Your post-pandemic life is not all that different to your pre-pandemic life, is it?
Answer:
That is my guilty truth. I stay home and I drink smoothies and I work on music and I go hiking and I read books and I occasionally watch bad TV. It’s not all that different, but I have a sense of guilt around that and the only way I can assuage that guilt is by respecting and listening to what other people are going through.
He has such a raging conscientiousness that it seems jerky to needle him like this, but I've got to say that looking at other people's pain for the purpose of assuaging your own sense of guilt isn't empathy for them, nor is it helping them. It's comforting yourself. It's another smoothie.
(To be fair: He is giving money to charity.)
ALSO: He talks about reading comments in social media:
It's in his self-interest at this point though, isn't it? And he's not committing suicide or — say — resigning from a Senate seat like Al Franken. He has the power to come back when it suits his interests. This is his best hope to get people to buy his book, better at this point than going around telling people buy my book (with some whining about how he's apologized). It's better for him to lie low. Yes, there's something horribly beta about it. Moby is mopey. But I'm guessing that fits his overall self-presentation, so it just might work.
The book is called "Then It Fell Apart." It's all so poetic.
IN THE COMMENTS: William said:
I myself am a beta male, and I'd just like to express my thanks to Moby for showing the way. Truly inspiring leadership. He didn't back down. He backed out...... It's not often a guy who looks like Moby ends up on a bed with a girl who looks like Portman. When such things happen, it's important for all of us to know that such a rare and welcome event has come to pass. Now, you Gods, stand up for betas.....I think Moby could put even a little more spin on the passive aggressive fists of fury by explicitly denying that he and Natalie ever had any kind of physical relationship.
"I also fully recognize that it was truly inconsiderate of me to not let her know about her inclusion in the book beforehand, and equally inconsiderate for me to not fully respect her reaction. I have a lot of admiration for Natalie, for her intelligence, creativity, and animal rights activism, and I hate that I might have caused her and her family distress. I tried to treat everyone I included in Then It Fell Apart with dignity and respect, but nonetheless it was truly inconsiderate for me to not let them know before the book was released. So for that I apologize, to Natalie, as well as the other people I wrote about in Then It Fell Apart without telling them beforehand. Also I accept that given the dynamic of our almost 14 year age difference I absolutely should've acted more responsibly and respectfully when Natalie and I first met almost 20 years ago."
It's a real apology, I think, but within a particular scope. He's saying three specific things: 1. He should have informed her that the writing was going to come out (not that he would have given her veto power or would have changed any of what he wrote, such as the fact she seems to dispute, that they "dated"), 2. He should have been more respectful of her feelings about what he wrote (not that he shouldn't have written what he did that caused these feelings), and 3. He should have been more respectful and responsible when they actually had that relationship (though he doesn't say exactly what he would have done differently and certainly doesn't concede that he was wrong to pursue a relationship with her).
There are 2 earlier posts on this celebrity psychodrama, so if you don't know what this post is about, click on the "Moby" tag and bone up before commenting that you don't understand. And please don't comment about not liking to talk about Moby/Natalie. Just go cheerfully on your way. Or grumpily.
Maybe someone got their tropes about memes mixed up.
Yeah, I wonder what happened. Did someone decide "beta-male" is not politically correct? Beta males are in the down position, but who knew a feminist attack had to be reined in and couldn't disparage a man's masculinity with that particular pejorative? Did "beta male" become taboo just this morning?
I'd like to read the memo on that new rule! I'm thinking right wingers insult men that way, so left wingers need to refrain. Or maybe it's a little too close to homophobia. Whatever... I don't think "nice-guy" can just be swapped in. I don't think Moby presents himself as nice.
I know a lot of men complain that women don't value the "nice guy," and that's a topic for feminist analysis, but I doubt it's what the author of the re-headlined piece thought she was talking about. "Beta male" has been expunged from the article. (Still in the URL though.)
I'm seeing this because I was starting to read "Moby's treatment of Natalie Portman is a masterclass in beta-male misogyny/While the musician might not spout misogynistic lyrics, he’s no feminist" by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian, where you see a cropped version of the picture (cropped above the nipples). I wanted to form my own opinion and get the code to embed the Instagram, and I clicked through and saw the full chestal expanse. Oh, my! What to think? The man is not attractive, but he's not totally horrible, but he's grimacing as if to try to look as horrible as possible, while she's just as pretty as a girl can be.
What's going on? Why doesn't she look uneasy? She's an actress — Who knows what she's thinking? Maybe she's only thinking of looking good in a photograph — which is what I think most people try to do when they know they're being photographed. What's he thinking? Something other than what I think most people think. Maybe I'm a beast — this is Beauty and the Beast — so go full beast, that's my only hope at some version of dignity.
I've already written about the Moby-and-Natalie tiff — here, with excerpts from his book — so please go there if you want to know what I think about it. This post is just about my reaction to Moby's Instagram and to The Guardian's effort at doing feminism about it. Reading the Guardian article, I see he's got a second Instagram, just fretting about his reputation now that Portman is turning people against him. He writes:
"He said I was 20; I definitely wasn’t. I was a teenager. I had just turned 18. There was no fact checking from him or his publisher – it almost feels deliberate. That he used this story to sell his book was very disturbing to me. It wasn’t the case. There are many factual errors and inventions. I would have liked him or his publisher to reach out to fact check.... I was a fan and went to one of his shows when I had just graduated.... When we met after the show, he said, ‘let’s be friends’. He was on tour and I was working, shooting a film, so we only hung out a handful of times before I realised that this was an older man who was interested in me in a way that felt inappropriate."
So... she did go out with him a few times and then she realized he was sexually attracted to her? And that makes him "creepy"... just because he was so much older. If she was 18, I think that means he was 34. Does he really deserve to be attacked as creepy? If she was a fan, she knew how old he is. If she went out with him — she, a beautiful woman — how could it come as a surprise to her that he was sexually interested? If she decided she wasn't interested and she broke it off and that was that, why is there anything that requires him to be publicly attacked as a creep?
From Moby's new book, "Then It Fell Apart," the second volume of his memoir. The scene is a party in New York City. It's 2001, after 9/11 (and Moby characterized himself as "traumatized" and not knowing "how to process my sorrow"). Moby describes himself as "well on my way to getting drunk," because he'd had "three glasses of champagne, three glasses of red wine with dinner, a shot of vodka before dessert, and an Armagnac digestif."
“Dale,” I said, once we had ordered drinks, “tell Clarice about ‘knob touch.’”
“First off, you’re beautiful,” he told her.
“She’s a Miss USA runner-up,” I said, proud of my new friend.
“Okay,” Dale continued, “‘knob touch’ is when you take your penis out of your pants at a party and brush it up against someone.”
“Eww,” Clarice said, grimacing.
“And that’s sexy?”
“No, no,” he said seriously, “it’s not sexual, it’s just stupid and funny. You only knob-touch their clothes, and the person you knob-touch can’t know they’ve been knob-touched.”
Clarice turned to me. “Have you done this?”
“No,” I admitted.
The party wasn’t that exciting. It was mainly full of businessmen and real-estate developers, most notably Donald Trump, who was standing a few yards away from us at the bottom of a staircase, talking loudly to some other guests.
“Moby, go knob-touch Donald Trump,” Lee said.
“Really?” I asked. “Should I?”
Donald Trump was a mid-level real-estate developer and tabloid-newspaper staple whose career had recently been resuscitated by a reality-TV show.
“Yeah,” Dale said.
“Yeah,” Clarice said, mischievously.
“Shit,” I said, realizing I now had to knob-touch Donald Trump. I drank a shot of vodka to brace myself, pulled my flaccid penis out of my pants, and casually walked past Trump, trying to brush the edge of his jacket with my penis. Luckily he didn’t seem to notice or even twitch.
I walked back to my friends and ordered another drink. “Did you do it?” Clarice asked. “I think so. I think I knob-touched Donald Trump.”
Is this a sexual assault? Dale says "it’s not sexual, it’s just stupid and funny," but the New York statute criminalizes "forcible touching when such person intentionally, and for no legitimate purpose... forcibly touches the sexual or other intimate parts of another person for the purpose of degrading or abusing such person, or for the purpose of gratifying the actor's sexual desire...." I'm not an expert on NY criminal law, but I think touching someone to be stupid and funny is not a legitimate purpose, and being free of an intent to gratify your own sexual desire doesn't save you. Moby seems to have had the intent to degrade or abuse Donald Trump, so the requisite intent is there. But I'd say Moby is off the hook because he didn't touch "the sexual or other intimate parts of another person." He used his own sexual part to "to brush the edge of his jacket." Maybe there's another New York statute. I find it hard to believe that "knob-touching" isn't a crime as long as you only touch the other person's non-intimate parts.
Anyway, I thought you should know. Imagine if we found out Donald Trump was knob-touching the hems of garments.
ADDED: Moby's story is unbelievable for a number of reasons. He was obviously drunk, and he had a motive to lie. But another thing is that he puts the story in his "New York City (2001)" chapter, then says Trump's "career had recently been resuscitated by a reality-TV show," but "The Apprentice" didn't debut until 2004.
ALSO: I became aware of this Moby story yesterday when I watched him on Bill Maher. He was there to talk about his book and brought up the "knob-touching"...
... and he did some additional knob-touching-related things during Maher's segment on using ASMR to deal with Trump fatigue. This segment is quite good, and I would recommend it even if it weren't for Moby and his dick, but keep an eye on Moby:
MORE: In the interview with Moby — the first of the 2 Moby videos above — he directly says he was drunk. He also says "These days, my penis is always flaccid." And when Moby asserts that knob-touching is "not sexual," Maher says: "Like Biden. It's not sexual. Not sexual. It's just inappropriate."
MORE ABOUT NY STATUTES: There is also the NY crime of "Sexual abuse in the third degree." That covers "sexual contact without the latter's consent." Here's the definition of "sexual contact" in NY law:
“Sexual contact” means any touching of the sexual or other intimate parts of a person for the purpose of gratifying sexual desire of either party. It includes the touching of the actor by the victim, as well as the touching of the victim by the actor, whether directly or through clothing, as well as the emission of ejaculate by the actor upon any part of the victim, clothed or unclothed.
Unlike the statute quoted above, this seems to cover using one's penis to touch a non-intimate part of another person. But now you need the intent of "gratifying sexual desire" and there's no mention of the intent of "degrading or abusing." So I don't think this statute works either, even though I'm sure that going around rubbing your naked penis on another person, without their consent, should be a crime.
AND: Why, in the #MeToo era, did Moby think he could freely confess to what looks like a sex crime? I am surprised that NY statutes don't seem to cover his exact behavior, and maybe his publishers ran the manuscript past its lawyers, and that's why this was published. But let's assume it's absolutely not a crime in New York (or that it's too late under the statute of limitations). Why does Moby not fear personal and career destruction over his open confession to amusing himself by brushing his naked penis against another person? Presumably, it's because the other person was Donald Trump, and that just takes the story into an entirely different universe where assaulting someone with your naked penis is pure hilarity.
As part of the publicity I’m doing for the book (Barrel Fever), I was interviewed and photographed for Avenue magazine. The talking part I’m fine with, but I hate having my picture taken. First the photographer had me pose with Dennis (my cat) while wearing a cat mask. Then she had me pretend to hang from the antlers in the living room. Next I was told to close the louvered doors on my neck and then to hold my freeze-dried turkey head up to my nose. Just as she was running out of film, the photographer said, “Can we try something silly?”
That made me remember I wanted to promote this book Chris Buck sent me, "Uneasy: Portraits 1986-2016." It has 338 photographs of celebrities — including one of David Sedaris (that's not from 1994) — often photographed in some odd, quirky way.
For example, there's Billy Joel sitting on the end of a bed holding one of those theater "applause" signs, there are separate photos of Moby and Ike Turner doing that old little boy's trick of positioning a finger to make it look like his naked penis, there's Margaret Atwood pushing the side of her face and outspread hands against a screen door (photographed from the other side of the door), Casey Affleck lying on a table pushed into the corner of a gaudily wallpapered room, Russ Meyer burying his face in cake shaped like 2 breasts, Philip Seymour Hoffman half-hiding behind underpants hung on a clothesline, and George McGovern wearing just a Speedo and (apparently) doing the twist. Much more!
I recommend it highly, having looked at all the pictures and admired the great variety and the gameness of the celebrities. Since they are mostly not actors and models but writers, musicians, and politicians, people who haven't spent their lives figuring out how to look interesting, it takes some ingenuity: Where can you put them, what can you say to them to try to get a photograph that will affect us in a way that has something to do with who this person is?
In Caffe Reggio on MacDougal Street in NYC last Saturday. Here's the top comment about Caffe Reggio at Yelp! on the Caffe Reggio page at Yelp!:
I sat in Caffe Reggio and drank an Americano, because I had to remind myself that I could, in fact, sit in Caffe Reggio and drink an Americano. It's downstairs from my apartment, and it's been there for thousands of years, and yet I seldom make my way inside. I could feel something deep inside me stirring, and suddenly I had an intense craving to break free from the pattern I had been running as of late. I wanted to be free. My my routine of sulking, and whining, and going to the same places that I always went day in and day out had exhausted me. So I opted for a little bit of history, and a little bit of Old New York, and I began to write a rant about why these things were at the same time toxic as they were healing. It went something like this:
It's been a constant topic of discussion, and it seems to be on all of our minds: New York is dead.
First, I love free expression, and one way to express a viewpoint is to say the opposite. It's sarcasm. It can be comedy. Look at Stephen Colbert. It's a good — even light-hearted — way to expose the bad side of your opponent's arguments.
Second, we all need to become as competent as possible as consumers of communication. Don't be naive. You need to detect these literary devices. Understand that writers/speakers have ulterior motives. I'm not going to clear out material that requires you to exercise your mental muscles. If you can't tell a moby when you see one, I'm not going to delete him: You need practice. If I see you responding to him as if he were sincere, it makes me sad. Where's your mental toughness? How will you be a competent citizen in the political arena where everyone's always more or less bullshitting?
See? This is the kind of thing I have to contend with. Web writers who don't like me or don't like whatever side of politics they think I represent will comb through the comments to find whatever sounds worst and then smear me and the entire comments community here. As the discussion turns to affirmative action today, people who would like to discredit or silence me are going to be especially active looking for comments. What can be done? 1. Think about what you are writing and how it will look to outsiders, 2. Don't feed the troll, 3. Perceive the Moby.
I think that lately the comments section of this blog has been attracting a lot Mobys. Yesterday, I called attention to a commenter who wrote something outrageous (and actually funny, if you recognize it as fake). A very high-traffic blog had exposed me to criticism for having that in my comments, and a commenter over there suggested it was a "false flag operation," and linked to a post by SEK over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money, that begins: "I went over to Althouse’s and wrote a number of insanely offensive comments, but everyone started agreeing with me before I could declare 'April Fools'!" Now, I already thought I was dealing with a Moby, and here was SEK, apparently, bragging about being a Moby. So I threw him a link and quoted him. He then showed up in my comments and said:
Dear Ann,
I didn't write any of those comments. You just got fooled twice over by your own racist and misogynist commenters. Please, feel free to check the IP addresses of the comments I claimed, all April-Foolsy, to have written.
I was in the middle of a 1000-mile drive, so I wasn't exactly anguishing over my failure to pick up whatever-the-hell SEK had layered into his blog post that was written in the form of a confession. My response to that — written at 11:23 at night from an I-80 rest stop in Iowa — was:
Someone was fooling, either you, per your confession, or someone else, if you're not fooling now. It makes no difference to me who did it. It wasn't one of our regulars and it wasn't a believable story.
The attempt to paint my commenters (or me!) as racist or whatever is inflammatory and ugly, and I've lost track of who wants that to stop.
Now, SEK has updated his post, with a not-too-attractive mix of hostile insults and whiny fears for his own fate:
You Althouse people really aren’t very bright. To anyone who thinks that I actually wrote the comments paraphrased above, I suggest you click here and enter my last name into the “Instructor” field. I’ll wait … so are you really ready to accuse me of writing that?
Well, you'll have to wait a long time, because I don't know your last name, SEK. Is that me being not very bright? Or are you patently a fool?
I’m only asking because, unlike Althouse, who has tenure and can misbehave as she pleases, I’m a lowly lecturer who, if he steps out of line, will be fired on the spot.
So why are you being so hostile and calling people names? It's interesting that you feel vulnerable, but what are you doing slugging people and then claiming vulnerability when you get a response.
Ann has the IP addresses of the people who left those comments and knows that it wasn’t me. If she insists on lying, I can’t afford to prove her wrong in a court of law; however, I’m willing to put my name and career on the line and proclaim, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t write the racist comments I mocked her for brooking on her blog. She can’t be fired for besmirching her university in public like this, but if I’m lying, I can be dismissed with two snaps from an irate bureaucrat. So in the interests of truth, I demand that should Althouse insist on claiming that I wrote those comments, she publish the IP addresses of the authors of the comments I linked to. If they all resolve to Corona, California, I’ll exit the internet for life.
As noted above, I do not have a collection of IP addresses. I have no way to check who's behind the various pseudonyms, so you're on your own denying that you wrote what you previously said you wrote. I believed you then, and you ask me to believe you now, and the reason you're supposed to be believable now is that you have a strong self-interest in disassociating yourself from your own words. You made your own problem, and yet you are still being nasty to me, trying to smear me with racism for nothing but maintaining a free-speech forum. You accuse me of lying for quoting you. You threaten to sue me — for quoting you! — and at the same time whine that you can't afford to sue me. You stress that you would like to see me fired — for what?! — and yet you beg in the most pusillanimous fashion that I should pity you because you could be fired.
This is all so pathetic. Or is this another satire that I'm not bright enough to understand?
Anyway, to my commenters: Please understand that there are Mobys here. There are commenters who pretend to mean what they are saying, when what they are trying to do is to make us look bad somehow. Take that into account when you interact with people here.
... who I assume was pro-Obama and writing under a pseudonym here with the object of making this blog — and more generally, criticism of Obama — look racist. This coward put up his comment on my 9:50 p.m. post — "Should the President be insulting pop stars?" — at 11:52, presumably to maximize the time that it would be up on the blog and that it would sit here as long as possible before I would take it down, which I did as soon as I got on the blog this morning at around 9 (Central Time).
The commenter, Metlife, had never posted here before and had a profile showing that he'd joined Blogger just this month. He wrote — and the asterisks are mine: "can someone murder that f***ing n***** fast? It will be a good day when Hussein is murdered by one of our southern patriots."
The pushback was immediate. Joe wrote at 11:59: "Could the previous comment be stricken and the poster banned?" Just Lurking said: "Is that you moby?" (suggesting, as I am doing now, that Metlife was against not Obama but this blog community). John Stodder said: "Althouse is probably asleep, but if you have her phone number, wake her up and tell her to delete it." (No one did that.)
Seven Machos said: "Okay, first, get Metlife out of here. At least Cedarford is subtle and occasionally witty.... All racist ass clowns and pretend-racist-agent-provocateur ass clowns should take note of Cedarford's work. This is how it's done." (Cedarford is a longtime commenter who writes well but often expresses extreme ideas of the sort that I do not censor).
Peter Hoh said:
I'm guessing that nolife is a plant. A true Southerner always capitalizes the S.
And wouldn't a full-blown racist southerner consider that "southern" is an unnecessary modifier for "patriot"?
Plus he knew how to spell "Hussein."
Good ole boys spell it "Hoo-sane."
Former law student said...
Speak of laying a turd and someone does. Probably an agent provocateur, because he created a fresh identity for the occasion.
An insidious and specialized type of left-wing troll who visits blogs and impersonates a conservative for the purpose of either spreading false rumors intended to sow dissension among conservative voters, or who purposely posts inflammatory and offensive comments for the purpose of discrediting the blog in question.
The term is derived from the name of the liberal musician Moby, who famously suggested in February of 2004 that left-wing activists engage in this type of subterfuge: “For example, you can go on all the pro-life chat rooms and say you’re an outraged right-wing voter and that you know that George Bush drove an ex-girlfriend to an abortion clinic and paid for her to get an abortion. Then you go to an anti-immigration Web site chat room and ask, ‘What’s all this about George Bush proposing amnesty for illegal aliens?’”
The strategy has been frequently attempted on conservative blogs, but has not been nearly as effective as Moby envisioned, since false rumors are easily debunked by fact-checking minions, and cartoonishly extreme commenters often get immediately identified as mobys and banned.
Lucid said:
Actually, Metlife, with his registration [email] and ip address, should be reported to the secret service. Threatening the president is a serious crime, as it should be.
I also wonder if Metlife is actually a lefty troll pulling an Alinsky.
God, what a festering stinkhole of a web site this is. I don't know how you wingnut loons can stand stewing in your own shit like this, presided over by the shit mistress, Ann Althouse.
Of course she's too dishonest to tell you dumb motherfuckers that Obama's remark was made off the record, thus rendering her posed questions ("should the president be insulting pop stars?" and "what business is it of the presidents?") inoperative. And of course you stupid shit-for-brains don't follow the link to find out for yourselves. Maybe the ever-dull Althouse didn't bother reading enough of the story to find out that the comment was off the record, or maybe she's just dishonest.
You're stewing in a cesspool. And you like it!
And that's an example of the sort of comment I don't delete. I'm that into free speech. But Metlife deserves deletion and, as Lucid said, investigation by the Secret Service. I like to think the Secret Service is good enough that they are already on it.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
Posts
