The Seven Deadly Virtues

by Jonathan V. Last

  We dress our children like porners, in “babykinis” (string-bikinis for babies), or push-up bikini tops for girls too young to have breasts (courtesy of Abercrombie & Fitch), or a whole slew of “future porn star”–themed onesies and T-shirts—widely available on the Internet—for the slutty toddlers looking to get a leg up on the slutty teens and the slutty adults we’re teaching them to become.

  In fact, we’ve become so accustomed to dressing like porners that now we even undress like them. Taking to its natural extreme last decade’s trend of wearing the sluttiest Halloween costume possible, one coed at Arizona State University recently arrived at a Halloween frat party dressed in nothing except a pair of heels. Pictures of the festivities spread across the Internet. As a writer named “Bacon” (not his Christian name, we assume) noticed from the website Total Frat Move, “There weren’t even a pair of ears to make her a Slutty Leopard or Slutty Rabbit. I guess she was just a Slutty Slut. Not sure, don’t care, because NAKED.” With feminist logic like that—feminism and frat-boyism are often indistinguishable these days—Bacon could have been angling for an internship at Jezebel.

  How slutty are we? Well, in the old days, if you wanted a quick hit and didn’t have the skills to wow the ladies at the Greene Turtle happy hour, you could pay for a prostitute. But now, people are eagerly willing to prostitute themselves with “hook-up apps” such as Tinder and Pure, which help you get straight to the rutting with willing participants in your geographic vicinity, without any of the bother of having a conversation or learning their name. So rampant is the hook-up culture on most college campuses that Boston College offered a course on how to plan a date, dating being nearly as forgotten as chastity.

  Middle-aged journalists, of course, love to bemoan the pro-miscuity of the college hook-up culture, since part of the fun of getting old is complaining how the youth of today are destroying civilization. But the hook-up culture doesn’t end when you graduate. A spokesperson for AshleyMadison.com, the world’s largest married hook-up service, where married folks go to cheat on their spouses (company slogan: “Life is short, have an affair”), announced they had 27,511 new sign-ups on New Year’s Day 2014—a 344 percent spike over normal days. This is like the entire population of Helena, Montana, simultaneously deciding on the same day that cheating on their spouse would be their New Year’s resolution.

  You can see why marriage is becoming as endangered as dating. In fact, nearly four in ten respondents in a recent Pew Survey said they thought marriage was becoming “obsolete.” (There are presently thirty-one marriages for every one thousand unmarried women in the United States, down from ninety in the 1950s.) Not that this is stopping anyone from making babies. The out-of-wedlock birthrate in America now hovers just above 40 percent (it’s close to 50 percent for first births), which is bad news for a large swath of the newborns who hope their parent(s) are able to afford babykinis and future-porn-star onesies.

  How slutty have we become? So slutty that people now try using chastity to sell sex. Hit the bookstore racks these days and you don’t see chastity talked about in the context of abstinence-promotion programs or purity rings, as was once all the rage. (Even Miley Cyrus wore one in her Disney days; it didn’t take.) Instead, you’re more likely to see Georgia Ivey Green, aka “Mistress Ivey,” prescribing chastity usage in her KeyHolder’s Handbook—A Woman’s Guide to Male Chastity and Sexual Teasing. The time-honored chastity belt, historically used as a rape-prevention device or to discourage childhood masturbation, it turns out, is now a vital part of BDSM role-play. As the Huffington Post reported, CB-X, the “world leader in male chastity,” now sells the lockable sheaths in wood, chrome, and camouflage finishes.

  So oversexed are we that even good, God-fearing Christian women are aping porn stars. Out on the Web, a sect of gals calling themselves “Christian Nymphos” have taken to exploring, graphically, the fine points of marital relations and the connubial sacrament. I hear where they’re coming from, though as a Christian myself, I prefer not to spiritualize sex, even when playing Wayward Priest and Naughty Nun with the missus. The last thing I want to think about, as the Christian Nymphos do, is to “ask the Father to give you the heart of the Shulamite Woman (for Him and for your husband).”

  But the Christian Nymphos go on, like most oversharing habitués of the Internet, getting into the literal ins-and-outs of every position from “The Pile Driver” to “The Italian Chandelier.” I don’t presume to speak for God, but by the time He gets to their spiritual forum on anal plugs, I suspect He’ll be regretting the divine grace of sex and wishing He’d settled for a gift card to Bed Bath & Beyond.

  So oversexed have we become that even some secularists have decided to take matters in hand, so to speak. A popular subsite on the user-based aggregator Reddit is “No Fap,” where “fapstronauts” take the “Fapstinence Challenge,” attempting to shake their porn and masturbation addictions through total abstinence from both. Its organizers cite all manner of incentives to participate, from increasing self-control to freeing up hard drive space. (“Some porn collections can take up terabytes of information.”)

  Fapstronauts, of course, are easy to make sport of. And yet, it’s a little harder to laugh at the fact that there are now over eighty thousand of them on this one little website. You don’t have to be a chastity champion or antiporn activist to recognize that something is seriously out-of-whack in the culture. I like sex as much as the next guy. But it’s getting strange out there. Our appetites increasingly know no bounds, running the gamut from dendrophilia (erotic interest in trees) to oculolinctus (a sexual urge to lick the eyeballs) to toxophilia (arousal from archery). Americans will do anything these days—and we’ve got nothing on the Japanese.

  An acquaintance of mine, Ron Fuegobutt, says, “When sex is too indiscriminate, you don’t even enjoy it anymore.” At a dinner not long ago, he was seated next to the retired porn star Ron Jeremy, who is the John Gielgud of the genre. By Jeremy’s own estimate, he’s had sex with a good four thousand women on film. “He explained to me,” Fuegobutt says, “that after all those years in porn, he can still get it up, but he can no longer finish. He’s like Sisyphus—the task is never completed. It’s horrible.”

  With so many of the stigmas gone, so, too, are many of the thrills. As it is written in Proverbs, “Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.” But good luck finding a secret place anymore. In our orgiastic pursuit of instant gratification, few mysteries are left. All of our appetites are known and celebrated and unrestrained. Want to see a man love up on a tree? A two-second Google search will show you images you can never unsee.

  All this thinking about chastity—and tree huggers—had me turn to a priest friend. His porn-star generator name is Father Chuck Looselips. He holds that people are mistaken, getting intimidated by thinking of chastity as something that has to be taken as far as the Mother Church requires him to take his. Instead, Father Looselips says that we should think of it as a worldview, as balance, as just enough. “In a culture of obese, depressed people with attention deficit disorder, we know what too much does.” What does just enough look like when we apply it throughout our lives: “How much do you eat? How many televisions do you watch at the same time? How many people are you talking to simultaneously? We are overdoing it to our own destruction. We lose the sense of taste, the sense of appreciation, the sense of pleasure. How do we break this cycle? By a ‘less is more’ philosophy. By balance. By just enough.”

  Everyone and everything, says Father Looselips, “has a chance for excellence.” But to attain it, we have to observe laws. The laws of our creation. “A chair is excellent if the wood is hard enough to hold a person. If it obeys the laws of gravity. If the seat is horizontal to the earth and is cut to the contours of the butt. All of this requires obedience on the part of the carpenter. Obedience to wood. Obedience to gravity. Obedience to comfort. It requires obedience to laws we did not create, and the smarts of knowing what these are through discovery.
”

  The same, he holds, applies to sex. How much truer this is of people than chairs. In regard to chastity, he says, “It means less is more, just enough, just right, the right person, the right time, the right closeness, and the right distance, and no more than that.”

  For the married, that means, “I strive to be the best friend, the best lover, the best husband and father, with the family we create.” This is a tall order, he concedes. “Human life is messy. We are neither angel nor devil (usually), but we have both influences and need to balance them all the time. Life is a long tightrope walk between two skyscrapers. Modernity is a constant consumer and has no use for the idea that less is more. It has no concept of just enough. And we are seriously suffering on every level—physical, emotional, psychological, mental, and spiritual—from our own excesses. But we are all better off knowing the obedience that is required to live healthy and excellent lives.”

  Without these principles, we’re not really living at all. We trade the beautiful expectancy of Christmas Eve for the perpetual anticlimax of Christmas morning. We lose mystery and wonder. We fail to cultivate and appreciate. We hunt for constant novelty, failing to rest in the fullness of our own passions. We are no longer making the simple, beautiful music of man/ woman song, with its harmonies and melodies and rhythms. We’re not even making an atonal loveless racket, the racket Paul described, in his letter to the Corinthians, as that of a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. Instead, no matter how much sex we’re having, we as a culture are making a lonely, sad, muted sound. The sound of one hand fapping.

  CHAPTER 10

  Simplicity

  Or, the Many-Splendored Virtues of Hoarding

  James Lileks

  I NEVER GOT THE CHANCE to ask Aunt Beulah about the hatchet in the wall. In the photo she’s sitting in a chair, looking pensive at something off-camera, and you can’t tell if she’s mad at the person who just spoiled a perfectly good wall by chucking a tomahawk into the plaster or whether it had been there for years and she’s bothered over a remark her sister made about the drapes. It’s just like her to say that. Really, she always has to say something. The rest of the wall is empty; perhaps they took all the pictures down when the party got plenty hot and someone wanted to play Ed Ames. I don’t know.

  Nor did I ever ask Aunt Edna why she posed for a shot on a small-town street in the late 1940s. Neon signs for EATS and hooch; gleaming black cars hunched along the curb like hunkering beetles. She’s standing stiff with her arms at her side, a sunny smile with a squint. A Kodak for a beau overseas, maybe. A memento of a trip into town: Here I am in Hot Springs!

  It’s impossible to ask, since they’re not my real aunts.

  I’ve no idea who these women are, actually. I met them at the antique store I visit now and again. They always have a shipment of orphaned photos for sale, hundreds of tiny pictures ripped from books, the soft, black scrapbook paper still stuck to their backs. “Fifty cents each!” said the sign. Instant family! I thought.

  I figured I’d pick up a few amusing shots. That was at the beginning. It’s something of a habit now. I always wonder about the people who bring the pictures into the store. What are they thinking? Oh, it was Grandma’s photo album, she’s long gone. Or, Mom died, and we have no idea who these people are. Or, What can I get for it?

  The scorn of your ancestors, that’s what you’ll get. But it’s a relief when the history passes from your hands, I suppose: These strangers aren’t your responsibility anymore. The people in the small, overexposed pictures look out as if they know you, but page after page of rangy men outside of barns, farm women in the yard holding bonneted baby blobs, interchangeable farm dogs, uniformed brothers back from basic—it doesn’t mean anything. Which is one way of saying it just means too much. Out it goes.

  The best ones get snapped up by people who have the time and temperament to sift through the history of strangers. As much as Beulah may have hated that axe in the wall, it bought her a ticket away from the flame.

  “Real photos”: That’s what they’re called in the ephemera trade. I don’t collect them, but I have some. There are people who collect phone cards; I’m not one of them either, but I have some of them, too. In fact I may have the world’s most complete collection of Sprint 1992 Presidential Phone Cards. They were handing them out at the GOP convention, and I wheedled a set out of a PR person. It’s likely that 90 percent of them were pocketed and forgotten. They fit in a cassette-tape box. They’ll make someone happy some day—but not in the first-kiss sense, not in the great-meal sense. The fleeting and solitary pleasure of acquisition and completion. As far as I know, the cards still work, which gives them a potency you’d spoil by squandering the minutes on an actual call. A collector would want to know if they’d been sullied by use.

  So the phone cards go in my closet, waiting for whomever. When I come across them periodically, they remind me of something else. In the GOP convention merchandise hall I bought a ticket from the 1892 GOP convention in Minneapolis, my adopted home. A ticket for the press. Beautiful engraving, minor wear, twenty bucks: Sold. (I don’t collect tickets, but I have a few.)

  Go forward ten years; my dad is getting ready to move from the house where I grew up, and we’re going through the drawers. Manila envelopes of things Mom saved. Grandma’s farm diary from the 1930s and ’40s. (Laconic to a fault: weather, condition of the crops, social notes. I kept hoping I’d find “Helen Gunderson came over with laudanum, day spent in fairyland.” But no.) Bank books from institutions long-ago gathered into great impersonal conglomerates. Newspaper clippings Dad saved because he was the subject of the story: Father and son enlist on the same day; local fuel-oil truck struck at intersection; fire consumes loading dock at West Fargo station; local man catches robbers.

  Eh? Sure enough: Here’s a clipping from the Fargo Forum detailing how a local businessman, concerned about pilfering at his warehouse, waited in the office with an employee and loaded shotguns. Check the date: Mom’s home on a hot July night, eight months along with me. The thieves showed up for a third night running—Dad hits the lights and walks out and KABOOM—fires one off overhead to lay down the plot for the rest of the evening. One of the crooks runs the odds and drops right there; the other flees. When his confederate gives him up, the cops go to his house, where his wife insists, “He’s nowhere, sir, haven’t seen him all night.” Dirty boot-prints lead to the closet. Off he goes.

  What a tale! I flip open the laptop, Google the names: One of the miscreants went on to a life of petty crime—and his son was killed by his wife and her lover for the insurance money decades later. I’m stunned. You never told us about this, I tell Dad.

  He smiled. Never came up, I guess.

  Can I have this clipping? Sure.

  I don’t collect newspapers, but I have a few. My thinking went like this: At some point the entire paper’s archives will be digitized, and this yellowed, flaking scrap will be redundant, but there’s a difference between looking at a piece of scanned microfilm on a screen and holding in your hand the article cut out by the wife who was proud of her husband even though he could have gotten himself killed. I set it aside and looked at the next item in the stack.

  It’s an 1892 Minneapolis convention ticket. Identical to the one I bought ten years before, except that it’s a visitor’s pass. My great-grandfather had attended. This was the sole proof of his trip, which, I knew, ended at a train station in Minneapolis that no longer exists. Yet I visit that part of town from time to time; I walk where he walked. I got married on an island in the Mississippi close to the place where the convention was held. I work for the newspaper whose office would have been one of the buildings he saw when he left the station.

  Can I have this ticket? Shrug. Sure.

  The two tickets sit side by side on my shelf in the closet where I keep the things that matter. I know what they mean, separately and together. I’m the link between the two. I gave meaning to the objects that they couldn’t express on their own. I h
ave explained this meaning to my daughter.

  “These are somewhat valuable, and they are family heirlooms, which is why after I’m gone I want them to go the historical society, because otherwise a jittery boyfriend with rings in his ears and tattoos will make you sell them to get money for his demo record. Really, I would have thought you could see through him.”

  “Dad. Please.”

  “I’m just telling you now. They’re pieces of history that belong with appreciative curators, and I need to know you’re not going to be standing there while the boyfriend asks the pawnshop manager what he can get for them. He’s going to think they’re worth a lot because they’re old, but really, forty bucks, tops. You don’t want to get that sick feeling that you’re selling off your dad’s collection to make your boyfriend happy, and that feeling ought to tell you he’s not right for you.”

  “Does your valuable collection include the Starbucks cards?”

  “That’s completely different.”

  Sigh. I don’t particularly like Starbucks. I have no interest in plastic-card collection. But these cards are commonplace ephemeral objects, the daily detritus, discarded because they’re numerous and have no value once the numbers have been logged into a smartphone app or spent in a store. But someone will want them, someday.

  “That’s hoarding,” she says. Well, it’s not hoarding if the cards are in shoebox #14 on the shelf in the closet, okay? I have three thousand matchbooks because someone, somewhere, set them aside. There’s a website devoted to old candy wrappers that shows us the style of bygone candy because someone set them aside. I couldn’t care less about gift cards, but someone will. It’s not hoarding. It’s philanthropy.