Gotham Diary:
Sexball
31 July 2013
“Carlos Danger.” That’s apparently what New Yorker editor David Remnick said to the magazine’s art director, Françoise Mouly, by way of command. Remnick wanted a cover featuring Anthony Wiener in his superpower capacity. We presume that he is very pleased with John Cuneo’s drawing, which was released to the Times a few days ago. So much novelty! Seeing a New Yorker cover in the paper, before it hits the newstands! Editorial requests for topical covers! Well, those are perhaps no longer a novelty, but they still seem new to me, after decades of seasonally-adjusted timelessness. The cover of The New Yorker is now its most prominent cartoon (sorry, “drawing”), with the added joke that you have to look at the Table of Contents for the caption, which, this week, is “Carlos Danger.”
One thing I miss about the old days is knowing so much less about the sex lives of others. Close to nothing, really. Pregnancy used to be the only evidence of sexual activity, and even that was much less on view when I was a little boy. Information about the sex lives of others is not only unuseful but corrosive, because our social lives are carefully constructed atop sexual privacy. Sex happens, all the time, but if it’s not happening to you, how are you going to feel, sitting down to dinner with the teenager whose sexting has somehow come to your attention? Carlos Danger, even worse. An adult male who wants you to vote for him! I’ll bet that Bill Clinton, when he gets down on his knees for bedtime prayers, thanks the Lord especially for having gotten him in and out of the White House before the invention of Facebook.
One of the major pieces in this week’s issue is Ariel Levy’s account of the Steubenville ordeal, “Trial by Twitter.” Over the past months, I have been aware of “Steubenville” as a label pasted on a sordid episode, as effective as a skull-and-crossbones at warning me away. Or perhaps it was the infernal cliché of football-star rapists. I could assume that whatever it was that made “Steubenville” more exciting than other scandals would eventually run its course, and that if there were still anything worth talking about when it did, it would at least be considered talk, not “news.” Levy’s story is indeed considered, and the real issue has little to do with sexting teens. Rather it is the somewhat confounding alliance between critics of America’s “rape culture” and seekers after vigilante justice — the latter, in my book, no better than rapists.
I’m reminded of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. One of the best things in that novel is the account, ostensibly composed by the victim herself, of the heroine’s rape at the age of seventeen. Patty Emerson’s parents urge her not to press charges, because the boy involved is the scion of a wealthy family whom it would be politically embarrassing to disgrace. Patty’s mother in particular finds it difficult to believe that an athlete as robust as her daughter could be forced into nonconsensual sex. Disgusted, Patty turns her back on her affluent Westchester life and migrates to the Midwest, just like the pioneers of earlier centuries. Her adulthood begins in acrimonious rejection.
Franzen times Patty’s rape to occur at a transitional moment. Her parents take the traditional view: rape cannot occur when the man is known socially to the woman and the woman declines to make a fuss during the act. Rape is a violent crime, perpetrated in sudden, unexpected encounters by brutal, barbaric men. Patty’s coach, who notices some cuts and bruises, takes the new view, one of much wider scope. If sex is unwanted, it’s rape, and it cannot be mitigated by the woman’s desire to keep the assault a secret. Ariel Levy’s piece suggests that there is a quasi-legal presumption at work today, according to which a woman does not have the right to suppress a rape.
“Rape culture” is the banner of this new thinking, which is far from universally shared — certainly not by teenagers with no experience of sexual repercussion. Some of the tweets that Levy quotes have an almost Islamic sound to them: girls who get falling-down drunk at parties deserve to be screwed. Indeed, the Internet and its refinements have increased both the incidence of sexual risk-taking and the volume of social disapproval. At the center of everything is a terrible silence, where effective sex education ought to be. I’m not talking about biology classes. I’m not thinking of something that we ought necessarily to look to public schools to provide. But adults could clearly do more to help young people navigate the treacheries of adolescence than blow up every time a wild party leads to bad behavior.
In any case, “rape culture,” as I see it, is just a subset of “football culture.” The sooner football is perceived to be a vice that damages and brutalizes young men (and the young men who watch them), the sooner we can worry less about rape.