Women are, apparently, the great sanitizing machine. We're the culture's laundry, where everything gets clean.

I'm trying to read "The Year Women Got ‘Horny’/Women reclaimed a word once the province of crass boys and men who are boys" by Tracie Egan Morrissey in the NYT.

Phonetically speaking, 'horny' is ugly. It lends itself to a nasal sound that’s comically inelegant. 'Horny' has benefited... from that same so-bad-it’s-good rationality."'I used to hate the word,' Sophia Benoit said. 'I used to think it was so disgusting.' Ms. Benoit writes a column for GQ about the sexiest things that men did during the month, called 'Horny on Main,' which on the internet means posting sexually charged content to your main social media account, as opposed to posting on a separate, and likely secret, account that was created for that purpose... 'But I love it now, because I think we, especially women, have reclaimed it and made it not gross,' Ms. Benoit said

Well, of course, when it's about women, it's not gross.

Twenty-five years ago, William Safire wrote about 'horny” for his etymology column in The New York Times Magazine, noting that a “horn is hard; it is shaft-shaped; since the 15th century, it has been used as a symbol for the male’s erect sex organ.”

Let's go read that old Safire column, because there had to be a reason why the subject came up — something in the news that half-century ago. Aha!

Toward the end of "Meet the Press"... we were discussing Whitewatergate. David Broder of The Washington Post took issue with my suspicions of heavy financial scandal ahead. "If you told me that Bill Clinton was very horny or very ambitious," Mr. Broder opined over the NBC network, "I would have no trouble believing it. If you told me that he was money-hungry and was cutting corners for money, I'd say that doesn't sound like the Bill Clinton I know."

When the show ended, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist looked around and innocently asked, "Can you use a word like horny on television?"... In my opinion, no... Instead of "if you told me he was horny," try "if you told me he played around a lot." (In formal newspaper writing, of course, you could not use play around, except in a quotation; you would have to use terms like promiscuous or the fuzzier, less judgmental sexually active, or if referring to a specific state, sexually aroused.

So it was about Bill Clinton, and having just spoken of the notion of women as the cultural washing machine, I must note the havoc caused in America when that man, Mr. Clinton, sullied a woman's dress and she chose not to clean it.

By the way, that Safire article is from February 6, 1994 — and that was 4 years before the name Monica Lewinsky first appeared in the NYT... in an editorial called "A Crisis From Petty Sources" (January 28, 1998):

David Broder has died.

WaPo obit.

"The talk in Washington is what the impending elevation of the former Harvard Law School dean and solicitor general will mean for the capstone of the judiciary."

Asserts David Broder, and I have to laugh. 1. There's the inane elevated tone of the writing: "impending elevation," "capstone of the judiciary." You know you're reading bullshit, so, thanks for that. 2. Who can possibly believe the people of Washington are abuzz over the effect Elena Kagan will have on the Supreme Court? 3. Didn't everyone figure out many weeks ago that Kagan, replacing Stevens, is only going to keep things the same?

To his credit, Broder proceeds to posit the theory that is my question #3. He puts it in the mouth of a former attorney general next to whom Broder was seated at a dinner party the other day. Gotta put in the seat-work at those D.C. dinner parties to dig up ideas for WaPo columns, you know. Broder decides this is "probably the conventional wisdom," then begins his next paragraph: "That is what they say, and I have no legal credentials to challenge their conclusion." Yes, but you are some kind of journalist — right? — so you could have asked some more people before you took what that one fellow/lady dribbled out at the dining table as what everyone was saying.

But, as I told my dinner companion...

Oh, lord, the thrill of being transported to this scintillating dinner party, in Washington, with an ancient pundit extracting conventional wisdom from a once-powerful lawyer!

... I suspect that he is wrong and that Kagan's joining Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor on the bench will change the high court in ways that no one foresees.

Quelle riposte! Oh! Would that I could be in such company! The elderly lawyer manages to say something mind-crushingly obvious, and the old pundit, keeping the colloquy going, with no legal knowledge, disagrees.

I say this based on what I saw happen in The Post's newsroom and many others when female reporters and editors arrived, in increasing numbers, starting in the 1970s and '80s. 

Now, our trusty columnist does the hard work of dredging up memories from 30+ years ago. I saw those female reporters in the 70s... humming "I Am Woman" as they changed the world of men for the better... And yet you still have your job, cluttering up the pages of the Washington Post with this self-indulgent nonsense. Why hasn't some brilliant lady ousted you yet? I mean, this column has you recounting a conversation that — if I'd participated in it — I'd have gone home feeling ashamed that I'd been so dull at the dinner-table. Yet you serve it up as leftovers in a Washington Post column. And now you are feeding me this warmed over Women's Liberation stuff that is refuted —  refudiated! — by the fact that you are still here writing this column.

They changed the culture of the newspaper business and altered the way everyone, male or female, did the work.

And this has something to do with Elena Kagan, coming onto the Supreme Court, where there isn't ONE Justice who hasn't shared that bench with a woman. Stevens — have you noticed? — was the last Justice who served on an all-male Supreme Court.

The women who came onto the political beat asked candidates questions that would not have occurred to male reporters. They saw the candidates' lives whole, while we were much more likely to deal only with the official part of it. So the scope of the candidate profiles expanded, and the realm of privacy began to shrink.

They saw the candidates' lives whole...  Broder's elevated diction goes wild.  The realm of privacy began to shrink... Please don't reveal your shrinkage problems, Dave! I don't want to hear about your realm... your domain....

He's dredging up material from the 80s "In a Different Voice" Women's Studies era, and it's borderline insulting. It's Broderline insulting.

They also changed the rules for reporters themselves. When I joined the press corps in the 1960 presidential campaign, I was formally instructed by a senior reporter for the New York Times on the "west of the Potomac rule." What happened between consenting adults west of the Potomac was not to be discussed with bosses, friends and especially family members east of the Potomac.

Look out! The floodgates have opened! Broder's going back to 1960!

It was a protective, chauvinistic culture, and it changed dramatically when more than the occasional female reporter boarded the bus or plane.

Hey, Broder. Remember the 90s? How'd you guys do with the Clinton sexual harassment story? Are you keeping up with the allegations against Al Gore?

I don't know how having three strong-minded female justices serving simultaneously for the first time will change the world of the Supreme Court. But I will not be surprised if this small society does not change for all its members.

That's right. You don't know whether 3 women with 6 modern men will be different from 2 women with 7 modern men, and you haven't gotten up out of your antique comfy chair to do one thing to find out. Yet Broder, at this point, has run out of material on his subject. Go to the link and you'll see that he pads out his column with 200+ more words on other Kagan-related stuff that was casually rattling around in his...  eminent dome... his venerable cranium... his... nugatory noggin.

David Broder on Sarah Palin: "The lady is good."

"Those who want to stop her will need more ammunition than deriding her habit of writing on her hand."

And that band on her wrist.

The Senate finally passes the health care bill — and the question is, for people who wanted the bill to pass: How good or bad are they supposed to feel?

Liberals mull nuancefully:

"There is so much that is wrong with it -- and the way it was made -- and, at the same time, so much that is right that you just have to shake your head in despair and in wonder." — David Broder.

"At the moment of ... historical triumph, liberals are retreating from politics into languor, rage, and other incarnations of anti-politics. One day they may look back upon this time with longing." — Jonathan Chait.

"It's been a long time since the legislative system did anything this big, and people have forgotten how awful the victories are. But these are the victories, and if they feel bad to many, they will do good for more. As that comes clearer and clearer, this bill will come to feel more and more like the historic advance it actually is." — Ezra Klein.