I take it that by now most people with a pulse have seen The Dark Knight at least 1/5 as many times as my 18-year-old brother, not counting IMAX. Still, no spoilers here, except maybe of your jaunty “ain’t love grand?” mood. The Onion’s AV Club recently took up a topic from one of The Dark Knight’s IMDB boards — one that took what we over here take to be a bit of a disturbing turn. The question at hand: “Is The Joker ‘sexy’ — too sexy, in fact, to be an effective villain?”
Um, quick bio: The Joker is a deeply disturbed killer who shows no remorse for his actions. He takes perverse pleasure in chaos; he will go to any length to bring it about. My father, quaintly, compared The Joker to the Phantom of the Opera. Sure, some of us — uncomfortably — do find The Phantom a bit arousing, but he, let’s recall, is motivated by love. We know his sorrowful backstory; we develop sympathy for him, trapped as he is in an unbearable soundtrack. The Joker, by contrast, appears out of nowhere, backstory-, alias-, and fingerprint-free, motivated by nothing other than pure eeeeeeevil, to wreak havoc upon Gotham. No tragic story, just an appetite for destruction and a terrible hair day. So…”sexy!?” Yikes.
Advertising Age reports that The Parents’ Television Council (PTC) is wagging quite the stern finger at broadcast networks for undermining marriage, they say, by making affairs look much more interesting. Networks show sex between married couples as “boring, burdensome or nonexistent, while depicting extramarital sex as positive,” according to the PTC. “[Prime-time] verbal references to nonmarital sex outnumber references to sex in marriage nearly 3 to 1, and scenes implying sex between unmarried partners outnumbered similar scenes between married couples 4 to 1.”
BG just stumbled across this oldish-ie but goodie in the Boston Globe Magazine by Erika Cann, who writes: “[A]s I hurtle toward 40, I find myself irresistible to younger men. While I used to be focused on 30- to 40-something mid-career professionals in Dockers, I find that in my pursuit of these “safe bets,” I’m tripping over young Zac Efron look-alikes who are falling to their knees. I have become an Accidental Cougar.”
Say what you want about the term “cougar” — what I want to say, for example, is: “How come we call women who date younger men ‘cougars,’ and men who date younger women ‘men’? — but that, really, isn’t the point of Cann’s charming piece, which is really about being open, adventurous, and patient in the safari of love. Go enjoy the rest after one more bonus teaser: “During this year and a half, I dated a handful of interesting guys all seven to 14 years my junior and was only once approached by a guy in my age range. I went out with him the same weekend I had a date with a 27-year-old, winding up at a string quartet one night and ‘Beerfest’ the next. I fell asleep at one of these events, but I’m too embarrassed to say which one.”
If you have a happy marriage, you might let your kids date more. If you have a bad marriage, you may keep your teenagers closer to home. A new study links parents’ satisfaction in their own relationships to the dating rules they set for their children. Alex Cohen talks to Stephanie Madsen, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at McDaniel College, about what that link says about parents.
Filed under: Psychology — posted by Amanda @ 2:13 pm
Adultery lurks everywhere, among celeb couples and political leaders, our neighbors and even, on a bad day, our own relationships. New York Magazine, following up on the Spitzer scandal in its own back yard, recently weighed in on the matter, with a lot to say about American culture and the perhaps untenable emphasis we put on monogamy.
According to writer Susan Squire, marriage wasn’t made to handle all this pressure in the first place. The average life span is far greater now than it was 100 years ago, and back in those days, marriage was a more formal institution for breeding and family purposes only. It’s becoming more and more difficult for partners in a marriage to get the variety and sexual attention that they need. The American burden is the ideal that marriage should provide romantic love forever. “Marriage involves routine, and routine kills passion,†Squire says. Sometimes partners see an affair as the only way out of that rut.
That’s why Mira Kirshenbaum, clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute in Boston, suggests that not all cheaters are evil trolls. (more…)
Filed under: News,Psychology — posted by Amanda @ 5:18 am
The New York Daily News, our fair city’s runner-up for best morning-after headlines, recently reported that women are not enjoying one-night stands as much as men. According to a survey published in the journal Human Nature, 58% of women said they would not have a casual encounter again, compared to only 23% of men who felt the same. The study found that women still tend to feel “used†after a one-night stand, and that in such brief encounters, often feel let down by sex that’s “not as satisfying as they’d hoped for.†Men, for their part, tended to regret their choice of partners, lamenting that the women “weren’t as attractive in the morning as they’d seemed the night before.â€
Over here at BG.net, we’re not sure either how much we’d respect the ultimate conclusions of this study in the morning. Because maybe it’s not so much that “women have not adapted to casual sex” (Urr?) but that society’s double standards (still!) have not adapted to women having casual sex. Check out Feministing’s response for more.
It’s the clothes that make the man…brave enough to talk to a woman! Spotted on the blog at Wired.com: the CyranoSuit, which, as Wired describes it, “uses a series of sensors embedded in the arms and chest to detect physical interaction with a woman and then a hacked receipt printer delivers romantic lines [such as “I love your hair”] straight to the breast pocket of the shy would-be Lothario.”
Man, you know, if a nervous nerd made this much effort just to talk to me, I’d totally give him a shot. Sure, cutie, let’s hit Staples for another roll of paper, ’cause I could read you talking about me allllll night!
Yes, it’s happened again. An expert has proclaimed that single women, despite their protestations to the contrary, are completely miserable. According to Pam Spurr, an author and psychologist, single women who assert they are happy with their lives despite “their crushing loneliness and desperation” are not merely deluded, but outright lying. How does she know? Body language.
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
“She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: ‘Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'”
Hmm. You don’t suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?
Ah, the eternal bachelor. The man who’ll never settle down, the man with many labels: “player,” “commitment-phobe,” “jerk!” — and now, according to new research, a big ole scaredy-cat. Turns out most bachelors out there aren’t necessarily afraid of marriage; they’re just afraid of a bad marriage.
Carl Weisman, a bachelor himself at 49 — and sick of being stereotyped for his status — set out to discover the reason why more and more eligible men are in their early 40s are choosing to stay single (reportedly up from 6 percent in 1980 to 17 percent today). The result: his new book, So Why Have You Never Been Married?: 10 Insights Into Why He Hasn’t Wed. “Men are 10 times more scared of marrying the wrong person than of never getting married at all,” Weisman told Reuters. “It’s so important to these men to get it right.” Yaaah, but isn’t seeking perfection — as some of the bachelors in his study claim they are — the, um, perfect way to remain a bachelor?
e-mail to a friend in need
I take it that by now most people with a pulse have seen The Dark Knight at least 1/5 as many times as my 18-year-old brother, not counting IMAX. Still, no spoilers here, except maybe of your jaunty “ain’t love grand?” mood. The Onion’s AV Club recently took up a topic from one of The Dark Knight’s IMDB boards — one that took what we over here take to be a bit of a disturbing turn. The question at hand: “Is The Joker ‘sexy’ — too sexy, in fact, to be an effective villain?”
, recently reported that women are not enjoying 
. “Men are 10 times more scared of marrying the wrong person than of never getting married at all,” Weisman told Reuters. “It’s so important to these men to get it right.” Yaaah, but isn’t seeking perfection — as some of the bachelors in his study claim they are — the, um, perfect way to remain a bachelor?
