"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.
Click the little arrow... there's more:And there's one more panel:
Check the details. I'm sure "upgrading the historic 1902 structure" is wrong. I agree that the "main residence" is preserved, but there seems to be nothing left of "the historic 1902 structure," the old East Wing. Maybe the underground part? And though Obama may have met with "members of the Muslim Brotherhood" in the White House, that photograph of him was taken in Kenya, not at the White House. As for the famous photo of Hunter Biden enjoying a bath, that was not a White House bathtub. Was it?
Anyway, highlighting the lowlights of Democratic administrations — replete with semi-nudity — that's rich. "Major events" ≈ most embarrassing events.
This is a good example of Donald Trump always moving forward, always fighting back. Oppose him, and this is what you get.
"'Ultimately, you can’t have a political magazine that doesn’t have a politics,' Victor Navasky, then the publisher of The Nation, told The New York Times in an article headlined 'George Wins Readers, but Little Respect.'
Arguably, the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was the publication’s undoing.
In the spring of 1998, when the independent counsel Ken Starr was deep in his investigation of the Clinton White House, George published a puffy cover story on the film 'Primary Colors,' an adaptation of the roman à clef about Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign. (For a brief while, America had its own Elena Ferrante in Joe Klein).
The magazine further showed its hand when it referred to the under-fire president as the 'chief charmer.' When Mr. Kennedy and his staff tried to cover the imbroglio, they made choices that would now seem cringe, like publishing a write-around article about Ms. Lewinsky’s past accompanied by a full-page caricature of her biting into a hot dog."
Why is it so difficult to find that caricature of Monica Lewinsky biting into a hot dog?
Google gives me 2 pix of Obama stuffing something into his mouth and one of Reagan. This is the most obvious caricature idea for Lewinsky. You'd think dozens of lame efforts would show up in this search. And George Magazine published one. Where is it? Is Google caring for our presumed devotion to the beloved boy? I mean John John. Not that rogue Bill!
Said Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, reacting to Congressman Robert Garcia, who'd had some reason to point out that Trump seems to be sleeping some of the time at his criminal trial, reported at Mediaite.
Writes Maureen Dowd, in "The Ivy League Flunks Out" (NYT), talking about the line "It is a context-dependent decision" spoken by U Penn president Penn’s Elizabeth Magill.
We were just talking about Bill Clinton rhetoric — 2 posts down, here — but that was about "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and the topic was Biden's denials of involvement in his son's influence peddling.
Dowd is writing about the "pathetic display" put on by the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania "when they were asked if calling for genocide against Jews counted as harassment."
"... in alleged influence peddling by his son and brothers. An irate Biden seemed to morph into Bill Clinton and — echoing his predecessor’s 'I did not have sex with that woman' denial of an earlier scandal — effectively declared that he did not have relations with 'those people.'
As with Clinton, the denial was absurd, even insulting. Roughly 70% of voters (including 40% of Democrats) believe Biden has acted either unlawfully or unethically in the overseas business dealings of his family. More importantly, the House has interviews, documents, photos and even audiotapes contradicting Biden's continuing denial of having any knowledge of his son's financial dealings.... Bill Clinton eventually gave a redemptive-sinner speech and effectively confessed to being a cad. Yet for Biden, after years of categorical denials, it will be a bit more difficult to reveal himself or his family as being corrupt.... Influence peddling... involves the selling of access to or influence on one's public office. Even if you claim the money did not influence your decisions, knowledge of or interaction with such corruption undermines both the office and the public trust...."
By the way, the famous Clinton quote is not "I did not have sex with that woman." It is "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Does it matter? Substantively, it depends. Formally, yes. The material within quotation marks must be exact, and later in the column, Turley does get the quote right.
If Clinton hadn't lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky — and maybe he didn't (if "sexual relations" meant penis-in-vagina sex) — there would have been no "high crimes and misdemeanors" to accuse him of committing. He just lied about sex. But what Biden is lying about — if he is lying — are distinct crimes that undermine his fitness for office.
"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."
"First, in the ’70s, women saw a series of legal victories in addition to Roe: Title IX was passed (1972), housing discrimination was outlawed (1974), the pregnancy-descrimination ban was passed (1978).... By the ’90s, we could 'do it all'... Feminism, by this point, had traded in its quest for 'liberation of women' to fully pursue parity with men, all while attempting to remain appealing to them. In short, both professionally and privately, we were chasing victories defined on male terms. (Little defines this era so clearly as feminists confidently siding with Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair.)
Since then, the language may have changed—there were the sexual-empowerment aughts where we could have 'sex like men' (think: Sex and the City), then the career-empowerment teens (think: #Girlboss). But ultimately, each decade finds us led by a feminism that has abandoned ameliorating the struggles of our collective lives as women in lieu of chasing individual wins on playing fields drawn up by men.... The language of feminism is not working for us, not in the arena of the patriarchy or even in our own private lives.... We need to regroup and reframe our language away from 'defending' the individual and toward protecting the collective. Because yes, protecting women’s reproductive rights benefits me, but equally important is that a pro-woman reproductive policy benefits us all: men, children, our economy, and our national security."
Xochitl Gonzalez, a novelist, is 44. I had to look that up to get a sense of how much radical feminism she might have lived through. A lot of the linked essay is about what the mainstream women's magazines have been saying to women. Who doesn't know those things are a con? If you have any true feminist spirit, you should hypothesize that whatever the mainstream is pushing is a patriarchal scheme, especially if it's boosting women's spirits and bolstering their alliance with men.
The last sentence quoted above sounds like the very women's-magazine boosting and bolstering that she seemed to be criticizing. The sentence before that sounds like raw left-wing politics that isn't centered on women at all but simply promises incidental benefits. How is that not patriarchal?
"... the show makes Tripp an awful friend, a bitter woman, a conservative hack primarily responsible for the world crashing around Lewinsky’s ears, but one who is also granted an inch of ground to stand on. Bill Clinton was far worse than his allies and friends ever wanted to admit. That she chose the most harmful, duplicitous, self-serving way to address this is still true—but if she comes out looking bad, it’s still better than she’s ever looked before."
ADDED: I said "Which one looks more like Monica Lewinsky?" because one of them is Monica Lewinsky, but another question could be: Does Monica Lewinsky look more Monica Lewinsky or more like Melania Trump?
Who would have imagined that in 2021, women would age into a similar look, not an old look, a more or less beautiful look, but a look-alike look? I'd say "Twilight Zone" imagined it, in "Number 12 Looks Just Like You."
Set in the 1990s, the 10-episode series revisits the miasma of scandal and innuendo that shrouded the Clinton White House: Paula Jones’s sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton; Clinton’s sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky; Lewinsky’s friendship with Linda Tripp; and the tangle of lies, half-truths and illicit recordings that were ultimately detailed in the Starr Report, the infamous and lurid document prepared by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr....
From the group interview with Annaleigh Ashford (Paula Jones), Sarah Paulson (Linda Tripp), Beanie Feldstein (Monica Lewinsky), and Ryan Murphy (who isn't really identified in the article/we're just told it's "Ryan Murphy's 'Impeachment'):
"The hallmarks of contemporary ornamental masculinity — being valued as the object of the gaze, playing the perpetual child, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing — are the very ones that women have, for half a century, struggled to dismantle as belittling, misogynist characterizations of femininity. The preoccupation with popularity, glamour, celebrity, appearance — what are these qualities but the old consumer face of the Girl? If Mr. Trump is reclaiming a traditional stereotypical sex role, it’s one that long belonged to women.
Why have so many of the modern-day grunts who mourn the loss of 'old-fashioned' manhood hitched their wagon to a silk-suited flyboy? Since at least the 1990s, and at full tilt in the era of social media, men have been faced with a quandary: how to define their sex in a culture where visibility, performance and marketability are the currency. You could say that Mr. Trump has, if nothing else, found a way. But he’s done so not by defending the Greatest Generation man, but by abandoning him."
"Flyboy" is explained elsewhere in the column. It's a WWII epithet for aviators who posed in silk scarves, Faludi explains, and were disparaged as not showing true manliness.
By the way is Trump "silk-suited"? I presume his suits are wool, not silk. I looked it up and found a lot of articles about how cheap Trump's suits look! Here's an example of such an article from right before he won the 2016 election. We were told it matters because "you can tell a lot about someone by the way they dress," and Trump's baggy clothes show that "he isn't detail-oriented." The article ends: "Next Tuesday, vote with your sartorial conscience."
Here's a good clip showing Hirono's earnest, mildly contemptuous attitude toward the Supreme Court nominee and editing in the use of "sexual preference" by a few notables, including Joe Biden and Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who Mazie Hirono called "our champion" on Monday, used the term "sexual preference" in 2017. Hirono jumped on Amy Coney Barrett for saying it Tuesday, calling it "offensive and outdated." pic.twitter.com/8bHIQTSVFkhttps://t.co/JlcRA35g59
I was surprised to hear that "sexual preference" has become — at least in some circles — a politically incorrect term. I could immediately see the reason for objecting to it: It vaguely suggests that sexual orientation is a choice, even though I don't think it's true that we choose our preferences. It might suggest that who we love — and who we feel sexually attracted to — is lightweight, more like which flavor ice cream we like better than another. Yes, you prefer to have sex with a blonde, but if you can't have the blonde, the brunette will do just as well.
Why not get bent out of shape about "sexual orientation" then? Orientation suggests pointing east or west on a landscape. All you have to do is turn around and you'll have a different orientation.
And why the focus on immutability anyway? I think even if sexual attraction is a matter of choice, your choice is worth of respect. Choices are important and a good foundation for rights in a free society. Think of freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom to have political opinions and to speak about them. These things matter in part because they can change and you do have a choice.
Indeed, the right to have an abortion is referred to as the right to choose. It's about individual autonomy. Let me quote the 3-Justice opinion that determined the outcome in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (the case that partially overruled Roe v. Wade in 1992):
These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
But I took Hirono's scolding to heart. Even though what I've just said is what I genuinely think upon reflection, my first reaction was: Oh! I didn't know this was offensive! Have I offended?! I knew I could look in my 17-year blog archive and in my classnotes from conlaw2 to see if I'd used the offending phrase.
"Lately, I have asked myself this question: Could I have moved forward from that moment without any assistance with my mental health and state of well-being?... We’ve sequestered ourselves for months.... [H]ow do we step out into this new world—emotionally? What about the mental health costs of the underlying anxiety of the times?... [T]he administration has overlooked a dire need—and that decision is a reflection of our values and priorities in this country.... We need the loud, culturally relevant presence of an expert in mental health.... A psychologist general at the forefront of mental health research and delivery would send a strong message that psychological well-being is prized on a par with physical health—a message in keeping with the phrase 'Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'"... And someone whom we trust. Someone who might become so familiar to us that she or he would turn into a regular character depicted on Saturday Night Live.... [A]ll we’re left with are fictional characters from television—paging Dr. Frasier Crane (Frasier), Dr. Jennifer Melfi (The Sopranos), Dr. Noelle Akopian (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Charlie Brown’s pal Lucy, and, of course, all of Larry David’s therapists on Curb. In all seriousness, this speaks to a significant imbalance in our society."
From "The Forgotten F-Word in the Pandemic/Monica Lewinsky wonders if these times demand a prominent mental health czar" by Monica Lewinsky (Vanity Fair). The "The Forgotten F-Word" is feelings. "The Gun Incident" is that time in 2011 when she was stopped in her car and "someone... wearing a widely striped, bright turquoise and gray sweatshirt... gripping a gun, brandished [it] at his waist" in such a way that she was somehow "looking straight down the barrel of A Gun." The car was mightier than the gun, and she was able to "jam my Prius into drive, gun the accelerator, and move forward... [t]ires squealing." I didn't know you could jam and gun a Prius and get its tires to squeal, but Lewinsky deploys action verbs. I love that it's a Prius and that we're not told the color of the "someone" though we're told the color of his sweatshirt — bright turquoise! The point is, she had a traumatic experience in 2011, and she sought psychiatric care, which puts her in a position to recommend mental health care for those going through trauma, and since 2020 is so traumatic for all of us, the nation should have a Psychologist General, and it ought to be someone with such cultural prominence that she/he would get impersonated on "SNL." Instead we only have fictional characters as our centrally prominent psychologist, which is too bad.
That has me remember when the nation did have one most-famous psychologist, and it was somebody that got joked about and impersonated. Do you remember? It was Dr. Joyce Brothers!
While defending the taping as necessary to protect herself if her credibility were questioned, Tripp also consulted with a New York literary agent before beginning her secret recordings. Her initial concerns proved warranted when officials and pundits questioned her motives and attacked her character.
Tripp soon became a recognizable member of the wide cast of characters in the impeachment drama, so much so that actor John Goodman appeared as Tripp several times on “Saturday Night Live.”...
That was back when women who came forward and exposed sexual harassment in the workplace were treated as fat, ugly, old, jealous, self-aggrandizing freaks. But America had not yet learned about sexual harassment... other than that time we watched the high-profile, televised attack on Clarence Thomas. Who portrayed Anita Hill on "Saturday Night Live"?
"You feel like you’re staggering around — you’ve been in a 15-round prizefight that was extended to 30 rounds, and here’s something that’ll take your mind off it for a while,” Mr. Clinton says. “Everybody’s life has pressures and disappointments and terrors, fears of whatever, things I did to manage my anxieties for years."
He pictures himself as a boxer going 20 rounds, then suddenly he's in Oprahesque confessional mode, offering up bullshit bonbons of self-insight. Don't eat that. But it's good for a laugh.
But it's really not so funny. He says "something that’ll take your mind off it" and "things I did." But the thing was a human being — a woman. Even as he's trying to present himself as having reflected and gained perspective and wisdom, he's still speaking of Monica Lewinsky as an object, understood in terms of what she did for him. His new insight is only to diminish the use she had. He ought to have managed his anxieties better, but at the time he took advantage of her — you know, of the thing.
I was just talking — yesterday, in off-blog life — about Monica Lewinsky. I have long taken the position — in real-world conversations — that Monica Lewinsky really loved Bill Clinton and would have done anything for him, would have continued to please him in the style of old-fashioned femininity, driven by love wherever it went. Her confidante, Linda Tripp, is often disparaged, but we should recognize her as an early exemplar of the #MeToo woman. She was the woman telling another woman to wake up and look at what is really happening. This isn't love. This is exploitation. Your emotionality has been weaponized against you, to diminish and control you, but it needs to gather force and disturb the universe.
This idea of the indelible mark works to downplay the knowledge that the Senate will acquit the President. He won't be removed from office, so wasn't impeachment futile? No, it matters! It's an indelible mark that will last forever, a stain that can never be removed!
The assertion of indelibility seemed really important for... what?... a day? And then along came the new idea that the President wasn't even impeached at all. Yes, that too, happened on December 19th. Noah Feldman — last seen somberly informing us that what Donald Trump did was oh, so impeachable — returned for Act 2 of Law Professors Tell You What the Law Is.
It's December 23, and I haven't talked about this show yet. I've been actively avoiding it. I don't want to see "Cats" or "The Rise of Skywalker" either. I did feel like watching vintage TV commercials about laundry products that miraculously eradicated stains. (Remember the Clinton impeachment with its "stained" dress that was only stained because of a conscious choice not to wash it at all?) I found these 2 old Wisk ads — one from the 1970s and another from 1983. They're amusing to watch in sequence because of the radical social change from one decade to the next:
So, what's the answer to the question is Trump impeached? Sorry, I don't play in the show called Law Professors Tell You What the Law Is. But if you want to know what "impeachment" is, I'd say the answer has to do with what Americans believe it is. Whether Trump was impeached is a manipulable concept, and so is whether impeachment dirties the President, even temporarily. Maybe it's a mark of distinction to the one who is impeached and an embarrassment to the impeachers.
Professor Feldman says impeachment is "a process" and it's not complete until the House formally tells the Senate that it has voted to impeach. Is that about what impeachment means or about what impeachment does? The latter question is what turns on the Senate's "sole power to Try all impeachments"? Is the vote enough or must the House tell the Senate about the vote? Do you think the House should have the power to vote to impeach and then to withhold the case from the Senate? If that question needs to be answered, it's the Senate that will give the final answer. But the Senate can just as well decide not to decide, and leave this impeachment where the House has stowed it —in the back of the closet like an unwashed dress...
... she said she initially thought the marks on her dress "could be spinach dip or something."... she didn’t notice the stain until she took the dress out for Thanksgiving. She tried it on for confidante Linda Tripp, who told her it made her look fat. When the two women figured out that the president’s semen was deposited on the blue Gap dress, Tripp — who was taping Lewinsky — encouraged her to keep it....
Just keep it around. You might want to use it. But for now, you know, it makes you look fat.
Phonetically speaking, 'horny' is ugly. It lends itself to a nasal sound that’s comically inelegant. 'Horny' has benefited... from that same so-bad-it’s-good rationality."'I used to hate the word,' Sophia Benoit said. 'I used to think it was so disgusting.' Ms. Benoit writes a column for GQ about the sexiest things that men did during the month, called 'Horny on Main,' which on the internet means posting sexually charged content to your main social media account, as opposed to posting on a separate, and likely secret, account that was created for that purpose... 'But I love it now, because I think we, especially women, have reclaimed it and made it not gross,' Ms. Benoit said
Well, of course, when it's about women, it's not gross.
Twenty-five years ago, William Safire wrote about 'horny” for his etymology column in The New York Times Magazine, noting that a “horn is hard; it is shaft-shaped; since the 15th century, it has been used as a symbol for the male’s erect sex organ.”
Let's go read that old Safire column, because there had to be a reason why the subject came up — something in the news that half-century ago. Aha!
Toward the end of "Meet the Press"... we were discussing Whitewatergate. David Broder of The Washington Post took issue with my suspicions of heavy financial scandal ahead. "If you told me that Bill Clinton was very horny or very ambitious," Mr. Broder opined over the NBC network, "I would have no trouble believing it. If you told me that he was money-hungry and was cutting corners for money, I'd say that doesn't sound like the Bill Clinton I know."
When the show ended, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and columnist looked around and innocently asked, "Can you use a word like horny on television?"... In my opinion, no... Instead of "if you told me he was horny," try "if you told me he played around a lot." (In formal newspaper writing, of course, you could not use play around, except in a quotation; you would have to use terms like promiscuous or the fuzzier, less judgmental sexually active, or if referring to a specific state, sexually aroused.
So it was about Bill Clinton, and having just spoken of the notion of women as the cultural washing machine, I must note the havoc caused in America when that man, Mr. Clinton, sullied a woman's dress and she chose not to clean it.
By the way, that Safire article is from February 6, 1994 — and that was 4 years before the name Monica Lewinsky first appeared in the NYT... in an editorial called "A Crisis From Petty Sources" (January 28, 1998):
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And there's one more panel:
Google gives me 2 pix of Obama stuffing something into his mouth and one of Reagan. This is the most obvious caricature idea for Lewinsky. You'd think dozens of lame efforts would show up in this search. And George Magazine published one. Where is it? Is Google caring for our presumed devotion to the beloved boy? I mean John John. Not that rogue Bill!
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