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From: spaf@gatech.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: A different subject
Message-ID: <9049@gatech.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Jul-84 09:58:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: gatech.9049
Posted: Thu Jul 19 09:58:15 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Jul-84 03:30:35 EDT
Organization: The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech
Lines: 272

I think the following might be amusing and/or valuable to some
of the readers of this group.  I found it posted in net.misc and
figured I'd report is here.  It was originally posted by mj@zeus
(Tektronix).

>Caring, Sharing, Relating, The man/woman trend of today
>[Copied without permission from Mother Jones]
>by Charlie Haas
>
>Jill (not her real name, which is Alison) is 33.  With her high cheekbones, 
>friendly smile and good posture, she could easily be taken for a
>new-products-marketing group head, or perhaps a planning-and-development
>research coordinator.  Surprisingly, though, she is an administrative policy
>liason, working at a large Chicago corporation.
>
>A few weeks ago, Jill met Kevin (Michael, actually), 41.  People who meet
>Kevin feel instantly drawn toward him, and Jill was no exception.  With his
>lean, spare body and easygoing manner, Kevin has the look of a telephone
>lineman who fools you by not looking anything like a telephone lineman and
>instead resembling a shale derivatives consultant.  He is a bassoonist.
>
>The two met at the Jade Palate, a fashionable Chinese restaurant on the
>North Side.  "He overheard me ordering the Five Happiness Special Sea
>Biscuits," Jill remembers.  "and he leaned over and said, 'Not without a
>side of gamma globulin, you don't.'  Well, I'm not normally that impulsive
>about things, but I switched to the Chicken With Flavor Taste right away.  A
>week later, we were living together."
>
>"At first, it was incredibly intense," she continues.  "We had both 'been
>with' people before--Kevin had been married, in fact--but neither of us had
>felt so close to anybody.  Other men would listen to my life story, but
>Kevin actually optioned it.  I had sometimes had a hard time in
>relationships before, and at first I had a lot of trouble letting myself be
>comfortable with being vulnerable--vulnerable to what, I'm not sure, maybe
>just to being comfortable.  And I wondered if being open to being vulnerable
>to being trusted to be comforable being honest still lets you be free, or if
>you have to close off some of the closeness in order to have the selfness as
>well as the otherness.  I felt that we were moving out of a place that was
>'we' into a place that was 'us'; from 'each other' into 'one another.'  And
>I guess I didn't know if I was ready for that.
>
>Kevin, too, remembers the early days of the relationship as exhilarating and
>special.  "With Jill," he says, "I felt that I was discovering all kinds of
>intimate places inside myself.  My pancreas, for example, is shaped like a
>little booth at a cocktail lounge, and of course it's pretty dark in there."
>
>Soon, though, Jill began to feel that "something was missing.  I was
>discovering that I wanted a deeper kind of commitment," she says.  "More
>than that, I found myself wanting all kinds of things that my parents had
>wanted, things I thought I would never want.  Wrought iron, particularly."
>
>"We both felt that the relationship wasn't going anywhere.  Finally, a few
>weeks ago, we were shopping together for tile grout at Handier Than Thou,
>and just as we were deciding to spend a few pennies more for the added
>convenience of a premixed product, I suddenly had this, like, breakthrough,
>where I said, 'Wow, O.K., I know exactly what I want from this relationship.'
>
>"What I wanted, it turned out, was to have our relationship written about in
>a magazine article on contemporary relationships.  I wanted to explore; I
>wanted to test myself as an interview subject; I wanted to see what my
>not-real name would be.  I wanted to be quoted saying things like, 'At
>first, it was incredibly intense' and 'I wanted  a deeper kind of
>commitment.'  And, of course, I wanted to see how many of my friends would
>figure out it was me.  Because that's what I think is happening with men and
>women now: they're either writing articles about their relationshsips or
>being interviewed about them.  People are carrying on about themselves in
>print in a way that, even a few years ago, would have seemed impossibly
>dreary.  And I think that's a positive, positive thing."
>
>Jill and Kevin's story is real, although the two of them are phonys.  And
>their story is important, because it is not only their story but the story
>of countless other couples on the change-torn, contradiction-littered
>battleground of contemporary relationships.  All of a sudden and all over
>the place, it seems, men and women are warning each other off questionable
>seafood dishes, experiencing insights while purchasing tile-related
>products, and using up magazine space that would otherwise have gone to
>stories about people who were clinically dead and "saw a warm, pulsating
>light" or to profiles of Debra Winger.  And it is crucially important that
>we understand the reason for this, as we enter the early mid-1980's if we
>are to succeed in our struggle to build a more decent, caring, humane,
>sharing, honest, open, loyal, thrifty, clean and cheerful society.
>
>Dr. Richard Brain is a professor of Sheetrock Psychology at Johns-Manville-
>Hopkins University in Teaberry Shuffle, New Jersey, and the author of Up the
>Self With Gun and Chimera (Macmillan & Wife, 1982).  "Relationships," he
>posits, "are the human potential workshops of the '80s--in the same sense
>that human potential workshops were the peace marches of the '70s, and that
>peace marches were the Johnny-Mathis-records-and-little-hot-dog-and-biscuit-
>dough-hors-d'oeuvre parties of the '60s, and so on back down the line."
>
>If what Brain says is true, then he is right.  Some background may be
>helpful.  During the long sleep of the Eisenhower years, sex was something
>"dirty," unnatural and very much restricted.  In many states, laws placed
>stringent limits on breast size and penis length--freedoms that, today, we
>take almost for granted.  But then came the '60s--a turbulent decade of
>turmoil, or ferment, or fomented torment.  For many, the lyrics of
>rock-prophet Bob Dylan seemed to sum it all up: "Now your dancing child with
>his Chinese suit, / He spoke to me, I took his flute, / No, I wasn't very
>cute to him, ' Was I?"  The very foundations of society seemed to be
>shaking, as long-held assumptions were questioned.  Who were we?  Why were
>we here?  Where were we going?  Were we there yet?  When were we going to be
>there?  NOW were we there yet?
>
>But the '70s held few answers.  We seemed to be hurtling into a new,
>terrifyingly uncertain time, as sex roles, standards of conduct, even car
>shapes, underwent rapid alterations.  The Muppets rushed into the vacuum the
>Beatles had left; John Heard was the new screen idol for all who could
>remember which one he was.  The Pill had revolutionized sexuality.  I think
>I meant William Hurt back there.  Reeling from assassinations, from Vietnam,
>from Watergate, we hungered for a portentous, yackety style of journalizm
>that could put all the pieces together.  But chilling new deterrents to sex
>were on the horizon: herpes, AIDS, the Grace Jones look.  This whole analysis
>is valid because I say so, and Jill (not her real name) is glad I do.  "I'd
>hate to be in an article like this," she say, "and then have them leave out
>the phrase 'the long sleep of the Eisenhower years.'"
>
>Nowhere was the new freedom felt more keenly than among magazine writers,
>who turned their attention to the precise documenting of trends in "personal
>growth" and in male-female relationships--a doubly difficult task since,
>before being documented, the trends had to be fabricated, often on the basis
>of a single incident in the life of a writer or a friend.  The birth of the
>subgenre of "confessional journalism" was "an enormously fortunate thing for
>writers," says book critic Bigby Deal, whose "How My Catharsis Made Me an
>Even Greater and Famouser Sort of Person" appeared recently in Exchoir ("The
>Magazine for Men Whose Voices Changed Some Time Ago").  "We discovered,"
>says Deal, "that we were free to carry on about our marriages, our divorces,
>our affairs, as if people waiting to have porcelain jackets put on their
>back molars were genuinely, passionately, urgently interested."
>
>One of the most prolific masters of the new forms is New York journalist
>Barbara Gristedes Harrasing, who has contributed countless pieces to Scurvy
>("The Magazine for the Executive Woman Who Doesn't Have Time to Eat Her
>Vegetables"), including the wrenching "My Briefcase, My Self"; to the trendy,
>sexually emancipated women's journal Madame's Wazoo (her "When He Calls Your
>Friends a Pack of Shrill Freaks With No Discernible Values" appeared in
>February); and in Ws, ("The Magazine for Women Who Are Pretty Pissed Off By
>This Point"), where her "Cliff-Hanger Movie Serials: The Roots of Premature
>Ejaculation" was considered a seminal piece.
>
>Harrassing rejects the suggestion that her brand of journalism trades
>heavily in cliches.  "Cliches just don't play an important role," she says.
>"You see, I think we're really only beginning to understand some of the
>things that have happened.  In the '70s, after the peace movement and so on,
>there was a kind of branching out, a seizing of possibilities.  An
>opportunity to go in some new directions.  A freeing up, if you will.  It
>was an exciting period, because a lot of the old formulas simply didn't
>apply anymore, and people almost needed to invent a new language in order to
>address what was happening.  I think it affected the way we all saw
>ourselves.  Women, in particular, began to understand their power
>differently and to draw strength from each other.  There was a great desire
>to create alternative structures.  Now, of course, I think you see a lot of
>people turning inward.  A kind of retrenching is taking place, especially at
>the community level.  But, no, I don't think cliches have very much to do
>with it."
>
>Annette (not her real teeth) is 13, but she has been searching for the
>"right" relationship for as long as many older women.  "Cubby and I were
>together for a long time, and it was painful for us to break up," she says.
>"But he was so much younger, and while I enjoyed the vitality, the
>immaturity became too much for me."  (See "This Month's Article About Older
>Women and Younger Men" in Cosmopolymer, "The Magazine for the Completely
>Artificial Woman," March 1983.)  "Then, with Spin, it was great, except that
>his whole male-bonding thing with Marty took up so much of his energy--you
>know, 'Come on, man, let's go ride these horses; let's go find this calf
>that's missing.  Let's, let's, let's.'  So, finally, that came to an end,
>too--it was on Talent Roundup Day, it's funny how you remember these things.
>But now I'm with Donald and I feel very good about that--his sense of play,
>the way he lets his anger out, and of course he's so much more animated
>than--oh, but I see the clock on the clubhouse wall says it's time to go.
>See you real soon!"  Why?  Because she likes us.
>
>George Leonard (not his real name) has spent his past few years on the
>"cutting edge" of the human potential movement.  After a long career at the
>popular picture magazine Look (he was, at various times, the magazine's
>Ghetto Kids Cavorting in the Spray from a Fire Hydrant Editor, the Wizened
>Crackers Sitting on General Store Vernadas Editor and a consultant to the
>Cat in a Baby Carriage department), Leonard became a fixture at personal-
>growth beachheads such as the Esalen Institute and in the pages of Exchoir,
>where his "Sorry, That's It For Sex" appeared last winter.  "Make no
>mistake: I was on the front lines of the Sexual Revolution," he wrote, "and
>I derived my share of personal benefits, if you know what I mean.  More than
>my share, actually, and a lot more than most of the 'upscale' subscribers to
>this rag, I'll tell you that, pal.  You were out getting your MBA while your
>faithful correspondent here was getting his end wet, and now you think
>you're going to catch up.  Well, forget it, because it's over.  That's
>right.  Those of us who are in charge of these things have had it with the
>Sexual Revolution, so you missed it.  Maybe next time, if there is a next
>time, you won't be sitting with your head stuck in a magazine about how to
>wear the classic porkpie hat and mix the classic Sidecar and all this shit.
>But I doubt it."
>
>"George is an incredibly charismatic and magnetic social philosopher," I had
>been told.  "He doesn't shake your hand, he Rolfs it."  I was not
>disappointed.  With his piercing, curious eyes, easy laugh and warm, open
>toaster-oven, Leonard commands the listener's immediate trust.  "There are
>so many questions we have to look at, but I think that's what's exciting,"
>he says, with infectious enthusiasm.  "For example, the 'end of sex'--what
>does that mean?  Well, for a lot of people, the end of sex means the
>beginning of a cigarette.  And that's fine, except there are a lot of people
>who don't smoke, and I think we incredibly charismatic and magnetic social
>philosophers have to be willing to look at that.
>
>"I do think it's true that we've pretty well come out of the 'Me Decade,'
>and it's good to keep in mind what Tom Wolfe said: that after the Me Decade
>you can't go home again.  I really think that's true.  Already we've moved
>into the 'US Festival Weekend,' though, of course, that's a good deal
>shorter.  But there's a lot of variety ahead, a lot of options.  Eventually,
>I think we'll see the 'Your Mother Fortnight'--in fact, I understand that's
>already happening in certain neighborhoods--and even the 'Her Cousin That We
>Met Over a Lonnie's House Mid-Afternoon.'  The one thing you can say with
>any certainty is that whatever trend does happen, it will start in this kind
>of article.  In fact, it will end in this kind of article, too.  In fact..."
>But his voice trails off, his mind already tracking a new insight.
>
>Nick (not his real nickname) is 34.  Rangy, softspoken and dumb as a post,
>he feels that he has "moved past relationships as a model for interacting
>with people.  I think we have to find some new models.
>
>"In college, at Berkeley, I was always very active in politics--you know,
>writing trade agreements, forming collusive suballiances within SEATO, that
>kind of thing," he continues.  "And I still think of myself as very much a
>'movement person.' But eventually I burned out on that kind of activity and
>I began to feel that change had to start with the individual.
>
>"For the past few years, I've mostly been involved in taking, and then
>leading, various kinds of workshops.  Workshops in a sense are more viable
>than one-on-one relationships, because you can really rotate who brings the
>salad.  I've been through workshops on birthing, rebirthing, parenting,
>networking, bonding, actualizing, life-transitioning, even on composting.
>Finally, I took a look at what I was doing and where it was taking me, and I
>decided to lead a workshop on gerunding.  A surprising number of people
>turned out for it.  We want to look at our gerunding behavior and try to
>understand where it comes from.  For a lot of us, it's been a chance to get
>back in touch with our root words.  I made a breakthrough a couple of weeks
>ago, for instance, when I realized what an impact it had on me, as a kid, to
>hear Nancy Sinatra sing, 'You keep lyin' when you oughta be truthin' '--you
>know, in 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. If fact, that may have been the
>basis of a lot of the human potential movement, right there.
>
>"So, without question, you know, I'm still searching.  Maybe I'll always be
>searching.  But for me, the '60s are definitely over.  I guess that means
>I'll first hear of the Talking Heads in about 1995."
>
>Judy C. is a dour (not her real demeanor) editor at Mother's Loans ("The
>Magazine of Trust-Fund Radicalism") in San Francisco.  "In a way," she says,
>"I think I've stopped looking for the 'perfect' relationship article.  It
>took us a while to get into this kind of journalism, because we brought a
>lot of our old habits to it.  First, we assigned an investigative story
>on 'Boyfriends That Burst Into Flames When You Hit Them From Behind,' but it
>was hard to pin down the sources on that one.  We also sent a reporter to
>check out the singles scene in Nicaragua, but he was captured and held in a
>piano bar in Managua for, oh, six or seven weeks, and all he came back with
>that was really substantive was the Spanish lyrics for 'Raindrops Keep
>Falling on My Head,' 'Georgy Girl' and a lot of Billy Joel things, and we
>feel our readers are more into, you know, Joan Armatrading and so forth.
>
>"But now I think we're getting the hang of it with this new series.  The
>thing to remember is that this kind of journalism isn't really all that
>different from any other kind.  The same standards of quality certainly
>apply.  For example, if a piece is truly excellent, there will always be a
>quote at the end that sort of sums it all up, and just before the very last
>part of the quote, the writer will always have the person who's being quoted
>smile or brush some hair out of their face or something."  She smiles,
>brushing some hair out of her face.  "If you have that, you know you've done
>your job."
-- 
Off the Wall of Gene Spafford
The Clouds Project, School of ICS, Georgia Tech, Atlanta GA 30332
Phone:	(404) 894-6169, (404) 894-6170 [messages]
CSNet:	Spaf @ GATech		ARPA:	Spaf%GATech.CSNet @ CSNet-Relay.ARPA
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