the naked gaze 肉眼

Girls Gone Wild

A recent essay in Time (posted to Time’s online magazine a week ago) entitled “The Myth about Girls Going Wild “ criticizes the prevalence of the “girls gone wild” stereotype, and particularly its association with Spring Break bacchanalia. Cox argues that an overly conservative attitude toward women’s behavior makes drunken revelry one of the few appropriate ways in which certain kinds of libidinal urges can be expressed: “Maybe it would be progress if we had a definition of femininity expansive enough to include shaking one's thing without raising one's top — so that girls could go a little wild without having to rely on what we used to refer to as the "sorority girl's mating call": "I am soooo drunk.”

This argument is undoubtedly basically correct, but what is perhaps even more intriguing is the essay’s by-line: Ana Marie Cox—an independent journalist who is, of course, best-known by her former alter-ego in the blogosphere: Wonkette (though it was announced in January that Cox was stepping down from the blog to be a full-time author). Wonkette (whose blogs would frequently celebrate their drunken origins, and reveled their unabashedly prurient fascination with the sexual underside the American politics), ironically, shared far more in common with the “girls gone wild” stereotype than she does with narrative voice of the Time essay.

Un Petit Mort

In a current commercial for A1 steak sauce, a prisoner on death row about to dig into a final meal consisting of a steak and said steak sauce when a guard happens to pull off a patch covering the prisoner’s name tag…and discovers that he is actually an imposter, a different prisoner altogether. The prisoner is then unceremoniously hauled away, gazing regretfully at the uneaten meal.

The commercial is amusing, and disturbing. It is unclear, for instance, whether the prisoner was planning to reveal his true identity following the meal, or whether he was planning to go through with the actual execution simply on account of being sick of standard prison food. Was this supposed to be an isolated incident, or are we to imagine Mr. Moeller pulling the same scam over and over each time one of his colleagues is scheduled to die?

A House Divided

Who has the authority to invite a stranger into one’s home? What if there are co-occupants who are at odds on whether on not to invite the stranger in?

These are the questions at the heart of the recent Supreme Court decision, Georgia v Randolph. The case revolves around questions of hospitality and exclusion, and appropriately enough comes at a time that the Court is itself in the process of welcoming and integrating two new members (neither of whom, needless to say, did the Court play any role in inviting in the first place). As the Times recently observed, Georgia v Randolph was one of the first decisions in which a certain testiness could be detected beneath the “surface placidity and collegiality of the young Roberts court.”