The P Game

I am putting this post up here for reference, lest it trip spam/NSFW filters at Obsidian Wings. Contains accurate and frank descriptions of middle-school vocabulary, so may be NSFW depending on your workplace.

In a family dinnertime conversation about riding the schoolbus, the children (currently in high school and college) mentioned "The Penis Game". "Say what?" we said. And so they described it:

Kids A and B are sitting close to each other.

A (whispers): Penis!

B (slightly louder): Penis!

A (slightly louder yet): Penis!

B (another notch louder): Penis!

This witty entertainment continues, getting progressively louder, until the players either break down into helpless laughter (first one to break loses), or they're stopped by the bus driver or other authority figure.

The game is played by both boys and girls, and is a characteristically middle-school activity -- by the lofty age of 15 it's lost most of its charm. But before then, as Sprog #1 explained:

The boys on the bus go penis, penis, penis
Penis, penis, penis
Penis, penis, penis
The boys on the bus go penis, penis, penis
All through the town

-- sung in the most weary and disgusted tones you can imagine.

Parallels to media coverage of the Anthony Weiner scandal may occur to you.

Links and online reading

Harry at Crooked Timber posted about Nicholas Carr's latest luddite rant, against links. I commented:

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I don't have time for the full critique here, but Carr is 100% wrong, Rosenberg mostly wrong.

How can I tell? Because neither of them cites (or links to) Jakob Nielsen, the Guru of Web Usability studies, including how people actually read online. Nielsen's most important discovery for this discussion: outbound hypertext links increase your credibility:

Links to other sites show that the authors have done their homework and are not afraid to let readers visit other sites.

Writers -- like Carr -- who don't link are making their arguments from authority: "trust me because I'm me!" The Web is *ideal* for scholarship because it makes it extremely easy for readers to check that writers have in fact done their homework, that they're not just outgassing.

Emma in Sydney's project is a superb example of how good linking can be done. The only thing comparable I've seen on any high-profile site is Frank Rich's column at the NY Times, which recently started using popup-explicated links.

John @12:

if we (writers and readers collectively) were only allowed One Book, that book would be written and read very carefully

-- and as nick s points out @18, that reading and writing would *become a hyptertext*, so Carr would *still* be unhappy*. No, he wants the Authority of the Author to be an absolute monarchy: only one Book, read only one way, and no passing notes, neither.

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Harry @23:

I just ignore it until I have i) figured out whether what I am reading is worth reading to the end and if so then ii) have actually read to the end. Isn’t that what everyone does?

Assuming you are not being sarcastic, the answer is: No.

In the first place, as Nielsen shows, the nature of those links is a major factor in most readers’ decisions about whether the text is worth reading to the end. The limiting factor in online life is human attention: it is the most precious, unexpandable resource. Thus, the decision “is this worth reading to the end?” is a much more crucial one for an online reader than for a hard-copy reader, and she’s going to be much more cynical and distractable (= motivated by her own agenda, not the author’s) than Carr would like.

Hookups and "Counts As Sex"

Oliver Wang (subbing for Ta-Nehesis Coates) posted about sociological research on hookup culture. I commented:

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Thank you for shedding a little clarity and rationality on the topic.

One of the things baffling me, though, is that I don't know what you (or the researchers) mean by "having sex". The contexts.org article, for instance, includes under "hooking up" activities that in my distant youth were called "making out", which was definitely *not* classified as "having sex".

Similarly, I have a lot of trouble with remembering who is supposed to be "receiving" oral sex, and wish people would just say "fellatio" when that's all they mean. It's extremely difficult, reading this material, to figure out who is actively trying to have an orgasm with whom and how often, which I figured was the Gold Standard of When It Counts, but maybe I'm just a fogey.

In "This Side of Paradise", doesn't Fitzgerald talk about a culture of "petting" and "petting parties" in the 1920s? -- which sounds a lot like hooking up to me, if hooking includes what us fogeys called "second base".