No Substance in `Sex'

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday September 24, 2000

A POTENTIAL SUITOR recently told me that he is learning a lot about women from HBO's hit series ``Sex and the City.'' I figure he is the sort of person who studied long-term relationships on ``Seinfeld'' and took parenting tips from Al Bundy.

But he's not alone. Judging by the abundance of STC-inspired commentary, led last month by Time magazine's piece on the potential obsolescence of husbands, it does appear that Americans are incorrectly associating the phenomenon of fabulously independent single women with a weekly farce about a coven of post-adolescent New York frat girls.

So here's the reality check. STC, the serial adult sitcom about four single thirty-something women sexing their way through Manhattan, is not a documentary on women, nor has producer Darren Star tapped into a keg of wisdom previously inaccessible to the male viewing population. Most women do not recognize ourselves in these characters, and we hardly revere their trite talk and predictable behavior.

Conversations on penis sizes and shoe sales do not comprise the total topic quotient of the average single woman. Distress over irregularly flavored bodily fluids does not top the luncheon agenda. Career women actually discuss careers. Sexually active singles are not all promiscuous skanks.

Most viewers must know this. I hope. I hope it is glaringly obvious to the majority of HBO subscribers that despite provocative topics, earnest voiceover narratives, and a weekly foursome of prettily knit brows, STC presents one-dimensional women in yet another achingly shallow program about people you wouldn't want to know doing things most people wouldn't do. These are not, after all, likable characters. They sleep with married men. They lie to loyal boyfriends. They dispose of lovers with emphatic speed and cruelty. They laugh at each other and fail to provide support at key moments. Their conversations are a running kiss-and-tell violation of any respectful exchanges that occurred in the privacy of their well-traveled bedrooms.

Did I mention I haven't missed a new episode this year?

I could fabricate a lot of persuasive explanations for my loyal viewership. Political reasons, like my need to know what fallacies are being broadcast about single women so that I may take the offensive road to truth. Cultural reasons, like my need, as a writer, to monitor closely any pop phenomenon that is receiving as much attention as STC. Or I could call it escape, to a happy place where single female columnists make enough money to afford fur coats and diamond studded shoes.

But I'm big enough to speak truth. The same voyeurism that turns necks to rubber at accidents, that accelerates prime time game shows into record popularity, that transforms so-called reality shows into greedy ratings hogs, is the curiosity that compels me to set my VCR every Sunday night at nine. I know it is my love of an entertaining story, my smug belief that I would never stoop so low as STC's characters, and my utter lack of stake in their stories that allows me to be so utterly amused by their weekly self-indulgence and low brow antics.

I watch for the same reason as my pal who planned her last 13 Wednesday nights around ``Survivor'' and who has yet to miss a season of MTV's ``Real World'. ``I love seeing what they'll do,'' she admits. ``I love the conflicts. Anything happens, and none of it's real.''

Indeed, anything can happen, and it makes no difference to her, because she doesn't particularly like them, care about them, or invest emotionally in the outcome. The formats allow her to watch from a distance, without forming pesky attachments to the characters.

Likewise, STC is a lot of fluff, but, wrapped in a deceptively edgy package, I fear the culture at large might be mistaking the facade for substance.

When Time Magazine's James Poniewozik calls the show's conflicts ``real and honest,'' I hope he is not referring to that time when Carrie's married ex-lover assaulted her in an elevator, and she responded by pleading for him to make love to her while her unsuspecting boyfriend waited guilelessly at home. Or when Time writes that STC ``avoids pat sitcom solutions,'' I'm assuming he missed the episode where the only black character to ever penetrate the show -- a godlike hero resembling male perfection -- was disposed of within 15 minutes in a predictable and awkwardly manufactured racial conflict.

There's nothing wrong with watching the televised version of a Jackie Collins novel. We all deserve good escape and relaxation, and whether your preference is watching potential millionaires, survivors, or home-wreckers, I say pop the corn, pour the wine and have at it with as much voyeuristic abandon as you can muster. But please, try to remember that what you're watching is not groundbreaking social commentary.

And if you're particularly gullible, if you wished that sweet Jerry Seinfeld had reconciled with his true love Elaine, please enter the new fall television season at your own risk.

Because with more than a handful of STC imitations cluttering the networks, single-life cliches will abound, and it may be difficult to resist the lure of the absurd. But please try. Otherwise, when you go looking for your own clan of stylishly self-obsessed urban singles with time on their hands and satisfaction on their minds, you may be incredibly disappointed to find that most of us are simply wearing jeans, running errands and working overtime. And that might be too much reality to take.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

The Play That Won't Go Away

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
April 15, 2001

PLEASE MAKE the "Vagina Monologues" go away.

Not because I can't bear the word. Honest. "Vagina" might not fit in as many of my daily sentences as "DSL," "BART" and "cat food," but it receives appropriate mention.

The problem is I can’t bear another round of rave reviews that declare pop-culture genius in Eve Ensler's much-trumpeted collection of essays. I have exceeded my tolerance for women who feel empowered by Monologues that left me feeling partitioned, categorized, and minimized to the extreme.

Going in on a free ticket, the theatrical reading of the essays seemed harmless enough. But while I expected some minor embarrassment at the reputably racy material, I hardly anticipated being so deeply offended by the shallow, dated essays as to withhold my applause and resist the predominantly female audience's baffling insistence on standing ovation.

Enslers' premise, I think, is that, without a comfortable daily place in conversational English, the vagina lacks definitive identity. The solution, she contends, is to fit every sentence with triple vagina occupancy, while personifying the region as a simultaneously sassy, girlish, churlish, victimized, neglected and abused entity. Ensler and her fans apparently believe that if women would only talk about our vaginas, we could reclaim our bodies, enjoy our femininity, and embrace our sexuality.

A radical hypothesis -- if the year was 1971. But unless my history degree was a sham, I'm quite certain female reclamation was a burgeoning priority right around the time my mother wore go-go boots and frosted eye shadow. A shame if the subsequent sexual revolution and women's liberation movements were for naught and that after 30 years, the white liberal women with whom I saw the show still need the same buoying slogans they once chanted on university campuses.

If Ensler's message is that the struggle for female equality and expression continues among different walks of female life, new recommendations for action might be more persuasive than old, tired complaints of pigeon-holing and derision. In fact, it seemed downright irresponsible in the dawning days of the 21st century to amass women for a recap of dismal statistics and international horror stories without providing a single solution for protecting vaginas. Body issues, identity crises, sexism, and sexual abuse all persist, but resurrecting the language of old to battle pressing modern problems is an empty promise. A far better use of time might have included a self-defense class and a seminar on responsible behavior.

But then, it is not action but reaction that comprises the "Vagina Monologues." In every tale of maligned, mistreated, neglected vaginas, circumstances beyond the woman's control had caused her vaginal woes. Someone made her shave, wash, defend, acquiesce. Via motivational rhetoric masked as language, the dominant message was that vaginas are passive reactors.

Which implies that Ensler's audience of hooting, howling vagina liberators think women are passive reactors. But while women in some parts of the world still lack freedom and choice, I am fairly confident that the members of the Bay Area's theater-ticket-holding community enjoy relative control over their own vaginal destinies. Yet if they disagree, if they honestly believe they don't have jurisdiction over their vaginas, you have to wonder what hope they have that their daughters can overcome their own modern problems.

Maybe the audience's lack of problems is actually their problem. Maybe the chronic rhetoric of sisterhood and empowerment is just so enjoyable that they are loathe to relinquish it. Maybe the very women who walked the walk the first time simply haven’t yet written their next act. Maybe they haven't moved with the times and don't realize that, thanks to their efforts the first time around, vaginal dialogues are now just trite.

Before I entered the theater, I considered myself well-rounded and un- compartmentalized. I had enjoyed a full day in my full life, made possible by the combined efforts of many of my most sturdy and least political body parts. Yet when the monologues began, the richness of my day as a young professional in a complex world of both sexes was reduced; I was a vagina.

I thought of my mother's struggle to find balance and success in a male business world and of my own professional efforts to be assertive while still feminine. I shuddered to think how some socially-unenlightened men at work might react to the confusing message that, though women have been representing ourselves as robust, fully-functioning people, a thrilled audience was now boiling female identities back down to our sexes. And I shuddered harder as my eyes fell on women who were cheering old language instead of drawing men into a new loop.

Unfortunately, among all those fans who celebrate the Monologues in cities around the country, I am apparently a minority in my boredom, in my irritation that racy language is confused with groundbreaking substance, and in my contention that the essays highlight the feminist confusion over where to go from here.

And so the Monologues do not appear to be going away anytime soon.

Ensler's project was a creative and interesting contribution. But the eager way audiences and the media embrace the essays indicates that women are looking for something to embrace, that the pickings are slim, and that after all this time, there's still an awful lot of power in saying a provocative word.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Priced Out of the Promised Land

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday July 30, 2000

The water cooler is a depressing place lately. Gone are the days of dot-com envy, protein-diet success stories, and travel logs from the new Ikea. They are yesterday's buzz, made obsolete by the trauma of the current housing market and the frustration it breeds in hard-working, respectably earning Bay Area residents.

When you earn enough money, require the space, and seek the tax benefits and privacy associated with the American Dream, a house seems a logical acquisition, right between a decent car and a decent crib. But the bewildered faces of Bay Area neighbors and colleagues indicate that the puzzle before us is anything but logical. In other professional climates, competitive salaries correlate with the means to buy quality housing. This is hardly the case here, however, and the wear and tear of being priced out of our own lifestyles is beginning to show.

Wherever people gather, the talk seems to hover around three distinct housing scenarios: people who can't afford to buy but can't afford not to, people who buy houses and the sacrifices they make, and people who strike gold by simply posting a ``For Sale'' sign outside their most humble of abodes. From the home-ownership-challenged to the homeowners themselves, horror stories circulate of depressing house-hunts, outrageous prices, marathon bidding, and the utter lack of quality house to which it all leads.

But then the talk changes. As the hopes of finding good deals on local houses ebb, there is a dreamlike, almost spooky quality to the tales that we formerly smug, self-satisfied Northern Californians now tell one another. In a string of too-good-to-be-true reports, we announce that the promised land of affordable quality living is actually . . . somewhere else.

Somewhere, beyond the Bay Area's borders, people are reputed to work eight-hour days, own houses with yards and actually visit those yards now and then because they only work eight-hour days. Somewhere, out in that vast country that we usually consider California garnish, a renter is someone who is saving money for a dream house he or she will actually be able to afford, and ``house poor'' is not the automatic default circumstance of the average home owner. Did you know, we taunt each other, that you can buy a seven-bedroom suburban masterpiece in Maryland for $198,000? Or that $250,000 buys you an entire city block in Maine? Who knows if it's true -- the fact that our interest is piqued and that those of us who fled the East Coast might actually consider returning speaks volumes for the dissatisfaction breeding on our local grounds.

Remember back when Northern California was the promised land?

No more. When you work so hard to achieve and maintain a certain quality of life that you have no quality of life, it may be time to get out. That's certainly what my friends and colleagues are saying. Sure, the region is diverse, sunny and mild, friendly and liberal, but is it worth the sacrifices and frustration? They think not.

Colleen is getting out. She and her partner plan to save enough California-salary cash for a down payment that will buy them a real house -- you know, the hearty, suburban kind with a garage and everything -- back home in the East.

Thomas is getting out. He plans to make himself so vital to his company that they will invite him to telecommute full time -- from a sprawling ranch in Montana.

Michelle's getting out. When her significant other moved out of state, she considered ending the relationship. But when she visited him and saw the hunk of house she could acquire for the cost of a San Francisco bathtub, her love suddenly knew no bounds.

Me, I flirt with the idea. I didn't move back to California looking for a bargain, but I did expect that hard work would equal the means for a decent living situation. Feeling the odds so stacked against that outcome now, I have to wonder if investing in a life here is the most sensible choice for my long-range plans of financial independence and relative freedom and mobility.

Perhaps it is indeed time to pioneer in reverse toward communities that are actually livable. Trouble is, other places are not the Bay Area. They lack the open minds, rich diversity, idyllic weather, picturesque vistas, and -- let's face it -- they lack the glamour. They're not the best place on Earth, they are just part of the scenery.

Yet, faced with the alternative of a self-perpetuating local work-and-spend cycle, the lunchroom lips wonder seriously how much of the Bay Area could only exist here, and how much we could resurrect elsewhere.

Talk is the only cheap thing left in the Bay Area. But if the talkers back their verbal investments with action, no real estate boom will compensate for the record losses we will suffer. I wonder who among us will be left to notice.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

True Romance to Die For

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday February 18, 2001

LADIES, do you want to win his eternal love? To burn your image indelibly into his mind? Want to freeze the moment in time when your love affair was at its most passionate and wondrous? Hollywood has the answer for you in two simple words: Die young.

Winona Ryder did it. So did Charlize Theron -- twice. Both savvy members of the next generation, they are following the hallowed footsteps of such screen legends as Meryl Streep, Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, Susan Sarandon, Ali McGraw, Madonna, and Julia Roberts, all of whom have portrayed tragic, terminally ill female characters who died too young.

That's the way to do it, ladies. When you fall in love, when you are in the throes of that magical honeymoon moment, begin to plan your own demise. Calculate the moment when the your union will climax, when reality, laundry, and morning breath hover somewhere over the horizon, and pull your own plug just prior. Don't risk letting the real world invade and threaten the purity of a new romance. Better to do as they do in the movies and let an untimely death immortalize the moment.

Consider the benefits that Hollywood has been insightful enough to demonstrate. If you die young, you can dedicate your remaining days to teaching your partner about life and showing him everything he'll need after you're gone. You can spend every final gasping breath worrying about him, demonstrating all you've learned in your limited days on earth, regarding him with wisdom beyond your years, demonstrating the power of commitment, but dying before he actually has to act on it.

As an added perk, remember that if you die young, your face can pale and your hair can thin with no worries, because delicate frailty will only become you in your weakened state. A fading complexion at the hands of illness is hardly the aesthetic affront you might inflict upon him if you live long enough to sag and wrinkle naturally. Better to check out in your prime, while your youthful beauty still thrives.

This strategy is gold, ladies. And who should know better than those hedonistic lovers in Hollywood? With a gusto that any red-blooded romantic can admire, our movie stars go at mating with all they've got, yet long-term love affairs are not exactly thriving among our favorite celebrity power couples.

Anyone with radio contact to the broadcast world knows that the marriages of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner and Harrison Ford and his wife Melanie have recently dissolved, joining countless other defunct Hollywood unions.

But thanks to their public lives, we've been able to learn from their mistakes and observe the obvious problem with their relationships: No one died when the going was good. When the romances were idyllic, when true love vibrated in the purified air around them, no life-ending event occurred to capture the moment forever. Instead, just over the peak from blissful happiness lurked the work conflicts, differences, distractions and mismatched timing that fell well outside the realm of paradise and instead presented the challenges that don't arise when one lover (usually the woman) is good enough to die first.

Now I know what you're thinking, ladies. Your life has just begun. Wise women keep promising you that life begins at 30, then at 40, and once again at a zesty, gutsy 50. Sure, if you're lucky enough to possess the genetic potential for longevity, the years ahead may hold many wonderful opportunities for you. You might build a career and a family, form relationships and make contributions that sustain and buoy you through good times and bad. But how romantic is that?

Forget "happily ever after." Think "during visiting hours only." Hollywood's been crafting fairy tales longer than most of us have been alive, and they know a little something about staging a love story. If they say that a beautiful death scene is more romantic than filing yet another set of divorce papers in Los Angeles County, if they acknowledge that their own love stories are evaporating instead of flourishing, who are you to disagree?

Unless Hollywood has it wrong. Unless you think you can actually have your romance and live it, too. Feeling lucky? Feeling greedy? Willing to risk the mundanity of everyday life by outliving the golden age of your new love, and seeing if you can't find compromise and passion in the demands of two busy lives merging into one crowded relationship?

In that case, it's clear that you're talking about work. Hard work. A lifetime of grueling, troublesome toil. Well, that and, you know, lasting partnership and love and that other crap. But who would want that? Better to cut your losses and make a grand exit.

It's the way to true romance, ladies. Hollywood said it. And before you cast a cynical eye on this surefire method, consider this final incentive. Dennis Quaid is single again. Now isn't that an opportunity worth dying for?

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Tainted Love

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, May 28, 2000

IT'S YOUR classic modern story. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Boy becomes intimate with girl. Boy asks girl if she'll start taking birth control pills so that he can stop wearing a condom.

What's a girl to do? She likes him and agrees that sex is much more pleasurable and simple without that pesky prophylactic. Except that, while unplanned pregnancies may have once been the worst-case scenario from unprotected sex, they've hardly been the big bang in sexual gotchas in, say, the past 20 years. For those girls and boys who came of age in the past two decades, the devastation of disease and domestic disaster pose a far greater threat.

Though currently identified with the dot-com revolution, we twentysomethings have other, older claims to fame that shaped us far more profoundly than any amount of high-speed pointing and clicking.

The same young whizzes now often more comfortable in front of a computer screen than a live person learned about intimacy and interaction during childhoods marked by two significant shaping forces: AIDS and divorce.

I knew sex was dangerous before I knew it felt good. AIDS was on the news and magazine covers when I was in grade school, and I learned about safe sex as a foundational necessity comparable to seat belts while driving, helmets while riding, and forgoing smoking on airplanes. While older generations have had to adapt to these modifications, I learned them from scratch.

The silver lining, however, from seventh-grade health class on, was that safe sex was only necessary until you fell in love with someone you trusted, at which time you could peel away the protection and go at it au naturel. That is, if you could trust anyone. If relationships lasted, if people stayed true to each other, and if divorce didn't become, in the span of my primary through secondary years, the new national pastime. But if you grew up seeing what I saw, the broken marriages, custody battles, infidelity, broken promises, deadbeat parents, dissolved vows and utter domestic chaos, how readily would you trust a partner? How could you ever put yourself at risk just because another person once promised to love you?

Plus, if the swollen divorce rate wasn't enough to condition a young mind against the permanence of any trusting relationship, the mostly welcome dissolution of many social and gender barriers meant that boys and girls became platonic friends. Which meant I enjoyed access to sexual condor unavailable in earlier generations: And there was plenty going around.

First-hand knowledge of sexual promiscuity and infidelity did little to assuage concerns that risky extracurricular sexual encounters can mean life or death when brought back to the unprotected partner. So much for the romantic fantasy that a loving, committed spouse is one whose bodily fluids you can readily receive. But the paradox deepens. In a society whose obsession with sex only occasionally takes a backseat to greed and power, marriage, ironically, is still viewed as a noble institution and an inevitable goal. We still want to be in love, and, whether for the tax break or the genuine partnership, we still want to get married. (We think enough of marriage, in fact, to vote to protect its sanctity from any potentially weakening interpretations.)

And so there is our girl, weighing dangers and opportunities. Her short but poignant life experiences have taught her sex kills, marriages end, trust breaks and infidelities happen. Yet society, biology and ideology compel her to mate and partner. Just how does this informed, self-protective young person determine when, if ever, she is safe to pursue the physical intimacy of a committed relationship? And if she cannot avail herself physically, how much emotional intimacy can she muster? Would it please readers more, I wonder, if I reported that most twentysomethings I know want sexual and emotional intimacy and are willing to make the necessary leaps of faith to attain it? Or would the older populace be more comforted to know that a generation is sacrificing its base desires for closeness in a self-protective movement that will keep us wary but alive? In all honesty, I see both scenarios, and neither offers relief or a completely healthy model.

When my friends and I discuss this common girl's scenario, there is never a right answer. Whichever way we go, sacrifices are necessary, and danger is abundant. Intimacy -- on all levels -- might prove elusive for a generation that has grown up associating pain and danger with the very acts on which loving, trusting relationships were once built. Knowing what we know and seeing what we saw, I wonder everyday how can any of us trust enough to peel away the layers of protection -- the latex barrier on top, and the emotional ones that run much deeper.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Corporate VIPs a Dime a Dozen

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, January 28, 2001

IT'S OFFICIAL. As of today, I've kissed my last corporate butt.

Correction. With some 50 years left in my career, I may still find future occasion to pucker and flatter in the workplace. But as of close of business this evening, my criteria has changed.

No longer will a high title and fancy perch on the org chart dictate the degree of my reverence. It was a lucrative business while I was in it, but lately there are simply too many VIPs (very important professionals) clogging the Bay Area for a climber like me to continue a campaign of indiscriminate homage without applying some process of elimination.

It wasn’t always this way. There was a time, even in my short professional memory, when VIPs were special people with remarkable histories and noteworthy credentials. When a CEO was a person of lengthy career and impressive achievement. When a vice president had combined education and a slow steady climb to achieve a respectable rank of second-in-command. When officers had once provided service and directors had once been directed.

Such VIPS deserved respect just like elders and educators, because they had done time and earned stripes. They were industry leaders with wisdom to share and opportunities to provide. The right kind of people to know if you were young, hungry, and on the lookout for a good mentor.

But now, after the somewhat anticlimactic Next Generation workplace revolution, it seems that every working stiff has an executive rank. Managers, directors, vice presidents, chiefs, leaders, specialists and experts sit in seats still warm from when they were known as interns, entry-levelers and assistants. Count the VIPs spewing forth from every corporate doorway, and it becomes painfully evident that housing and technology stocks are not the only things we've overvalued in the Bay Area. Title inflation is through the roof.

It's easy to see how it happened. Start-ups with little money used oversized titles to attract talent. Small companies with one-person departments offered prestigious titles to represent the brave-but-questionably qualified solo artists they hired. As the job market swelled along with the egos of hotly pursued candidates, swanky titles became as essential a part of the offer package as stock options and commission schedule. And naturally, as has been the case since forever, budding entrepreneurs filled their key seats with friends and acquaintances.

But while cronies used to be college pals and after-work golfing buddies, many new executives are too inexperienced to have built any professional foundations together; their technical expertise has made their rise meteoric without the usual need for long-term experience or proven results. Powerful positions are often diluted by incompetence, but the case of many new VIPs is one of pre-competence. Their titles simply precede their abilities.

Even in traditional work environments, older companies began recognizing the importance of keeping up with technology and elevated their technical talent to positions of exaggerated importance and title. The contagion of the Bay Area's love affair with young workers and casual appearances infected them too, making older executives appear outdated and unnecessary, leaving their positions open to new interpretation.

As a result, the new corporate landscape reads like a who's who of high-speed ladder vaulting, while professionals in traditional industries, such as health care and publishing, remain entrenched in the classic hierarchies and related nomenclature that make them appear, in comparison to their loftily- titled friends, like low-level clerks.

It's a shame. For hiring managers and recruiters who can't rely on titles to accurately depict the experience and level of a potential candidate. For job seekers, whose skills might be advanced but whose titles subordinate them next to more aptly named competitors. For the overtitled individuals who, in future jobs, may be embarrassed and accused of misrepresentation if their skills fall short of their previous titles or who may have difficulty even finding jobs that match their accustomed titles and salaries. And for scruffy little brown nosers like me who like to rub shoulders with the knowledgeable, connected bigwigs but who resent wasting a single batted lash on so-called executives who have neither the skills nor experience to lead.

Fact is, I'm simply exhausted from seeking guidance and instead finding lacking experience and nonexistent professionalism. Trying to find a true grown-up in this corporate landscape is a crapshoot. Therefore, from this day forward, title is no object. I'm abandoning preconceived expectations associated with names and am embarking on a one-woman substance-seeking mission. My goal: to distinguish true leaders from those with truly leader-like titles.

Henceforth, VIPs must actually prove themselves to win my respect. They must demonstrate actual knowledge. Draw from experience and cite some precedent. Lead people and projects with skill and authority. Solve problems according to proven methodology, not just deadline-driven instinct. Teach skills and best practices that they have tested for real-world success. Advise people and guide careers based on substantive information, not armchair impulses.

It's a meaty list, but a fair and necessary one. If I don't demand some genuine greatness from the titled gentry in our local corporate culture, I will have to face the unthinkable alternative. And even I am neither ambitious nor motivated enough to continue kissing the butt of every fool who calls himself president.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

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See also: "Why Go Home When The Workplace Beckons" (January 30, 2000), as quoted in the book Married to the Job: Why We Live to Work and What We Can Do About It by Ilene Philipson, page 133.

Paying Dues is Old News

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, March 26, 2000

THE BAY AREA's lifestyle treadmill has been running on high for a while now. But it's the greed, not the speed, that has me reaching for the off-switch.

Look around, and you see people panting gracelessly as they scramble to keep up with the local pace of upward mobility. Listen closely, and you hear their little chant of ``more money, more stocks, more house, more car, more RAM, more than the guy next to me.'' The relentless pursuit of more -- and the expectation that it is due to everyone -- is getting to be a collective obsession once again.

But the excitement of living in the Bay Area in this historic time of technological and economic boom is giving way to unease and exhaustion. New tools and toys launch daily, yet with the advances have come a disturbing upward ratcheting of salaries, living costs, and expectations.

We hear about the 64 new Silicon Valley millionaires a day, the job- hoppers who pick up an easy $25K each time they switch employers, and the endless abundance of juicy venture capital. Money, and the promise of all it can buy, has been renewed as a driving force. And while I'm a card-carrying capitalist who values a buck, I can't deny that the frantic pace has me ready to jump track.

When I first stepped on five years ago, it was at a very different tempo. I was surviving on $21,000 a year, and though I didn't like it, I thought it appropriate for my age and experience. I was six months out of college, and I had everything I had anticipated: a hard-won entry-level job, a broom closet studio apartment, and a regular paycheck. I knew the meager earnings would be temporary, that I would eventually find professional success and financial comfort. But I expected them later than sooner.

Temporary post-graduate poverty was a noble rite of passage that was neither a surprise nor a real hardship, but, in the Bay Area's high-tech industry, it no longer exists. Today, recent college grads are fielding offers that begin at $70,000 a year.

My friend, a manager of programmers at a large financial institution, recently hired a ``kid who knows absolutely nothing,'' for the mere potential he has to learn. He was asking $75,000. She scoffed, and hired him at $72K.

It's not actually the high salaries, however, that concern me. Nor do I particularly mind the SUVs, the boats, houses, interior designers, vacations or wine cellars. It's the single-minded focus on the acquisition of more, instigated largely by the knowledge that others are making it, so therefore, we're all owed. Worse, it's the nagging question of what my peers may be losing by making their fortunes so easily and what, if anything, comes after the money is made or the well runs dry.

Many of us forget, too, that not everyone is making big bucks on the current boom. But whether we are the earners or the aspirers, everyone is talking about money -- who's making it, and how to get in on the action. It is in response to this fixation on wealth that I find myself, despite having traded up to reach my current comfortable salary and managerial position, developing a revulsion to our current professional climate. Backlash, to the money-grubbing, material-acquiring, stock- option-coveting culture, is nearly upon me. And I'm not alone.

While most of my friends are caught up in the revolving earn-and-spend cycle, there appears a recent glimmer of sanity. A handful of people around me seem to recognize that, as economically and socially costly as it may be to sacrifice some opportunities, trade-offs may be necessary to preserve a little heart and humility.

When my sister finished college last May, she landed a sweet job in the financial world but quickly left for a folksy bookstore position, where she is poor but valued. One of my well-paid contract technical writers bailed for a local nonprofit company that pays him in little more than good vibes. A struggling entry-level architect I know has more roommates than he can count, a childhood friend works nights in a local shelter for adolescent girls, and even I found myself filling in bubbles on the state teaching exam last month, contemplating a trade of my hefty paycheck for some meaningful work.

Making money isn't wrong. But when my feet start to drag because my only motivation is to keep up, it's time to question who set this pace, and why it's worth maintaining. As my 20s speed by, I'd like to define myself as more than a product of my fast and greedy time. Doing so might mean trading in the car, the big apartment, the plans for early retirement, and all those sushi dinners, but pursuing something other than the pursuit of wealth might just turn out to be, in Bay Area terms, a remarkably lucrative venture.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001
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Letters to the Editor


SILICON VALLEY IS BOUND TO HIT THE SKIDS
Editor -- What a marvelous article -- congratulations on the quality and truth of its content and in the intellectual maturity Jordana Willner displayed in writing it (Sunday, March 26). I recognize that it must be difficult for writers to come up with good ideas on a daily or weekly basis, and so many of her colleagues do not succeed in that effort. So it is refreshing to read an article like hers.

Regarding the content of the article (and I am a well-educated 61-year-old with pretty sound basic values), I can only add the old truism, ``What goes around comes around.'' What she discussed in the article cannot go on forever, and the momentum behind it (Silicon Valley) will cycle down sometime in the future for two reasons. Every industry cycles, the only variables being the duration and amplitude of the cycles.

Secondly, Silicon Valley has a volatile history, and the down phase of the next cycle will definitely come. I lived in Silicon Valley when it was called Santa Clara Valley and we still had orchards lining I-280 in Santa Clara County. We still have a home in San Carlos, and my wife and I stay familiar with what is happening there.

I just hope that the next down cycle will not extensively hurt a lot of people, but it probably will. Most people have very short memories. Again, great article.

JERRY YOUNG
Truckee
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MAYBE IT'S TIME TO DROP OUT AGAIN

Editor -- How much I enjoyed Jordana Willner's words on a Sunday morning! I have been feeling quite the same, and my perspective is that of a 52-year-old. While I am fortunate enough to have a home and a job I enjoy on most days, I have felt lately as if I would like to sell in this crazy market, find a small cabin in the woods somewhere, and move in with my dog!

The traffic in San Mateo County, the values one overhears at work or out socially, I don't know that I want to be even a passive participant in that life. I know there are others who feel as I do.
I am always amazed, as I shop for wedding gifts that have been prechosen by registering, that couples start off with all of the best material possessions. What is there to work toward then?

Maybe I am old-fashioned? Reading Willner's perspective though was quite encouraging to me. Not only ``mature'' people (I still cannot say ``older'') share my concern about the direction in which we are allowing life to take us, sometimes without our even stopping to realize it.

Keep up the good work!
HELEN DONEUX
Redwood City

Miss America Needs New Reality

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, October 15, 2000

I'M NOW TOO OLD to compete in the Miss America Pageant. Which is probably just as well, considering I've never impressed anyone by walking in high heels with a bathing suit taped to my butt, and I was five the last time I dazzled a crowd in an evening gown.

Missing my beauty contest window is no great loss. Ever since Heidi Hoskins went pageant in the 8th grade and came to school with Vaseline on her teeth and a new pivot- turn combo that substituted for walking, I figured my own talents would serve better elsewhere. But it's funny that while I now have a solid five years on most contestants, they still appear older than I in age and generation. With big hair and Stepford smiles, these girls seem to live in a timeless mid-century America, where World War II heroes preside and women work only until marriage renders them domestic.

It's a disturbing picture, yet I have to believe that the young women comprising the deceptively vapid lineup are far more than a pre-reproductive crew of Betty Crocker soccer moms-in-training. Silly as they look preening in sequins and lace, these poised competitors are probably a lot like me -- modern, ambitious, accomplished and willing to use a variety of channels to advance toward their vision of success. But while I use a computer and a dictionary, their venue has the unfortunate requirement that they parade themselves like prime USDA-select auctionettes in an antiquated contest that does little more than mock the challenges facing young women today.

In fact, as an anachronistic throwback to a time when congeniality, poise and posture defined a women's identity, the pageant does so little for modern audiences that Disney finds it increasingly hard to attract viewers. The producers might have tried to revamp the contest's publicity rap as a community service fest, but no one buys the alleged coincidence that the 51 most active do-gooders in the country also happen to be babes. Instead, many of the viewers who do bother to tune it in do so for campy value alone.

Which is too bad, because if Americans love anything more than beer and sports, it's beautiful women and a good contest. And with an injection of modernity, the contest could do what it was meant to do: identify the most impressive contestant of her time while entertaining a broad, captive audience.

Conventional pageanteers might spontaneously combust at the suggestion, but what if the contest actually capitalized on what people like to see by showcasing beauties while demanding that they demonstrate the variety of modern skills that each of them probably possesses? To appeal to the stringent demands of the American viewing public, call the program Miss American Survivor, and, instead of using the traditional judges, require the contestants to display cunning and political savvy by voting each other off the stage. The intrigue of deserted island politics would pale beside the cutthroat alliances and betrayals of 51 exceptional women vying for victory.

Then, within such a compelling format, the show could present legitimate challenges that any true miss in America must face. In the Miss Corporate America competition, a contestant would have to role-play an incident of sexual harassment or discrimination in the workplace. In the Miss Self-Defense America category, each miss would ward off an attacker using the martial art of her choice. For Miss Stock Market America, each contestant would receive $1,000 at the opening bell. The richest at contest's end would win, and any bankruptcies would result in disqualification. In Miss America Cooks, each contestant would be placed in a kitchen and given minimal time and ingredients to prepare a tasty, nutritious meal and clean up after herself.

In the question portion, naturally titled ``Who Wants to be Miss America,'' the contestants would answer challenging stumpers like: What would you do if you found yourself with an unwanted pregnancy? Have you ever had an eating disorder, and, if so, how did you treat it? Will you stay home with your children or go out to work? If and when you marry, will you take your husband's last name? What form of birth control do you use? How do you handle the situation when a man refuses to wear a condom?

Plus, for the category you've all been waiting for, a modernized pageant would acknowledge that no contest, modern or passe, is deemed complete without the requisite display of young beautiful skin. But here, the contestants would forgo the bathing suits and instead display their world-class figures in sports bras and Umbro shorts -- while kicking soccer balls through a goal post. The ballroom gowns would be replaced on the catwalk by business suits, displayed from all angles as the contestants maintain grace while carrying laptop computers, briefcases, and purses, answering ringing cell phones and responding to e-mail on Palm Pilots.

In sub-categories, each young woman would demonstrate her true range of modern capabilities by displaying proficiency in killing household insects, assembling PCs, programming VCRs and balancing checkbooks. The final four could then face each other in the Miss American Gladiator competition, where the girls demonstrate athletic superiority in a series of physical showdowns. And to the victor would go the crown.

Any young woman savvy enough to haul herself all the way to the Miss America Pageant should have no trouble with these challenges, and if she does, she has no place under the crown anyway.

America outgrew hokey pageant pomp back before most current contestants were even born, and while the viewing public may never outgrow beauty contests, we can at least hope that they grow with us. And in the year of so-called reality programming, any girl called Miss America deserves a seriously modern arena, where a seriously modern audience can watch her strut her seriously modern stuff.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Three Precious Things

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, December 17, 2000

They ask every year -- the same curious question with the same underlying message: "What do Jewish kids get for Christmas?" An innocent query that belies the ethnocentric assumption that everyone, regardless of religious beliefs or traditions, celebrates the most dominant of holidays.

It's an easy mistake to make. Not only does Christmas paralyze our piece of the earth every year, but plenty of Jews do get plenty of stuff for Christmas. Some decorate Hanukkah trees, others exchange gifts on Dec. 25, and I can name more than a few who've been spotted sucking down eggnog and sugar cookies with the skill of a true Santa Claus disciple.

I don’t fault them. It's an annual challenge to participate in American culture, respect the festive moods of friends and co-workers, yet avoid the simultaneously attractive and offensive consumer frenzy of the Yuletide season. Plus, with relaxed work schedules, paid days off, and a brief national campaign for goodwill unto others, it makes sense to seize the opportunity for some special family time of our own.

But aside from those assimilators who give in to a puzzling, though mercifully brief, yearly love affair with red and green, I believe I speak for the remainder of Jewish Americans when I say that there are several responses to the question of what Jewish kids get for Christmas.

The first and most obvious answer is: nothing. Most Jews do not celebrate Christmas because it is not a Jewish holiday. Nor is it an American holiday, as several devotees try to tell me each year. Christmas is a Christian holiday. It may also be a federal holiday, but this does not change the fact that, if you sift through tales of reindeer, toy factories, and fat men in chimneys, you find the birth of Jesus Christ at the root of all the commotion. Secular celebrators who argue that Christmas is not about religion may have forgotten its origins; I, sensitive to a history of religious division and persecution, have not.

This news that Jews don't get anything for Christmas often meets with pity and disbelief. But throughout my years of lighting the Hanukkah candles for the requisite eight days and then hitting the movie theater when everyone else opens presents under their trees, I can honestly report that I never experienced Christmas envy.

It's not because I had great parents, which I did, or because they always made us feel special inside the novelty of our own minority status, which they did. The holiday was simply no big deal to me or most of my Jewish friends because of the second precious thing we got for Christmas: answers.

We Jewish kids got to be in the know. We got the inside scoop on Christmas, Santa Claus, elves, the whole deal. It was like being in on the big lie. While gullible friends participated in an elaborate deception of imaginary roof- dwellers and muppetlike characters, we Jewish kids understood the whole Christmas mechanism from the top down. Our friends naively worshipped an intermediary gift-giver, while we knew our presents came from the people who loved us best. Our parents dealt with us honestly as adults; our friends' parents, in contrast, made up stories for them.

We saw that while Christmas might have had some appeal, it held no monopoly on family tradition or fun. Instead, most of us grew up honoring our own sturdy identities, reveling in the right to practice and not practice as we choose.

And now, at a time when congressmen still try to draw religion into classrooms, after a presidential campaign filled with religious innuendoes from overtly Christian candidates, it is this constitutional gift that I treasure most. Indeed, the third thing Jewish kids get for Christmas is the most valuable present of all: Every year, we get the freedom to get nothing for Christmas.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001
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Letters to the Editor

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Sunday, December 24, 0

Christmas Traditions in Jewish Eyes

Editor -- Jordana Willner's rant about being Jewish during the holiday season raised my hackles ("Three Precious Things Jewish Kids Get for Christmas," Chronicle Sunday, Dec. 17). She might find Christmas less annoying if she did some research and disassociated Christmas, the religious holiday, from the commercial shopping phenomenon.

Many traditions associated with Christmas are based on folklore and on pagan observances of agricultural and solar events. For example, Willner's euphemistic "love affair with red and green" refers to the early Europeans' use of evergreens to celebrate the triumph of the unconquerable sun during the winter solstice.

Willner describes Santa Claus as part of "an elaborate deception of imaginary roof-dwellers" and a figure of worship. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, he's an imaginary folk character based on legends about St. Nicholas, fourth century bishop of Myra (Turkey) and a magician in Nordic folklore who punished naughty children and rewarded good ones with presents. He "lives" at the North Pole, not on roofs.

American advertisers use the figure to promote their wares during the holidays. The "root of all the commotion" at Christmas time is commercialism, not the birth of Jesus.

After she has done her homework, I hope Willner sees that she doesn't need to disparage other people's customs and religious beliefs in order to show pride in her own. Commercialism is the real problem. Plenty of gentiles are sick of it, too.

CATHERINE SHEPARD-HAIER
Berkeley
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PULITZER FOR 'OBVIOUS'

Editor -- I suggest a Pulitzer Prize nomination for Jordana Willner. In a very articulate way, she has pointed out the obvious to the oblivious.

Not every one in this great country considers Christmas the greatest thing that ever happened.

RICHARD HEWETSON
San Francisco

Living Hell of High School

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, April 28, 1999

TEENAGE TERRORISTS created a picture of hell at their Littleton, Colo., high school last Tuesday. But in their deranged minds, they were escaping one of the staple hells on earth: high school in America.

No explanation, justification or assignation of blame can account for the horror inflicted on Columbine High School and the nation. But while specialists of every ilk wonder why kids turn so violent, the question also emerges: Why is high school so hellish?

Cliques, cool kids, misfits, late bloomers. Public high school in America offers cruel and enduring social stratification. Kids know their rank and social placement like members of a military community. Those at the top rule with cruelty and disdain. Those at the bottom resent and withdraw with the apologist behavior of an inferior class.

High school, still the glory days of many adolescent sports heroes, social climbers and peppy overachievers, is for many others a four-year trek of basic survival. The long walk down the hall, the lone seat in the cafeteria, the exclusion from a more elite society is detrimental to self-esteem and to the opportunity we hope our kids have to belong.

The platitudes that kids will be kids, wait until you're older and life isn't fair do not appease young people who are consistently diminished by the contempt of cruel and judgmental peers. Likewise, the teachers who observe silently are no less guilty than the students and parents who passively allow high school society to segregate and deride.

Ten years ago, in a rich suburb north of Boston, the misfits in my high school were ridiculed, beaten and made unwelcome at every turn. After countless failed attempts to fit in, their only means of emotional survival was the formation of their own separate world. They latched onto various violent social movements -- from punk rock to skinheads -- in search of a larger, stronger community where they could escape the steady, degrading ostracism.

None of my outcast classmates turned their violent tendencies toward the school, but I would have hardly been surprised to see any one of them conceal a weapon and turn it upon the sources of their daily social torture. Their frustration in those days was palpable, and more disturbingly, they were so firmly entrenched in the misery of their teenage hell that they doubted the passing of time would change their lot as second- class citizens.

High school, most kids learn later, is not a microcosm of real life. Outside of lockers and lunch periods, a world exists with room for the unique contributions of all types of people. But when stuck in that noisy, intimidating four-year prison, many kids mistake this long detour for a more permanent inferno.



Adolescence is always tough. Most of us suffered through high school in one way or another, often using those unhappy memories as the motivation to excel later in life. But for those kids who lose their hope and now have a model for unprecedented revenge, we must acknowledge the ugly reality of teenage society and treat it far more tenderly than as a few tough years that kids must grin at and bear. High school heroes may tell stories of their glory days for decades to come, but someone should remind them that it's not nice to ridicule others, that throwing food and insults is unacceptable, and that everyone has their own version of hell.

Two teenage misfits escaped their hell by inflicting another kind last week, leaving the nation scarred and fearful. But as the numbers of violent American teens grow and we search for answers, perhaps, in addition to blaming the gun lobby, remiss parents and the violent entertainment industry, we should return to the scene of the crime. There, between football games and school plays, huddling on the fringe and looking for a way in -- or out -- we might find some of the answers we seek.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Growing Up in Camelot's Ashes

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, July 20, 1999

MY PARENTS WATCHED the news of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane crash, and they cried. Not in the intellectually stricken way they reacted to the Kosovars' struggle, nor with the frustration they felt during the Persian Gulf War or the TWA flight 800 disaster. Not even with the sorrow that struck when Princess Diana died. Their pain was personal, flowing from old wounds newly aggravated. When my mother questioned how much more ``they'' could take, she was referring to the Kennedy family, the nation and to herself.

Watching my parents mourn, I stood apart from this bond they apparently share with the nation. Despite nearly 26 years in my parents' lives, I can neither relate to nor understand their decades-old connection with the lives and losses of the Kennedys. In the modern context of my entirely post-Watergate life, ``Kennedy'' is an elusive and anachronistic concept. I cannot, as a product of 1980s and '90s political and social cynicism, understand the hope -- and subsequent pain of loss -- that created and sustained America's Camelot. In an age of school violence, impeachment, drugs, gangs, AIDS and a president best known as a unabashed liar, I am not imaginative enough to believe in a nation that, just a generation ago, believed in fairy tales.

I know my history. I know the tragedies that have befallen the Kennedys. I know that Caroline Kennedy is now the sole surviving member of her once-idolized nuclear family. I understand the physical place held by the Kennedys in 20th century America. But it is the emotional tie between average Americans and this nearly royal family that keeps me asking: What is a Kennedy? And who was this Kennedy that his very life and death should inspire a national dirge?

They tell me: He was a child who grew up under the nation's collective watch. But I ask: Would the deaths of Lisa Marie Presley or the Olsen twins, while tragic, incite such raw emotions? He was an offspring of a political dynasty. But would similar news of a Bush son get live, uninterrupted coverage all week end long? He was the child of a beloved politician. Yet not even a Playboy spread moved Americans to take much notice of President Reagan's daughter Patti. He was a rich and privileged man. But would anyone cry alone in their kitchen over a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs aviation tragedy? He was a much-photographed heartthrob. But while deceased hunks River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain have been heartily eulogized, they hardly garnered cross-country mourning. He was a celebrity who died tragically. Yet John Denver was a national treasure also lost to his own piloting, and we accepted his passing with resignation to the sorrows of life.

John F. Kennedy Jr. was all this and more, because Kennedys are seen as so much greater than the sum of their parts. But such loyal national fascination could not hatch in my own generation, where the expectation of wrongdoing and scandal replace the awe once associated with those of privilege and power. In the 1960s, images were built and revered, but in 1999, I feel lucky when I can dare to hope that a political or social leader won't fall drastically short of all my expectations.

My parents' tears reveal that Americans once cared enough to hope for the best. That I never learned how speaks volumes about what has been lost, and I can't help thinking that a little Kennedy in my generation might have gone a long way toward discouraging apathy-raising expectations, and encouraging hope. I might not share my parents' connection with the Kennedys, but the weekend's loss of life and what it reveals about the world I've grown up in is enough to make me cry.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Youthful Discretion Is Just a Big Waste of Time

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Tuesday, August 24, 1999

I'M THINKING of knocking over a convenience store. Then I might commit a little arson, tamper with the mail, forge some signatures and follow it all up by yelling ``Fire!'' in a crowded theater. It doesn't matter. I'm only in my 20s. Before this summer, I thought committing such illegal acts might have negative bearing on potential for future success. But in the 10 days since my 26th birthday, my self-image and career strategies have undergone a renaissance.

It turns out that, if I start now, I can put myself on a 25-year plan that allows me to commit federal crimes today and still be eligible for election to the presidency in the year 2024. Thanks to current interpretations of actions allegedly committed by Texas Gov. and Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush when he was about my age, nothing I do in the next few years matters at all.

How embarrassing. Until now, I have taken my life very seriously. I excelled in high school, made an academic killing in college, entered the professional world and have diligently worked my way into positions of increased responsibility and skill. What ego. What nerve. What a waste of time.

How preposterous to think anything I do in my 20s could register as an important accomplishment, contribution or, most comically, as an indicator of the citizen and professional I might become. What a shame I wasted all these years saying no to drugs when I could have enjoyed myself and never paid the consequences -- because any of my erroneous actions could have been explained away with two words: youthful indiscretion.

Youthful indiscretion. My entire life up to this moment can be described as a youthful indiscretion. This article, in fact, can easily be explained away as the mistake of an immature, unthinking young woman -- an argument that may come in handy if I ever find myself vying for a job with the Republican Party. But why bother to write it all? Why waste my time scribbling, when nothing I say could have any real importance? And if nothing I do right now matters anyway, why not follow the path of least resistance and just have a good time until I'm old enough? Come to think of it, my employers would be wise to stop wasting my salary on a mere irrelevant youth and replace me with an older, more qualified person.

But just how old is a relevant person? If the actions of a 24-year-old are easily dismissed, at what point does a person become accountable? Age 27? Thirty? Thirty-five? When will I actually be answerable for my actions? When am I on the clock? I had mistakenly thought that when I began earning a living, paying taxes, supporting local businesses, providing a model for my younger sister and making my parents proud, my actions were those of a responsible adult. Now that I've learned those years were nothing but throwaway time, I think it is legitimate to wonder just when I will become relevant.

(But maybe I have no hope of relevance. If you consider that I was born when my parents were 28, you might say my entire life is the result of their youthful indiscretion.)

It is disconcerting, to say the least, to discover this early in the 2000 Republican presidential primary campaign how irrelevant I am in the minds of many Americans.

And yet, in one particular arena, I know I still matter. My vote, of which I have been the proud owner since my 18th birthday, still counts as much as that of every 50-something American in the land.

You can bet I will cast it for a candidate who believes that 26 is old enough to make an informed decision and stand by it.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Young Voters Cavalier

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, November 5, 2000

I'VE NEVER been the jealous type, but my inner green is showing in this election season. For months, as I've gnawed nails and split hairs over the sociopolitical issues at stake, my single, twentysomething brethren have lolled idly around in the luxurious, enviable position of thumbing their noses at the whole production.

Young Americans -- the approximately 60 million 18- to 34-year-olds who make up nearly 25 percent of eligible voters -- are parroting a well-rehearsed mantra that the issues don't concern them, so they don't really care. It's a catchy little generational chant that no one taught me. Lucky ducks. How divine their lives must be to let the bread-and-butter concerns of a nation roll smoothly off their disinterested backs. How utterly entitled to float through life unencumbered and rootless, without the pesky nagging of familial obligations, societal accountability or -- gulp -- a future.

How did they get to be so free? How did they qualify for such pervasive and well-documented disinterest? Where do I sign up? If only I could be so cavalier and unfettered as to disdainfully shake my smug young head and say that the issues being bandied about are someone else's concern. But, alas, I do not exist in a self-contained living apparatus. I function as part of a complex interactive contracts I like to think of as family, friends, and country. Poor me, I never get a break.

If I did, I could agree with lucky- duck up-and-comer Jakki Taylor, a 28-year-old producer of the ABC talk show, ``The View,'' who is quoted by the show's co-host Lisa Ling as saying, ``I'm just not concerned about Social Security, prescription drugs and health care.'' Ling, 27, writing in USA Weekend, is also in the enviable position of noting that, ``The defining issue for many Americans hasn't been health care or education; it's been IPOs.''

Say what? Sure, we've had a lucrative couple years. But even as college rags turned to post-IPO riches, I was not aware we blessed young folk had received tower clearance for societal secession. Guess I missed the airlift to Next Generation nirvana.

But I, poor burdened soul, have parents. And having watched both endure recent surgeries, I worry about a viable Medicare system being in place to treat them with affordable, dignified quality health care as they age, and I worry that without it, I could be financially responsible for their costly care.

I fret about education. I may not have kids yet, but even as a future parent, I apparently didn't make the cut to join those prestigious young voters who plan to have children but who seem to think schools are someone else's business.

Taxes concern me. I am not nearly so lucky as my arrogant counterparts, who earn such gargantuan sums of techno-dollars that they can't be bothered to wonder how much is withheld for the taxes they say are none of their affair. Facing a daily commute, I find it hard to imagine the happy place where discussions of oil dependency, availability and prices are not relevant to me. But for my friends who don't think beyond the pump, I have to assume that unrest in the Middle East, endangered environmental preserves, and too slow-to-come clean-fuel-burning automobiles are equally disinteresting.

Am I cavorting within a generation of self-centered, shortsighted brats living in a bubble? Do I represent a cringing minority who understands the vast network of interdependency and accountability that sustains us?

Surely, the intelligent, hardworking offspring of the activist '60s could not be this hopelessly selfish. It must simply be the case that someone forgot to let me in on the secret. That it's all going to be OK. That Supreme Court justices who uphold my beliefs grow on Washington trees. That the Earth we inherit will remain inhabitable. That the stock market can only go up. That a budget surplus is sure as the rising of the sun. That we'll never get old or be in need. That our loved ones will magically care for themselves. Yes, I must be the mistaken one. Because if not, if young voters are simply crowding into an untouchable, self-important fantasy camp, where the glow of invincible youth blinds them from life's political, social and economic realities, it could take a cataclysmic change in their comfort level to awaken them to their own relevance.
And by then, it might be too late.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

If You Know How to Surf, You Can Learn How to Stalk

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, April 30, 2000

TODAY, when I ran out of e- mail to write, news to read, stocks to assess, and items to bid, I did what any marginally competent Web surfer can do while online in the privacy of her own home office: I stalked myself.

And there, courtesy of the most mainstream of popular search engines, I discovered the exciting and ego-inflating truth: that I have emerged from obscurity into the hot and hallowed pages of cyber notoriety.

I -- Oakland girl, UC grad, elder daughter, daily commuter -- am a star. It's all right there, with hyperlinks to back it up: my name as a force that elicits site matches and referrals, identifying a young writer who is riding the next generation wave right into a full-fledged niche. It's a proud day.

But as I clicked my few relevant links and found my home phone number, address, and trail of prior residences, employers and writings, I became uneasy. Without my knowledge or express written consent, I was remarkably and irrevocably exposed. I, hardly the slickest of surfing searchers, had unearthed this raw, accurate data in a matter of a few unschooled clicks; what could a skilled and motivated researcher learn about me? The novelty of seeing my name in links faded quickly into the looming vulnerability of unsanctioned exposure.

So big deal, I thought. A bad person with bad intentions could do some bad stuff if they got hold of my data. They could misuse my phone number, find my home, steal my bank account numbers, or mess with my identity. Hardly a welcome set of possibilities, but hardly new either. Prank calls and phony charges predate the Internet by generations, and a little fatalism goes a long way to acknowledge that, whether by online or more conventional methods, if someone wants to do me wrong, they'll find a way, regardless of whether they cyberlaunch their attack.

What was more important, I reasoned, was that while my facts, stats, and figures may be readily available online, none of those details provides any real insight into who I am. Strangers may read my electronic bio, but none of it reveals the personality, outlook, or general nature of me.

No amount of basic data can invade my privacy, because I am far more than a sum of all my alma maters and area codes. But then again, if you consider that integrated systems, smart computers and increasingly sophisticated monitoring devices are tracking unprecedented categories and details of information, it suddenly seems highly possible and indeed probable that those distant personal facts can be very dangerous if viewed by the wrong people.

Say my exposed electronic medical record, viewed by a potential employer, reveals HIV, high risk behaviors, or a history of psychiatric treatment? Or maybe an employment record reveals actions or lawsuits that could hamper future progress. Or an old report card shows a failing grade in a class that someone else deems important.

What if police records display a past I don't want publicized, or acquaintances post information about me that I would prefer not surface? What if my electronic vote is viewed, my faith revealed, or my sexual orientation advertised in the public domain? Such concerns may be paranoid and premature, but they may also be realistic considerations in the all too near future. Or they would be if I was an alarmist. Which I'm not.

What I really am, I reminded myself, is an ambitious, hardworking young capitalist trying to advance my own cause and sell the one product I have worth hocking: my words. And as a writer with more articles to sell than publications to buy them, I realized that I'm not nearly exposed enough. Everyone, be they artists, consultants, nutritionists or techies, has his or her own Web site that advertise their services and promotes their talents.

If I want to be competitive in my field, I better grab a domain, post my work, and network with as many portals as are willing to link me. My articles, resume, bio, plans, and affiliations should all be listed. Why not some photographs, too? If I'm going to really use the Internet to introduce myself, I should go all the way.

Except that the last time I allowed my photograph to accompany my work in a small print magazine, I acquired a zealous admirer who, based on his romantic letters and vivid fantasy life, was one marble short of being a full-fledged, sleep-disturbing, fear-inspiring, life- altering stalker.

But then again, with a mouse, a browser, and an occasional moment of curiosity, who among us isn't a potential stalker? Thanks to the availability of information, the line between basic interest, utilization of available resources, and blatant invasion of privacy is nearly invisible. We can each stalk and be stalked -- right in the comfort of our own homes.

Whether a welcome blessing or veiled threat, no one yet knows the extent of risk associated with such exposure. Until we do, let's hope each of us, exercising the appropriate caution, awareness and vigilance, takes the time to stalk ourselves and thereby, for as long as possible, remains our own worst enemy.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Boy Culture Meets Workplace

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, December 5, 1999

VOLLEYBALL NETS, Nerf balls, postmodern office equipment, and eighteen- hour workdays. Some call it the workplace of the next generation. I call it the proliferation of boy culture.

Here in the IT heartland, the old boys’ network that closes deals on the golf course is making way for a little boys’ club that does its best thinking while pelting coworkers with Styrofoam darts. Hip young techno-workplaces are being billed as the creative brainchildren of a new generation, but while humanizing sterile cubicle culture sounds like an idea for everyone, gadgets and gizmos are little more than a slice of paradise, boy style. Who other than affluent, hedonistic boys could conceive of a workplace with sports, weapons, games, and beer? Only boys, and especially those attracted to the gaming, problem-solving nature of technology careers, could choose to surround themselves with the recreational gadgetry of their pre-adolescent fantasies. Consequently, the modern high tech office is still a surprisingly male- defined place, where, instead of business suits and attache cases, success is built with Lego's and Northface backpacks.

At the computer services department of the SF-based corporation where I work, the techie boys are an elite group who believe their cutting edge database development is far more vital to human survival than even those know-nothing doctors who can't read the simplest lines of code. These young Gods troubleshoot and play, passing the time between client calls and happy hours with X-rated boy dialect, toxic-proof boy beverages, palm-sized plastic boy toys, and boy games. (Boy games can involve everything from suggestive pseudonyms in Internet chat rooms, to prank telephone calls, to in-cubicle betting, to scanning the digital image of a coworker onto every available surface in the building.) The boy culture in my office intrigued me from the start, as I was unaccustomed to the fantastical quality of the modern young office. I was never privy to their peculiar brands of games and jokes, yet I was always fascinated that, while we girls spent a lot of time sitting around discussing what to do, boys almost always seemed occupied. Much as they do now.

The boys in my office are some of the hardest working, hardest playing people I've ever met. Their workdays know no boundaries, and even if lunchtime finds them imbibing, midnight often finds them troubleshooting. This more than full-time commitment is impressive, and it provides some insight into why boys are defining the office culture. Boys are the majority in offices like mine, both in numbers and in on-site hours. Whereas even our hardest working women head home to balance a multitude of personal responsibilities, the boys are dedicating such large portions of their lives to their jobs that they naturally invest their personalities and interests into the office culture - because it is their world. My female colleague who winds up working every Sunday comes to the office to do her work and then leaves to resume her life. In contrast, the boys who work comparable hours to hers socialize together after-hours. If she stayed, they would most likely welcome her; I note little discrimination from the boys other than the obvious necessity of being present to learn their inside jokes as they occur. It just happens that some of us have priorities elsewhere.

None of the boys at work agree with my assessment of their work culture. They cite women with toys as evidence that games at work are natural cross-gender stress relievers, and they see the modern office culture as a simple product of androgynous young energy.

But what they miss is that the Slinky on my desk is not my own natural expression of fun; it's simply my attempt at cultural assimilation. Just as my mother once wore masculine business suits to be taken seriously in a man's corporate culture, I'm learning the modern games so I can be one of the guys. I participate in their lunches, ask them polite questions, and occasionally intercept an airborne rubber frog, all in the hopes of fitting in. I appreciate that they attribute no gender bias to their activities, but I must admit that, at my most creative, I would never custom design an office to include plastic weaponry or Marvin the Martian paraphernalia. A feminized workplace might instead include fewer toys and more lounge spaces, with couches strategically placed to foster relaxed, team-building dialogue.

Instead of the quarterly subsidized all-you-can-drink beerfests we currently receive, I might vie for healthy catered lunches, a visiting masseuse, or a day at the spa. And ultimately, I believe girl culture would expedite the business day so that all the work was done while still balancing in our equally important non-professional endeavors. In boy culture, however, balance is often absent. Work is the center of their world, where all intellectual and recreational activities can exist. And with lucrative salaries, the latest technology, a community, a purpose, and a future, they do indeed seem to have all they need.

The boys in my office amuse me, earn my respect for their indisputable technical prowess, and stir my envy for having found careers and work environments so conducive to their happiness. They may enjoy a long and prosperous corporate reign, or they may find that the modern workplace is still open to interpretation. Boy culture may not be for everyone, but one thing it teaches is that with enthusiasm and commitment, workplaces can be molded to reflect their workers.

This round of office re-engineering goes to the boys. Round 2 is still anyone's game.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

These Days, There's a Price to Pay For Meeting Your Match

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, February 13, 2000

FORGET NATURE, karma and kismet. My single friends are taking matters and checkbooks into their own hands. They tried it the old- fashioned way. But for single, financially independent, emotionally secure women used to pursuing and getting what they want, waiting around for true love is hardly their style.

They are ready for relationships, and though their harried daily journey of work and life hardly aligns them with eligible single male prospects, their proverbial clocks have ticked on. Thus my friends decided that deliberate, proactive strategy was necessary to jump-start their love lives and ensure the options they desired. And in recent months, no fewer than six women in my life have paid money for a professional, targeted search.

The methodologies differ, but the idea is the same: engage local services to help them meet men, often prescreened for compatibility, who also want relationships. Several friends are using online personal ads, listing extensive facts and photos that offer insight into who they are and what they want. Other friends have joined activity clubs, touring everything from museums to hillsides in packs of upbeat, engaging singles.

Still others participate in meet- and-greet gatherings where a master of ceremonies separates people into small groups in which they can mingle and exchange phone numbers. Some people I know are lunching in small, preassigned mixed groups of single professionals in the hopes of finding a match. One friend even went to a pricey matchmaking service that gave her an extensive personality assessment, promising to match her with similar personality types until she finds a mutual physical attraction.

The good news is that my friends now have dates. They are meeting men, going out, enjoying themselves, sampling a variety of different people and activities, and having companions for all those times they wished they didn't have to go stag.

The bad news is that they now have dates. They are meeting men, going out and reacquainting themselves with all the predictable traps and games of grown-up, modern, recreational dating. At first, the smorgasbord of possible suitors and potential scenarios was exciting. My friends gleefully reported on new prospects, amazed and energized by the array of people suddenly accessible to them. But as reliably as these services deliver dates, they still compensate for little more than an introduction.

Once two people are together for their first meeting, the origin of their acquaintance seems to lose its import, and the chaos of dating presides. On the other hand, while the road to true love can be both rocky and expensive (especially with the higher-end matchmaking services) the disappointment of any missed connection or lost opportunity is greatly assuaged by the knowledge that another match, another e-mail, activity or luncheon will soon follow.

Real-life dating has limited prospects. Service dating, my friends are finding, seems to provide a steady flow of options. Natural selection never provided such guarantees.

Which is probably why so many people are tossing themselves into the matchmaking ring. Once, these institutionalized methods for meeting people were, at best, considered ``alternative'' and, at worst, stigmatized as ``desperate.'' But bars are attracting fewer prowling singles, an entire generation has grown with the knowledge of AIDS and the caution necessary when meeting new people, and the affluence and ambition of many modern singles produces a hefty list of requirements. As a result, maximizing dating time and efficiency with a built-in screening process is as sensible as using a headhunter to find the right job or a wine expert to select the appropriate year.

But then again, what is sensible is not always appropriate for matters of the heart. My friends don't need men for economic support, social comfort or to have children. Because they simply want a partner with whom to share their full lives, they are (and have every right to be) selective. They are actively participating in their own matchmaking -- why shouldn't they get exactly what they want? Because the quest for a mate is not as straightforward as selecting the options you want on a new car, and people rarely seem to meet and fall in love with the type of partner they would have described if given the chance.

Thus my friends and their fellow searchers face a conflict: They have opened themselves up to a huge pool of eligible singles by joining various services, yet by specifying what they think they want and don't want, they are actually limiting the size of their potential dating sample.

The business of dating brings science, numbers and probability into the favor of every searching single out there. But by taking the sorting away from nature, that elusive universal uniter called chemistry is often forgotten.
My friends are all dating now, some casually, some halfheartedly, and some exclusively. Whether they find love and commitment or simply continue an efficient and steady flow of prospects remains to be seen. But if they keep it up, one of them is bound to meet their match. Whether they find true love is another story.

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Cindy Crawford - Branching out or Caving In?

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, January 16, 2000

Strutting the catwalk and pouting at the camera were fun for awhile, but supermodel Cindy Crawford knew that, like all good things, her youthful beauty would be temporary. Looks fade, and, being a shrewd self-promoter, she wisely repackaged herself as a fitness icon, author, actress, and journalist, until ABC News' ``Good Morning America'' finally hired her as a regular contributor. That much is clear.

What is less apparent is whether Crawford, the female phenomenon behind a legendary Playboy spread and infinite glamour shots, videos, and fashion shows, has advanced her career or leapt into the past by following the path of countless women before her: into the kitchen. That's right. With the birth of her first child comes the birth of Crawford's newest television niche: domestic goddess. Swap the bikini for an apron and train the camera on the famous mole, Cindy Crawford is now teaching the world to cook, date, and groom.

Should we applaud her business acumen or fret over another irreparable setback for feminism? True, no one ever accused a supermodel -- that great American symbol of unnatural thinness and objectified sexuality -- of being a feminist. But Crawford, with a straight-forward style and an eye on bigger returns than mere beauty, was more than your average starlet.

A one-woman business who hawks one versatile product – herself, it's hard to believe she would enter a new venture that didn't promise to advance her celebrity and income. More likely, she, like Martha Stewart, recognizes there is money to be made and power to be gleaned by exploiting traditionally female arenas for profit. Who could forget Stewart's delicious stock market triumph last year that left the WWF in the trading floor dust the day both went public?

Similarly, many women, from Madonna's sale of erotica, to Hillary Rodham Clinton's high ratings for marital loyalty, to Naomi Wolf's $15,000-a-month fashion consulting for Vice President Al Gore, are cashing in by selling the very items and issues people seem to want from women. And whether male or female, manipulating stereotypes and expectations for profit is perhaps as free and equal as you can get.

That is, if women freely choose these endeavors. But noting Crawford's onscreen awkwardness and stilted voice-overs, the operant question is whether she is a pioneer profiting from the traditional pigeon holes of women, or a symbol that, despite supposed progress, women's choices remain limited. As the adoring camera lingers on her nervous narratives, there's little doubt that ABC News, like Crawford herself, is banking on her looks. But if everyone is making money, does matter that she looks like a shell-shocked wind-up doll -- as long as she did her own winding?

Years ago, Madonna defended one of her more sexually explicit videos by saying it was empowering rather than exploitative because, though she was tied to a wall, she had chained herself. Despite the deceptively submissive pose, Madonna claimed power in the situation, because she freely chose to portray herself in a subordinate position. Madonna place herself in an earning role, profiting, like Crawford, from the money consumers spend on her image. And if Crawford, like Madonna, sees her new role as a conscious career choice aimed at advancing her own cause, it's hard to argue that it is anything but deliberate and astute. Both women exploit powerful niches for which they are uniquely qualified, and that seems like good modern business sense to me.

Trouble is, power and business sense may not be the most important traits in a modern working woman. Sex sells, but behind it lurks the danger of trapping women inside limiting stereotypes. While we've come far enough that women like Crawford can proactively choose a profitable kitchen gig, it remains unclear whether women have earned the freedom and security to advance only themselves with their professional choices, or whether we face a mutual responsibility to advance collective goals and universal access. Sexuality, femininity, and traditionalism often appear to help women in professional and social situations, but history teaches that unchallenged female roles remain subordinate, weak, and dangerously dependent. Supermodels doing kitchen segments won't change this.

Perhaps, despite years of airbrushed images and sultry poses, Cindy Crawford has done much to promote the idea of strong, self-driven women who carve a niche and enjoy a bountiful return. But she may also have contributed to damaging stereotypes and assumptions that result in everything from teenage anorexia to the mistaken belief that, with so much money and power, women face no remaining obstacles to equality. Earning power and screen time may seem influential and progressive. But time will tell if Crawford symbolizes a new era of unprecedented access, or whether she simply represents irresponsible and greedy maneuvers that may ultimately do more harm than good. Until then, let's just hope she turns out to be a decent cook.


--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001

Blame Jake Gyllenhaal

Jordana Willner

As October crashes gracelessly down upon Republicans, and party leaders blame Democrats, gay staffers, and hostile journalists, even seasoned party operatives have missed the obvious culprit for the swell of anti-party sentiment and projected loss of congressional power. The problem is actor Jake Gyllenhaal.

With pouty ambivalence absent since the glory days of 1980s anti-hero Molly Ringwald, 25-year-old Gyllenhaal has delivered a comprehensive body of work more liberal than the typically slanted Hollywood output and evidently targeted as a systematic, one-man cinematic battering ram to bludgeon the ideals held dear by President Bush and his party of faith and traditional Republican values.

Consider Gyllenhaal's films. In the 2001 cult classic, title character Donnie Darko meets doom after his smug wealthy white parents aver their dedication to the Republican Party. Vacant and vague while their teenage son plunges the depths of mental illness, overmedication, and quantum physics, they helplessly fund his tuition and psychotherapy but can’t prevent his violent death in his own bed in their garish suburban McMansion.

That same year, Gyllenhaal’s teenage photo store clerk in Lovely and Amazing spotlights the unlivability of the minimum wage for anyone over age 17 and offers a stark reminder of the heightened culture of statutory rape of American boys when he falls willing but bewildered partner to seduction by a 30-something married mother.

Gyllenhaal’s enviable romantic tryst with America’s sweetheart Jennifer Aniston is the clever lure of 2002’s The Good Girl, but the back stories expose the slow brain death, middle-American sloth, and physical dangers lurking for the untold numbers of financially and politically manipulated communities whose livelihoods center around Wal-Mart and other corporate retail giants.

No plan to undermine the right could compete in today’s crowded political landscape without a cinematic slam against climate change naysayers. In 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, Gyllenhaal pleads an urgent case for the impending near-term doomsday consequences of global warming, as he and ultra hot screen father Dennis Quaid barely survive the instant onset of an ice age triggered by an earthly temperature trend gone haywire.

Jarhead, the 2005 telling of Anthony Swofford’s chilling indoctrination into Gulf War Marine Corps life, reveals dehumanized soldiers longing to kill and suffering the monotony of the legendary buildup to and short duration of Operation Desert Storm. Gyllenhaal’s destitute, ambivalent Swofford sees his fellow soldiers not as patriots who long to serve their country but as felons who choose service over jail-time, killers looking for sanctioned gun-time, young men with few options, and a small fanatical minority who seek “USMC” branding with a smoking cattle prod. “Anti-war” understates the damning commentary of Gyllenhaal’s film, whose final quiet irony is the 1992 celebration of America’s “permanent” departure from Iraq.

And of course, via 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, Gyllenhaal forever reframes into homosexual perspective the posse archetype, casting aspersions on men with fancy spurs. Shock value and world-class direction brought international prominence and a permanent place in societal and cinematic lore to his sympathetic, lovelorn gay cowboy.

To recap Gyllenhaal’s subversive messages: Global warming exists on an apocalyptic scale. Our manliest icons are gay lovers. Republican suburbanites kill their children. Retail is not a living wage. People die if they work at Wal-Mart. No one can protect our sons from sexual predators. The military is a dehumanizing hell for our sons. Our first Gulf War was an absurdly tragic waste of time; just what in the world are we doing there now for more than three years?

Gyllenhaal is not yet 26 years old. Surely the Republican machine, so adept at smoking out its enemies, will identify and quell this seditious source before he fires his propaganda machine anew.

If the right doesn’t act fast, the problem will only compound. Because Gyllenhaal has one more destructive new bomb to drop: sex appeal. The buff new bod he sent to the Gulf War in Jarhead was a sculpted work of art, reminding female viewers that the counter culture boy is growing into a desirably dissident man, and there’s an apolitical Demi Moore with Ashton Kutcher dreams in each of us.

The Republicans handle sex as well as Democrats handle taxes. But they must handle Gyllenhaal now. For if Gyllenhaal continues driving his messages home, the ever important female electorate will increasingly want that Gyllenhaal message, with their boy Jake in the driver’s seat.

Hollywood political dabbling is age-old and expected. To Republican relief, gentlemen lefties Paul Newman and Robert Redford are finally teetering their way into elderly obscurity, and to the Party’s confusion, trusted righty Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) has become more independent maverick than party faithful. Gyllenhaal’s oddity, and indeed his genius, is that with those vacant hound dog eyes and twitchy post-adolescent stance, he seems utterly oblivious to the political groundswell he has single-handedly launched. No grandstanding Jane Fonda clinging to the podium, this guy’s very distraction is his keynote speech.

Clever, sexy little bastard. It’s all part of his plan. The Republican political machine understands enemies and battles, but on subtlety, youth, angst, and sex they forever come up short. This time, all because of Gyllenhaal, so might their votes.