in praise of the cocktail hour

I’ve been experiencing prolonged nostalgia for a repressed age in America: the 1950s. The age of the Cold War, Joe DiMaggio, Abstract Expressionism, Joe McCarthy, girdles and Buddy Holly, the 1950s were also the golden age of the cocktail hour. Ah, the cocktail hour, that metonymic moment when adults shuffled children to their beds and were thus given free rein to enjoy Old Fashioneds and Side Cars, smoke cigarettes, snap their fingers to cool Jazz and generally be adults. Little marks the difference between adult and child like the cocktail hour, and little embodies the erosion of the privileges of adulthood like the gradual disappearance of that golden hour.

To be historically precise, the cocktail hour did not begin in the 1950s, and it began not as an event as quotidian and daily as dusk, but one as incandescent and occasional as a comet. Like Coltrane and Presley, the cocktail party has its roots in post-WW I culture. Some historians argue its invention in 1924 London; others that the very first cocktail party was held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1917 (which actually places its invention toward the end of WW I, but not technically after it). Prohibition’s alluring and illegal excess gave birth to the “modern drinking woman,” and thus the cocktail dress sprung like a beaded Athena from the brow of a fashion-forward Zeus. The end of WW II caused a coalescence of the middle class and its standard-bearer, the nuclear family. And it was in this increasingly ordered culture that the cocktail hour came into its own.

There is a lot that was very, very wrong with the 1950s. One thing that it got right, however, was a separation between adults and children. Limits were placed. Boundaries were kept. Men were men and women were women—and this was one of the very, very wrong things—but more importantly adults were adults while kids were kids. Father knew best in this leave-it-to-Beaver world, and as problematic as that structure was in terms of gender, race and class, it was kind of awesome when it came to being an adult.

I was born in the 1960s and raised by a single mother, so my knowledge of the cocktail hour is somewhat limited. When my mom and I were living with her parents, I do recall being bundled off to bed early while the adults did something glamorous and highly scented downstairs. However, most of my understanding of the cocktail culture comes from reading Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver and John Cheever and watching old movies starring Lauren Bacall or the recent television series Madmen. I recognize the limits of my real experience and thus the necessitated romanticization of the magical land of cocktail. Still, I want it.

It’s less the alcohol. I’m rarely an enthusiastic drinker, though I do drink. It’s not the smoking; I quit over ten years ago, and I’ve never looked back. It’s the idealized concept of a space where adults may be adults and we need not worry our sophisticated brains about the contamination of nearby innocent children. We can roam free as Noel Coward buffalo, and no one will scream in horror, “But what about the children!”

My fantasy cocktail hour absolutely is a fantasy because it’s not about real cocktails or about real hours. It’s about the internet. I have written this blog for almost four years (my anniversary is—eek—Thursday 19 March). Here, I have given myself the freedom to write about anything I feel like writing about. Haiku to sexual dysfunction, odes to my dog, primers for blow-jobs, paeans to relationships, dissections of television shows: every scrap of detritus that blows across my brain is fair game. I’ve not ghettoized the carnal from the cerebral, the modest from the profane, the adult from the adolescent, or the NSFW from the SFW. And that choice has worked to my disadvantage.

Early on in my writing a mommy blogger linked my blog and then a day later delinked me. I asked her about it, and she admitted that she didn’t want her babysitter knowing that she read my blog. Which is fine, it’s her prerogative. I understand the discomfort this blogger might feel, and perhaps she saw my blog as inhabiting her own Utopian cocktail space. But it set up a paradigm where my work, like Ang Lee’s openly sexual film Lust, Caution or the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, kind of falls through the sexual cracks. It’s not filthy enough to be porn, exactly, nor is it sanitized enough for general consumption. I wonder how many people choose not to link to my blog because I have categories devoted to oral sex.

But it’s not just that my ego gets bruised or my traffic gets thwarted. It’s also larger issues about the ways that Internet behemoths like Google funnel traffic. Like the sites of Tony Comstock and Violet Blue, among others, my site was temporarily lost by Google in the winter of 2006. We all simply ceased to exist as far as Google’s search engines were concerned; a programming glitch had placed us all into an unsearchable category reserved for sites that had violated various terms of service. The matter was resolved in a week or so, and we all reappeared.

This kind of programming snafu continues with Google’s treatment of the word “clitoris.” Search “clitoris” with Google’s safest filter and you will get zero results. “Penis,” however, returns hundreds of thousands of hits. People have pointed out this disparity and called it sexist, and I suppose an argument could be made for that distinction. To me, however, the great Google clitoris/penis gap is less an example of overt sexism as it is a sign of how impossible it is to shield children from the oogitty-boogitty world of adults. It’s not possible in real life, and it’s certainly yet more impossible on the web. Kids will learn about penises and they will learn about clitorises, and if they’re very fortunate, they’ll learn how very pleasurable each genital version can be.

The stark fact is that no matter how much we try to police the Internet, we can’t. No matter how much I wish I could create my site in the cocktail hour paradigm, I can’t. No matter how much I wish for an adult space, but not an XXX Adult Space, it’s not going to happen. We can’t return to the boundaries of the 1950s. Not in real life and not on the Web.

Still, I wish that we could. I wish for a sophisticated, sparkly space that can undulate between the ribald and the political, the savvy and the sexy, the silly and the sophisticated, a space as complex, as dark, as shiny, as messy as real adult life is. A virtual cocktail party complete with the sound of tinkling ice cubes, occasional raucous laughter, the smattering of emo drama, the spikey scent of cocktail olives, and the quiet breathing of the tidy little kiddies  slumbering happily unaware upstairs.

Comments

[Sybil Vane]

This sometimes mommy blogger is happy for the liminality of your space here. Partly because I know cocktail hour is more fun now hen there is something/one to quarantine than it was before there was anything for me to protect.

[Pete]

CG,
4 years? Wow, it seems like your blog is brand new and yet has been here forever. I mean this in best possible way. Your writing has kept me coming back again and again to read about whatever subject you write about.
Keep it up.
Pete

[Paul Davis]

Isn't the more interesting question why you want the little kiddies to be quiet and tidy, why you want them slumbering unaware upstairs, and why you think it will make/keep them happy?

[chelsea g.]

I'm sorry, Paul, but you're asking me whether I think it'll make my metaphoric children happy to be sleeping upstairs from a metaphoric cocktail party? Metaphorically, I'm going to say yes.

Yes, at the root of this issue is my contention that children do get too much freedom in this society. I understand that theories of child-raising work in pendulums, as do most other cultural forces. Right now, we're in a very big "Go Childhood!" mode. I don't believe that adults should bargain with very young children. I don't believe that adults should permit children to have access to many areas of their private lives. I do believe in that it's safer, better, and healthier for children to have boundaries. Should they be as strict as they tended to be in the 1950s? No, probably not. Should they be stricter than they are now? Well, yes.

And I think that part of the "Oh Noes! Won't someone think of the children!" culture is the laxness of these child-rearing limits. Children, I believe, need a lot of time to be children, and that means barring them access to adulthood. Of course, this idea is a tricky and difficult, and it frankly makes me very happy that I chose not to have children.

But, yeah, at the end of the day, I think kids are happier when they don't see their parents acting like the adults they are. I also think adults are happier when they can indulge their own mature behavior safely.

So, uh, there.

[Paul Davis]

CG, ever read Postman's The End of Childhood? He contends that childhood is primarily an invention of a literate culture - it takes a fairly substantive amount of time to become literate, and during that time there are secrets about the world that you do not have access to (historically, it takes between 7 and 14 years). In pre-literate cultures, Postman contends, there was really no special period identified as "childhood" - you were just a less capable person because of your size, physical development, experience etc. Once you add literature to the culture, and put important things in it, then there is the world of readers (and implicitly, writers), and then is the world of the illiterate, of whom children are a specific subset. Postman's perspective was that visual mediums like television have removed this barrier - when adult culture exists in a visual form, even young children can access it (not necessarily understand it as it was intended, but access it). I can't possibly do his thesis, evidence or writing justice in a blog comment, but I thoroughly recommend the book (and all his other books, of which there several).

As for boundaries, I can say as a parent who shares your perspective that its a problem. Annette Peacock said once "tradition is a static defense against a chaotic community", and this merely hints at the problems you encounter when you tear down tradition merely because its, well, old. When we (as a culture) began to remove a lot of the boundaries that had been used to fence in children's lives, we didn't give a lot of thought to the idea that some of them might actually serve some real purpose. Its a pretty difficult job to work out which ones, and its even worse when you're doing it on the fly, so to speak. Unfortunately, making that judgement is critical on an almost daily basis as a parent, and it was presumably a lot easier when there were apparent rules to follow. There isn't a day that passes when I don't regret the judgement call I made regarding one or more of my kids (14/17/19), not because it is going to screw them up, but just because I got it wrong by my own standards.