"Whenever celebrities say that they're just getting nude as a form of self-expression... I have a question."

"How often are they just walking around their house nude, like by themselves, or are they just wearing PJs like a normal person? Like, as as a normal part of self-expression, do you just like walk around nude... do you walk nude to the grocery store as a form of self-expression? You know, just walking around in public nude... Would you be walking around as a form of, you know, just knowing yourself? Would you be walking around naked?"

Ben Shapiro — listening to Miley Cyrus talk to Monica Lewinsky — asks, rhetorically, because he's very sure the answer is no.

 

But maybe you yourself or somebody you've known does walk the face of the earth nude because that's who they really are.

I know I've said this before and maybe I was quoting someone else, but I just spent an absurd amount of time searching for that, unsuccessfully, so I'm just going to try to say it again, though I'm quite convinced I said it better that other time: Nudes have virtually no role in human history.

Trump wore a lapel pin depicting himself.

Questioned about it, he said "Somebody gave me this. Do you know what that is? That's called a 'Happy Trump.' And considering the fact that I'm never happy—I'm never satisfied. I will never be satisfied until we make America great again. But we're getting pretty close, I'll tell you what. This is called a Happy Trump. Somebody gave it to me. I put it on."

 

And that's that. Somebody gave it to him and he put it on. Wore it on camera. I wonder what other things people could get him to pin onto himself just by giving it to him. He could be pranked so easily. But I suspect that he exercises some judgment about what to pin on himself. 

And who attaches an image of himself to himself/herself?

It happens, mostly entertainment celebrities in T-shirts.

If you're trying to understand the mindset of young women as they fail to step up and solve the problem of worldwide population collapse.

Here's Miley Cyrus, from an interview in the NYT:

I was talking to my stepdad, and he said, “Why are you the only celebrity without a makeup line?” And I said, “’Cause I’m not passionate about it.” And he said, “That’s the right answer.” I feel that way about motherhood. It’s just never been something that I’ve been overly passionate about. It’s a lot of responsibility and devotion and energy, and if you’re not passionate about that, I don’t know how you do sleepless nights and 18 years of what my mom dealt with. And when I say 18 years, I mean 33, ’cause I’m still a baby. So I’ve never felt the burn, you know? And I think for me, the burn is everything.

For any given individual, it's an individual decision... unless you take individuality away.

Why aren't there so many songs about rainbows?

I see "Wisconsin teacher fired after criticizing district’s ‘Rainbowland’ ban/Administrators in Waukesha, Wis., had banned Melissa Tempel’s first-graders from singing the song by Dolly Parton and Miley Cyrus" (WaPo).

At Wednesday’s hearing, Tempel and her attorney, Summer Murshid... argued, the teacher’s tweets after school hours fall outside the scope of her employment and constitute "the type of speech that falls squarely within the protection afforded by the First Amendment," Murshid said. 

"I thought that the fact that the tweet that I made, that 'Rainbowland' wasn’t going to be allowed, was something that the public would be really concerned about and that they would be interested in knowing about it," said Tempel, whose supervisor deemed her a “master teacher” who was “magical with children” in her last employment review. 

Are you waiting for the basketball game to start and enduring Miley Cyrus?

Miley Cyrus singing We Will Rock You at the #FinalFour #MarchMadness

MILEY CYRUS FINAL FOUR pic.twitter.com/pA6PfMnydz

— Miley Cyrus Edition (@MileyEdition) April 3, 2021

"Hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan..."

Hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and a cardigan... #OurCrewOurOctober pic.twitter.com/ULjogbijRM

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 14, 2018

It's a Miley Cyrus allusion....



I hopped off the plane at LAX/With a dream and my cardigan/Welcome to the land of fame excess/Am I gonna fit in?/Jumped in the cab, here I am for the first time/Look to my right, and I see the Hollywood sign/This is all so crazy/Everybody seems so famous....

I looked through 52 photographs — a whole deck of cards — of the fashion at last night's VMA's.

Maybe I did it so you don't have to, or maybe you'll go through — here — and challenge my ratings:

1. Miley Cyrus
2. Lizzo
3. Nicki Minaj
4. Demi Lovato

Remember, it's the VMAs, not the Oscars. There's supposed to me some weirdness and playfulness in the glamour.

I'd never heard of Lizzo before, but her strange getup got me to look at her for a long time, to notice a very beautiful face, and to look up her music and listen to this:

Understanding the creepiness of wholesomeness.

Here's a piece by Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker: "Miley Cyrus's Creepy Return to Wholesome." Do we think that a young woman is pure until she're not, and after that, if she presents herself as healthy and good, it's a disgusting fraud, and we've got to point fingers at her and call her out, so that no one is deceived into allying with this loathsome slut? That seems awfully retrograde for The New Yorker. Perhaps they never liked wholesomeness in the first place. Okay, now, I'll read the thing.

1. At the Billboard Music Awards, Miley Cyrus was introduced by her younger sister Noah with the (obviously scripted) line: "For the first time in years with pants on, my big sis, Miley Cyrus." Here's how that looked. The "pants" are very short white cut-off jeans. She also had the kind of off-the-shoulder blouse that we were just talking about in the Michelle Obama context. Instead of dancing about, Cyrus stood planted at the microphone, in the take-my-voice-seriously style of singers like Adele.

2. Cyrus has a video in which she "pets a dog, runs with balloons, and flashes her gold engagement ring." The song, we're told, "is a mix of Laurel Canyon and Nashville, equal parts bohemian and smarmy." Which doesn't sound wholesome. Petrusich says it's "lifeless." Lifeless isn't wholesome. Wholesomeness relates to goodness and health. Lifelessness is death. But Petrusich happens to prefer Cyrus's more vigorous demeanor in her song "Wrecking Ball" (which is about celebrating body-slamming ("I came in like a wrecking ball/I never hit so hard in love/All I wanted was to break your walls")).

3. Cyrus had a period a couple years ago in which she indulged in the white privilege of "trying-on and discarding of black culture," and now she's "essentially scrubbed her music and image of any hints of the hip-hop and R. & B.," and that might be "sinister."

4. Now, she seems to be doing a "good-girl routine," and it might be "a sendup" of — among other things — "our racially polarized political climate." Pop music is full of "artifice," we all know, and part of the "charade" is a cycle of "reinvention." Cyrus already reinvented herself from "Hannah Montana" to game sex object. To go back to "guileless, fresh-faced ingénue" is to pendulum swing between the 2 most obvious options for a female pop star.

5. Cyrus is getting married, we're told, and that seems to mean she needs to "find[] a new way to be (or act) virtuous." But what she's doing now is so "banal": "pretty, tamed, straight, still, white." Why is the "path forward" for young women so "narrow"? She can "become less selfish and wayward only by embracing antiquated notions of femininity and propriety."

Is that "creepy"? "Creepiness" is the headline-writer's word. Perhaps Petrusich's point is more that the reinvention is just banal and boring. A girl veers into badness for thrills and excitement. What comes next should be a better form of emotional satisfaction, not retreat to the starting point. But is retreat "creepy"?

Being boring and uncreative isn't really creepy. The creeping sensation — to get back to origins — is a feeling in the flesh, a "chill shuddering feeling, caused by horror or repugnance" (OED). If that's your point here, New Yorker, you've got to take this to the next level, to what I said in the first paragraph of this post and say that the pose is gross because what looks wholesome is actually unwholesome, and you feel revulsion.

But that wouldn't fit with the conclusion you chose, which was itself banal and boring, that after the innocence and debauchery, there's a new third stage, something less "less selfish and wayward" but not just "femininity and propriety." I guess that's supposed to sound like feminism, but I'm a bit creeped out by the statement that "femininity" is an "antiquated notion" and "white" is "banal."

Who's really creepy here?

By the way, if you declare "femininity" a "notion" — even without the "antiquated" —  how can you be trans-friendly?

Miley sings Dylan...

... and says something about Trump...

"There is nowhere I would rather be than in New York City playing this song with the Roots, and being on Jimmy Fallon with our host, who is always so much fun, except when you're Donald Trump. And then don't even think about messing with my hair, I'm serious."

... without taking a position on Trump.

Well played.

Yes, I watched "Saturday Night Live" with Hillary.

I thought the cold open with the Trump impersonator was very entertaining. I even liked Miley Cyrus singing "My Way" as the monologue. But Hillary did fine. Of course, the show loves her and exalted her as much as they could get away with... or more... that shoe stuff in the end was embarrassing. But Hillary herself looked good — maybe she should dress like a bartender all the time — and she showed some comic spark.

ADDED: By the way, when did it become a thing for women to wear flesh-colored shoes? Is it related to that awful trend of ice skaters wearing flesh-colored tights that come down over the skates? "Exhibit A: Sarah Hughes, 2002 Olympic Gold Medalist":



Notice that in the first GOP debate, Carly Fiorina was wearing those seemingly ubiquitous flesh-tone shoes:



It's like they're saying: Don't consider me to be wearing shoes at all. Just think of my feet as an inconspicuous continuation of my legs.

In the second debate, however, she upgraded to shoes that were shoes!

"From the time I was 11, it was, 'You're a pop star!' That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair..."

"... and you have to put on some glittery tight thing.' Meanwhile, I'm this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras. I had fucking flippers.... I was told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show. I was made to look like someone that I wasn't, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn't on that show, it was like, Who the fuck am I?

Said Miley Cyrus.

What does "I had fucking flippers" mean? Flippers like people who redo homes and sell them? Flippers like the children with birth defects? Flippers like faster than lightning... a world full of wonder... under the sea?



Hey, I wonder how Luke Halpin is doing. Was he told you're a pop star, that means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair and and you have to put on some glittery tight thing?

"You know, everyone's a little bit gay. It's the truth. Everyone's gay, all it takes is one cocktail. And if that doesn't work, sprinkle something in their drink. That's what I always do."

"I" = Miley Cyrus.

Joking about date rape. She might get some flak here, since she's joking about raping women.

Why does Miley Cyrus, in her current show, "stuff a thong in her mouth and simulate oral sex on a Bill Clinton impersonator"?

I'm not going to talk about the parents who are complaining that the show is pornographic and unsuitable for youngsters. Exercise parental control, parents, you nitwits. It's not like the general sexual aspect of the performance was a surprise. I don't think the parents' pettish performance in The Theater of Outrage had to do with the specific aspect of the show that made sport of Bill Clinton. That was a surprise, and if that made the difference in where you draw your own okay-for-kids line, then I'd like to hear the specifics of your particular outrage, because I'm closely following the subject of the continued viability of the story of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

Some people think this story belongs in the past, even as Bill Clinton seems likely to renew his residence in the White House, the site of his "inappropriate" and "in fact... wrong" interactions with Monica. Others, notably Rand Paul, seem to believe that it's relevant to Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy. But members of the opposing party will use whatever material is useful in attacking her, and the question whether this material works is something I've been writing about in other posts.

What I want to talk about here is a popular entertainer dragging this old story out of the shadows. Presumably, Miley Cyrus is either a liberal or would like to have the reputation as a liberal. She's an entertainer. That's the norm. I feel I need to presume that she and the people who design her shows do not want to undercut the public image as a properly leftish character — not too political, perhaps, but safely and comfortably in bed with the good people.

"If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily..."

"... we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell."

So goes the roiling prose of Russell Brand, who's feeling no sense of narrative completion from the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Brand, himself a recovering drug addict, wants to leverage the occasion of the Hoffman death into an argument for changing the drug laws.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor will lead the Times Square New Year's Eve ball-drop countdown.

"She will press the crystal button... the first United States Supreme Court justice to do so."

Because she's from New York City? But almost half of the Supreme Court Justices are from New York City, including both the other female Justices. The male is Justice Scalia.

While it may be difficult to imagine Justice Scalia on the stage in Times Square, Justice Sotomayor has taken on a more public role as a justice, especially as she promoted her recent memoir, “My Beloved World.” She has doled out career advice on “Sesame Street,” appeared on “The Daily Show” and even salsa-danced with a Univision anchor.

Justice Scalia doesn't take a public role?! He's always out and about spreading the word about Originalism and so forth. If he's not manning the Times Square crystal button and not on "Sesame Street" and "The Daily Show," I think that has more to do with liberal media ostracizing nonliberals than anything else.

Justice Sotomayor was selected because of her inspirational story of rising from a humble background to become the first Hispanic justice on the court, said Tim Tompkins, president of the Times Square Alliance. She has encouraged others to dream big, a nice message for a new year, he said.

Anderson Cooper will host the televised party in Times Square, with performances by Miley Cyrus, Melissa Etheridge and others. Viewers should not expect to see Ms. Cyrus twerking near Justice Sotomayor. The justice will have a private space at the event, Mr. Tompkins said.

Humility, big dreams and inspiration, and the continuing subordination of women (in the form of Miley's plastic-clad ass, but not too close to the risen-from-humility Supreme Court Justice, who will be encased in an enclosure of sublime respect with her crystal button).

The 10 finalists for Time's Person of the Year.

I know. I hate getting suckered into this annual nonsense, but the list presents some interesting options"

Bashar Assad, President of Syria
Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder
Ted Cruz, Texas Senator
Miley Cyrus, Singer
Pope Francis, Leader of the Catholic Church
Barack Obama, President of the United States
Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran
Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Edward Snowden, N.S.A. Leaker
Edith Windsor, Gay rights activist

It's not going to be Assad. If we were going to do Bad Guy persons of the year, somebody more dramatically bad would have won recently, like Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. It would be pathetic to reward Assad with that kind of attention. What about Vladimir Putin? He's not even on the list of finalists, probably because he's already won, back in 2007.

Scratch Hassan Rouhani. He hassan done enough yet.

"We can’t 'Whatevs' hard enough on this one."

"The only thing that merits any kind of response is the question of style. And since she clearly doesn’t have any, there’s literally nothing left to say about it. We reiterate what we said the morning after she destroyed Western Civilization: she just looks stupid.... Nothing says 'I have no persona of my own' than freezing your face into nothing more than a logo for pictures and thinking that it makes you look interesting."

Meanwhile, at the Emmys, keep scrolling here until you get to Raquel Welch. She's 73.

"Women have sexualised themselves and made great art, which they may get flak for, but it's powerful."

"But if you sexualise yourself and you're not making art, you are just sexualising yourself. Everyone's embarrassed. It's not very good, is it? You're just pooping on yourself."

Said Tori Amos, somewhere into the answer to The Guardian's question "Do men age more easily?" and right after saying "I won't talk about Miley Cyrus at the VMAs."

It's an interesting chain of thought, no? Here's how I visualize the thoughts of Tori Amos, in 11 steps:

1. To ask "Do men age more easily?" is to ask whether aging is more difficult for women.

2. Miley Cyrus — who's very young, but used to be younger and who's trying to gain credibility as woman and not a kid anymore — showed some awful awkwardness with that sexy dressing and dancing.

3. Sexuality can work, since obviously I've used sexuality well in my artistic performances.

4. I'm not going to get sidetracked into talking about Miley like everybody else, the topic here should be me, and when I think of self-sexualizing, I want the subject to be me, and this interview is PR from my artistic work product.

5. The most graceful way to retrack onto me and my excellent use of sexuality is to speak in the abstract.

6. Women have sexualized themselves and made great art which they may get flak for, but it's powerful.

7. The key is to unleash the power of self-sexualizing only when you can arrive at great art, which is what I have done and Miley has failed at.

8. All these artists, including me, have a powerful effect on young girls, who want to be like us, and this is a problem that I have a responsibility to solve.

9. If your self-sexualizing doesn't produce art, then the product is you — your body out there in the real world.

10. The self-sexualized woman out there in the world — not on the stage within the trappings of art — is bad... is shit.

11. Oh, my dear fans, do not poop on yourselves!

"How do you ask John Kerry to be the fall guy, go on all the Sunday morning talk shows, and try to cover up for your own leadership mistake?"

Asks Meade, in the comments to "How do you ask a man to be the [first] man to die for a mistake?" — which was yesterday's post, titled after Meade's rewrite of Kerry's famous question, " How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

So, we watched the talk shows today, and in addition to Kerry, on "Meet the Press," there was Rand Paul, and just about the first thing he said was:

... I think it's a mistake to get involved in the Syrian civil war. And what I want would ask John Kerry is, he's famous for saying, "How can you ask a man to be the last one to die for a mistake?" I would ask John Kerry, "How can you ask a man to be the first one to die from a mistake?"

I'm not saying Rand reads the Althouse blog, but hi, Rand. Rand was remarkable — or seemed remarkable in contrast to Kerry, who preceded him — because he listened to the questions and appeared to think in real time and then verbalize actual answers.

Kerry filibustered, evading David Gregory's questions, such as "If Congress says no [to an attack on Syria], the president will act regardless of what Congress says?" Nonanswer: "I said that the president has the authority to act, but the Congress is going to do what's right here." Note the "I said," like he's already answered and now he's forced to repeat himself.

Somehow I started feeling sorry for Kerry, having to be the one to go around to all the talk shows. And he looked so weary. He looked awful, weirdly different from usual, like something wasn't right. His hair was fine. (It's a wig, right?) But his eyes were mismatched, and he kept sticking out his tongue like this:



Is there some tongue-out disease going around this week, some virulence of chapped lips? (Cf. "21 Obnoxious Photos of Miley’s Tongue.") That particular shot was taken immediately after he said the words "the American people," which annoyed Meade so much that he backtracked to pause it so I could photograph it.

What I really want to do, now that I have the transcript, is go through and find all the ways Kerry managed to say that the President needs to go to Congress and doesn't need to go to Congress. I'll update this post and show you soon.

ADDED: Here's how Kerry avoided saying the President needed authority from Congress:

Miley Cyrus "stepped out in some comfy pajamas and unicorn slippers (and a Chanel handbag...)."

Good move (presumably by her stylist). Keep people guessing. Keep people looking. Keep people off balance wondering/worrying whether they are feeling sexual toward a child.