Jones gives good blog?

It's Bonne Bell. Not Bonnie Bell. Fact checking, people!

http://www.bonnebell.com/

 

Chris: What you wrote certainly did not merit the backlash you've received. However, it comes with the territory when you reach the level of success you have. Bill Simmons has an entire message board devoted to tearing him apart.

With that out of the way, this quote really stands out: "Most women act as though they're sexual Olympians, as though they're doing the men in their lives the greatest of favors merely by presenting themselves like a downed deer strapped to the hood of a car." Once you do the "Most (this segment of the human race) do (this behavior)" then you're sort of begging for a backlash.

It reminds me of Buzz Bissinger's piece in the Daily Beast about why white people supposedly don't like the NBA anymore. He wrote, "Lack of effort is what whites still assume of black athletes in basketball—they don’t have sufficient desire, their body language during timeouts connotes boredom, they are always looking in the stands for the next concubine, they just don’t have that blue-collar work ethic that makes great white athletes great."

Depending on the intent of that statement, it's either insulting to black NBA players or white basketball fans. When I confronted him about it, he brushed it off as the sentiments of the whites he's talked to about the NBA. Well, he should have specified in the piece. Similarly, you should have specified that most women you've been intimate with considered themselves to be sexual Olympians, instead of lumping the whole gender together.

Again, I'm not suggesting you deserve the backlash you've received. More than anything else, I'm perplexed why an editor wouldn't call attention to this -- just like I was perplexed that an ESPN editor didn't catch the Montreal massacre remark. If editors at ESPN and Esquire aren't nipping these things in the bud, I guess we all have to be our own editors from now on.

 

Wow, this has been one long-ass thread.

 

Scott: I think you have a fundemental misunderstanding of what magazine essay writing is all about. Chris Jones was asked to write a brief essay about sex for a men's magazine. His audience was men who are not him but have theoretically had sex. Buzz Bissinger was asked to write a longer essay about the divide between the NBA and college basketball for a news analysis website. His audience was intellectuals who likely don't follow the NBA and may not care at all about basketball. The goal of these types of essays is to appeal to the audience by avoiding specifity. It's a place to intentionally paint with a broad brush for the purpose of supposed truth and relatability.

The cultural essay isn't for everyone. And any broad-brush piece will overstate. They are meant to draw attention to issues, not to provide factual blueprints on an issue. Newspapers by and large don't run these types of essays. It's not because of the aversion to detail and fact as much as the generalist audience most newspapers target. Without a specific, clearly defined target audience, these pieces will always fail. You didn't like Bissinger's piece because you're an NBA fan, a hard-core one at that. You weren't the audience. Lugnuts didn't like Jones' piece because she's a woman.

Bissinger's essay examines the role race plays in expectations that go far beyond basketball. Jones's essay examines responsibilities in the home that go far beyond the bedroom. More precise wording would negate the universal truths the writers were getting at with their essays. More precise wording would detach readers.

That said, the successes of each piece are up for debate. I didn't care much for Jones' but thought Bissinger's rang true despite its generalities. But the approach is standard fair for magazine essays, and it can be very effective when used properly

 

I agree that Jonesy certainly set himself up to get some blowback, but for the Gaaccher writer to pretend that Jones was writing about his wife was dishonest and mean-spirited.

 

As opposed to setting himself up for a blow job.

 

You write for your audience, Boom.

 

In next weeks New Yorker Roger Angell has an essay complaining about how the modern female has lost the art of giving good blow jobs.

 

Even I'm bored at this point, and I can talk about myself a lot. I'm just struggling to reconcile Luggy's hopeful claim that penis size doesn't matter, when half of the rebuttals to my 300-word sex essay include some shot about my penis.

Again, that's okay, because I'm a man. Women can make all the dick jokes they want. But you talk about women (who are not your wife) starfishing, and it's Armageddon.

And for obvious reasons, this would never appear in the New Yorker as written: It would have needed a date stamp in the first paragraph and to be written in strict chronological order.

"It was April 10, 1937, when I received my first oral copulation behind a green grocers in Flatbush. It was satisfactory."

 

Flatbush. Huh huh. Huh huh.

 

Ha! ;D

Just to confirm... Size doesn't matter unless it's a problem to the extreme-- one way or the other.

I think the women probably posted those remarks because women know that jokes about size are an easy way to get to men.

All the shit we put up with? At least we can always count on a penis-size joke to be a jab well-landed.

 

I would kill for Buzz Bissinger to come here and defend his writing.

It would be epic.

Can you imagine how badly Boom would get under his skin?