Author: Mary Anne

Researchers just conducted a timely new study that might make the holidays a little merrier this year - especially if, like me, you stress out over gift giving.  A recent study in the Psychology Science journal points to some keys to taking the stress out of gift giving.

First - does gifting always require shopping?  It must, right because re-gifting is bad form and insulting.  Well, it turns out that's not as true as it used to be.  The Wall Street Journal did a piece about the study, and here's what it said about re-gifting:

Take regifting. That Crock-Pot your well-meaning aunt gave you last year that you are shamefully contemplating wrapping up for your dear neighbor this year? Research shows you can go right ahead and regift it, shame intact. Your aunt probably won't mind.

Many people shy away from regifting, or hide the fact they are doing it, out of fear the original giver of the item could be offended. Don't worry, says a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science. The person who first gave the item is less likely to be offended than the regifter expects.

Recent research suggests that the "new" wears off a marriage after about 2 years.

In a hands-across-the-ocean project, American and European researchers tracked 1,761 people who managed to stay married for 15 years.  The results?  Their newlywed burst of "happy, happy, joy, joy" wore off after 2 years.   Given the tragically high divorce rates, I'd love to know many people were in the initial group to allow researchers to end up with a sample of 1,761 still-marrieds-after-2-years.  I'm betting - a lot.

The new love, the "passionate love" changed into "companionate love" after a couple of years.  That meant that the state of intense desire and attraction became a state of deep affection and connection.  The author of the NY Times op-ed, Sonja Lyubomirsky, suggests the transition occurs because humans are prone to "hedonic adaptation" - meaning that humans tend to take positive experiences for granted.  Ms. Lyubomirsky states as follows:

Sexual passion and arousal are particularly prone to hedonic adaptation. Laboratory studies in places as far-flung as Melbourne, Australia, and Stony Brook, N.Y., are persuasive: both men and women are less aroused after they have repeatedly viewed the same erotic pictures or engaged in similar sexual fantasies. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt; but research suggests that it breeds indifference. Or, as Raymond Chandler wrote: “The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine.”

There are evolutionary, physiological and practical reasons passionate love is unlikely to endure for long. If we obsessed, endlessly, about our partners and had sex with them multiple times a day — every day — we would not be very productive at work or attentive to our children, our friends or our health. (To quote a line from the 2004 film “Before Sunset,” about two former lovers who chance to meet again after a decade, if passion did not fade, “we would end up doing nothing at all with our lives.” ) Indeed, the condition of being in love has a lot in common with the state of addiction and narcissism; if unabated, it will eventually exact a toll.

I agree with much of the author's premise -- but I very much DISAGREE with her conclusion.  The intense, passionate characteristics of what the piece calls "new love" should only devolve permanently if it's more lust than love.  Real love - the enduring kind- is more like the ocean.  Life and its complications may intervene and moods may rise and fall.  All of that will - at times -  make the water choppy and rough.  There will be long sunny days where the water runs smooth.  But always, always, there will be the waves -- those events that kindle the spark and send you towering high above that normal, level water.

I was glad to see one finding of the study, though:  researchers found that the rush of newlywed love is often repeated when a couple reaches the empty nest stage.  See, that's because the love didn't devolve and dwindle - it was always there.

As to the author's other point -- Is love an addiction?  She likens it to narcissism or self-love but to me, that's the opposite of romantic love.  Romantic love is putting someone else's interests and desires first.  It's excellent training for becoming a parent, you know.  Mother Nature is smart that way.  The concept of caring that much for someone else doesn't remind me of addiction.  It reminds me more of dedication or devotion - like that moment when one of a person's talents connects with a way to use them to build a career.  I can see that addictive love would be prone to dwindle until it died, but dedicated, devoted love will continue like the roots of a tree - providing strength and support and nurture.

Real love isn't an addiction - it's a growth hormone!

Suzanne Venker's recent provocative piece for Fox News suggests that there is a war on men. This prompted Lauren Boyle of The Huffington Post to suggest that the idea of a war on men is actually a war on women.

Hanh?

While I was preoccupied with Thanksgiving, airplane flights and end of the year insanity getting underway at my office - DID SOMEONE DECLARE WAR ON MEN? Oh, I'd heard that there was allegedly a war on women earlier.  I never quite figured that one out either.  Birth control isn't an issue for me any longer and I've already reproduced (twice - may the Great Duck save the universe).

From reading the Fox piece, I gather that the war on men was caused by women getting college degrees and going to work.  Women became so delighted at the joyous delirium that is a 9 to 5 existence that they didn't want men to protect them or provide for them any longer.  Yet, at the same time, the abundant ecstasy of life lived at the whim of a paycheck and a boss also prompted women to be pissed off at men.  As a result, men have decided they don't want to get married anymore.

The Huff Po piece says that the notion that successful women emasculate men is, itself, a war on women.  Ms. Boyle's Huffington piece summarizes Ms. Venker's Fox piece like this:

So, if you're keeping score at home, Venker has 1) implied that young men are pathetic, 2) flat-out stated that they don't want to compete with women and 3) suggested that, if not corralled, all men want is sex and meaningless relationships without responsibility. If that isn't offensive to men, what is?

So my question is this - if there's a war on men and a war on women, who is leading the battle?  The last time I checked, there wasn't a third gender choice.  Maybe it's all a dastardly duck plot.  If the men and the women eliminate each other, then ducks can rule the world.

The likeliest truth is this --  there is no war.

I've never felt that men wanted to oppress me.  Heck, I've spent years trying to get Mr. Duck to forbid me to work and force me to pad around the house barefoot.  He refuses to cooperate.  He just wants me to be happy.  Go figure - right?

We don't need a war - we've got economic reality.  These days, whoever is lucky enough to have a job goes out and does it.  And there are a horde of stressed folks who can't pay their bills and worry about their kids getting educations and jobs.   Yes, there are men who would like to have better jobs or different jobs or even - a job.  But I've not heard them blaming women for the absence of a rosier economy.   Other than the general situation, the thing oppressing men and women the most right now are employers who no longer value experience as much as a piece of paper.

Neither of my diplomas (college and law school) taught me how to do my job.  Both of those programs taught me how to think.  I had to learn how to work on my own and it's taken me many, many years to acquire the knowledge rattling around my head.  Yet employers today don't value all those years of experience - they'd rather hire people with the worthless pieces of paper.   I've reached a point where I have both, but lots of folks started at a job and worked their way up and those folks may not have the paper.  When did knowing how to do a job become unimportant?

No, there is no war on either sex - there is a war on the underlying values that made America great. Experience and loyalty are considered not just unimportant, but irrelevant.   It doesn't matter if you can do the job - it matters if someone gave you a piece of paper saying you can do the job.

What caused us to reach this hideous point?  It's our insistence that fast matters more than thorough.  Yes, Virginia - that's how we got here.  I'm not really sure how to fix it except by re-focusing, long term, on what actually matters instead of what looks like it should matter.

All this talk of war means that we need a concrete someone to blame.  We want to be able to take out our troubles on somebody and if you're a man, you blame the women.  If you're a woman, you blame the men.  But we'll need both sexes to fix this mess.  So, I say, let's pick something else to blame.

You know what might make us feel better?  Let's go shoot our microwaves.

UPDATE:  THE 2012 PRIZE WAS AWARDED DECEMBER 4TH.  IT WENT TO NANCY HUSTON - SEE EXCERPT BELOW.

MS. HUSTON REACTED TO THE AWARD:

In a statement, she said she hoped the win would "incite thousands of British women to take close-up photos of their lovers' bodies in all states of array and disarray."

Previous winners of the Bad Sex in Fiction award include Norman Mailer, Jonathan Littell and Sebastian Faulks. In 2008, John Updike was given the lifetime achievement award.

*********************************************

 

 

What do Tom Wolfe, Nicholas Coleridge, Nancy Huston and Paul Mason have in common? They're a few of the authors shortlisted for the 2012 Bad Sex In Fiction Award.

It's a list a writer really doesn't want to make.

The award is by Britain's Literary Review.  It's a Razzie of sorts for the "most embarrassing passage of sexual description in a novel."  The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to and discourage the "crude, badly written, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel."

This year, the publication notes that:

In a year in which the country's obsession with mummy porn, red rooms of pain and Christian Grey has reached fever pitch, Literary Review is proud to continue its gentle chastisement of the worst excesses of the literary novel.

Ahh, but Great Britain's best known sexual export, the "Fifty Shades of Grey" trilogy didn't make the list.  Why?  It wasn't eligible.  The prize does not cover erotic literature.

Last year's prize was won by David Guterson for his "Ed King,"  published by Bloomsbury.  This year's shortlisted novels include:

• The Yips by Nicola Barker
• The Adventuress by Nicholas Coleridge
• Infrared by Nancy Huston
• Rare Earth by Paul Mason
• Noughties by Ben Masters
• The Quiddity of Will Self by Sam Mills
• The Divine Comedy by Craig Raine
• Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe

What does it take to make the list?  Peruse these excerpts from the nominated novels:

Rare Earth by Paul Mason: “She breathed hot into his neck and he plunged three rough fingers down the front of her jeans, making her squeak. She had never tried wu-wei in this situation before and Khünbish, hairy and slightly paunchy, she noticed now that he had his shirt off, was generating slightly more karmic energy than she had anticipated.”

Noughties by Ben Masters: “We got up from the chair and she led me to her elfin grot, getting amongst the pillows and cool sheets. We trawled each other’s bodies for every inch of history. I dug after what I had always imagined and came up with even more. She stroked my outlines in perfect synchrony until I was febrile in her hands, willingly guided elsewhere.”

Infrared by Nancy Huston: “He runs his tongue and lips over my breasts, the back of my neck, my toes, my stomach, the countless treasures between my legs, oh the sheer ecstasy of lips and tongues on genitals, either simultaneously or in alternation, never will I tire of that silvery fluidity, my sex swimming in joy like a fish in water…”

The Adventuress: The Irresistible Rise of Miss Cath Fox by Nicholas Coleridge: “In seconds the duke had lowered his trousers and boxers and positioned himself across a leather steamer trunk, emblazoned with the royal arms of Hohenzollern Castle. ‘Give me no quarter,’ he commanded. ‘Lay it on with all your might.’”

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe: “Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw — all this without a word.”

The Yips by Nicola Barker: “She smells of almonds, like a plump Bakewell pudding; and he is the spoon, the whipped cream, the helpless dollop of warm custard. She steams. He applauds, his tongue hanging out (like a bloodhound espying a raw chop in a cartoon).”

The Divine Comedy by Craig Raine: “And he came. Like a wubbering springboard. His ejaculate jumped the length of her arm. Eight diminishing gouts. The first too high for her to lick. Right on the shoulder.”

The Quiddity of Wilf Self by Sam Mills: “Down, down, on to the eschatological bed. Pages chafed me; my blood wept onto them. My cheek nestled against the scratch of paper. My cock was barely a ghost, but I did not suffer panic.”

Once again, this year, I can breathe easy because my books escaped nomination.  Then again, Erika Leonard's (EL James) work escaped too, so I'm certainly in good company.  My work is romance rather than erotica, so it would technically be eligible, but the award seems to focus on the literary "greats" who make the mistake of grubbing in the dirt with lesser writers, like a certain Duck Lady, who is a grubber from way back.

The winner of the prize will be announced December 4th.

Married?  In a committed relationship that you'd like to keep committed?  Forget hairspray - bring on the oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a hormone made in the brain's hypothalamus.  It triggers childbirth, helps with breastfeeding and - apparently - promotes togetherness and fidelity.    A new study involved a group of 86 heterosexual men with an average age of 25.  Researchers dosed the guys with either oxytocin or a placebo to study the effects.  And what were they?

Men in committed relationships who got the morning spritz of oxytocin kept a greater physical distance when approaching or being approached by a woman they considered attractive. It had no effect on the single fellows nor did the oxytocin effect the distance men kept between themselves and other men.

"Because oxytocin is known to increase trust in people, we expected men under the influence of the hormone to allow the female experimenter to come even closer, but the direct opposite happened," study leader Rene Hurlemann, of the University of Bonn, in Germany, said in a journal news release.

The findings suggest that oxytocin may help men remain faithful to their female partners.

I've always had particular fears about Mr. Duck and red-headed women.  Why red-heads?  Does jealousy need a reason?  I'd be equally unhappy with him hooking up with a blonde, a brunette or a woman with purple and green locks.

This only means one thing............  I may have to do something drastic like, alter a morning ritual at the Duck Pond.  In the morning Mr. Duck and our littlest duckling (he's a high school kid but will always be my baby) venture back to the bedroom where I'm making myself look semi-human.  They kiss me goodbye before heading out into the wide world. Sometimes, they arrive as I have hairspray in hand.

I'm thinking I could fix up a label for the oxytocin that says something like "Forever - Hold Hairspray" and accidentally keep it in my hand whilst giving Mr. Duck his morning smooch.  Now, if I can only figure out a way to spray it up his nose without him noticing.

I suppose I could deploy a curvy red-head.  That might keep Mr. Duck from noticing anything, including a nuclear explosion.  But it seems  counterproductive somehow, doesn't it?

I have a political point of view and, yes, I voted.  However, this column is not about politics.  It's not about the sky falling because one party lost nor is it about eternal sunshine because the other party won.  This post is about something much closer to home.  It's about what I learned from the election that I can use to win at marketing my books.

President Obama ran a very smart campaign emphasizing bullet point messaging and images.  His talking points were easy to tweet and the photos were easy to share.  Both he and Mr. Romney could - and surely did - give lengthy speeches.  But President Obama's speeches emphasized those bullet points and then explained the meaning of each.  But you know what?  The meaning didn't matter.  The messaging was in the bullet points.  It was in the photos emphasizing the bullet points.   And those bullet points?  They could all be easily condensed into 140 characters or less.

Yes, America.  IMHO, We've just witnessed the first Twitter Election.

...continue reading "What The Election Should Teach Us About Marketing"