Lolita in Cambodia! I've seen similar dynamics elsewhere: my ex's 35-year-old roommate took up with a 17 year-old beautiful, blonde 17 year-old woman, and once it had become clear that it was going to last past the first few months, most people suspected that she was going to leave him behind, devasted and just old.
The thing was, even though I thought this guy was a sleazebag, it also seemed to me that there were some ways in which she had the power in their relationship.
Clearly, if A and B are in a relationship, and A loves B, but B doesn't love A, then B has virtually all the power. For example, B has the ability to choose whether the relationship exists or not.
The comic in 8 is very true. Just the other day, someone I know pretty well struck up a conversation that totally skeeved me out but that, oddly, I would not have felt awkward talking about at all with you guys. The power of time, place, and forum.
If you're lonely enough, you're bound to get worked. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there's a pretty high correlation between visiting prostitutes (esp. if you travel for it, I'd think) and persistent loneliness.
Yeah, that's an odd kind of thing. On the other hand, the guy in the situation clearly does have *some* control--after all, this woman who despises him is sleeping with him and being his "girlfriend," albeit a shitty one, because of his citizenship and money. It's kind of like, he has the systemic advantage, and she has the personal advantage.
For those unfamiliar with Chinese slang (like me) and un-willing to google (unlike me), tai-tai: (noun) means lady of leisure in Chinese. What does one do when one is not brilliant enough to be a doctor and not pretty enough to be an air stewardess? The art of achieving tai-taihood is no easy task and seems to be a fascinating art to master. A tai-tai is normally married to an ultra rich husband, manages the home with her maids, full-time shopper, part-time mum and often seen in the beauty salon or spa. This Blog tracks the life and times of an aspiring Tai-Tai.
If you haven't read it, Louise Brown's Sex Slaves : The Trafficking of Women in Asia (which I bought, perhaps weirdly but perhaps not, in a pharmacy in Koh Lanta off southern Thailand) is a good (for certain values of good) read with similar conclusions, although the work is not really quantitative. Perhaps the TV show was based on it?
the concept of the "tai-tai" here in singapore is a whippen-thin chinese woman with a rich husband who divides her day between slimming treatments, the gym, the manicurist, and her personal shopper at Takashimaya. such a person also favors massive jewellry.
4: Yeah, there are lots of sources of power in a relationship. You can't look at a relationship from the outside and say, oh, I see one person has dominant class trait x and the other has less dominant class trait y; person with x must be controlling person y. I think that's a frequent error of logic in looking at the dynamics of age-gap relationships: the older person, especially if he's the man, could be looking for someone could control, but it's also possible that the younger person could be looking for someone she or he can control. And of course, it's also possible neither obtains.
But I don't know if the fact that the Cambodian woman wasn't that pretty actually constitutes evidence that the British guy alameida knows was more interested in her personally than anyone else who has falls in love with his tai-tai. Witness Phillip in _Of Human Bondage_, or my first boyfriend's relationship with his girlfriend before me. People can be captured by something else besides conventional beauty, but it doesn't mean the relationship isn't based in sexual obsession or that they aren't seeking out the feeling of powerlessness.
Clearly, if A and B are in a relationship, and A loves B, but B doesn't love A, then B has virtually all the power. For example, B has the ability to choose whether the relationship exists or not.
I'm going to play analytic philosopher and say this doesn't follow. Say A = Thomas Jefferson and B = Sally Hemmings (actuallly I have no evidence that Hemmings didn't love Jefferson). A still has a lot of power, because A owns B. And B can't meaningfully end the relationship, because B is A's slave. Or say that A and B live in a society where the husband has insane amounts of legal rights over the wife. Or say that B is an illegal immigrant, who A could have deported. The history of jealousy reveals that loving someone who doesn't love you is not incompatible with exercising a lot of coercive power over them.
That's not to deny the main point, that as Tia said there really are a lot of sources of power in a relationship, and paying the bills doesn't necessarily give you the power.
First of all, dang you, mysterious Almedia, for taking the fun out of age-of-consent jokes. We were going to have a big age-of-consent party tonight- it would have been a blast!- but I guess we'll just have to play Cranium.
Second, what was up with American Dime-A-Dance clubs often luridly featured in movies in the 30s and 40s? (They were a big draw in Potterstown in It's A Wonderful Life, for example.) Would a contemporary audience have understood "brothel", or were there really dudes lonely enough to pay their dimes for a chaste (?) slow dance?
re: 27 - I know friends of friends who are paid to dance in clubs in Prague. Not as podium dancers but just to attract punters in. Tourists and locals are more likely to come to a club if there's a high percentage of hott girls on the dance floor.
They are certainly not paid for anything other than dancing as they aren't really dancing *with* the customers. Indeed, the customers don't actually know they are being paid to dance there, obviously.
Not quite the same as 'taxi' dancing but I suppose there's a vague similarity.
Using my googlewit, here's an interesting article about an old taxi-dance hall in NYC. The conclusion seems to be: Not whorehouses, at least in their heyday.
There's a short story called "The Dancing Detective" by Cornell Woolrich, originally in Black Mask, in which the central character was a taxi-dancer that describes this kind of business. Apparently men would pay ten cents for a dance and whatever they could get in the way of a grope. Although some of the women freelanced, the places weren't technically brothels as sex wasn't supposed to take place on the premises.
mcmc, thanks! I think I was vaguely trying to remember that story. Unless I was vaguely trying to remember a different Woolrich story, which is about a murder at a dance marathon.
But the substitution was made all the time in popular culture, particularly movies. I think that's whats going on with Potterville. For instance, in the movie of From Here to Eternity, an honest-to-god brothel in the book becomes a dance hall.
33: I think that because of the Code (I forget the name of the Code) a movie could not depict a brothel as such, or a prostitute either. So you'd substitute a dancehall (bad) for the brothel (so bad it cannot be admitted to exist). Does anybody remember the name of the early (pre-Code) Barbara Stanwyck film that was recently re-released in its original form? I heard it discussed on the radio a couple of months ago--Stanwick's character starts out being pimped out by her father, a tavern owner, and ends up sleeping her way into High Society, and is, naturally, the villain of the piece? Was it "Baby Face"?
"I think that because of the Code (I forget the name of the Code) "
The Hays Code from the Hays Office. 1922-45 for the office; the code ran from 1930-1966; then we got the deeply wonderful MPAA, and now we get to see them followed around by a PI and shown to often not have the young children Jack Valenti swore they had.
Do you have any evidence that Jefferson loved Hemmings?
To the best of my recollection, Hemmings was Jefferson's beloved dead wife's half-sister. (That is, Jefferson's father-in-law raped his own slaves, and Hemmings was his daughter.) The resemblance was supposed to be fairly strong. So, love? But probably some fairly complex and intense (and desperately screwed-up) emotional stuff going on.
On the question of who has the power in a relationship like the one described, I think Alameida solves it by describing the guy as a schmuck. While being in love with someone who doesn't love you gives them power over you, it does so only because there's something wrong with you -- a healthy person in a relationship with someone who treats them badly walks away. (This is cold, all sorts of wonderful people have been in positions like this at some time in their lives, if everyone got healthy what would happen to most of the great poetry in the Western canon... sure. But it's still unhealthy to put emotional weight on a relationship with someone who treats you badly.)
So, sure, she has power within the relationship. She has it for exactly as long as he remains fucked up. If he straightens his head out, she loses all of her power. He has power in the relationship, for as long as he retains his job, or his earning capacity generally, and his British citizenship. His power strikes me as having a much more stable and reliable base -- she can't do much to maintain her power, and he can do a lot to maintain his.
But probably some fairly complex and intense (and desperately screwed-up) emotional stuff going on.
IIRC, he neither freed her nor her issue, though his later family did. (There is a defense of Jefferson built out of the fact that a freed slave had to leave the state.) I think at least one of her kids was not his, and some claim that all of his kids were fathered by a nephew. Perhaps Jefferson had a more enlightened view of sexual freedom than I have assumed. But my bet is that he saw her as a favorite slave, and nothing more.
some claim that all of his kids were fathered by a nephew
My understanding is that this isn't based on much -- it's just the nephew is the only other possible father based on the DNA analysis, and so people clinging to the 'maybe he didn't do it' possibility don't have anyplace else to go.
# Thomas Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings' children: Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822; Madison and Eston were released in Jefferson's 1826 will. Jefferson gave freedom to no other nuclear slave family.
# Thomas Jefferson did not free Sally Hemings. She was permitted to leave Monticello by his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph not long after Jefferson's death in 1826, and went to live with her sons Madison and Eston in Charlottesville."
He has power in the relationship, for as long as he retains his job, or his earning capacity generally, and his British citizenship. His power strikes me as having a much more stable and reliable base -- she can't do much to maintain her power, and he can do a lot to maintain his.
I don't think it's that easy. Presumably, her power is her ability to attract people who meet or better the characteristics that he has. I don't know that they're thick on the ground, but finding and tooling a lonely person is not precisely the hardest thing in the world.
Relationships are deals. Once the terms are struck, each side should have roughly equivalent power. It's from the outside, where we judge the relationship against an idealized baseline, that we infer power because the terms seem to favor one side or the other.
I had thought that Jefferson didn't free all his slaves because he was in too much debt (I don't know how this works), but that might not account for Hemmings. Still, I don't accept "He didn't free her" as definitive proof that there's no love involved. If you have power over someone who doesn't love you, wanting to keep her in your power is not incompatible with an emotion that, though it may be fucked up, resembles love in enough respects that we might want to call it that. Few people actually live "If you love something set it free" on purpose. --That's to the broad point on "Is it possible," on the narrow point I really don't have any evidence Jefferson loved Hemmings, and I think it was the introduction to America: The Book that I was vaguely getting this from.
Relationships are deals. Once the terms are struck, each side should have roughly equivalent power.
Cute, but what I meant worked the other way around: Because in debt, he was unable to free his slaves (even in his will). As I said, I don't know if this was true.
No, I see what you mean, Matt. I guess I really mean that it's impossible to connect whatever feelings he had for Hemmings with whatever feelings we have for a SO, because the underlying conditions are so different.
As to the deal thingie - it isn't a great description, is it? I just meant that I assume people subconsciously maximize their own interests at the time the relationship forms. You silently agree, for example, to not watch sports every night, in order to make the relationship work. Presumably there are outer bounds for each person. And if they're really maximizing at the time of formation, they're each at that outer bound already. So neither person can cheat the terms too much - that risks breaking up the relationship.
Thinking about it, I don't think that's accurate, though.
Actually, I think this is a really interesting historical question, and one to which there's no real answer, although one can gas on endlessly about it -- to what extent can one put oneself in a historical actor's shoes; to what extent do we believe "human nature" to have consistency over time?
I remember reading a classic in school, and coming across a sentence about how it was simply not in human nature to lie so much about things, that we'd have to take historical actors at their word. I about had a fit in the discussion, saying that this said more about the author's noble personality than it did about the actual historical figures -- what he couldn't imagine people lying about, I darn well could.
Wait, here it is:
Few men possess the self-understanding, few are capable of the deliberate cynicism, that would enable them knowingly to deceive others about their motives.
He was talking, of course, about Republican politicians. It's possible that now this sounds even more ludicrous than it did then.
42, 46: We seem to be forgetting that the woman in question had been a prostitute. Saying "she has power to make people fall in love with her" is pretty gross, imho; her "power" is the power one would ascribe to a desireable object. Do we say a nice pair of shoes has power over the person who buys them? Like LB says, she has power precisely as long as he is *giving his power up to her* because he is in love with her (whatever that means); he not only has power as long as he has a job and British citizenship, but, in a contest between the two of them, pretty much as a permanent condition of his existence, no?
On TJ/Sally Hemmings: I've never found it all that hard to believe that he was in love with her. It was not all that uncommon, back in the day, for husbands or wives to own one another (e.g., a freed slave would buy his/her spouse, and might or might not get around to manumitting them). I think it's hard to imagine a world in which slavery is simply part of the fabric of life. OTOH, we do think that love between economic and social unequals is terribly romantic (e.g., every poor-boy-rich-girl teen movie), precisely because the emotional feeling ignores realities of inequality, no?
This has to be taken with a grain of salt because it is from the wsj opinion page (it takes a few random smacks at clinton), but Jeffereson's brother is a candidate for impregnating Sally Hemmings:
Indeed, the less cerebral Randolph would seem to be a far more likely candidate for Eston's paternity than the aging president. Randolph is documented by a 19th-century slave account to have spent his evenings at Monticello playing his fiddle among the slaves and "dancing half the night," and there is evidence he fathered children by his own slaves. We know that Randolph, who lived only 20 miles away, was invited to Monticello only days before Sally Hemings likely conceived Eston.
Furthermore, the oral history passed down for generations by Eston's descendants claimed he wasn't Thomas Jefferson's child but the son of "an uncle." Jefferson's paternal uncles died decades before Eston was conceived, but the president's brother was widely known at Monticello as "Uncle Randolph" because of his relationship to the president's daughters.
Finally, all of Sally Hemings's known children seem to have been born between the death of Randolph's first wife and his remarriage at about the time Eston was born. About the same time as this remarriage, Thomas Jefferson completed his second term and returned to live full time at Monticello; the 34-year-old Sally conceived no more known children.
On the other hand, nobody was pointing to jefferson's brother until after Martha's brothers were ruled out by the DNA testing.
If I could read Unfogged at the library I was in today I'd have commented normally, instead of reading all the threads at once. (Instead I got work done.) But as long as Unfogged doesn't have an .edu, or possibly .org, domain I'm not going to be able to follow anything from that library.
(Also, I looked up the quotation on A9 and it showed up on Amazon. But I did read the book and vaguely remember that interpretation of the republicans.)
Lolita in Cambodia! I've seen similar dynamics elsewhere: my ex's 35-year-old roommate took up with a 17 year-old beautiful, blonde 17 year-old woman, and once it had become clear that it was going to last past the first few months, most people suspected that she was going to leave him behind, devasted and just old.
Also "retail control" is a funny typo in context.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 9:57 PM
I had meant to say that "elsewhere" for that particular story was Paris, and that both people were French (and bourgeois).
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 9:59 PM
So they were French. that explains everything.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:01 PM
The thing was, even though I thought this guy was a sleazebag, it also seemed to me that there were some ways in which she had the power in their relationship.
Clearly, if A and B are in a relationship, and A loves B, but B doesn't love A, then B has virtually all the power. For example, B has the ability to choose whether the relationship exists or not.
Posted by Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:02 PM
That's why lopsided relationships suck.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:05 PM
A navy buddy of my dad's fell in love with a Thai prostitute and married her. I can't remember how this story ends.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:09 PM
I fantasize about Wolfson as a Thai prostitute. I remember that it has a happy ending.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:11 PM
As usual, the T-Rex is fairly insightful on this subject.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:18 PM
I love T-Rex. So insightful. (Inciteful, too.)
Posted by teofilo | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:20 PM
The comic in 8 is very true. Just the other day, someone I know pretty well struck up a conversation that totally skeeved me out but that, oddly, I would not have felt awkward talking about at all with you guys. The power of time, place, and forum.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:25 PM
If you're lonely enough, you're bound to get worked. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there's a pretty high correlation between visiting prostitutes (esp. if you travel for it, I'd think) and persistent loneliness.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:42 PM
Yeah, that's an odd kind of thing. On the other hand, the guy in the situation clearly does have *some* control--after all, this woman who despises him is sleeping with him and being his "girlfriend," albeit a shitty one, because of his citizenship and money. It's kind of like, he has the systemic advantage, and she has the personal advantage.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-23-06 10:55 PM
"Schmuck it up" is a commendable expression.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 12:22 AM
For those unfamiliar with Chinese slang (like me) and un-willing to google (unlike me), tai-tai: (noun) means lady of leisure in Chinese. What does one do when one is not brilliant enough to be a doctor and not pretty enough to be an air stewardess? The art of achieving tai-taihood is no easy task and seems to be a fascinating art to master. A tai-tai is normally married to an ultra rich husband, manages the home with her maids, full-time shopper, part-time mum and often seen in the beauty salon or spa. This Blog tracks the life and times of an aspiring Tai-Tai.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 12:28 AM
Interesting tai-tai juxtaposition.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 12:35 AM
I believe there was a relationship much like this in a Raymond Chandler novel. Farewell, My Lovely?
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 1:03 AM
"much like this" meaning the power disparity, not so much the age of consent or Thailand setting.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 1:11 AM
Doesn't "tai-tai" just mean "wife" in Chinese? It used to. Maybe some other word is used now so that the old word can be reserved for this usage.
Posted by mealworm | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 2:36 AM
If you haven't read it, Louise Brown's Sex Slaves : The Trafficking of Women in Asia (which I bought, perhaps weirdly but perhaps not, in a pharmacy in Koh Lanta off southern Thailand) is a good (for certain values of good) read with similar conclusions, although the work is not really quantitative. Perhaps the TV show was based on it?
Posted by Mary | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 3:22 AM
I mean, similar conclusions to your first paragraph in particular: it doesn't deal with men who form long term relationships with prostitutes.
Posted by Mary | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 3:26 AM
the concept of the "tai-tai" here in singapore is a whippen-thin chinese woman with a rich husband who divides her day between slimming treatments, the gym, the manicurist, and her personal shopper at Takashimaya. such a person also favors massive jewellry.
Posted by alameida | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 3:28 AM
who dances at the big clubs and offers her services as a prostitute there in exchange for giving the club a cut. Not a brothel, exactly
no, that is exactly what a brothel is. trust me, I konw a guy who does the tax for a few.
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 4:59 AM
4: Yeah, there are lots of sources of power in a relationship. You can't look at a relationship from the outside and say, oh, I see one person has dominant class trait x and the other has less dominant class trait y; person with x must be controlling person y. I think that's a frequent error of logic in looking at the dynamics of age-gap relationships: the older person, especially if he's the man, could be looking for someone could control, but it's also possible that the younger person could be looking for someone she or he can control. And of course, it's also possible neither obtains.
But I don't know if the fact that the Cambodian woman wasn't that pretty actually constitutes evidence that the British guy alameida knows was more interested in her personally than anyone else who has falls in love with his tai-tai. Witness Phillip in _Of Human Bondage_, or my first boyfriend's relationship with his girlfriend before me. People can be captured by something else besides conventional beauty, but it doesn't mean the relationship isn't based in sexual obsession or that they aren't seeking out the feeling of powerlessness.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 5:59 AM
Clearly, if A and B are in a relationship, and A loves B, but B doesn't love A, then B has virtually all the power. For example, B has the ability to choose whether the relationship exists or not.
I'm going to play analytic philosopher and say this doesn't follow. Say A = Thomas Jefferson and B = Sally Hemmings (actuallly I have no evidence that Hemmings didn't love Jefferson). A still has a lot of power, because A owns B. And B can't meaningfully end the relationship, because B is A's slave. Or say that A and B live in a society where the husband has insane amounts of legal rights over the wife. Or say that B is an illegal immigrant, who A could have deported. The history of jealousy reveals that loving someone who doesn't love you is not incompatible with exercising a lot of coercive power over them.
That's not to deny the main point, that as Tia said there really are a lot of sources of power in a relationship, and paying the bills doesn't necessarily give you the power.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 6:44 AM
actuallly I have no evidence that Hemmings didn't love Jefferson
Do you have any evidence that Jefferson loved Hemmings?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:05 AM
I thought I had vaguely heard that, but maybe I got it from the Onion. Anyway, imagine a slave-owner who loves his slave, who doesn't love him back.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 7:50 AM
First of all, dang you, mysterious Almedia, for taking the fun out of age-of-consent jokes. We were going to have a big age-of-consent party tonight- it would have been a blast!- but I guess we'll just have to play Cranium.
Second, what was up with American Dime-A-Dance clubs often luridly featured in movies in the 30s and 40s? (They were a big draw in Potterstown in It's A Wonderful Life, for example.) Would a contemporary audience have understood "brothel", or were there really dudes lonely enough to pay their dimes for a chaste (?) slow dance?
Posted by Ted Barlow | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:01 AM
re: 27 - I know friends of friends who are paid to dance in clubs in Prague. Not as podium dancers but just to attract punters in. Tourists and locals are more likely to come to a club if there's a high percentage of hott girls on the dance floor.
They are certainly not paid for anything other than dancing as they aren't really dancing *with* the customers. Indeed, the customers don't actually know they are being paid to dance there, obviously.
Not quite the same as 'taxi' dancing but I suppose there's a vague similarity.
Posted by nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:23 AM
paying the bills doesn't necessarily give you the power
I have a problem with this. Having the money *does* give you power, even if it doesn't give you *all* the power.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:34 AM
Using my googlewit, here's an interesting article about an old taxi-dance hall in NYC. The conclusion seems to be: Not whorehouses, at least in their heyday.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:35 AM
There's a short story called "The Dancing Detective" by Cornell Woolrich, originally in Black Mask, in which the central character was a taxi-dancer that describes this kind of business. Apparently men would pay ten cents for a dance and whatever they could get in the way of a grope. Although some of the women freelanced, the places weren't technically brothels as sex wasn't supposed to take place on the premises.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:50 AM
mcmc, thanks! I think I was vaguely trying to remember that story. Unless I was vaguely trying to remember a different Woolrich story, which is about a murder at a dance marathon.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:55 AM
But the substitution was made all the time in popular culture, particularly movies. I think that's whats going on with Potterville. For instance, in the movie of From Here to Eternity, an honest-to-god brothel in the book becomes a dance hall.
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 8:59 AM
33: I think that because of the Code (I forget the name of the Code) a movie could not depict a brothel as such, or a prostitute either. So you'd substitute a dancehall (bad) for the brothel (so bad it cannot be admitted to exist). Does anybody remember the name of the early (pre-Code) Barbara Stanwyck film that was recently re-released in its original form? I heard it discussed on the radio a couple of months ago--Stanwick's character starts out being pimped out by her father, a tavern owner, and ends up sleeping her way into High Society, and is, naturally, the villain of the piece? Was it "Baby Face"?
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:29 AM
I don't believe in sex, because it leads to dancing.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:30 AM
mcmc -- are you thinking of "Ten Cents a Dance"?
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:33 AM
The Hays code -- and, looks like Baby Face.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:33 AM
Oh yeah -- duh, never mind.
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:35 AM
oh yeah! "she climbed the ladder of success, wrong by wrong!"
a must-rent.
Posted by mcmc | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 9:52 AM
"I think that because of the Code (I forget the name of the Code) "
The Hays Code from the Hays Office. 1922-45 for the office; the code ran from 1930-1966; then we got the deeply wonderful MPAA, and now we get to see them followed around by a PI and shown to often not have the young children Jack Valenti swore they had.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 02-24-06 1:41 PM
Do you have any evidence that Jefferson loved Hemmings?
To the best of my recollection, Hemmings was Jefferson's beloved dead wife's half-sister. (That is, Jefferson's father-in-law raped his own slaves, and Hemmings was his daughter.) The resemblance was supposed to be fairly strong. So, love? But probably some fairly complex and intense (and desperately screwed-up) emotional stuff going on.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 12:18 PM
On the question of who has the power in a relationship like the one described, I think Alameida solves it by describing the guy as a schmuck. While being in love with someone who doesn't love you gives them power over you, it does so only because there's something wrong with you -- a healthy person in a relationship with someone who treats them badly walks away. (This is cold, all sorts of wonderful people have been in positions like this at some time in their lives, if everyone got healthy what would happen to most of the great poetry in the Western canon... sure. But it's still unhealthy to put emotional weight on a relationship with someone who treats you badly.)
So, sure, she has power within the relationship. She has it for exactly as long as he remains fucked up. If he straightens his head out, she loses all of her power. He has power in the relationship, for as long as he retains his job, or his earning capacity generally, and his British citizenship. His power strikes me as having a much more stable and reliable base -- she can't do much to maintain her power, and he can do a lot to maintain his.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 12:48 PM
But probably some fairly complex and intense (and desperately screwed-up) emotional stuff going on.
IIRC, he neither freed her nor her issue, though his later family did. (There is a defense of Jefferson built out of the fact that a freed slave had to leave the state.) I think at least one of her kids was not his, and some claim that all of his kids were fathered by a nephew. Perhaps Jefferson had a more enlightened view of sexual freedom than I have assumed. But my bet is that he saw her as a favorite slave, and nothing more.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:02 PM
some claim that all of his kids were fathered by a nephew
My understanding is that this isn't based on much -- it's just the nephew is the only other possible father based on the DNA analysis, and so people clinging to the 'maybe he didn't do it' possibility don't have anyplace else to go.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:05 PM
I stand mildly corrected:
Still not seeing love enter into it. Or only in the sense that I love my favorite jacket.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:09 PM
He has power in the relationship, for as long as he retains his job, or his earning capacity generally, and his British citizenship. His power strikes me as having a much more stable and reliable base -- she can't do much to maintain her power, and he can do a lot to maintain his.
I don't think it's that easy. Presumably, her power is her ability to attract people who meet or better the characteristics that he has. I don't know that they're thick on the ground, but finding and tooling a lonely person is not precisely the hardest thing in the world.
Relationships are deals. Once the terms are struck, each side should have roughly equivalent power. It's from the outside, where we judge the relationship against an idealized baseline, that we infer power because the terms seem to favor one side or the other.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:18 PM
I had thought that Jefferson didn't free all his slaves because he was in too much debt (I don't know how this works), but that might not account for Hemmings. Still, I don't accept "He didn't free her" as definitive proof that there's no love involved. If you have power over someone who doesn't love you, wanting to keep her in your power is not incompatible with an emotion that, though it may be fucked up, resembles love in enough respects that we might want to call it that. Few people actually live "If you love something set it free" on purpose. --That's to the broad point on "Is it possible," on the narrow point I really don't have any evidence Jefferson loved Hemmings, and I think it was the introduction to America: The Book that I was vaguely getting this from.
Relationships are deals. Once the terms are struck, each side should have roughly equivalent power.
I'm not feeling this.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:30 PM
didn't free all his slaves because he was in too much debt (I don't know how this works)
Weiner spends responsibly, so he's never had to free any of his slaves.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:32 PM
Cute, but what I meant worked the other way around: Because in debt, he was unable to free his slaves (even in his will). As I said, I don't know if this was true.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:39 PM
No, I see what you mean, Matt. I guess I really mean that it's impossible to connect whatever feelings he had for Hemmings with whatever feelings we have for a SO, because the underlying conditions are so different.
As to the deal thingie - it isn't a great description, is it? I just meant that I assume people subconsciously maximize their own interests at the time the relationship forms. You silently agree, for example, to not watch sports every night, in order to make the relationship work. Presumably there are outer bounds for each person. And if they're really maximizing at the time of formation, they're each at that outer bound already. So neither person can cheat the terms too much - that risks breaking up the relationship.
Thinking about it, I don't think that's accurate, though.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 1:42 PM
the underlying conditions are so different
Indeed. I doubt any of us can even begin to understand the relationship, as it is so far out of our realm of experience.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 2:15 PM
I doubt any of us can even begin to understand the relationship, as it is so far out of our realm of experience.
Isn't that what the study of history is all about?
Posted by Josh | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 2:31 PM
Well, yes, but I meant on an empathetic level.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 3:25 PM
Actually, I think this is a really interesting historical question, and one to which there's no real answer, although one can gas on endlessly about it -- to what extent can one put oneself in a historical actor's shoes; to what extent do we believe "human nature" to have consistency over time?
I remember reading a classic in school, and coming across a sentence about how it was simply not in human nature to lie so much about things, that we'd have to take historical actors at their word. I about had a fit in the discussion, saying that this said more about the author's noble personality than it did about the actual historical figures -- what he couldn't imagine people lying about, I darn well could.
Wait, here it is:
He was talking, of course, about Republican politicians. It's possible that now this sounds even more ludicrous than it did then.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 3:44 PM
42, 46: We seem to be forgetting that the woman in question had been a prostitute. Saying "she has power to make people fall in love with her" is pretty gross, imho; her "power" is the power one would ascribe to a desireable object. Do we say a nice pair of shoes has power over the person who buys them? Like LB says, she has power precisely as long as he is *giving his power up to her* because he is in love with her (whatever that means); he not only has power as long as he has a job and British citizenship, but, in a contest between the two of them, pretty much as a permanent condition of his existence, no?
On TJ/Sally Hemmings: I've never found it all that hard to believe that he was in love with her. It was not all that uncommon, back in the day, for husbands or wives to own one another (e.g., a freed slave would buy his/her spouse, and might or might not get around to manumitting them). I think it's hard to imagine a world in which slavery is simply part of the fabric of life. OTOH, we do think that love between economic and social unequals is terribly romantic (e.g., every poor-boy-rich-girl teen movie), precisely because the emotional feeling ignores realities of inequality, no?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 3:56 PM
If I had truly loved my poodle, would I have set her free? If she had loved me, would I not still have been her slave?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 4:03 PM
Good Lord, slol, who the hell said that?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 4:16 PM
Well, I was trying to spare a nice man a cringe. I'll email you the link.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 4:22 PM
This has to be taken with a grain of salt because it is from the wsj opinion page (it takes a few random smacks at clinton), but Jeffereson's brother is a candidate for impregnating Sally Hemmings:
In fact, the DNA evidence merely showed that Sally Hemings's youngest son, Eston, was likely fathered by one of more than two dozen Jefferson males in Virginia at the time. Eugene Foster, who organized the tests, acknowledged that the results did not point to the then 64-year-old Thomas Jefferson any more than to his much younger brother, Randolph, or for that matter any of Randolph's five sons.
Indeed, the less cerebral Randolph would seem to be a far more likely candidate for Eston's paternity than the aging president. Randolph is documented by a 19th-century slave account to have spent his evenings at Monticello playing his fiddle among the slaves and "dancing half the night," and there is evidence he fathered children by his own slaves. We know that Randolph, who lived only 20 miles away, was invited to Monticello only days before Sally Hemings likely conceived Eston.
Furthermore, the oral history passed down for generations by Eston's descendants claimed he wasn't Thomas Jefferson's child but the son of "an uncle." Jefferson's paternal uncles died decades before Eston was conceived, but the president's brother was widely known at Monticello as "Uncle Randolph" because of his relationship to the president's daughters.
Finally, all of Sally Hemings's known children seem to have been born between the death of Randolph's first wife and his remarriage at about the time Eston was born. About the same time as this remarriage, Thomas Jefferson completed his second term and returned to live full time at Monticello; the 34-year-old Sally conceived no more known children.
On the other hand, nobody was pointing to jefferson's brother until after Martha's brothers were ruled out by the DNA testing.
here is a link to a book discussing this case.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 4:55 PM
58: I had to read that book so fast I'm not sure I even had time to cringe.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 8:46 PM
60: Ah, but you recognize the book! (What are you, strafing the comment threads?)
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 9:20 PM
An homage to Mitch Mills, surely.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 9:44 PM
If I could read Unfogged at the library I was in today I'd have commented normally, instead of reading all the threads at once. (Instead I got work done.) But as long as Unfogged doesn't have an .edu, or possibly .org, domain I'm not going to be able to follow anything from that library.
(Also, I looked up the quotation on A9 and it showed up on Amazon. But I did read the book and vaguely remember that interpretation of the republicans.)
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 02-25-06 10:44 PM
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