"Boebert famously campaigned against drag story hours, while Noem wrote to South Dakota’s college board asking it to ban campus drag shows...."

"Yet these women express themselves via a dizzying mash-up of gendered conventions: They augment their smiles, bedazzle their pantsuits, and broadcast their bench presses. In their fevered performances of hyperfemininity and hypermasculinity, so many of the GOP’s most visible women are themselves engaging in a form of drag. Of course, drag in its queer context offers the chance to slip from and send up the constricting bounds of gender norms, to encourage empathy and celebrate diverse forms of identity. The show these Republican politicians are putting on is its cold opposite: asphyxiated, distended, nasty. Theirs is surely drag’s gothic inverse."

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "How Did Republican Women End Up Like This? The baffling, contradictory demands of being female in the party of Donald Trump" (NY Magazine).

"As a journalist who has been told for decades that my empathy for the female candidates I often cover is probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification..."

"... let me just tell you that you should never stand between a white male political journalist over the age of 40 and his feelings about the Kennedys...."

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "RFK Jr.’s Inside Job How a conspiracy-spewing literal Kennedy posing as a populist outsider jolted the Democratic Party" (NY Magazine).

Unlike his uncles and his father, RFK Jr. doesn't have a "brain trust" — doesn't have "protective support from the journalists and politically powerful friends who shined him up, in many cases literally editing his words." He used to, but...

Now his brain trust appears to be the hyperonline, hard-right masculinity influencers who give him the approval he craves and encourage him to do things like post videos of himself shirtless, his chest and arms improbably pumped, doing nine janky push-ups. 

Traister — who just revealed she knows her "empathy for the female candidates" is regarded by others as "probably overemotional and built too strongly on personal identification" — now openly displays her distaste for men who seem afflicted by overemotional attraction to the masculinity of a male candidate. 

"Why was [Andrew Cuomo] celebrated for so long?"

The headline for an article at New York Magazine is "Abuse and Power Andrew Cuomo’s governorship has been defined by cruelty that disguised chronic mismanagement. Why was that celebrated for so long?"

Was the "governorship" celebrated or was the governor celebrated? I rewrote the headline for my post title because it seemed perversely impersonal and inaccurate to say that people have been celebrating the abstraction. People were celebrating the man. There was some embarrassing fawning.

The NY Magazine article is by Rebecca Traister. She writes: "Cuomo was a bully, but he was our bully." He was also a liar: 

“He makes things up like I’ve never seen anyone do before,” said [Bill Lipton, a founder of the Working Families Party]. “He makes people who disagree with him feel like they’re crazy.” It’s a pattern that — like his narcissism, theatrical bombast, love of cameras, hatred of “experts,” and the fact that, as one national reporter who covered him said, “I don’t think he believes in much, except that he wants to be powerful”—makes Cuomo not the anti-Trump that many imagined him, but rather the 45th president’s Democratic twin. Or, as one person put it to me, they are “the same person” but for “two major exceptions: Fred Trump was Donald Trump’s father, and Mario Cuomo was Andrew Cuomo’s father.”

What if the hatred for Trump is really envy? The haters just want one like that for themselves. 

ADDED: These personality traits — narcissism, theatrical bombast, love of cameras, no deeper belief than the love of power — will be found in virtually all politicians. Shy, humble philosophers who shrink at imposing their will on others don't step forward and announce their candidacy. Those of you who fall for  bullies need to take responsibility for your cheesy love affairs. 

"When I say that Joe Biden is basic, by which I mean 100 percent medium grade, I don’t intend it as an insult."

"I mean it as an honest description of everything he seems to want to assure us he is: ordinary, relatable, comforting in the lack of intellectual, ideological, or political threat he poses. Biden looks and talks like presidents have looked and talked—before the election of Barack Obama and his bilious cartoon inversion, Trump—since forever.... Biden had a long and largely unremarkable political career as a senator from Delaware.... Prior to 2020, he had made two unsuccessful tries at the presidency, in 1988 and again in 2008, when he lost the Iowa caucuses well behind two historical firsts, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. During his primary contest against Obama, Biden had made gently racist comments about his opponent, noting the 'storybook' qualities of 'the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.' With this paternalistic appraisal, and its lightly resentful affirmative-action framing of Obama’s success, Biden had projected attitudes so familiarly American that they perhaps sealed his deal as Obama’s running mate—the strain of average white masculinity he radiated would calm the nerves of some who might be discomfited by the meteoric rise of a Black man.... And now [Biden] is received as a balm. For what injury? The one caused by the spasm of violent revulsion and resentment millions of voters and politicians felt after having elected a single Black man to, and considered a single white woman for, the American presidency. Of course, neither of those people—Obama or Clinton—fully challenged the system of white capitalist patriarchy that Biden is a neater symbol for. Had they presented more substantive rebukes to that system, they never would have made it as far as they did."

From "America Is Back, Indeed With Biden we’ve restored our country’s favorite tradition: basic, middling, white patriarchy" by Rebecca Traister (NY Magazine). This gets my tag "Biden attacked from the left." Like the article, the photograph is hostile:

"Yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood up and gave one of the finest speeches recently heard on the House floor, calling out not just Florida representative Ted Yoho..."

"... for having called her 'disgusting,' 'out of your freaking mind,' and a 'fucking bitch' on the steps of the Capitol in front of reporters on Tuesday, but also elucidating how that kind of language is normalized and deployed against all kinds of women, on all kinds of days. It was a remarkable piece of oratory, clear and thoughtful about some of the knottiest dynamics of gendered power imbalance in political, public, and personal life.... [Yoho] had offered up a floor speech purported to be apology, though it was actually far closer to pallid self-justification. 'Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of my language,' Yoho had said, in a speech in which he did not mention Ocasio-Cortez’s name, and in which he nonsensically refused to 'apologize for my passion, or for loving my God, my family, and my country.' It was this non-apology and not his original outburst, Ocasio-Cortez said on Thursday, that led her to make her own speech, in which she eviscerated Yoho’s use of familial pablum and domestic association with women as evidence of his respect for them. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that she, too, was someone’s daughter, and that that did not in any way insulate her or other women, also daughters and wives, from the impact of degrading and sexist diminution."

Writes Rebecca Traister in "The Poison of Male Incivility/When a woman dares respond to it, she’s seen as 'disruptive'" (The Cut).

Why did Yoho defend himself like that? He could have said he was just doing equality, and behind the scenes this is how the men talk to other men, using strong language. His apology was sexist, and it, ironically, cast the original remark as sexist. And now Traister can feed us civility bullshit.

"Warren agrees that her belief in Socratic dialogue informs how she instinctively engages with people professionally."

"In part, she said, Socratic teaching is about that back-and-forth, a breaking down of ideas and examining them from all angles. So when she and her policy team began discussing a wealth tax, she said, 'I kept taking the side of the opposition: Wouldn’t this create a problem? … We’re pulling it apart to stress-test it, see if it would work.'... One of Warren’s former students who declined to be named had a theory about the seeming paradox of a woman known as a bold political progressive adhering to an old-fashioned, rule-bound approach to teaching. It reminded him, he said, of Thurgood Marshall, who was known for being punctilious about civil procedure even as he broke revolutionary ground on civil rights. This student talked about how Marshall understood that rules could be used to enforce equality, and that as soon as you introduced flexibility and discretion, those with more power would take advantage of the wiggle room. Regulations, calling every name in a classroom, could serve as a set of guide rails, a system it would be harder to take advantage of. It’s easy to see how Warren’s fondness for just this kind of formal system jibes with her view of regulations in the financial industry. It is also true that teachers love rules.... It’s true that people may resent teachers. It’s also true that people are primed to resent teachers, because they resent women who might wield power over them, and it is still new and uncomfortable to think about women having political — presidential! — power. And yet: People who have had great teachers love them in ways that are intense and alchemical and irrational and sometimes difficult to convey — which is also, oddly enough, how some people love the politicians they believe in and choose to fight for."

From "Elizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy A lifelong teacher, she’s the most professorial presidential candidate ever. But does America want to be taught?" by Rebecca Traister" (The Cut).

"Those on the left have been going over how we’re supposed to feel about him for decades, but in the arguing about it, we have been asked to focus again and again on Clinton and his dick and what he did or didn’t do with it."

"The questions we’ve asked ourselves and one another have become defining. Are we morally compromised in our defense of him or sexually uptight in our condemnation? Are we shills for having not believed he should have resigned, or doing the bidding of a vindictive right wing if we say that, in retrospect, he probably should have?"

Writes Rebecca Traister, in "Who Was Jeffrey Epstein Calling? A close study of his circle — social, professional, transactional — reveals a damning portrait of elite New York" (a long compendium by the editors of New York Magazine). Traister continues:

Meanwhile, how much energy and time have been spent circling round this man and how we’ve felt about him, when in fact his behaviors were symptomatic of far broader and more damaging assumptions about men, power, and access to — as Trump has so memorably voiced it — pussies?

You wouldn't have spent all that time if you'd been consistent in the first place. Anyone who cared at all about feminism back then already knew the "far broader" picture! That is feminism. If you'd put feminism over party politics at the time, you'd have easily processed the Clinton story long ago.

After all, Clinton was elected president during a period that may turn out to be an aberration, just as the kinds of dominating, sexually aggressive behaviors that had been norms for his West Wing predecessors had become officially unacceptable, and 24 years before those behaviors would again become a presidential norm. So yes, Clinton got in trouble, yet still managed to sail out of office beloved by many, his reputation as the Big Dog mostly only enhanced by revelations of his exploits.

I don't understand the logic of this "After all... So yes" rhetoric. I feel that I'd need to rewrite those 2 sentences to begin to understand them. I invite your efforts. Here's mine: Although Clinton became President after America had officially rejected sexual harassment in the workplace, many people gave him a pass and even loved him more because he did it anyway.

But the election of Trump over Clinton’s wife, and the broad conversation around sexual assault and harassment that has erupted in its wake, has recast his behavior more profoundly.

Ha ha. What's "profound" about partisan politics? It's not profound. It's laughably shallow!

The buffoonery, the smallness and tantrums of Trump, has helped make clear what always should have been: that the out-of-control behavior toward women by powerful men, the lack of self-control or amount of self-regard that undergirded their reckless treatment of women, spoke not of virility or authority but of their immaturity.

To "undergird" is to fasten something securely from the under-side. According to this sentence, lack of self-control undergirded recklessness. When I see writing like this, my hypothesis is that the writer is declining to be straightforward. Here's my paraphrase: Things that are perfectly visible go in and out of focus depending on what you want to see.

The hot messiness of white-woman ass.

Phrases jump out at me as I try to read Rebecca Traister's "Don’t Give Up on the Women’s March" (New York Magazine):

[T]he fact that millions of women and men have turned out for mass protests for two years in a row, not despite tensions over racial, religious, ideological, and economic differences — but in the midst of them, some engaging them head-on — has been one of the most defining and electrifying features of this iteration of a women’s movement. The hot messiness has been one of contemporary feminism’s surest signs of life and of a willingness to work toward being better than it has been in the past.

At the Women’s March convention in 2017, the session on confronting white womanhood was the most oversubscribed of the weekend.... In the two years since, there has been vivid, if insufficient, acknowledgment of white patriarchy, not just within the nation but within the women’s movement.....

There was too little sense that a march of resistance to Donald Trump — organized and primarily attended by white women, co-opting a renewed culture of public protest pioneered within movements for racial justice (BLM) and leftist policy (Occupy), held in the wake of an election in which exit polls showed the majority of white women voting for Donald Trump and 94 percent of black women voting for Hillary Clinton — would have been disastrous. Such an event would have ensured that a contemporary revivification of a woman’s movement was bound to replicate the mistakes of the past, rather than to address and correct them. In other words, Mallory, Perez, and Sarsour wound up covering a lot of white-woman ass in 2017....

The reporting on Mallory, on Farrakhan, on the Women’s March, has taught me so much: about the history and role of the Nation of Islam, about the history of anti-Semitism in some black communities, and of racism within some Jewish communities. Is this not the ideal future for a movement of women, in which we must expose and examine the twisted histories of our own resentments?....

ADDED: It's almost as if Traister is calling on white women — especially Jewish women — to patronize women of color?

Slate: "The Kavanaugh Hearings Have Women Fired Up… to Vote Republican."

The article, here, is by Ruth Graham.

The titanic anger of progressive women has been a dominant theme in the media since President Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton two years ago. Two major books about female rage have been published this fall, including Good and Mad by writer and reporter Rebecca Traister. “This political moment has provoked a period in which more and more women have been in no mood to dress their fury up as anything other than raw and burning rage,” Traister wrote in the New York Times on Saturday. “Many women are yelling, shouting, using Sharpies to etch sharply worded slogans onto protest signs, making furious phone calls to representatives.”

But women’s rage is not a chorus performed in unison. Atlantic reporter Emma Green talked with about a dozen female conservative leaders across the country for a story this week that puts flesh on the Marist poll’s finding: that the Kavanaugh hearings have electrified conservative women too. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party told Green. The Indiana state director for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Jodi Smith, told Green that “people in Indiana are angry.” In her view, the hearings are “one of the best things that could happen to us” as she looks forward to a hotly contested Senate election in the state in November.

Here's the Emma Green article, "Conservative Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Other Voters Are, Too/Local- and state-level leaders across the country say they’re ready to lash out against Democrats in the midterm elections."

ADDED: Also in Slate, "Christine Blasey Ford Changed Everything/#MeToo was just the beginning. For these women, the Kavanaugh hearings have incited both hotter rage and a deeper personal reckoning." You know, some of us women are put off by hot rage — especially, for me, if you're simultaneously trying to disqualify Kavanaugh for expressing anger and if all the rage is in service to Democratic Party politics.

2 views of Serena Williams.

1. The Atlantic: "Serena Williams's U.S. Open Loss Was Humiliating—But Not For Her/What happened to the superstar was shocking. It was not surprising."

Taking a game away from Williams for using the word “thief” during such a high-stakes match is unlikely to do much to quash the notion that a double standard exists between men and women in today’s competitive tennis field. And the stakes of that double standard can feel even higher for women of color....

To see Williams’s comeback after a traumatic birth stymied over seemingly minor infractions seems unnecessary and malicious. To see the devastation that those penalties wrought on two women of color at the top of their sport, during what should have been a joyous time, is heartbreaking.

During a post-game interview Williams was undeterred: “I’m here to fight for women’s rights and women’s equality,” she said....

2. New York Post: "It’s shameful what US Open did to Naomi Osaka."

Here was a young girl who pulled off one of the greatest upsets ever, who fought for every point she earned, ashamed. At the awards ceremony, Osaka covered her face with her black visor and cried. The crowd booed her. Katrina Adams, chairman and president of the USTA, opened the awards ceremony by denigrating the winner and lionizing Williams — whose ego, if anything, needs piercing....

ADDED: Another iteration of view #1. In The Cut (by Rebecca Traister): "Serena Williams and the Game That Can’t Be Won (Yet) What rage costs a woman":

"You know what I love to do?... I love to go to Target with Amelia and just spend the day there."

"We just wander around in there, look at the patio furniture, the pajama section. It’s like six hours of tuning out." Six hours?!! "Well, not just at Target. We go to BJ’s; we each have things we like to eat there. Then I get the socks I like at Macy’s.... It’s just a few hours, six hours that I don’t have to think about Mitch McConnell. That’s all I need."

Says Elizabeth Warren, "scissoring the bottom off a cheap sweater at her kitchen island," according to "Leader of the Persistence Elizabeth Warren’s full-body fight to defeat Trump" by Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine. Amelia is Warren's daughter, born when Warren, who is 69, was 22. The sweater is one of "a bunch of gauzy open-front cardigans to put over her uniform of black pants and a black tank top," that, we're told, "cost about $13 each" and are too long, which she is dealing with by cutting them and allowing the unhemmed bottom to roll up.

Open Secrets put Elizabeth Warren's net worth at $7,820,514 in 2015, but we're told she likes to spend her spare time poking around for 6 hours at Target and she wears $13 sweaters that she has to hack into the shape she wants.

Well, buying cheap clothing is priceless political theater. I challenge Elizabeth Warren to step away from the Rebecca Traister puff pieces — too much luxury! — and go full Scott Walker:



But Scott Walker actually is poor. (Last I looked.)

"Clinton’s feckless replies to questions about #MeToo revealed an unpreparedness that spoke volumes about why men have been able to abuse their power with relative impunity for generations..."

"... while the women around them have been asked to pay the price for them over and over and over again.... Consider that Lewinsky herself has been asked to answer for this relationship — and only this relationship — for two decades. Her name has been used as a synonym for fellatio by performers including Eminem and Beyoncé; in 2001, she was asked onstage, 'How does it feel to be America’s premier blow-job queen?'... But it’s not just the woman he had the extramarital relationship with who’s been evaluated based on his bad acts; it’s also the one he had the marital relationship with. Hillary Clinton lost the support of many feminists who’d adored her when she decided to stand by her man. Others made it clear that they thought the choice was hers to make, but their support had its own dark underside, when pundits like the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd accused Hillary of leveraging sympathy as a wronged wife into a political career. From there, it was just a short leap to view Hillary Clinton’s pathbreaking achievements — as the first woman elected to the Senate from New York, and later as the first American woman to become a major-party nominee for the presidency — as fundamentally unearned, some sick lagniappe benefit of having been publicly hurt and humiliated."

From "Time's Up, Bill" by Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine.

Random observations:

1. There's that word "feckless" again. Last time we saw "feckless" it was Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless cunt." But Traister didn't call Bill Clinton a feckless dick. She didn't even call him "feckless." She called his replies "feckless."

2. Key word in that sentence about Monica Lewinsky: "onstage." She wasn't walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant when someone had the nerve to challenge her to say how it feels "to be America’s premier blow-job queen." She'd put herself onstage. That's a choice, and the choice was only there for her to make because she had gotten famous for having sexual relations with that man, Mr. Clinton. What about all the other White House interns who did not get their hands on the fleshly lever of power? Where did they end up? What claim to fame do they have? Monica could have been another one of them. It's less giddy fun, and she chose a path and keep choosing to stay on it. Otherwise, why was she onstage?

3. As for "Hillary Clinton lost the support of many feminists," I'd say: not enough.

4. As for "she decided to stand by her man," let's not forget that when Hillary used that phrase, it was during the 1992 campaign and she said: "You know, I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette." She had her well-thought out reasons for sticking with him. Also, that remark was in the context of Bill's adultery, not the sexualization of power in the workplace.

5. What's a lagniappe? Wikipedia quotes Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" (1883):

We picked up one excellent word—a word worth travelling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—"lagniappe." They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish—so they said. [NOTE: It's actually Quechua.] We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a "baker's dozen." It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop—or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know—he finishes the operation by saying—"Give me something for lagniappe."

The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor — I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.

When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans—and you say, "What, again?—no, I've had enough;" the other party says, "But just this one time more—this is for lagniappe." When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his "I beg pardon—no harm intended," into the briefer form of "Oh, that's for lagniappe."

6. Of course, I agree with Traister that Bill Clinton should be held accountable for his offenses against women, but I have been saying that for 20 years.

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 1: New York Magazine.

It's hard to keep up with the sexual harassment news, as women (and men!) suddenly speak up about things that have happened over the years, but yesterday's bombshell on Franken blew up this week's narrative, which was all about killing Roy Moore and getting Trump to trip over his dead body. The politically defunct Bill Clinton was strategically deployed to ensure Trump's downfall. It was easy to see that the liberal media had a narrative they were pretty excited about. And then comes Al, too big to ignore, too photographically real to deny, too off-message to allow the week's dramatic narrative to grind forward as anticipated.

So what I want to do is go to my usual places — my most-clicked bookmarks — and see how they've absorbed/processed the Al Franken news. My first stop is New York Magazine, where the relevant segment of the front page looks like this (click to enlarge):



There's one Franken story, set amid the stories that carry on the early week theme, and it's already flipped it into another problem with Trump: "Trump Condemns Al Franken, Still Has Nothing to Say About Roy Moore" ("President Trump’s hypocrisy reached new heights on Thursday night..."

But if you go further down the page, in a much less conspicuous spot, there's also "With Franken, the Reckoning Over Sexual Misconduct Comes to the Democrats," which went up at 1:07 yesterday afternoon. I guess it's old and drooping. In it, Ed Kilgore acknowledges the narrative problem:

With the country warmed up by a debate about whether Roy Moore’s alleged sexual misconduct toward underaged women should disqualify him for Senate candidacy, or even serve as grounds for his expulsion if he is elected on December 12, calls for Al Franken’s resignation will come quickly....

Franken needs to leave — it was immediately apparent — because he interferes with the game we're playing right now, making the GOP candidate lose an Alabama Senate seat. (They don't have to worry about Franken's seat, because if he gives up and gets out, a Democratic governor will appoint his replacement, good until the next election for that seat, which isn't until 2020.)

Kilgore crushes Franken into the week's narrative:

But no matter what happens in Alabama, the Franken revelations shows once again that while conservative Republican men may be more prone to justifying piggish and predatory behavior toward women...

may be!

... just as they have a cavalier if not hostile attitude toward women’s rights, sexual harassment and assault occur all over the partisan and ideological spectrum.

I do not for one minute believe that political identification with women's rights issues makes a man less likely to be a sexual harasser in private. It's at least as likely to be used as a cover. Look at Bill Clinton. Look at Harvey Weinstein. It worked!

As New York’s Rebecca Traister puts it, there’s a national “reckoning” under way that will head in unpredictable directions for many individuals and institutions alike. Democrats were already being drawn into a painful reassessment of Bill Clinton’s alleged crimes and admitted misconduct. But Al Franken and Roy Moore are presently the odd couple showing the potential consequences of the “reckoning” in politics.

That's how Kilgore ends it, almost but not quite committing to principle: We must treat like cases alike in the fight against the subordination of women.

New York Magazine readers don't seem too interested in sex and politics though. The top-ranked article on its "Most Popular" list is "Everything I Learned From Dressing Like a Kardashian for a Week." Second is a story about a bumper sticker that says, "FUCK TRUMP AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM." Third is another sexual harrassment story, the one I haven't got around to talking about "Sylvester Stallone and His Former Bodyguard Accused of Sexually Assaulting a 16-Year-Old Girl in 1986."

Maybe New York Magazine readers are going elsewhere for their Al Franken news, but maybe they don't want to see the bashing of a politician they've been loving. I search the archive to see the treatment New York Magazine has given Al Franken. I'm seeing a lot of fawning, like, from last May, a video, "Watch Al Franken Talk You Through His Sumptuous Book Cover."* And this:



All right, enough penetration into the mind of New York Magazine. I'm just making a mental note to watch Bill Maher's show tonight and see if he takes any revenge on Franken for his I'm-too-virtuous-for-you posturing last spring. Or do comedians empathize with each other? I hope not! Empathy is the death of comedy, but then, you know I've been saying we are entering the era of That's Not Funny and maybe nothing will ever be funny anymore. But that reminds me of the second stop I want to make in this morning's review of liberal websites processing the Al Franken news. [ADDED: It wasn't the second stop. Or the third. I hope to get to it!]

___________________________

* Remember when the globe he had his hand on wasn't a woman's breast?

"I have been having conversations about Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual harassment for more than 17 years."

Admits Rebecca Traister in "Why the Harvey Weinstein Sexual-Harassment Allegations Didn’t Come Out Until Now."

Back in 2000, in NYC, Weinstein called Traister "a cunt and declared that he was glad he was the 'fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town'" and knocked her boyfriend/colleague down "a set of stairs."

So why didn't she out him? And why didn't any of the other journalists who were there report anything? Photos were taken, but never published. Why did all you people shield him, and why should I listen to you now?

Back then, Harvey could spin — or suppress — anything; there were so many journalists on his payroll, working as consultants on movie projects, or as screenwriters, or for his magazine.

He could only do it because you were complicit. Were you all paid off?

I never really thought of trying to write the story myself. Back then, I didn’t write about feminism; there wasn’t a lot of journalism about feminism. 

There's been plenty of journalism about feminism for the last 50 years, but why did you need a foundation of plenteous journalism about feminism to write about such beastly behavior?

His behavior toward women was obviously understood to be a bad thing—this was a decade after Anita Hill’s accusations against Clarence Thomas had helped the country to understand that sexual harassment was not just a quirk of the modern workplace, but a professional and economic crime committed against women as a class. But...

The "but" should be, but we the liberal journalists helped everyone forget what we'd learned because it was so important to help Bill Clinton. But Traister's "but" is:

...  the story felt fuzzier, harder to tell about Harvey: the notion of the “casting couch” still had an almost romantic reverberation...

Oh, bullshit. Harvey was another liberal, like Bill Clinton, so you pushed the obvious principles to the side and protected him. The only fuzziness is the blur imposed by politics, and once you let that in, you have no principle.

But another reason that I never considered trying to report the story myself... I remembered what it was like to have the full force of Harvey Weinstein — back then a mountainous man — screaming vulgarities at me, his spit hitting my face. I had watched him haul my friend into the street and try to hurt him. That kind of force, that kind of power? I could not have won against that.

Ridiculous. You were afraid of him because of his physical size and strength in an in-person encounter? What the hell is writing for?! You got your distance. He wasn't around. From a distance, in writing, his "mountainous" physicality is one more thing that makes it easier to portray him as a brute — an ugly brute. The photographs of this man that accompany any article about him stir up only revulsion, not sympathy. Why would you not have won with words?

But Weinstein didn’t just exert physical power. He also employed legal and professional and economic power. He supposedly had every employee sign elaborate, binding nondisclosure agreements. He gave jobs to people who might otherwise work to bring him down, and gave gobs of money to other powerful people, who knows how much, but perhaps just enough to keep them from listening to ugly rumors that might circulate among young people, among less powerful people. For decades, the reporters who tried to tell the story of Harvey Weinstein butted up against the same wall of sheer force and immovable power that was leveraged against those ambitious actors, the vulnerable assistants, the executives whose careers, salaries, and reputations were in his hands.

That was even more material to use against him, and it's material that goes against all you reporters now. If you don't know how to get a story where a corrupt miscreant is using legal maneuverings and payoffs to suppress it, how are you a journalist?!

Something has changed. Sources have gone on the record. It’s worth it to wonder why. Perhaps because of shifts in how we understand these kinds of abuses. Recent years have seen scores of women, finding strength and some kind of power in numbers, come forward and tell their stories about Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump. 

So! Now, we get to the meat of it. When the targets were right wing (or perceived as right wing), like Clarence Thomas all those years ago in the pre-Clinton era, the journalists knew how to get at the story. But they did it so aggressively and brought down such big targets that the protection of Harvey Weinstein was too obvious. The wall of silence broke.

But now our consciousness has been raised. 

Oh, please. You had consciousness before. Take responsibility for the politically skewed reporting that has infected sexual harassment stories since the Clarence Thomas/Bill Clinton combination that shamed political liberals in the 1990s.

There's one more thing, according to Traister:

I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail, and, when I caught sight of him in May, he appeared to be walking with a cane.

So what are you saying? You feel better about kicking a weak little guy? You really were holding back because of his erstwhile mountainousness?

He has also lost power in the movie industry....

This is a confession of the absence of courage in journalism. You should be going after the most powerful people and go after them when they are doing their damage, not tell us about it after age and bad fortune have done half the work of laying him low.

ADDED: "I saw Harvey Weinstein earlier this year, at a Planned Parenthood celebration. I was struck... by his physical diminishment; he seemed small and frail...." How awful to see the words "Planned Parenthood" come up when the subject is the author's comfort in going after someone who is weak and small! This is one more effect of the liberal cocoon. Traister must not have noticed the grisly irony. 

"Elizabeth Warren Is Getting Hillary-ed."

A headline at New York Magazine, for a piece by Rebecca Traister, who does not use the word "Hillary-ed."

What does it mean to "get Hillary-ed"?

I guess it could mean a lot of things, but from the article, the idea seems to be to portray her "as hypocritical and untrustworthy" (because of her personal wealth), and to stress her emotionality. Some right-wing radio guy called her “frazzled” and “triggered,” which Traister calls "highly gendered language." And Warren is portrayed as taking a "doggedly pragmatic paths to advancement" — being one of the "hand-in-the-air Tracy Flicks of the world" that Americans instinctively loathe. The "right wing," we're told, "regards ambitious women as threatening and ugly," while the "left" sees them as "compromised and emblematic of reviled Establishment mores."

However right or wrong any of that is about how opponents attack female candidates and voters react to those attacks and how "highly gendered" it is, there's still the question whether we want to see "Hillary" become a verb. We've seen proper names become verbs. We know what "to Bork" means, because we know what happened to Bork. But what happened to Hillary? She's got a whole tome trying to say or avoid saying what happened. It's called "What Happened." What the hell happened? Sorry, that does not have the makings of a new verb.

Does Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg know what happened? Charlie Rose tried to get her to say: "Do you think sexism played a role in that campaign?" A role. Obviously, it had some role.



So it's unsurprising that she said "I have no doubt that it did." The audience claps and whoops though she's just said essentially nothing.

Rose is sharp enough to know he got essentially nothing and redid his question: "Do you think it was decisive?"

Ginsburg cagily said, "There are so many things that might have been decisive" and "But that was a major, major factor." The first statement absolves her of all responsibility, and the second statement gives those who want a quote a tasty nugget to enjoy.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not know what happened, because no one can really know. It's infinitely complex. Going forward, we need to predict what might happen and try to influence what happens. If we care about getting good candidates and figuring out whom to trust with political power, let's not screw up the discourse with the grotesque verb "to Hillary." Women candidates deserve better than that. We all deserve better than that.

If you care about a female candidate, you're not helping her by encouraging people to think of her as being like Hillary, even if you believe that some attacks on Hillary were unfairly sexist.

The yearning, stirring passions of the suburban white woman.

New York Magazine has this, by Rebecca Traister, "Can the New Activist Passion of Suburban White Women Change American Politics?":

To visit Georgia’s sixth in the days before the runoff is to land on a planet populated by politically impassioned women, talking as if they have just walked off the set of Thelma & Louise, using a language of awakening, liberation, and political fury that should indeed discomfit their conservative neighbors, and — if it is a harbinger of what’s to come — should shake conservative America more broadly....

Women speak with the youthful fever of having found new friends, or new love — of politics and each other....

“I tell people that I am fresh out of fucks,” says Tamara Brooking [a 50-year-old research assistant to a novelist]. “Seriously. I’m done. I’m done pretending that your hateful rhetoric is okay. I’m done pretending that people like us must be quiet to make you feel comfortable.”

I know you love seeming "youthful," but no one over 22 — and really no one — should be using no-fucks-left-to-give rhetoric. And by the time you're 50, Ms. Brooking, the stock prejudice is that it's the utterly mundane consequence of aging for you to have "no fucks."

In their nascent activism there are echoes of another American moment in which middle-class white women snapped to political consciousness. When describing their past inertia and isolation, these activists often sound more than a little bit like Betty Friedan, who wrote in the first paragraph of The Feminist Mystique, about the “strange stirring,” and “sense of dissatisfaction [and] yearning” that “each suburban wife struggled with …alone.”...

Apparently novelists have research assistants but New York Magazine doesn't have editors. The book is called "The Feminine Mystique," not "The Feminist Mystique."

And that book is about individual women wanting individual fulfillment in life by getting out of the house and into careers. It wasn't about collective action in politics!

And all that yearning, stirring passion is for a 30-year-old man. 

The reason I only have 1 post up today (until this one) is that I stopped to watch Bill Maher's show (which I had recorded).

I'd seen that he was the latest target in the game of Destroy a Comedian, and I wasn't interested in playing the game. We need our comedians, and if they're any good, they're going to offend us now and then. Maher does his show live, and he's got to jump at jibes when he sees them, and often he's childish or edgy or low.

I needed to watch the whole thing, and that took a while, because I have a sort of real-live, in-the-room, blogger-and-commenter thing happening here, and it takes a long time to watch the whole show. There's pausing and conversation and rewinding and innumerable points to be made — and not just about Maher's "Work in the fields? Senator, I’m a house nigger" response to Ben Sasse's invitation to come out to Nebraska and "work in the fields with us."

Meade and I weren't just talking about that, but about the entire interview with Ben Sasse, who was there to talk about his book — "The Vanishing American Adult" (which I've blogged about before). Sasse was doing a great job holding his ground and seeming like a smart, attractive, independent politician, and it will be a shame if people only want to talk about Maher's zinger with the bad word, but that's what we do these days. Because Sasse is right, adulthood is eroding.

Ooh! Maher said a bad word, Mommy. Punish him! 

And then there was a panel discussion, a completely unbalanced panel with what seemed to be 3 hopped-up Trump haters: Eliot Spitzer — isn't he supposed to be in prison? — Rebecca Traister — author of that NY Magazine Hillary hype, "Hillary Clinton Is Furious. And Resigned. And Funny. And Worried." — and Jim VandeHei — a co-founder of that new media effort Axios, which aspires to fix what's wrong with media, but might be bad. These 3 jiggled and fidgeted and spluttered. The best part was when Traister, effusing, made a reference to Hillary Clinton redirecting her fundraising "hose." Maher — with almost nothing but facial expression — called attention to the pun, and Traister tsked at him. Meanwhile, sitting between Traister and Maher was Spitzer — Client 9 — but Maher resisted the edgy joke there. He didn't say "Eliot, you know about hos" or anything like that. The panel stumbled on.

In the middle of the panel, there was the most substantive, intelligent part of the show, a little interview with a man named Tristan Harris, whose bottom-of-the-screen identification read: "Former design ethicist, Google." He had a lot to say about the great power of manipulation possessed by Google and Facebook and Apple and the ethical problems of the attention-manufacturing business. But that set up a question Maher threw to Traister and Traister seized the opportunity to chatter manically and we never got back to Harris.

The morning was getting late and the cool breeze in real-life world wasn't going to last. I got out for a long walk. But now I'm back and I see that Maher has apologized:

"Friday nights are always my worst night of sleep because I’m up reflecting on the things I should or shouldn’t have said on my live show. Last night was a particularly long night as I regret the word I used in the banter of a live moment. The word was offensive and I regret saying it and am very sorry."

If it were up to me, I'd say fine. The word wasn't directed at anybody (other than at Maher himself). It was mostly just laughing at the idea of Bill Maher working in a field. Worse that the "n-word" itself, in my view — if you want to take racial matters seriously — is that he used slavery in a lighthearted way.

For a different perspective, here's what Malcolm X said about the "field Negro" and the "house Negro" (via "Five (Other) Times Bill Maher Was Racist, Islamophobic, or Sexist"):

"To be sure, Trump got plenty of negative coverage in the press as well, but, during the campaign at least, the negative stories didn’t seem to stick to him with the same adhesion."

"And even now, as investigations of his administration’s connections to Russia splash across front pages, the Times has launched a new feature, a weekly call to readers to 'Say something nice' about him. I ask Clinton if she’s seen it. 'I did!' she says with a wide smile, taking a beat. 'I never saw them do that for me.'"

From "Hillary Clinton Is Furious. And Resigned. And Funny. And Worried./The surreal post-election life of the woman who would have been president," by Rebecca Traister.

AND: Here's the transcript of the graduation speech Hillary just gave at Wellesley:

You may have heard that things didn't exactly go the way I planned. But you know what? I'm doing okay. I've gotten to spend time with my family, especially my amazing grandchildren. I was going to give the entire commencement speech about them but was talked out of it.

Long walks in the woods. Organizing my closets, right? I won't lie. Chardonnay helped a little too. Here's what helped most of all. Remembering who I am, where I come from, and what I believe...

Too bad she didn't remember during the campaign. If she'd seemed at least a bit to be someone who believed in a few things, maybe the negative stories wouldn't have stuck to her with the same adhesion.

"Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it."

I know: newsflash. But the fact that consent is not enough to make sex good is received as news by anybody is what's interesting. It's also valuable to understand how some people got stuck on the consent/nonconsent distinction when there are so many other issues to examine.

The article, at New York Magazine, is by Rebecca Traister.

It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault. But contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its over­radicalization but rather its under­radicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.

"'Abortions are yucky... But after that response, there is a shrugging of the shoulders.' After all, a lot of life is yucky."

The last line of a New York Magazine article by Rebecca Traister titled "The Big Secret of Abortion: Women Already Know How It Works."