Let’s Talk (Frankly) About Sex

A new approach uses openness and humor to make "The Talk" less dreadful for parents and children alike.

By BONNIE ROCHMAN NY TIMES

Reasons Why I Shouldn’t Have to Go Tonight: If I wanted to talk about it, I would. / It’s my body. / It’s a waste of time. / It’s a waste of money. / I know what I need to know. / It sounds pretty stupid to me. / It’s so stereotypical because obviously I know this happens to everyone. / Considering I took the time out of my morning to write you these extremely reasonable and great reasons not to make me go (and it took forever because I can’t type very well), and the fact that I really, really, really, really . . . really, really, really strongly don’t want to go, please don’t send us to this horrible torture.

PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME GO. I DON’T WANT TO GO.

The plea came from Leah Likin, a fifth grader. It was addressed to her mother, who had registered both of them for a two-part course on puberty called "For Girls Only." The missive, which included additional objections, failed: Mother took daughter anyway. But Leah had plenty of company, peers who shared her resistance, their arms crossed, their eyes downcast. Last year, the course, which is split into sessions for preteen boys and girls and held mostly in and around Seattle, and also in the Bay Area, pulled in 14,000 attendees. They heard about it from their pediatricians, or through word of mouth.

The creator of the course, Julie Metzger, has been trying for nearly three decades to turn what’s so often at best a blush-inducing experience — the "facts of life" talk — into a candid dialogue between parents and children. In the mid-1980s, she was a graduate student at the University of Washington School of Nursing when she reviewed survey data on how women had learned about menarche, or the onset of menstruation, for her master’s thesis. Most reported getting information from gym class or their mothers. "You can picture those conversations lasting from 10 seconds to 10 hours," Metzger says. "And I thought, Wouldn’t it be interesting if you actually had a class where you sit with your parents and hear these things from someone? What if that class were fun and funny and interactive?"

Metzger, who is 56 and vigorous, with flushed cheeks and blue eyes, says she has always been comfortable talking about sexuality; her father was a urologist, her mother a nurse. "Hand me a microphone," she says. "I get so into this topic that I can make myself cry in front of the class, and it’s real."

Her class on puberty debuted in 1988 at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, where she was the nurse manager of the pediatrics unit. The class was so crowded, she says, that "we had to run it twice." That reception convinced her that there was an appetite for a forthright talk about growing up. Soon after she moved back West in 1990 — she was raised in Portland, Ore. — Metzger began offering the course at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

"Parents walk in feeling almost victimized by preteens and puberty, and my job is to utterly transform their ability to connect," she says. "That sounds so arrogant, but I know when I walk in that room, that is my work."

On a recent winter evening, Metzger stood at the door to the hospital auditorium and greeted every mother-daughter pair with animation, as if she’d known them for years, and told each girl to take an index card and a ballpoint pen with the name of her company, Great Conversations, on it. The first hour of each class amounts to an informative stand-up routine — Metzger sticks a sanitary pad on her shoulder to show that it won’t slip around — but the second hour is devoted to answering the girls’ questions. Metzger believes that having kids pose questions fosters intimacy and allows parents to hear for themselves what their children’s concerns are. In the first class, when the focus is on the physical changes caused by puberty, Metzger tends to be asked: Why do we have pubic hair? What does it feel like to have a growth spurt? How do I know when I’m getting my period?

As the girls scribbled on their index cards, some used their elbows to block an inquisitive mother’s gaze. (Bolder girls will sometimes go so far as to write things like "This is from Susan in the third row, in the red shirt.") After intermission, during which Metzger collected the cards into a disorderly pile, she put on a pair of thick red reading glasses and began.

"Can boys stick a tampon in their penis?" she read. "Absolutely not. They can try, but I wouldn’t recommend it." She flung the card to the floor.

"Do you always get a baby from having sex?" she read. "My husband and I have been married 28 years. We may have had sex over 1,000 times. I am happy to report we do not have 1,000 children. There are ways to show and share your love without having a baby." Another card flew out of her hand.

"Does having sex hurt?" she read. "When people bring their bodies together, their ear might go into your elbow, but because you have chosen someone you love and trust, you say, ‘Please get your elbow out of my ear.’ And they would say, ‘Of course.’ Do I look like someone who would choose something 1,000 times if it was painful? No, I do not."

The second class of every course delves into the opposite sex’s puberty, along with reproduction and decision making. Metzger can count on at least one girl asking how you know if you want to have sex with someone. At the class I attended, she got the expected question, then walked briskly to one side of the auditorium and said: "Let’s say it’s 8:12 on a Tuesday night, and you walk by a complete stranger. What would you do?"

"Nothing," the girls chirped.

"What if it’s 8:12, and you run into Ralph from Jamba Juice, and your family gets a Jamba Juice every Saturday. What would you do?"

"Say hi," someone yelled. With each question, Metzger moved a few steps toward the other side of the room. "What if it’s your friend whom you haven’t seen since 2:30? What’s your feeling?"

"Happy!"

"What are the consequences? Sleepover! Now what if you spot your grandmother? You give her a big hug, and what’s the consequence? She takes you shopping. But what if I go over to a stranger and shake her hand? What if I give Ralph a huge hug like you did your grandmother?"

　

The girls snickered. By now, Metzger had reached the other side of the room, her movement reinforcing the notion that different relationships call for different behaviors. "Ohh," Metzger said with exaggeration. "You’re saying my actions don’t reflect my feelings for these people? If you’re telling me that, then if two people brought their bodies so close that a penis actually went inside a vagina, that’s enormous. If it’s true what you’re telling me, that this seems to be one of the biggest human-being actions, I have to put it together with some of the biggest human-being qualities — trust, respect, love, commitment. That’s why some people say this action belongs only to grown-ups, and that’s why some people say this action belongs only in marriage."

Boys and girls experience puberty differently. For girls, puberty typically begins at 10 or 11 and lasts five to six years, punctuated by distinct events — breast development and the onset of menstruation. Puberty for boys starts later, around 11 or 12, and lasts longer. Many girls are done with puberty — over, by definition, when growth stops — in their sophomore year of high school. Boys, on the other hand, may still be growing in college, and some secondary sex characteristics, like beard growth, may not show up until they are in their 20s.

The first night of the boys’ course includes a musical interlude, "The Penis Opera," in which the falsetto of the boys is set off by the bass of their fathers. Preteen boys think saying "penis" is funny, and my son, then 11, guffawed even as he looked around to gauge others’ reactions — perhaps because no one anywhere else ever shouts "penis" at the top of his lungs.

"Maybe you’ve been using the word ‘willy’ or ‘stick’ or ‘twig,’ " the instructor, Greg Smallidge, a sexuality educator who teaches many of the boys’ classes, told the audience. "We were brought up for generations with people thinking it wasn’t O.K. to name these body parts. That’s why we need ‘The Penis Opera.’ We need to talk about sexuality."

Yet what that conversation should include is far from settled. In 1913, Chicago’s became the first major school system in the United States to include sexuality as a subject. More than 100 years later, there is still no standardized curriculum. Detailed guidelines, released in 2012 as a resource for school districts, recommend minimum standards for comprehensive K-12 sex ed, but compliance is voluntary. "No state or school district I’m aware of has adopted them in full," says Danene Sorace, who coordinated the development of the guidelines for Future of Sex Education, a partnership of three nonprofits. As a result, sex ed varies widely in schools. Some places, like New Jersey and Chicago, deliver age-specific lessons starting in kindergarten and continuing all the way through Grade 12. Other places, like Clark County, Nev., home to Las Vegas and the nation’s fifth-largest school district, teach abstinence-based curriculums. Many states have no policies; more than half receive a share of the $50 million that the federal government hands out each year to promote abstinence through community programs.

　

Great Conversations represents a distinct shift from the usual approach to sex education. Metzger believes that adolescence and puberty should be the purview of children and their parents, not solely that of children and their teachers. "The idea that we are talking to two generations at the same time is at the core of this," she says.

In a 2012 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 87 percent of teenagers said "open, honest" conversations with their parents could help them put off sex and avoid pregnancy. Students who take part in comprehensive sex-ed programs delay having sex for the first time, have less sex and fewer partners and rely more on contraception than their peers. (Conversely, abstinence-only instruction has not succeeded in extending virginity.) "As parents of young children, we are really engaged," Sorace says. "But sexuality is such a taboo topic in our culture that when it comes to adolescence, we freeze."

That’s probably why information about sex, whether from parents or schools, is so often delivered in serious, white-coat fashion, its clinical messages heavy with the fear of consequences. To those who advocate abstinence until marriage, attitudes like Metzger’s foster permissiveness. But limiting the conversation to abstinence, Metzger says, "isn’t a full-enough understanding of sexuality." Because they are voluntary, Great Conversations courses are free to be more frank than school-based sex ed; they can sidestep detractors who think kids shouldn’t be taught about masturbation, for example. "We are not saying you have to learn this," Metzger says. "People get to choose to come to us."

Metzger’s greatest challenge might be figuring out how to speak in one voice to families from radically different backgrounds and viewpoints. For the most part, the course, which costs $70, attracts a well-educated, mostly homogeneous demographic. But over the years, Metzger and her business partner, Robert Lehman, who also runs the boys’ curriculum, have tried to appeal to lower-income parents. They found success in Palo Alto, where the class is regularly taught in Spanish. But in Seattle, Metzger says, she has struggled to find a community partner. A deal with the Y.M.C.A. fell through because of the need to simultaneously translate instructors’ rapid-fire delivery into several languages.

Earlier this month, Metzger got an email from a middle-school teacher she knows: Would Great Conversations want to teach a group of disadvantaged students — some homeless, others victims of abuse? Two of her instructors are interested, and Metzger is imagining what shape such a class would take. "It wouldn’t be the same song and dance," she says.

Metzger’s course might need to evolve in other ways. Lindsey Doe, a clinical sexologist whose YouTube channel, Sexplanations, tackles subjects ranging from kissing to anal sex, attended Great Conversations with her daughter. She was disappointed that the focus was limited to either boys or girls. Where would a transgender or an intersex child fit in? "I loved the curriculum so much that I wanted it to be perfect, and that was the piece that would have completed my experience," Doe says.

Metzger is open to the idea. Finding the right words to include adoptive families was tricky when she started teaching the course; now, it’s how to deal with sexual identity. "There was a titanic shift five years ago when the audience began demanding a more open conversation around homosexuality and transgender experiences," she says. "We’re always trying to balance the readiness of the room, and we may be running a bit behind."

In November, my 10-year-old, Shira, and I attended For Girls Only. There was an undercurrent of nervous tension as we waited for the class to start. Mothers looked stressed, daughters embarrassed. Shira hadn’t wanted to come. "I don’t want to learn about puberty," she pouted. "I don’t even like the word." But as the girls looked around, some of them spying friends, they seemed emboldened: Maybe theirs weren’t the only parents to drag them to a talk about penises and vaginas.

And then Metzger won them over. At one point, she handed out a diagram of a woman’s reproductive organs and challenged the girls to go home, stand naked in front of a mirror and superimpose the image over their abdomens to get a sense of where things were in their bodies. When Shira’s drawing fell to the floor, she gave me an impish grin and asked, "Mom, could you pick up my uterus?"

Later still, she leaned forward, intrigued, when the talk turned to how to insert a tampon; I’d never explained that to her. "Some people worry they’ll put it in too far," Metzger was saying. "What if you’re in social studies and it comes out your ear?" She pantomimed stumbling across the room and pulling a tampon out of her ear; lots of laughter followed her. "That — " Metzger paused dramatically — "cannot happen."

A month later, on a drizzly December Monday, I met with Leah Likin, now 14. She has long, curly hair that fades from brown to blond, and she twirled one lock around and around as she talked. I asked her why she was dead-set against going to Metzger’s class three years earlier. She struggled to explain herself. At last she said, with a blush that highlighted her freckles: "I guess I didn’t want to grow up. I was happy with the way things were. I am realizing now that the class was superhelpful. Julie sends you away with this greater message that we are all in this together, that you’re fine," she said, referring to Metzger. "That’s what my mom always says: You are just right the way you are."

One of the truly great evils in modern times is the MUNI, San Francisco's wretched sadistic transit system. It never gets better and the MTA police are morons with their card readers. ISIL is better than the MUNI. Leap represents a genuine step toward rational transit. $6 is a bit steep, but be certain it's a heaven sent step forward! Jesus is smiling! DAF

 

LEAP BUS ARRIVES IN SAN FRANCISCO

 

 

It’s been a year in the making. FROM TECH CRUNCH

Transit startup Leap is finally launching in San Francisco with completely overhauled buses and a route from the Marina to the downtown area.

The startup, which is trying to rethink mass transit, is competing with a host of other shared transit companies from Y Combinator-backed Chariot to ride-pooling startup Loup and, of course, Uber and Lyft.

Leap, however, is aimed at regular commuters who are doing a predictable route every day and may not want to jump for the price points of on-demand services like UberPool and Lyft Line. Tickets cost $6 individually or $5 in packs of 20. If you use commuter benefits, you can get the cost down to $4 a ride, according to co-founder Kyle Kirchhoff.

The buses circulate every 10 to 15 minutes and take about 25 minutes to go from one end of the line on Lombard Street to the other end in the Downtown area. The service runs during peak commute hours from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The key differentiator from other bus startups like Chariot is how Leap has rethought the entire internal experience of the bus. They bought old NABI buses and refurbished them with plush interior seating, Wi-Fi, USB ports and bar stools for working on laptops. They run on natural gas.

"We’re really building an entirely different experience inside. Every single material in this bus was really thought through," Kirchhoff said. "This is kind of a blend between a coffee shop, a workspace and something that feels like your living room."

The on-boarding process uses a quick QR code scan on an iPhone or an Android device, or if you have Bluetooth enabled, it will do it automatically. If you don’t have a smartphone, you can print paper passes. The same apps can also be used to purchase food and drinks from Blue Bottle Coffee to Happy Moose Juice. There’s an opt-in part of the app where you can choose to share a little bit of information about yourself and learn about who is riding along with you.

　

They also give live updates on where buses are along the route and how many seats are left. Leap doesn’t use any existing MUNI stops and consulted with the San Francisco MTA about designing routes that would not interfere with public transit. Leap buses are not also currently accessible to wheelchair-using or disabled passengers, but Kirchhoff plans to add that in future buses.

"San Francisco faces some very real challenges. Taxis are impossible to hail. Private car services are extremely expensive at peak times," Kirchhoff said. "We built something with an eye to complement the overall system."

It is, of course, a politically sensitive time to be launching anything in San Francisco around buses, given the Google bus blockades from the last year.

But there is historical precedent in the city for a mix of both public and private solutions to transit. Many of the city’s older streetcar lines were originally created by entrepreneurs in the late 1800s or early 20th century, then were later purchased and absorbed into MUNI after the emergence of the private automobile challenged their financial viability. Then, private jitney services ran through the city for about 60 years, covering inter-city transit gaps that were later addressed by the regional BART system.

Some critics have raised worries that these bus startups, like Chariot and competitor Leap Transit, will cause the broader public to disinvest in the city’s municipal transit system. (Back in the 1970s, the city actually stopped issuing jitney licenses and voters backed a ballot initiative protecting MUNI on this very concern.)

But at this point, MUNI handles 700,000 passenger boardings per day. Leap is running four buses, with one in reserve, and probably handling fewer than 1,000 people per day. Political support for mass transit also continues to be pretty strong, with the city voters passing a $500 million bond for transit last year. Notably, it was the first bond supporting MUNI that the city was able to pass in nearly 70 years. The region’s political leaders are also starting to seriously discuss a second Transbay Tube for BART, which will ease overcrowding to the East Bay but will probably take several decades to build.

"We take a really long-term view of this thing," Kirchhoff said. "There’s a sort of invisible boundary if part of a city is not accessible to transit."

Leap is backed with $2.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Slow Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.

'I'm rich. You're hot.' The cold mathematics of sugar daddy dating

Lauren Smiley, San Francisco magazine

 

 

Paula Patton and Robin Thicke may be separated now but once upon a time they were one of Hollywood's "spiciest" couples.

 

"The spice is not our problem. We could probably take a few spices off the shelf."

Indeed, the couple like to get creative in the bedroom. When asked whether Patton ever listened to his music to get in the mood, Thicke replied: "She likes to do it more than ever now. Sometimes she'll even play groupie for me."

We sort of suspected the man who gave us the "Blurred Lines" video would say that.

 

Sugar dating is on the rise. Sugar daddy sites started popping up on the Internet about a decade ago, but the top three sites in the Bay Area have reported a dramatic acceleration over the last three or four years of Tech Boom 2.0.

Even though it's fairly normalized these days, sugar daddy culture is still considered fairly scandalous. Click through the gallery to see other sex confessions.

Like many men who fall short of Jude Law handsome, Bruce Boston struggles on OkCupid. It probably doesn't help that his profile describes him as a "somewhat socially awkward introvert," his teeth as "crooked," and his tastes as kinky and nonmonogamous. In real life, too, the 44-year-old data analyst would have a hard time competing with the other guys at this midweek house party in the Mission: clean-cut tech bros who are grilling peaches and shiitake mushrooms in the backyard and wandering into the kitchen to get more Pacifico, their deep laughs booming. They're the alpha-male types who get right-swiped on Tinder. Yet Boston, sitting on the couch in the living room and nursing a ginger ale, has an advantage over most of his younger, svelter counterparts. As a senior theorist at Nest, the smart thermostat company bought by Google for $3.2 billion earlier this year, he has an income in the low six figures and rising—and he's willing to spend a good chunk of it buying dates. Boston is one of a growing number of 21st-century sugar daddies: well-off men who unabashedly pay for female companionship, friendship, and sex. And he's probably getting more of the latter than most of the other men here.

Three years ago, Boston seemed an unlikely sugar daddy. A married Mormon with three sons, he had a Cupertino condo, an Apple paycheck, and a vanilla sex life. But then he started seeing a therapist about issues that had been tugging at him for years: his self-identification as a sapiosexual, or someone who is sexually attracted to intellect, and as a polyamorist, drawn to having more than one romantic and/or sexual relationship. On the sly, he googled "married dating," and the search results opened Door B.

Boston was intrigued by SeekingArrangement, a website where so-called sugar daddies can connect with "sugar babies" looking to be pampered and paid on an ongoing basis, and WhatsYourPrice, where men bid on first dates with women who can accept the bid or demand more. The site's blunt pitch to women: "Get Paid to Date." The more subtle appeal to men: SeekingArrangement claims to have more than 40,000 female Bay Area members, compared with just 12,000 men. WhatsYourPrice boasts a similarly favorable ratio.

Boston began soliciting dates with women aged 31 to 63, stating in his profile that he was married. "Winks" from women showing their interest in his profile—some of them alarmingly attractive in a blow-dried Laguna Beach way—started rolling in at the rate of three to four a week. And so Boston became a dating machine, landing rendezvous with about 30 women so far. The leggy brunette in hot-pink stilettos. The busty artist. The therapist. The real estate agent. The UC Berkeley student.

Boston makes a $40 bid for an initial coffee date or dinner to vet a woman for compatibility. His date may then design a fantasy night out—for which he handles all expenses. He also compensates the date for her time if she asks, matching what he calculates as her overtime wages, sometimes $25 to $50 an hour. The woman can choose—and Boston emphasizes in his profile that he respects her choice—either "good clean fun," like hand-holding and small kisses, or "friends with benefits."

Beyond the costs of the dates, Boston has helped with other expenses: an Ikea bed, a transmission, a Tiffany bracelet. "Some people spend money on cars or a vacation," Boston says. "I prefer to spend it on people I have a crush on."

Boston views his munificence as a sort of philanthropy, a horny twist on Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's call for tech workers to give back to the region's less fortunate. He prefers to pay for things that contribute to his dates' careers, like tuition, or that "help them get from a bad place to a good place," like taking someone who's feeling glum out for Valentine's Day.

Boston's new lifestyle has had consequences. His wife divorced him (she dismissed his claim of being polyamorous as just an excuse for cheating), he says that he was excommunicated from the Cupertino Mormon church, and he's living in a trailer. But he evinces no regrets when he talks about his new life: booking as many as three dates a week and nurturing three to four ongoing liaisons, including one with a dominatrix from Oakland to whom he pays $1,000 for four dates monthly. He even seems excited about a date who pickpocketed him. "She was amazing! You get to see a part of life you never get to see! How would I ever get to date a person like that? You think they work at my business? They don't work at Google."

At happy hour, Boston's coworkers pump him for details: How is going out with a sugar baby different from hiring an escort? He answers that he hires escorts, too, but that sugar babies are more like real dates. He doesn't care if his peers judge him—he is transparent (Bruce Boston is his real name), awash in women, and, frankly, effervescent about it. Sugaring, he says, has changed his life.

Is sugar dating just a genteel form of prostitution, the latest incarnation of an age-old pay-to-play tradition? Or is it a form of erotic efficiency, a cut-to-the-chase innovation in a supercharged culture with no time for the dance of courtship? "When I look at OkCupid, it takes 20 emails, five minutes each, to get a response," one tech industry sugar daddy tells me. "That's too long. My time is more valuable than that."

Whatever it is, sugar dating is on the rise. The sheer amount of money coursing through the region is largely responsible: Sugar daddy sites started popping up on the Internet about a decade ago, but the top three sites in the Bay Area have reported a dramatic acceleration over the last three or four years of Tech Boom 2.0. SugarDaddyForMe.com claims that its membership in San Francisco is growing 50 percent faster than in any other metropolitan area, with the sugar daddies skewing heavily toward tech. On SeekingArrangement, the top three self-reported job categories are entrepreneur (20 percent), high-ranking executive (18 percent), and software engineer (16 percent). Two of the sites claim Bay Area memberships of more than 100,000 members, though only a fraction of those profiles are visible; the sites say that they don't want to overwhelm users with choices and that members often choose to be invisible. (The membership numbers are self-reported and impossible to verify.)

The sugar daddy universe at its most lurid made headlines in July, months after married Google X executive Forrest Hayes died on his yacht of a heroin overdose allegedly injected by Alix Tichelman, a woman he'd hooked up with on SeekingArrangement. After Tichelman was arrested for manslaughter, her attorneys told reporters that she was receiving good money from Hayes and had every reason to want to keep him alive.

The Tichelman story cast a tabloid-esque, tawdry light on paid dating. And in the progressive Bay Area, with its feminist, antipatriarchal ideals, the sugar daddy phenomenon seems weirdly out of step, a march backward toward a class-stratified sexual world reminiscent of 19th-century France or Gay (18)90s San Francisco, when well-off married gentlemen installed their mistresses in swanky apartments. Yet some (a few sugar babies among them) argue that the sites are harbingers of a clear-eyed future in which women take control of their romantic, or at least their financial, lives. Given the Bay Area's growing income disparity—one that often divides along gender lines—and the increasing cost of living here, sugar dating can be seen as a pragmatic move for women. If you're already dating online, adding a financial filter doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Despite that, there's something intrinsically creepy about sugar dating. It seems to turn the most basic of human needs—the desire for companionship—into a calculation in which men use money to buy intimacy, and women sell their time (and potential access to their bodies) to the highest bidder. But interviews with men and women who post profiles on sugar sites reveal individuals who are far more complex than the stereotypes suggest.

Online profiles of sugar daddies reveal a spectrum of the stressed, the bored, the insecure, the sexually voracious, and the commitment-averse. There's the 53-year-old Silicon Valley guy who says that he could find a girlfriend on his own, but that "not many women would accept the fact I'm focused on my career at the moment." There's MasterRaj, a 35-year-old beefcake from Palo Alto who rakes in more than $300,000 and claims to be "sexually dominant in the bedroom." And there's the 34-year-old "business-tech geek" looking for "a relationship that turns on and off with the flip of a switch."

Some sugar daddies are looking for under-the-table liaisons that require discretion: People can choose "married but looking" as their relationship status on SeekingArrangement. Others are looking for ongoing sex or just young arm candy. One married man on the site told me that sugar dating wards against relationship "scope creep"—that is, getting too serious. Others like the clarity around the monetary needs of the woman. ("I don't view the whole trophy wife thing as significantly different," one sugar daddy told me.)

Chris, a video game designer, is definitely not an exploitative john; in fact, if anyone's being exploited, he seems to be the one. I meet him in a cheap SoMa coffee shop—he's a hip-looking guy with black nerd glasses and stylized black hair swooping about his temples, scribbling monster cartoons in a black notebook. Like many sugar daddies, the 33-year-old is a decidedly non-alpha male. Speaking in sporadic and sometimes not-quite-linear bursts, he admits that he has never had a girlfriend. He says that he decided to engage in practice relationships with sugar babies in hopes of someday graduating to nonpaid courtships with women. (Chris's name, like many others in this story, was changed to avoid stigma and Google searches. Now is also a good time to disclose that many of the websites mentioned here, eager to promote themselves, offered their members upgraded memberships, and in one case $500, in exchange for being interviewed.)

In retrospect, Chris says, he should have seen the warning signs about 23-year-old Sarah. There was her SugarDaddyForMe profile, which read, "I like shiny things like gems and diamonds." And there was the fact that she stood him up on New Year's Eve. But when she texted one Sunday that she needed a ride to her job at a jewelry shop, Chris obliged, and he "was blown away by how beautiful and exotic she was." Sarah stared at him intently during the ride—in what he considered to be an "interesting but kind of creepy" attempt at seduction. Getting out of the car, she said she was having an "existential crisis" at work and needed a $3,000 Bottega Veneta purse.

When Chris agreed to buy it, Sarah blew off going to work, and they went to the Bottega Veneta store near Union Square. He also treated Sarah to a high-end haircut and took her to dinner at Hamano Sushi in the Castro. "I felt we were on some kind of an adventure in the city, trying to help this young lady I befriended attain a certain level of class, so she can become the person she wants to be," Chris wrote me in an email. "I felt like we were a couple as she held my arm and gave this falling-in-love look in her eyes to me. I've never had that happen to me, so it was quite an eye opener." The two returned to Sarah's Noe Valley apartment, Chris hoping that he might be about to get lucky. But at the door, Sarah claimed to be worried that someone named Craig would find out. As Chris walked away despondently, Sarah blurted out a parting "I love you!" Chris never saw her again.

Many sugar daddies are not exactly Casanovas. "Let's be honest, a lot of those guys are kind of nerdy and didn't do too well with the ladies until they got a little bit of wealth," says Gautam Sharma, SugarDaddyForMe's founder. San Francisco sex therapists Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel say that men on the sites often have lagging self-esteem. Harel says, "I have a client who doesn't believe he can find a date otherwise. He's doing it so he doesn't need to deal with being rejected." Hirschman adds that many sugar daddies are resigned to the fact that women are attracted to them partly because of their wealth. "These men know that women will choose them because they're able providers."

But the simple knowledge that money—not looks or charm or chemistry— is the factor that secures a date doesn't mean that some men aren't hoping for more emotional nourishment. In fact, there are cases when sugar daddy arrangements end up being just as fulfilling as typical dating relationships.

A 56-year-old South Bay computer engineer from South America, whose screen name is Captain Harlock, joined SugarDaddyForMe while in a sexless marriage. (He is now separated.) Captain Harlock, who prefers women over 35, describes the money-driven motivations of some of the younger women on the site as "sordid." He says that when one woman who had advertised herself as 35 confessed on their first date that she was actually 10 years older, he "was so relieved—she couldn't understand why." They started an 18-month liaison during which he paid her $1,600 to $2,000 a month, usually in the form of checks to PG&E, Verizon, and San Jose State, where she was earning a nursing degree. They became quite close and eventually did have sex. "I helped her because we liked each other, and not the other way around," Captain Harlock says. "It's hard after a certain point to know what is a sugar daddy and a sugar baby." He likes the clarity of the financial expectations on SugarDaddyForMe, noting that on OkCupid, where he also dates, women can be just as money-motivated but are less up-front about it.

Captain Harlock's observation has merit: Studies have shown that people who use mainstream dating websites make their decisions based largely on the very criteria that sugar sites make explicit. Paul Oyer, a Stanford economics professor and the author of Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating, says, "All your preconceptions and stereotypes about gender roles play out shockingly well in the online dating world. On average, women are looking for men who make more money, and men are looking for women who are more attractive."

Brandon Wade created a successful business based on this harsh truth. Wade, who launched SeekingArrangement, is an MIT-educated tech nerd. An immigrant from Singapore (his real name is Lead Wey), he was an IT guy in his late 30s when he decided to leverage his wealth to better his odds in online dating—and cash in on helping other nerds do the same. "I see the wallet as bait, just like the muscles," he says over the phone.

SeekingArrangement wasn't the first online sugar daddy site, but it has by far the most traffic, ranking in the top 2,100 websites in the country. It claims to have 3.6 million members worldwide. Wade's sugar empire has expanded to include WhatsYourPrice, MissTravel (for dates on vacations), and the Carrot Dating app ("Bribe Your Way to a Date!"). The sites make money off a lopsided payment structure: On SeekingArrangement, sugar daddies (and mamas) must pay monthly membership fees ranging from $50 to $209, while sugar babies may join for free. On WhatsYourPrice, the company charges a nominal fee on successful bids.

Wade spins the practice on Dr. Phil and CNN and in the New York Times as a way for women who are "tired of dating a loser and settling for the status quo" to date up. He frames his customers not as cynical gold diggers or exploitative johns with deep pockets, but as freethinkers who know what they want. "We have changed the perception of sugar daddy and sugar baby dating," Wade boasts. "I think we're affecting pop culture."

Whether or not that's true, Wade is clearly riding a business that's headed in a more lucrative direction. Bay Area sugar daddies are getting younger and richer. The average age of a sugar daddy on SeekingArrangement has dropped three years, to 43, in the last five years, and his average annual income has risen to $408,063, from $326,000 five years ago. (The latter bucks the trend for the rest of the country, where the average sugar daddy salary has dropped.) These income figures explain why on SeekingArrangement, the average man reported spending $3,505 per month on his sugar babies, up from $2,200 five years ago. That adds up to more than $42,000 a year, a sum plenty of Bay Area women can't afford to pass up.

Sugar babies turn out to be just as mixed a bag as sugar daddies. Yes, there are Versace–bedecked gold diggers and out-and-out prostitutes (though they can't admit this because the sites will kick them off). But a deep dive into sugar baby profiles reveals less a parade of Jezebels than a taxonomy of Bay Area female archetypes. There's the 25-year-old recent development economics grad, a vintage-clothes lover who would look at home on Valencia Street. There's the 20-year-old queer Oaklander with the sides of her head shaved and a penchant for environmental justice movements. (The sites host substantial numbers of gay sugar mamas and daddies, too.) There's the 25-year-old personal assistant who posts a Kardashian-style selfie of her rear, writing, "Yes, that is my ass, and yes, it is close to perfect," but then adds a Northern California twist: "If you are looking for a fun girl who can go to a gala one night and fly-fishing the next afternoon, look no further."

Then there is the startup entrepreneur I talked to over the phone: a former porn cam girl who goes by the name Ruby, holds a technical graduate degree from Berkeley, and is raking in $2,500 a month from a married tech exec. She's also involved in sex arrangements with two other tech guys, earning $1,000 to $2,000 per session. (She claims that one is a household name in the tech world.) The money allows her to forgo a day job in favor of the startup lifestyle—she's living with several brogrammer housemates and developing a sex-related tech company of her own. The sugar money isn't enough to replace substantial seed funding, she admits, but "it's sure as hell more fun." In exchange for about eight hours of dates and emails each week, the sugar bucks cover her $1,400 rent and a grass-fed meat and organic produce delivery service—a San Francisco sugar baby perk if there ever was one.

On the face of it, a sugar daddy–sugar baby relationship is a feminist's worst nightmare. Yet the power dynamics in sugar relationships are anything but defined. Ruby says that she's the one pulling the strings: She's free to spend her days working on her company, and she even had to distance one sugar daddy who was falling in love with her. Then there's the fact that some women say that they never have sex with the men who pay them.

Lexi is an athletic, blond 34-year-old elder-care worker in Sacramento who first got on SugarDaddyForMe after a friend's sugar daddy paid for her breast implants. Though Lexi would like to find a potential partner on the site, she hasn't met anyone yet whom she considers a match. In the meantime, she has received a $250 Visa gift card from a man she met just once for dinner and $350 to sit next to a married man as he won $11,000 at blackjack at Thunder Valley Casino Resort. A bigger payoff has come from a 34-year-old San Jose server engineer with whom she has been chatting online, by text, and by phone since February—he's sent her $3,000 via Paypal. She wonders if he might be someone with potential for a real relationship, but he refuses to send her a photo of himself and always claims that he's too busy to meet her. "He sounds cute [over the phone]," she says, "but he could be a cute-sounding ogre."

Other men have propositioned Lexi for sex—her profile pic, showing her in a sheer, black, ruffled skirt adorned with pink bows, does have the feel of a rather wholesome adult ad—but so far, she has refused to do anything more than hold hands. She turned down the gambler's offer of an additional $200 if she would sleep with him. "They're just dangling the carrot, seeing how far they can go," she says. "But it's a relationship. It's not like, I'll spend two hours with you [having sex] and you'll give me $200. A lot of the guys, that's what they're used to. For me, this is about the ideal of being pampered."

For Naomi Tripi, a 41-year-old single mother with an autistic son, charging $100 per date on WhatsYourPrice isn't about being pampered—it's simply a way to offset the cost of dating: the $15-an-hour babysitter, the bridge toll from Oakland, gas, city parking, and the time away from her own fledgling business. Tripi isn't intent on finding "the one," but she genuinely likes to date, and the fee allows her to give a chance to men she might otherwise have dismissed. "If someone gives me $100," she says, "I can be relaxed and not hold people up to the judgment of 'Are you worth my time?'" She can also plumb dates who happen to be entrepreneurs for feedback on her card-game business. The only awkward part, she says, comes at the date's conclusion, when some of the men can't figure out a graceful way to hand her the cash.

For women like Lexi and Naomi, outings with sugar daddies are potentially genuine dates, opportunities to get to know men with whom they might develop a real relationship. Yet other women see it as nothing but a hustle.

Monique, as we'll call her, takes a drag off a Newport Light in the kitchen of an Antioch ranch house with a broken-down car in the driveway. This tract of houses is a down-on-its-luck mirror image of the manicured cul-de-sacs of Silicon Valley. In Monique's case, though, sugar websites have provided a conduit for cash from the paychecks in the Valley to her federally subsidized Section 8 rent check here. ("Who wouldn't want a sugar daddy right now?" asks Monique's roommate, sauntering into the kitchen in pajama pants and a head scarf. She adds, "I like the fat ones—you don't have to do much.")

Monique has a pretty baby face. The Chinese characters for "love" and "money" are tattooed on her arm, and she wields a certain brand of candid charm. "I've never had a job," she says emphatically. Now 28, she posted a SugarDaddyForMe profile at age 20, at first using it as a thinly veiled escort ad. She says that sugar babies and sugar daddies who claim that they're not engaged in a form of prostitution are lying to themselves. "I just play my part, and I play my role. I'm a people person, I always have been. That's what made me a good con artist for a lot of years." About that: Monique says that she served jail time for credit card cash advance fraud with bank tellers, breezily telling me to look her up in a "crime stoppers" story (it checks out). As the final proof that she holds her sugar daddies at a bit of an emotional distance, she refuses to kiss them. "I kiss my kids," she says.

None of that makes it onto Monique's SugarDaddyForMe profile, where she describes herself as an exotic bombshell and a 23-year-old full-time "struggling student" ("That was my favorite line: I'm going to school," she tells me), concluding with "What can I say? I'm just your all-American girl."

Yet Monique eventually found that there was a subtle difference between sugaring and her con work. "When you're a con artist, you have no emotional connection to them at all." Late last year, a 56-year-old divorced computer technician who lived in the Avenues responded to Monique's profile. On their second date, he took her to Fisherman's Grotto for cioppino, and they rode a ferry across the bay. He wore sweater vests, "just like Mister Rogers," Monique says. There was an undeniable racial factor to the coupling: Monique is black, and he wanted to find out more about urban black life. She took him to the now-closed Club Six in SoMa, where her friends suspected that he was a cop. (He wasn't.) "He was cool and friendly—he just had old-people humor," she says.

To calculate her monthly allowance from the engineer, Monique totaled all her bills, including private school tuition for her two sons, and "added $1,000 on to it," she says, chuckling. The engineer paid up the first week of every month and bought her a Louis Vuitton purse. "He was always telling me, you need to learn how to save money," she says. "I don't care about none of that. I'm trying to be young and have fun." She recalls having sex with him about four times. Only six months into the arrangement, she was back in jail, having been arrested on a warrant for a DUI case, and has since lost track of the engineer. "I kind of miss him," she says, pausing. "Yeah, I do."

Siouxsie Q, a San Francisco sex worker who writes a sex column for SF Weekly and hosts the podcast The WhoreCast, agrees that sugar babies are not much different from escorts who advertise "the girlfriend experience": kissing (many prostitutes refuse to kiss their johns), going out on dates before having sex, and, usually, seeing a client on a continuing basis. What about the sugar babies who say that they don't have sex at all? "That's awesome," Siouxsie Q says. "If you can do that hustle, do that hustle."

Jolene Parton, an East Bay sex worker, blasted sugaring on the escort site Slixa. "All of my interaction with SeekingArrangement has been nearly indistinguishable from my experience as a sex worker and, most of the time, less pleasant. There's certainly nothing wrong with exchanging escorting services for money.... But tangling it up in a false promise of 'real-life dating' is both deceitful and hurtful to paying customers."

Nonetheless, many sugar relationships aren't just a hustle, and some do lead to love. Wade asserts that SeekingArrangement has spawned "thousands" of marriages, a claim impossible to verify. (He also denies that there's any real distinction between sugar relationships and marriage: "Marriage is an arrangement," he says.) Among the dozen women I talked to, a divorced woman named Viv has used sugar sites most like an upwardly mobilizing OkCupid—and has actually met a potentially serious partner. A 28-year-old who's studying biochemistry at Sacramento State, she had moral qualms about sugar sites but wanted access to "someone who's established, instead of the type of guy I meet, who is doing nothing and going nowhere"—the kind of man who could help pay for her physician's assistant master's program in the future.

So, in April, Viv posted a selfie in a minidress on SugarDaddyForMe. She went on dates with an engineer and a Samsung server specialist in Silicon Valley, but was most intrigued by an intelligent, 38-year-old hospital administrator from San Diego. They were soon texting several times a day, and he bought her an iPad and Bebe stilettos. In August, he flew her to San Diego for a weeklong rendezvous in a hotel suite, where, between trips to SeaWorld and the beach, they decided to become exclusive. Viv deleted her profile, met his family, and began calling him her boyfriend. On the phone, she sounds upbeat about the relationship. "I'm going to see where it goes with this guy."

On an August Friday night, Boston walks into Ippuku, a swanky Japanese restaurant in downtown Berkeley. He's sweating profusely from a sexual rendezvous minutes before at the Berkeley Hot Tubs. In what must seem like quite the score to onlookers, he's accompanied by Cequinne, a self-described "short Asian with big tits and a pretty face"—all true. Tonight her ample breasts are going bra-free, lending her turtleneck PG-13 flair.

The 30-year-old South Bay native and polyamory convert uses the name Cequinne in her merchandising business and on her costume play website, where she posts photos of herself in corsets and tutus, or sometimes just nude. She joined WhatsYourPrice in February, first out of curiosity and then in hope of an ongoing paid relationship. Now she's looking for a mentor for her nascent hangover-prevention business (it involves gummy bears). She has created a system to evaluate dates: She brings value to a man through her beauty, her conversational skills, and her nurturing nature. A date's profile must interest her. If it's not compelling, he can pay her more ($100 to $200) to make it worth her time. She decides if she wants to hook up with him only after she meets him, a decision that she claims has nothing to do with the money.

After Cequinne accepted Boston's $50 offer for a first date last February (he raised his normal $40 bid because he liked her profile so much), they hit it off, and they've been going out as often as three times a week ever since. "Most of the time we just eat and talk and have sex," Cequinne says. Boston advises her about her business, which she hopes will someday bring her "blang blang cash moneys," as she says on her profile, and financial freedom. She offers Boston a nonjudgmental sounding board for matters of the poly-heart.

At Ippuku, the two sit on mats atop a raised wooden platform, sharing the easy but electric banter of a happy new couple—though that's where the normal conventions end. "I had an interesting date on Monday," Boston announces, meaning with someone else. Cequinne describes her visit that week with a boyfriend in Toronto whom she met on OkCupid and talks about doing a nude 5K in Vancouver. Boston goes into his divorce proceedings and describes a new woman from SeekingArrangement. Toward the end of dinner, Cequinne leans her back into Boston's chest.

When the $120 check arrives, Boston pulls out his credit card.

"I need to tell both of you this," Cequinne says. "I would have gone out on a date with Bruce for free."

Boston looks at Cequinne lovingly and beams. "Marvelous!"

Everyone is happy and everyone goes home fully satisfied, money well spent!

　

Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex

By Gary Gutting The NY TIMES

Last month, Salvatore Cordileone, the archbishop of San Francisco, made controversial changes to a handbook for Catholic high school teachers in his jurisdiction. The changes included morals clauses, one of which forbids those teachers from publicly endorsing homosexual behavior. There are plausible legal and educational objections to this move. But there is a deeper issue, one that raises fundamental questions about Catholic teachings on homosexuality and other sexual matters.

Sex can contribute to any couple’s fulfillment as human beings. Isn’t this just what it should mean to live in accord with human nature?

The archbishop has justified of his decision on the grounds that homosexual acts are "contrary to natural law." Unlike many religions, Catholicism insists that its moral teachings are based not just on faith but also on human reason. For example, the church claims that its moral condemnation of homosexual acts can be established by rigorous philosophical argument, independent of anything in the Bible.

The primary arguments derive from what is known as the "natural-law tradition" of ethical thought, which begins with Plato and Aristotle, continues through Thomas Aquinas and other medieval and modern philosophers, and still flourishes today in the work of thinkers like John Finnis and Robert George. This tradition sees morality as a matter of the moral laws that follow from what fundamentally makes us human: our human nature. This is what the archbishop was referring to when he said that homosexual acts are contrary to natural law. This has long been a major basis for the church’s claim that homosexual acts are immoral — indeed "gravely sinful."

The problem is that, rightly developed, natural-law thinking seems to support rather than reject the morality of homosexual behavior. Consider this line of thought from John Corvino, a philosopher at Wayne State University: "A gay relationship, like a straight relationship, can be a significant avenue of meaning, growth, and fulfillment. It can realize a variety of genuine human goods; it can bear good fruit. . . . [For both straight and gay couples,] sex is a powerful and unique way of building, celebrating, and replenishing intimacy." The sort of relationship Corvino describes seems clearly one that would contribute to a couple’s fulfillment as human beings — whether the sex involved is hetero- or homosexual. Isn’t this just what it should mean to live in accord with human nature?

Natural-law ethicists typically don’t see it that way. They judge homosexual acts immoral, and claim that even a relationship like the one Corvino describes would be evil because the sex involved would be of the wrong sort. According to them, any sexual act that could not in principle result in pregnancy is contrary to the laws of human nature because it means that each partner is using it as a means to his or her pleasure. Only a shared act directed toward reproduction can prevent this ultimate selfishness. The awkward talk of "an act that could not in principle result in pregnancy" is necessary since those who put forward this argument want to maintain that heterosexual unions in which one (or both) of the partners is sterile are still moral. There’s nothing unnatural about their intercourse because it’s the sort of act that in general can lead to reproduction.

Just trying to formulate the argument shows how strained it is. There are, of course, numerous subtle distinctions employed to defend it, requiring equal subtlety to respond. And many would see the argument as proving too much, since proponents also use it to show the immorality of birth control, masturbation and even non-reproductive sexual acts between heterosexuals.

Most important, however, the argument has no satisfactory response to two crucial questions. First, why, even if nonreproductive sex were somehow less "natural" than reproductive, couldn’t it still play a positive role in a humanly fulfilling life of love between two people of the same sex? Second, why must nonreproductive sex be only for the selfish pleasure of each partner, rather than, as Corvino put it, a way of building, celebrating, and replenishing their shared intimacy?

The natural-law argument might make some sense to those who see homosexuals as dominated by an obsessive desire for pleasure, to which they subordinate any notion of fidelity or integrity. The courageous uncloseting of many homosexuals has revealed them as people like most everyone else, searching for and sometimes achieving a fulfilling human life through rich and complex relationships. Since the official church, under Pope Francis, is more than ever open to this sensible view, the time is overdue for a revision of its philosophical misunderstanding of homosexual acts.

But should the failure of the natural-law case against homosexual behavior bother Catholics, who, after all, can also appeal to the Bible’s denunciations of homosexual behavior? Here another aspect of Catholic thought becomes crucial: The church accepts that there are two distinct sources of truth: divine revelation and reason unaided by revelation (for example, the "natural reason" of scientists and philosophers). But it also holds Thomas Aquinas’s view that there can never be a genuine conflict between these two sources. Therefore, any apparent conflict results from our failure to understand what either God or reason is saying.

Most important, there is no assumption, in any given case, that we must resolve the conflict by revising the apparent conclusion of reason. For example, the church (eventually) decided that the scientific claims of Galileo and Darwin were correct and required revisions in teachings based on biblical passages suggesting otherwise. It is, therefore, an open question whether to accept the reasonable conclusion that homosexual acts need not be immoral and reject the view that this is what the Bible says.

There is considerable discussion among biblical scholars on this issue, with many suggesting that the passages that seem to condemn homosexual acts in general actually refer only to certain cases such as homosexual rape or male prostitution. But even if the biblical view is that any homosexual act is immoral, the Bible’s support for this view is no stronger than its support for the morality of slavery. Christian scholars argue that the acceptance of slavery (even in the New Testament, by Paul) merely reflects the limited perspective of the Bible’s human authors (similar to their belief in geocentrism or six-day creation) and does not reflect God’s revelation.

The condemnation of homosexuality could plausibly be treated in the same way. The argument would then be that rational reflection strongly supports the claim that homosexual acts are not in general immoral, while there’s no need to conclude that God’s revelation says otherwise. This points the way to the church’s acceptance of homosexual acts as part of a morally fulfilling human relationship.

I understand that an archbishop is not politically in a position to deny what is still an official church doctrine. But there is nothing that requires him to vigorously enforce a teaching that is so dubious even in terms of the church’s own view on the two sources of truth. This, after all, is exactly the path most clergy, including some bishops, have taken regarding birth control — a teaching supported by the very same sort of natural-law argument as that against homosexual acts.

More generally, the church needs to undertake a thorough rethinking of its teachings on sexual ethics, including premarital sex, masturbation and remarriage after divorce. In every case, the old arguments no longer work (if they ever did), and a vast number of Catholics reject the teachings. It’s time for the church to realize that its sexual ethics are philosophically untenable and theologically unnecessary.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960," and writes regularly for The Stone.

From Craigslist's

Going out on a limb - m4m - 24 (Cc)

age : 24

Looking for something very specific. I've never had sex with a man before. I don't find men attractive. I just enjoy the feeling of anal stimulation. I only know that because I've played with dogs before. And I'm only posting because I can't find an animal partner to play with. So in order for me to actually consider playing with another man, you would have to be attractive and have a decent body. You would also have to be able to keep your mouth shut. Also, even small vegetables hurt me. So have a slim penis. Thick would not be good for me. Last thing is be a clean, shaven, good smelling, disease free person. I know it's a lot to ask but sorry. That's my standard. I hope someone can fit the shoe. As long as this ad is up, I'm seeking. Later

 

God Bless America!

American Crime

This new ABC drama is the most nuanced, intelligent take on race relations we’ve seen in years.
By Willa Paskin  SLATE

American Crime, the impressive and somber new drama series written by John Ridley, the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave, begins with a dreaded phone call. Robbery-homicide officers in Modesto, California, wake Russ Skokie (Timothy Hutton) in the middle of the night and tell him he needs to fly there immediately to identify what they believe to be the remains of his son, Matt, who appears to be the victim of a home invasion. Russ arrives that morning, gazes on his son’s corpse, learns Matt’s wife, Gwen, is in a coma, seemingly the victim of sexual assault, and asks to use the restroom, where he sobs loudly, like a wounded animal. It’s a blunt, immersive introduction to American Crime’s tough emotional palate. The series is one of the first network dramas in a cable mode that that does not feel seriously reduced, stupefied, or broadened by its network address, and that means the viewing can be very tough going.

Matt Skokie’s murder sets the series’ plot in motion, but not by turning the show into a whodunit. American Crime eschews the propulsive, entertaining genre beats of a mystery show: None of its main characters are detectives, lawyers, or crime-solvers of any kind. The title, American Crime, does not refer to any one act but a host of them, including Matt’s death; the lesser crimes surrounding it; the crimes in prosecuting it; and, hovering above it all, the crimes of prejudice and racism and their distinctly American flavors.

It’s a reflection of the show’s philosophy that the seemingly happily married white couple whose murder and assault kicks off the series remains largely mysterious and unknown: Matt and Gwen would be on the front page of the paper, but they are of the least interest to American Crime’s writers. Instead Matt’s death acts as a kind of dragnet, grabbing up a number of disparate characters that the show follows even as the immediate ramifications of the murder fade from their lives.

Those characters include Russ’ rigid, racist ex-wife, Barb (Felicity Huffman); Gwen’s parents, Tom (W. Earl Brown) and Eve (Penelope Ann Miller); widowed Mexican American garage owner Alonzo (Benito Martinez, who abruptly left House of Cards this season, probably for this role), his teenage son, Tony (Johnny Ortiz), and daughter, Jenny (Gleendilys Inoa); two lovebird meth-heads, the white Aubrey (Caitlin Gerard) and the black Carter (Elvis Nolasco), whose sister Aliyah (Regina King) is a devoted convert to Islam; and Hector (Richard Cabral), a tattoo-covered gangbanger from Mexico.

All of these characters have something to say about race. Barb, who raised her two sons in public housing after Russ, a gambling addict, left them with nothing, continuously refers to "those people"—"you wouldn’t believe what those people did to us," for example. Upon hearing that the murderer might be a "Hispanic kid," she immediately begins describing the maybe-suspect as an "illegal." She wants to have her son’s death prosecuted as a hate crime. Alonzo tells a reporter that undocumented immigrants "always make the rest of us look bad." He tells his children, "Be better than them. They just think you’re a Mexican," and his children, in turn, believe that he "wishes he were white." Aubrey and Carter, lovingly devoted junkies, rip out pages from fashion magazines that show beautiful biracial couples and hang them on the walls of their disgusting apartment. Aliyah believes her brother is being targeted because he is black and is so horrified by his relationship with a white woman that she keeps insisting he break it off. "You can hate whitey all you want," Carter tells her, "but I love [Aubrey]."

All of this, as you can probably surmise, could very easily slip over into the territory of Crash, the hackneyed, pious Best Picture winner in which characters were stand-ins for hoary insights about race. It is true that American Crime, like Crash, is a kaleidoscopic look at racial relations, which do come up in every single storyline (and sometimes as ridiculously as a pair of junkies lining their apartment with aspirational biracial photo shoots). But Ridley’s insights are, generally speaking, much more complicated and nuanced than Crash’s, which ultimately came to the banal and head-scratching conclusion that everyone who seems racist deep down is not, and everyone who doesn’t probably is.

In the most powerful storyline of the first four episodes, Alonzo arrives at the police station where his son, Tony, is being questioned. Alonzo insists that Tony, who has been bridling under his father’s overprotection, tell the police everything. Tony does and is afforded no protection under the law. No one can quite believe that Alonzo didn’t get his son a lawyer. "White cops, interviewing a brown boy, and you didn’t do anything?" his brother-in-law asks. Did Alonzo just want to please the police officers, to prove he was not like "them"? Or was he acting like a good father and citizen of any color, expecting honesty from his son and good faith from law enforcement? Wasn’t, after all, Tony behaving like any teenager? But what if expecting such good faith from the cops, while brown, makes one a decent citizen and also a negligent parent? Alonzo is trying his best, but the system isn’t just rigged—it’s quicksand.

This question of how to protect your children, imperfect as they are, also occupies Matt’s and Gwen’s parents. Gwen’s father, Tom, becomes fixated on his daughter’s sexual proclivities and increasingly disgusted with her, even as she lies in bed in a coma. Tom’s not in denial, but his love is increasingly conditional, which makes him a counterpoint to Barb, who goes into a kind of emotional lockdown. She will hear nothing ill of Matt, even if that involves living in a fantasy world about his lifestyle. Huffman, with the most abjectly racist role in the series, is excellent playing a character who is both awful and in real emotional pain. She makes herself detestable and pitiable at the same time, a mother who really does love her children, however limited she may otherwise be. And as prejudiced as she is, it’s not all that she is—which is the key to avoiding the Crash trap. She is motivated by a sense of herself as single mother, survivor, and protector, the one person looking out for her kids, however delusional that may be.

Of all the series this season to take on race and diversity— Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Empire, How to Get Away With Murder—American Crime is the most serious-minded. It has no sense of humor to speak of. It’s relentlessly focused on its themes. It can be harrowing and bleak. But what it lacks in fun, it makes up for in intelligence, complexity, and boldness. It’s a network show about heavy, difficult, uncomfortable topics, and it expects, quite simply, an audience. It deserves one, too.