Monday, January 29, 2007

Oh, THAT'S Why I'm Not in The Biz

Gay-porn producer stabbed to death

Sure, it could have been a totally random murder. I'm sure there are tons of people uninvolved in any sketchiness who are...stabbed to death in their home then have their house burned and have to be identified by their dental records. But perhaps some industries are more mob-like than others. Right.

The part that's making my ears perk up at this story specifically is that there will inevitably be some speculation about whether one particular charming young porn star was involved. I'm a bit of a fan of this young man: I read his blog regularly, and I've seen a small slice of his work. For quite a few years he and the deceased were in a legal battle about the work the actor did for the producer and has done since. He was underage when he performed, so those videos have all been recalled (yes, he was 18+ in the vids I've seen), and the studio filed a lawsuit against the actor for breach of contract and trademark violations. Part of this was because the actor forged identification documents (I'm not sure that this has been established) and partially because the studio claims to own the actor's stage name as a trademark, but he's gone off and tried to start his own production company. They managed to stop him with the lawsuit last Novem...ok, I have no idea when this shit went down. The relevant entry has disappeared from the actor's blog without a trace. Perhaps I dreamt the whole thing.

Oh, so at work today (yes, I was working this weekend. I'm a "baller," as the kids say) I decided to listen to some of our illustrious art director's music. Of course I stumbled upon an amazing album and was forced to download it from iTunes. Bruce Springsteen toasts Pete Seeger in "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions." No no, whatever you're thinking, it's better. Totally jubilant. Sure, Springsteen's singing isn't in absolute top form and he doesn't give the world's best rendition of Shenandoah, but from the first song, a toe-tapping romp of "Old Dan Tucker," I knew this would be coming with me on my next road trip out into the heartland. Yeehaw!

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Love, Actually?

This week, there was much blogospheric activity surrounding a recent Modern Love column, I Fell for a Man Who Wore an Electronic Ankle Bracelet. In the piece (read it, really), a young woman writes about her ex-boyfriend, whom she dated for three years. A few weeks into their relationship, she found out he was on leave from Harvard because another student had accused him of rape. She eventually got the law involved, he pled out, and he wound up condemned to house arrest and counseling. She didn't like who he became during counseling—inhibited, solemn, uneasy—so they eventually broke up.

It's a classic story of boy meets girl, boy reveals checkered past to girl, girl forgives boy, law isn't quite so forgiving. Or something. In any case, what's been getting people so worked up? For one thing, there are passages like this:
But for me the experience had fundamentally altered my previously programmed reaction to stories of alcohol-fueled date rape on college campuses. No longer was my response autopilot compassion for the girl. No longer would I assume the guilt of intoxicated boys in the company of intoxicated girls everywhere.

And this one:
Yet what alarmed me was not some sinister side of him I never saw but a passivity and retreat that I saw far too much of. In the end, I found it harder to love an emasculated boyfriend than one accused of rape.

Unsurprisingly people aren't thrilled with the New York Times publishing this girl's perspective, which occasionally comes across as hostile to the girl that accused the boyfriend of rape. The author doesn't believe that the rape happened: Her boyfriend told her they were both drunk and had sex; the plea he copped to said the girl told him to leave, but he forced his way into the room, her bed, and her.

Amanda at Pandagon writes:
Cross claims to have read everything about the case she could get her hands on, so it’s entirely unlikely that she isn’t aware that the victim was too drunk to fight him off effectively, that she tried to fight him off, and that he tossed the victim around. He forced himself on a drunk woman, which is way different than “they had sex”, a phrasing that implies that the woman was willfully involved.

So it's the word of what he told his girlfriend against the word of the girl/what he pled to. A lot of commenters at Pandagon dis the "he said, she said" approach to evaluating this situation. Really now, he pled to the charges. Well, I'm very hesitant to take any plea as undisputeduted truth. After seeing Capturing the Friedmans (mandatory viewing), I'll never underestimate the amount of tactical decision-making and personal crap that go into accepting a plea. While it's wholly possible everything happened exactly as he said, I don't think its place on the record gives it fact status.

So is the author deluded, as so many commenters say, or is she reasonable in saying that she knows the guy well enough to believe him? Here's an idea I'd like to throw out (if not actually advocate): She's wrong, but she's wrong because she's operating under the assumption that only bad people commit rape. That's the conventional wisdom, right? People who rape are bad people who are part of the rape culture and get off on disempowering women. Maybe that's true, I don't know, but I don't quite see why someone who's a generally good-if-imperfect person couldn't fuck up and rape someone. I mean, normal people do bad things all the time, right? They gossip and scheme and insult people and hit people who provoke them and do dishonest deals that make them more money and screw oinnocentsents. Non-hideous people prioritize their own immediate pleasure over the good of others.

So can this be what rape is about? Could it be that a drunk guy gets one "no, I don't want to" and little further resistance and just decides to go ahead? I don't see why not. To be clear, yes, this is rape. It is criminal assault and he needs to be penalized for that. Even if he was drunk, even if she wasn't very firm in her resistance. If she didn't consent he is guilty of something harmful and explicitly illegal. But I don't know that that's an indication that he is someone who gets off on dehumanizing women or is even likely to rape again.

It's clear the sex offender label has itself become nearly meaningless. Some 13-year-old who grabbed a girl's boobs may now have to register as a sex offender for life. Really, do people need to be warned that when he was 13, he assaulted someone in a not-especially-harmful way? And then there's that kid who's going to jail for ten years for getting a blow job from a girl two years his junior. I think he has to register, too. Great. Shouldn't this label and all the stigma that goes with it be reserved for people who are likely to be repeat offenders?

God, this post has been long and incoherent enough. I think it's time to stop. If you're a first time reader who got here via a search, please realize this blog is primarily written for myself and interested friends, so take it slow. All opinions represented here may or may not be mine. They're just what was running through my head while I was writing. I also ask that you please do not copy and paste sections of this post to another blog. Allow me to censor myself by deleting this post later on, if I deem it to offensive. Thanks.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

The Innocence Project

Please excuse me for co-opting the name of a seriously important non-profit for a post about graphing virginity loss.

So, Brad an I have a long-standing argument (one of many) about whether, if you were to graph the age at which people in America lose their virginity, it would look like a normal Gaussian. Brad says yes. I say no. My argument was, essentially, the graph would be very asymmetrical, with a sharp increase into the peak and a slow deline away from it (the average age is 16...many people lose their virginity at 20 or 21; many fewer at 11 or 12). Brad says that while it's true there's going to be some asymmetry, a normal distribution is still a pretty great approximation, or at least good enough to be useful.

I was reading about recent studies for work (what's new?), and I came across one study on premarital sex in the US. (Finding: The vast majority of people do it. The vast majority of people have been doing it for a really long time). The analysis was based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth, and I realized this survey might be just what I needed to prove my point (or be horribly shamed). Since all of this data is publicly available—if a pain in the ass to access—I was able to download the relevant questions for the women who took the survey: age, whether had sex, and age of first sex. I had data for 6500 nationally-representative respondents in 2002. The graph of number of people who lost their virginity at each age looks like this:


It's a very pretty graph, and it looks more or less as expected (although I'm a little surprised at the sharp drop-off in the 18-20 range). You can see where we're both coming from: It is pretty asymmetrical, and it also looks on the Gaussian side of life. It's also important to note that the data I took was from people aged 20 to 44 at the time of the survey. Therefore everything after age 20 is skewed down a bit.

So I did some fits. First I did the normal fit and it did look decent, but got far too low far too quickly. I did only fit it through age 25 (so the skew wouldn't affect the fit too much), but by age 21 it's already a suck-fest. Then I tried to fit a Poisson distribution. To put it mildly, that distribution doesn't exactly lend itself to Excel curve fitting. I attribute this mostly to the bitchy factorial in the denominator. I also tried to fit the black-body radiation function. Also a mediocre result. Then I had an idea and tried to curve-fit the integral:


As you can see, I got a nice little arctan thing going on there. While its derivative is still a symmetrical function (1/[x^2 + 1]), it seemed to drop off more nicely, so I fit the polynomial A/[ax^2 + bx + c] to the curve. It's not perfect, but it's actually quite a bit nicer than the sharp drop Gaussian. Anyway, here they are: THE FITS!


Light blue is data, red is the Gaussian, yellow is black body, green is Poisson and purple is the inverse polynomial. I still think a more generalized Poisson may make the best fit, but right now I think the inverse polynomial works best. If someone knows a better asymmetrical distribution, please let me know! But the important thing is that at two standard deviations, the Gaussian sucks :-P

Oh, and if you're curious, here are comparisons for different age groups in 2002. The peaks are a fair bit sharper and a little earlier for the younger groups, but they're all pretty similar:


I hope you've enjoyed the viginity loss post!

Now for some google loading so nobody else has to graph this stuff: virginity loss, age of first sex, america, usa, large sample size, age of first intercourse, age of first sexual intercourse, nsfg, 2002 national survey of family growth

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Let's Do This Thing

All right, kids, it's the vacation post. Each day gets one sentence. This is for posterity, not pretty prose.

The week kicked off with Schreier's eighth crazy night party on Friday, where Brad and the high school folks collided and compared notes about Cat's new exercise program, "pirates."

On Saturday I trained into Slave, chilled with the folks, and bounced right back to the city to see a totally awesome "Company" with V, familiar-looking debate boy on the side.

Sunday started with crosswording with V at Slave and finished with a very solid Seven Jews/Seven Woks/Seven-Thirty Christmas eve...albeit with only six Jews.

Christmas is a slow day in, well, most of the Western world, so Monday was low key, with a trip to Jacob Burns to see Volver with the fam and a chips-n-guac-fueled watching of the Jets' first victory with Dad and Adam.

Natalie and I meant to get some shopping done on Tuesday but emerged from the Westchester empty-handed, but at least we had some fun adventures on Central Avenue and a meal at Villagio before I saw The Good Shepherd with Mike L and nearly saw Mike L in The Good Shepherd.

I woke up back in the city on Wednesday but soon met up with Mom and Natalia for a Tennessee Williams play with a gorgeous, gorgeous actor who wouldn't let me take a picture of him (pshaw!), followed by a shockingly-good vegan dinner and terrific Bond movie with Lauren and Will.

I walked up to the Guggenheim on Thursday to see the Spanish painting exhibit (I <3 the Spaniards), after which Brad and I got overpriced Indian food then had a lively conversation with V over beers in ::shudder:: Murray Hill.

Friday held a nice Thai lunch with Mike L, where we ran into a cute boy he sorta likes, then I saw Children of Men with Will (the via Brad one), and the eve topped off with Greg's birthday party, which included cool kids (yay, Sam) and...a cute boy he sorta likes.

Saturday brought a long-overdue visit from Meremurti (woot!) and a just-plain-long walk from Brooklyn to my apartment so she (and I, and our buddy Thomas) could get a taste of New York.

Meredith wanted to see St. John the Divine for L'Engle-related purposes, so on Sunday we went to the Hungarian Pastry Shop (and the church, yeah yeah), and after we departed I headed to Adam's for Saturday's puzzle and Sunday's Jets victory before I prepared awesome deviled eggs for the fun New Year's Eve potluck at the Frushticks' great, new-ish place.

The weather blew on Monday, so I was a bit low energy while doing the puzzle and meeting up with Greg and V for a late-afternoon showing of the slightly disappointing Dreamgirls, followed up by Thai food and a far too rough night of sleep.

Well, there you go! Now my life of leisure is over, and I return to the grind. As long as I get a little sleep tonight, all will be well.