What's the "boyfriend loophole"?

In his big speech last night, Biden proposed legislation to "close the boyfriend loophole to keep guns out of the hands of abusers." I'd never noticed the phrase before, and I can't understand it from the context. He was talking about amending the Violence Against Women Act, and he added:

The court order said this is an abuser, you can’t own a gun. It’s to close that loophole that exists. You know it is estimated that 50 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner every month in America, 50 a month. Let’s pass it and save some lives.

But what is the loophole? This doesn't read like a written script. I had to look up the term "boyfriend loophole." It has its own Wikipedia page.

The term boyfriend loophole refers to a gap in American gun legislation that allows access to guns by physically abusive ex-boyfriends and stalkers with previous convictions. While individuals who have been convicted of, or are under a restraining order for domestic violence are prohibited from owning a firearm, the prohibition only applies if the victim was the perpetrator's spouse, cohabitant, or had a child with the victim. The boyfriend loophole has had a direct effect on people who experience domestic abuse or stalking by former or current intimate partners.

FROM THE EMAIL: Owen writes:

I guess one lesson is that whenever you see “loophole” you know that it’s the rhetorical warm-up move to justify some big new demand. (Previous similar usage: “gun show loophole,” “bump stock loophole,” “private transfer loophole.”) Emotionally “loophole” is catnip because who wants a hole in their cabin wall? Even if it was deliberately made to allow you to defend yourself from attackers?

Good point. And you made me think about the original meaning of "loophole" for the first time!

"Glenda Cleveland was Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbor, and the serial killer could have been stopped two months earlier if police had only listened to her."

"God knows she tried. 'Are you sure?'  she kept asking police on the phone when they insisted that a dazed and naked boy trying to escape from Dahmer was actually an adult involved in a lovers' spat with him. We know now, of course, that he was 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, and that he was about to become Dahmer's next homicide victim. Cleveland's daughter, Sandra Smith, and niece, Nicole Childress, had spotted the boy fleeing from Dahmer in the alley on May 27, 1991. They were rebuffed by police at the scene, but they told Cleveland who then called police numerous times."

Cleveland died on Christmas Eve at the age of 56.

A 911 call transcript:

Cleveland: “Yeah, uh, what happened? I mean my daughter and my niece witnessed what was going on. Was anything done about the situation? Do you need their names or information or anything from them?”

Officer: “No, not at all.”

Cleveland: “You don’t?”

Officer: “Nope. It was an intoxicated boyfriend of another boyfriend.”

Cleveland: “Well, how old was this child?”

Officer: “It wasn’t a child. It was an adult.”

Cleveland: “Are you sure?”

Officer: “Yup.”

Cleveland: “Are you positive? Because this child doesn’t even speak English. My daughter had, you know, dealt with him before, seeing him on the street. You know, catching earthworms.”

The name I looked for in the tributes to Mary Tyler Moore: Marlo Thomas.

When Mary Tyler Moore died, was she celebrated as a television first having something to do with feminism? You can't say "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" presented a new kind of woman without dealing with the earlier show, "That Girl":

That Girl is an American sitcom that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. It starred Marlo Thomas as the title character Ann Marie, an aspiring (but only sporadically employed) actress, who moves from her hometown of Brewster, New York, to try to make it big in New York City. Ann has to take a number of offbeat "temp" jobs to support herself in between her various auditions and bit parts. Ted Bessell played her boyfriend Donald Hollinger, a writer for Newsview Magazine...

That Girl was one of the first sitcoms to focus on a single woman who was not a domestic or living with her parents. Some consider this show the forerunner of the highly successful The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and an early indication of the changing roles of American women in feminist-era America...

At the end of the 1969–1970 season, That Girl was still doing moderately well in the ratings, but after four years Thomas had grown tired of the series and wanted to move on. ABC convinced her to do one more year. In the beginning of the fifth season, Don and Ann became engaged, but they never actually married. The decision to leave the couple engaged at the end of the run was largely the idea of Thomas. She did not want to send a message to young women that marriage was the ultimate goal for them, and she worried that it would have undercut the somewhat feminist message of the show.

"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" did not begin until 1970. Look how similar the opening credits are for the 2 shows:





When I first saw the MTM opening credits I wondered how could they get away with such a rip-off. Also, I think MTM was a throwback to the 1960s and actively old, not new at all. Now, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" turned out to be a great, great show, undoubtedly one of the best shows in the history of television. I just hate to see descriptions of it that give credit for being ahead of its time. It followed "That Girl."

Too good to check? Were the "Terry and Julie" of "Waterloo Sunset" Terence Stamp and Julie Christie?

I'm reading "Terence Stamp’s Swinging, Smoldering Style/He helped redefine male beauty, ushering in the era of the cinematic bad boy" by the NYT style reporter Guy Trebay. (Stamp died last Sunday at the age of 87.) 

Trebay writes: "In his 20s, when he sought a life beyond the straitened circumstances of his upbringing, he became a favorite of the London tabloids that relentlessly chronicled his relationships with the model Jean Shrimpton and the actress Julie Christie. His romantic life was at one point so well known that he and Ms. Christie inspired the 'Terry and Julie' in the Kinks song 'Waterloo Sunset,' released at the height of the mid-1960s music and fashion scene known as Swinging London."

If we go over to Genius.com to find the lyrics, we see: 

How many posts on this blog have the "Obama the Boyfriend" tag? 54!

We were just talking about yesterday's "'Obama Courts Women in Campaign Swing' — courts women?! Not men?'" I was saying it's normal to say that a candidate "courts votes" — because he really wants to win the one-and-only vote the person has to give in a particular election — and that easily slips into the sloppier usage "courts voters," but when you slot in a single sex and say "courts women" — as the NYT did yesterday — the original connotation of wooing a lover becomes apparent. You can tell it's there because you know they wouldn't say "courts men."

I said to Meade: "You know, there's a reason I created the 'Obama the Boyfriend' tag. How many times do you think I've used it?" He answered "5." I knew it was a lot more than that, but even I was surprised to see that the answer was: 54. Obama has been sold to us on this theme for a long, long time. The most recent post with the tag before yesterday's was "'You're so handsome that I can't speak properly.' Said to Barack Obama by Gwyneth Paltrow...."

But when did it start? Whose gush first pushed me to create the tag?

Maureen Dowd has boyfriend trouble.

"He was going to be the kind of guy who whipped you up and then, when you were all excited, left you flat, and then, when you were deflated and exasperated and time was running out, ensorcelled you again with some sparkly fairy dust."

Absurd. And so mystifyingly anti-feminist. How did Barack Obama pull voters away from Hillary Clinton in 2008? You'd think that women would have felt a special attachment to the the woman on the verge of being the first woman President. There's a special attachment that is more special than the attachment of woman to woman: the boyfriend. What a deft political move for Obama! It was a fairytale romance.

As our old boyfriend declared — and it takes one to know one — it was "the biggest fairytale" he'd ever seen.

"Quite apart from this post marking the couple’s coming out on social media, it has broader cultural significance on two counts."

Writes Polly Vernon in "Trudeau's going all Travis" (London Times)(about this Katy Perry Instagram post). The 2 counts:

1. "[I]t’s a flagrant challenge to Vogue magazine’s recent diktat regarding how embarrassing it is to have a boyfriend nowadays; a viral article that made specific reference to how 'no one' is doing precisely the thing Katy Perry, in fact, just did, ie sharing images of their boyfriend on social media."

2. "[T]he 'Travis Kelce-fication™" of romantic male partners. Travis Kelce... All photographic evidence suggests Kelce is even now incapable of so much as glancing at [Taylor] Swift without his entire facial expression melting into a mush of captivated swoony wonder that she could be interested in him… I would be so bold as to suggest that early signs are Trudeau has been, or is in the process of being, Travis Kelce-ficated by Perry...."

From the linked Vogue article:

The day after Obama evolved, WaPo rolls out a Romney-bullied-a-gay-guy story.

This supposedly happened in high school in 1965:

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection....

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another....

Romney declined an interview, and a spokeswoman said "The stories of fifty years ago seem exaggerated and off base and Governor Romney has no memory of participating in these incidents."

Another story:

In an English class, Gary Hummel, who was a closeted gay student at the time, recalled that his efforts to speak out in class were punctuated with Romney shouting, “Atta girl!” In the culture of that time and place, that was not entirely out of the norm. Hummel recalled some teachers using similar language.

ADDED: Obama bullied a black girl:

"Can I Keep a Baby My Boyfriend Doesn’t Want?"

An interesting question to the NYT "Ethicist." The woman is 38, pretty late to be having her first child, and she wants the baby and says she won't ask the man to support the child. But he is her boyfriend and she's not at all opposed to abortion. He's telling her she's forcing him to have a baby "against his will," and — in the last sentence of the letter — she admits that she allowed him to think she was on birth control when she was not. The first sentence of the letter uses the expression "accidentally pregnant."

If you think abortion is murder, it will color your response to the question. The wrong to the unborn child outweighs the imposition on the man. If he's a decent person, he will care about his child once it is born, so there's no way to relieve him of that burden (even if you're will to let him off the hook financially). You might say: Who cares about this selfish man who's lobbying to kill the unborn child? Lose the man, have the baby, and go forth and try to live a virtuous life. Devote yourself to that child.

If you accept abortion, you might say ethics require her to end the pregnancy because she deceived him into have unprotected sex. (You could even accuse her of rape.) She's mired in deception, as she portrays the pregnancy as accidental. And she doesn't seem to love her own boyfriend, since she's willing to estrange him over this interloping nonentity. Or did she think this man who told her he never wanted children would reshape his world for her?

Now, I'm going to read what the actual NYT ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah says.

First, he blames the man for not pro-actively ensuring that birth control was in force. (The letter-writer says the boyfriend "never asked." I hadn't noticed that detail.) And if the man is angry because he's thinking "you deliberately misled him, in order to try to entrap him with the child," the man is having an "uncharitable thought." Bad man. (And I'm bad too, because I thought that too.)

The ethicist excludes the question whether it's "morally permissible" to have an abortion. (The woman believes it is, and her opinion locks down the answer). He observes that the man is being forced into having whatever feelings of responsibility might arise from the birth of the child, even if the mother is willing to let him off the hook financially. And "an ongoing relationship with you would involve a relationship with your child." (I'd thought of it more in terms of how feelings of wanting to be connected with his own child would force him into continued involvement with the woman who deceived him and didn't get that abortion he wanted. But I guess they could stay together, with that child he didn't want. It was only a relationship of "a few months.")

The ethicist continues:

I don’t have much sympathy, though, with the idea that he has property rights in his sperm or half-rights in the baby. Children aren’t property, and we should think about their futures in terms of their interests, our relationships with them and the responsibilities those connections entail. So both his feelings and the prospective interests of the child may provide some grounds for ending the pregnancy. (It may seem odd to say that consideration of someone’s interests may count against continuing his or her existence, yet that’s sometimes the case.) 

That's one hell of a parenthetical.

In the end, the ethicist recommends calm conversation and, failing that, counseling. But — and I agree with this — she could "drop the boyfriend and keep the child." She wants it, and she's willing to take all responsibility for it. His "wishes" have some weight, but hers have more, because — as the ethicist puts it — "women bear the greater risks of bringing children into the world." I would have said: The woman's choice prevails because she must have the power to control what happens inside her own body. And: The man lost his power when he gave her his genetic material which was once inside his body, in the domain where he rules.

What's the best solution?

She owes him the abortion.

Talk calmly until you agree.

When the woman wants the baby, it's wrong to get an abortion.

Her body, her choice. The man must accept the position he got himself into.

The baby is real, and it should win. The details about these 2 selfish people are beside the point.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: Poll results:

"Even for Sarkozy the American, who loves everything in our culture... it was a wild gush over a new Washington crush."

On to the Maureen Dowd column. Yeah, I know I could be more creative about where to go for a Sunday morning's blogging, but the Frank Rich/Maureen Dowd pairing is telling today.

“You must want a cigarette after that,” I teased the candidate after the amorous joint press conference, as he flew from Paris to London for the finale of his grand tour.

Okay, so Dowd has some sardonic distance on the love fest — and yet I feel that she's teasing us here, showing off that she got close to the world's boyfriend — and can even kind of talk about sex with him. It's an interview. (Is Frank jealous?) She's on the plane, having a personal conversation! I'm jealous.

“I think we could work well together,” he said of Sarko, smiling broadly.

He did not get to meet his fan, Carla Bruni. “She wasn’t there,” he said. “Which I think disappointed all my staff. That was the only thing they were really interested in.”

He admitted showing “extraordinarily poor judgment” in leaving Paris after only a few hours. Watching Paris recede from behind the frosted glass of his limo was “a pretty good metaphor” for how constricted his life has become, he said, compared with his student days tramping around Europe with “a feeling of complete freedom.”

Aw. The man in the bubble. Let's write a different movie scenario — one where the fabulously successful candidate realizes he doesn't want to live like this. He only wants to be free. He just runs off one night. Have him climb out a window. He melts into the crowd. No one ever hears from him again. Maybe he grows a big beard and starts wearing glasses. Spends the rest of his life giving free legal services to the poor and teaching night classes as a third tier law school somewhere in America....

But he can't climb out the window now. He's on an airplane. With Maureen Dowd:

“But the flip side is that I deeply enjoy the work,” he said, “so it’s a trade-off.”

It's all about enjoying your work. Wouldn't it be amusing if some day, a President resigned because he just wasn't enjoying the work — not deeply, anyway?

But that comment makes me feel a little wistful and sad for the world's boyfriend. He admitted he feels trapped in his new role — he's given up his freedom. Yet, because he's a candidate, he had to immediately say that he really does enjoy it. Deeply.

Assertions of depth ≈ shallowness.

Life must be hollow now. Oh! I shed a tear for our boyfriend.

“One of the values of this trip for me was to remind me of what this campaign should be about,” he said. “It’s so easy to get sucked into day-to-day, tit-for-tat thinking, finding some clever retort for whatever comment your opponent made. And then I think I’m not doing my job, which should be to raise up some big important issues.”

The sacrifices our boyfriend makes for us.

But he's going to be even better in the future. He's going to raise up some big important issues. He won't just raise issues. He will raise up issues. He will glorify issues. And not just issues. Big important issues.

I asked how his “Citizen of the World” tour will go down in Steubenville, Ohio.

“There will probably be some backlash,” he said. “I’m a big believer that if something’s good then there’s a bad to it, and vice versa. We had a good week. That always inspires the press to knock me down a peg....

“Even if you start believing your own hype, which I rarely do, things’ll turn on you pretty quick anyway,” he said. “I have a fairly steady temperament that has at times been interpreted as, ‘Oh, he’s sort of too cool.’ But it’s not real.”

This is a good theme for him. Even, balanced, seeing the good and bad in everything....

Sigh.

Reemerging twinges of lust for our old boyfriend, Bill Clinton.

That's the post title I've written for this quotation of the first 2 sentences and the last 2 sentences of Maureen Dowd's new column. Read with me, and then let's talk about it:

Not  only is President Obama leading from behind, now he’s leading from behind Bill Clinton.

After dithering for two years over what to do about the slaughter in Syria, the president was finally shoved into action by the past and perhaps future occupant of his bedroom....

The less Obama leads, the more likely it is that history will see him as a pallid interregnum between two chaotic Clinton eras.

Nature abhors a vacuum. And so does Bill Clinton.

If you want to talk about what's actually going on in Syria and what the United States ought to do about it, please go to the earlier post on the subject. This new post is for talking about those 4 Maureen Dowd sentences. I'll start off the conversation with a list of 10 things.

1. The phrase "leading from behind" has always seemed funny to people. If you're behind, you're not in front, so how is that leading? Those who like Obama think it's clever/intriguing. Those who are literal-minded — and notice imagery — focus on the word "behind."

2. To take "leading from behind" and then put Barack behind Bill is to demand that we picture the 2 men in a physical position and — particularly with the amusing phrasing and because we're talking about Bill Clinton — to experience the sexual innuendo.

3. Said innuendo is violently intensified by the phrase: "shoved into action by the past and perhaps future occupant of his bedroom."

4. If Barack is behind Bill, then how did Bill shove Barack? Maureen is not fully in control of her imagery.

5. Got to give Maureen points for the poetic proximity of the verbs "dither" and "slaughter."

6. The dithering is Barack's. The (unlinkable) OED says "dither" originally meant, in dialect, "to tremble, quake, quiver, thrill."

7. "Pallid" means " Lacking depth or intensity of colour; faint or feeble in colour; spec. (of the face) wan, pale...." That's quite something, saying that history will remember The First Black President, Barack Obama, as pale-faced!

8. Barack is pallid compared to Bill. Maureen is taunting Boyfriend Barack: He's not as manly as Boyfriend Bill, who might just get to be her boyfriend again.

9. Pallid interregnum. "Pallid" is a poetic word, and Maureen is doing various poetic turns. I know what "interregnum" means, but I also hear near-puns, and we've got leading from behind and shoving in the bedroom and 2 boyfriends, one of whom is portrayed as subordinate.

10. And that brings us to "vacuum," an empty space. One might say a hole, which you know Bill Clinton feels compelled to fill.

"Don't touch me"... "Don't touch my girlfriend."

Who says "Don't touch me"? Most famously: Jesus. He said it — "Noli me tangere" — to Mary Magdalene, in a scene depicted many times in art:



That had something to do with the fragility of the fleshly body in the immediate aftermath of resurrection. A very special case. In modern times, I think we tend to think of a woman saying "Don't touch me." But Howie Mandel wrote a book called "Don't Touch Me":



He was writing about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Maybe you remember pre-"2001" Keir Dullea as David in "David and Lisa" with his mentally disordered fear of touching:



"You touched me! You want to kill me! Touch can kill!... You coarse, clumsy, stupid FOOL!"

The truth is that we all have a right to sovereignty over our own bodies. It's not just something for women to demand from men. It's something we are all entitled to as human beings. We are now encountering the defense of female integrity embodied in the rather muddled campus policy known as "Yes means yes," but it applies to men too. Women care about our bodily integrity, but too many of us believe that our sexual favors are so universally desirable that a "yes" from a man can be presumed, that a woman can impose upon a man. But that's wrong.

And now, today, we see this story of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, making the kind of assumption that is more typical of the female — the assumption that the person he chooses to touch must necessarily want to be touched. Obama is caught in a relationship with a man who postures as the woman's boyfriend and says to the President: "Don't touch my girlfriend." The President proceeds to grasp at his own dignity by demonstrating to that man that he most certainly can touch that woman, but what of the woman, that woman possessed by two men? It was her choice whether to be touched by the President, and her choice whether to be owned by the man who said to the President "Don't touch my girlfriend," and yet both men assumed ownership over her autonomy — the boyfriend because he had a past with her and the President because, like too many woman, he thought of himself as so universally desirable that a "yes" from any woman can be presumed.

In the history of the world, has there ever been a woman as uniquely subordinated as Aia Cooper? My heart breaks to see how she saw her best hope in coming to the aid of both men, both men who, within seconds, claim sovereignty over the territory of her body. What history lies behind this instinct to protect these 2 men, these 2 exemplars of male power — the boyfriend and the President of the United States? Cooper didn't even want to stand next to the President: "I was like, 'do I have to stand there? I don't really want to stand there.'" And after the incident in which Cooper defended her boyfriend and acceded to the Commander-in-Chief's command "You're gonna kiss me," Ms. Cooper reached out to the President's wife:  "I wanna meet Michelle... Hopefully she doesn't think anything about me, but I really want to meet her."

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth," Jesus said.

"It was before we lived in a theocracy."

So says Barbara Hall, the creator of the "Joan of Arcadia," trying to explain the TV show's big drop in ratings in this, its second season. She adds, "God wasn't quite as controversial then as he is now."

Her theory seems to be that a show about religion -- Joan is an ordinary teenager to whom God speaks -- is being spurned by all the many Americans who are appalled by the great strength of religion in America. But if religion is so popular, why wouldn't there be plenty of people eager to take in a well-made show about a young person struggling to understand and live up to the requirements of religion?

I'd say it is Hall and her co-writers who are appalled by the strength of religion in our political culture, and they've imbued the show with their own politics, thus putting off the natural audience for their show: ordinary Americans struggling to understand and live up to the requirements of religion. Hall and her co-writers wrongly imagined that the audience was made up of people with Hollywood-style values.

The first episode of Season 2 featured a gratuitous dirty joke (suitably deniable). As I wrote at the time:

In the first episode of this season's "Joan of Arcadia," Joan's boyfriend Adam is telling her about his summer spent working full-time in a hotel and the caption reads: "What do you want to know about plaster, grout, or unclogging toilets? And don't get me started on caulk 'cause that's my passion." But the actor clearly mispronounces the screenplay's word "caulk" in the most hilarious way possible.

I'm sure in Hollywood they fell on the floor laughing, but I think a lot of regular viewers felt uneasy. The NYT article linked above reports:

Barbara Hall ... said in a recent telephone interview that CBS bought the show in 2002 when public discourse about spirituality seemed more gentle: post-9/11 prayer services rather than heated debates over "The Passion of the Christ."

So Hall, concerned about the success of "The Passion of the Christ," set us straight with Episode 1 about what the real passion is: cock.

The season proceeded on the theme of teenage sex. Will Joan sleep with her boyfriend? What if he has another girlfriend? What if she has another boyfriend? Religion had very little to do with the problems Joan faced in these dreary episodes. I was one of the people who stopped watching midway through the season.

And it wasn't just all the Hollywood sex rained down on the sweet, earnest teenager we came to love the year before. It was also the Hollywood politics. Two weeks after Bush won reelection last November, I wrote about another early episode in Season 2:

On last night's episode of "Joan of Arcadia," Joan's boyfriend said to her: "So what if you don't make Ivy League? Is it really that big of a deal? If George Bush is any indication..."

The actor says "George Bush" with a mild but scoffing inflection that invokes the Bush-is-dumb opinion it's assumed we share. But this a big, popular network show, and Bush just won a decisive re-election. Who do they think watches the show?

And now that the show has lost two million viewers and faces cancellation, Barbara Hall blames America's devotion to religion? Why not blame yourself for losing faith in the deep religious component of your own show?

UPDATE: The Anchoress approves.

"Seems like a lot of twentysomething women, including me, have felt bad? strange? uncomfortable? guilty? childish? about wanting a boyfriend..."

"... but we hardly talk about it."

But if you did? talk? about it? would there be question marks? all over everything? you were saying? to each other?

The link goes to a Slate dialogue with lots of female participants, all much younger than I am. I'm not sure if any of them says exactly this, but it seems to me that the shame of admitting to wanting a boyfriend is the concession that you don't have a boyfriend. Pride leads you to act as though what you are doing you are doing intentionally. And if you really do want a boyfriend, you probably also think that revealing that you want what you don't have only makes it harder to get get what you want.

Maybe women are so good at standing proud that men have stopped believing women must really want men.

Late in the conversation, from a participant other than the one quoted above:

What strikes me as weird about this conversation, and why this shift in priorities doesn't seem like a complete feminist victory, is that it discounts the idea that a relationship can be an incredible source of support for career and life goals. Having someone who, say, helps with chores to give you more time to study or work, or who encourages you when you're discouraged, or works in a similar field and helps you with ideas, who backs you publicly, etc? All this stuff can make it much easier to work harder and in a more productive way or to work through difficult challenges. I'm not sure we should get psyched by the idea that young women don't want relationships but rather by the idea that women want more from their relationships or that we view relationships as part of a larger matrix of things that can work well together.

Jeez! It's all so much work. The point of love is so you can do even more work. The stereotypical traditional male works so that a woman would have him and he could have love. Love was the end, not the means. If, for the woman, love is the means and the end is career advancement... then what? And why?

"One night, [our housemate] and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better..."

"... the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, 'This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.' I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.... [One] time, I was on a Zoom call in the living room and heard, from behind his closed bedroom door, the Avril Lavigne song 'Girlfriend,' the chorus of which is a peppy 'Hey, hey, you, you, I don’t like your girlfriend,' playing at a pointed volume. Eventually, my boyfriend texted him to see if he would talk about the situation. He replied that there wasn’t much to say, except one thing: 'Your girlfriend is toxic,' he warned, followed by an emoji of a monkey covering its face."

Writes Kaitlyn Tiffany, in "That’s It. You’re Dead to Me. Suddenly everyone is 'toxic'" (The Atlantic).

About that Romney line: "He's a nice guy, but he's in over his head."

James Taranto says:

"He's a nice guy, but . . ." is exquisitely condescending. It's probably not true: Obama strikes us as a petulant narcissist. But calling someone a "nice guy" is rarely a genuine compliment, and it never is when conjoined by "but." As any man who has ever been rejected by a woman knows, describing someone as "a nice guy, but . . ." is another way of saying he's ineffectual. That is exactly the point Romney is making about Obama.

First of all: Obama is not our boyfriend. He/we sometimes act like he is. I've had a blog tag "Obama the Boyfriend" for a long time.  There's this longstanding notion that everyone likes Obama, that he's just soooo likable.

Remember back in January 2008, when Hillary Clinton was asked to deal with her shocking likability deficit next to The Most Likable Man in the World?



But anyway, Taranto's right about what Romney is saying, especially since Romney comes right out and says it: He's in over his head. But the "nice guy" part is, I think, really the ritual of acknowledging that we all [almost all!] like Obama. This ritual goes back to 2008. Remember how John McCain refrained from any sort of personal attack on Obama. Wasn't that the central aspect of Sarah Palin's "going rogue" — that she wanted to light into Obama?

"All over the country, particularly in bright blue states like California, people are swapping the words 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' — and even 'husband' and 'wife' — for the word 'partner.'"

"According to data compiled by Google Trends, the search term 'my partner' has been steadily gaining traction...  After the term 'domestic partnership' gained significant legal and popular recognition, 'partner' became the default word for much of the LGBT community until gay marriage was legalized in the United States in 2015. More recently, straight couples have started saying 'partner,' with the term gaining most traction among young people in highly-educated, liberal enclaves. On certain college campuses, several students said, it would come across as strange, even rude, to use the terms 'boyfriend' or 'girlfriend' in lieu of the more inclusive, gender-neutral 'partner.' 'At Harvard, everyone is very polite and liberal,' said [Michael Bronski, a professor of women and gender studies at Harvard]. 'Everyone has partners now. Even if that person is someone you hooked up with the night before or your spouse of 40 years.'... The word “partner,” she said, gives couples the power to publicly announce a lasting adult commitment, without an engagement or a wedding. If the couple does decide to get married, the ceremony itself serves not to solidify the relationship, but to celebrate it, surrounded by family and friends.... But some members of the LGBT community are skeptical. 'It’s a joke we all know,' said Sean Drohan, a college consultant based in New York City who identifies as gay. 'If I was making a movie for a gay audience, and a straight couple introduced themselves as partners, that would definitely get a laugh.'... He is especially dubious of people who use the term as what he calls a 'performance of wokeness,' an attempt to publicly showcase their progressive worldview."

"Boyfriend and girlfriend are out. 'Partners' are in. Here’s why more millennials are changing how they define their relationships. The growing preference for 'partner' could suggest a shift that goes beyond labels and language" (at "The Lily" at WaPo).

Ha ha. I am encouraged to see the term "performance of wokeness" and to know that it's laughed at by more woke people. You're less woke if you perform it? I like that development.

And it makes me think of Jesus:  "Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.... [W]hen you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others.... And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others."

But Jesus's point was that the show-offs got their reward from other people and do not get rewarded by God. But Drohan is saying that the show-offs — the performers of wokeness — are not getting rewarded by other people, at least not by the really woke people whose approval they want.

How then will we know who's woke? We won't and we shouldn't and we can't. All expressions are mysterious and even when you think you're following the precepts of your religion/religion substitute, you can be seen as the opposite of what you think you are. Just ask that smiling boy over there.

Hip friend replacement.

Slate wants to replace your "hip friend":

Slate V will... help you find the best video produced elsewhere on the Web. Our feature "Did You See This?" will sift and sort the ocean of content already out there and show you the most compelling and exotic videos online. If we do this well, you won't have to wait for that hip friend to e-mail you the link to the latest must-see "water cooler" clip. By putting these Web-video gems all in one place, we hope to help you indulge the voyeur within—and to enable you to waste your time more efficiently.

Are you excited about "Slate V," which is --- we're told, in decidedly unhip language -- "an ordered universe of video, in which all the content has the irreverent wit, sharp intelligence, and counterintuitive insights that have been the hallmarks of Slate the magazine for the past 11 years."

ADDED: I watched this video, with Dear Prudence responding to a letter written by a woman who didn't like her boyfriend's dog. It was cutely put together with animation illustrating the problems -- like the sound the dog makes when she's licking herself -- but there was nothing "counterintuitive" about telling the woman she's got to put up with it or she'll lose her boyfriend! I'd have told the woman not to sleep overnight with her boyfriend. That dog is annoying her the most during the night. Just pleasantly breeze out of there after you've had your fun and let him spend the night with the dog. Shake things up. Or here's another idea, when the dog licks herself, lick yourself. Give him something to think about.

"In Japan there is a disturbing trend for disaffected young men to fall in love with a pillow printed with their favorite anime character and announce the pillow is their girlfriend."

"So thank goodness your boyfriend does not have such a relationship with any of his [two dozen stuffed animals]. Men have been told that women do not want testosterone-addled brutes in their lives (OK, maybe the success of Fifty Shades sends some mixed messages), and you don’t get much less brutish than a stuffed animal collection. It’s a good sign that the group is only 20 percent of what it once was and that with one exception they live in the closet. You yourself have gone through life with a special teddy bear (do you bring him to your boyfriend’s for a sleepover with his special friend?), so you’re right, you should be more accepting. If this is the only thing that bothers you about a great guy, then you need to look at your own sexist beliefs."

From Emily Yoffe's advice column. 

6 things:

1. Does objecting to one extreme — "testosterone-addled brutes" — mean you're hypocritical to accept the other extreme? That excludes a preference for someone who fits your conception of balanced, moderate, and normal.

2. I don't think people seeking a life partner should be told to "be more accepting." You'd better find somebody who's right in the zone of what you like, whatever it is. The problem I see with this woman is that she's not looking closely enough at what she herself likes. She wants an outsider to pass judgment on whether there's something wrong with the man. I'd say it's not that this woman needs to "be more accepting," but that she shouldn't deny herself the pleasure and fulfillment of accepting this man, if that's what she wants.

3. Is it "sexist" to consider writing off a man who has a big stuffed animal collection? This woman is (apparently) heterosexual, so she's already applying "sexist" judgment in her choice of a partner. If that's okay and not sexist — and what a weird world it would be if we thought we shouldn't do that — then why is it wrong, as you search for a person of the sex you prefer, to search more precisely for the manifestation of masculinity (or femininity) that you find especially appealing? The problem, as stated at #2, is that the woman is having trouble using her own thoughts and feelings and wants to import what other people think.

4. Having her own teddy bear does not obligate the woman to accept a man with huge stuffed animal collection. To have one is very different from having a big collection — in stuffed animals and in many things. But more important, you can quite appropriately want to possess various things and at the same time not want your partner to have things like that. If she discovered that her boyfriend has a big collection of makeup, the argument that she should accept it because she too has makeup is something that we easily see as silly. (Maybe the day is coming when it won't look silly per se.)

5. If the brutishness of brutish men has a physical cause — testosterone — shouldn't we be more empathetic the way we are toward other medical conditions that impair the mind? Isn't it ableist of us to direct hostility toward "testosterone-addled brutes"?

6. "Men have been told that women do not want testosterone-addled brutes in their lives...." What, exactly, have men been told and how have they adjusted? I think the message has been that women don't want violence and subordination. No sensible man should read that to mean that women want babyish men. If the man is too dumb to understand that the rejection of violence and subordination is not a rejection of masculinity, then maybe the problem is that he's too dumb. Or he just doesn't love women enough to get the message straight.

"First gay couple to become fathers in UK spend £65k to ensure next child is a girl."

It's illegal to use IVF for sex selection purposes in the UK, so they had to come to America to pursue their goal. Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow already have 4 boys and one girl, and they want another girl — or 2 or 3 — for little Saffron to play with:

The millionaire dad [Barrie] added: 'We can’t wait to spoil our new daughters. I want to buy them pink Prada dresses and babygros. We will recycle too. We are going to use Saffron’s old wicker crib from Harrods, which cost £5,000, and divide one of the £100,000 diamond necklaces she does not wear any more into individual pieces for the babies. And we want to decorate the nursery as a rainforest!'...

Tony said: 'If sex selection was not possible, we would still have more children and love them, whatever their gender. But the technology is available and we wanted girls to balance our family. It causes outrage but I bet most people would do it.... The kids love the idea of getting sisters. They are so close. They are all such different characters, but get along so well.”

Barrie... said: “Saffron’s clothes come from every designer from Gucci and Karen Millen and she has 500 pairs of shoes. We spent £50,000 having her room designed like a swanky London flat with a 39-inch plasma TV and furniture from Harrods. The boys are not as bothered about clothes, but we get them the latest iPads and laptops. People say we should not spoil them, but they deserve it."

We all deserve it, no? The question is: Do you have the money to buy it? They are rich, they can buy what they like? Do you have a problem with that? Or do you think they're choosing the wrong things? And if you do, what business is it of yours?

Is it okay to want a girl because you want a kid that you can dress up in fashionable clothes?
	Yes, but you can't use sex selection technology to get that.
	Yes, and go ahead and use sex selection if you can afford it.
	Yes, and the government should pay for sex selection treatment.
	No, that's the wrong attitude to have, but I'm not going to stop you from buying the technology.
	No, and you should be banned from using technology to get that.
	No, and people like you shouldn't be allowed to have children.
pollcode.com free polls

UPDATE: Rereading this many years later, I wondered how things went for the Drewitt-Barlow family. I found this, from 2021: "EGG-CELLENT BOND/My ex dumped me for our girl’s boyfriend – but we’re best mates & I’ll use the same egg donor so our kids are siblings" (The Sun). "Our girl" is Saffron, the one they wanted another girl to play with. She grew up and got a boyfriend, and then Tony, one of the dads, stole her boyfriend. But they all live together, and we're told Tony made $90 million selling Bitcoin.

Thanks for licking the doughnut, Ariana Grande.

"Ariana Grande and her boyfriend walk into a California doughnut shop. While the employee walks away from the counter, they lick some doughnuts set out on the counter and laugh about it. When the employee comes back with a tray of doughnuts, Grande says disdainfully, 'What is the f— is that? I hate Americans. I hate America.'"

Now, most people are taking shots at Arianna. With good reason, of course. But I'm not going to pile on. I'm only posting because I see another angle, one that's not getting attention.

The doughnut shop put big trays full of doughnuts out, on top of the glass case, at mouth level, where they will tantalize and be accessible to all sorts of people, including those with low impulse control and children (in arms) and other childish individuals. It's easy to see — in the now-famous security footage — how the placement of the doughnuts leads to playful foolery that escalates from "Mmmm, I want" to "I could just bite that" to "Go ahead! Do it!" and "I dare you!" And then some naughty girl licks it and her boyfriend laughs and laughs. If that happened once — we caught Ariana — it happened more than once. I'm glad the weakness in doughnut shop sanitation has been exposed. Now, quit putting them out on top of the case. It should be a health code violation. Even without anyone licking, they're still breathing on them.

As for "I hate Americans. I hate America." Yes, you can trash her. But she said that as a joke, and just as I bet she's not the first person to lick doughnuts, I'll bet she's not the first person to use the line "I hate Americans, I hate America" as a comic expression of minor irritation. The "What the fuck is that?" preface indicates, I think, that she believed the latest tray of doughnuts was so inferior that it was funny to act like they weren't even doughnuts. The followup "I hate Americans, I hate America" is, in this view, over-the-top faux-drama, similar to saying "Everything has gone to hell in this country," just because the latest batch of doughnuts isn't the kind you like. It's a type of humor. You had to be there, in the setting, as the young lady or her boyfriend, having some fun goofing around.