Here's a guest post from Slate V intern Lindsay O'Neal:

On Wednesday, I joined a hundred other voyeurs at the Rock 'n' Roll Hotel in D.C. to watch air guitar's scandalous sister sport, air sex. Air sex, as the name implies, is a theatrical sexual performance with an imaginary partner. The Air Sex competitions are to be held in 16 cities across the U.S., culminating in the World Air Sex Championship where the Ultimate Air Lover will be crowned. (It would have been 17, but the Utah venue, facing a threat of a revoked liquor license if it hosted the event, backed out.)

I was surprised to find that the performers and the audience were of the typical D.C. mold—professional and straight-laced. My favorite, “Dr. Love,” came straight from the hospital still donning his scrubs. (Watch him, and the rest of the highlight reel, below.) The first performer, Auto Asphyxia, a Georgetown Law student, told me why the Teach for America alum wanted to enter into the sexual three-ringed circus: “Bringing comedy to sex helps ease the tension that so many people feel about it. It relaxes people.”

View highlights from the Air Sex Championship.

Don't see the video? Click here.

I guess I’m one of those tense people he’s talking about. I was raised in a socially and sexually conservative environment where not only was sex not dinner table conversation, but it was almost completely ignored.

Now past my formative years, I still am extremely reserved when it comes to sex. I am notorious for dodging even the slightest PDA. The thought of kissing in public causes my eye to twitch, and public handholding turns my face red. Yet, I found myself with a front row ticket to some serious PDS (public displays of sex), and loving it.

Yet, I refused to believe that anyone here could see real sex as a mere performance. Or is it? Have all its wonders and mysteries been navigated, leaving just a shell of entertainment? Was I the only one who does still find it mysterious, who still has anxieties or sexual inhibitions?

I brought my question to the night's winner, Auto Asphyxia. His response: “Sex can be a very powerful thing, and it's kind of nerveracking not being able to know with 100 percent certainty what sex means to that new partner." So, even the most skilled of air sex-ers comes into real relationships with a little bit of stage fright. Who knew an air sex competition would bring such peace of mind? Still, I don't think I'll be pleasuring a vaporous lover on a stage any time soon.

Tags: air sex

Iranian voters go to the polls today in an election being discussed in apocalyptic terms, as Iran’s next great awakening. Much of the popular excitement centers around Zahra Rahnavard, wife of reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi, also known as Iran’s Michelle Obama. The 1979 revolution has brought conflicting results for women. It’s created sexual hypocrisy and fear of liberated women, as Janet Afary describes in her new book Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. But it’s also raised the average age of marriage and opened up opportunities for women. Rahnavard represents a slow awakening of the latter strain. In her dramatic unveiling, she recently went onstage holding her husband’s hand—the first time any woman has done that since the revolution. In college, she studied art and wore a miniskirt, but reluctantly. She “abhorred” sexual freedoms flaunted by her fellow students, writes Afary. After the revolution, she started a feminist magazine but always wore a chador. In her writings and speeches she popularized the term “second sex” and fought for laws against sexual abuse of women by relatives. If her husband wins, she may end up the most visible advocate for women the Muslim world has ever had.

Tags: iranian elections, zahna rahnavard

Great job, Obama! You've finally succeeded in getting somebody else to take some of those Guantanamo detainees off your hands. Your masterful diplomacy, although strangely ignored by more than 100 of our petitioned allies, has swayed the tiny island country of Palau to generously take a small group of the least dangerous detainees. Perhaps also helpful was the mere fee of $200 million we're paying them, which—as the Wall Street Journal points out—is a practical $10,000 for every citizen of Palau. On the heels of that good news comes yet more: Saudi Arabia is willing to take almost 100 of the most dangerous detainees. Details of that negotiation still to come.

I can't help but wonder if the same protesters who raged over America's abuse of detainees in Guantanamo will express the same level of outrage for the inevitably much worse treatment to come from Saudi Prisons. As one distressed Yemini family member of a detainee worried, it is unlikely the prisoners will have access to the American judicial system (let alone the American media) in Saudi Arabia. As Haitham Al-Marwalah, 16, brother of detainee Mohammed al-Marwalah, was quoted in the Yemin Times, "... we think Saudi Arabia is not fair."

But who ever said being fair had anything to do with it? Throughout the Guantanamo saga, I've struggled to understand why it's worth closing one of the most scrutinized and secure prisons in the world—especially in the aftermath of such intense public scrutiny.  Symbolically it makes sense for Obama (I mean, Guantanamo is probably the only prison in the world that most people know by name), since once he closes it he's "solved the problem" simply by removing it from public radar. But in terms of rationality and national security, it makes just about as much sense as shutting a school because of inappropriate behavior from a teacher. Fire the teacher—definitely. But close the school?

Being president is about making hard decisions that are best for the country—rather than what's best for your personal image. I'm trying to be optimistic that Obama's Guantanamo grandstanding isn't indicitive of what motivates all his decision-making, but it's not the easiest position to hold after watching him be willing to gamble away taxpayer dollars, detainee welfare, and national security interests this time around.

Tags: Guantanamo, national security, Obama, taxes, torture

Emily, you brought up BlackBerry etiquette yesterday, after Tom Golisano got mad at New York State Senate majority leader Malcolm Smith for rude usage of his. I'm continually astounded by the blatant disregard with which people whip out their devices and start multitasking in situations where full attention is obviously what etiquette demands. Or what safety demands—too often I've been the backseat witness to the unnerving practice of BlackBerrying while driving. I don't care that your BlackBerry has a map. Either pull over to check it, or have the passenger navigate, just like in the old days of paper maps.

But for the most part, it seems like even those guilty of succumbing to BlackBerry's pull toward constant communication, like Emily and Inci admit to being, realize and feel guilty about their breach of etiquette. The hazier question, I've found, is what's appropriate regarding smartphones' pull toward constant information. Too many conversations in the past year have been cut off by someone deftly tapping an iPhone or BlackBerry under the table, and pronouncing the "answer" to whatever it is we were discussing. I'm all for research and fact-finding, but I miss the days when you could spend half an hour speculating on the origin of "OK" (a president writing "oll korrect" in the margin? A word stolen from some other language? But it doesn't sound like Latin or Greek, so what language would it be?) or wondering whether opera singers tend to be fat because being fat makes it easier to sing well (or maybe something about the profession makes people gain weight? Or maybe opera singers aren't actually any fatter, as a group, it's just that a few key famous ones are?) without some fancy phone putting an end to your musings. Good conversations depend, at times, on some degree of ignorance and mutual discovery—piecing together theories and ideas from conversants' collective knowledge. When the person with the fanciest phone suddenly puts all the answers on the table, it strips away much of the art—and fun—of the activity.

So I say, checking your e-mail obsessively isn't the only BlackBerry crime. Incessant Googling, even to answer a question someone across from you just posed, has its drawbacks, too.

Tags: blackberry, etiquette, google

Pixar’s making a movie about a girl! The animation company announced its schedule through 2012 and not one, but two of their films will feature females. Harping on Pixar for not having made a movie with a female heroine sooner, especially when I’m still high on Up! (just as Meghan is), feels a little like ragging on Jackson Pollack for not painting straight lines. Still, it’s exciting news.

The first film, Newt, out in 2011, imagines “What happens when the last remaining male and female blue-footed newts on the planet are forced together by science to save the species, and they can’t stand each other?” This sounds like the animated version of It Happened One Night (plus a few action sequences), so, you know, sign me up. The second film, The Bear and The Bow, will be even more girlcentric, telling the tale of “the impetuous, tangle-haired Merida, [who] though a daughter of royalty, would prefer to make her mark as a great archer.” It’s also set to come out 2011 and will be voiced by Reese Witherspoon.

Not to harsh on Pixar too harshly, especially since I have all the faith in the world that The Bear and The Bow will be fantastic, but it's slightly puzzling that Merida, their first female protagonist, is a princess. As Linda Holmes at NPR puts it, “I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? [Pixar parent company Disney even has two more princess films, the controversial The Princess and The Frog and Rapunzel, coming out in the next year] If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn't you have chosen something for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys?” In other words, little girls already have lots of role models who wear tiaras and shiny pink dresses. Hopefully the new Pixar movies will show them a heroine who does other things. too.

Tags: Dinsey Princess, movies, Newt, Pixar, The Bear and The Bow, the princess and the frog

I was intrigued by Willa Paskin's take-down of Naomi Wolf's latest in Harper’s Bazaar and entirely primed to read an annoying "absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter to Angelina Jolie, the woman who, in Wolf’s analysis, most fully embodies "having it all," as Paskin put it. But I think Wolf actually has a point. Jolie has managed to successfully create an archetypic persona, Wolf writes, "one that really, for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation." To put it more directly—she manages to successfully combine a vast array of different female archetypes that have historically been seen as being incompatible with each other.

Wolf writes:

So you can be respected as a symbol of goodness (Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa) but not, obviously, be seen as sexual. You can have a hot sex life (Marlene Dietrich) but not at the same time be seen as a symbol of goodness. You can't get away with it. (Somehow, when an icon who was at once both a sexual being and engaged in good deeds died in a violent accident—Princess Di, of course—the story had a kind of terrible narrative inevitability.) You can take a lover—and even be a home wrecker—but not claim the hope of being seen as a good mom (Madame Bovary, Elizabeth Taylor). You can't get away with it. You can have money, fame, and a dazzling career, but you must surely be depressed, drug addicted, lonely, or self-destructive (Jacqueline Susann, Marilyn Monroe). You can't get away with it.

The magic of Jolie's self-presentation? She makes the claim, with her life and actions, that, indeed, you can get away with it. All of it. Against every Western convention, she has managed to draw together all of these kinds of female liberation and empowerment.

But you don't have to look to historic figures like Dietrich or Monroe or Nightingale to see famous women still struggling to combine it all. Just look at Sarah Palin.

Like Jolie, Palin flies a plane, has a greater than average number of kids, a good-looking husband, beauty-pageant good looks, a hair and make-up team (at least during the campaign), an international profile, and the ability to command extraordinary levels of media attention. Unlike Jolie, however, Palin cannot seem to get away with anything. Some of this may be the result of their handlers—Jolie, as the far richer of the two, can afford more people and appears to have a more sophisticated media team for her arena than Palin does for hers—and some the result of their different politics and lifestyle choices. Some of it likely has to do with their different manners of speaking—folksy versus sophisticated—and Jolie's greater gift for mythmaking self-display, as well.

But a large part of it, surely, has to do with the fact that, as women have transitioned into new roles over the past century, we've wound up with two systems in which they can operate—what I've come to think of as the system of power and the system of beauty. Most actresses succeed first within the system of beauty, moving later into roles where they take on other forms of power as directors, studio owners, or crusaders for various causes.

Most women in politics, in contrast, begin within the system of power—a system from which women have historically been excluded. Jolie may look like she's "got it all," but she's still combining mainly female archetypes as an emissary from the system of beauty. And she's most prominently an international spokeswoman for children who are displaced victims of conflict—the kind of work traditionally done by first ladies more than presidents. (That's not to say she's not having a powerful impact; my friends in the international development arena tell me she's had one.) She dresses beautifully, is a clothing spokesmodel, a movie star.

But Palin is a governor—the first female chief executive of the most male-dominated state in the nation—and was trying to be the first female vice president. She has tried and still tries to meld archetypically masculine roles with traditionally feminine ones while contending for prominence within the system of power—a much tougher challenge, and one that leads to things like cracks about her "slutty flight attendant" look from the likes of David Letterman (among many other things). Remember the controversy of Hillary Clinton's hint of cleavage? Or how the then-Mary Bono traded in her long California hair for a severe brunette 'do after taking her husband's slot in office? (She's since let it grow long again.)

Women in politics by and large practice the politics of physical negation, where an early goal is finding a look that's pleasantly unremarkable, so people can focus on the words and work. There are consultants who work with women leaders around the globe to help them find these happy middle-grounds. The higher they ascend, the more the problem created by the simultaneous need for erasure and visibility recurs.

In the past, there has been chatter about Jolie toying with a bid for office. It would be a true test of her abilities if she could make the transition to the much harsher system of power while preserving her present persona. I suspect, however, even she would have trouble holding all her archetypes together if she did so.

Tags: Naomi Wolf