"Is this supposed to be fun? Am I supposed to be serious? Am I supposed to be a comedian?"

Trump finally gets his White House Correspondents' Dinner speech:

Was he just supposed to take up where he left off before he was so rudely interrupted?

"I could never [do] the speech that I had ready just a short while [ago]. Oh, that was going to be a doozy. I was so psyched. I was going to rip people and I don't know, just something changed and it's really for the better. But I just wouldn't want to do that. But we'll do a little ripping if you don't mind...."

ADDED: I just listened to the whole "little ripping." He told a lot of bad jokes, often stopping to ask "who wrote this?" Sample bad joke: "I thought Kaitlan [Collins] had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I [was informed] that it wasn't her on the Bud Light can. It was Dylan Mulvaney."

Then there's the joke he said he thought was the best one: "The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy, from his wife, and she said, 'When you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me.' And he said, 'I can't do both.'" He had to say, "Does anybody get that?" And then: "That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole freaking stupid speech that they wrote." They wrote. Don't blame him. He's trying to use the old Johnny Carson method of improvising jokes about how the monologue is failing. 

I see he took the same position I took on Graham Platner: "I think Platner might have done surprisingly well because we're in the age of Trump.... People can do well today. Platner, I don't know. But, you know, people don't have the guts to stick it out.... He certainly didn't defend himself very well...."

And here's the joke I thought was the best: "Under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they're now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions. But I for one wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News. She's a wonderful woman."

AND: Near the end, he offers "somewhat of a scoop": "My intention to run for a fourth term as President of the United States." He puts on a red "Trump 2028" cap. It's a double joke — that he's running beyond the constitutional term limit and that he's already won more than twice — and he leans into it, to make sure they get it: "I won three times. Now I'm going to do it again.... I'm going to do it again. It should be easy. I'm getting very good at running for President. No, I won three times. Did very well the second time, by the way. It's a rigged election...."

"Now, it’s easier to become a 'who.' Everyone has at least a thousand hard-core fans. You don’t even have to be that famous to have a dedicated audience."

Said the podcaster Lindsey Weber, quoted in "Who Even Knows What Famous Means These Days? They Do. As viral stars cross into the mainstream, the hosts of the 'Who? Weekly' podcast consider: Is Addison Rae an actual celebrity? Yes. Brittany Broski? Definitely not" (NYT).

The podcast, which started in 2016, is a roundup of developments for notable “whos” — and for teasing out who is a “who.” Recent episodes have weighed the celebrity of the actor Jason Isaacs, who entered the zeitgeist for his awkward commentary on his nudity in “The White Lotus,” and that of the former “America’s Next Top Model” contestant Yaya DaCosta, who addressed modern viewers’ criticism of that reality show. Both are interesting, but nowhere near front-page news....

Fame isn't what it used to be. Fame is a has been. Who's who? Who cares? When I think of a "who," I think of Cindy-Lou Who, and, in that light, and considering present-day fame, here's something I saw on TikTok yesterday:

"So, Dylan, that's womanhood. Everyone on earth wants you to be a shiny, 2-dimensional caricature...."

What happens when "girlhood" gets old? Dylan Mulvaney ages out:

"She still loves recording herself and often thinks of her life decisions as things to debut on a platform...."

"But the memoir ends with a declaration of intention to protect, if not necessarily her privacy, then perhaps her interiority. 'I’m trying this new thing where I keep certain things to myself,' Ms. Mulvaney writes. 'Little yummy womanly moments just for me.'"

From "Dylan Mulvaney Dreams of Privacy. Really. Her bubbly video diaries about her gender transition were once a study in oversharing. Now on the other side of a nationwide boycott, she sees the value in keeping some things to herself" (NYT).

What are you doing, just for you? Is it manly/womanly... and how would you know? Is it yummy? Is it bubbly? When you're in there, in your interiority, can it be bubbly?

How is your interiority? It's the NYT writer, Maggie Lange, not Mulvaney, who's using that word. I was moved to ask Grok: What kind of people use the word "interiority"? 

I'm told: "Writers, especially novelists and literary critics, use it a lot when dissecting characters or narratives—think folks analyzing Dostoevsky or Woolf for their deep dives into the human psyche."

And maybe also NYT writers helping very lightweight pop culture figures promote their memoirs. 

"Interiority" is showily contemplative. "Everyday people don’t typically say 'interiority' unless they’re parroting something they read or heard in a niche context."

I wondered if — in the 21 years of this blog — I'd ever used it. Quick search. I see it appears 5 times, but each time, I'm quoting someone else: 

"Whether Alito was participating in the boycott matters, moreover, for one of the several reasons it matters why there was an upside-down American flag flying at his house on Jan. 17, 2021...."

"...as The New York Times reported earlier this week, and what he knew about that.... Participating in a boycott is undeniably a political statement. And there are pending cases for which participation in an anti-trans beer boycott could be seen as his having a finger on the scale of justice on the side of the anti-trans advocates supporting — and in some cases, defending — these laws such that recusal could be required...."

Writes Chris Geidner, in "Exclusive: Justice Alito sold Bud Light stock amidst anti-trans boycott effort/Alito did not respond to questions about the sale, but its timing raises fair questions — particularly in light of other recent ethical questions" (Law Dork).

Why would selling the stock reveal an anti-trans bias? If anything, it reflects a belief that the stock will go down because other people are biased. To participate in the boycott would be to decline to continue to buy Bud Light beer. There's no evidence that Alito was a Bud Light consumer. I googled Does Alito drink beer and I found this 2006 article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, "A Tiger on the Court: Sam Alito ’72 at Princeton":

What an expensive screwup that turned out to be.

 

From the London Times.

"I would talk to you differently knowing no right-wing conservatives could run with what I say. I shut down sometimes..."

"I was such a good little kid and I had so much love and I trusted everyone I met.... [My parents] are trying to learn how to be parents to a daughter while also watching their child get reamed.... As a parent, you’re trying to protect your child, and if transness is the thing that is being used against me, they have a hard time sometimes seeing that it’s actually a beautiful thing.... I think hopefully years from now we’ll look back on this time period and be like, What the fuck was that?... I don’t want to be the one that’s scared, the one who’s controversial — that word, controversial, drives me fucking insane. What really makes me controversial? That I’m trans? That I’m hyperfeminine? That I make jokes? That I overshare? Because I actually like being myself or that, God forbid, I’m happy? Maybe that’s what makes me controversial. I don’t think I’ve actually fucked up majorly. I think that the world is fucked up. Cheers to that."

Said Dylan Mulvaney, quoted in "Girlhood, Interrupted/Dylan Mulvaney is pretty sure she can win everyone over. Well, most everyone" (NY Magazine).

"For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse than not hiring a trans person at all."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dylan Mulvaney (@dylanmulvaney)

"When things get divisive and controversial so easily, I think it’s an important wake-up call to all of us marketers to be very humble...."

Said Marcel Marcondes, Anheuser-Busch’s global chief marketing officer, quoted in "Bud Light is ‘coming back’ but controversy is a ‘wake-up call,’ Anheuser-Busch exec says" (CNN).

Dylan is trending on Twitter, and I am feeling alienated.

 

AND: Since I'm seeing a lot of comments of incomprehension, let me front page what I wrote in the comments:

"Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant."

"(Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: 'I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.' We are going backward, not forward.)... If a Christianist hospital was busy changing the sexes of overwhelmingly gay kids, so that they became straight, what do you think the gay rights establishment would say? But when a queer facility does exactly that, all the worriers are bigots.... So many potentially gay children were being sent down the pathway to change gender, two of the clinicians said there was a dark joke among staff that 'there would be no gay people left.' 'It feels like conversion therapy for gay children,' one male clinician said. 'I frequently had cases where people started identifying as trans after months of horrendous bullying for being gay.... Young lesbians considered at the bottom of the heap suddenly found they were really popular when they said they were trans.'..."

Writes Andrew Sullivan in "The Queers Versus The Homosexuals/We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying" (Substack).

"I've been having some crazy deja vu, because I'm an adult, 26, and, throughout childhood, I was called 'too feminine' and 'over the top,' and here I am now being called all those same things..."

"... but this time, it's from other adults. And if they're going to accuse me of anything, it should be that I'm a theater person, that I'm camp. But this is just my personality. And it always has been. What I'm struggling with most is that I grew up in a conservative family, and I'm extremely privileged because they still love me very much. And I grew up in the church, and I still have my faith, which I am really trying to hold onto right now. But I've always tried to love everyone — you know, people that make it really hard. I think it's okay to be frustrated with someone — confused. But what I'm struggling to understand is the need to dehumanize — to be cruel. I just think that's not great. You know, dehumanization has never fixed anything in history — ever."

Says Dylan Mulvaney, breaking a few weeks of silence and expressing a desire to continue speaking to the people who have liked and enjoyed her.

"Then suddenly that bucket is not just cream and sugar, it’s something else."

Said Americus Reed, "a professor of marketing... who studies the intersection of social movements and consumer behavior," about Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which has long maintained an image of hippies located in Burlington, Vermont.

Quoted in "Ad Flap Leaves Bitter Aftertaste for Bud Light and Warning for Big Business/Bud Light’s marketing effort with a transgender influencer has put it 'in the center of the culture wars in a way that no company could possibly want to be,' one observer said" (NYT).

“There’s an authenticity element to what Ben & Jerry’s does.... When you have these large corporations that have a historic brand identity, it just looks inauthentic when they’re all of a sudden getting involved in these social campaigns,” said Anson Frericks.

"I have never spoken to [Dylan Mulvaney], nor will I. I try to be, for the LGBT community, the adult in the room. She is not."

"She is bouncing around all over the place. I have nothing in common with her. The fringe is the worst thing that can happen to the trans community and the media only wants to report on that because of the sensationalization of it and honestly that’s got to stop."

Said Caitlyn Jenner, quoted in The NY Post.

Jenner also weighed in on Trump '24: "I think Trump is going to win this thing… He is a great man and he did tremendous things for this country.... We need an adult in the room and that adult right now is Donald Trump and that’s just kind of the way I feel right now."

She likes that word "adult." But that's a high level of generality. If you make looking for the adults your guiding principle, good luck finding your way around America.

I retreat to the OED. Here's the relevant definition, 2b: "Mature in attitude, outlook, behaviour, etc.; emotionally and mentally grown-up." There's a historical example from 1927 that I assure you I read only after writing the previous paragraph:

"It is a widely-held notion in Europe..that the American is not adult, that he remains all his life a child."

When did you first become sensitized to the mocking of women?

I wonder, this morning, as I scan the comments on yesterday's post, "Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."*

Here's what I'm seeing (boldface added):

Sebastian: "Exuberant mockery of women, subversion of common sense, and in-your-face-take-that-deplorables-middle-fingerism....

Michelle Dulak Thomson: "[A]ll I can say is that he doesn't traffic in 'whimsy and joy.' He is a sick individual who mercilessly mocks women. Which is evidently OK these days...."

"Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."

"Where Matt Walsh offers enemies, Dylan Mulvaney aspires to exuberance. She suggests the possibility of making yourself, and the world, into something better, while [Matt] Walsh promises, at best, only the dour satisfaction of being right about how terrible everything is. It isn’t surprising that the kids are choosing Mulvaney over that. But Walsh is right, his followers cry. Even if he were, it wouldn’t justify his tactics. In the court of public opinion, truth is not necessarily a sufficient defense."

Writes Megan McArdle in "For conservatives, Dylan Mulvaney should be a role model" (WaPo).

Also: "Conservatives... understand that bullying has cost progressivism a lot of support among moderates, including on issues surrounding transgenderism, where successful efforts to stifle public discussion of basic questions — such as 'What Is a Woman'? — have led to resentment and backlash rather than consensus...."

ADDED: I've got a new post based on some of the comments in this post. Writing that new post, I noticed my use of brackets in the post title above — "[s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty" — makes it seem as though McArdle might have used the masculine pronoun "he." No, she had "She," and I needed to switch to a lower-case "S." I just deploying brackets in the conventional way editors do when cutting down a quote. Nothing substantive.

"So now the Bud-lash is a whole thing, as is the backlash to the Bud-lash."

Writes Emily Stewart (at Vox), voxsplaining the fuss over Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light.

Radio personality Howard Stern said he’s “dumbfounded” at all the hullabaloo, wondering on air, with regard to Kid Rock and [Travis] Tritt, “Why do you care so much?” ...

Anheuser-Busch, which is getting a ton of earned media out of this, appears to largely be riding the wave.... 

"Bud Light vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid said she was inspired to update the 'fratty' and 'out-of-touch' humor of the beer company..."

"... with 'inclusivity' in a March 30 interview with the podcast 'Make Yourself At Home' podcast. But her effort to be inclusive excluded the people who matter most — Bud Light drinkers, according to St. Louis-area operator John Rieker. 'It's kind of mind-boggling they stepped into this realm,' Rieker, who owns Harpo's Bar and Grill in Chesterfield, Missouri, told FOX Business. 'You're marketing to an audience that represents a fraction of 1% of consumers while alienating the much larger base of your consumers.'"

I'm reading "Bud Light suffers bloodbath as longtime and loyal consumers revolt against transgender campaign/'In Bud Light's effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else,' says a St. Louis bar owner" (Fox Business).

I've been staying out of this tempest in a teapot brouhaha in a beer can. Too much jackassery. But the phrase "the 'fratty' and 'out-of-touch' humor of the beer company" caught my attention and I want to say a few things. 

It's just a "paid partnership" on Instagram. If it's not for you, it's not for you.

I'm yawning at the "uproar," noted by the stalwart New York Post, in "Nike faces online uproar over paid partnership with trans TikToker Dylan Mulvaney."

Overheard at Meadhouse:

"I've never called anything 'stalwart' before. I just felt for some reason that I needed to call The New York Post 'stalwart.'"

"I think you probably heard it called that before."

"So I'm being conventional?"

"It's just somewhere in the back of your memory, that you associate the word with The New York Post."

"Stalwart" means "Resolute, unbending, determined" as in " The duke made his stalwart declaration in the House of Lords against all parliamentary reform" (OED). 

And an "uproar" is a "Loud outcry or vociferation; noise of shouting or tumult" (OED). Some classy examples:

Why, exactly, is Caitlyn Jenner attacking Dylan Mulvaney?

There's this:

. @MarshaBlackburn thank you for speaking out and having a backbone - one of the best senators we have. Let’s not ‘normalize’ any of what this person is doing. This is absurdity! https://t.co/YmQcuwWKhj

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) October 26, 2022

I got there via "Caitlyn Jenner Piles on Trans TikToker, Calls Body Positive Video ‘Absurdity’/The anti-trans attacks against Mulvaney come days after her interview with President Biden surrounding transgender rights and policies" (Rolling Stone).

I've been avoiding the Mulvaney-at-the-White-House story. Not sure why. I'd already seen many Dylan Mulvaney videos on TikTok, including the one that reenacts the opening sequence of the old TV show "That Girl" (and the subsequent version of that where Marlo Thomas looks on and is (or acts) choked up about the tribute to her long-ago perky, girly youth).