"As a 'very, very effeminate boy' growing up in Baltimore, Ben Appel was teased mercilessly. At school, where he was regularly bullied, the other kids called him 'Bengay.'..."

"But when Appel later enrolled at Columbia University, eager to learn about the theories behind his activism, the rhetoric he encountered felt more like dogma than inquiry. 'According to queer theory, if you're a man who behaves in "unmasculine" ways or wears eyeliner you must be a woman inside, which I thought was regressive.... Saying that those superficial attributes are what make women women, and that any variation on the rough he-man stereotype means you're not a man, reinforces these rigid sex roles, and I thought we were supposed to be against those.' In his book 'Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic' [commission earned] which comes out next week, Appel argues that gender ideology is 'illiberal, regressive and anti-gay'...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "The Growing Divide in the Rainbow Coalition/More gay people are speaking out against the gender ideology of trans and queer activists" (Wall Street Journal).

As the headline indicates, there's much more at the link than Appel's story. To quote just a bit:

"It started decades ago, in my opinion. It started decades ago with timeouts and last-place participation trophies."

"And sorry to put it so harsh, but it seems to me like we lost a good portion of a few generations of men who've just turned into complete fucking pussies."

Said Kid Rock, getting the last word in a discussion — with Bill Maher, Tim Ryan, and Pamela Paul — that started out with a criticism of the Boy Scouts changing its name to Scouting America.

So now comes the postmortem.

I see this little collection of chastened musings on the edge of the NYT front page...

... but I don't have to read this stuff. For you, though, I'll power through it super-quick and say...

1. "In this new era, in which supporting Palestinian freedom has become central to what it means to be progressive, the Palestinian exception is not just immoral. It’s politically disastrous."

2. "In the longer term, we’ll need liberal politics that are about more than just fending off the right."

3. "Instead of proposing sweeping new programs or even taking a stand, as Ms. Harris did, in defense of the status quo, [Democrats] could try to redefine themselves as responsible reformers."

4. "She spoke in the foamy blather of a corporate human resources manager. She pandered to low-information, single women voters by appearing on podcasts like 'Call Her Daddy' and goofballing along to her 'brat' label. She often came across as fake and scripted... seeming to parrot whatever her political consultants told her. The act wore thin."

"I have harbored a strong dislike of summer activity dating back to a series of failed attempts at camp during childhood...."

"Maine takes up a lot of my mental space, probably because I don’t go there. People in Maine have undiscovered hamlets where everyone has been coming for ages and they barbecue amiably with authentic locals at night. Others belong to Old Families with a private island off the coast tucked into the family tree, a place where only family have been allowed to go for hundreds of years. On this island they have sailboats and clambakes and croquet and break out periodically into song. These kinds of summers are plainly out of reach. The 1 percent of the 1 percent don’t need to plan summer because they have it built in. They have a place on the Vineyard or in the Hamptons. They belong to a club where everyone speaks golf and there’s a long waiting list even for those who can afford it. Summer is when the maw of income inequality gapes wide open and only people who summer are allowed in.... I marvel at people with second homes when I can barely stay on top of my one, and summer traffic stresses me out. And what did I miss, really?..."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "It’s Too Late for Summer Now" (NYT).

"When someone drones on about 'solidarity,' all I hear is, 'Get in line.' When there’s no room for dissent from the dissent..."

"...there’s no room for me. Color me an anti-fan of performative politics, particularly if it means I’d be part of the show that features bigots posing as bleeding hearts. Plus, all that earnestness! It brings out my ironic and impish side, inclined to correct typos on signage or foment some kind of peripheral debate. Every time someone at one of those encampments cried out 'Free Palestine' I’d be tempted to yell 'From Hamas!' I’d surely get kicked out of the group that wants to kick other people out.... I realize we live in a country born of protest and my attitude may seem vaguely un-American. Watching the rabble-rousers on HBO’s 'John Adams' during Covid lockdown, my first grumbly thought was, 'Stop whining and pay your taxes!' Reading about the Whiskey Rebellion made me think of drunken MAGA types sloganeering at a Trump rally about the glory of firearms...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "Confessions of an Anti-Protester" (NYT)(free access link).

I share a lot of those feelings. I feel a sense of heightened individuality when I find myself in a crowd. And, like Paul, I've only participated in one political protest in my entire life, but I do rankle at "drunken MAGA types sloganeering at a Trump rally."

Drinking at a Trump rally? Where does she get that? I see the effort at humor after the mention of the Whiskey Rebellion, but I don't think there's drunkenness at Trump rallies. Maybe attend one and look around. You don't have to protest. You don't even need to support the candidate. Snake through the line and talk to people over the railings.

You may be surprised. They might be real human individuals, like you.

"For those of us who love to travel, the question of whether to revisit a place you’ve been to before is a repeated conundrum...."

"You’ve changed and the place has changed. You’re visiting not simply a place, but a place captured in a moment in time — one that exists for you in the past and to a past version of yourself.... Every traveler has been told on one journey or another, 'You should have been here 30 years ago.' You missed Angkor Wat when it was largely abandoned. Beijing when the sky was still blue. Iceland before Instagram. It can seem like you’ve always arrived too late...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "The Joys and Perils of Return Travel" (NYT).

I would think that any place that turns out to have been worth traveling to once is better seen on the second visit. This principle applies to many other things, such as seeing a movie, reading a book, eating a food, and — most obviously — meeting a person. If your reaction to a first encounter is once is enough, then, in retrospect, you're seeing that it didn't really meet the better-than-nothing standard.

"My brain wants to delete everything it’s heard from people who have spent time in [Biden's] presence in the last year. (It’s not encouraging.)"

I wanted to highlight those 2 stray sentences that appear in "Biden Must Win. But How?," an opinion piece by Pamela Paul in The New York Times.

I really don't care what her "brain" "wants." Your brain is you. If it feels like a separate entity that you need to speak about in the third person, something is very wrong. Maybe you think it's humorous. But you're talking about withholding information from us. You're admitting that you know things that would hurt Biden's campaign, and you won't share it with the voters. You just wish you didn't know.

This is destructive of democracy. There must be a flow of information to the voters.

Paul goes on to argue that the Biden campaign should stress substantive policy differences between Trump and Biden. That's what I've been saying too. But you can't simply hide the candidate and forefront the party's policy agenda as if the man is nothing at all. You can't beat something with nothing.

If this becomes a personality contest — as hideous and inconceivable as that may sound to steadfast Trump loathers — Biden may well lose. 

ADDED: Pamela Paul exhibits the problem that Ricky Gervais mocks Karl Pilkington about: 

All the women Trump might pick for VP fit "the demeaning gendered stereotypes Trump basks in..."

"... whether it’s the steely, stilettoed vixen or the no-nonsense broad. Of the first sort, [Kristi] Noem and [Kari] Lake both look the part, which has always been top of mind to Trump, who told his female staffers to 'dress like women.' They’re impeccably groomed in the ready-for-TV mold of Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway. Of the second type, there’s Mean Girl Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon fantasist whose relationship to the truth rivals that of the election lawyer turned criminal Sidney Powell, and the forceful but unthreatening Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Yes, these are all distasteful stereotypes...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "Please Let It Not Be a Woman" (NYT).

Why is it okay to articulate these stereotypes... and what's so bad about them? Anyone who hopes to be seen as a possible President must be steely and no-nonsense. What's "demeaning"? These adjectives only sound demeaning when attached to the nouns the New York Times writer chose: "vixen" and "broad." Those terms are used to divide the women into 2 groups based on looks. And Trump is supposed to be the sexist here? The writer is expressing contempt for women if they glam up and if they don't. And that's in a column expressing the hope that all the female options are rejected.

By the way, did you know that "vixen," referring to a human woman, originally meant a quarrelsome shrew? 

"For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed... a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions..."

"... that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students. When, as a student at Harvard Law School, I was booed and hissed and told to 'go die' for articulating pro-life or other conservative views, exactly zero administrators cared about my feelings. Nor did it cross my mind to ask them for help. I was an adult. I could handle my classmates’ anger. Yet how sensitive are administrators to student feelings under other circumstances? I had to chuckle when I read my colleague Pamela Paul’s excellent column on the Columbia School of Social Work and she quoted a school glossary that uses the term 'folx.' Why spell the word with an 'x'? Because some apparently believe the letter 's' in 'folks' renders the term insufficiently inclusive. I kid you not...."The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes.... "

Writes David French, in "What the University Presidents Got Right and Wrong About Antisemitic Speech" (NYT).

French concludes (and I agree): "[P]rotect students from harassment... But do not protect students from speech.... The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more."

Jordan Peterson overwhelms the NYT columnist Pamela Paul and Cruz crushes Bill Maher.

Bill does stand down amusingly.

Watch "Overtime: Sen. Ted Cruz, Jordan Peterson, Pamela Paul | Real Time with Bill Maher":

"In what at first glance might seem like a positive (and possibly 'sex positive') move, the term 'sex work' suddenly appears to be everywhere...."

"It’s now commonly used by politicians, the media, Hollywood and government agencies. But make no mistake: 'Sex work' is hardly a sign of liberation. Why, you might wonder, does exchanging money for sex need a rebrand? Derogatory terms like 'hooker' and 'whore' were long ago replaced by the more neutral 'prostitute.' But 'sex worker' goes one step further, couching it as a conventional job title, like something plucked out of 'What Color Is Your Parachute?' Its most grotesque variant is the phrase 'child sex worker,' which has appeared in a wide range of publications, including BuzzFeed, The Decider and The Independent. (Sometimes the phrase has been edited out after publication.)... In recent years, language has undergone drastic shifts in an effort to reduce harm. Sometimes these shifts result in contorted language that obscures meaning. Sometimes these shifts make people feel better without changing anything of substance. And sometimes they do move the needle toward positive change, which is always welcome. But the use of 'sex work,' however lofty the intention, effectively increases the likelihood of harm.... To help people hurt by the sex trade, we need to call it like it is."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "What It Means to Call Prostitution 'Sex Work'" (NYT).

"In a recent study, a team of marketing professors looked at how service employees perceive 'customer deviant behaviors,' which include minor infractions like incivility and aggression..."

"... as well as more serious offenses like shoplifting and fraudulent returns. The researchers found that shoplifting was 'by far' the most prevalent and detrimental form of deviant behavior. According to the study, in the presence of a suspected thief the burden of policing often falls to frontline employees, who, depending on company policy, may be expected to guard the store, stand by passively or even assist the thieves as if they were paying customers. These behaviors leave employees feeling frustrated, angry, helpless, targeted, unmotivated and uncomfortable. Allowing shoplifting to continue unimpeded, the authors found, undermines the sense of pride they might otherwise find in their work and the workplace.... Because retailers continue to struggle with underemployment and employee retention, stores are often more sparsely staffed than they once were, and all the more grim. On a recent shopping excursion in Manhattan, I saw something I’d never seen before: a handwritten sign in the window of a major clothing chain, apologizing for closing for an hour midday because of understaffing...."

Writes Pamela Paul, in "What We Lose to Shoplifting" (NYT).

It's amazing that stores — the kind you can physically enter and shop in — still exist.

"But [Hadley] Freeman is eager to dispel the idea that anorexia is simply about the desire to be thin. Instead, she says, the goal..."

"... is to look ill, like a skeleton. It’s about courting death. Among psychiatric illnesses, anorexia is among the deadliest.... 'Anorexia is a way of telling people you’re unhappy without saying it because saying it looks entitled,' Freeman told me. 'It’s a highly visible outward expression of saying something is very wrong here.'... Nearly three in five teenage girls reported feeling 'persistent sadness' in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the highest ratio in a decade. Whichever susceptibilities they are born into and whatever pain they’re feeling in the world, girls clearly seem to be taking it out on themselves. We need to ask very seriously why."

Writes Pamela Paul in "Girls Are Taking Their Pain Out on Themselves" (NYT)(discussing Hadley Freeman's memoir, "Good Girls: A Study and Story of Anorexia").

"But nothing Rowling has said qualifies as transphobic. She is not disputing the existence of gender dysphoria."

"She has never voiced opposition to allowing people to transition under evidence-based therapeutic and medical care. She is not denying transgender people equal pay or housing. There is no evidence that she is putting trans people 'in danger,' as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist. Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called '20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.' After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, 'I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.' On Twitter she declared, 'You’re burning the wrong witch.'"

Writes Pamela Paul in "In Defense of J.K. Rowling" (NYT).

If my name were Rosetta, my go-to metaphor for persecution wouldn't be witch-burning. It would be stoning. But "witch" is apt because there's a new podcast, "The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling."

"Women, of course, have been accommodating. They’ve welcomed transgender women into their organizations."

"They’ve learned that to propose any space just for biological women in situations where the presence of males can be threatening or unfair — rape crisis centers, domestic abuse shelters, competitive sports — is currently viewed by some as exclusionary. If there are other marginalized people to fight for, it’s assumed women will be the ones to serve other people’s agendas rather than promote their own. But, but, but. Can you blame the sisterhood for feeling a little nervous?... For essentially ceding to another backlash?... Seeing women as their own complete entities, not just a collection of derivative parts, was an important part of the struggle for sexual equality. But here we go again, parsing women into organs.... Those women who do publicly express mixed emotions... are maligned as somehow transphobic or labeled TERFs.... When not defining women by body parts, misogynists on both ideological poles seem determined to reduce women to rigid gender stereotypes.... Women are maternal and domestic — the feelers and the givers and the 'Don’t mind mes.'... Gender identity workbooks created by transgender advocacy groups for use in schools offer children helpful diagrams suggesting that certain styles or behaviors are 'masculine' and others 'feminine.' Didn’t we ditch those straitened categories in the ’70s?"

From "The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count" by Pamela Paul (NYT).

"Am I, as a new columnist for The Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?"

"Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture — docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts. It’s the ultimate litmus test: Only those whose 'lived experience' matches the story are qualified to tell the tale... Here’s the argument: The dominant culture (white, male, Western, straight) has been dictating the terms for decades, effectively silencing or 'erasing' the authentic identities and voices of the people whose stories are being told. The time has come to 'center' these other voices.... If we followed the solipsistic credo of always 'centering' identity when greenlighting a project, we’d lose out on much of journalism, history and fiction. Culture is a conversation, not a monologue. The outsider’s take, whether it comes from a journalist, historian, writer or director, can offer its own equally valid perspective.... Privileging only those voices with a stake in a story carries its own risks.... You may find it harder to maintain a critical distance.... You may become blinded to ideas that contradict your own or subconsciously de-emphasize them. You may have an agenda...."

From "The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’" by Pamela Paul (NYT).