Pride (In the Name of Love)

The excitement of yesterday's pride parade (which, thanks to Emily, I had a spectacular front row view of!) got me thinking about the tenuous position of the LGBT community in India today.  This weekend saw Bangalore and New Delhi's first-ever gay pride marches -- monumental events in a country that has legislated its LGBT community into the closet for many years. From the AP:

While small groups have marched in the eastern city of Calcutta in recent years, Sunday's events were the first gay pride parades in Bangalore and New Delhi. Several hundred people turned out at each of the three events.

The marches came days before the Delhi High Court is expected to hear arguments on overturning a law against homosexual sex that dates to the British colonial era. The law, which forbids sexual acts "against the order of nature," carries punishment of up to 10 years in prison.

The law is rarely enforced, but activists say it sanctions discrimination.

And as the Deccan Herald's terse coverage of yesterday's march in Bangalore suggests, this is just a very small first step.  But an important one!

Left Wondering about the Upper Hand?

Today's New York Sun hones in on an interesting bit of trivia that unites John McCain and Barack Obama: They're both left-handed. Which means that the next president -- like every president since 1974 (except for George W. and Jimmy Carter) -- will once again be a leftie. That's right: Ford, Reagan, H. W. Bush, Clinton and our next president-to-be're all lefties. So what? Well, since only 10% of the population is left-handed, the recent spree of lefties in the Oval Office is a statistical anomolie that may very well have a biological explanation.   The Sun pokes around for evidence linking left-handedness to other presidential traits like ambition or problem-solving skills but comes up only with ... hair whorls:

[Amar Klar's] research shows that the whorl for right-handers curls clockwise in 92% of cases. In left-handers, the distribution is random, with half exhibiting clockwise whorl and the other half spinning counterclockwise. Mr. Klar said he could spot a counterclockwise whorl from seeing Mr. McCain and Mr. Clinton on television and looking at the way they appear to comb their hair.

Also? Apparently those hair whorls have been linked not only to electability in recent decades but also to sexual orientation. This all must mean something, but I'm not really sure what. 

Green Porno

From the lovely and talented Lulu: Green Porno! In these short videos produced for the Sundance Channel, Isabella Rossellini brings her old-school elegance and poise to some spiffy bug costumes as she -- with the help of some spiffy cardboard bug dummies -- acts out the mating rites of insects. Yeah, it's weird, but it's funny and edifying too; there's just something riveting about bug sex.  And Rossellini's performances in this series are nothing short of inspired.  Fun fact! Rossellini's son and his buddies are Green Porno extras: 

Bees are so complicated and they are so much of a community that I couldn't really play all [of them]. I needed some actors, so I hired my son and his friends to play the male bees.

Art Major Mess

All art is quite useless. -- Oscar Wilde

Alright. It's icky, but (for reasons not entirely clear to me), I feel I have the duty to post on Yale student Aliza Shvarts and her senior art project. Shvarts' project was billed as a provocative exploration of the relationship between art and the human body featuring layers of plastic sheeting smeared with the blood from a series of self-induced miscarriages. Shvarts said she filmed these miscarriages over a 9-month period when she alternately inseminated herself and took over-the-counter abortifacient drugs, and that she planned to project the footage onto the plastic sheeting. "Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it," she told the Yale Daily News, but it's not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone." Anyway, some scandalized parties came knocking, and the project was ousted as "creative fiction." Grossed out yet? Slate's Dana Stevens, who knows a thing or two about abortion and all along suspected that this was a scam, has assessed things nicely:

Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time ... Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?

I suspect Shvarts just thought she could get away with pretending she had those abortions in the name of art, but if the deception was part of the project itself I'm a little more intrigued -- her work then becomes more like a highly-effective booby trap for reactionaries on both sides of the issue than just a tasteless and hollow fake-out.

That Model First Lady

This week Hillary Frey advocates for Carla Bruni as a "useful" and "modern" "model of feminism, and femininity." I'm not convinced. Yes, she looks great naked; yes, she's savvy and sophisticated enough to seduce politicians and rockstars alike. But what about the part where Bruni moves in with her French writer lover then goes on to have an affair -- and a child -- with his already-married son? She may be a bold icon of style, but Bruni's not exactly raising the bar for womankind with her accomplishments. As former French Vogue editor-in-chief Joan Juliet Buck says:

Versailles was conceived as a magnificent showroom for French goods, because around 1678, Colbert said to Louis XIV: We have to prove the French do things better than anybody. In 2008, at last, a model is married to the president, which is great PR for the further global extension of French luxury brands.

Or, as NYU European Studies professor Tony Judt puts it, Bruni is a "neat encapsulation of [Sarkozy's] presidency: eye-catching, over-compersatory and more than a little lacking in taste."

The Worst Poem Ever

Further proof that John Updike is a dirty old man (just in case you still needed convincing): This "brutally dismissive" review of The Best Erotic Poems in The New York Times (via Begley the Bookie) calls Updike's poem "Fellatio," "perhaps the worst poem ever written on any subject" -- which, for a writer known for his "seeming inability to write badly" is really quite a feat. Begley goes on to cite the poem in its entirety, so I won't. If you're curious and need a laugh, click here! If you'd prefer to soberly mourn the collapse of literature and the descent of literary studies into "trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy," click here instead.

Eliot Imagined

My brother sent me this great read from The Washington Post in which Richard Russo begins to imagine the rich story beyond the basic Spitzer plotline:

I cannot speak for the real Eliot, but some part of my Eliot has known all along he's no saint, that he's not anybody's best hope, not even his own. He knows this even as some other part of him believes what people are telling him because, of course, he wants to. This has been his true conflict all along, and finally, explosively, it's been resolved.

That Skeevy Girls Gone Wild Guy

When the Girls Gone Wild kingpin heads for Florida, you know spring time is on its way. The AP is reporting that Joe Francis (that's him in the brown t-shirt on the right -- not to be confused with this other guy) has made his way to the hotbed of spring break scandal that is Panama City, Florida, to take care of some legal business this week. The Panama City News Herald says Francis is expected to enter a plea tomorrow. After reading this thoroughly creepy LA Times story from a few years back (recommended to me by Genevieve), I say, lock 'em up!

Gubernotorious

A few things you might not have known about Eliot Spiter (from The New Yorker's December profile):

He wears only white button-down shirts, which he buys at Brooks Brothers. He bought a blue one once: “It was unnerving. Never wore it.” He gets up at five in the morning to jog; he’s known for it, and wants you to know it, but if it’s a pose it’s a hard-earned one. His first thought upon waking each day, he says, is a wish for two more hours’ sleep.

A few things you might not have known about the Emperors' Club (from Slate's Josh Levin):

For the john who just can't make up his mind, Emperors' Club's site map lists a buffet of options. Along with the requisites—"millionaire dating," "billionaire dating," "billionaire introductions"—there's a healthy supply of nonsexual fare, including private yacht charters and "authentic art for purchase." The site's contemporary art page claims that Emperors' Club represents "artists of superior mastery," linking to dedicated pages for Andrew Wyeth and Jeff Koons. Emperors' Club is a model of efficient Web design: The site's artist portfolios have the exact same layout as the prostitute portfolios.

And the observation that says it all (right up there with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch's assessment that "there's a screw loose"), from Douglas Muzzio of Baruch College in The New York Times:

Here’s a guy who won an overwhelming electoral landslide and has inflicted fatal wounds on himself publicly and privately. I’m not a psychologist, but this is just utterly, completely reckless.

Girls, They Want to Have Fun

Why is this article in the Fashion & Style -- and not Health -- section of The New York Times? While you ponder that question, an amusing ditty from the Broadsheet archives:

Why block a vaccine? Here's our answer.
Gardasil is no values-enhancer.
To prevent HPV
Causes sex, don't you see?
And quite frankly, we prefer cancer.

Is Caitlin Flanagan Trying to Tell Me Something?

So I thought I had a sense of what to expect from Caitlin Flanagan, that sharp-witted woman-hating Wahoo. But her op-ed in today's New York Times ("Sex and the Teenage Girl") struck me as, well, pretty weird. She transitions from a quick look at Juno to some big talk about "commitment to girls" and then concludes with a bizarre anecdote about something she spotted in a high school girls bathroom: "In the last stall, carved deeply into the box reserved for used sanitary napkins, was the single word 'Please.'" This strange piece of writing stops short of being a full-on critical look at the film, or a flat-out call to action or even a wholesale emotional appeal; it proposes no new solution and offers no new insight into the issue of teen pregnancy. Instead, it's just head-scratchingly fuzzy restatement of a familiar problem. I thought that kind of writing was reserved for blogs?

Savage Love Does Disney Princesses

Sometimes Dan Savage is a bit much, but his response to this question about Disney princess panties is hilariously spot-on.  Read on if you'd like to find out how to subversively "deconstruct a patriarchal heteronormative discourse that reifies female purity" (while more or less naked); don't read on if sex columnists make you squeamish.