From Lauren Collins' profile of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in The New Yorker: "A study of Sotomayor’s criminal decisions by the University of Texas law professor Stefanie Lindquist found that, of sixty-seven majority opinions involving criminal matters, eighty-one per cent were pro-government and nineteen per cent were pro-defendant. 'People who think she’s going to be a really reliable liberal on all issues—I don’t know!' one of Sotomayor’s former clerks said."

I e-mailed Lindquist to ask how Sotomayor's record in criminal cases stacks up in comparison to other appeals court judges nominated by Democrats versus Republicans. So more on this soon. But my hunch is that as a former prosecutor, the justice is more liable to see things a cop or a prosecutor's way than some of her liberal colleagues are. Here's one case along those lines that gave me pause during the confirmation process. We'll know more about Sotomayor's approach to criminal law by the end of the term, given the court's docket. I do think, based on her questions at oral argument, she'll come down on the side of banning life without parole as a punishment for juveniles. But in other cases where it's a question of making life easier or harder for prosecutors or the police? As her clerk said, if you're a liberal, you might not want to count on her.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

Kerry, the young novelists that DoubleX contributor Katie Roiphe discusses in her essay for the New York Times Book Review may be "boys too busy gazing at themselves in the mirror to think much about girls," but the men of the MTV reality show Jersey Shore are displaying another sort of modern male sexuality, one that involves both gazing at themselves in the mirror and thinking about girls.

So much has been written about the Jersey Shore phenomenon—there's another article about the show in today's New York Times—but one aspect that has not been discussed much is the appearance of the men of Jersey Shore when compared with the appearance of the women. All the men have an exaggerated version of the ideal male form: Mike, aka "The Situation," shows his abs to the world whenever possible and says he "basically looks like Rambo." They all spend a ton of time at the gym and are part of a steroid-loving culture. The women of Jersey Shore, however, are notably softer. While there is a lot of upkeep involved in their look—tanning, nails, and hair extensions are de rigueur—you never see them going to the gym, and they don't seem to mind having normal figures. Though the men of the Jersey Shore are undeniably narcissistic, they have no problem displaying their Updikean carnal sides.

Tags: jersey shore, John Updike, katie roiphe, sexuality

Kerry, I agree with you that the "daring" misogynist sexuality portrayed by literary lions of yesteryear that get Roiphe all excited has disappeared because the novelty has worn off. Roiphe, in her favorite note that she likes to hit, blames feminism for being prudish, an argument that relies on the questionable assumption that sexuality is the same thing as misogyny, and nothing is hotter than a man who cares more about degrading you than getting you off. But the change she notes is easily attributed to an obvious cause she apparently wishes to ignore, which is that in the era she describes, pornography exploded in popularity to the point where it's ubiquituous.

Let's face it; pornography owns the narrative about male virility demonstrated through dominance over women who are portrayed as dirty whores who don't deserve any respect. That wasn't so in Updike and Roth's heyday, but if a male writer nowadays wants to write a story about bullying and dismissing women as eroticism, he has to contend with the fact that porn does so harder, longer, faster, and with an often alarming brutality. The male writers she quotes mostly seem to be contending with this reality; they don't even need to directly reference porn to grapple with the way that it creates a comical distance between sex as it's actually experienced and sex as our culture collectively imagines it.

Roiphe's angst over what she perceives as the feminist murder of male sexuality has a lot of bizarre assumptions underpinning it, so many that it's hard to untangle them all. The casual assumption that the only real male sexuality is cruel and contemptuous of women doesn't really square away with any reality that I know of, though I suppose if you watch a lot of mainstream porn and/or reality TV shows, you might start to think that way. But even if you accept that the only real male sexuality is one that dismisses women's safety, pleasure, autonomy, or humanity, I still question the idea that feminists have beat it into the ground because of aforementioned reality TV shows and mainstream porn. Or maybe Roiphe doesn't live in the world that I do, where the word "facial" tends to only mean the skin treatment as an afterthought.

I find simple-minded Roiphe's assumption that characters like Alexander Portnoy or Rabbit Angstrom are straightforward celebrations of what she appears to think is the only legitimate expression of male sexuality. When I read those books back in college, I honestly and naively took those characters to be the literary equivalent of mustache-twirling villains. Now, of course, I realize that the characters are somewhere in between, meant to be pathetic or disturbing, but also sympathetic. Going back to what you said, those stories don't resonate anymore, because the world has changed. A man who seeks to define himself through a form of sexual bullying of women doesn't seem daring or an interesting statement on modern ennui anymore; he just seems like someone who watches way too much XTube. It's hard to care much about Rabbit Angstrom when we have his modern form, Jon Gosselin, running around in Ed Hardy shirts with the babysitter on his arm. Maybe a great writer could complicate Gosselin as a character for us, but right now, most of us are too busy laughing at him to care.

Tags: John Updike, kate roiphe, Philip Roth, porn

As reported in the New York Post yesterday, Vanity Fair contributor Peter Biskind has penned a biography of actor/notorious lothario Warren Beatty, titled Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, due to hit bookshelves next week. Among the juicier tidbits the book offers, Biskind claims Beatty slept with nearly 13,000 women. (Note: This estimate does not include "drive-bys" or your basic, everyday "casual gropings.") Happy 2010, Tiger Woods! You're no longer America's most notorious philanderer. 18 mistresses in six years? Pppsh. Beatty was averaging four trysts a week. And according to his biographer, the man didn't even get started until the age of 20.

However, practice, apparently, does not make perfect. According to the Post piece, a skeptic once asked Joan Collins, Beatty's second starlet lover (he dumped Jane Fonda after spotting Collins at a Hollywood restaurant), whether the two really had sex seven times a day. She responded: "Maybe he did, but I just lay there." Sounds like great sex! Good thing Beatty was generous enough to spread his magic bedroom technique to the beckoning hamantaschens of thousands upon thousands of other ladies.

On the list: Madonna, Jane Fonda, Isabelle Adjani, Diane Keaton, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, and Annette Bening, plus say, 12,768 more.

Tags: biography, peter biskind, warren beatty

Pick your poison, demands Katie Roiphe in the New York Times: navel-gazing, ambivalent little boys or phallus-obsessed old/dead men. Post-war writers derided as narcissists, she argues, risk being supplanted by precious, innocent scribes who construct angst-ridden cost/benefit analyses prior to penetration.

The same crusading feminist critics who objected to Mailer, Bellow, Roth and Updike might be tempted to take this new sensitivity or softness or indifference to sexual adventuring as a sign of progress. (Mailer called these critics “the ladies with their fierce ideas.”) But the sexism in the work of the heirs apparent is simply wilier and shrewder and harder to smoke out.

Let’s agree that it’s deeply stupid to dismiss Updike’s work out of some notion that he’s not the feminist you thought him to be. I’m left wondering whether it’s true that “Philip Roth’s sex scenes are still enraging us,” as Roiphe claims; whether we spend much time “denouncing the Great Male Novelists for their sexism.” In particular, I question the royal We. When was the last time you heard a full-throated feminist denunciation of Saul Bellow? Roiphe mentions David Foster Wallace’s classic meditation on Updike, which quotes some anonymous anti-Updike female friends of Wallace’s (DFW actually identifies himself as an Updike fan), an essay that was first published in 1998, which was, for anyone counting, over a decade ago.

Roiphe does a nice job limning the romance of the older, phallocentric search for meaning: the act of ejaculation infused with mystical, purpose-giving power. The charm is there. But perhaps the perceived lack of enthusiasm for these writers is born of a sense that they spoke mostly to their particular time, a time in which sexual adventure seemed a natural response to middle-class ennui, a time in which anal sex seemed profoundly transgressive, a time in which no one saw anything wrong with anointing a crop of “Great Male Novelists.”

“I’m not especially offended by this attitude,” DFW says of an Updike narrator who thinks sex to be the antidote to despair, “I mostly just don’t get it.” That’s not rage; it’s indifference, and several degrees more damning. Maybe the (somewhat arbitrary) list of heirs apparent Roiphe mentions—Franzen, DFW, Eggers—have been browbeaten out of their virility. It seems as likely that the opposite has happened: A particular kind of rebellion has ceased to feel particularly dangerous, liberating, or literary.

Photograph of Philip Roth by Torsten Silz/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: david foster wallace, John Updike, katie roiphe