Believe me, I more than anyone understand the impulse to titter about this story, but you should just remind yourself that this a is legitimate medical breakthrough that will save the lives of thousands of people and that while it is only natural to face your discomfort with feces by attempting to disarm it (the feces) with humor, saying something like “The front page of today’s New York Times is covered in doody,” is neither mature nor appropriate, so don’t do it. Anyway, you should print this out and read it later. Like, when you’re on the toilet. Hahaha, get it? Gah.

Have you checked your girlfriend today?

It’s trivia night at the Transit Museum. This will not be wussy trivia, people. This is for real. Also Pretty Yende makes a rare NYC appearance at the Met, Adam Mansbach takes McNally Jackson, and the Future of Film Criticism (deserves caps) is decided at the Tribeca Cinemas.

Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. “Does your soul ever feel, you know, not so fresh?”

Dear Polly,

I finally garnered the courage to write to you about my particular problem, and I hope you can shed some of your wisdom on the situation.

Ever since the 6th grade, people have been asking me if I’m gay. Back then, the other kids thought any person who was any bit different from them was gay, and attached a bad meaning to the word. I’ll be the first to say that I’ve never been the most “masculine” individual. I love to read and write, and a lot of what I read is somewhat romantic. My iPod is full of Ellie Goulding, Florence + The Machine and Norah Jones, but utterly lacking in Korn, Metallica or Aerosmith. I love to cook, and have been singing in school choruses since 4th grade. I’ve never liked violent video games or talking about sex. I can kind of see where they got their opinions of me, but it made me enormously self-conscious. When I got to high school, the asking increased, as people noticed when I discovered fan fiction, the piano, and numerous other “non-masculine” things. I realized after a while that most of the people asking me were genuinely curious, and it made me even more self-conscious. I found a great girl sophomore year and we dated up until senior year, but the asking still continued, some of which was coming from my closest friends.

In high school, I tried as hard as I could to rid myself of the label people had given me. I joined both the football and hockey teams. I tried my hand at Call of Duty. I quit the chorus and playing piano. Unfortunately, no matter how hard I tried, people would still assume and ask. It came to a point junior year that I had to have a “talk” with my football coach, since he had caught wind of the rumors and wanted to make sure it was okay that I was surrounded by men all the time. It also didn’t really help my case that my best friend came out that he was gay senior year.

I left for college far away from home, hoping to maybe get a fresh start. I rejoined the chorus and began playing piano again, while joining the hockey team at the university, and I met my amazing girlfriend in the chorus and we have been dating since August. However, people I had barely come into contact with began walking up to me and asking if I was gay. It still really hurt, but I tried to shrug it off as best I could. The asking just kept coming, and it has now come to the point where I had a talk with my parents over Christmas about how “they will always love me, no matter how I live my life.” I have had enough.

My question for you is: is there anything I can do or change about myself that will stop all of this asking? How can I change the impressions I give on people in that context? And if nothing, am I really gay? I’ve never liked men like that, but you never know. Please help.

Had Enough

Dear Had Enough,

We all have lots of reasons for wanting other people to be something other than what they really are. Some of the men who keep asking you about your sexuality are probably just attracted to you. Some of the women are hoping you’ll be the gay confidant of their dreams, or maybe they want to be the one who gracefully ushers you out of the closet. Your parents, on the other hand, are just trying to be good parents.

We all have lots of reasons for wanting to be something other than what we really are, too. I went through a phase where I kept getting hit on by beautiful women who assumed I was a lesbian. My boyfriend at the time had never managed to attract such pretty women, so he wanted to live vicariously by encouraging me to encourage them. The initial titillation was always fueled by boozy banter, but it inevitably gave way to awkwardness and a complete absence of desire on my part, paired with the uncomfortable feeling that I was expected to play the butchy conquistador. Oh sweet god, the panic of that! As badly as I wanted to be a devil-may-care bisexual, I was just a very straight woman who not only wasn’t remotely interested in naked women, but absolutely hated being cast as the lanky, boyish heroine in these scenarios. (I also felt horribly guilty when I’d get a chatty, hopeful email the next day that sounded like every chatty, hopeful email I’d ever sent to a man.)

Although my whole bisexual experiment was an abject failure, I learned a lot from it. 1) Some people are just flat-out straight. Disappointingly enough, I am one of them. 2) Chatty, hopeful emails have an uncanny way of transforming indifference into repulsion. 3) There’s nothing quite as unnerving as feeling misunderstood sexually. 4) People anxious to inform you of what you are usually aren’t the best listeners when it comes to discussing how you actually feel inside.

So there are two elements in play here. There’s the impression people have of you, and then there’s how you feel about yourself inside. Somehow, these two things have become muddled for you, and I’m not sure why. While I can totally empathize with feeling misunderstood, it’s hard to believe that you JUST want me to tell you how to “act straighter.” Because acting like a straight man is really easy. Just try to think and move like a slow animal, one that’s a little angry. Look people right in the eyes, yes, but let your eyes reflect a glint of disdain and disinterest. Voila, you are straight! (Interestingly, if you’re a women, these same behaviors will make people think you’re gay. In my case, I just happen to be a slow animal who’s a little bit angry and disdainful.)

So there’s your cheap shortcut to dealing with the outside. But what about the inside? Is everything great with your girlfriend, or does this looming question seem to be poisoning everything in your life? Until you know exactly who you are and what you want, until you know how you want to feel (and how you don’t want to feel) and you can say it out loud without shame, sex can feel like an elaborate performance, in which only actors and liars and ghosts show up. That’s how it felt when I was trying to be with women. But sometimes you have to experiment to understand whether you’re lying to yourself or lying to someone else. You have to try a few things before you know what titillates you and what leaves you cold. You have to trust your own instincts and physical reactions. You have to forgive yourself for not living up to your internal fantasy of what you “should” be.

You ask, “If there’s nothing I can do to convince people I’m not gay, then am I really gay?” Clearly, you are whatever you are, no matter what anyone else thinks. On the other hand, Oprah once said that if it looks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it is a duck. (Are we sure that Oprah isn’t a duck?) You say, “I’ve never liked men like that, but you never know.” Well, you do know, eventually. Do you want to find out?

If you do, you might want to consider experimenting a little, to see how it feels. This would require a discussion with your girlfriend, of course. Or maybe you should call your friend from high school and talk to him about it. Or you could talk to some other trusted friend, a good listener who’ll keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions. You could rent When I Knew, the documentary where gay men and women explain how they figured out they were gay.

Duck or no duck, something feels unsettled to you about your identity right now. You’re standing at the precipice of something really big. I don’t know if it’s sexual or not. It could be purely emotional. It could be about balancing the world’s version of you against who you really are. Try to forget what everyone else thinks for a while. Your feelings about yourself are what matter the most. You have to honor what you want, stay as open as you possibly can, be as courageous and as interested in the truth as you possibly can be, and forgive yourself, over and over again, for whatever mistakes you might make along the way. Fuck the spectators. You are the decider. The more true to yourself, to your heart, you are, the more love and guidance and wisdom there is waiting for you.

You know how it feels to wake up in the morning with a song in your head, and you go to the piano and you can play it, and it’s so beautiful it makes you cry? The closer you get to your true self, the more you’ll find yourself in that divine space. In that space, other people’s confusion and labels and noise melt away, and you can see right through to their love for you. That’s where you’re pointed right now. The sky is on your side. Every tree, every blade of grass wants you to be exactly who you are, and nothing less.

Polly

Dear Polly,

It’s sort of difficult to put my problem into words. It’s more a series of questions. And confusions. And I’m probably just fishing for validation. What you should know first of all is that I’m a 14 year old girl and I have no sexual experience whatsoever. My problem is that I’m not sure I even want to.

I always sort of expected that I would grow up and have sex and eventually get married. I’m not exactly squeamish about sex, either. I had a good grasp of what it entailed by the time I was eleven, probably because my parents have a (rather lovely) stance about not interfering when it comes to my internet connection, which they maintain to this day as long as I’m not doing anything illegal. And since joining the fandoms I’ve been exposed to some very explicit smut, het and gay. And that’s kind of great. I’ve never felt traumatized by my knowledge of these things. I even enjoy reading about them, just, I’ve never felt the need to do it myself.

As for masturbation and that, (sorry, this is becoming far more detailed that I’d hoped it would have to be) I’m quite fond of down there and comfortable around it but feeling it is about as pleasant as having a cup of tea in that its familiar, and I feel like, absolutely no need to have someone thrust their dick down it. I guess I can see why others would — I’m sure it’s very intimate and enjoyable, and I think I’ll try it myself when I’m older. But that’s just it. I’m not any more eager to try it for itself (connotations of romance aside) than I am eager to try a really good cheesecake or a restaurant that people have kept recommending to me.

I’ve had crushes on boys before but my idea of a relationship is solely romantic, based around conversation. The only times I want to be close to people are the times I really like their brains.

Sometimes I try and work out whether I’m just missing my episodes of turned-on-ness or whatever, and try and look at boys (and girls) sexually. At the thought of intercourse (I know pretty well how it works, from smut and even video porn I once looked up to try and make myself feel something) there’s just a sort of layer of emptiness where something should be. I don’t feel warm or happy or turned on or even impassioned, just sort of separate.

Last year, I was reading fanfiction when I discovered this idea of ‘asexuality’. These rare sort of people don’t need sex or even want it particularly. Before finding AVEN I had started to think that maybe there was something wrong with me, teens being the age of hormones and all. There are all these people out there the same as me, and some of them the same age and since then I’ve been wondering — maybe that’s how I am too, and it isn’t bad and I’m not ill and I’m not too young. Because I don’t think of other people like that, and I feel fake when I pretend to around my friends.

I’m sorry for all this context, it’s really complicated. My actual question is what I should do. I feel asexual. Would it be absurd to come out when I have so little experience? Should I just keep quiet about it? I find myself sort of acting around my mother when I see attractive men on TV.

I know this is a really simple situation and I have it easier than most. My insides aren’t being chewed up by this and I think my parents would accept it (although they would probably privately discuss it as a ‘phase’.) It’s rarer than being gay or trans, so I feel sort of alienated and like I’d be making a fuss over nothing. I do kind of want to come out and feel like I know myself — but maybe it’s better to just wait and hope it is a ‘phase’?

Is it stupid to identify as something when I am as young as this?

Over-thinking And Uneasy

Dear OAU,

I’d really like to track down your lovely parents and punch them in the face, hard. While I completely understand your curiosity about pornographic stuff (and your gratitude toward your parents for not being overprotective), most adults have pretty good reasons for wanting to keep 14 year olds away from that shit. Understanding sex by watching porn is sort of like playing Call of Duty to find out what it’s like to join the army. Powering down your PS3 doesn’t prepare you for washing real brains and intestines off your boots.

But listen to me now, and listen very, very closely: You are not asexual. And what you’re experiencing is totally normal. You are exactly as uninterested in sex as most 14-year-old girls out there. I don’t care what your friends say. Most of them are just trying to fit in. If I had watched porn when I was 14, I’d probably be a monk right now.

And just so you know, real sex is nothing like porn — that is, if you’re lucky, and don’t find yourself dating some idiot who watches and reads way too much porn, and thus believes that jackhammering away at the same speed for 45 minutes straight is the ultimate test of macho endurance.

Do me a big favor and put all of that out of your mind for a while. You’ll have several decades to sort out sex, but you only have a few more years to be a girl. I hope you’ll be patient. I know that sexual stuff online can be intriguing, but now that you’ve seen it, will you take a little break and, I don’t know, read some good books or watch old episodes of “Kids in the Hall” or research new music? There’s so much other great stuff out there, stuff that will nurture your mind and your soul instead of fucking with your perspective on sex and your body and making you feel self-conscious about being a regular, healthy girl.

Tell your friends the truth: You’re not all fired up to have sex, and that’s perfectly normal. The more you can tell the truth to other people, the more you make it okay for them to tell the truth to you. You’re doing them a favor. I guarantee they’re not as anxious to do the deed as they pretend to be. One of them is, maybe, but the rest are just following the leader. Try to be nice and let your friends be wherever they are. But trust me, you’re not weird. Stop monitoring yourself so closely on this front. The more patient and truthful you are with yourself, the better that part of your life will be when you get there.

It could take five years, eight years. Who knows? Don’t label something that hasn’t even had a chance to develop yet. A lot of those young people who are anxious to call themselves “asexual” are just afraid of feeling like freaks. They want to make sure it’ll be okay if they never feel anything. But by embracing that label too early, they’re cutting themselves off from their own developing feelings. I had a friend who thought she might be asexual for a while, and she avoided dating anyone for almost a decade. It turned out she actually was very passionate — about women. Another friend didn’t feel that sexual until she fell in love with the right man. So keep an open mind, and avoid labels. Anything could happen!

But most of all, take your time! Christ. The kids who hurry, it messes with their heads. There’s nothing worse than going too far and feeling grossed out by it, because you weren’t ready yet. Hang back and let other people explore the frontier. Enjoy where you are right now.

And please, give your parents a swift kick in the shins for me.

Polly

Previously: Ask Polly: Will I Be Alone Forever?

Are you worrying about what the hell is wrong with you? Write to Polly and she’ll worry right along with you — 100% guaranteed!

Heather Havrilesky (aka Polly Esther) is The Awl’s existential advice columnist. She’s also a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of the memoir Disaster Preparedness (Riverhead 2011). She blogs here about scratchy pants, personality disorders, and aged cheeses. Photo by Rishad Daroowala.

★★★ A rim of bright sky to the north, in the morning, made it seem as if the clouds might be going. They reconstituted themselves soon enough, though. The only change from the gray days before was that the old, hard cold was back. Dry skin and a dry cough came to meet it — nothing too awful, yet. Daylight did its ordinary gradual fade out the windows. Joggers and sprinting children were still out on the sidewalks in the evening dark. No, not bad for the depths of the season, if this were the bottom. But at night, from the bedroom windows, came the ticking of something frozen hitting the glass.

Does the modest increase in gun regulation proposed by the White House today seem too crazy to comprehend? Here is how quickly big things can change: In the not so long ago era of Bill Clinton’s second term and “Friends,” when the Drudge Report was what the old people already had as their home page, you could still smoke almost anywhere in California. Restaurants, bars, concert venues, the beach, outside elementary schools. And then the No Smoking laws came to pass, and despite threats of violence by rednecks, within a few months it was all over. Short-lived protests like the “private clubs” that some Central Valley truck stops formed to allow their customers to relax in a haze of cigarette toxins were soon forgotten, just as New York City’s ban on bar smoke went from “Oh no the drunkards are causing trouble in the streets because they have to share a Camel Light or a clove outside” to simply being the way we live now — meaning, the privileged continue to light up in expensive sleazebag discos, while humbler establishments get hassled by the smoking police.

When the bar ban went into effect in 1998, nearly one in five Californian adults smoked cigarettes. Now, it’s closer to one-in-ten, with only 11% of Californians smoking. There were other trends at work, from the higher smoking rates of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe to the crushingly regular recessions to higher taxes per pack, but it is hard to argue with the results of the anti-smoking campaigns. The national percentage for tobacco use is 19%.

As of Tuesday in San Francisco, you also cannot smoke at outdoor public events. There will be signs, and announcements! People will complain, and then in a few months, they’ll quit smoking at outdoor public events. When the will of the populace is formalized into law, it generally works.

Photo by Tinou Bao.

The Questions Following Aaron Swartz’s Death

The suicide of Aaron Swartz last week has brought attention to a lot of things in need of immediate and substantial change: the unchecked power of ambitious, self-serving federal prosecutors; the curious disconnect between the ferocity with which those prosecutors hunted down a 20-something political activist, and their respectful reluctance to disturb the potentates of Wall Street; the absurdity of our current copyright laws; ditto, the outmoded laws still on the books with respect to “hacking.”

There’s also an important point to reiterate. I’ve seen a number of angry commenters on Twitter and elsewhere claiming that JSTOR “has blood on its hands.” This is false. JSTOR declined involvement in the prosecution from the outset, issuing an immediate statement to this effect on its website. JSTOR’s attorney, Mary Jo White (herself a former federal prosecutor), called prosecutor Stephen Heymann and asked him to drop the case, according to Swartz’s lawyer, Elliot Peters; JSTOR’s Heidi McGregor confirmed this by phone.

The culpability of MIT, however, whose network Swartz accessed in order to conduct his maybe-somewhat-illegal-ish download, is a more complicated matter. MIT president L. Rafael Reif announced that the university would investigate its role in the Swartz affair. A number of observers have surmised that without MIT’s eager handing over of evidence to the Feds, the prosecution against Swartz might well have stopped in its tracks; others point out that having once called the Feds in, it might not have been so easy to call them off again.

Many who looked into the case, myself included, simply didn’t believe the government could possibly succeed in its prosecution of Aaron Swartz; learning of the details after his death, I am sorry I dismissed that possibility. Writing in the Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan shed light on Swartz’s exact position:

Swartz’s lawyer said that his team rejected a plea deal which would have put his client behind bars for six months. The deeper issue, one largely ignored by his legion of online surrogates, is made cogently by [the crooked but unrepentant newspaper magnate Conrad] Black [who is in a position to know]: “[In the United States] prosecutors win 95 percent of their cases, 90 percent of those without a trial, and people who exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to go to trial receive more than three times the sentence they receive if they cop a plea, as a penalty for exercising their rights.” In other words, if Swartz wanted to demonstrate his innocence — and potentially not be branded a convicted criminal — those 6 months could have quickly mushroomed into six years.

Beyond this, one must ask what additional pressures a government hell-bent on the prosecution of whistleblowers and hackers might have brought to bear on this fragile young man, who is known to have been a sufferer from depression. How would Swartz, a champion of openness and freedom of information, have stood up to such pressure? A 2011 investigation by the Guardian (“One in four US hackers ‘is an FBI informer’”) concluded that “[c]yber policing units have had such success in forcing online criminals to co-operate with their investigations through the threat of long prison sentences that they have managed to create an army of informants deep inside the hacking community.” Both the FBI and the Secret Service are named in this piece. Marcy Wheeler, who blogs at emptywheel, noted the early involvement of the Secret Service in Swartz’s prosecution in a recent post, raising a point that I hope will get a whole lot of traction in the days to come: “I want to know whether MIT — which is dependent on federal grants for much of its funding–brought in the Secret Service.” I’d also like to know exactly what the Secret Service had to say to Aaron Swartz.

Related: Was Aaron Swartz Stealing?

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman. Photo by Jacob Applebaum.

by Matt Haber

• “She holds out her right arm to show me her tattoo of Marilyn Monroe. All that remains of Marilyn is a few drops of black against skin that is the color the moon possesses in the thin air of northern winters.” — Stephen Marche on Megan Fox, Esquire, February 2013.

• “Her skin is lined and slightly worn and depends on light from other sources — from her eyes, from her smile, even from the hounding incandescence of television.” — Tom Junod on Hillary Clinton, Esquire, February 2008.

• “I can’t help but notice her skin. It’s the smoothest skin I’ve seen outside of a Clinique ad.” — A.J. Jaocbs on Rosario Dawson, Esquire, April 2006.

• “[T]he soft light makes her skin look as creamy as café au lait.” — Leslie Bennetts on Nicole Richie, Vanity Fair, June 2006.

• “[T]he sting of emotion that starts, always, in her nose and restores, instantly, the freshness of her face and the color of her eyes; the shimmer of her skin, which is so white since she’s forsworn the sun that it can light his way in a very dark room….” — Tom Junod on Sharon Stone, Esquire, November 2005.

• “[H]er skin is akin to some sort of dairy product (a pale kind, pick your brand)….” — Bill Zehme on Heather Graham, Esquire, April 2000.

• “She’s wearing gray slacks, black shoes with no socks, and an unbuttoned white man-tailored shirt over a T-shirt so short it reveals the stripe of her belly, which is so pale it’s almost blue, the color of ice milk…. She will clutch at herself self-consciously and twist her body in provocative fashion, or at least in a fashion that lifts the hem of her shirt and reveals the ice-milk border of her belly…. She is painted in four colors, and four only — red, pink, blue, and ice-milk white — and now there was creamy brown froth on her lips, like something left by the tide. She licked it off with her tongue’s dainty pink tip…. Nicole is ice-milk white…. We assumed various positions: head to head, head to feet, curled up, straight out, staring at the ceiling, staring at her, eye to eye, pillow to pillow, her ice-milk belly, her ice-milk ankles.” — Tom Junod on Nicole Kidman, Esquire, August 1999.

• “[Gretchen Mol has] a face like a tournament rose dipped in whipped cream” — Ned Zeman on Gretchen Mol, Vanity Fair, September 1998.

Matt Haber also has some skin.

“A new government survey suggests the number of people seeking emergency treatment after consuming energy drinks has doubled nationwide during the past four years, the same period in which the supercharged drink industry has surged in popularity in convenience stores, bars and on college campuses. From 2007 to 2011, the government estimates the number of emergency room visits involving the neon-labeled beverages shot up from about 10,000 to more than 20,000.”
 — Those corn-syrup/caffeine “sports drinks” are not just making you obese.

Look at this headline, if your faith is strong enough: “Why I Raise My Children Without God.” Whoa, what is going on at CNN.com? Did someone forget that CNN’s job is to protect God from weird blog posts by random moms in Texas? What if a child finds out there’s no God? Oh don’t worry, we’re pretty sure Newtown took care of that, for the current generation of five-year-olds. And now our children supposedly shouldn’t be narcissists? Is that even American, to not think the entire world and also an All-Powerful Deity exists solely to get you certain presents and make you a rapper on reality television someday?

God Teaches Narcissism

“God has a plan for you.” Telling kids there is a big guy in the sky who has a special path for them makes children narcissistic; it makes them think the world is at their disposal and that, no matter what happens, it doesn’t really matter because God is in control. That gives kids a sense of false security and creates selfishness. “No matter what I do, God loves me and forgives me. He knows my purpose. I am special.” The irony is that, while we tell this story to our kids, other children are abused and murdered, starved and neglected. All part of God’s plan, right?

Are you being sarcastic about God, ma’am? On a cable news website?

Perhaps you shouldn’t be a mother after all. Or, you know, perhaps you’re right, and even people still suffering the mentally-crippling cultural delusion of monotheism occasionally wonder if the “plan” of God is simply to ignore us forever while we rape and massacre and bomb each other as our only planet — which God apparently thought was the center of the universe — dries up and burns out and leaves nothing but a road of bones for the Terminator robot tanks to crush.

Still, the CNN web producers are so freaked out over this lady writing free blog content for CNN.com that there’s now a pop-up that informs you the blog post is under review. If you’re brave enough, you can click the OK button and then you will be allowed to see this heresy, for now. But CNN didn’t become the Number Three cable-news network in America by letting people kick around God, so we can only hope this she-witch’s post is removed and replaced with something else, like Wolf Blitzer’s musings on the magic of holograms.

“Next week is 40 years since the landmark abortion-rights decision Roe v. Wade and a new poll shows the majority of people under 30 can’t name what the case was about.”