The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  What now?

  “I thought maybe I should choose the photo of you that runs,” Mary-Louise continues. “So you can really experience that loss of control and possible objectification.”

  I can’t remember exactly how I reacted to this. But Mary-Louise—in the essay she wrote later—gives a description that sounds pretty accurate. She wrote:

  I was met with some sputtering and somewhat choked, mortified laughter, the way people laugh when they feel suddenly light-headed, or when they view something both compelling and grotesque, like, say, two cats having sex, or a child vomiting into his Easter basket. [A.J.] said he would get back to me.

  That rings mostly true. Though for the record, I’ve never seen a child vomiting into his Easter basket. And if I ever did see one, I don’t think I’d laugh. Or at least I’d try to suppress the laugh in case my wife was nearby.

  When I get home, I tell Julie about Mary-Louise’s idea, and count on her to be equally disturbed. “Oh, you have to do it,” she says. “It’s only fair.” (Julie later confessed that she thought a nude photo in a national magazine would finally force me to start doing ab crunches.) I tell my boss, who is also unnervingly enthusiastic. I mention the possibility of subscription cancellations. “Maybe we could shoot you the way we did Monica Bellucci on our cover,” he says. “With caviar on your chest.” He’s not joking.

  I’m relatively new to Esquire, and don’t have the nerve to say no. So a few days later, I find myself in a cab on the way to the studio with the magazine’s design director, who keeps assuring me that there will be nothing edible on my solar plexus and no Mapplethorpian whips in my orifices. This would be very classy, an homage to a famous Yves Saint Laurent nude. Classy. An adjective I’m sure Linda Lovelace heard a few times.

  In the dim, hangar-sized studio, they pour me chilled sauvignon blanc, put on a Norah Jones CD, hand me a white terry-cloth robe, and apologize for not having a fluffer. Everyone has a good laugh at that one.

  They still have to adjust the lighting. So I pace back and forth in my robe. In times of stress, I often try to put things in context. Take the long view. In a hundred years, I remind myself, no one will remember this photo. There are six billion people on the planet Earth. No one cares if some midlevel editor at a men’s magazine bares his nipples. In ten billion years, the second law of thermodynamics will have run its course, and there won’t be humans around to judge, just billions of cold, amoral, lifeless hydrogen atoms bouncing around in the black emptiness.

  But every time I try this tactic, another part of my brain plays devil’s advocate. You think this will be gone in a hundred years? The Internet has no statute of limitations. This will follow you around forever, like a grand larceny conviction. You think people will be gone? They’ll figure out a way to control entropy. They’ll figure out a way to keep the database of all embarrassing things you’ve ever done.

  What’s that? The crew is ready. Okay. Deep breaths. Ponder the universe in ten billion years. I drop my robe. The air is chilly. I step in front of the camera. When I’m nervous, I often put my hands in my pockets. This time, I have no pockets. I ease myself onto a round, red cushion (which I hope has been dry-cleaned since the last photo shoot), cross my legs, and try to look dignified.

  The photographer is a kind, salt-and-pepper-haired Scotsman named Nigel Parry.

  He keeps telling me to relax.

  I concentrate really hard on relaxing.

  “Try to relax yer face,” he says. “You look like yer constipated.”

  The thing is, it’s not really a relaxing situation. In addition to Nigel and his camera, the room has five assistants and a couple of random onlookers. I can’t help but notice that all of them are wearing clothes. Whereas I’m not. The balance of power is radically off-kilter.

  Nigel snaps a couple of photos.

  I try distancing myself. Where would I place this on the spectrum of humiliating episodes in my life? Probably better than the time I inadvertently drooled on the piano during music class in sixth grade and Kim Glickman pointed it out to everyone. But worse than the time I asked Julie’s friend when she was due (her baby was six weeks old).

  “Okay, now,” says Nigel. “Sook in yer goot!”

  I stare at him blankly.

  “Sook in yer goot!”

  My goot? Nigel taps his stomach.

  Ah, he’s talking about my problematic belly. I sook in some air.

  Nigel begins snapping photos. The Frisbee-sized lights flash, making a soft pop, like a snare drum in smooth jazz. I sit. I try to think dignified thoughts. Think of the Romans, the Greeks. They posed nude and still started civilization as we know it.

  I feel vulnerable, yes. There I am, exposed for all to see. But paradoxically, I feel disappointed that no one seems to be looking at me. Nigel has a cadre of cute, young female assistants. They are busy making cell phone calls, chatting about what they heard on NPR that morning, unpacking lenses. My nude form holds about as much allure to them as a wicker chair.

  I adjust my pose, lowering my knee. Nigel raises his eyebrows.

  “Not like that. I can see your chopper,” he says.

  I move my knee fast. I don’t want my “chopper” on film, even if I know Esquire would never publish anything with my chopper exposed.

  Esquire is generally opposed to showing the real naughty bits—whether male or female—in their nude photos. This can be quite a creative challenge for the photographers. In my case, Nigel is using a tried-and-true strategy: contortionist, yogalike body positions. Another option would have been props. For our seventieth anniversary, I compiled a list of objects that Esquire had used to obscure the nipples on women’s breasts over the years: flowers, paperback books, peaches, suspenders, and on and on.

  Even though I knew my chopper would be covered, I’d spent the previous three days worrying about its debut in public. I became irrationally obsessed with the idea that it might misbehave. Which is highly unlikely. It’s not like I’m thirteen. But what if it does? Stress can do strange things to the body. And if it does, I’d never live it down. I’m terrified of losing control in any situation, and this would seem to be the worst. So I took measures. I’ve brought along a small black-and-white photo of my late grandmother just in case.

  “Your poor grandmother,” Julie said, as I scoured photo albums for the picture the last night.

  “It’s not disrespectful,” I said. “It shows my respect for her.”

  The photo, which I stashed in my shoulder bag, will hopefully never be called into duty.

  “Try smiling,” says Nigel. “Now serious . . . Now look up for me.”

  I tilt my chin toward the ceiling.

  I’ve read interviews where celebrities claim to have felt empowered by their nude photo shoot. They learned to embrace the freedom and love their body and throw off the constraining shackles of repressed society. Not me.

  I just don’t feel comfortable nude. Even when I’m alone in my apartment, I keep my pants zipped. No doubt this comes in part from my ambivalence to my physical self. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing—never has a race of people been so disassociated from their bodies. Like many Jews, I spent a lot of my life viewing my body as a way to transport my intellect from place to place. In my twenties, I had a brief half-year fling with weight lifting and StairMaster (guess what? I was single at the time!), but other than that, I haven’t logged a lot of hours at Bally Total Fitness. And it shows. My chest has an indentation where you could store a half cup of flour.

  I’m much more comfortable exposing the contents of my mind—even when those contents are potentially more humiliating than my chopper. I’ll expose my ignorance long before I take off my T-shirt. I’m not sure why I’m okay with laying bare my brain.

  Maybe there’s a sense of relief in confession. As I discovered while being radically honest, there’s freedom in keeping no secrets. Throw all the junk on the lawn and hope the good outweighs the bad.

  Perhaps it’s so I can beat others to the
punch. You’re going to make fun of the mole on my nose? I’ve been doing it for years.

  Or maybe it’s that when I confess the most embarrassing secrets, there’s comfort in knowing that others are just as abnormal as I am. In my book on reading the encyclopedia, I made a throwaway comment about a high school fantasy I had involving pancake batter. A few months later, I got an e-mail from a guy who said he was glad to hear someone shared his passion for pancake batter. It was simultaneously the creepiest letter I’ve ever gotten, and the most reassuring. Well, more creepy than reassuring, come to think of it.

  My sons, incidentally, don’t have the same problem with bodily repression. Zane, for instance, loves to get nude. A few months ago, I was on a book tour stop in Cincinnati. I had a prearranged video chat with Julie and Zane. I was on wireless at Starbucks and called them up on my Mac laptop. Julie put the camera on Zane.

  And Zane decided, at that moment, that his clothes were restraining, and whipped off his shirt and pants.

  I chuckled. Until I started to figure out how this might appear: a thirty-nine-year-old man watching a naked toddler cavort on his computer screen. I glanced around to make sure no one was calling the authorities.

  “Okay, then. You can put your clothes back on now.”

  Julie stayed offscreen. Did she leave? Did she have a pressing appointment?

  Zane continued dancing joyfully.

  “Julie, can you come back on for a second.”

  I looked around the Starbucks. I had about forty-five seconds before someone would call Dateline.

  “Julie? Please.”

  Nothing.

  “Okay, then, daddy has to go now.”

  I snapped my laptop closed.

  Maybe that’s the key. It’s a generational thing, this privacy gap. My mother still shakes her head in wonder that I use my writing as public therapy. And when I told her that I had to pose naked for my job, she looked at me the way I imagine John Walker Lindh’s mom looked at him when he said he was joining the Taliban. Meanwhile, I shake my head in wonder that kids in their twenties “sext” each other during work hours or post MySpace photos of themselves doing naked three-legged races, or whatever the kids are doing nowadays.

  Nigel keeps snapping away. I adjust my face. I adjust my butt. I never get comfortable. I try to zone out and think of sandy white beaches. I fail.

  “Okay,” he says, after half an hour. “We’re finished.” Finally.

  I grab my clothes, ready for my walk of shame. As I’m leaving, I catch sight of the crew setting up for Mary-Louise. The table fills up with champagne bottles and plates of couscous and grilled chicken. My catering had consisted of a six-pack of Diet Coke and a bottle of wine. An eloquent statement of my place on the celebrity chain. If I thought my dignity was at a low ebb during the photo shoot, the buffet just took the last of it.

  CODA

  The photos came out a month later. The results were actually much better than they could have been. I swear I almost look buff. Never again will I question the miracle of good lighting. Or of black-and-white film, which makes everything about 50 percent less sleazy. You take a photo of a Delta Nu sorority girl lifting her baby T at Mardi Gras, and if it’s in black-and-white, it’ll somehow look poignant and profound.

  Still, the reaction wasn’t good for my ego. You had your expected taunts from coworkers and friends, most saying that I had successfully torpedoed any slim chance I ever had of a real journalistic career. Someone anonymously scribbled on the photo “Time to invest in some Nair”—a reference to my hairy legs. We also got a half-dozen nasty letters. Most complained that my photo, which came right after Mary-Louise Parker’s beautiful black-and-white layout, ruined the portfolio. Like enjoying a fantastic tasting menu at a Michelin three-star restaurant, then getting botulism immediately after. “Well, at least there were no subscription cancellations,” my boss told me.

  I do respect Mary-Louise for putting me through photographic hell. Fame is about exposure, whether it’s exposure of your medical records or your past peccadilloes or your onset tantrums. And she decided to give me a lesson in literal exposure.

  And I give her this: She succeeded in her goal. I can never look at a nude picture the same way. I can still admire a nude photo, but I can no longer separate it from the context in which it was created. I can’t forget, as Mary-Louise put it, the loss of control and possible objectification.

  What were the negotiations like between the editor and the model? Did the person getting photographed feel empowered? And if she felt empowered, was it just a rationalization for allowing herself to be stripped of her pants? What was the dynamic between her and the photographer? What CD was playing to get her in the mood? Did she hate the outcome? Did she like the couscous?

  Before this book went to press, I got in touch with Mary-Louise Parker to ask if she’s made any other editors expose themselves. She hasn’t. But she did say she was satisfied with the results of our experiment. “I think you learned your lesson,” she said. “And I’m supergrateful to your wife. She really pushed you to do it.”

  I told her that just a month ago, I finally got my first piece of positive feedback on the nude photo. A San Diego man e-mailed me asking for a JPEG of it. (He said he preferred me with my biblical beard, leading me to think he’s what you call a “bear.” I appeal to a very narrow demographic.) Mary-Louise seemed pleased. “I was actually hoping you’d get a lot of fans in prison to boost your ego. That was my real goal.”

  Chapter Seven

  What Would George Washington Do?

  PREAMBLE

  After Julie and I watched the John Adams miniseries on HBO, I had two reactions. The first was unsettling: if I’d been alive in Colonial times, I would not have been on the side of the patriots. This is an unpleasant epiphany for someone who’s always considered himself moderately patriotic. But I’m convinced of it.

  I wouldn’t be a king-loving Loyalist, mind you. I’d be somewhere in the middle. John Adams estimated that a third of the country was patriots, a third loyalist, and a third neutral. That’d be me: neutral.

  I don’t have a revolutionary nature. I’m not confrontational enough. I’d probably grumble about the tax on tea, but in the end, I’d cough up the money rather than putting on a feathered headdress and storming a ship. I mean, I’ve shelled out $3.45 for a tall pumpkin latte without declaring war on Starbucks. That’s truly intolerable.

  I knew that the Founding Fathers took a risk. But it didn’t sink in quite how breathtaking their leap of faith was. They had to realize that their odds of failure were staggeringly high, like Rob-Schneider-winning-the-Oscar high. And if they did fail, they wouldn’t go back to their farms and lick their wounds and play cribbage; they’d all end up swinging from the gallows.

  If I’d been alive, I would have sided with Pennsylvania lawyer John Dickinson, who wanted to keep negotiating with Britain, telling the Continental Congress they “should exhaust all peaceful approaches.”

  “Precisely,” I’d say. “If we can get electricity from a kite, we can work out this tax dispute . . .”

  So I’m thankful I wasn’t born in the eighteenth century.

  The second realization was that I wanted to know more about George Washington. In the past, I’d found him the least interesting of the Founding Fathers. Undeniably great, but kind of bland. He was the market leader, sure, but he lacked pizzazz, sort of like Wal-Mart. Give me Ben Franklin and his wry, sometimes randy wisdom. Or Jefferson and his political poetry. Or cantankerous old John Adams, and his strange obsession with his compost pile (see note in back).

  But in the miniseries, there was a moment that crystallized Washington’s greatness for me in a new way: John Adams had come up with a list of highfalutin titles for the new president (“His Majesty the President” and “His High Mightiness”). Washington scolded him: “Mr. President. That is all.”

  What restraint! This was a man who could have crowned himself Czar Washington if he’d wanted to. He could have oc
cupied a throne for life. He could have had a harem of big-bustled women. Instead, restraint. This humble act of heroism—which helped assure our democracy didn’t become a monarchy—is as impressive to me as Washington’s battles. We need more restraint, more civility. I’m writing this as the Dow continues its free fall. And what got us into this? You could argue it was a lack of restraint. Unbridled hunger for power by some rogue emperors of Wall Street.

  The next week, while reading Joseph Ellis’s biography of George Washington, I stumbled across something extraordinary. Namely, a list Washington wrote called “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.” It’s exactly what it says: an easy-to-read rundown of how to behave while talking, eating, doing business, courting, you name it. There are 110 of them.

  Providence—as Washington used to say—has provided me with my next experiment.

  First, it’s a list of rules. I love those. Frankly, I miss living by the Bible’s laws. I miss the stable architecture, the paradoxical freedom from choice. This will be like living biblically, but with a Colonial flavor—less stoning adulterers, more bowing. Second, I’ll get a crash course in this remarkable man, the Founding Father in Chief.

  And, most important, I’ll get to mainline the ideals of a long-ago, seemingly more civil time. I may never become a revolutionary, but maybe I can become a better leader and more dignified human being.

  THE LIST

  Washington wrote the Rules in his notebook when he was a young man. Rumors to the contrary, he didn’t actually come up with the 110 Rules in the first place—they were originally from the pen of a French Jesuit in the late sixteenth century. But he copied them painstakingly by hand. And the list had a deep impact on him. Many historians say it shaped his character throughout his life.

  The list itself is an early version of Emily Post mixed with GQ, with a dash of Ten Commandments thrown in to give it heft.

  The first rule is this:

  Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.