Archive for March, 2008

Sex by the Book

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

There aren’t that many countries any more that are willing to send you to jail and keep you there for having sex (I have not done an official count of this, though I promise that I will do so tomorrow). America, however, is one of them. Particularly in the American South and Southeast, having consensual sex is a crime punishable by jail time – in some cases serious jail time. I have a friend who married a registered sex offender from Texas. Were we freaked? Not really. His offense was having a 16-year-old girlfriend when he was 18-years-old, and the consensual sex they engaged in got him thrown in jail for a few years.

Consensual sex laws vary by state, and nearly all of them are set at somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18. Teenagers accused of having consensual sex before the age established by the state have been punished in many places other than Texas. But Texas is particularly notorious for such prosecutions. Then again, Texas just likes throwing people in jail. And of course, killing them once they are there.

Interestingly, many states have different ages of consent depending on whether you are male or female. In Delaware, Idaho, Massachusetts, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming, you can have legal sex at 16 if you are female, but not until 18 if you are male. Presumably this is so those faster-maturing girls don’t leave their 2-years-older boyfriends squirming for too long. In the state of Montana a female can have consensual sex with a male when she is 16 years old, but not with another female until she’s 18. I can’t come up with an explanation for that one. In New Hampshire both males and females must wait until they are 16 years old to have consensual sex, unless they want to get married, in which case they can do so as young as 13 years old as long as they have parental permission. Oh wait – males have to be 14.

States don’t just legislate how old you have to be to have sex, some of them still regulate whether or not one can have gay or lesbian sex. In most of our lifetimes it was illegal for a black person and a white person to have sex (though only really enforced if the white half of that equation happened to be a woman). Prostitution (Eliot Spitzer being a rather noteworthy exception) is generally illegal for the selling party – 99 times out of 100 a woman. What is our country doing spending so much time and money legislating sex? Aren’t our lawmakers busy enough with our completely ineffective and grossly expensive drug war?

But I digress. What got me on this tangent? The intersection of our national sexual fixation with our national religion. I was reading a newspaper article about two 20-somethings who broke into (i.e., broke the latch on the door of) a little used church in MacClenny, Florida for the purpose of having sex in a sanctified space. They are still cooling their heels in jail a day later. They are being charged with damage to property, criminal mischief, and burglary. From what I can tell they didn’t steal anything, they broke the lock on the door, and they left their underwear laying around in the church. Stupid? Yes. Should they have to go in front of a judge and answer for their breach of a law? Yes. Dangerous? Perhaps only to their reputations. An offense worthy of keeping two young people in jail? Oh come on.

What’s got folks all upset is that these two young people wanted to have sex in a church (actually, in classic Eve fashion, the newspapers from that part of the country have laid the blame firmly at the 24-year-old woman’s feet – the poor 28-year-old guy was found “hiding in a crawl space under the church.” Well, Adam wasn’t that bright either, but at least he didn’t get the whole damn human race thrown out of the garden. Though if you think about it, if the price we pay is childbirth, I think they can start leaving chicks like this young lady alone already. The local television station, Channel 4 in Baker County, ran their headline news story under the banner Unholy Act.

If they had broken the lock on someone’s barn, someone’s garage, even someone’s little-used country house (and they weren’t in Texas), nobody would be in jail right now. But they broke the lock on sacred space. And not just anybody’s sacred space. Christian sacred space. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d be willing to wager that a young couple breaking the lock on someone’s private tarot parlor, someone’s yoga studio, or near someone’s Buddhist altar to have sex wouldn’t be partaking of jail meals either. Still wrong. But not likely a jail-able offense.

Am I anti-Christian? Definitely not. I am pro-whatever-it-is-you-do-to-love-your-fellow-man-and-make-a-better-world-for-all-of-us. I don’t sit around worrying about the state of anybody else’s soul, but that’s only a prerequisite for some sects of Christianity anyway. No, my issue is three-fold.

  • As an American citizen I have an issue with using the law to enforce something as serious as jail-time for an infraction that, had it occurred in any other architectural structure, would likely not lead to jail time.
  • As a human being, I have an issue with society being so quick to treat sexuality and sexual behavior as fundamentally wrong – even “un-godlike.” Why would God give us something so incredibly awesome as sex if it wasn’t inherently good? And don’t tell me it’s for the purpose of having children, because I have three of those at home. If that were the reason then God is the most profound tease in the history of the Universe.
  • Finally, when will humanity tire of blaming women for all this sex? Clearly men don’t enjoy it, never engage in it, and are never the ones to come up with the idea for having it. Except, of course, when they do. The news media’s blaming of Crystal Rowland continued, when on their news broadcast they also said that Matthew Pearce’s family had been in to speak with him and he “wanted to apologize for his actions. He had been drinking that day and he really didn’t know what was going on.” No word from the Rowland camp, nor do I think it likely that there will be.

So. Miss Crystal Rowland and Mr. Matthew Pearce are a horny young couple with bad enough judgment to consider a minor breaking and entering charge a reasonable risk for a sexual dalliance. Not my choice of evening entertainment, but I’ve never considered shoplifting or dine-n-dash either. Nonetheless, could some of my North Central Florida readers please make up a couple of homemade picket signs and suggest to the Honorable Sheriff Gerald Gonzalez that he let those young folks go free?

    (c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Culture, Sublime | 2 Comments »

Do You Even Know You’re Naked?

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Now I write, but for more than two decades I was the one responsible for the message, and the people who wrote and designed worked for me. Over the course of those years, I learned just how difficult it is to convey a need in such a way that everyone on the team could wrap both the mind and the emotions around it. In most cases, what passes for brand or message direction is insufficient, and the people who pay the price are the ones who are trying to write the copy, develop the graphics, and buy the media.

In time, I became good at conveying messages effectively. Once that happened, I was able to experience the greatness of talented copywriters and designers. Most people who enter the field of business media have a passion for it, and they thrive in an environment that offers great direction and welcomes not only their talent but also their input.

One type of business media personality, however, has bemused and confused me for my entire career. Sometimes it’s an art director, sometimes an account executive – at any rate, someone possessing authority. They produce a product that is superficially sexy, glossy, purports to be edgy, and is resolutely mundane. No amount of information regarding the intended customer’s needs, wants, or perspectives influences this person’s design direction. Customer awareness is not their concern.

I have theorized many times over the years about what would cause an otherwise talented individual to so completely ignore the customer perspective. I ultimately concluded that the individuals in question were working in a customer segment that bored them. Maybe they were serving jewelry store owners, or video store owners, or moms with small kids, when what they really wanted to be selling was haute couture or Hollywood.

Today I realized that my conclusion was wrong. I spent the day doing fashion trend analysis, and I encountered more mindless, customer unaware, superficially sexy, glossy, and mundane advertising in four hours than I could stomach. If the people actually selling haute couture and Hollywood are behaving in the same way as the people who I thought were behaving that way because they wanted to be selling haute couture or Hollywood, there must be a deeper reason.

I had to take a break from the fashion, so I picked up a business book and stumbled immediately upon a different theory as to why so many marketing communications make sense only to their creators. The book is Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, and the author is Mark Penn. Penn suggests that many marketing communications don’t make sense because they are based on the faulty premise that consumers are irrational, “misguided scatterbrains” who don’t know what they want or whether or not the promotion they are experiencing is good or bad.

According to this premise the egotistical marketer designs for his or her own pleasure, and any communication that is done solely for the self is just another form of self-abuse (to use a polite – if somewhat Catholic – euphemism). If nobody else is actually involved, then it stands to reason that nobody else actually feels anything.

Unfortunately, the public plays a role in this ongoing farce. It’s a modern-day Emperor’s New Clothes. If you will recall, the Emperor in the Hans Christian Anderson story goes to a pair of con artists for new clothing. The con artists tell the Emperor that the fabric from which they will make his new clothes is so fine and rare that only people of exceptional refinement and intelligence can see it. The Emperor sends his valet to evaluate the clothes before the final fitting. The valet, unable to see the clothes himself, will not admit that he is not refined or intelligent enough to see them. So he proclaims their beauty in his report to his boss. The Emperor is also unable to see the clothing and unable to disclose (pardon the pun) his lack of vision. So he walks naked through the streets, with everyone in the kingdom unwilling to acknowledge their Emperor’s nakedness for fear of exposing their own frailty. Only a child has the courage to shout out the obvious fact that the Emperor is wearing nothing at all.

I don’t watch much television, but a few weeks ago I was watching a movie with my teenage and young adult kids. After watching a few completely incomprehensible advertisements (quick disclaimer – I also saw a lot of great advertising that night), I finally asked my kids to explain what the ads meant. Their response was that they had no idea. My kids are hardly sheltered, and mom-ish pride aside, they seem to be pretty hip.

“Do you think anyone understands these ads?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” replied my son. “They’re just stupid.” Sentiments with which my daughter agreed.

A 30-second ad during American Idol costs $620,000. To run the same ad during Desperate Housewives costs $324,000. Survivor is a bargain at $296,000. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I have a hard time understanding the wholesale waste of those dollars on advertising that discounts the intelligence of the viewers and invites us all to participate in pretending that the Emperor is wearing clothes.

There’s really nothing to be done about it, because for every bright, intelligent, customer-focused advertising director there will be a self-centered, superficial Hollywood wanna-be with vapid ideas. The only value in this observation is for each one of us. When we are tempted to believe that we are smarter than our customers, when we find ourselves thinking that our customers are boring, or irritating, or simply pedestrian, there is a very good chance that we are about to waste a lot of money. Our own.

As Mark Penn points out in his book, the average Joe is actually pretty smart, making intelligent decisions about how to spend their money and regarding who deserves their loyalty. We discount our customers at our own peril.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Culture, Lucre | No Comments »

Pretty Is As Pretty Does

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

The February 25, 2008 issue of Newsweek offers a frightening little insight into the new world of families and child rearing in an innocuous article regarding airbrushing. It seems that parents of grade-schoolers are increasingly requesting airbrush services on their little wonders’ class portraits.

I have distinct memories of my class portraits. I didn’t like brushing my hair, and all of my photos between the 2nd and 4th grades betrayed me with a subtle little lump just above and behind my left ear. In 1st grade I got chickenpox, and had recovered sufficiently enough to return to school – just before the lady from Timeless Images showed up with her tripod and green rug. Some people struggle with remembering when they got the chickenpox, but I only have to consult my 1st grade class portrait. There was the year I got glasses (4th grade), the year I had stitches in my chin (5th), and the year I was first allowed to wear mascara (6th). An entire personal history translated with clarity through my awkward class photos.

In the Newsweek article a Legacy Photographer named Kelly Price said, “People want their kids to look perfect rather than teach them to appreciate their flaws.” She goes on to say that she fears if she asked for her 12-year-old daughter’s photo to be retouched, she would be sending a message of insufficiency to that child. The article quotes a psychoanalyst named Susie Orbach as saying “The rise in airbrushing is a byproduct of a culture consumed with the idea that the body is perfectible.”

When my now 23-year-old daughter first realized she had buck teeth – the kind of sudden awareness that can crush a 10-year-old – I was able to show her pictures of me at the same age and with the same buck teeth. Then I showed her my class portrait from 8th grade – the one with the braces and the headgear. That – and a promise that head gear was rarely employed any longer – comforted her. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that she also saw the massive pimple just over my right eye in that same 8th grade photo – a reassurance that one day she, too, would enjoy pimple-free skin again.

I am disconcerted. I’m not sure if it’s the matter of being a part of a society that is “consumed with the idea that the body is perfectible,” or if my concern is related to the idea of what a perfect body should be. We live in a culture that idolizes the 15-year-old female form – no hips, and an ability to show 6″ of flesh below the navel without disclosing the presence of pubic hair. When I was a teenager it was socially risky to be larger than a size 7. Our children are under far greater pressure today, not only to be a much smaller size, but also to be self-conscious at a much younger age.

Our role as parents is to help our children see beauty in all its forms and to recognize their own inherent beauty – inclusive of any temporary or permanent perceived flaws. When we cave in to society’s superficial notions of what makes an attractive person we relinquish our ability to be authentic. A terrible sacrifice.

Many parents would assert that they ask for airbrushing in an attempt to protect their children from discomfort and dissatisfaction. But is this truly a service to them? Sparing our children the experience of discomfort only delays the time when they must confront it head on. Such delay can rob them of the skills necessary to face their frailties with humor or to muster the courage and strength to recover from a disappointment.

I remember scheduling my Senior Portrait. I was acutely conscious of how expensive it would be, and I asked my mom why the photos cost so much. Her reply was that, unlike my class portraits in years past, the senior photo would be taken in a studio with special lighting and photo retouching services. Not having any prior experience of that type of photography, I questioned the value of spending so much money. Her response? “Oh honey, won’t it be fun to have just one photo that makes you look like someone in a magazine ad? Something you’ll always hold on to because it’s your last class photo?”

It was. And I did. But in all the years since, I have gotten much more value out of those years of class photos that showed me precisely as I was.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Connections, Culture, The Couch | No Comments »