"I’m very skeptical about much of psychoanalysis... I think it’s such a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it."

Said Sophie Freud, quoted in "Sophie Freud, professor who challenged her grandfather’s doctrine, dies at 97/The last surviving grandchild of Sigmund Freud described her grandfather as one of the 'false prophets of the 20th century'" (WaPo).

"Similar to the 5-inch inseam short craze that took over the video-sharing app in the summer of 2020..."

"... TikTok users are now getting all hot and bothered over men sporting another simple, unpretentious piece of garb: the backwards baseball cap. In a recent viral trend, users are sharing videos of their boyfriends and husbands in baseball caps backed by the popular TikTok sound called 'I like you have a cupcakke,' which is used to share a user’s personal preferences. The format goes like this: words flash across the screen indicating things that a user likes as a child’s voice repeats the words, 'I like you, have a cupcake.' Then, abruptly, the sound is interrupted by the rapper Cupcakke’s song 'Vagina,' at which point a final phrase appears on the screen, this time indicating the thing the user likes most of all, trumping all else. In the baseball hat videos, women film their significant others wearing normal, forward-facing caps and then no caps... then...  wearing their caps backwards."

 
From "The Hottest Way to Wear Your Baseball Cap? Backwards. A recent TikTok trend highlights the enduring sex appeal of backwards baseball caps" (Inside Hook).

The relevant TikTok videos are embedded at the link, so I won't put them here. I don't know if I noticed the shorts craze last summer. Maybe not. Was I using TikTok then? It's something I like to look at these days. But whatever. I had never heard of the rapper Cupcakke, nor of the song "Vagina," which sounds rather obvious, but I will read the lyrics. 

Okay. I've accomplished the task I assigned myself. I was surprised to see that it was by a woman. Isn't that weird? I thought a man was contemplating the mysterious genitalia of the other, but it turns out Cupcakke is female, and it's another one of those songs bragging about one's own genitalia. And really, it's absolutely mere chance that I've got 2 posts in a row with prominent genitalia.

As for hats... did you know that Freud thought hats were a phallic symbol? From "The Intepretation of Dreams":

"In many... cases, students have felt deeply violated even when their partner followed affirmative-consent rules—asking for and receiving a 'yes'—because aspects of the situation made them feel that what occurred was not what they wanted...."

"Sometimes the explicit request for permission might have induced them to do something they were conflicted about. Some schools have trained students, as part of orientation, to seek and settle for nothing less than 'enthusiastic' agreement to sex. Even under an affirmative-consent regime’s valorization of clarity, 'yes' doesn’t always mean 'yes.' The jury is still out on whether our experiment with affirmative consent will reduce rape, prove useful for distinguishing sex from sexual assault, or lead to less experience of sexual violation. But what may well emerge is a recognition that the clearest practices of 'yes' and 'no' do little to untangle a deep difficulty that makes consent seem promising yet wide of the mark: the altogether human experience of not knowing in the first place what is wanted or unwanted, desired or undesired. In a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte, a French psychoanalyst who sought treatment for what she described as 'frigidity,' Sigmund Freud wrote, in the nineteen-twenties, 'The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"'"

That's from "The Politics of Bad Sex/A new book argues that current standards of affirmative consent place too much emphasis on knowing what we want" by Jeannie Suk Gersen (in The New Yorker). 

I was surprised to see the return of Sigmund Freud, but Suk Gersen perceives Freud's question — she calls it "Freud's aporia" — in the new book she's reviewing, Katherine Angel’s “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent.” 

Suk Gersen writes:

There's no crying in baseball, and now, there's no spitting in baseball.

Not anymore.

I'm seeing the front-page teaser at WaPo: "No more spitting in baseball? Safety proposals would bar many MLB staples." The article is "MLB proposes safety plan that covers everything from sunflower seeds to lineup card exchanges." Excerpt:

A baseball game with no spitting? Yes, and that includes sunflower seeds, a staple for many modern ballplayers.

Players and coaches “must make every effort to avoid touching their face with their hands (including to give signs), wiping away sweat with their hands, licking their fingers, whistling with their fingers, etc.” There would be no bat boys or bat girls, and balls that are put in play and touched by multiple players — a groundout, a relay throw — would be removed and exchanged for a new baseball.

And no spitballs!



From the comments at WaPo:

I need a guy to explain this to me. i work in an office with tons of guys, all ages, and I have never, ever seen one of them spit. At their desk, in a meeting, on the phone, walking to a customer meeting, never. Why, then is it required for sports people to spit? Can’t they just swallow it? Is it contaminated or something?

Ha ha. It's funny, the presumed gender difference. It's a man problem... or prerogative. This made me think of a post I wrote 16 years ago: "Freud and the counterculture girl":

"Recently I heard a woman say her department is full of freaks, they don’t like her, and she doesn’t have a life, but that sounded more like a whine than an epiphany."

"I’m no sociologist so I don’t know if this era is less interesting. You’d think people would be as tormented by sex, self-fulfillment, and relationships (and babies) as ever, but I’m not hearing it on any movie lines I’ve been on lately. Maybe I should ask the NSA."

Said Stan Mack in a 2013 interview on the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York. Stan Mack drew the fantastic cartoon "Stan Mack's Real Life Funnies" that ran in The Village Voice from 1974 to 1995. The words in the cartoons were all things Mack claims to have heard people say around New York City. I, myself, had long loved the absurdity of the partial conversations you'd overhear as you walked around or half-minded your own business in a restaurant or shop. Here's an example showing part of one week's Stan Mack cartoon:



If you like that, you can order a collection of the funnies — remember when we called the comics "the funnies"? — here (at Amazon).

In the quote that begins in the post title, Mack is comparing the words he used to overhear with the words he overhears today, which, unlike then, include a lot of talking into cell phones. In fact, the reason I was looking up Stan Mack this morning is because I read (on Facebook) this post by Annie Gottlieb:

Really, the things you hear on the street. People on their cellphones seem to assume they’re in a soundproof phone booth, and people just conversing seem to have been made unselfconscious or oblivious by phone culture to being either intrusively loud, or private and overheard. You hear some funny things.

(a woman on her cellphone, crossing the street, indignantly: ) “I don’t want ANY bacteria.” (Apparently no one has yet broken the news about the microbiome.)

(Young man to his girlfriend, walking along holding hands, conversationally) “You know how some people jerk off just to jerk off?” (as opposed to?)

(today) “Hydroglyphics”

ADDED: Did people become less self-conscious because of cellphones? It's very hard to compare what you're hearing now with what you heard back then. Stan Mack is kind of an authority on the subject, and the difference he cites is in the interestingness. If what people are saying these days is less interesting, it could be that people are more private, less prone to revealing themselves when they can be overheard. But it could be that the eavesdropper has changed, and not just because we've all gotten older. We're different because we're listening to phone talkers, not to people who are with other people and talking in the flesh. People talking into a phone irritate us a lot more, so we're more judgmental. We think they're intruding on us. When we listen to people who are together in real life — as in "Real Life Funnies" — we feel that we are intruding on them. Our transgression makes things inherently more interesting.

"Physical assault definitely violates most society's [sic] idea of a moral order, which perhaps explains why aggression plays some kind of role in most humor."

"Freud theorized that humor serves as a way to dissipate sexual or aggressive tension in a socially acceptable way. Thomas Hobbes argues in the Leviathan that laughter arises from feeling superior, and that it's an extension of a feeling of 'sudden glory' arising from recognizing someone else's comparative defect or weakness.... The brain gets its wires crossed when confronted by someone else getting hurt. As a pain-filled situation unfolds, a witness doesn't experience the negative emotional valence that the person in pain does, but the brain still registers an emotional arousal. It can mistakenly categorize the sudden spike in emotion as positive....."

From "FYI: Why Is It Funny When A Guy Gets Hit In The Groin?" — a 2013 Popular Science article — which I'm reading this morning after blogging about last night's "SNL" cold open which featured "Joe Manchin" punching "Chuck Schumer" in the balls. There was a lot more in that sketch, and I didn't find any of it too funny, but in the comments to my post, Meade wrote: "in this era of That's Not Funny, at least we still have male-on-male sexual assault to laugh at."

Is hitting a man in the balls a sexual assault? It depends on the meaning of "sexual." I remember the definition of "sexual behavior" used by Rachel Mitchell (the prosecutor) in questioning Brett Kavanaugh. It specified the outward behavior and excluded intent. If you were doing the behavior — e.g., rubbing your clothed genitals against another person's clothed genitals — it didn't matter if you weren't doing it for sexual gratification. It could be mere "horseplay," and it would be "sexual behavior." That's adopting a broad view of "sexual," and that was done, I think, to take the perspective of the person on the receiving end of the behavior.

What about the man on the receiving end of a hit in the balls? First, are we talking about real life or a comedy scene? Getting hit in the balls is extremely common in comedy — it has a TV Tropes article* — and that's one reason to avoid it. But let's think about whether it should be avoided because it's not taking sexual assault seriously. We don't laugh to see a woman hit in the genitals. I don't think I've ever seen that used in comedy. It's not a cliché, but why isn't it a hilarious twist on the old cliché? We know it's not. Violence against women! And now, remember the 1970s feminist ideology about rape: It's a crime of violence, not sex. Rapists are not doing something sexual. See how that fits with Rachel Mitchell's definition of "sexual behavior."

Now, let's get back to the Popular Science article:

Besides the Freudian implications of the aggressive and sexual tension in the situation, there's also the suddenness with which a blow to the 'nads can take down even an otherwise big, strapping man.... Add that to the theories already at play with physical humor—benign violations, mistaken commitments, aggression, emotional arousal....

And you don't have women to tell you "That's not funny." It's male on male and the men are free to laugh fraternalistically.... until the women crack down on that too. And why wouldn't we? You're not taking sexual violence seriously. Or do you think it's not sexual? Maybe if we get you to think of it as sexual, you guys will stop laughing at other men's pain. And don't try to fend off the ire of women by purporting to take pride in man-on-man sexuality. The sexuality is on the rape continuum and therefore not funny in the Era of That's Not Funny.
_____________________________

* It was all the way back in 1995, that "The Simpsons" was trying to instruct us that this form of humor is so bad that only Homer Simpson is laughing:



ADDED: A reader sends a link to this example of a woman getting kicked in the crotch:



"King of the Hill" felt it could get away with that, I suspect, because: 1. It's a cartoon, 2. The woman is portrayed as stronger than men (not having balls is a super-power).

"12 Rules sets out an interesting and complex model for humanity, and it really has nothing to do with petting a cat or taking your tablets or being kind to lobsters."

"It is about strength, courage, responsibility, and suffering, but it is deep and difficult, and it is not easy to pigeonhole. In a sense, 12 Rules contains a number of hidden structures and hidden processes, and confusingly, these are not always made explicit in the text. The first of these is Deep Time. We are biological creatures, evolved beings who can only be truly understood through a model that encapsulates the notion of geological time.... Quite apart from the immensity of Deep Time, our story must take into account indescribable spans of historical time... His message is far from a 'Christian' one: it is a Jungian one...  Like Jung, Peterson senses a secret unrest that gnaws at the roots of our being, because we have forgotten too much from our long and dangerous journey. We must listen to our myths, understand them, and learn from them.... This leads to a second hidden concept: the Unconscious. Here Peterson recaptures ground that’s become unfashionable in modern psychology. His model is heavily influenced by Freud and Jung. 'You don’t know yourself,' he says. We are not who we thought we were. We carry secret, shameful knowledge that’s scarcely accessible to conscious exploration (Freud). We also carry elements of a Collective Unconscious (Jung) that’s glimpsed via our myths and creation narratives. If you think you are an atheist you are wrong, says Peterson, because your mind has been bent and shaped and molded by a god-fearing past stretching back into the unfathomable abysm of time."

From "Jordan Peterson and the Return of the Stoics/His book in part is about accepting the ubiquity of human suffering. No wonder reviewers don't get it" by Tim Rogers in The American Conservative.

You can buy the book at Amazon, here.

And here's Jordan Peterson doing a nice job on Bill Maher's show last Friday:

The way people act in real life is disgusting compared to the way I behave in my best dreams.

Trump's dreams are lovely compared to reality.



Transcript:

But we have to take steps to harden our schools so that they are less vulnerable to attack. This includes allowing well-trained and certified school personnel to carry concealed firearms. At some point, you need volume. I don’t know that a school is going to be able to hire a hundred security guards that are armed. Plus, you know, I got to watch some deputy sheriffs performing this week. And they weren’t exactly Medal of Honor winners. All right?

The way they performed was, frankly, disgusting. They were listening to what was going on. The one in particular, he was then — he was early. And then you had three others that probably a similar deal a little bit later, but a similar kind of a thing.

You know, I really believe — you don’t know until you test it — but I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t had a weapon. And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you. But the way they performed was really a disgrace.

And I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, because I know most of you.... The delusion that the people you've met are the good people. The disgusting — deplorable — people are farther away.

When other people do something disgusting, you should wonder whether, in the same situation, you'd have been disgusting too.

But he's serving up high hopes of solutions that could work, and like his dream of how he'd run into a stream of bullets for the kids, these solutions are happening now in the realm of the imaginary. You see yourself running toward danger, and you see the "well-trained and certified school personnel" with their concealed firearms "harden[ing] our schools." What fine, brave, competent personnel they are! But they'll be school district employees, just human beings beset by the complicated, unpredictable failings that cause real life to play out in a manner so different from dreams.



That's "Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening." That title was a clue in today's NYT crossword. The answer is Salvador Dali:

In this "hand-painted dream photograph", as Dalí generally called his paintings, there is a seascape of distant horizons and calm waters, perhaps Port Lligat, amidst which [his wife] Gala is the subject of the scene.... In the upper left of the painting what seems to be a Yelloweye rockfish bursts out of the pomegranate, and in turn spews out a tiger that then spews out another tiger and a rifle with a bayonet that is about to sting Gala in the arm. Above them is Dalí's first use of an elephant with long flamingo legs....

In 1962, Dalí said this painting was intended "to express for the first time in images Freud's discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala."

An elephant with long flamingo legs. That could be the new symbol of the Republican Party, the Republican Party that dreams.


Detail from "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" by Salvador Dali.

Dreams! They're not just for Democrats anymore.

"One reason female comics often seem to run afoul of Facebook’s guidelines is that the company’s content moderators fail to recognize the humor in their posts."

"Popular tropes such as 'ban men' are interpreted literally under Facebook’s current set of community standards, and women suffer the consequences for attempting to express themselves. In the past, ironic misandry has been a popular way for women to deal with living in a world where they’re exposed to frequent abuse at the hands of powerful men. Yet, if a woman takes to Facebook to vent about how she 'wants to imprison men and milk them for their male tears,' she could quickly lose access to her account. Trolls know this... Feigning outrage at statements that were clearly not written to be interpreted that way has become a favored tactic of the alt-right, Gamergate, and movements known for their coordinated harassment efforts. When moderators can’t make this distinction they punish innocent parties and embolden trolls."

From "Facebook Is Banning Women for Calling Men ‘Scum’/Women had accounts banned from Facebook for responding to male trolls with sentences like ‘men are trash,’ in part because the company classifies white men as a protected group" (in The Daily Beast).

Read the whole thing. I don't support what Facebook is doing, but I do think the use of the word "scum" warrants a historical note on "SCUM" — The Society for Cutting Up Men. The author of "The SCUM Manifesto," Valerie Solanas wasn't joking:

According to Solanas, this genetic deficiency [the Y chromosome] causes the male to be emotionally limited, egocentric, and incapable of mental passion or genuine interaction. She describes the male as lacking empathy and unable to relate to anything apart from his own physical sensations. The Manifesto continues by arguing that the male spends his life attempting to become female, and thereby overcome his inferiority. He does this by "constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live though and fuse with the female." Solanas rejects Freud's theory of penis envy, and argues that men have "pussy envy". Solanas then accuses men of turning the world into a "shitpile" and presents a long list of grievances... 

Due to the aforementioned grievances, the Manifesto concludes that the elimination of the male sex is a moral imperative.... The Manifesto argues that SCUM [a revolutionary vanguard of women] should employ sabotage and direct action tactics... "If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade."

It was 1967, and the President with the "stupid, sickening face" was LBJ.

Solanas told the Village Voice that the SCUM Manifesto was "just a literary device." And some scholars call it satire. But I wrote "Valerie Solanas wasn't joking," because she did go out and shoot Andy Warhol. Maybe the point should be that joking isn't inconsistent with violence. You'd be a fool to think that a person who expresses herself (or himself) in a joking form is necessarily safe. Often hostility fuels humor, and the fact that the hostility finds its way into humor does not mean it will always and only channel into humor.

So I guess all the Freudian analysis and mockery of men and their planes is true.

A Navy pilot drew a giant penis in the sky.

The most monumental thing to happen in omak. A penis in the sky pic.twitter.com/SM8k1tNYaj

— Anahi Torres (@anahi_torres_) November 16, 2017

Thanks for dispelling the age-old mystery.

"What is 'Top Gun'? You think it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots?"/"It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around?"

"When you put a hat and sunglasses on it, it kind of takes the raunchiness out of it."

"I want to raise the bar for dick pics. If you’re going to send one, at least make me laugh. Put some effort into it."

[Soraya] Doolbaz says her husband is very supportive of the idea and dick pics in general, noting that they dated long-distance for a while. Before that, she says she received enough dick pics to give her plenty of inspiration for the project: “Oh my God, when I was single, I would get a ton of them,” she says. “And my friends would get them too and we would show them to each other.”

That's from a Village Voice piece published in 2015. I found that as a result of searches inspired by discussion in the comments to yesterday's "Questionable Artwork Café," where I'd invited people to impose political analysis on a Thomas Hart Benton painting of a farm scene. Participating in the comments myself, I said:

Huge vagina symbol in foreground.

Empowering for women or insulting?

Horse is big phallic symbol, but far from adequate to that huge vagina. Also the harnessing of the horse is emphasized. Is that empowering for women?

And after I got a little pushback for seeing a vagina symbol, I added:

Freud thought a hat was a vagina symbol.

And then the fanciful notion:

That suggests that when a man is having sex with a woman, he's wearing her.

Not wearing her out. Wearing her like she's a very elaborate hat.

Robt C brought up one of my all-time favorite books:

If what Althouse says about sex and hats is true, it give a whole new meaning to Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I said:

Suddenly, everything makes sense!

The man wasn't wrong at all. He was right and everyone else was wrong. And that's the way of the world, if we could only see things from a different point.

As Bob Dylan sang: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view."

Meanwhile, CWJ had said, "Well there are pussy hats after all." But those are hats for your head. To get the humor — and it's my favorite form of humor — you have to picture the ridiculous big-and-small foolery. The penis is wearing that hat. I figured somebody had already made a project out of putting little hats on penises, and I was right. The big-and-small element or humor is not present in the art project shown at The Village Voice. Soraya Doolbaz — great name! — makes penis-sized clothing, including hats, and dresses real penises up for posing in photographs. In the woman-as-hat notion that amused me, the "head" for the hat is much smaller than the head in a normal hat, but the hat is much larger than the normal hat, so you've got a very radical disproportion.

As I said in a post back in 2009, I have long been aware I am usually amused by humor about the size of things:

We were talking about the expression "postage stamp lawn," that is, a very small lawn, perhaps the size of an area rug. But what if there really were a postage stamp the size of an area rug? That would be a huge postage stamp. Ha ha. Imagine the size of the envelope you'd put it on. Okay. That to me is hilarious, and it reminded me of the joke I found so funny — decades ago — that I laughed so hard the teller of the joke got mad at me for laughing so much. I was cutting the joker's hair — I used to think I could do haircuts and acted upon that belief — and I noticed a bright red dot on the top of his head — the size of a pimple, but not a pimple — and not something he'd ever have noticed. I said, "What's this red dot on top of your head?" He said, "That's my Santa Claus hat!"

I have ever since regarded that as the funniest spontaneous remark I've ever heard, and maybe that will give you some insight into how I feel about the woman-as-hat notion that amused me so much yesterday. Or maybe you have the same taste in big-and-small jokes and you're laughing too. Click the "big and small" tag for more insight into Althouse's big-and-small fetish. In any case, I hope you like the photographs of Soraya Doolbaz.

And apologies to all of you who are thinking I waited nearly 4 hours for the 3d post of the day and this — this!! — is what I get? This post, half written, spurred a real-world conversation that took up nearly the entire interval. So that makes me think if you'll find plenty to say in the comments.

"By identifying sexual desire as a universal drive with endlessly idiosyncratic objects determined by individual experiences and memories..."

"... Freud, more than anyone, not only made it possible to see female desire as a force no less powerful or valid than male desire; he made all the variants of sexual proclivity dance along a shared erotic continuum. In doing so, Freud articulated basic conceptual premises that reduced the sway of experts who attributed diverse sexual urges to hereditary degeneration or criminal pathology. His work has allowed many people to feel less isolated and freakish in their deepest cravings and fears...."

From a NYT book review of "FREUD/The Making of an Illusion." The book is by Frederick Crews, who is extremely hostile to Freud. The review is by George Prochnik, who sees value in Freud, despite all of the bad science and self-deception belabored by Crews.

Crews has been debunking Freud’s scientific pretensions for decades now; and it seems fair to ask what keeps driving him back to stab the corpse again. 

The Oedipus complex?

Now that we’ve effectively expelled Freud from the therapeutic clinic, have we become less neurotic? With that baneful “illusion” gone, and with all our psychopharmaceuticals and empirically grounded cognitive therapy techniques firmly in place, can we assert that we’ve advanced toward some more rational state of mental health than that enjoyed by our forebears in the heyday of analysis? Indeed, with a commander in chief who often seems to act entirely out of the depths of a dark unconscious, we might all do better to read more, not less, of Freud.

Ooh! Trump keeps popping up everywhere. It's like sex in Freud. It/he is everywhere. I'm going to read Freud just because I'd like some reading material where I know Trump won't show up.

Just kidding. What I really mean is that there's some reason we seem to need a big, dominating, larger-that-life male figure to loom over us and mess with our mind.

Prochnik says Trump seems to act entirely out of the depths of a dark unconscious, but maybe the feelings we project onto Trump are arising entirely out of the depths of our dark unconscious.

"Suprihmbé is a proheaux womanist thot scholar who wants to promote freedom, is Morrison political, and likes cats."

Okay, I just learned a new word: "proheaux."

The quote in the post title is the blurb about the author of something I was reading (at Wear Your Voice), "Being Naked With My Son/My nudity does not offend my son, because he has not been exposed to trivial conversations about modesty. My nudity means nothing to him." Excerpt:

Why is my nakedness around my child an issue? Why is him seeing my genitalia in a non-sexual manner an issue? Is he worried my child is going to develop some sort of Oedipus complex? According to Freudian lore, my son being just about around 5-years-old, is in the phallic stage. Freudian psychology is heterocentric and cissexist–it deals in binaries and doesn’t take into account a spectrum of identities. For its time it was revolutionary–but science is permeated with sexist and racist men, polluted with biases.

... At this age my son is supposed to have formed some sort of erotic attachment to me. Yet here he is, playing pretend in our living room, oblivious to the projected sexual nature of our being naked and sweating in our little house.

Ah! Freud came up. I brought up Freud this morning, in the context of the hard, pointing prong of Callista Gingrich's hair, and as I did that, I was thinking, life was so much more interesting when adult conversation flowed easily into Freudian speculation. Then prissy demands for science spoiled the fluid fun. Suprihmbé seems to be saying that Freud's work was patriarchal, but the rejection of Freud's ideas for their failure to fit the rigors of science is also patriarchal, so there is perhaps something of the counter-patriarchial in restoring Freudianism, sparingly and strategically, such as in the discussion of Callista's pointy prong.

But that word! Proheaux. I looked it up and got another article by Suprihmbé: "proheauxism: a working definition." Key to understanding the coinage: Heaux is a way to spell the plural of ho. (Do you have a better idea? I wrote "the plural of ho" because I didn't.) The definition has 4 parts. I'll just quote #3:

Sex positivity for black and brown women and femmes. Specifically sex worker & trans inclusive. Might be: a professional heaux, a refined heaux, an elegant, sensual woman of divine sex. One who owns oneself, regardless if she is attached to a man or masculine person or not. One who understands and reveres the power of healthy femininity (and masculinity) and understands that this power is beyond the physical. It is political, it is economic, it is survival, it is personal. Fuck classism. Fuck respectability. Fuck the norm. Fuck free emotional labor.

I do understand how some literalists look at the word "Literature" and say that it denotes material that is to be read.

Here's what the Online Etymology Dictionary says:

In English originally "book learning" (in which sense it replaced Old English boccræft); the meaning "activity of a writer, the profession of a literary writer" is first attested 1779 in Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets;" that of "literary productions as a whole, body of writings from a period or people" is first recorded 1812.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. [Ezra Pound, "ABC of Reading"]

Meaning "the whole of the writing on a particular subject" is by 1860; sense of "printed matter generally" is from 1895....

Oh, hang on. I have a point I'm making. But I have Dylanmind and I must disrupt my literature — such as it is — to do my Dylan imitation. You're reading, but imagine hearing it:

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 — "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

Ezra Pound never won. Nor did Ezra Pound really fight with T.S. Eliot in the captain's tower, whatever that is. Back when "Desolation Row" came out, it was 1965, and we would have assumed that something called "the captain's tower" was a phallus, but people don't talk like that anymore. And why didn't Sigmund Freud win the Nobel Prize in Literature? That was some kick-ass literature he wrote. It came out in book form, and people read those books.



That's Ezra. Man, look at him. He looks like Bob Dylan.

Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in England and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s he embraced Benito Mussolini's fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a six-by-six-foot outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: "when the raft broke and the waters went over me". Deemed unfit to stand trial, he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.

Oh, Ezra. There are winners and losers, and he's a big time loser. But he said — see above — "Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree." He didn't say, it's got to be read. He said it is language, the best of language. That would include words written to be heard, not read, if only the words were good enough. But he had terrible political judgment.

Yet you are the literalist perhaps, and politics has no part in your assessment of the meaning of words. Literature is stuff that you read, and Bob Dylan's songs are designed to be heard mixed up with sounds from musical instruments, sounds that are not words at all.

But the Nobel Committee is not a committee on precision in language, and it controls the scope of the meaning of its prize. It doesn't have to give the prize to the person who most closely embodies the meaning of the name of the prize. And anyway, the committee is operating in Swedish. If you're so hot to be literal, start speaking Swedish.

"So where Freud once wrote that 'the type of female most frequently met with' tended to love narcissistically, we are now more likely to apply that characterization to men."

"'If there’s one thing a girl with a bad boyfriend has,' Dombek notes,' it’s the moral upper hand in the religion of mental health.' Here, she turns to the corner of the Internet she calls the 'narcisphere,' a collection of blogs and forums in which women, mostly, solidify a sense of their superior powers of empathy and raise their collective consciousness about surviving narcissism and about narcissism-induced P.T.S.D. 'If you are an especially giving person, warns the Internet, you are a prime target for narcissists,' Dombek writes. The narcisphere has a gendered inverse, which some call the manosphere and which is dedicated to teaching men how to dominate women by feigning self-confidence. This is the realm of pickup artistry. It is much worse than the narcisphere.... The story of the narcissist is, in part, a story of the people around him pleading for empathy, insisting that we should all care more about one another. And yet somehow this account of the world has become 'a story that divides us, by defining empathy as something we have and others lack,' Dombek writes. Perhaps in pathologizing narcissism, we have forgotten how perilous it is to constantly diagnose other people. In the end, what 'The Selfishness of Others' lays out most clearly is not the danger of narcissism but, rather, the danger of any particular world view that requires, for the sake of consistency, its owner to believe that she is good."

From "WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DECIDE EVERYONE ELSE IS A NARCISSIST," a New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino about "An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism" by Kristin Dombek (in the book "The Selfishness of Others").

"Dr. Spitzer’s remaking of psychiatry began with an early interest in one of the least glamorous and, historically, most ignored corners of the field: measurement."

"In the early 1960s, the field was fighting to sustain its credibility, in large part because diagnoses varied widely from doctor to doctor. For instance, a patient told he was depressed by one doctor might be called anxious or neurotic by another. The field’s diagnostic manual, at the time a pamphlet-like document rooted in Freudian ideas, left wide latitude for the therapist’s judgment. Dr. Spitzer, a rising star at Columbia University, was himself looking for direction, increasingly frustrated with Freudian analysis. A chance meeting with a colleague working on a new edition of the manual — the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M. for short — led to a job taking notes for the committee debating revisions. There, he became fascinated with reliable means for measuring symptoms and behavior — i.e., assessment.... One of the first behaviors he scrutinized was homosexuality, which at the time was listed in the manual as a mental disorder. Dr. Spitzer, after meeting with gay advocates, began re-examining homosexuality based on whether it caused any measurable distress. The issue was extremely contentious, but in 1973, Dr. Spitzer engineered a deal by which the diagnosis was replaced by 'sexual orientation disturbance,' to describe people whose sexual orientation, gay or straight, caused them distress."

Dr. Robert L. Spitzer died last Friday at the age of 83.

"Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they’ve stolen."

An old Mort Sahl joke, quoted in a NYT piece by Lee Siegel titled "Welcome to the Age of the Unfunny Joke."

Siegel, who's about to publish a biography of Groucho Marx, has observations like: "The laughter, if it comes, is a new kind of laughter: a satisfying release, but also distracted by an undercurrent of hard fact. In that sense, humor today is a continuing assault, or insurrection."

How far into the past do we need to go to find humor that wasn't interwoven with real-life things thing disturb us? Freud had that figured out in 1905.

Siegel ought to have to give us evidence that there was an earlier era when jokes had no "undercurrent of hard fact," when people giggled over jokes that did not relate to the troubles of real life. To the extent that Siegel is saying that many of today's real-life-related jokes aren't funny, there have always been unfunny jokes.

Maybe his point is: These days, we feel social pressure to accept and act appreciative of unfunny comedy that makes reference to subject matter that we believe we're supposed to take seriously. In the older era, the jokes about disturbing subjects gave us release, and that's why we laughed. In the new era, there's no release from anxiety. The laughter is the manifestation of anxiety about being seen as good people who care about the serious things we understand we're supposed to care about.

After 6 posts, I see that the blog has a theme this morning — almost and inadvertently.

The theme is fingers and hands. 3 posts are absolutely clearly on theme:

1. "Slate's education columnist Rebecca Schuman flaunts a series of photographs of herself giving her infant the finger."

2. "Barney's ad gets my attention, reveals secrets" focuses on 2 background figures who are picking at something with their hands as well as hands in the foreground: "I included the hand in my close-up of the Manet painting because it matches the central hand in the Barney's ad."

3. "Donald Trump is emasculating Jeb Bush" talks about Trump's "hand gestures — fingers up, palms out, wave-y wave-y... 'jazz hands'..."

The other 3 posts are harder to portray as on theme, but let me try:

1. "... Wes Craven — of the 'Nightmare on Elm Street"' and 'Scream' movies — who has died, at the age of 76." That one just needs an image:



2. "President Obama announced on Sunday that Mount McKinley was being renamed Denali, using his executive power to restore an Alaska Native name with deep cultural significance to the tallest mountain in North America." That one has a poll and the winning option by far is "Obama does too much by executive order." Again, the solution is an image. I pick the handsiest one:



3. The most difficult to whip into theme is: "ISIS money — coins minted in gold, silver, and copper." But one need only explore the psychology of the preference for precious-metal coins over paper money. It's the desire to hold the value in your hands. Here, this can get your started, from The New Republic: "Feces and the Gold Standard: A Psychological Explanation of Goldbuggery."

Dawn walk thoughts.

1. It looked like this...



... as the sun rose over Milio's sandwich shop.

2. For perhaps the first time in nearly 12 years, I woke up, read the internet (part of it anyway) and instead of feeling like blogging anything, went out for a walk.

3. I hate the news right now. Everyone seems to think the thing to talk about is Donald Trump, which strikes me as profoundly stupid. I watched 5-and-a-half Sunday morning talk shows yesterday, and I heard the same thing over and over. Trump has lost some unregainable portion of the women. He can never get them back, but he could never have won anyway, and really what he is is America's expression of anger. We're an angry, angry America, and this lout is, apparently, an embodiment of our collective id.

4. That's id, not ID. You need an ID to vote, but bring your id.

The id (Latin for "it") is the unorganized part of the personality structure that contains a human's basic, instinctual drives. Id is the only component of personality that is present from birth. It is the source of our bodily needs, wants, desires, and impulses, particularly our sexual and aggressive drives. The id contains the libido, which is the primary source of instinctual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality. The id acts according to the "pleasure principle"—the psychic force that motivates the tendency to seek immediate gratification of any impulse—defined as seeking to avoid pain or unpleasure (not 'displeasure') aroused by increases in instinctual tension. According to Freud the id is unconscious by definition:

"It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality... We approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. ... It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle."

5.  "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing" is the epitaph the writer Guy De Maupassant wrote for himself. He looked like this when he was 7:



6. I think young people take all those selfies to say I am young and beautiful and I'm here. That's fine. Older people look askance at selfies because that's no longer what they have to say. On my travels — mostly mere walks — I take pictures of the sunrise over Milio's or the flowers by the sidewalk and these aren't so different from the young person's selfies. I am old, life is beautiful, and I'm here. 

Camille Paglia says "Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions" (in the course of comparing the Bills, Cosby and Clinton).

A Salon interview:

In most of these cases, like the Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized–“Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!” “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written–in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions...

Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile–they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power–and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy....

We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac... to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia–this fear and envy of a woman’s power.

And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother.  He felt smothered by her in some way...

Oh, for the old days, when we analyzed the minds of others and made up stories — Oedipus and all! It was so interesting. And it's so boring now. And these young girls today just don't understand. They don't know the joys of the intellectual life. It's so thin and dull dull dull today. We made up a lot of stuff back then. Sigmund Freud and the antics he unleashed. Now, you can't say a thing that the young people can hear and understand. You can't talk about what it meant when Hillary served Bill carrot sticks instead of onion rings. No one knows how to have deep fun with celebrities and their psyches anymore.