Garrison Keillor: What were you thinking?
Dec. 2nd, 2008 09:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spicedogsThis is a really funny essay. It talks about the recent men's-room sex between two drunken football fans. What were they thinking? They weren't thinking and Keillor nicely makes fun of the situation.
Midwesterners usually go south to misbehave, not to the handicapped stall in a Minneapolis men's room at halftime.
Dec. 3, 2008 | I've been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men's room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of your mind. And the environmental impact is slight. Some paper towels, that's about it.
The Iowans apparently did not know each other until they got really, really drunk and ran into each other on the concourse. Probably their shared Iowaness in enemy territory was an initial bond -- Minnesotans tell the same jokes about Iowans that used to be told about Polish people -- and they were a little happy about the fact that the Hawkeyes were walloping the Gophers (55-0 was the final score), and somehow the 38-year-old woman and the 26-year-old guy wound up in a handicapped stall in a men's room and had intercourse, which drew a crowd who cheered them on.
They were interrupted by a security man who spotted two pairs of feet under the partition and saw underwear on the floor and called police, who arrested them for indecent conduct, a misdemeanor, and released the male perp to the custody of his girlfriend and the woman to her husband. That is mostly all we know, except that the woman has told reporters, "It's ruined my life," which is pretty much what a nice Midwestern lady should say after she's gotten drunk and had sex in public with a complete stranger. It shows good manners. You can't have drunken public sex with a stranger and say, "I don't know what got into me!" You are supposed to sit in the ashes and rock back and forth for a while.
Midwesterners have always needed to go elsewhere to misbehave and so when people head south to Florida or Arizona in January, purportedly for the warm weather, we know better. "Warm weather for what?" we ask. Public sex, most likely.
This is one area of life that American literature needs to explore. You read about the Iowans and you think, "I would never do such a thing as that. No no no no no no no." And it's the job of the novelist to create empathy and to write this story so as to put the reader into the toilet stall with a heart full of passion and his or her drawers on the floor.
I'm going to put them at a Minnesota Orchestra concert instead of a football game. He's there with a girlfriend he's trying to break up with. He's had two glasses of Merlot at dinner. Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is the opener, and at intermission he brushes against a lady in the lobby and quickly apologizes, and she says, "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" He is. Men always are. "I said to myself during the Stravinsky," she says, "that I would offer myself to the first man who touches me." This is OK by him.
She leads him into the women's john and into a stall, and she says, "I never did this before," and he says he never did either, and the two of them have wild sex and it is magical, it is stupendous, until 50 women waiting for a stall start shrieking, "Hey, there was a line!" and pound on the door and security comes running and pulls them apart and they're arrested, and there's shame, of course, being led by police through a crowd of the sensitive and genteel ("They did what? You're kidding!"), but also pride -- they crossed a line and it feels brave and good and also it's their ticket to something better. He was National Guard but now he's thinking about acting school. She's thinking she'll write a memoir called "Lavatory of Love."
All very believable, but there's one detail I can't quite get my head around. Midwesterners I know would not, even if three sheets to the wind and overwhelmed by hormones, use a handicapped stall to have sex in, just as we would never have sex in a car parked in a handicapped spot. It's a basic taboo. The adultery we cannot approve of, the drunkenness is immature, sex with a stranger is definitely sketchy, but the handicapped stall is beyond the pale. As your mother would say, "How could you do it? What were you thinking?"
Source: Salon.com
Midwesterners usually go south to misbehave, not to the handicapped stall in a Minneapolis men's room at halftime.
Dec. 3, 2008 | I've been trying not to think about the man and woman from Iowa who had sex in the men's room at the Iowa-Minnesota football game in Minneapolis a week ago and to think about the environment instead, or the future of American fiction, but it is hard to put something like lavatory sex out of your mind. And the environmental impact is slight. Some paper towels, that's about it.
The Iowans apparently did not know each other until they got really, really drunk and ran into each other on the concourse. Probably their shared Iowaness in enemy territory was an initial bond -- Minnesotans tell the same jokes about Iowans that used to be told about Polish people -- and they were a little happy about the fact that the Hawkeyes were walloping the Gophers (55-0 was the final score), and somehow the 38-year-old woman and the 26-year-old guy wound up in a handicapped stall in a men's room and had intercourse, which drew a crowd who cheered them on.
They were interrupted by a security man who spotted two pairs of feet under the partition and saw underwear on the floor and called police, who arrested them for indecent conduct, a misdemeanor, and released the male perp to the custody of his girlfriend and the woman to her husband. That is mostly all we know, except that the woman has told reporters, "It's ruined my life," which is pretty much what a nice Midwestern lady should say after she's gotten drunk and had sex in public with a complete stranger. It shows good manners. You can't have drunken public sex with a stranger and say, "I don't know what got into me!" You are supposed to sit in the ashes and rock back and forth for a while.
Midwesterners have always needed to go elsewhere to misbehave and so when people head south to Florida or Arizona in January, purportedly for the warm weather, we know better. "Warm weather for what?" we ask. Public sex, most likely.
This is one area of life that American literature needs to explore. You read about the Iowans and you think, "I would never do such a thing as that. No no no no no no no." And it's the job of the novelist to create empathy and to write this story so as to put the reader into the toilet stall with a heart full of passion and his or her drawers on the floor.
I'm going to put them at a Minnesota Orchestra concert instead of a football game. He's there with a girlfriend he's trying to break up with. He's had two glasses of Merlot at dinner. Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" is the opener, and at intermission he brushes against a lady in the lobby and quickly apologizes, and she says, "Are you thinking the same thing I am?" He is. Men always are. "I said to myself during the Stravinsky," she says, "that I would offer myself to the first man who touches me." This is OK by him.
She leads him into the women's john and into a stall, and she says, "I never did this before," and he says he never did either, and the two of them have wild sex and it is magical, it is stupendous, until 50 women waiting for a stall start shrieking, "Hey, there was a line!" and pound on the door and security comes running and pulls them apart and they're arrested, and there's shame, of course, being led by police through a crowd of the sensitive and genteel ("They did what? You're kidding!"), but also pride -- they crossed a line and it feels brave and good and also it's their ticket to something better. He was National Guard but now he's thinking about acting school. She's thinking she'll write a memoir called "Lavatory of Love."
All very believable, but there's one detail I can't quite get my head around. Midwesterners I know would not, even if three sheets to the wind and overwhelmed by hormones, use a handicapped stall to have sex in, just as we would never have sex in a car parked in a handicapped spot. It's a basic taboo. The adultery we cannot approve of, the drunkenness is immature, sex with a stranger is definitely sketchy, but the handicapped stall is beyond the pale. As your mother would say, "How could you do it? What were you thinking?"
Source: Salon.com
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:33 am (UTC)Yeah, it sounds like a rationalization, but when you think about it being drunk does not grant categorical consent to have sex, but it does put a woman in position to say yes when she wouldn't or worse, be unable to say no or fight back. The woman says she has no recollection of the event, which would be true if she drank too much, which is possible at a sporting event.
Two thought you can take away here, are 1, Obviously don't drink so much you end up become the object of men's sport and 2, just because a woman is drop-dead drunk, it's not OK to use her for sex, even if she says it is.
Opinions about this among people I know has tended to run along gender lines. Which makes you realize how women are regarded by society.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:41 am (UTC)True, but that does give a man permission to force her to have sex with him.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:44 am (UTC)You said " … she should have known better as to when to stop drinking …"
And I replied that that was true, but it doesn't give the man permission to force her to have sex with her, or maybe just simply push her into the restroom stall and have at her.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:19 am (UTC)There's a lot to this story that makes me suspicious. The woman was an administrator of an assisted-living center. So she held a responsible job. She was fired of course after word got out. She also had three kids. So you wonder what was going on with her to do what she did? It doesn't make sense.
There's a lot of detail missing from this story, which tells me that it's something about which you can't just jump to conclusions. There are a lot of explanations that range from baffling to ridiculous to incredulous, and any one of them could be true.
At first I was like everyone else who thought it was a crazy story, but after my friend began to go over some of the points, I had to admit she had some valid points, and you can't just conclude it was two nut jobs caught in the handicapped stall and that it's more than news for our amusement.
no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:22 am (UTC)