robertson discovering that some ladies like erotica through the world-conquering phenomenon that is Fifty Shades of Grey:

First, there’s the way that he asks his co-host, “You’re a sweet Christian girl. Lady. Do you see anything in porn that attracts you at all?” I imagine his intention is to provide her an opportunity to reaffirm her chastity, to come across as a little shocked and maybe even innocent. But it comes across as awfully prurient.

And that position of shock and presumption of innocence and purity is actually more revealing than the idea that “A third of the millions of Americans who watch porn are women.” If Robertson is shocked that E.L. James “the author, kind of a little house-wifey type, who doesn’t look like a glamor queen…this woman is kind of like a housewife in some little town” thinks about sex, he must be almost wholly unacquainted with the prospect of female desire. If you can’t reckon with the idea that women crave, enjoy, and think about how to make sex better, it actually makes sense that you’d have a hard time understanding why contraceptive coverage is important to women, or why it’s important to us to have final decision-making authority over our own bodies. Doesn’t make that befuddlement admirable. But it does help make sense of at least a segment of the tide of weird that’s enveloped us over the last year. It would be nice if Robertson, a late convert to the idea that marijuana should be legal and regulated, could get up to speed on this kind of thing in his old age as well.

I wish I could say that I’m shocked that two female candidates for Senate got asked in a debate whether they’d read Fifty Shades of Grey, but sometimes, everything is weird and terrible and this kind of nonsense does come to pass:

I’m willing to give the moderators a pass for asking about culture in general, both because the questions were meant to warm up the debaters, and because I think that asking substantive questions about culture is an interesting way to get at what public figures value and the extent to which they’re inclined to pander. But asking a yes or no question about whether Kirsten Gillibrand and Wendy Long have read a book that, as of August, had sold more than 40 million copies, doesn’t actually reveal any meaningful information about their tastes that distinguishes them from other women.

The reason people think reading Fifty Shade of Grey indicates anything at all is because people think it’s weird for women to publicly admit to being interested in sex, much less in books that involve women figuring out what they like sexually. Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t actually a particularly good book if you want to have a discussion of sexual self-knowledge, given that it’s a big proponent of the idea that all women have magically effective vaginal orgasms, that if you haven’t had sex before that it will automatically be terrific as long as your partner is a charismatic and kinky industrial tycoon, and that its knowledge of BDSM and power dynamics in sex appears to have been gleaned from a vigorous read of Wikipedia. But it’s still treated as if it’s some sort of scandalous text—people literally write articles about how to avoid being caught reading Fifty Shades of Grey in public. Asking Gillibrand and Long whether they’d read the book isn’t a way to learn more about them, or to start a discussion about sexuality, or to see if they’re in synch with female readers, or to warm them up: it’s in part to catch them out on something that shouldn’t be a titter-worthy issue in the first place.

As Fifty Shades of Grey mania’s swept the country, film and television production companies have fallen all over themselves, first to snap up the rights to E.L. James’ erotic trilogy, and then to find the next Fifty Shades, whether it’s YA riff Beautiful Disaster (bought by Warner Brothers) or ABC’s efforts to develop Dress To Kill, an erotic mystery set in the fashion world, as a series. There’s just one problem: movies and television in particular are often terrible at depicting sex compellingly, even without the addition of floggers and sub-dom power dynamics to navigate and ratings systems to accommodate. But if television’s determined to get serious about sex, and networks want to compete with cable, which has far fewer restrictions on what it can show but still often demonstrates a basic cluelessness about what makes a scene genuinely erotically charged, here are five tips for how to shoot sex scenes that can pass Standards and Practices and still get viewers hot and bothered.

1. Leadup Matters: Short scenes in television often mean we see couples on a straight route from the front door to the bedroom. Hot and heavy’s fine, but it cuts out one of the most fun things about watching characters prepare to get it on, whether this is the first time they’re sleeping together, or whether they’re an established couple going to bed prepared to surprise each other all over again. Two instructive examples come from The Hour and Parenthood. The former spent its third hour on a number of plots, but the through line was rising sexual tension between Bel Rowley, the producer on the news magazine program The Hour, and Hector Madden, her married anchor. As they flirted on the drive up to London and wandered the halls of Madden’s wife’s palatial country home during a game of Sardines, watching Hector catch Bel’s hand or move in for an early kiss was as tense and thrilling as a full-on sex scene, and we didn’t even have to see them take off their clothes. In the second season of Parenthood, in the episode “Amazing Andy And His Wonderful World Of Bugs” Julia and Joel Graham end up delaying having sex until Julia is ovulating because they’re trying to get pregnant. Watching Joel lust after Julia is half the fun, in part because Sam Jaeger conveys longing so well. You don’t have to worry about what acts you can and can’t broadcast if you have actors who can plausibly sell desire even when they aren’t touching each other.

2. People Should Have Fun: Pop culture sex often looks so deadly serious, choreographed rather than spontaneous, attentive to the audience’s expectations rather than conveying the impression the people involved are actually enjoying themselves. The reason that the first sex scene in the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair is so effective (once you get beyond the stair-sex, which no one will ever convince me could possibly less than extremely uncomfortable) is that the characters get to be silly, and enthusiastic, and awkward. They laugh, fall off things, vamp a little. It’s actually plausible that they’re all wrapped up in each other, rather than thinking ahead to what they’ll look like when the editing bay gets done with them.
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I spent an hour yesterday considering how to tackle Stephen Marche’s calamitously awful piece for Esquire, “The Contempt of Women,” an attempt at cultural analysis in which he strawmans Girls, Sex and the City and Fifty Shades of Grey all in one paragraph, praises President Bush’s myopia, and literally cites declining sexual assaults rate as evidence of women’s contempt for men. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say so much as I didn’t know where to start, at least until Marche tweeted “The women who show their contempt for my piece on the contempt of women prove my point by virtue of their contempt. Does that make sense?” It’s the perfect encapsulation of an idea that’s shows up in culture everywhere from the backlash against Anita Sarkeesian to the defense of comics who say that women aren’t funny: that women don’t have the right to determine what’s fit for judgement, particularly if their target is something admired by men or conferring of male privilege, and when they do, their judgement is inevitably tainted by self-interest or motivated by irrational contempt rather than the merits of the case.

It is, apparently, not okay for women to want clarity about the status of their relationships and sex that is fulfilling for them as well as their partners, as Hannah does on Girls, to attempt to negotiate the terms of their relationship as Anastasia Steele does in Fifty Shades of Grey, tease the president of the United States, who is also your husband and probably comes equipped with his own set of domestic idiosyncrasies and slight annoyances, or appreciate Louis C.K.’s self-examination. The thing is, there’s a lot of stupid in our culture, and contempt for women is embedded in that very stupid. I’m not sure why women are supposed to accord a heightened level of respect for narratives that tell us we should fall for inconsiderate schlubs whose inattentiveness is a theoretical down payment in future awesome, or the idea that sexual harassment is part of video game culture, or assertions that female incompetence is adorable and endearing. If people and concepts are going to treat women with utter, logic-boggling disrespect, I have no idea why I should bring deference to a contempt-fight.

But we are in luck! Because it turns out that even if I’m not supposed to feel contempt for things and behaviors, and men are supposed to ignore me, Marche is allowed to visit judgement down on his fellow men, and they’d do well to fall in line. “I suppose I should feel compassion, or some kind of weird gender loyalty, for the guys who can’t figure this out,” he writes. “In all honesty, I don’t. There is no masculinity crisis. There’s a crisis for idiots. The Tucker Maxes of the world are doomed. That’s not the end of men. It’s the beginning.” What a relief that someone is allowed to name nonsense for what it is! I hope Marche is ready and able to serve. Because I have a list of things I’d like him to hold in contempt for me.

Because I am deeply dedicated to exploring any and all pop culture phenomena for your benefit no matter the cost to my own sanity, (and because what else was I going to read poolside in California?) I spent part of my time away reading Fifty Shades of Grey*. The novel, a self-published best-seller that started as Twilight fan fiction and subsequently landed print publication and a major movie deal, is essentially a conventional romance about a broken man rescued by the love of a good woman. But Fifty Shades‘ embrace of BDSM isn’t tight enough to leave a bruise, or to open up a serious conversation about power in intimate relationships.

The potential submissive here is Anastasia Steele, possessed of one of the great stupid romance novel names of all time, a virginal college senior who hopes to go into publishing. Her roommate, the editor of the college newspaper, inexplicably asks Anastasia rather than another reporter to fill in for her at an interview with an elusive industrialist who is a major university benefactor. The interview is outwardly a disaster: Anastasia falls down, gets flustered, asks Christian Grey if he’s gay. But as in Twilight, her incompetence ignites a possessive urge and an erotic obsession in Grey. He asks her to sign a contract to become his submissive, divests her of her virginity, and gives her an education in erotic spanking, riding crops, and handcuffs, then begins breaking all his rules and forging an emotional relationship with her as well. While Fifty Shades of Grey has references to all sorts of toys in what Anastasia refers to as Christian’s “Red Room of Pain,” and some discussion of dominant-submissive power dynamics, overall the novel reads as if author E.L. James did what Christian encourages Anastasia to do after proposing that she become his sub: hit up Wikipedia.

The novel, told from Anastasia’s perspective, consistently insists that Christian, who was born to a drug-addicted mother and sexually initiated by a dominant friend of his mother’s at fifteen, is interested in BDSM because it’s a way of containing and channeling his psychological damage. And Anastasia constantly insists that Christian is an unreliable narrator of his own life. She describes him as “A young man deprived of his adolescence, sexually abused by some evil Mrs. Robinson figure.” When she thinks about his experiences with Elana, his first lover, it’s with distrust and disbelief: “I just can’t picture it. Christian being beaten by someone as old as my mother, it’s just so wrong. Again I wonder what damage she’s wrought.” Some of her jealousy is the result of a sense of inadequacy. Anastasia wonders “Did she have the best of him? Before he became so closed? Or did she bring him out of himself? He has such a fun, playful side.” But mostly, Anastasia firmly believes that Christian’s interest in dominance and submission is the result of profound self-loathing, something that Christian can grow beyond to heal rather than a source of what he needs: “He doesn’t even love himself. I recall his self-loathing, her love being the only form he found acceptable. Punished— whipped, beaten, whatever their relationship entailed— he feels undeserving of love. Why does he feel like that? How can he feel like that?”

It’s a weirdly condescending perspective for Anastasia to take towards Christian’s understanding of himself. She’s jealous and confused that Christian could consider Elana a friend, that he’s in business with her, that they have dinner together. “It wasn’t like that,” he tells Anastasia. “Okay, it didn’t feel like that to me…She was a force for good. What I needed…She’s not an animal, Anastasia. Of course she didn’t. I don’t understand why you feel you have to demonize her.” A more sophisticated novel might have delved into the question of what Christian believes that he needs. Anastasia is convinced that, for Christian, domination and submission are about associating love with pain. But the book never examines the idea that a dominant-submissive relationship might be about providing Christian with relationships that have an extreme clarity and predictability to them after the chaos of his childhood before he was adopted, about knowing exactly what he’s supposed to do or expected to do or allowed to do in one arena of his life, or about guaranteeing that he has someone who will be receptive to his offers of love and pleasure. Giving more respect to his perspective could have moved Fifty Shades of Grey beyond the romance novel conventions that form its skeleton, and into a more serious consideration of what people want from their relationships and the fact that pop culture ideals of love and sex are not sufficient to everyone’s needs.
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