A note: the song is fantastic; the video is strange and creepy.  You’ve been warned.

I’ve read quite a bit recently about Disney’s recent decision to rework it’s upcoming Rapunzel film by changing the title and adding a male protagonist, but I think that it’s going to be tough to judge how wise the changes are until the film comes out.  Is this a savvy storytelling decision, made to beef up a thin plot?  Or a marketing ploy by Disney executives desperate to attract young viewers of both sexes?  From this remove, it’s tough to say.

But in her (excellent) post discussing the controversy, Alyssa Rosenberg makes an incidental point about Pixar:

But it disappoints me to hear that instead of working on creating girl-centric stories that will appeal to audiences across gender lines, Disney’s responding by shelving a project with a female lead.  As the LA Times points out, Pixar’s become the shop that produces movies with male leads, something that I hadn’t thought about before, but is true, and is sort of worrisome.  Pixar movies I think generally appeal to both male and female audiences strongly.  But Disney appears to have little faith that they can make movies with female leads where their gender isn’t determinative of audience.

Given Pixar’s competence in all other areas of filmmaking, their almost obsessive focus on male protagonists is, on the face of it, rather strange.  But it actually seems to be a function of the company’s minuscule writing corps – rather than some sort of inherent bias – that results in the gender homogeneity.

Consider: Pixar has released ten feature-films in the last fifteen years.  Of those, fully six were written Andrew Stanton – the closest thing Pixar has to a head-writer.  Stanton was the main screenwriter of Pixar’s first five films – Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo – and he also wrote and directed WALL-E.  Additionally, four of Pixar’s films – A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and WALL-E – were conceived in a single productive lunch in 1994 between Stanton, John Lasseter (director of five Pixar films), Pete Doctor (writer / director of Up), and Joe Ranft (writer of A Bug’s Life and Cars).

All told, Pixar has added only one major creative force to their team since their inception: Brad Bird, the writer/director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille. And Bird’s production style differed so radically from the rest of the organization that they allowed him to bring in his own animation crew from The Iron Giant, and he still operates with relative autonomy from the rest of the group.

None of this excuses Pixar’s gender problem – which is, I’ll agree, worrisome.  But it does help to explain it.  Since the company formed, most of Pixar’s creative decisions have been made by the same group of half a dozen men – men with strikingly similar storytelling styles.  You can certainly blame the organization for not going out and finding the talent that it needed to write films with strong female leads.  But I don’t think that you can blame the writers themselves for the films they’ve written.

When you’re a screenwriter, you write what comes naturally to you – that’s what makes you good.  Stanton, for example, obviously feels at home writing about duos: his films usually feature a conservative, neurotic character (Woody, Marlin, Sully, Wall-E) who finds himself unexpectedly paired with a rogue outlier (Buzz, Dory, Mike Wazowski, EVE) who throws his life into disarray and sends him on some sort of zany quest.  It takes serious talent to write films as good as Stanton’s; it’s little wonder that Pixar has tried to mess with his style as little as possible.

The good news is that Pixar is aware of the problem and is working to fix it.  Next year’s The Bear and The Bow, currently in production, is being written and directed by Brenda Chapman.  Chapman was intimately involved with writing The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, and The Bear and the Bow is about a princess in ancient Scotland who yearns to be an archer.  I don’t quite buy into the idea that writers inherently create better characters of their own gender; nor am I entirely enthused about the idea of yet another princess film.  But it’s pretty obvious that Pixar needed to do something, and I’m excited to see what will come out of their attempts to expand their creative base.

I’ve been meaning for awhile to write about this study (PDF), conducted by Eaves (a London-based charity for vulnerable women) and reported on in the Guardian, about the motives behind men who frequent prostitutes.  The group interviewed a hundred and three men between the ages of 18-70.  They enticed the men to come in for the interview by putting an ad in the paper offering £20 and anonymity to any man who had experience with a prostitute.  (The report helpfully notes that they refused to interview those men who “were seeking sex from the person who answered the phone”, although personally I think those men were themselves ripe for study.)

I’ve found the study difficult to write about, though, mostly because I kept searching through it trying to find the portrait of the typical John – the personality blueprint, if you will, that could be analyzed and eventually decoded and lain bare for all to see.  Certainly there are some common threads here.  The vast majority of all transactions were handled inside, in brothels, apartments, or massage parlors, firmly putting to rest the stereotype of the street-walking prostitute.  The men were, by and large, casually misogynistic.  “I don’t want her to cry or this and that because that spoils the idea for me,” said one; “I feel sorry for these girls but this is what I want,” said another.  Yet the men remained decidedly ambivalent about their actions; 71% reported that they had some degree of guilt or shame about their actions, though apparently not enough so to stop themselves.

But for all that, the blueprint I was looking for simply does not exist – not here and not, I suspect, anywhere.  The men interviewed in the Eaves study were frustratingly diverse and contradictory.  Some sought out prostitution because they had no other sexual recourse, but an equal number were married or in a serious relationship.  Seeking prostitution was not found to vary significantly due to age, race, religion, political affiliation, or income level.  Some men wanted the woman to act like she cared about him; others, the exact opposite.  54% percent of the men interviewed admitted to having felt an emotional connection with a prostitute, and the other half denied that such a thing was even possible – let alone desirable.

Many of the men – 44% – agreed that prostitution has a negative psychological effect on the woman in question, and pluralities acknowledged that they were aware of the high levels of homelessness, coercion, human trafficking, and childhood sexual abuse among prostitutes.  These numbers mean, of course, that significant percentages of the men interviewed were willfully or blissfully ignorant of the true motives and experiences of the women they paid for sex, and the rest simply didn’t care.  Many – though again, not all – believed that prostitution was an inevitable by-product of the male psyche, and a majority believed that it helped to prevent higher levels of rape (a belief, I should point out, that is statistically false).

I went into this report trying to find an easy answer to a complex situation; it’s no surprise I came back dispirited.  The Eaves report reflects the unclear motivations and the messy justifications of the men involved, and it’s unsettling to find that we live in a world where such a simple question – why do men pay for sex, even when they know it hurts people? – has no clear answer.

In the ground rules for this project I promised to stay away from beers I had previously sampled.  I bent that rule a bit for the Rogue Dead Guy Ale: this was actually the first craft beer I ever tasted.  When I was all of sixteen years old my mother bought some for a “grown-up party”; naturally, I stole the leftovers out of the refrigerator and drank them in my bedroom with my friends.  (An act I vigorously denied for years, and have never gone public about until now – it should never be said that I don’t sacrifice for my readers.)

At sixteen I found the Dead Guy Ale to be almost overwhelmingly bitter and heavy.  I distinctly remember wondering whether something was actually wrong with it, and my friend mentioning that he’d rather have a Bud Light.  So I was glad to discover that the Dead Guy Ale is actually a clean, well-balanced ale, with a bit of a sharp first sip that turns smooth after a half a bottle or so.  It’s very drinkable, and the flavor’s complex enough to be interesting without precluding the possibility of drinking three or four at a time.  In a lot of ways, it’s what the Alaskan Amber Ale from last month was trying to be – a good, full-bodied beer.

Dogfish Head’s Midas Touch, on the other hand, is a beer that demands your full attention.  The concept is a touch pretentious – its recipe, which includes honey, muscat grapes, saffron, and barley, is based on the chemical analysis of a 2800 year-old pot found in King Midas’s tomb – but the taste is an absolute marvel.  I’m not even sure how to classify it – not quite a beer, nor a wine, nor a cider, nor a mead,  but containing elements of all.

It’s spicy – as in, containing spices, not picante – and sweet, with plenty of kick (it’s 9% alcohol by volume).  This is not a good party beer; the taste is so complex that I wouldn’t drink more than a bottle or two at a time.  But it’s certainly one of the more interesting beers I’ve ever had.  I cracked one open at a recent family dinner, and it dominated the conversation for a good fifteen minutes as it was passed from person to person.  (And my family, for all their virtues, are not known for their beer enthusiasm.)  Dogfish Head is known for their relentless experimentation.  Here, they redefine what a beer can be, and while I wouldn’t want to drink it every day, I have to give the credit where it’s due: this is something absolutely unique.

ChatRoulette, if you haven’t heard, is the newest mainstream outlet for people seeking to indulge their desire to be disgusted by their fellow man (or, somewhat less frequently, woman).  The concept is simple: it starts a videochat between you and a random stranger, and when one or the other of you disconnects, it finds you someone else.  And what you see can sometimes be pretty bizarre.  Or, as Sam Anderson puts it in New York Magazine:

There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four.

Sadly, spectacles such as these are in reality few and far between.  I can say from experience that the vast majority of ChatRoulette interactions fall into one of two categories: either you find yourself connected to another 18-24 guy, also alone, also staring blankly at his computer monitor; or you see a man masturbating.  It’s no exaggeration to say that fully half of all people on ChatRoulette at any given time are pleasuring themselves, and most of the other half are trying to avoid them – to the presumable disappointment of both.

Initially, this saddened me.  But then I started thinking about these masturbators, sitting alone in darkened rooms and training webcams on their throbbing members.  Where did these people come from?  Have they heretofore existed in such great number, and if so, how did they satisfy this fetish before ChatRoulette existed?  What sort of joy do they take in making their private activities public?  It would seem that there are literally tens of thousands of men out there – accountants, programmers, students, waiters – who have a deep-seated need to sexually connect not just with one person but with as many people as humanly possible.  Is it fair to judge them after we provide them with the perfect tool to satisfy their desires?

I wanted answers, and I tried to go right to the source – the masturbators themselves.  Sadly, they are disinclined to discuss the deeper psychological motivations behind their actions, and after an hour or so of being rejected by various self-fornicators I logged off of ChatRoulette feeling dispirited and vaguely dirty.  But I remain that there are interesting sociological factors at work here, even if the avenue for investigating them is unclear.

Since the establishment of the Flickr Commons two years ago, remarkably little attention has been paid to it – which is odd, given its extraordinary breadth and significance.  In January 2008, Flickr announced that the Library of Congress would put 3,500 pictures online without copyright or restriction, and invited other institutions to do the same.  Neither Flickr nor the Library of Congress, it should be said, had entirely altruistic reasons for doing this – Flickr wanted the extra traffic, and the Library needed help catagorizing and identifying many of its photographs.  Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that the response – both from users and from other historical institutions – has been vastly more enthusiastic than anybody counted on.

Today, the Flickr Commons hosts historical photos from no fewer than thirty-three institutions, including The Smithsonian, the U.S. National Archives, the Getty Institute, the State Library of New South Wales (from which the above picture, entitled Soldier’s Goodbye & Bobbie The Cat, was taken), and many more.  Flickr hopes to double that number by the end of 2010, and while it’s oddly difficult to gauge how many photos are in the Commons, there are certainly tens of thousands now, and there may soon be hundreds of thousands (this in addition to the four billion user-uploaded photos already on the site).  Flickr has, almost on the sly, positioned itself as the single greatest cultural achievement of the internet after Wikipedia.

This is interesting both because the Commons are an incredible historical resource (and, speaking from experience, an absorbing way to spend three hours) and because it’s such an incredibly unlikely place for Flickr – a company that has succeeded almost in spite of their best intentions – to find themselves.  The entire history of Flickr is one big accident: it was originally developed as an adjunct to a now-forgotten online role-playing game called Game Neverending, whose users found that swapping photos was a more engaging pastime than the game itself.  Presumably luckily for everyone involved, Game Neverending was soon shelved and Flickr’s life began in earnest.  But all of its primary innovations, from photo-tagging to groups, have been user-driven.

It wasn’t uncommon even in pre-internet days for companies to evolve far away from their original product.  IBM originally sold mechanical adding machines and, later, typewriters.  Nintendo was originally founded in 1889 and for most of its existence sold hanafuda, an elaborate style of Japanese playing cards; it was only after the company had narrowly avoided bankruptcy by running cab companies and love hotels that they finally invested in an upright arcade game called Donkey Kong.  But the speed with which that evolution takes place is definitely accelerating.  Flickr went from a vague afterthought to a colossal cultural institution in seven years.  Where’s it going to be in 2015?

I’ve been listening to The Avett Brothers compulsively for the last month or so, and in that time I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about their music that appeals to me so. They’re talented but not extraordinary instrumentalists. They sing reasonably well. As lyricists they hew more to direct-but-plain than elegant-but-complex – more Pete Seeger than Joanna Newsom, if you will – and they’re not above using the cliche to their own advantage.

Yet for all that, their songs are remarkably moving, to a degree that borders on manipulative.  Their albums veer from emotional peak to trough with a speed that seems frankly ill-advised, jubilant one moment and sobbing the next but never anything less than unabashedly sentimental.  They’re the band that Pitchfork hates to love.  And there’s something very impressive about a band that can move from a meditation on family to an exquisite love song to fierce expression of self-loathing with equal skill and faculty.

“Murder In The City” is from their EP The Second Gleam.  “January Wedding” is from their brand-new record I And Love And You.  “Shame” is from their 2008 album Emotionalism.

It’s true that The Avett Brothers aren’t doing anything markedly different than what country music – or folk music, or alt-country, or any other genre that relies on guitars and fiddles and earnestness – has been doing for the last fifty years: drawing upon a reservoir of common stories, of heartbreak and joy and disillusionment and guilt, and telling those stories in a way that seems at once specific and universal.  It’s why Don Williams or Dolly Parton can sell out 80,000 seats in Zimbabwe and have everyone in the stadium singing along.

There’s something very appealing about this kind of naked emotion, because that’s how our emotions feel, to us: they’re keening things, personal and unignorable and absolutely immune to reason.  No knowledge of how small our sufferings are can make them seem any less painful to us.  And artists like The Avett Brothers tell us that’s okay – that reveling in our joy and drowning in our sorrow isn’t only normal but right.  “I hope that I don’t sound to insane when I say / There is darkness all around us / I don’t feel weak but I do need sometimes for her to protect me,” they sing on “January Wedding”, and I, whose life has admittedly been pretty blessed, can sing along and feel the truth.  And therein lies the power.

In their most recent blog post, they highlight the apparent dichotomy that though relatively older women (in their 30s and 40s) often score as attractive and have more enlightened attitudes about things like casual sex and STD testing, the vast majority of men prefer to date women younger than themselves.

A man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age.  The median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35—nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.

In the comments, a number of people point out the obvious (though debatable) corollary to the OkCupid findings: many older women aren’t interested in dating younger men, especially men in their early-twenties.

The trend that the OkCupid guys are noticing here is actually a much-studied sociological phenomenon called marital hypergamy.  It’s most commonly seen in societies with very strong castes in their social system, but it’s observable, to one degree or another, in most modern cultures.  Basically, in general, men are willing do marry women of their own social caste or lower, while women are generally only willing to marry in their own social caste or higher.  With all the men marrying up and the women marrying down, two lonely strata are created: a large pool of men at the bottom, and a small number of women at the top.  Neither of these groups have the luxury of looking outside their social strata for mates.

OkCupid in particular has what I would imagine to be a relatively homogeneous middle-class user base – that is, relatively few people on it are very rich or very poor. Given that, in the United States, there are few ways other than money to recognize social status, I think it’s clear that the hypergamy is broadly manifesting itself in dating ages.

I first learned about marital hypergamy in my Introduction to Sociology class my freshman year at NYU, and it was responsible for perhaps the most profound epiphany of my college years.  The epiphany was this: hypergamy is completely applicable to the social structure of most American high schools.

Consider!  High schools are organized into extremely strict social strata with a number of observable trends.  Freshman and sophomore girls very often date junior or senior boys.  But the reverse is uncommon – freshman or sophomore boys hardly ever date junior or senior girls.  Older girls tend to date other seniors, college students, or the recently-graduated.  And at the bottom are a large pool of younger males who can’t find anyone to date them, except junior high students, which even at that age strikes everyone else as a little creepy.

For a few moments after this all hit me I was struck dumb, but then I raised my hand and, when called on, excitedly related my theory to the professor.  Unfortunately, my three-hundred-person intro class was taught by an aging, somewhat-deaf man named Gerald Marwell – quite the luminary in his field, and very knowledgeable, but unused to sudden interruptions from excited students.  “No, young man,” he said, “you’ve misunderstood me.  I was talking about early-twentieth century Japan.  You see…”   And he turned back around to the board and continued with his lecture.

The observation has nevertheless stuck with me, and I’m almost absurdly pleased that OkCupid has given me the opportunity to brag about it in a public forum.

The big news this week is, of course, the rollout of Google Buzz – the not-quite-Twitter, not-quite-Facebook tool that Google hopes will replace both.  This isn’t an area in which Google has had a great deal of success – Orkut, their only other social-networking service, has caught on in India and Brazil but virtually nowhere else – and since Google has gobbled up large sections of the email, online video, and advertising sectors, it makes sense that they’d turn their gaze to social networking next.

The debut was not, as they say, an unqualified success.  Many users were unprepared for the rather cavalier way that Google bandied about the email addresses of their friends and family.  Others wondered why service existed in the first place.  It generates entirely too many emails, especially for a service so closely tied to Gmail.  And it doesn’t seem to offer much, at this point, that Twitter or Facebook doesn’t already.

I’ve been using Buzz for two days now, and at this point Google’s decision to marry it so tightly to Gmail seems a misstep.  By and large, most people don’t use email to keep in touch with their friends and family; they use it for more pedestrian communication.  So when I started up Buzz, sure, it imported my friend’s emails – but I also found that I was automatically following three people who had recently inquired about a room I was subletting, and the admissions officer at a large New England university.  (Worse, these people were following me!)  By contrast, on Twitter I follow people like Nathan Fillion and the FakeAPStylebook – with whom I have never, and sadly will never, exchange any sort of correspondence.

So though I won’t deny that Buzz is kinda fun, it’s tough to imagine it totally replacing Twitter or Facebook.  However – they say that necessity is the mother of invention, but I don’t think that’s quite true; generally, things get invented accidentally, and a good use for them is found later.  The inventor of the Slinky, Clay Watson, was busily engaged in developing a spring that would help stabilize the payload of ships; it wasn’t until he knocked one of his working models off the workbench and watched as it skittered away that its potential as a toy occurred to him.  Likewise, the inventors of Twitter never dreamed it would be used to coordinate protests in Iran.  And it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if a use for Buzz develops that isn’t immediately clear, and in eighteen months we can’t imagine how we ever lived without it.

Update: Only twenty minutes or so after I posted this the news came through that Google is indeed mulling separating Buzz from Gmail.

However, the plan to incubate a Neanderthal baby inside a human mother is eerily similar to the premise of Mark Canter’s little-remembered novel Ember From The Sun, in which an Alaskan scientist finds a pregnant Neanderthal frozen in a glacier and transplants her embryo into a modern-day human.  When the Neanderthal baby is born, she is basically a super-human: she can put together jigsaw puzzles that have been spray-painted black; she’s an incredible baseball player; and eventually she has to save her frozen ancestors from destruction by some kind of evil gold-mining company.

Ember From The Sun was a book that I loved as a kid – I probably read it eight or ten times – but when I revisited it a year or two ago I found, to my dismay, that it’s actually pretty bad.  Ember’s character is reasonably well-developed, but the characters around her act in awkward and obviously plot-dictated ways.  The writing is insipid.  Ember is superior to the humans around her in basically every way, and Canter’s answer to the uncomfortable question this raises – how, exactly, did the weak humans manage to wipe out the other species? – is that the Neanderthals had psychic powers that prevented them from waging war.  (Seriously.  If I remember correctly, Ember can actually remember things that happened to her frozen biological mother.)

I’ve had this experience before, where I’ve returned to a cherished childhood work of art – Terry Pratchett’s entire bibliography, Pippi Longstockings, the movie Sphere - only to discover that it doesn’t hold up to my recollection.  Who among us hasn’t felt that sinking feeling upon realizing, after having excitedly recommended a beloved childhood movie, that everyone else watching is laughing at you inside?  (My good friend Julia never quite lived down the time she insisted to me that The Goofy Movie was a towering cinematic achievement.)

My response to this, naturally, is to treat any opinion I formed before the age of twenty as deeply suspect.  I may not be working in film right now, but it was during my time at NYU that I remember first thinking seriously, and critically, about the media I consume.  And I like to think that, while I may like bad things now, at least I can explain why I like them, and acknowledge their flaws.  Thinking critically is a learned skill, and part of the reason that I keep this blog is to practice.

But – sometimes, I am afraid.  Afraid that I still haven’t learned to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Afraid that I’ll look back at this blog and say, Really?  I recommended THAT?  What was I thinking? Maybe that won’t happen.  Or maybe that would be a good thing – maybe my taste should be something that evolves with me as I age.  But I hope not.  I’d like to have as few Ember From The Sun’s in my life as possible.