It appears that being a narcissist psycopath who likes Machiavelli has an advantage in fathering children:

Two studies suggest that men who are narcissistic, psychopathic and Machiavellian tend to have large numbers of sexual conquests.

The traits are said to be epitomised in Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent with a licence to kill, 007.

Scientists believe the reproductive success of “dark triad” men explains why the traits persist in the human population, despite the harm they can cause.

Narcissists are self obsessed and manipulative, psychopaths are impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous, and people with a Machiavellian nature are deceitful and exploitative. There is evidence that the traits have an up-side - they lead to men having a prolific sex life and fathering more offspring. As a result, they have not been “weeded out” by natural selection.

A team of US scientists led by Dr Peter Jonason, from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, conducted personality tests on 200 college students designed to rank them for each of the “dark triad” traits.

The students were also questioned about their attitudes to sexual relationships and their sex lives. They were asked how many partners they had had, and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

Those who scored higher on the “dark triad” personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short flings. But this pattern only held true for males — no link between promiscuity and the traits was seen in female students.

(H/T)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go re-read The Prince, preferably in front of a mirror.

Hubbard posted this at 5:24 PM EDT on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

5 Comments »

Though I don’t normally like what Kathryn Lopez writes, she taps into much of what I’ve thought of Sex and the City. A while back, Dorothy and I watched the whole series in a couple of months, and, largely, enjoyed it. The show was enjoyable because it was able to present a true representation of human nature, which is a rarity.

Though we came away from the whole experience thinking that the lesson of the show is that these women were only happy when they had the traditional things in life: home and a stable love. Their pretensions of reveling in their singleness were the results of them becoming accustomed to being miserable. Yet everyone commenting on the show or movie says that the story is about how much fun these girls have together. I guess they have some fun together, but aren’t they always trying to change their situations and get men? Isn’t it true that the only times they are truly happy for any period of time is when they’re in something approximating a traditional relationship? There are times when they realize that their circle of friends is rapidly becoming a circle of middle-aged spinsters, and this is when they are at their most distressed. The episode where Miranda decided to not have an abortion was painful to the degree it tried to emphasize that it was her RIGHT [dammit!], but everyone was much happier with her having the baby instead.

Or perhaps I watched a different show than everyone else. Which may be true, since I find myself in agreement with the normally cranky Lopez.

Apollo posted this at 12:08 AM EDT on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth

No Comments »

Jennifer Graham complains about crude ads:

In polite society, there are things that can’t be said. In Massachusetts, for instance, school superintendents want the Board of Education to stop labeling some schools as “chronically underperforming” — too harsh, they say. But when it comes to talking about the nation’s digestive health, it appears that anything goes.

“Got bran?” a Cottonelle toilet-paper billboard recently blared in Grand Central Terminal. “Who knew No. 2 could feel this good?” asks tennis-star-turned-pitchman John McEnroe, hawking Kellogg’s All-Bran cereal. Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who was cinematically “Perfect” just 23 years ago, now bemoans “occasional irregularity” in ads for Dannon’s Activia yogurt. And some children found oval-shaped chocolates in their Easter baskets with this bit of inspiring verse: “The Easter Bunny came last night/ So listen, here’s the scoop./ He left a special treat for you, a bit of bunny poop!”

The Easter Bunny, apparently, is not constipated.

Several years back, Florence King discussed the same topic:

Father Flanagan said, “There’s no such thing as a bad boy”; adoption pioneer Edna Gladney said, “There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents”; and I say that earthy subjects are offensive only when they are badly presented. . . .

Madison Avenue must have a treasonous mole burrowing in its midst because there is one series of laxative ads that departs from the formula. I always enjoy watching them because they follow the rules for high comedy and succeed as clever entertainment: the Phillips Milk of Magnesia couple, Lucille and Raymond.

Lucille constantly embarrasses her husband with her eerie talent for turning any conversation around to his constipation. She apparently carries a bottle of Phillips in her purse at all times, and whips it out at parties, merrily rattling on about Raymond’s “problem,” ignoring his hisses and frantic signals to shut up. The spots are funny because Lucille is utterly lacking in insight and self-knowledge. If she smirked, if she noticed Raymond’s mortification, if she ever once exhibited even a shred of self-consciousness, the ad would be offensive. But because she’s incapable of realizing that anything is amiss, her obtuseness rescues the ad from bathroom humor and turns it into comic material worthy of Burns and Allen.

Lucille is a classic example of that staple of wit, the “Candide character,” the innocent and/or dense person who has no idea what is going on. Virtually any subject can be funny as long as a Candide is present to provide the salvaging innocence, but if everyone is in the know, it becomes vulgar.

I couldn’t find a youtube of Lucille and Raymond, but I think the Candide principle holds. Unfortunately, innocence is as out of fashion these days as common sense, so it looks like we’ll be in the desert of vulgarity for some time. One of the perks of not owning a TV set is that I miss a lot of this (probably a good thing, since when I did have one, I’d refuse to buy products with ads that annoyed me, and it sounds like I’d be forced to make my own bran cereal and culture my own yogurt). Still, are there any decent ads, any oases of good taste out there?

Hubbard posted this at 11:04 AM EDT on Friday, April 11th, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

8 Comments »

. . . In the New Republic:

When I called Lucas to arrange an interview, he said he was a longtime subscriber to The New Republic, and, arriving at his Manhattan office, I found The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Times of London spread out on his glass desk. (I couldn’t tell if the papers were there to impress, were film props, or were actual reading material.) When Lucas, who turns 36 this month, does wear clothes, he tends toward the form-fitting, and he sported a sharply tailored suit for our interview. He has a strong Russian accent, which is very much on display in his films. As we spoke, he occasionally paused to yell instructions at his publicist. Meanwhile, models entered and exited the room, slamming doors in search of sex toys.

You wouldn’t know it from watching his movies—which are apolitical—but Lucas has opinions on everything. He is a fan of David Brooks and the late Oriana Fallaci (though he acknowledges her homophobia), thought the Iraq war was a bad idea (”the wrong target”), considers the press soft in portraying Islamist terrorism (”it’s very upsetting that they don’t allow people to see the beheadings”), loves Nicolas Sarkozy (”I think Marc Jacobs told me that Sarkozy went to synagogue”), and hates Jimmy Carter (”this fucking peanut farmer”). While he originally disagreed with Russia’s brutal policies toward Chechnya, he now believes that America could learn something from Vladimir Putin. “The American Army can’t take Fallujah?” Lucas asks me, incredulous. “Level it!”

He criticizes Republicans, whom he calls “homophobic and anti-Semitic,” while labeling ultraOrthodox Israelis “anal warts on the body of Israeli society.” But the true objects of his ire are gay liberals whom he sees as overly sympathetic to the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

We’ve covered Michael Lucas here before.  It looks like he’s still pushing people’s buttons.

Hubbard posted this at 1:04 PM EDT on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

No Comments »

I haven’t ragged on movies in a while. So just in case you weren’t aware, the nominees for best picture this year were the 18th (Juno), 40th (No Country for Old Men), 53rd (Atonement), 55th (Michael Clayton), and 78th (There Will Be Blood) highest grossing films last year. The one that gets me there is Michael Clayton–a Best Picture caliber film starring George Clooney, and it can’t even top $50 million?

I’ve seen 2.5 of those, which is significantly more than I’ve seen of the last two years’ crop. I loved No Country, I found Atonement decent until the last five minutes when it descended into drivel, and I stopped watching There Will Be Blood maybe halfway through because it was boring as hell. That said, it’s hard for me to justifiably claim that No Country was the best movie of the year if 39 other movies sold significantly more tickets. It seems like the first thing a good movie should do is compel people to watch it.

Anyhow, congrats, Hollywood on continuing to expand that gulf between you and your audience. You guys sold fewer tickets than you did seven years ago, when the economy was in the crapper, people spent months avoiding public places out of fear of terrorism, and there were several million fewer people in the country.

Apollo posted this at 8:18 PM EST on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth

14 Comments »

Evidently there’s an entire department store in London where no one knows about one of the best and most well known books of the 20th century:

A chain of retail stores in Britain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls…

[snip]

“What seems to have happened is the staff who run the website had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either,” a spokesman told British newspapers.

“We had to look it up on (online encyclopedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now.”

The only thing that could have improved this story would be a store clerk saying, “I guess I should rename my daughter.”  But if they’ve never heard of the book, how’d they come up with this name? I guess it was named after Lolita, Texas, or an orca at the Miami Seaquarium. Or maybe they’re Celine Dion fans who know more about French than about American literature.

Apollo posted this at 10:13 PM EST on Friday, February 1st, 2008 as Pop Culture Is Filth

No Comments »