"On social media, Mr. Macron’s sunglasses were seen as a political statement, projecting a tough image in the face of Mr. Trump’s threats to..."

"... impose tariffs on French wine and champagne and to annex Greenland. He has previously used his clothing to send a message, donning a turtleneck in the winter of 2022 as Europe contended with an energy crisis in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some people likened the bespectacled Mr. Macron to the naval aviator played by Tom Cruise in 'Top Gun.' Others recalled former President Joe Biden’s penchant for aviators, though Mr. Biden was not known to wear his sunglasses while addressing world leaders...."

From "Why Was Macron Wearing Sunglasses at Davos? An eye condition, not a style choice, prompted President Emmanuel Macron of France to don aviators to address the World Economic Forum" (NYT).

I've written about aviator sunglasses before. Let me find that. Here, from March 2017, "And gold aviator eyeglasses are one of the sexiest shapes you could possibly wear." I wrote:

For the annals of sexiest shapes imaginable. Aviator glasses are back in style, we're told in the NYT.

I'm not buying that these glasses are obviously sexy. There's also... 

"One of my style icons is Gloria Steinem, and she’s worn that look forever."...

Aviator glasses were adopted by stylish people in the 60s. I'll never forget seeing Mort Sahl — the political satirist — on "The Tonight Show" holding up a picture of Gloria Steinem and railing against her, harping specifically on her glasses. As I remember it, he took the position that it was ludicrous to wear aviator glasses unless you were an aviator.

"[A]n unpopular hero to civil libertarians, the Devil incarnate to an unlikely alliance of feminists and morality preachers, a conundrum to judges and juries..."

"... and a purveyor of guilty secrets to legions of men slinking off from porn shops or the mailbox with brown paper parcels."

"Larry Flynt, Who Built a Porn Empire With Hustler, Dies at 78" (NYT). 

Hustler’s June 1978 cover caught the enigmas of a magazine that was at once salacious, satirical, perverse, decadent, gleefully immoral and hypocritical. It portrayed a woman upside down and half gone into a meat grinder, with a plate of hamburger below. A “seal of approval” noted: “Prime. Last All Meat Issue. Grade ‘A’ Pink.” A caption quoted Mr. Flynt, “We will no longer hang women up like pieces of meat.”... 

"Rose Byrne’s Gloria Steinem comes off as a vacillating, shallow, vain egomaniac; Tracey Ullman’s Betty Friedan strongly suggests that her feminist anger..."

"... came out of crushed romantic dreams; Bella Abzug is only slightly more appealing — but largely because her pragmatism seems so sane in comparison with the antics of her fellows.... And what the series gets so right about left-wing identitarianism is how riddled it often is with jealousy, personal rivalry, and internal spats... The intersection, if you’ll forgive my using that word, of glamour and elite left-wing politics is pretty damning of both. The feminists completely underestimated Schlafly, because their vain self-regard could not believe that any serious pushback against the ERA could be rooted in real arguments about the difference between the sexes rather than their interchangeability.... Schlafly’s version of feminism is, in fact, less a reactionary one than a truly prescient one. She was the first feminist (though she would reject that label) to depict traditional home and family life as something not to be despised, as long as women had the choice to abandon it.... This is the first time I’ve seen a conservative woman portrayed as human, complicated, vulnerable, and also extraordinarily courageous."

Andrew Sullivan praises the Hulu movie-biography of Phyllis Schlafly (in NY Magazine).

Here's the trailer (with Cate Blanchett in the starring role):

"So while in the past it might have been applauded and seen as almost an honor to have... your culture absorbed by some rarefied French fashion house..."

"... I think today people - you know, they don't see that as an honor. They see that as insult. They see it as, how dare you? Like, I own this. You don't."

Said Robin Givhan, quoted in "Mexico Calls Out Carolina Herrera For Appropriating Indigenous Groups' Patterns" (NPR).

No pictures there. (It's "radio.") Here are some pictures of the offending clothes at The Daily Beast. The fabrics will look very familiar. Herrera isn't the first designer to appropriate them. It's more like she's reappropriating the stuff of decades of hippiewear.

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LATIN HOLIDAY Sunrise in Tulum The light of Lima Strolls in Mexico City The waves of José Ignacio Dancing in Buenos Aires The colors of Cartagena The Carolina Herrera Resort 2020 collection takes on the playful and colorful mood of a Latin holiday. Inspired by the House spirit of alegria de vivir that is synonymous with the resort season, this collection is about visceral reactions of delight—eclectic patterns, unexpected silhouettes, pulsating energy. This is my favorite collection that I have ever been a part of and I am so grateful to my amazing design team and the brilliant patternmakers and seamstresses who tirelessly brought it to life. And an especially huge thank you to the genius that is @tabithasimmons. These are just a few of the gorgeous images by @dariocatellani. Go to vogue.com to see the rest ❤️💙💚🧡💛

A post shared by Ｗ Ｅ Ｓ Ｇ Ｏ Ｒ Ｄ Ｏ Ｎ (@wesgordon) on Jun 6, 2019 at 8:35pm PDT

Vanessa Friedman at the NYT validates cultural appropriation (but not completely):

How can I trust a column with "'The personal is political,' Gloria Steinem famously said"?

That's not a Gloria Steinem quote! It's easy to look up. Wikipedia has an article, "The personal is political":

The phrase was popularized by the publication of a 1969 essay by feminist Carol Hanisch under the title "The Personal is Political" in 1970, but she disavows authorship of the phrase. According to Kerry Burch, Shulamith Firestone, Robin Morgan, and other feminists given credit for originating the phrase have also declined authorship. "Instead," Burch writes, "they cite millions of women in public and private conversations as the phrase's collective authors." Gloria Steinem has likened claiming authorship of the phrase to claiming authorship of "World War II."

That is, it looks as though Gloria Steinem is at most "famous" for saying that no one person can claim to have said it first.

The column with the bad fact-checking is by Margaret Sullivan in WaPo: "Abusive media moguls harmed more than just individual women. They shaped a misogynistic culture." Excerpt:

The powerful and now-departed men of CBS — Moonves, Fager and star interviewer Charlie Rose — helped shape how our society sees women. The network, after all, is the most-watched in the nation. “60 Minutes” for 50 years has been the very definition of quality broadcast journalism: the gold standard.

It’s impossible to know how different America would be if power-happy and misogynistic men hadn’t been running the show in so many influential media organizations — certainly not just CBS.

Yes, we can't know what might have been without these apparently awful people running CBS, but what's the evidence that the shows the shows pumped out on CBS were importantly misogynistic enough to have made our culture the "misogynistic culture" it is? I can't find anything in Sullivan's column.

Gloria Steinem is still alive. Let's hear her speak for herself.

I'm reading Jeff Greenfield's piece in Politico, "How Roy Moore’s Misdeeds Are Forcing an Awakening on the Left/Years of excusing Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct suddenly seems morally indefensible":

There's no better illustration of how the ground has shifted than to look at Gloria Steinem’s 1998 New York Times op-ed piece, “Why Feminists Support Clinton.” Published as the Lewinsky story was on full boil, the piece talked not about that story, but about the charges of harassment leveled by Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey [but not Juanita Broaddrick]....

“He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a supporter during a low point in her life” Steinem wrote of Willey. “She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again.” In her original story, Paula Jones essentially said the same thing. She went to then-Governor Clinton's hotel room, where she said he asked her to perform oral sex and even dropped his trousers. She refused, and even she claims that he said something like, ‘Well, I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do.’’

“As with the allegations in Ms. Willey's case, Mr. Clinton seems to have made a clumsy sexual pass, then accepted rejection,” Steinem wrote by way of excusing him.... It was labeled the “one free grope” theory.

Politico doesn't give us a link for the Steinem piece, but I wanted to add one. I like to see the original text, not just excerpts. I went to the NYT to do a search and something really weird happened. When I typed in the search term "steinem" and added a space, my spelling (the correct spelling of the name) was accepted, but when, after that space, I added "clinton," the word "steinem" automatically corrected to "seinem" (and returned no results). I retested that over and over and it happened every time, at least as long as I stayed in my browser Safari. (It did not happen in Firefox.)

Anyway, I could not get the 1998 op-ed to turn up in the search of the archive. I got many letters to the editor responding to that op-ed, and I got a 2010 reprint — "March 22, 1998: Why Feminists Support Clinton, By Gloria Steinem" — which has the notation "The preceding was excerpted and adapted from a previously published Op-Ed article, for inclusion in a 40th-anniversary issue." Excerpts!

Greenfield continues:

At the height of the Lewinsky impeachment melodrama, Clinton’s defenders always argued that the president’s behavior was a private matter. To this day, you can find references to Clinton’s “dalliances” and “peccadilloes.”

Yes, NYT columnist Gail Collins and my Bloggingheads interlocutor Glenn Loury used the word "peccadilloes" to try to insulate Bill Clinton, as I discussed in a May 2016 post titled "Why does NYT columnist Gail Collins call Bill Clinton's sexual misdeeds 'private peccadilloes'?"

Collins had written "The sex scandal issue isn’t really central, since Americans have a long record of voting for the candidates they think can deliver, regardless of private peccadilloes." I said:

The phrase "the personal is political" means something important in the fight for women's equality. No one who cares about that fight should call the accusations against Bill Clinton "private peccadilloes." A "peccadillo" is: "A minor fault or sin; a trivial offence."...

Private peccadillo. Really, Gail Collins, what do you think the young women of today — women who know sexual harassment and sexual assault are extremely serious — are going to think of your using that word peccadillo?

I added a clip from I discussion I'd had with Glenn Loury in January 2016 about the same use of the word "peccadillo," and I'm going to embed it one more time because I think it improves with age (even the part where the software causes my words to be completely silenced when Loury overtalks and even the crazily distorted skin tone (flaming red)):



If there is one word that revives my anger on this subject, it's "peccadilloes." That's all I'm going to say now, because I've said the same thing so many times, but I just want to underscore what I wrote in the post title.

Gloria Steinem still lives and breathes, as far as I know. She's getting knocked around for what she said (and the harm that she did) 19 years ago. She should step up and speak for herself now.

"There are many pornographers, but what, within the realm of pornography, earns you a substantial obituary in The New York Times?"

"Some day we'll see how they treat Hugh Hefner, who made pornography clean, commercial and classy, but today we read about the death of Al Goldstein: '... The manifesto in Screw’s debut issue in 1968 was... 'We promise never to ink out a pubic hair or chalk out an organ...'... Apart from Screw, Mr. Goldstein’s most notorious creation was Al Goldstein himself, a cartoonishly vituperative amalgam of borscht belt comic, free-range social critic and sex-obsessed loser.... ' In later years, it became impossible to get famous for being a loud sleazy guy with a magazine, and the idea of anyone 'inking' out pubic hair seems mostly puzzling...."

So I wrote back in 2013, and now the day has come when I can read the substantial obituary for Hugh Hefner in the NYT. I've already written 2 posts, the first 2 of the day, on the death of the gargantuan cultural icon Hugh Hefner. Let me then, at long last, get to the NYT obituary:

Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years — as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect.

He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.

The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953, when Mr. Hefner was 27 years old, a new father married to, by his account, the first woman he had slept with.

He had only recently moved out of his parents’ house and left his job at Children’s Activities magazine. But in an editorial in Playboy’s inaugural issue, the young publisher purveyed another life:

“We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”

A boy's fantasy of adulthood and sophistication.

Mr. Hefner began excoriating American puritanism at a time when doctors refused contraceptives to single women and the Hollywood production code dictated separate beds for married couples. As the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, an early Playboy contributor, saw the 1950s, “People wore tight little gray flannel suits and went to their tight little jobs. You couldn’t talk politically.... You couldn’t use obscenities. What Playboy represented was the beginning of a break from all that.”...

In “The Playboy Philosophy,” a mix of libertarian and libertine arguments that Mr. Hefner wrote in 25 installments starting in 1962, his message was simple: Society was to blame. His causes — abortion rights, decriminalization of marijuana and, most important, the repeal of 19th-century sex laws — were daring at the time. Ten years later, they would be unexceptional.

“Hefner won,” Mr. Gitlin said in a 2015 interview. “The prevailing values in the country now, for all the conservative backlash, are essentially libertarian, and that basically was what the Playboy Philosophy was. It’s laissez-faire. It’s anti-censorship. It’s consumerist: Let the buyer rule. It’s hedonistic. In the longer run, Hugh Hefner’s significance is as a salesman of the libertarian ideal.”

Born in 1926, he was raised "with a lot of repression" by Methodists, but he found his way through drawing comics, first as a child, in high school (where he "'I reinvented myself' as the suave, breezy 'Hef,"  and in college as the editor of the humor magazine. He came up with Playboy as "a vehicle for his slightly randy cartoons."

What did his cartoons like like? I found this (click to enlarge and read ("This is me, dreaming about women in general!"))

More here.

The NYT devotes the mid-section of the obituary to the feminist challenge. Gloria Steinem did undercover research as a "bunny" in the Playboy Club in 1963 and discovered that it's hard work, the outfits are uncomfortable, and the customers are (as the Times puts it) "vulgar."

Another feminist critic, Susan Brownmiller, debating Mr. Hefner on a television talk show, asserted, “The role that you have selected for women is degrading to women because you choose to see women as sex objects, not as full human beings.” She continued: “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end. …”

Mr. Hefner responded in 1970 by ordering an article on the activists then called “women’s libbers.” In an internal memo, he wrote: “These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.”

The commissioned article, by Morton Hunt, ran with the headline “Up Against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig.” (The same issue contained an interview with William F. Buckley Jr., fiction by Isaac Bashevis Singer and an article by a prominent critic of the Vietnam War, Senator Vance Hartke of Indiana.)

Mr. Hefner said later that he was perplexed by feminists’ apparent rejection of the message he had set forth in the Playboy Philosophy. “We are in the process of acquiring a new moral maturity and honesty,” he wrote in one installment, “in which man’s body, mind and soul are in harmony rather than in conflict.” Of Americans’ fright of anything “unsuitable for children,” he said, “Instead of raising children in an adult world, with adult tastes, interests and opinions prevailing, we prefer to live much of our lives in a make-believe children’s world.”

The 3 quoted sentences from that internal memo are fascinating. The first 2 talk tough, calling for a hard fight, but the third one makes an argument that belongs in a sweet, soft fight: The feminists want to say that we're alienating men and women — with domineering men and oppressed, insignificant women — but we're the ones who are for "the romantic boy-girl society." What do women want? A lot of us love the ideal of a romantic boy-girl society. It's interesting that Hef wrote "boy-girl" and yet later publicly talked about the "adult world" and rising above the "make-believe children’s world."

Marilyn Monroe appears twice in the obit, first as the nude model in the first issue of Playboy and second as the long dead body in a mausoleum next to which the newly dead body of Hugh Hefner will lie.

"I really, really wish, that at the moment of her passing, the Washington Post had found a picture of Kate Millett without Gloria Steinem sharing the frame."

A comment on the Washington Post obituary "Kate Millett, ‘high priestess’ of second-wave feminism, dies at 82."

By the way, Gloria Steinem isn't merely "sharing the frame." She's in focus, speaking, looking engaged and emphatic, and Kate Millett is out of focus, leaning back, and has her eyes cast on Gloria Steinem. The caption says "Dr. Millett, left, listens as feminist activist Gloria Steinem speaks at a news conference in New York City in 1970." Millet listens....

The third paragraph reads:

Dr. Millett was a contemporary of Gloria Steinem’s — the Ms. Magazine co-founder was six months her senior — and along with Steinem became a driving force behind feminism’s “second wave” that transformed the movement in the 1960s and 1970s....

Way too much Steinem. Inappropriate. It's an obituary. Lavish attention on the person who died. And it's not even accurate to portray Millett as a sidekick to Gloria Steinem. So they were contemporaries in the same general field — arguably. Obituaries don't normally work like that, and there shouldn't be a different rule for feminists.

I wrote "arguably" in that last paragraph because Steinem worked on a magazine and Millett wrote a theoretical book. Millett's important book was a big sensation in 1970, and Ms. Magazine did not begin until 1971. There is zero reason to put Millett in the shadow of Steinem.

"On the drive back, she said it would be very easy for her to convert someone to Catholicism. 'It has great appeal,' she said."

"'Not for me, of course, but I can see the appeal.' A few years after she discovered the Ghost Ranch and built her house there, the ranch (not including her property) was sold to the Presbyterian Church, which used it as a conference center. 'I gave the Presbyterians a wide berth,' she told us. 'You know about the Indian eye that passes over you without lingering, as though you didn’t exist? That was the way I looked at the Presbyterians, so they wouldn’t become too friendly.'"

She = Georgia O'Keeffe. I = Calvin Tomkins, who's writing today about an encounter that occurred in 1962.

"The Indian eye" — I don't remember seeing that before, but maybe I did and passed over it, as though it didn't exist. But it seems politically incorrect, no? Isn't it unkind to pin that on Georgia, after all these years?

I idly google "Was Georgia O'Keeffe racist?" and I get to a passage in a biography I read a long time ago (by Roxana Robinson). The word "racism" appears in the context of her comparison of sexism to racism: "I think it's pretty funny that women have always been treated like Negroes in this country and they don't even know it." That was said in the 1970s, when feminists took to idolizing her. I enjoyed this paragraph on the next page:

"And gold aviator eyeglasses are one of the sexiest shapes you could possibly wear."

For the annals of sexiest shapes imaginable. Aviator glasses are back in style, we're told in the NYT.

I'm not buying that these glasses are obviously sexy. There's also:

"I think part of the aviator returning is a result of old shows from the 1980s and 1990s that we get to watch on Netflix. It’s fun to look back at ‘Friends’ episodes and ‘Beverly Hills 90210.’ The eyewear of that time is definitely influencing our designers.

There's also:

"One of my style icons is Gloria Steinem, and she’s worn that look forever."

I think it's more like: Once an old style has been abandoned even by old people, it can be reinstalled as new and retro. You put the old style on young models, and it looks cute, the way nerd glasses once did. Then the long process begins: Less stylish people adopt it, even completely out-of-style people are choosing it, and eventually, it will be pushed out by something else seeping slowly into the culture, and it can be picked up again as retro. I think the cycle takes about 50 years.

I don't know why that one quote talks about the 80s and the 90s. Aviator glasses were adopted by stylish people in the 60s. I'll never forget seeing Mort Sahl — the political satirist — on "The Tonight Show" holding up a picture of Gloria Steinem and railing against her, harping specifically on her glasses. As I remember it, he took the position that it was ludicrous to wear aviator glasses unless you were an aviator.

I love when real lefties outflank the Hillary-Clinton-level lefties.

Here's Ted Rall bitching about the Women's March:

A good indication that the Women's March got coopted into a Democratic boo-hoo Hillary/Cory Booker-in-2020 pep rally was that the speakers were limited to celebrity millionaire liberal Democrats like Michael Moore, Ashley Judd and Gloria. Had this been a militant action (i.e., one that might frighten Trump and the GOP), or a coalition of liberals who welcomed and respected their leftist allies rather than merely wanting to vampirize their righteous anger and energy into midterm votes, the roster of speakers would have included people calling for revolutionary change and action outside of the existing system. There would also have been some radical activists you'd never of who do important work.

Celebrity liberalism and pleas to vote Democratic are where the Left goes to die....

"Although the original creators may have intended Wonder Woman to represent a strong and independent 'warrior' woman with a feminist message..."

"... the reality is that the character’s current iteration is that of a large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh-baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee high boots –the epitome of a 'pin-up' girl."

Said the petition to reconsider the decision by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on October 21, 2016, to make Wonder Woman the new Honorary Ambassador for the empowerment of women and girls.

Today comes the announcement:

The United Nations has ended a campaign featuring Wonder Woman as an ambassador for women and girls, two months after the announcement was met with protests and a petition complaining that the fictional superhero was an inappropriate choice to represent female empowerment....

Jeffrey Brez, a spokesman for the U.N., disputed that the campaign had ended early or as a result of the protest, as some reports have suggested, citing other honorary ambassadorships with much shorter tenures.

So what is the correct feminist position on Wonder Woman? I've never liked her, but I just don't give a damn about super-heroes. She's scantily clad and has an idealized physique, but that's true of male super-heroes as well. It's a good idea, within super-herodom, to have female characters. Is that inspiring from a feminist perspective? Ms. Magazine has always liked the fictional lady. She was on the cover of the first issue:



I remember seeing that first issue bandied about in 1972 and dismissing it out of hand as old-fashioned and middle class. We had advanced beyond the boundaries of gender, I thought, so this was retrograde — embarrassing.

But Gloria Steinem has long promoted the buxom, hot-pantsed woman:

Wonder Woman's family of Amazons on Paradise Island, her band of college girls in America, and her efforts to save individual women are all welcome examples of women working together and caring about each other's welfare. The idea of such cooperation may not seem particularly revolutionary to the male reader. Men are routinely depicted as working well together, but women know how rare and therefore exhilarating the idea of sisterhood really is.... Wonder Woman symbolizes many of the values of the women's culture that feminists are now trying to introduce into the mainstream: strength and self-reliance for women; sisterhood and mutual support among women; peacefulness and esteem for human life; a diminishment both of "masculine" aggression and of the belief that violence is the only way of solving conflicts.

Wonder Woman has a band of American college girls? Seriously, I do not know the story of Wonder Woman. It really doesn't sound U.N.-appropriate. 

Creating a "fake news" tag and applying it retrospectively.

I'd been avoiding it, sticking to "journalism" and "propaganda" and "fake" — all well-established tags on this blog. But today, I gave in — because "fake news" is not just the subject of fake news. It also means the deployment of the term "fake news" and that's something I need to keep track of.

But having applied the tag retrospectively with a word search and an automatic function, I had to go in by hand and "keep track of" it backwards, into the past. There are recent utterly on-point applications of the tag. I just want to highlight a few older things:

May 5, 2016: "Gloria Steinem hopes Donald Trump will lose 'in a very definitive and humiliating way."

She wants humiliation. What is that about?

Oh, Gloria. Grandiosity goes before the fall. Your imperious arrogance looks so stupid now. As for the "fake news" tag. It didn't belong and was removed.

April 11, 2016: "It's sad for the paper. You know, it used to be considered a major paper. And now, it's like a super-market throw-out."

Said Donald Trump, invited to comment on the stupid Onion-like front page of yesterday's Boston Globe, which was all fake news about the horrors of an imagined Trump presidency.

That's me, using the term before the use of the term became a thing. And it's in the context of anti-Trump fake news. I'd forgotten about that Boston Globe front page story:

Is that ground-zero of the "fake news" subject? Maybe all the later effort to point to pro-Trump things as fake was generated to cover up the embarrassing Boston Globe screwup.

October 27, 2015: "I am convinced... that the way the Drive-Bys and the Democrat Party and the left are attempting to reconstitute their media monopoly is via Twitter and Facebook." That's a quote from Rush Limbaugh. He continues:

"In a way, the sewer of Twitter and Facebook is the left attempting to corral everyone into their playground, their way of thinking, and create a new legacy media to replace what the big three networks had back in 1988. You populate Twitter and Facebook with enough political activists disguised as citizens in their underwear in their basements just tapping out comments and posting left-wing news stories from AP, Reuters, Washington Post, New York Times, and that's how you reconstitute your monopoly. You don't constitute a network media monopoly, but you constitute a mode-of-thinking monopoly by transferring your polluted, perverted way of thinking to social media to infect as many minds as possible who are incapable of critical thinking anymore, because it isn't taught."

So Rush was complaining about fake news more than a year before the election, and it was in the context of liberal media trying to control everything. The flip today is that you have people like Hillary Clinton contending that social media needs to be regulated to control "fake news" that hurts liberals.

December 8, 2014: "Credulous journalist ponders why journalists are so credulous." Here, "fake" comes up in the context of a phrase that should be seen as an ancestor of "fake news": "fake but accurate":

The expression "fake but accurate" is really all we need to understand the problem, and it's pathetic that journalists at the WaPo level haven't fully internalized the lessons of these old scandals. Tweeting one day and cogitating over the general problem the next — it's so sloppy, so lazy, so stupid.

July 10, 2014: "It's hard to fathom why a movie about Rathergate — with Robert Redford as Dan Rather — is being made."

Years ago, Redford played the role of another newsman, Bob Woodward, in "All the President's Men," the story of 2 dogged journalists who were wildly successful. They brought down a President and sparked an American love affair with "investigative journalism." What's become of that today? Maybe this new movie will seriously address what has happened to the profession that Bob Woodward (and his partner Carl Bernstein) made us see as heroic and centered on truth-seeking. In Rathergate, a once-illustrious network, centered on ruining a presidential candidate, faked a document.

The movie will be called "Truth." Ironically? I doubt it....

Maureen Dowd's new column, "Thanks, Obama," is titled sarcastically.

It took me a moment to get past the photograph — Hillary encountering Obama and doing that awful gaping maw expression right into his face — and then I thought I was reading a column of genuine appreciation of the goodness of Barack Obama compared to Clinton and it took me a while to realize that the title — "Thanks, Obama" — was sarcastic.

Dowd goes back to 2008, when an Obama ad said: “Hillary Clinton. She’ll say anything and change nothing. It’s time to turn the page.” Dowd quips:

Evidently, President Obama folded the corner of that page over so he could go back to it later. Remarkably, he bought us our return ticket to the past, rolling out the red carpet for the restoration of the Clinton blurred-lines White House.

An army of idealistic young people had moved to Iowa in 2007 to help Obama beat seemingly impossible odds. But in this election, Bernie Sanders’s idealistic young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who wanted free stuff or, according to Gloria Steinem, dates....

The president made his vote-for-Hillary-or-face-doom convention speech only 22 days after his F.B.I. director painted Hillary as reckless and untruthful.

He argued that there is no choice but to support Hillary against a “self-declared savior” like Donald Trump, perhaps forgetting that Obama was once hailed as such a messiah that Oprah introduced him in 2007 as “the one,” and it became his moniker.

In the end, Obama didn’t overthrow the Clinton machine. He enabled it.

It turns out, who we choose is not really about our souls. It’s just politics, man.

Aptly put. 

Gloria Steinem hopes Donald Trump will lose "in a very definitive and humiliating way."

She wants humiliation. What is that about?

It made me think about something else I read this morning: "MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Caught on Hot Mic Ogling Melania Trump." That's in Variety, which is going after Matthews for saying, "Did you see her walk? Runway walk. My God is that good." I have trouble even seeing what's wrong with that. Modeling was her chosen profession and she has real skills that people admire. Variety puts Matthews's remark into what's supposed to look like a pattern: "The pundit has been accused of sounding sexist on live television many times before. Here’s a look at some of his sexually regressive greatest hits." That sounds awful, but I don't see the pattern. Just because you make a list doesn't mean you have a list of things that belong together. But what I wanted to pull out of that list — because I'm trying to understand why Steinem wants to see humiliation — was something about humiliation:

(3) January 9, 2008: Argues Hillary Clinton Is Successful Because Bill Clinton “Messed Around”

Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Matthews credited said she appealed to voters as a suffering wife, “I think the Hillary appeal has always been somewhat about her mix of toughness and sympathy for her. Let’s not forget the reason she is a U.S. Senator, the reason she is a candidate for President is because her husband messed around. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t get there on her merits, because everyone felt, ‘My God, this woman stood up under humiliation.’ Right? That’s what happened.” Matthews later apologized and admitted he “sounded nasty.”

What is it about humiliation? We have a creepy love of it — a fascination — do we not? I confess to using the word myself on the night of the Indiana primary: "CNN talk is all about Trump but the big news is Hillary's humiliation."

It should be enough that the better candidate wins and the loser concedes with dignity. Why do we want to stare into the pain of the one who is defeated? What's wrong with us? Those questions relate to what I said on Tuesday and what Gloria Steinem said about the coming election, but it's a weirder dynamic that Chris Matthews talked about, the embrace of the humiliated woman, the desire to see her win because of her humiliation. It makes me wonder whether we really accept the truly independent, strong, successful woman. Maybe we need our woman pre-crushed.

But I'm looking back to the last time Hillary Clinton was elected, which was 9 years ago. Maybe we've changed, and that humiliation happened 18 years ago. Whatever taste for humiliated women America may retain at this point, is Hillary still crushed enough?

IN THE COMMENTS:  Henry said:

Althouse wrote: Modeling was her chosen profession and she has real skills that people admire.

This reminded me of a weird line in the Melania profile [in The New Yorker that] you linked the other day:

Through a quirk in immigration law, models, nearly half of them without high-school diplomas, are admitted on H-1B visas, as highly skilled workers, along with scientists and computer programmers, who are required to show proof of a college degree.

What a lovely mashup of intellectual snobbery and fake distinction this is! Think of all the athletes, artists, actors, and musicians who work in the U.S. despite not being "highly skilled" workers like "scientists and compute programmers." Of course, through a quirk of immigration law they have O and P visas.

Don't you want to lean on the Bernie Sanders guy with the silky-soft, mouse-brown raincoat?

ADDED: Meade was consuming this through headphones and I heard him say "Oh, my gosh." What was that? Oh, he was just repeating what some young woman in the video was saying as the guy in the raincoat embraced her. Then Meade said "I think Gloria Steinem was right" and starts singing "Where the Boys Are."

Gloria Steinem's nonapology doubles down on the sexualization of young women.

Gloria Steinem ran into a bit of criticism when — explaining why some young women support the male instead of the female candidate — she portrayed them as thinking "Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie...”

Now, she has put up a statement on Facebook:

In a case of talk-show Interruptus, I misspoke on the Bill Maher show recently, and apologize for what's been misinterpreted as implying young women aren't serious in their politics. What I had just said on the same show was the opposite: young women are active, mad as hell about what's happening to them, graduating in debt, but averaging a million dollars less over their lifetimes to pay it back. Whether they gravitate to Bernie or Hillary, young women are activist and feminist in greater numbers than ever before.

It's a nonapology — she only purports to regret the way other people have misinterpreted her. And there's nothing to explain how the specific words — "Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie" — did not have the meaning that's been read into them. She only said there were other words too, and those other words are the ones that convey her real attitude toward young women. But those other words were about the way young women care about feminism, not why these women might prefer Bernie to Hillary. On that topic, she needed to grope for an explanation, and what popped out was a dismissive insult: The young women are boy crazy, looking for sexual partners. That still feels like unfiltered Gloria — what she really thinks of these girls today.

In that light, let's look at the striking phrase that begins her statement: talk-show Interruptus.

I can only think of one interpretation of that. Maybe what I'm going to say is a misinterpretation, and I eagerly encourage you to offer any alternatives that escape me. To me, it seems that it must be a play on the only "interruptus" phrase in common parlance: coitus interruptus.

Coitus interruptus, also known as the rejected sexual intercourse, withdrawal or pull-out method, is a method of birth control in which a man, during sexual intercourse, withdraws his penis from a woman's vagina prior to orgasm (and ejaculation), and then directs his ejaculate (semen) away from the vagina in an effort to avoid insemination. 

So... in Gloria's metaphor, she was fucking us, hoping to inseminate us with her idea that women must vote for Hillary — is there an abortion for that? — and she pulled out too soon and her idea-ejaculate spewed fruitlessly.

Look, there's nothing really wrong with this metaphor — ideas as sperm, communication as insemination, other people's brains as wombs. It's just pretty weird and telling, under the circumstances, for the grand old feminist to see herself in the male sexual role as she sets out to reach young women! And this wasn't just what popped out of her when a talk show host put her on the spot. That was "Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie." This was the written word — her thought-out response to the criticism. She was in a position to choose her words carefully and strongly motivated to redeem herself, and once again, she gravitated toward thinking of sexualizing young women!

***

Bonus: Found while Googling "coitus interruptus" — a new AV Club listicle, "Coitus interruptus: 15 reasons to knock first," with 15 clips from movies (e.g., "American Pie") trading on the comic trope of getting interrupted while having sex.

Gloria Steinen, disrespecting young women: "And, when you’re young, you’re thinking, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie...”

Quite the misstep, but she's for Hillary, and when you put politics first, even if you're the biggest feminist in the world, you come out with anti-feminism.

Watch the full interview. Bill Maher lures into other embarrassments, like when she asserts that feminism has no boundaries then characterizes the abuses in Muslim countries as something that needs to be dealt with within those countries, by Muslim women:



ADDED: At 6:36, Maher asks, "Is feminism something that goes beyond our borders?," and Steinem says "Oh, yes, absolutely, it is totally beyond borders." Maher follows up: "Then why aren't [sic] the way women are treated in the Muslim world considered more of a feminist cause?" She says, "It is! Are you kidding me? Of course, it is!" She mentions the women in those countries who see it as a feminist cause, then tries to pivot away from Islam with "All monotheism is a problem." And — wisely — "Islam being attached to the government is the problem." Maher bears down: "40 countries have Sharia law and under Sharia law...." He lists some very burdensome limitations on women. Her response is: "A lot of feminists in the Islamic world are taking Muhammad's words and pointing out that, you know, his first wife was a real estate agent and smarter than him and richer than him." (Maher says: "A real estate agent?! For what? Century 7?) She says that in his day Muhammad was "a reformer on a lot of issues for women." Now, it's "another story." And then: "Only you could get me to defend any monotheism. I can't believe I'm saying this." He says he's not asking her to defend Sharia law, only saying it should be a big cause for the people who fought for civil rights in the 60s and against apartheid in the 80s. She says: "It is, including for the women in those countries."

AND:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg gives Gloria Steinem her rap name and Gloria doesn't like it.

From a NYT interview of the 2 women (who are sitting together in RBG's chambers):

Philip Galanes: Let’s start with a glaring inequity. Only one of you has a rap name.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I like the way mine began. A second-year law student at N.Y.U. was outraged by the court’s decision in the voting rights case. But instead of just venting her anger, she took up my dissent.

PG: Happily, there are rap-name generators online.

Gloria Steinem: They have those?

PG: Yours, if you want it, is GlowStick.

GS: We may need to work on that.

Imagine getting your rap name from Ruth Bader Ginsburg and not laughing or saying something positive. What goes on in Gloria Steinem's mind? Nothing with "stick" or anything that could be construed as phallic? Or, just, nobody's going to be assigning names to me — I and I alone define myself?

Anyway, the results are in: Ruth Bader Ginsburg is more fun than Gloria Steinem.

"I was on a TV show, and Gloria Steinem didn’t even want to be on the stage with me. I was seen as a submissive slut."

"But I was a woman doing what I wanted to do. Isn’t that feminist? Some lady said to me, 'How could you shame yourself this way?' I said, 'I’m so sorry that you didn’t get to sleep with Mick Jagger and I did.' That shut her up."

From "Groupies, From Sex Symbols to Style Icons/When Pamela Des Barres and other backstage women came to prominence in 1969, the news media focused on their brazen sexuality. Now the focus is on their fashion" in the NYT.