"One frustrated Title IX coordinator told me she sometimes thought of her job as running 'The Break Up Office.'"

"She said many young people lacked the skills to navigate relationships themselves, and often didn’t want to. Why should they? Instead of focusing on punishing students who commit truly bad acts and aiding their victims, campus administrators transmitted the message that recasting any sexual experience as malign, and then reporting it to school authorities, is an act of bravery."

From Emily Yoffe in "Biden's Sex Police/The White Houses's new regulations will gut due-process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct" by Emily Yoffe (Common Sense).

"I was told, yes, he was deeply flawed, but then again so was I. And so I worked on myself and stayed."

"If he was a monster all the time, perhaps it would have been easier to leave. But he could be kind and sensitive. And so I stayed. He cried and apologized. And so I stayed. He offered to get help and even went to a few counseling sessions and therapy groups. And so I stayed. He belittled my intelligence and destroyed my confidence. And so I stayed. I felt ashamed and trapped."

Wrote Jennie Willoughby, last April.

Via Emily Yoffe at Twitter, who says "This statement by one of the ex-wives of Rob Porter, now former White House staffer, describes so well what it's like to be with an abuser and what makes you stay. I know because I've been there. If you're there, please get help and get out!"

ADDED: I'm seeing at the Jennie Willoughby site, that you can "Book Jennie" and that she does "Teaching & Speaking" with "Mindfulness/Meditation group lessons," "Corporate Training workshops," and "Resiliency/Learning keynote talks" in which you can "Hear me tell my story and inspire you to dig deeper as you recognize the beauty of life unfolding, adversity and all."

It's incredibly hard to think about what goes on inside a marriage, especially when you're listening to the story one participant chooses to take public after the marriage breaks up. In the case of Rob Porter, to attack him is also to go with flow of the torrent of raging attacks on the President of the United States and roiling #MeToo accusations.

Willoughby did, apparently, publish her statement last April, before #MeToo took off, but long after the presidential election, which was heavily focused on accusations of sexual harassment against Trump.

AND: At The Washington Post, "‘Your story is mine’: Rob Porter’s ex, Jennie Willoughby, inspires outpouring from abuse survivors." Excerpt:

“This could have been me writing the article,” one poster [i.e., commenter at Willoughby's post] wrote. “OMG, your story is mine also . . . for 19 years. Yes, we stay, and we hurt, and we try,” another added. “[A]nd others don’t see it, so we are alone.”...

“Outside the house he was Mr. GQ, an Associate Director at one of our federal agencies,” one poster said. “At home, he terrorized me and our children. He belittled me, called me names, told me I had no friends, told me I was stupid, unattractive, evil, that I’d never make it on my own, a lousy mother, a lousy wife, a crack addict (never seen it), ad nauseum.”

Another stated: “I was attractive, well educated and confident; people can never understand why I stayed. He was charming, in a boy next door kind of way, and everyone loved him; people have a hard time believing that he wasn’t always so wonderful. Your ability to explain that he was not just some horrible person and you were not just a victim, was very accurate and left me in tears.”

Video:

Slate has hired a youngster with a lip ring to replace Emily Yoffe as its "Dear Prudence" advice columnist.

You want advice from a person who on first look you can tell could have used some better advice?!

Okay, on second look, here are 3 articles (listicles) by Mallory Ortberg:

1. "Dogs I Would Like To Own In Art, Even Though They Are Probably Dead Now."

2. "Every Southern Gothic Novel Ever" (a 17-point list, beginning with "The Red, Red Dirt Understands" and including "No One Listens To What Old Pap’s Got To Say, On Account Of This Deformity, But I Say It’s You All What Has The Deformity, In Your Souls, I Knows What I’ve Seen").

3. "Every Comment On Every Article About Bras Ever" (and they're pretty much all you're wearing the wrong size).

"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.

Slate's advice columnist Emily Yoffe fails even to see being a homemaker as an option.

A 26-year-old woman writes and describes her preference for life as a homemaker. She doesn't use the word "homemaker" or "housewife," but those are the old-fashioned terms for what the woman is describing. She's given up a career as a social worker, can't find any other career that interests her, and:

I'm happiest in my quiet home, cleaning and making beautiful meals for my partner. I walk my dog, go to the gym, volunteer cleaning up a local forest and do things that promote tranquility. He makes enough at a tech firm to support the both of us, but I am paying my share of bills with my meager savings.... Is it wrong to ask my partner to support my quiet at-home life for the sake of my mental health?

This woman portrays her plight as a "mental heath" issue. She pathologizes her desire for the kind of life women were once criticized for not wanting. It's worth exploring this woman's possible mental problems, but why doesn't Yoffe even recognize the possibility that the single-earner household with a home-based partner is a beautiful, legitimate arrangement?

"Maybe you should lay off this grieving widower because your need to reproduce with him before the 'other predatory females' get their claws in makes me shudder."

"If you’re friends with this man, you send a condolence note. Put out of your mind that you’re about to make a move, and stay friends and stay in touch. If he’s interested that will become clear when he’s ready. If you really have respect for this man, you will respect his loss and his grief."

You will respect his loss and grief and hope like hell that he doesn't read the advice column in Slate. (Or that he has a strong and somewhat perverted sense of humor.... but that wasn't really what you loved about him, was it?)

Responding to a mother who's upset to find that her 13-year-old daughter is reading sexually explicit fan fiction about a popular boy band....

... Slate's advice columnist Emily Yoffe begins:

I remember the thrilling times at my friend Paula's house when I was about your daughter's age when Paula would abscond with her father's Playboy as soon as it hit the mail slot, surgically remove it from its plain brown wrapper, and we would gleefully laugh over every page. You may have put parental controls on her reading, but I assume she has friends, and will simply swallow these unexpurgated tales of male bonding at their houses.

Emily Yoffe was born in 1955, by the way. I was born in 1951. Playboy was born in 1953. Longtime readers of the blog, close readers anyway, know, when I was growing up, in a middle class suburban home in Delaware, the latest issue of Playboy was always available on the coffee table in the living room, and anyone could pick it up and read it or look at the pictures. Nothing was said about it one way or the other. I'm sure I looked at the pictures before I could read, and when I could read, I puzzled over what the words referred to. I remember disappointment at the cartoons. These were cartoons, like in the newspaper, except the words weren't funny and someone was always naked.

Was it better to leave the magazine out where it could be perused than to leave those the girls to sneak around, slipping it out and back into its brown paper wrapper? Whatever the answer to that question, a parent today has a different problem, pornography and the internet being what they are. You can't choose the 1950s Althouse family method. That's a lost world.

Looking in Wikipedia to get Playboy's birthdate, I was interested in this quote from Hugh Hefner, from 1967:

Consider the girl we made popular: the Playmate of the Month. She is never sophisticated, a girl you cannot really have. She is a young, healthy, simple girl — the girl next door . . . we are not interested in the mysterious, difficult woman, the femme fatale, who wears elegant underwear, with lace, and she is sad, and somehow mentally filthy. The Playboy girl has no lace, no underwear, she is naked, well-washed with soap and water, and she is happy.

A lost world.

"Though you haven't heard of it, there are some fundamentalist churches that encourage dating and marrying nonbelievers and trying to convert them."

"It's called 'missionary dating' and it's a real thing."

"But as it stands only 3 people know you're the biological father of the boy, and while it may take all your will power, I think it should remain that way."

Says Prudie, noting that it's only a cousin marriage in the offing and not mentioning the thrilling line in the wedding ceremony — often used for drama in fiction — "Speak now or forever hold your peace." That line is there because of problems like the one raised by the advice seeker.  In fictional stories, it tends to be used to create tension over problems like — spoiler alert! — this:

"I had decided that I would go to my grave never telling anyone what I had done."

"Recently, a friend became pregnant after a one-night stand. Everyone assumes that was an accident, but she confided in me that she had been seeking out sex with the purpose of getting pregnant. I was so relieved to meet someone else who planned an 'accidental' pregnancy that it made me wonder if I should open up about my secret."

From a letter to the advice columnist Prudie. I haven't yet read Prudie's answer. I just want to say that this woman imagines that she's found her counterpart in this other woman, but she hasn't. The letter-writer deceived a man with whom she had a serious relationship, letting him think she was still on contraceptive pills, and she's clung to her secret for many years, including from the man she married. She's kept the old boyfriend and the husband in the dark even as she's involved both of them in the upbringing of the child. That's years of hardcore deceit. This other lady is sleeping around with men she doesn't seem to care much about. And who knows what she told them about birth control? And she was apparently ready to blab about it as soon as the pregnancy happened. She's out and proud. It's way too late to emulate her. She's nothing like you.

Now I've read Prudie's answer. Excerpt: "There’s nothing to be gained by telling your husband and making him uneasy about your essential honesty." Essential honesty? The letter-writer's only indication of honesty (in everything but the central lie of her life) was "I'm mentally stable, and I have a pretty unremarkable suburban life." As if unremarkable suburbanites are honest.

"I feel like a complete oddity, but I am a male who hates sex."

"I feel dirty and gross during and after the process. When I’m with a partner I do my best to help satisfy their needs and desires, but I almost always have to rush to the shower afterward. Some times I simply can't even be touched without jerking away and having a panic attack. But I do love going on dates, making dinner together, snuggling while watching movies."

A question for Emily Yoffe.

In a similar vein: "The married couples who NEVER have sex but insist they're happy: Are they deluded - or just honest?"

"A few months ago, my husband uncovered an affair I was having with an old flame."

"He moved out and initiated divorce proceedings, but in the time since, I was able to convince him that I am truly repentant and to give our marriage another chance for the sake of our children. The problem I have now is that he says that if we are to stay married, he wants it to be an open marriage. I've tried to tell him that I've gotten that out of my system and I don't want to be with anybody other than him, but he says there just isn't any way he can ever trust me again, he doesn't feel an obligation to be faithful to me anymore, and at least this way we're being honest about it."

Letter to advice columnist "Prudie" from a woman who "just want[s] things to go back to how they used to be."

Who's more wrong, the wife or the husband? It's easy to say the wife, but the husband is also wrong, because the idea of open marriage should be founded on trust, not mistrust. He's punishing her, deliberately, not pursuing what he believes is a positive way of life. (I'm not recommending polyamory, but if you're doing it as an expression of hostility to your primary partner, you're not doing it the way the prominent proponents say you should. I know... should... why speak of shoulds in the realm of transgression? I do get that. But I'm not one of the promoters of polyamory. I'm just someone who's listened to my share of Dan Savage podcasts.)

"When my wife and I met in college, the attraction was immediate, and we quickly became inseparable."

"We had a number of things in common, we came from the same large metropolitan area, and we both wanted to return there after school, so everything was very natural between us. We married soon after graduation, moved back closer to our families, and had three children by the time we were 30. We were both born to lesbians, she to a couple, and me to a single woman."

You see where this is going? Blah blah blah... "I can't help but think 'This is my sister' every time I look at her now...."

Emily Yoffe asserts that I attacked her "as a tool of the racial and ethnic preference lobby."

She stands by her ethical advice to someone, but quite aside from my problem with that ethical advice, I'd like to say that it's unethical to portray what I said so inaccurately.

Here's the post I wrote, which isn't a general attack on her support for affirmative action. I was calling attention to the problem of incomplete honesty from those who seek to benefit from affirmative action and the way the school applying its policy has shared interests that cause it not to want to know about a false or misleading statement. This is the very issue that had been in the news with respect to Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren. The schools want to be able to say that they have a good proportion of minority students, so they may not mind if an applicant claims, based on family lore, to be a member of a minority group.

Yoffe professed not to notice any harm to anyone in this interaction between a school and an applicant. That was, at best, willfully blind. As an ethicist, she ought to want to address the larger problem. And now, after linking to me as she did, she has an ethical obligation toward me that needs some attention.

Did President Obama violate the precepts of etiquette and display raging narcissism at the funeral of Daniel Inouye?

It's pretty much what everyone is saying, notably Emily Yoffe at Slate (where one ordinarily expects support for the Prez). When I encounter a controversy at this late stage of one-sidedness, my instinct is to develop the other side. Law school class is like that, you know. If there's a case that everyone just somehow knows is rightly decided, the way to have a discussion about it isn't to remark upon its obviousness, but to figure out how someone — someone intelligent, educated, and sane — could think it wasn't right. That's what I do.

Read Yoffe's description of Obama's eulogy, which dwells on Obama's own life, growing up in Hawaii, the state Inouye represented in the Senate. Obama talks about his family vacations, where they stayed in motels, and the motel rooms had TVs, and — "as the people must have been twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going" — the Watergate hearings were on TV, and so he saw Inouye, and because Inouye did not have that typical white person look, the young mixed-race Obama was inspired to imagine "what might be possible in my own life."

A funeral for a very old person — Inouye was 88 — is not an occasion for deep mourning or soothing profound shock. It can be an occasion to look back on the era, to indulge one's own personal connections to the time and the man who has passed on. And if the President of the United States speaks at the funeral, that in itself is a phenomenal honor for the deceased. The President should not read a typical eulogy, a conventional account of the dead man's achievements and wonderful personal traits. This is something different. And when the President is specifically noted for his oratory, something special is anticipated.

No one — I submit — was "twitching in the pews wondering where this was all going." They were rapt, experiencing the gift of a unique presentation, The Story of a Boy — that boy! — and how his individual history merged with The Story of America — A Story of Race. They knew, as they surrendered themselves into the hands of our storyteller-in-chief, that they would be cared for and rewarded. The threads would come together, the yarns would be knitted into a beautiful eulogy blanket, under which Daniel Inouye could be laid to rest and all would be comforted.

How dare you snatch that comfort away by counting the "I"s and "me"s in that speech?!

"I'm a 21-year-old female who is becoming increasingly fearful of aging."

"Since I was 18, I've tended to date men who were in their mid-20s to 30s which I figured that was about my attraction to the intelligence and maturity that comes with age. But I'm starting to realize that a large factor in my choice of mates is that I enjoy being cherished for my youth. I'm terrified of losing what I see as my most desirable trait. I am surrounded by beautiful women who are decades older than I am. But in my mind, youth precedes even physical attractiveness when it comes to sexual desirability. This sentiment has been echoed by the men I've dated. I've started exercising and using anti-aging skin products, but is there anything I can do to ease my apprehension?"

A letter to Dear Prudence.

"A candidate who actually nods when his opponent makes a powerful counterargument—as Obama did several times during the last debate—is a rare bird."

So wrote Slate Culture Critic Meghan O'Rourke on October 28, 2008, in a collection of short statements by various Slate writers, explaining who they were about to vote for and why. For some reason, this article isn't available on line anymore, but it turns up in a Google search as a "doc" file that downloads. I had the text to Google because my son John had blogged it back in '08, and he remembered it and emailed me about it after I blogged today about how I hadn't interpreted Obama's looking down and nodding in a negative way.

Here's O'Rourke's entire statement of why she was voting for Obama:

For his charisma, his cautiousness, and his cool. In a time of high stakes, we need someone who can sort out the best course of action without bridling in anger. A candidate who actually nods when his opponent makes a powerful counterargument—as Obama did several times during the last debate—is a rare bird. Of course, Obama is untested in many regards. My main concern about him is this: How will he deal with making an unpopular or tough decision? Can he keep his cool then without losing confidence in himself? I believe so, and that's why he has my vote.

If you Google that text, you'll get to the document that has the many statements of various writers. I predict there's a lot of raw material for analyzing the state of affairs today. State of affairs... the state of America's affair with Barack Obama.

If you love a man, his passive nodding means one thing. If you've fallen out of love, it's something else. Obama's demeanor at the first debate didn't diminish our affection for him; our reaction to it was evidence of how we already felt.

What can he do now? Act some different way at debate #2? If my hypothesis is correct, it doesn't matter what he does. We won't like it.

ADDED: I'm rooting around in that Slate document. Here's Tim Wu, evincing the classic '08 madness:

Most of all, I like his obvious inner calm. It suggests that his decisions will come from somewhere other than expediency, anger, or fear. It's like electing Obi-Wan Kenobi as president.

And here's some prescience:

Emily Yoffe, "Dear Prudence" Columnist: Obama

Please, please, Barack, don't become another Jimmy Carter.

"But don’t worry, Harvard Law School racked up their identity-group bonus points on the basis of the authoritative evidence of Ms Warren’s family 'lore'..."

"... which surely ought to be good enough for faculty-lounge affirmative-action credits."

Mark Steyn aptly notes.

We were talking about this yesterday, and tmitsss reminded us of the "Dear Prudence" column that we were talking about a couple weeks ago. You remember, the Slate advice columnist Emily Yoffe got a question from a student who wondered whether it was ethical to accept a scholarship that was available only to Hispanic students when, in fact, he had recently learned that he had no Hispanic ancestors. (He was adopted and had a Hispanic surname.)

Yoffe told him:

There is one essential criteria people must meet in order to be considered Hispanic by the U.S. Census Bureau: That’s what they say they are. 

Your say-so makes it so. And there's money in it!

You were raised by a Hispanic father and have his last name. For most of your life you identified yourself as Hispanic. 

So family "lore" is good enough!

On your behalf the “Hispanic” box was checked on the relevant forms. If you want to shed your Hispanic identity, of course you are free to do so. But given your last name, people will still assume that's what you are, even if you are no longer checking the appropriate boxes. This Pew Hispanic Center report shows just how squishy and variable the term “Hispanic” is. I’m confident your college is thrilled to include you in their count of Hispanic students and doesn’t really want to know you may be thinking of yourself as Armenian. 

Your college is thrilled. You and the college, benefiting together... and who is harmed by this thrilling fantasy... this mutual stimulation to self-pleasure....? Let the frottage continue!

Given the price of tuition, a substantial scholarship is a blessing and you should claim it with equanimity.

Claim your blessings! Everybody wins! Not a loser in sight. Ah! Beautiful!

UPDATE: Yoffe links to this post and makes an offensive, inaccurate statement about it.

"My Hispanic surname is from my adoptive, now deceased, father. Since childhood I was told I was Hispanic."

"And unlike my blue-eyed, sandy-haired mother, I have dark hair and dark eyes and look Hispanic. This is the ethnicity that’s been checked off for me on all school and other forms. My parents always told me this might give me an edge for college admissions or some government jobs. I have recently found out I’m not Hispanic. My mother told me my biological father was Mediterranean, maybe Armenian. I make good grades and was accepted into a good college on my own merits. I've been offered a substantial financial scholarship available only for Hispanic students. Is it ethical to take it?"

If you think the answer so obviously "no" that anyone getting as far as writing it down should see that to ask the question is to demonstrate to yourself that the answer is "no," then you should read the advice columnist Emily Yoffe, who answers "yes."