Search Results for: New York Times

The Gymnast’s Position

Illustration by Homestead

Dvora Meyers | Longreads | June 2019 | 25 minutes (6,257 words)

More than two decades ago, a billboard went up in Salt Lake City near the 600 South exit of the I-15. It featured a young woman in repose clad in a sleeveless black leotard, her back to the viewer and her head tilted up. The weight of her upper body rested on her right arm, which was extended behind her; her left arm lay languidly on her bent left knee. Her right leg was extended straight in front of her, its foot arch, creating the appearance of a straight line from hip to toe.

The angle of the woman’s head seemingly bathed her face in light, her long curly blonde hair falling freely down her neck. The pose was reminiscent of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, only inverted.

Passersby unable to make out the words printed in small text beneath the image would be forgiven for not knowing what exactly the billboard was advertising. Was it selling a dance performance or was it an ad for workout apparel or a photography exhibit at a local gallery? Visually, there were few clues.
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True Roots

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Ronnie Citron-Fink | True Roots | Island Press | June 2019 | 34 minutes (5.655 words)

 

How’d You do it? Are you doing that on purpose? Are you okay? Ever since I stopped coloring my silver hair, I’ve gotten a lot of questions. One of the most common during my hair transition was Why are you letting it go gray? While my roots didn’t ask permission before they stopped growing in dark brown, it was a complex mix of fear and determination that rearranged my beauty priorities. The question of why — why, after twenty-five years of using chemical dyes, I gave them up-is something I’ve thought about a lot.

My world began to shift four years ago. I was sitting in a meeting about toxics reform in Washington, DC, when an environmental scientist began to describe the buildup of chemicals in our bodies. As she rattled off a list of ingredients in personal care products-toluene, benzophenone, stearates, triclosan — my scalp started to tingle. “We’re just beginning to understand how these chemicals compromise long-term health,” she concluded.

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The Artificial Intelligence of the Public Intellectual

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 8 minutes (2,228 words)

“Well, that’s a really important thing to investigate.” While Naomi Wolf’s intellectual side failed her last week, her public side did not. That first line was her measured response when a BBC interviewer pointed out — on live radio — that cursory research had disproven a major thesis in her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (she misinterpreted a Victorian legal term, “death recorded,” to mean execution — the term actually meant the person was pardoned). Hearing this go down, journalists like me theorized how we would react in similar circumstances (defenestration) and decried the lack of fact-checkers in publishing (fact: Authors often have to pay for their own). The mistake did, however, ironically, offer one corrective: It turned Wolf from cerebral superhero into mere mortal. No longer was she an otherworldly intellect who could suddenly complete her Ph.D. — abandoned at Oxford when she was a Rhodes Scholar in the mid-’80s, Outrages is a reworking of her second, successful, attempt — while juggling columns for outlets like The Guardian, a speaking circuit, an institute for ethical leadership, and her own site, DailyClout, not to mention a new marriage. Something had to give, and it was the Victorians.

Once, the public intellectual had the deserved reputation of a scholarly individual who steered the public discourse: I always think of Oscar Wilde, the perfect dinner wit who could riff on any subject on command and always had the presence of mind to come up with an immortal line like, “One can survive everything nowadays except death.” The public intellectual now has no time for dinner. Wolf, for instance, parlayed the success of her 1991 book The Beauty Myth into an intellectual career that has spanned three decades, multiple books, and a couple of political advisory jobs, in which time her supposed expertise has spread far beyond third-wave feminism. She has become a symbol of intellectual rigor that spans everything from vaginas to dictatorships — a sort of lifestyle brand for the brain. Other thought leaders like her include Jordan Peterson, Fareed Zakaria, and Jill Abramson. Their minds have hijacked the public trust, each one acting as the pinnacle of intellect, an individual example of brilliance to cut through all the dullness, before sacrificing the very rigor that put them there in order to maintain the illusion floated by the media, by them, even by us. The public intellectual once meant public action, a voice from the outside shifting the inside, but then it became personal, populated by self-serving insiders. The public intellectual thus became an extension — rather than an indictment — of the American Dream, the idea that one person, on their own, can achieve anything, including being the smartest person in the room as well as the richest.

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I accuse the Age of Enlightenment of being indirectly responsible for 12 Rules for Life. The increasingly literate population of the 18th century was primed to live up to the era’s ultimate aspiration: an increasingly informed public. This was a time of debates, public lectures, and publications and fame for the academics behind them. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for one. In his celebrated “The American Scholar” speech from 1837, Emerson provided a framework for an American cultural identity — distinct from Europe’s — which was composed of a multifaceted intellect (the One Man theory). “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future,” he said. “In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” While Emerson argued that the intellectual was bound to action, the “public intellectual” really arrived at the end of the 19th century, when French novelist Émile Zola publicly accused the French military of antisemitism over the Dreyfus Affair in an open letter published in  L’Aurore newspaper in 1898. With  “J’Accuse…!,” the social commentary Zola spread through his naturalist novels was transformed into a direct appeal to the public: Observational wisdom became intellectual action. “I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness,” he wrote. “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.”

The public intellectual thenceforth became the individual who used scholarship for social justice. But only briefly. After the Second World War, universities opened up to serve those who had served America, which lead to a boost in educated citizens and a captive audience for philosophers and other scholars. By the end of the ’60s, television commanded our attention further with learned debates on The Dick Cavett Show — where autodidact James Baldwin famously dressed down Yale philosopher Paul Weiss — and Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. (also famously destroyed by Baldwin), which would go on to host academics like Camille Paglia in the ’90s. But Culture Trip editor Michael Barron dates the “splintering of televised American intellectualism” to a 1968 debate between Gore Vidal — “I want to make 200 million people change their minds,” the “writer-hero” once said — and Buckley, which devolved into playground insults. A decade later, the public intellectual reached its celebrity peak, with Susan Sontag introducing the branded brain in People magazine (“I’m a book junkie. … I buy special editions like other women shop for designer originals at Saks.”)

As television lost patience with Vidal’s verbose bravado, he was replaced with more telegenic — angrier, stupider, more right-wing — white men like Bill O’Reilly, who did not clarify nuance but blustered over the issues of the day; the public intellectual was now all public, no intellect. Which is to say, the celebrity pushed out the scholar, but it was on its way out anyway. By the ’80s, the communal philosophical and political conversations of the post-war era slunk back to the confines of academia, which became increasingly professionalized, specialized, and insular, producing experts with less general and public-facing knowledge. “Anyone who engages in public debate as a scholar is at risk of being labelled not a serious scholar, someone who is diverting their attention and resources away from research and publicly seeking personal aggrandizement,” one professor told University Affairs in 2014. “It discourages people from participating at a time when public issues are more complicated and ethically fraught, more requiring of diverse voices than ever before.” Diversity rarely got past the ivy, with the towering brilliance of trespassers like Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, among other marginalized writers, limited by their circumstances. “The white audience does not seek out black public intellectuals to challenge their worldview,” wrote Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s last year, “instead they are meant to serve as tour guides through a foreign experience that the white audience wishes to keep at a comfortable distance.”

Speaking of white audiences … here’s where I mention the intellectual dark web even though I would rather not. It’s the place — online, outside the academy, in pseudo-intellectual “free thought” mag Quillette — where reactionary “intellectuals” flash their advanced degrees while claiming their views are too edgy for the schools that graduated them. These are your Petersons, your Sam Harrises, your Ben Shapiros, the white (non)thinkers, usually men, tied in some vague way to academia, which they use to validate their anti-intellectualism while passing their feelings off as philosophy and, worse, as (mis)guides for the misguided. Last month, a hyped debate between psychology professor Peterson and philosopher Slavoj Žižek had the former spending his opening remarks stumbling around Marxism, having only just read The Communist Manifesto for the first time since high school. As Andray Domise wrote in Maclean’s, “The good professor hadn’t done his homework.” But neither have his fans.

But it’s not just the conservative public intellectuals who are slacking off. Earlier this year, Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, published Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts. She was the foremost mind on journalism in the Trump era for roughly two seconds before being accused of plagiarizing parts of her book. Her response revealed that the authorship wasn’t exactly hers alone, a fact which only came to light in order for her to blame others for her mistakes. “I did have fact-checking, I did have assistants in research, and in some cases, the drafting of parts of the book,” she told NPR. “I certainly did spend money. But maybe it wasn’t enough.” Abramson’s explanation implied a tradition in which, if you are smart enough to be rich enough, you can pay to uphold your intellectual reputation, no matter how artificial it may be.

That certainly wasn’t the first time a public intellectual overrepresented their abilities. CNN host Fareed Zakaria, a specialist in foreign policy with a Ph.D. from Harvard — a marker of intelligence that can almost stand in for actual acumen these days — has been accused multiple times of plagiarism, despite “stripping down” his extensive workload (books, speeches, columns, tweets). Yet he continues to host his own show and to write a column for The Washington Post in the midst of a growing number of unemployed journalists and dwindling number of outlets. Which is part of the problem. “What happens in the media is the cult of personality,” said Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Livingston Awards and Knight-Wallace Fellowship, in the Times. “As long as it’s cheaper to brand individual personalities than to build staff and bolster their brand, they will do it.” Which is why Wolf, and even Abramson, are unlikely to be gone for good.

To be honest, we want them around. Media output hasn’t contracted along with the industry, so it’s easier to follow an individual than a sprawling media site, just like it’s easier to consult a YouTube beauty influencer than it is to browse an entire Sephora. With public intellectuals concealing the amount of work required of them, the pressure to live up to the myth we are all helping to maintain only increases, since the rest of us have given up on trying to keep pace with these superstars. They think better than we ever could, so why should we bother? Except that, like the human beings they are, they’re cutting corners and making errors and no longer have room to think the way they did when they first got noticed. It takes significant strength of character in this economy of nonstop (and precarious) work to bow out, but Ta-Nehisi Coates did when he stepped down last year from his columnist gig at The Atlantic, where he had worked long before he started writing books and comics. “I became the public face of the magazine in many ways and I don’t really want to be that,” he told The Washington Post. “I want to be a writer. I’m not a symbol of what The Atlantic wants to do or whatever.”

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Of course a public intellectual saw this coming. In a 1968 discussion between Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on identity in the technology age (which explains the rise in STEM-based public intellectuals), the latter said, “When you give people too much information, they resort to pattern recognition.” The individuals who have since become symbols of thought — from the right (Christina Hoff Sommers) to the left (Roxane Gay) — are overrepresented in the media, contravening the original definition of their role as outsiders who spur public action against the insiders. In a capitalist system that promotes branded individualism at the expense of collective action, the public intellectual becomes a myth of impossible aspiration that not even it can live up to, which is the point — to keep selling a dream that is easier to buy than to engage in reality. But an increasingly intelligent public is gaining ground.

The “Public Intellectual” entry in Urban Dictionary defines it as, “A professor who spends too much time on Twitter,” citing Peterson as an example. Ha? The entry is by OrinKerr, who may or may not be (I am leaning toward the former) a legal scholar who writes for the conservative Volokh Conspiracy blog. His bad joke is facetious, but not entirely inaccurate — there’s a shift afoot, from the traditional individual public intellectual toward a collective model. That includes online activists and writers like Mikki Kendall, who regularly leads discussions about feminism and race on Twitter; Bill McKibben, who cofounded 360.org, an online community of climate change activists; and YouTubers like Natalie Wynn, whose ContraPoints video essays respond to real questions from alt-right men. In both models, complex thought does not reside solely with the individual, but engages the community. This is a reversion to one of the early definitions of public intellectualism by philosopher Antonio Gramsci. “The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the man of letters, the philosopher, the artist,” he wrote in his Prison Notebooks — first published in 1971. “The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator.” It doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest person in the room, as long as you can make it move.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

I’ve Done a Lot of Forgetting

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Jordan Michael Smith | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,744 words)

If someone spits bigotry at you while you’re a kid, you’re unlikely to forget it. You’ll remember it not because it’s traumatic, though it can be. You’ll remember it not even because it’s degrading and excruciating, though it is certainly those things, too. No, you’ll remember it because it instills in you an understanding that people are capable of motiveless evil. That humans can be moved to hate because they are hateful. You aren’t given a reason for why people hate you, because they don’t need a reason. You’re you, through no fault of your own, even if you want desperately to be anyone else. And that’s enough.

I am a Canadian. I was born in Markham, which is a small city about 30 kilometers northeast of Toronto. That distance meant a great deal. Markham was a large town of middle- and working-class families when my newlywed parents moved there, in the late 1970s, with a population that hovered around 60,000. It was pretty mixed demographically, I recall, though containing a white majority. My older sister and I were the only Jews in our elementary school, except for one other family who arrived after we did and seemed not to attract much ire; I imagined it was because they were beautiful and popular (we were neither).

We were one of the minority of Canadian Jewish families living outside Toronto or Montreal. More than 71% of all Canadian Jews reside in these two cities, according to Allan Levine’s serviceable but unexceptional new book on the history of Jewish Canada, Seeking the Fabled City. Levine describes a familiar story of an immigrant group gradually gaining acceptance (and some power) in a once-largely white Christian country. For the first half of the 20th century, Jews in Canada were arguably detested to a greater degree than in America. By the 21st century, Canadian Jews felt as safe as Jews anywhere felt safe. Levine quotes a Toronto rabbi as saying, “Living in Toronto, my children don’t know that Jews are a minority.” Read more…

Born to Be Eaten

Illustration by Glenn Harvey

Eva Holland | Longreads | May 30, 2019 | 26 minutes (7,122 words)

Calving

The caribou cow gives birth on her feet. She stands with legs wide apart, or turns on the spot, shuffling in slow circles, craning her long neck to watch as her calf emerges inch by inch from below her tail, between her hips. It’s oddly calm, this process — a strange thing to witness for us two-legged mammals, more accustomed to the stirrups and the struggle and the white-knuckled screaming of a Hollywood birth scene.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first. He climbs into the world fully extended, like a diver stretching toward the water. Out come the front pair of hooves, capping spindly legs, then the long narrow head, the lean, wet-furred body, and finally, another set of bony legs and sharp little hooves. His divergence from his mother leaves behind nothing but some strings of sticky fluid and a small patch of bloody fur. He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first…He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.

Still slick with mucus, the calf takes his first steps within minutes, stumbling awkwardly to his feet as his mother licks him clean. Within 24 hours, he is able to walk a mile or more. Soon, if he survives long enough, he will be capable of swimming white-water rivers, outrunning wolves, and trotting overland for miles upon miles every day. His life will offer myriad dangers and only the rarest respite; for the caribou, staying alive means staying on the move.

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Who Do You Belong To?

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Emily Lackey | Longreads | May 2019 | 17 minutes (4,462 words)

When I was a teenager, I didn’t fall in love with boys — I fell in love with their families. In seventh grade, it was Sean’s mother, who came to our classroom every day to help the teacher with whatever needed helping. I loved way she outlined the bubble letters on our art projects and cut pieces of construction paper into perfect circles. I loved how she was always there with her short hair, driving the purple minivan whose license plate I memorized. I liked Sean, too, but I can’t remember why other than the fact that he had hair that got blonder the longer he was in the sun, and that he liked a football team other than the Patriots.

Jason was next. Jason was the best because his parents were divorced, which meant there were two families to love. His father and stepmother invited me to their cocktail parties, took me to a New Year’s Eve dinner in New York City, brought me home when it was too late for Jason to drive, and paid me for painting the side of their house. Their house was where I was introduced to life’s greatest luxuries: gas stoves, hummus, bread that wasn’t white, olives that weren’t black.

“This girl is great,” I remember Jason’s father saying every time I offered to help with dinner, every time I set the table, every time I cleared my own dishes without being asked.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Brian M. Rosenthal, Katelyn Burns, Chris Ip, Wendy S. Walters, and Nathaniel Penn.

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The Erotic Thriller’s Little Death

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2019 | 10 minutes (2,585 words)

Who do I have to fuck and kill to get a good erotic thriller? One of the first publicity stills from What/If, the new Netflix series starring Renée Zellweger, had the actress in a white dress, legs crossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. It was a transparent reference to Basic Instinct, the vulvular Verhoeven from 1992 that marked the climax of the golden age of erotic thrillers, particularly the titillating cross-examination in which femme fatale Sharon Stone sits in a white dress, no underwear, legs alternating between crossed and uncrossed, smiling enigmatically, her surroundings moody. What/If is a sex reversal of Indecent Proposal, Adrian Lyne’s naughty take on the American Dream about a rich stranger offering a struggling couple $1 million to spend one night with the wife. The series flirts heavily with its soft-core antecedents. “This whole idea was ripped right out of a bad ’90s movie,” says Jane Levy (in the husband role in What/If). “I thought that film was quite decent,” is the awkward reply from Zellweger (as the Robert Redford character).

The difference here is that the 50-year-old actress’ knees remain firmly closed, just as the erotic thriller has ever since its mainstream demise in 1995. Her show is marketed as a “neo-noir social thriller,” presumably because creator Mike Kelley (of Revenge soap) considered the gender flip feminist, but its refusal to fully embrace the genre it’s attempting to be, either sexually or thrillingly, is the latest example of the erotic thriller’s latter-day impotence.

“Erotic thrillers are noirish stories of sexual intrigue incorporating some form of criminality or duplicity, often as the flimsy framework for on-screen softcore sex,” Linda Ruth Williams writes in The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (2005). That’s the clinical description, but the most alluring aspect of these films (and, later, shows) was how clinical they weren’t. It was the “flimsy framework” around the saxophoned, vaseline-screened sex that really made them seductive. These films lingered on their characters, teasing out the personalities that were about to be pummelled, entering their layered lives of cutely chaotic homes and old friendships and workplace frustrations, not to mention the texture of the cities — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco — in which that setup was about to unravel. The stories about these ideal homes being threatened by a sensual interloper served as a metaphor for the sociopolitical climate of the time, in which second-wave feminism and its single career women were wreaking havoc on traditional family values and, more specifically, on the power position that men had secured for so long.    

The hottest time for the mainstream erotic thriller was the 15 years from 1980 until 1995, when multiplexes were flooded with glistening, underappreciated masterpieces like The Last Seduction, starring Linda Fiorentino as the other kind of Queen B, and less successful limpets like Body of Evidence, in which Madonna proved that she can’t act when she’s naked either. Since then, per Williams, “the explicit has become implicit.” Unless you are a foreign auteur, mainstream prurience is sublimated into the supernatural and the traumatic — even the young adult — and the modern adult erotic thriller is stripped of grit to become 50 Shades of Grey, an appropriate title for the interchangeable sterile “intrigues” of the suburban set. What/If rides the trend of ’90s nostalgia, in which the culturally relevant (if not always critically acclaimed) is resurrected for the sake of kitsch, with little consideration for its original milieu. But the erotic thriller is a genre born of a cultural climate that isn’t so different from the one we are in now, so why can’t it make us come?

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You can measure the erotic thriller’s critical reputation by how little it has penetrated academia. Porn has spawned its own journal, and yet the study of titles like Wild Things appears to be relegated to only three books, including Nina K. Martin’s Sexy Thrills: Undressing the Erotic Thriller. She has a predictable explanation for the lacuna: “It’s for women,” she tells me, “and it’s not edgy enough.” It’s true: If you were old enough to masturbate in the ’90s, not only could you watch a young David Duchovny lubing women up on cable (Red Shoe Diaries), you could also Blockbuster and chill (which we just referred to as “renting”). Between the flaming porn and the brooding thrillers at the local video store languished sultry VHS covers with titles like Savage Lust scrawled over images of half-dressed couples embracing against black backdrops. “It gave a lot of people the opportunity to have a one-handed watch that actually had a story,” says Martin, “and that you could watch with someone as a couple and kind of get off.” The last one she remembers — the last good one, I would argue — is 2003’s In the Cut, one of the rare feminist erotic thrillers, which opens with a woman watching another woman going down on a man. But these days you wouldn’t get a major Hollywood star like Meg Ryan appearing in such a film (or behind it — it was a Nicole Kidman production), nor would you get a filmmaker of Jane Campion’s caliber directing it.

The erotic thriller came out of film noir, so it makes sense that one of the earliest neo-noirs, Body Heat (1981), was inspired by Billy Wilder’s 1944 classic Double Indemnity. Kathleen Turner never really washed off the sweat of her debut, in which she plays the wife of a wealthy businessman who convinces her lover, an inept lawyer — “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.” — to kill her husband. The film was so ecstatically received that it spawned the Body Heat Society, a woman-run film fan club before that was de rigueur. “It’s the perfect story of the perfect seduction,’’ founder Royelen Lee Boykie told The Chicago Tribune in 1987. But it was Fatal Attraction (1987) that really hit the collective G-spot. Producer Sherry Lansing wanted to make a feminist version of the British film Diversion, in which a married man has an affair and gets his comeuppance. “When I watched that short film, I was on the single woman’s side,” Lansing told Susan Faludi for her book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). “I wanted the audience to feel great empathy for the woman.”

The men who ran Hollywood did not. To understand how the erotic thriller, which could have been a genre that celebrates women owning their sexuality, became its opposite, you have to understand the time in which it arose. This was the 1980s, the decade in which liberated women were trying to mind their own business and start a career and men were interpreting the shift as a direct shot at mankind and the murder of the nuclear family. That’s how Fatal Attraction’s single career woman becomes “the most hated woman in America.” The studio refused to keep Michael Douglas’s cheating husband unsympathetic, going against Lansing to make Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest a crazy-faced psycho killer. To protect the family man, they sacrificed the independent blond who knows what she wants, turning her into a woman-shaped threat to fundamental American values that can only be taken down by the traditional housewife’s phallus — sorry, pistol.

This was, according to Williams’s book, “the perfect erotic thriller blueprint.” And in some ways, Fatal Attraction, which dominated the box office and the cultural conversation, was perfect. Director Adrian Lyne had been chosen off the success of Flashdance, and it was his attention to detail — the authentic discussions between family and friends, the messy homes, the dizzying ambience of New York — that makes the movie a classic. “It adds the seeming irrelevancies that are most important,’’ he told The New York Times. But it was also Michael Douglas. The man who became the face of the erotic thriller — he also starred in Basic Instinct, Disclosure, and A Perfect Murder — was able to be hero and antihero at the same time, both championed and maligned. In Williams’s words, he was “the representation of flawed, crisis-ridden masculinity and the concomitant decline of male cultural and social authority.”

Only five years after Fatal Attraction, the blockbuster erotic thriller blew its load for the last time with Basic Instinct, which not only commanded record earnings, but was popular despite — because of? — the perceived anti-gay sentiment of its bisexual femme fatale. Then the genre died; it’s fitting that the man who brought the erotic thriller to climax with Basic Instinct also killed it with Showgirls. Director Paul Verhoeven had the chance to earn the NC-17 rating designed to bolster now well-established adult fare, but he failed and the erotic thriller became a studio risk. Perhaps this was enough to kill it, considering Hollywood’s increasing need to make bank, but it was buried for good by a political landscape that reinforced America’s growing puritanism, an industry saturated with cheap knockoffs like Fair Game (starring supermodel Cindy Crawford), and the rise of free online porn and graphic auteur cinema.

But it was only a little death. The specter of Beyoncé floats over a new form of mainstream erotic thriller, one which has been scrubbed for its debut. In 2009, Queen B reintroduced us to blockbuster eroticism with Obsessed, which was dubbed “the black Fatal Attraction” — a married man is terrorized by a woman at his office — but had none of its predecessor’s charm. Producer Will Packer is famous for his aspirational black rom-coms (This Christmas, Think Like a Man), and Obsessed shared the same generic aesthetic. The specificity of the best erotic thrillers was thus replaced by an all-encompassing generality — suburban-style wealth with interchangeable houses, offices, clothes, people, even storylines. Here, again, men were in charge (producing, directing, writing), so the politics remained largely the same — the man is castrated by the single woman, the mother is the reigning power who restores order — while Hollywood’s mixed feelings about black intimacy meant the erotic part was cooled way down. A stream of nonwhite erotic thrillers lifted this framework, most recently Unforgettable and When the Bough Breaks, though the genre’s biggest (white) release of the past decade did too.

“Uh, oh, uh, oh, uh, oh, oh, no, no,” sang Beyoncé over and over in 2015 leading up to the release of 50 Shades of Grey, for which she recorded a heart-pounding version of “Crazy in Love.” E.L. James’ S&M “book,” I suppose you would call it, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, was a phenomenon among housewives and the biggest mainstream erotic thriller in a decade, attracting an audience of mostly women who were so desperate for some hot sex on-screen that they were willing to pay $13 to see a movie based on a story that read like its writer had never actually had sex. 50 Shades of Grey is potentially the least foxy film of all time — wooden acting, wooden script, wooden directing, but absolutely no wood. “Are You Curious?” the marketing kept asking us. Don’t be: It basically looks exactly like Obsessed, except in a farcical display of our current conversation around consent, the heroine has to sign a contract before she can fuck. This was two years before we started talking about how men in Hollywood have abused their power, which could be why the two men who produced this cock-up thought it made sense to have Dakota Johnson play a woman who is willing to sign a paper in order to have Jamie Dornan’s rich, dead-eyed white man bore the pants off her (we can get that for free!).

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“Your pants are on fire.” “You have no idea.” Within the first five minutes of Indecent Proposal, Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson are having flaming sex — various positions, various body parts — on their kitchen floor. This is frenzied makeup fornication after a fight that resulted in his boxers landing on the boiling stove. In What/If, the analogous couple takes four episodes to get seriously steamy — like, in a shower. OK, they also have sex, but it is so pure it involves garters and is artfully shot through the slates in a banister. This is the erotic thriller now, a pale imitation of its white-hot heyday, in which romance is an afterthought and the thrill is gone. That clinical uptightness that was missing from the originals, which made them so seductive, has me wondering why they even bother anymore. But then again, it tracks that a culture steeped in nostalgia but fixated on box office performance would strip the erotic thriller, a once lucrative genre, down to its superficial parts — a gesture at sex, a glance at intrigue, the broad strokes of a vague threat to patriarchy — to sell it out to the widest audience possible. This would in part explain why the new films and shows have been denuded of their specificity — in character, in location, in aesthetic — though that also aligns with how aspiration is framed now, a time of sporadic employment in a digital (not that kind) dictatorship, as a sterile McMansion in which the comfort of wealth has replaced the comfort of relation.

Then there’s the sex. While men don’t want women to own their sexuality and are skittish in the wake of so many of their male peers screwing up, women don’t want to be objectified or reduced to their sexuality anymore either. Even if Fatal Attraction would make sense coming from a man right now, Martin thinks actresses, awakened to gender parity and intimacy standards, would be unlikely to take on the role. “It’s such a loaded grey area now,” says Martin, observing that sex is either problematized within a relationship as in Sex Education and Gypsy, or it’s associated with trauma as in Top of the Lake (another Campion) and Sharp Objects. That the rare erotic thriller comes from auteurs out of Europe (François Ozon) or Asia (Park Chan-wook) is unsurprising considering their divergent approach to sex and gender. In America, meanwhile, the spectacle has taken over the sexual — women are more concerned with saving the world than in exploring their sexuality. And, sure, I’m all for women solving the climate crisis, but we also have sex lives. And all the talk around consent suggests that it’s the perfect time for cinema to explore the nuances of sexuality (not to mention the widespread panic over millennials having less of it — I mean, would you in this economy?)

Instead, any prurience that threatens to limit the largest possible impact has been folded into the supernatural, since Twilight, which also introduced sensuality into the YA world, culminated in series like You and Riverdale. All of this is not to say that you can’t still find erotic thrillers, just that they have retreated to the margins. What was once a mainstream film — A-list actors and filmmakers — about a queer femme fatale, is now a queer erotic thriller — unknown actors and filmmakers — that only surfaces on streaming sites like Netflix for niche audiences whose algorithms call it out. You can get free porn online, you can pay for a good thriller in the cinema, but you can’t get both together. No wonder I found myself nodding along to the last two words of What/If, a scene in which Zellweger’s femme fatale orders a martini, perhaps to distract her from all the sex she’s not having. “One olive,” she says. “Very dry.”

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare

Getty / Black Inc. Books

Richard Cooke | Excerpt from Tired of Winning: A Chronicle of American Decline | Black Inc. Books | May 2019 | 21 minutes (5,527 words)

They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

Mark 16:18

One night John Stephen Toler dreamed that the Lord had placed him high on a cliff, overlooking a forest-filled valley. He had this vision while living in Man, West Virginia, where some of the townsfolk thought he was a hell-bound abomination; he countered that God works in different ways. The mountains were where he sought sanctuary, so he felt no fear; but as he watched, all the trees he could see were consumed by wildfire. It was incredible, he said, to see ‘how quick it was devoured’, and the meaning of the parable was clear. The forest was Man and the fire was drugs, and when the drugs came to Man, that was exactly how it happened – it was devoured ‘so fast, that you didn’t even see it coming’, he said. We were in Huntington, West Virginia, and by now John Stephen Toler was in recovery.

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An Audience of Athletes: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Sports

womenSports, Bettmann / Getty

Britni de la Cretaz | Longreads | May 2019 | 26 minutes (6,609 words)

The idea for womenSports magazine was born in a car suspended over the San Francisco Bay by beams of steel. Several weeks before she captivated the nation by beating Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match in the fall of 1973, Billie Jean King sat in the passenger seat of a car and stewed. At the wheel was her then-husband, Larry, driving the couple from Emeryville near Oakland toward San Francisco on the Bay Bridge, and as Billie Jean flipped through an issue of Sports Illustrated, she complained, which is what she always did whenever she picked up an issue of SI. Read more…