Sunday, July 06, 2008

Two-Hundred-Four

S U B L I M I N A L (from Snopes)

Looks innocent enough . . . .

Still looks innocent enough . . . .

Voila . . . .

And this one too . . . . starts off innocently enough . . . .

and voila . . . .

(h/t to Silent-Porn-Star and Snopes)

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Two-Hundred-Three

Computer says get a life – and we have
Simon Jenkins, London Times (July 2008)

Last week hundreds of young people queued overnight to watch Andrew Murray play a game of tennis. Tickets were reportedly changing hands for £2,000. Yet the game could be watched on any television or computer screen, in the comfort of home, pub or work-place. Last year the market clearing price for a ticket to December’s Led Zeppelin reunion was £7,425. Yet every note was available for free on download. What is happening?

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after the internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. There will be a novel way of downloading into the ear or eye, a new web phenomenon or interactive device. Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone, innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming plain, even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s answer should lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in reality television, reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the immediate, the active, the present, the live.

The phenomenon is near-universal. People do not want to spend their spare time in front of the same screens at which they increasingly work. They want to “go out”. They will use the internet and iPod, MySpace and YouTube, but as a proxy for the real. The popularity of “reality” television lies in being brought closer to truth to life than drama can ever be.

Last year sales of CDs fell by more than 10% and prices plummeted, while attendance at live concerts rose by 13% and prices soared. A million people reportedly tried to get tickets for Led Zeppelin. The Rolling Stones 2005-6 world tour grossed £280m, with single tickets costing more than the price of their entire album output.

At the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss concert in the grim Wembley arena in May, enthusiasts were hanging from the rafters. Tickets for Anna Netrebko at Covent Garden changed hands for four times their face value.

A year ago Prince declared that his CDs would be given away free, in effect as flyers to publicise his 21 concerts at the O2arena, which swiftly sold out. Recorded music became overnight what it had not been since the invention of recording: publicity for live rather than live being publicity for recording. With more than half of internet provider traffic estimated to be illegal downloads, David Bowie’s prediction is true, that “music will soon be like running water”, available at the cost only of transmitting it. A shrewd promoter signs a “360degree” contract with a singer, ensuring revenue from live as well as recorded output.

What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the products of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for free. What can be sold is that genius in the flesh. The miserable output of modern abstract art is gradually being supplanted by what amount to live freak shows, such as Tate Britain’s performers running up and down the gallery in trainers.

The boom in recorded music probably peaked in the mid1990s, when album sales hit a record of 3.4 billion worldwide. Last year the comparable figure was 1.9 billion and falling more than 10% a year, with revenue down 8%.

Nor is the “rise of live” confined to high-profile music, art and sport. The fastest growing cultural activity in Britain is literary and music festivals. The number of the latter has risen tenfold over the past two decades to about 450. Festivals such as Edinburgh, Oxford and Hay have become near-industrial in scale and others have spread out to embrace market towns and villages. My favourite festival of the year is at Charleston in East Sussex.

These are not financial extravaganzas and pay their performers little or nothing, but they draw big crowds to socialise and meet, or at least hear, celebrity performers. They generate turnover and employ people. The musicians and writers who are their staple input will soon earn more from live activity than from mass-produced versions of their work.

Wendy Cope, the poet, recently championed her profession by demanding that poetry readings acknowledge copyright. But when a poet’s work can be instantly disseminated on the web, the only real income will in future come from the gift book market and public recitals. The festival and lecture circuit, well exploited by retired politicians, may yet be many a writer’s chief source of income.

Lectures – surely the most archaic form of public entertainment – now cram the London what’s-on schedules. Popular debating series such as IQ2 regularly sell out at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington.

Even the steady decline in church attendance is not matched by a decline in well promoted religious events. The Dalai Lama packed the Albert Hall in May. The Pope is guaranteed to draw crowds wherever he goes.

Cathedrals are booming thanks to the fame of their architecture and choirs. Half a million people attended concerts last year in Exeter Cathedral. So many people went to Wells over Christmas that an official worried that it “could lose its prayerful atmosphere”. It is not a risk run by many parish churches.

One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by campaigning old style, from the back of a train.

Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly present on their territory.

The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it. Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh. The recent London mayoral election saw a dramatic return to the popularity of the old hustings with packed meetings.

The reason why public figures such as Clinton and Tony Blair can command huge sums for “personal appearances” is not that people are eager to hear their wisdom. That is available on the web for free. The reason is that people pay to be in the presence. JPMorgan, the bank, has blown £1m on a Blair “consul-tancy” that appears to involve no more than having him to lunch. That is the price of live.

Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the market supplies them.

I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want, they will pay for.

Ellis Rich, chairman of the Performing Rights Society, remarked recently that the battered music business, traditionally at the cutting edge of entertainment, “must constantly ask itself, where is the money being made? For that’s where we should be”.

The money is now being made in supplying a public craving not for technology but for human experience. It lies in flesh and blood. Live is live.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Two-Hundred-Two

How not to become a desperate housewife
Nothing comes between Jenny Block and her husband - except perhaps her live-in lover, Jemma. Louise France meets America’s new queen of the swingers (The Guardian, July 2008)

Jenny Block who loves her husband and her live in lover Jemma, photographed in Dallas last month. Photograph: Martha Camarillo

Sunday brunch at a dim sum restaurant in Seattle with the local polyamory group. I’m sitting between two men. One has a T-shirt that reads ‘Two’s Company’. The other’s wearing the slogan ‘Screw Abstinence’. Welcome to the neighbourhood ‘sex-positive’ community, a club where anything goes, just so long as it’s between consenting adults and latex is involved.
They’re a friendly bunch (well, I guess you’d have to be. It doesn’t do to be stand-offish and polyamorous). There is E, who has known she was polyamorous since she was 18; then J, who first discussed this kind of lifestyle with his wife back in 1962 (they’re still together); and a woman who describes herself as temple priestess, sex educator and counsellor, which must keep her busy.

Guest of honour is Jenny Block, America’s poster girl for open marriage. Block is a 38-year- old writer who has flown in from Dallas where she lives in one of the outlying suburbs with her husband Christopher, an IT consultant, and their nine-year-old daughter Emily.

Let’s be clear here. Block doesn’t do fetish parties or, even, polyamorous pot-luck suppers (an irresistible coupling of concepts; I can already imagine Russell T Davies near the buffet table, taking notes). ‘My day-to-day life is exactly the same as my neighbour’s,’ she insists. ‘There is nobody swinging naked from a chandelier.’ Breakfast, school run, work, lunch, homework with Emily. Evenings spent making dinner, watching a video, playing Scrabble. Weekends mean family dinners and miniature golf. The only difference is that in the Block household there’s always room on the sofa for Jenny’s 27-year-old girlfriend, Jemma, too.

Briefly, Jenny has a sexual relationship with both Christopher and Jemma - though her husband and her girlfriend don’t sleep with each other. Christopher, should he choose, could sleep with anyone he fancies (so long as it’s not in the neighbourhood; they have a strict ‘not in town’ rule). So could Jemma, although she says she doesn’t want to. Jenny used to hook up with other people, men and women, she met on work trips and writer retreats, but at the moment she’s content with just the two of them. In poly-speak this means she’s in a ‘vee’ relationship (in which one person has two lovers who aren’t involved with each other) as oppose to a ‘triad’ or a ‘quad’ which sound even more exciting, or exhausting, depending on your point of view.

She’s just written a book about these unusual (although, according to Jenny, not that unusual) domestic arrangements. A kiss and tell, if you will. A memoir about your open marriage means, of course, that there’s no such thing as an ‘inappropriate’ question. You cannot balk at being asked about your sleeping arrangements. You can’t demur if a stranger wants to know how often you have sex with your husband, or your girlfriend. Nothing is private, or out of bounds.

Which is how, by the end of two days following Jenny on her book tour, I know more about her than I do about some of my closest friends.

At what point in the evening do you decide who you’re going to sleep with?

‘Jemma stays in the guest room. Sometimes I stay with her, and sometimes I don’t.’

How do you decide?

‘It kind of happens naturally. It’s not about whose turn it is. People think my life is driven by sex but it isn’t.’

But you do still have sex with your husband?

‘Yes ... maybe at the weekend, when the house is quiet. I used to count how often before, but now I don’t.’

Does your daughter know?

‘No, she doesn’t. But the other day she asked me, “Do you love Jemma as much as you love Daddy?” And I replied, “Do you know? I do!” And she said, “I thought so”.’

Our perception of American values, or at least the Bible-bashing evangelical element of them, is that Jenny would surely be tarred and feathered and paraded around the parking lot of Wal-Mart for saying such things but, so far, so good. ‘A few people think I am a bitch and a whore and taking advantage of my poor, low self-esteemed husband,’ she says dryly, ‘but mostly the response has been positive.’

Last night, for instance, she was in a Southern-food restaurant in the heart of Portland, Oregon. ‘This woman kept looking at me. Afterwards she came over and said, “Did I see you on television this morning?” My sister was with me and I could see her bracing herself just in case this woman tried to attack me. But she said, “I just want to thank you”. She explained that she and her husband loved each other very much but they found monogamy very challenging.’

Before Jenny Block and I met in Seattle, she emailed me saying I was to expect ‘the girl next door’. Usually this kind of description makes a journalist’s heart sink but in this case it makes her story more intriguing. As one of Seattle’s tattooed and pierced polyamorists tells her: ‘What’s great is that you look so much like one of them’ - by which he means America’s supposedly monogamous majority. ‘You’re really screwing with them.’ In more ways than one.

She looks like someone who might anchor the evening news: petite, doll-like, large expressive brown eyes, immaculately groomed, with a glossy bob and cute frock. A wedding ring, engagement ring and anniversary ring on the third finger of her left hand (plus, on her right hand, a ring from Jemma, bought in Mexico. Jemma wears an identical one.) The most deviant thing about her is a pair of patent high heels but she wears these because she’s on the short side, rather than because she has a dominatrix fetish (more of which later).

‘People make assumptions about me and then when they see me they get confused,’ she explains. ‘They say you’re much more conservative than I expected.’

Her background is also conventional. Her father is a rabbi and drugs and alcohol counsellor. Her parents were married for over 30 years before they divorced. Jenny went to a private Catholic high school and then on to college; after graduation she became a university tutor. She was brought up to believe in marriage and monogamy. As she says in her heartfelt memoir Open, an articulately argued and enjoyably readable defence of her marriage, not least because this kind of bedroom nitty-gritty can hardly fail to fascinate: ‘I thought I could, and would, fall in love with a man who would fulfil every desire I ever had and that I’d never want to be with anyone else. If someone had told me back then that some day I’d be in an open marriage and that I would be the one who prompted it, I would have laughed in their face. I had every irrational reason to believe my prince would come.’

The term ‘open marriage’ was invented in 1972 by Nena and George O’Neill. At the peak of the sexual revolution, their book Open Marriage was a cosy, practical manual that drew on their training as anthropologists, to show people how to turn a stifling, traditional ‘closed’ marriage, into an enlightened modern ‘open’ one. Today many couples would find little of interest in its pages - most of the ideas are around equality and independence, concepts that we now take for granted. Except for two pages about the idea of sexual liberty within a relationship. The O’Neills argued that for some couples there just might be a place for a properly non-monogamous marriage - not secret affairs, or don’t-ask-don’t-tell understandings, but genuine agreement to transparent extramarital sex. Now, nobody remembers the rest of this eminently sensible tome - it’s these two pages, and the term ‘open marriage’ that have gone down in history.

Jenny was three years into her marriage to Christopher when she turned over in bed one night and said to her husband something along the lines of, ‘How would it be if we slept with other people?’ For a long time she’d been unhappy with the physical side of things. Everything else was tickety boo, she tells me: she loved Christopher, she loved her daughter, she simply wasn’t getting laid enough. ‘I wanted to feel as if I could breathe,’ she says now. ‘That if I was attracted to someone that our relationship could go to that next level. That it would be allowed.’

Jenny had always had a high libido. ‘We’re told in the media how to be sexy, but if a woman chats someone up in a bar she is a whore and a slut. That conflict was tortuous, even when I was growing up. Adverts telling me to wear lip gloss to get the boys and then being told I had to be a virgin when I got married. I just wanted to poke my eyes out.’ In her twenties she’d enjoyed flings with women, a fact that she’d told Christopher about before they were married. But here she was, lying next to her husband, and wondering if a Saturday-morning tumble once a month was enough for her. And if it wasn’t, did it mean the end of her marriage? Unlike many relationships which suffer from sexual torpor, especially after having children, she wasn’t willing to lie back and go to sleep.

However, the fact that she craved sex made her think she might be ‘a freak’ in some way. ‘I didn’t think other women had a high sex drive or if they did they weren’t allowed to talk about it. Bring it up with women and you get either, “Don’t be silly” or, “I wish my husband would leave me alone”.’

Jenny’s proposal may not have come as a complete surprise to her husband. The couple had survived Jenny’s affair with another woman the year before. (’The most exhausting six months of my life. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I was totally paranoid.’ ) Sex, or, rather, the lack of it, and Christopher’s disinclination to initiate it, had long been a source of arguments. ‘It didn’t have the same importance to him. I would feel either ignored or bummed out by it. That he didn’t want or love me any more,’ she recalls.

For some men the idea of an open marriage might have been a fantasy come true. I’m not so sure about Christopher. He remains a rather faceless character in the book. She and Jemma nickname him ‘the egoless man’ which is supposed to be a compliment but I’m not so sure. I’m torn between thinking, ‘poor bloke, all he wants is a quiet night in’ and ‘for God’s sake, try a bit harder!’ However, his wife is warmer about him in person than she is in print. She describes him with palpable affection and, whatever anyone thinks of their marriage, it seems he adores her.

So much so that, not long after Jenny’s proposal, they were in bed with Jenny’s NBF Lisbeth, who - you couldn’t make some of this stuff up - she’d met at book club. ‘I couldn’t keep from smiling as I watched my husband run his hands over Lisbeth’s breasts and down her hips,’ she writes. And so their open marriage begins.

They developed a code in front of Emily. When Jenny telephoned Lisbeth and said, ‘Can you baby-sit for the weekend?’ it meant, ‘Fancy coming round to our place?’ If Christopher commented, ‘Have a good time at the conference’ it translated as Jenny was free to pick up someone on a work trip. ‘When we tried it, and it worked, we were really shocked,’ she tells me. ‘We kept thinking - this is foolishness, this isn’t going to end well. When it did - and we are still very good friends (Lisbeth is happily married now) - the only thing that was wrong with it was that we kept on questioning ourselves.’

So what, I wonder, are the myths about this kind of arrangement? ‘Number one, being open does not mean being promiscuous,’ she says, counting out her arguments with her fingers. ‘Number two, that you have a bad marriage and you are doing this instead of getting divorced. Number three, that people are not careful in terms of protecting themselves - in my experience anyone who has more than one partner is militant on that score. Number four, that we’re into S&M. If you do one, you must do the other.’

And are you?

‘No. When I was younger I liked to think that I was, but no.’

Her main beef is that, according to her, one or both partners in many American marriages is cheating already - the only difference in her relationship is that they’re honest about it.

‘I am not afraid of my husband reading my emails or hearing me on the phone with Jemma or walking in when she is hugging me.’

The institution of marriage isn’t working, she says. ‘Around 50 per cent of marriages end in divorce. I can’t think of anything else with such a lousy success rate that people keep on doing. If your kid was getting 50 per cent on every test you’d be talking to the teachers.’

So did being open save your marriage? ‘I guess I would have to say yes. Although the implication would be that it was broken and this is what fixed it. In terms of being able to communicate more with my husband, being able to tell him about my sexuality, being honest about my needs - then yes. Does the fact that I can now sleep with my girlfriend save my marriage? I am not so sure. Being honest with each other certainly did.

‘I’m not a worse wife now. I am a better wife. Things are unusual and complicated already so I have to be really attentive.’

If your husband said: Give it up, or get out, what would you do?

‘I don’t think I’m a monogamous person. Would I attempt it because I want to be with my husband? Yes. Would it work? I don’t know.’

Why get married in the first place? Did she wonder if it would suit her or not?

‘Well, in the first place I didn’t know this was going to happen. Secondly, I really like being with someone who says he will stick around, regardless of how kooky I am. It’s easier to navigate the world as a couple. I expect to grow old with him.’

She’s plainly worked out an arrangement that works for her, but whether it’s in the best interests of Christopher and Jemma is hard to know without meeting them (they agreed to the book but declined to do any interviews). Jenny says she’s bisexual but I do wonder if she is a lesbian who realised after she married and had a child that she prefers sex with women but is not willing to give up the conveniences that come with a heterosexual lifestyle. Reading between the lines, is she having sex with Jemma and simply living with Christopher?

‘No matter how fabulous sex is between my husband and I, he is not a woman,’ she admits. ‘I could imagine not having sex with any other man forever but I would be disappointed not to be with another woman again.’ The book, written in a gay coffee shop in Dallas, is dedicated to Jemma although she insists that this is because she was fundamental in the whole editing process.

If she is gay, it might have been a whole lot easier to simply move in with Jemma, whom she met over 18 months ago, than spend her life defending her right to a husband and a girlfriend. It’s clear that none of this - the open relationship, the book - has come about without a degree of anguish and soul searching. ‘Sometimes, I wish my head would stop,’ she tells me. Yet she is also adamant that she and Christopher are happier than they have ever been.

The book was written under her maiden name, and she’s given her partners and her daughter pseudonyms, but she’s still found her picture on the front page of the local newspaper. All of which seems, oddly, to have come as a shock to her but must have been even more bewildering to egoless Christopher, who hasn’t read the book and whose work colleagues, until now, have had no idea about his home life. An additional, unforeseen, hazard has been the fact that some people, mostly men she talks to on aeroplane flights, think the book is an open invitation to sex. The irony is that once upon a time if she’d been attracted to one of these guys presumably the attention would have been welcome, a sort of ‘book with benefits’, but these days, in her tidy ‘vee’, she says she isn’t interested.

What agitates her critics the most, the ones who read everything she does and then send her fire-and-brimstone emails telling her she should never have written this stuff, is the idea that she is a mother in an open relationship. Emily, so far at least, is none the wiser. But surely there will come a point, particularly now the book has been published, when she does find out? ‘I am nervous about that. I won’t lie,’ she says. ‘But the assumption is that I’m ashamed somehow and I’m not. When she asks I will tell her that people love in different ways and that Mommy and Daddy don’t think that sexual ownership is part of a marriage. People say she’ll hate me when she’s 12 but she’ll probably hate me then anyway.’

Later on Sunday afternoon, Seattle’s swingers reconvene at their headquarters, two neighbouring cinderblock buildings a short drive from the centre of the city. There would be a nameplate on the door reading ‘Centre for Sex Positive Culture’ but for the fact that this might encourage ‘unwelcome voyeurs’ from the local college (as opposed to the welcome variety).

I’m taken on a tour of the murky but spotless room where they hold their almost nightly parties. It’s a disconcerting mixture of the bizarre and the banal: S&M paraphernalia, rows of antiseptic bottles, a curtained-off section packed full of double beds, neat piles of pillows and sheets, polite notices by the exit warning ‘Clothes to be worn beyond this point’. The centre was recently visited by the Internal Revenue Service and awarded charitable tax status on account of its educational activities.

Next door Jenny reads from her book to a rapt audience of couples, many of them holding hands, some of them remarkably conventional-looking. In the discussion afterwards they talk of a coming sexual revolution when open marriage is more accepted. Block is a natural speaker - likable, articulate, funny, confident, able to laugh at herself. She’s preaching to the converted although I do get the impression that for some of the people here limiting her partners to two is like saying you’ve only ever owned two pairs of trainers.

Later, one of the men from the group gives me a lift back into the city. He’s in his sixties and he wistfully tells me that many of his lovers have died or drifted away. ‘Although,’ he says, ‘my wife and I have realised that there is some benefit to getting older. It turns out there is one thing better than sex ... and that’s grandchildren.’ And I can’t help but think, after a weekend exploring the personal intricacies of another person’s marriage - hurrah to that.

· Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block is published by Seal Press

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©