"James struck licensing agreements for everything from 'Fifty Shades'-branded wine and lingerie to floggers, vibrators and handcuffs..."

"... and oversaw the development of many of these items herself. Perhaps most incongruously, she even licensed a 'Fifty Shades' teddy bear, who comes with mini handcuffs and a blindfold. 'We set about trademarking things just to stop people from making them,' she tells me in her office, which is festooned with 'Fifty Shades' paraphernalia... James wants to show me some nipple clamps she helped design in collaboration with the sex-toy maker Lovehoney, a British company that produced a line of Fifty Shades-themed erotic accessories. Lovehoney had first proposed some heavy, industrial-looking clamps, which James rejected. 'They looked like they could jump start Frankenstein,' James says."

From "The Evolution of E L James/James changed the literary landscape with her blockbuster erotica trilogy, 'Fifty Shades of Grey.' Now she is trying something (sort of) new" (NYT).

Jump start Frankenstein. That's good. Almost good enough to make me read EL James — not quite — who's got a new book. It's about "a wealthy British aristocrat who falls for his house cleaner, a beautiful, mysterious young woman who fled Albania." Ah, yes, Albania. The country you pick when you need a country nobody knows about.*

James worked hard to get Albania:

James traveled to Albania twice to research the novel, and collected a small library of books about the country, including an Albanian dictionary, a guide to Albanian social codes and laws, and a book about Albanian organized crime. Her husband, who’s the household cook, learned to make traditional Albanian stews.

I await Lucky James, the cultural-appropriation restaurant.

It was quite a change from the research she did for “Fifty Shades,” which involved lurking in some of the darker corners of the internet, scrolling through websites devoted to sexual bondage techniques and accessories....

Beneath the frothy fantasy, “The Mister” deals with unexpectedly weighty topics like economic inequality, the plight of undocumented workers, the oppression of women in conservative societies and the way social institutions and governments elevate the wealthy and powerful and exploit the vulnerable.

Get woke and titillated.
______________________

* Or so I learned from the movie "Wag that Dog."

"I haven’t spoken to him. Maybe just to say hello. It feels trite. I feel ridiculous bothering him."

Said Donald Trump Jr. about his father, the President. That's quoted in a big NYT "style" piece called "Donald Trump Jr. Is His Own Kind of Trump." I'm copying that quote for the post title because it distracted me. What I'd originally intended to make this post about was:

On Feb. 10, opening day for the erotic thriller “Fifty Shades Darker,” Mr. Trump tweeted, “@MrsVanessaTrump took/dragged me to see the new 50 shades movie and I am the only guy in an otherwise packed theater.”

“It’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back,” he said.

First, can't people think of some variations on "two hours of my life I’ll never get back"? It should be embarrassing to roll out that old line again. If you're so boring that you'd say that, I have no confidence that you'd have done anything of value with that 2 hours you lost, so the phrase collapses in upon itself.

Second, let's count the ways in which the man has insulted his wife by saying "@MrsVanessaTrump took/dragged me to see the new 50 shades movie and I am the only guy in an otherwise packed theater":

1. VT dragged her husband to a movie.

2. VT is interested in a movie about a man sexually dominating a woman.

3. VT loves sexual domination by a man but needs to dominate her own man to get to a cinematic vicarious experience of a man sexually dominating a woman.

4. VT unlike every other woman in the movie theater needs a man to get to the movie.

5. VT gazed at the sexually dominating man in the movie while her put-upon real-life man sat next to her not being the kind of man she's making such a show of fantasizing about wanting, which was a terribly unkind thing to do to him and something that no other woman in the theater stooped to doing.

11 Shades of Obtuseness about Donald Trump's Dirty Words.

Let me give an example of something I am seeing. With 55K shares on Facebook:



That's so obtuse, in so many ways. Let's count:

1. "50 Shades of Grey"? Hadn't seen that talked about in a while. (Wait. There is this.)

2. Boasting of committing what sounds like criminal sexual assault is not the mere saying of words. The size of the outrage isn't about the words as bad words, but the words as evidence of actions allegedly taken.

3. The outrage isn't limited to women. Men, too, are outraged.

4. Many people — women and men — are fine with using the words "fuck" and "pussy" in private conversation.

5. The words "fuck" and "pussy" can be used in sentences that express contempt and disregard for other human beings, and the outrage against Trump's words has to do with what the words express in the sentences actually spoken. Many excellent sentences can be made using those words — sentences that can be received with favor by women who hate what Trump said.

6. People read novels and see movies about all sorts of things, including horrible things. Stories about murder and torture and all kinds of physical and psychological abuse are very popular. The effect is titillating, but that doesn't mean people want these things actually to happen to them.

7. You may love a particular character in a story, because he's interesting and exciting and transgressive, but that doesn't mean you want him to be President. I love the movie "My Dinner with Andre," but Andre Gregory would be a terrible President. Last night, I watched the movie "Willard." Willard is a fascinating character. Watching him bond with rats, train them, gather them into suitcases and carry them into the office to unleash havoc was fascinating... oh, watch out, pussy!...



... but Willard would not make a good candidate for President. Neither would Hannibal Lecter.

8. It would be interesting to see those rats overrun the White House... in a movie. But not in real life!

9. Fantasy time is over. Put down the novel. Turn off the movie. Face the grim reality of picking a suitable President.

10. I said it 2 years ago: I'm for boring. I mean for President. I'm not talking about novels and movies and sexual fantasies.

11. "OK. Yes, we are bored. We're all bored now..."



"... but has it ever occurred to you... that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks, and it's not just a question of individual survival... but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?"

Confession: I read the Suzy Favor Hamilton memoir.

A few days ago, I blogged about a couple interviews with Suzy Favor Hamilton — the Olympian who turned into a high-priced prostitute:

[The Wisconsin State Journal] begins the interview by observing that SFH's book could be the new "50 Shades of Grey" and later asks if people are saying "there is too much sex in the book."...

We watched her hour-long interview on Dr. Phil's show, which was quite bizarre... Phil never got around to asking SFH what treatment she's had or is having, and she looks so strange, that we had to wonder whether she's on any treatment at all... I had the feeling Dr. Phil was also purveying sex for daytime-TV-watching women who want porn with deniability.... Why is SFH, if she wants to come across as reformed and relatable, wearing her hair like that and why do her eyes glint so lasciviously every time she talks about sex?

The book is "Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness." So is it a "50 Shades of Grey"-type thing — titillating, or porn with deniability— or is it the saga of mental heath suffering and healing that the authors/publisher seems to want us to think it is? Well, it turns out it's neither! There are many descriptions of sexual encounters, but they are not written in an erotic style. The reader is not, I don't think, drawn in to feel the excitement of the sexual behavior itself, and you can't really identify with SFH. She's a very unusual person! She's someone who loved intense athletic competition and then felt completely dissatisfied living a normal life — in Madison, Wisconsin of all places — with a handsome, loving husband and a nice daughter. She repurposed her strongly physical, competitive spirit in the game of prostitution, in the place that — like the Olympics for an athlete — was the center of the world — Las Vegas.

From such a young age, I’d been told I was special, a prodigy, destined for greatness, and I had spent my whole life chasing that dream on the track. Now, in Vegas, I was looking to be number one, too. At first, it had been enough to have the men I slept with tell me how amazing I was. And then, when I’d needed to take it up a notch, having sex for money had been enough. Then my need to compete turned into wanting more and better gifts from my clients. Now, chasing the high, I became obsessed with the rankings that clients gave escorts on the go-to website for information about escorts all over the world, the Erotic Review. The rankings were the thrill for me, and they fed my insatiable desire to compete. Vegas was no different than the track. If I was going to compete, I had to win. 

Formulating a plan of attack to climb through the rankings, I thought of regulars I could surely receive 10s from, and prepared myself to go the extra mile for new clients who, in turn, I trusted would write me a positive review. I wouldn’t rest until I was number one in Vegas.

When I first heard that SFH was writing a book with a mental health angle, I wrote:

This is the standard approach famous people use to explain sexual misbehavior when they get caught. But here's a person who worked for an escort service that scheduled $600 an hour dates for her in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. It's a business venture that seems organized and deliberate, not some sad symptom of mental illness. Too bad she can't own it.

Having read the book, I think she does own it! The mental health observations are dotted around in there, and there's an epilogue that tells us she's had a diagnosis and treatment, but it's a very short epilogue and what propels her into the health-care phase is not that she, on her own, decided the life she was living was bad or wrong or unsustainable. It's that she got outed. But I think the book makes it clear that she loved what she was doing, that she wasn't debasing herself or denying her humanity. She loved the sex, as she tells it. She wasn't just pretending. She massively enjoyed it, and it was a bonus that she also got paid a lot to do it.

"I was doing something I loved and getting paid for it."

"In Japan there is a disturbing trend for disaffected young men to fall in love with a pillow printed with their favorite anime character and announce the pillow is their girlfriend."

"So thank goodness your boyfriend does not have such a relationship with any of his [two dozen stuffed animals]. Men have been told that women do not want testosterone-addled brutes in their lives (OK, maybe the success of Fifty Shades sends some mixed messages), and you don’t get much less brutish than a stuffed animal collection. It’s a good sign that the group is only 20 percent of what it once was and that with one exception they live in the closet. You yourself have gone through life with a special teddy bear (do you bring him to your boyfriend’s for a sleepover with his special friend?), so you’re right, you should be more accepting. If this is the only thing that bothers you about a great guy, then you need to look at your own sexist beliefs."

From Emily Yoffe's advice column. 

6 things:

1. Does objecting to one extreme — "testosterone-addled brutes" — mean you're hypocritical to accept the other extreme? That excludes a preference for someone who fits your conception of balanced, moderate, and normal.

2. I don't think people seeking a life partner should be told to "be more accepting." You'd better find somebody who's right in the zone of what you like, whatever it is. The problem I see with this woman is that she's not looking closely enough at what she herself likes. She wants an outsider to pass judgment on whether there's something wrong with the man. I'd say it's not that this woman needs to "be more accepting," but that she shouldn't deny herself the pleasure and fulfillment of accepting this man, if that's what she wants.

3. Is it "sexist" to consider writing off a man who has a big stuffed animal collection? This woman is (apparently) heterosexual, so she's already applying "sexist" judgment in her choice of a partner. If that's okay and not sexist — and what a weird world it would be if we thought we shouldn't do that — then why is it wrong, as you search for a person of the sex you prefer, to search more precisely for the manifestation of masculinity (or femininity) that you find especially appealing? The problem, as stated at #2, is that the woman is having trouble using her own thoughts and feelings and wants to import what other people think.

4. Having her own teddy bear does not obligate the woman to accept a man with huge stuffed animal collection. To have one is very different from having a big collection — in stuffed animals and in many things. But more important, you can quite appropriately want to possess various things and at the same time not want your partner to have things like that. If she discovered that her boyfriend has a big collection of makeup, the argument that she should accept it because she too has makeup is something that we easily see as silly. (Maybe the day is coming when it won't look silly per se.)

5. If the brutishness of brutish men has a physical cause — testosterone — shouldn't we be more empathetic the way we are toward other medical conditions that impair the mind? Isn't it ableist of us to direct hostility toward "testosterone-addled brutes"?

6. "Men have been told that women do not want testosterone-addled brutes in their lives...." What, exactly, have men been told and how have they adjusted? I think the message has been that women don't want violence and subordination. No sensible man should read that to mean that women want babyish men. If the man is too dumb to understand that the rejection of violence and subordination is not a rejection of masculinity, then maybe the problem is that he's too dumb. Or he just doesn't love women enough to get the message straight.

"The remaining subclauses of this clause 15 are to be read subject to this proviso and to the fundamental matters agreed in clauses 2-5 above."

From a list of "50 of the most absurdly hilarious lines" demonstrating "the sheer enormity of terribleness encased in" "50 Shades of Grey," which sounds like it's got a fair amount of contract law in it and isn't quite as horribly bad as people seem to like to assure us it is. Not that I'm going to do a new Gatsby-project-like series on "50 Shades of Grey," even though 28% of you said I should:



These poll results are quite puzzling. "No" only gets 40%, so "yes" has 60%, but it's split between 3 options, with "50 Shades of Grey" getting the most and yet much less than doing nothing and less than the combined — and equally split — option for something other than "50 Shades of Grey." I should have included more subclauses, provisos, and fundamental matters.

Then, I got the idea of trying to find 50 sentences from this blog that would (appear to) demonstrate the sheer enormity of its terrible absurd badness, because that's a game you could play with any writer's work, including the work of Wm. Steven Humphrey, the writer of that "50 Terrible Lines" list, who begins with the sentence, "It still shocks the crap out of me when I realize how many people are still unfamiliar with the sheer enormity of terribleness encased in E.L. James absolutely awful book."

Oh, still? Really? Crap has been shocked out of you over some unspecified period of time that we should care about? And you wrote "still shocks... people are still...." That's "still... still..." Humphrey, you twit! You pose condescendingly and scoff at people who might only be enjoying some textual candy, and you repeat the word "still" in your opening shot?

You know, in the "Gatsby" project, many of those "Great Gatsby" sentences, isolated from context, looked pretty absurd, but we had confidence in the author and we didn't feel hostile to him for his success. We were on his side. We could take those sentences and play, really have some fun. There was no point in getting snobby or condescending, even when it seemed objectively ludicrous like: "The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back."

"Madison feminists urge boycott of Fifty Shades of Grey."

Noted.

Why should you have to boycott it? Isn't it better just not to want to see it?

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

I guess this means no "50 Shades of Gray" project like the "Gatsby" project on Althouse.

The "Gatsby" project was things like this. One sentence from the work, isolated for discussion in contextless isolation. I loved that project. Did you? Vote, and I just might do it.

Should I do a new series like the "Gatsby" project?

No.

Yes, and use "50 Shades of Grey."

Yes, but with something other than "50 Shades of Grey." (Put suggestions in the comments.)

Just bring back the "Gatsby" project. There are plenty of sentences left!

pollcode.com free polls

Word watch: pallid.

All of the following occurrences appeared within the last few days:

"The stakes are too high, the disappointment in some quarters — and some Supreme Court chambers — over the pallid outcome of the Supreme Court’s Fisher case too deep, the issue too mobilizing for it to fade away." Linda Greenhouse writing about affirmative action in the NYT.

"The potato farmers of Idaho are, I’m reasonably certain, distressingly pallid in appearance but no one is going around insisting that the French fry industry is going to collapse unless diversity increases there." From a discussion of the lack of racial diversity in Silicon Valley enterprises. 

"Jamie Dornan (the guy who's playing Christian Grey because they couldn't get Beyoncé) tries to give the pallid prose some weight by pausing significantly before informing us that his tastes are … singular, or telling Anastasia Steele that he'd like … to know more about her." A discussion of the "50 Shades of Grey" trailer in The Atlantic.

"And in the leading roles of Will Shakespeare and his muse and lover, Viola De Lesseps, Tom Bateman and Lucy Briggs-Owen are so vibrantly engaging that they make Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie look like a pair of pallid milksops." From a Chicago Tribune review of a stage version of "Shakespeare in Love."

"Pallid dudes surrounded by dorm-room décor rhapsodize over their first console and the discovery of game-playing soul mates." A NYT article about a movie about the history of video games. 

"The whole your eyes have known, your pallid cheeks have shown; for oh! the swelling tide no bravest heart could hide, when your dear mother died." Catholic News reports on a riddle poem published pseudonymously by Pope Leo XIII in the 19th century. 

"How I hate the man who talks about the 'brute creation', with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry, I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological times via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?" The U.K. Independent published that item from the 1910 diary of the naturalist WNP Barbellion.

"'The long days do wear on you,' says a pallid man named Stephen McMurray who is researching the population dynamics of sponges. He dips a spoon into a cup of instant noodles and looks through a window to the sea floor below." Undersea science at GulfNews.com.

The "50 Shades of Grey" trailer is ready to see you now.

I hope you find that suitably ludicrous. If not, if you got actual twinges of sexual feeling, you are not doing your part to prevent the downfall of civilization.

"The last thing Universal wants is another actor to emerge as its 'Fifty Shades' protagonist only to waffle."

The last guy quit because:

1. Fans of the books didn't think he properly embodied sadistic billionairitude and their hostility freaked out the poor guy, or...

2. The script sucks, and the actor's effort to participate in rewriting it went too far, and the studio drew the line, or...

3. It's a really dumb role, and whoever plays it will be ruined. As it says at the link: "the virgin-turned-sexpert Anastasia Steele... has greater dimension than the [Christian] Grey character." A 5-page booklet has greater dimension than a single sheet of paper. She gets to go from virgin to sexpert. (Is there a cornier word than "sexpert"?)

4. No one wants to be laughed at while performing sex, especially the sort of eroticism that depends so heavily on being taken seriously. If people start laughing in the theaters, which you know they will, this is a disaster. There's a reason stories like this get popular in print form.

5. Why can't I just eat my waffle?

A couple of books.

I was just asking for some ideas for a conversation about end-of-the-year things, and now I've had the conversation, which I'll be showing you when it's up, but right now, I'm buying 2 books that were recommended in that conversation:

1. "When the State Speaks, What Should It Say?"

2. "Veil Politics in Liberal Democratic States."

After I bought them, Amazon started making recommendations in the philosophy category, and I noticed that "Complete Works of Plato" (only $1.99) was ranking at #5. Maybe you think that's about where it belongs, but that would depend on what else is ranking. Here are those best sellers in philosophy. #4 is "Fifty Shades of Grey Decoded: A Man's Playbook." I can understand why it's #4, but I can't understand why it's philosophy. By the way, it's only 19 pages long, which is to say, it's not only not philosophy, it's not a book. You can get the first page free at the link, and it tells you that "sex slave" contracts are all over the internet, so the author isn't going to write one out for you. You should just "find one that suits your needs and tweak it." And "keep in mind that this is not 'real' slavery." Noted.

What was the biggest pop culture phenomenon of the year, do you think? "Fifty Shades of Grey" or "Gangnam Style"? Those are 2 things that, in the future, will seem so 2012. We're not taking them with us into the new year, '13.

"Time honors Sandra Fluke as 'Person of the Year' finalist."

That's the Breitbart headline for an item that begins "Just when you think Time magazine can’t make any more of a mockery of itself...." But there are 40 individuals on Time's "Who Should Be TIME's Person of the Year 2012?" which gives readers a chance to vote. Included on this list are many minor newsworthy figures and many whose contributions were not clearly positive. Bashar Assad and Kim Jong Un are on the list — "honored." Nice by not really world-changing figures like gymnast Gabrielle Douglas are included.  The click-through gallery is in alphabetical order, and the first picture that hits you is a conservative old white guy, Sheldon Adelson. Now, he's not presented in a positive light:

In the post-Citizens United era, Sheldon Adelson became the public face of what critics cast as a plutocrat class trying to buy U.S. elections. But it's not clear how much the conservative casino magnate got for his money — other than a heap of bad press.

Time's perspective is obviously liberal, but within that perspective, it's quite a concession to say that Citizens United hasn't been a horror show.

Anyway, Time made an effort to amass an interesting list of people who made the news for different reasons or who represent different cultural and demographic sectors. There's E.L. James and Jay-Z and Psy. Did they "influence the news" (Time's stated standard)? The real problem here is that it seems that Barack Obama is the necessary choice for 2012, and that's simply too boring.

And in fact, he is not winning in the readers poll. The readers have decisively chosen Malala Yousafzai. She has the least negative votes ("no way") and is coming in 3d on positive votes ("definitely"). Ahead of her on the positive list are Mohamed Morsy and — I guess the vote-for-the-worst crowd is out in force — Kim Jong Un. Malala Yousafzai is the face in the gallery that makes your heart zing. I clicked through the whole thing without feeling like hitting a definitely/no way button until I got to her. I still didn't vote, of course. (My female heart is well-defended against the outreached arms of commercial media.)

Sandra Fluke's no votes far exceed yes votes —  24,809/9,356  — but I would guess that outrage from the Breitbart crowd will now skew the vote. I don't know which way, but for Time, traffic is traffic and it will experience a nice boost from the inclusion of Fluke. The "Person of the Year" event — and this post gets my "annual nonsense" tag — is a nice commercial gambit for Time. So:

Who made a mockery of itself?
	Time
	Breitbart.com
	Both
	Neither
pollcode.com free polls

Gender role reversal on a very old — and lame — scenario.

"A British woman is divorcing her hubby on grounds the erotic bestseller 'Fifty Shades of Grey' failed to get a rise out of his languishing libido."

"Binders full of women."

Lots more here. Binders full!



ADDED: "Big Bird, binders, and Seamus key tenets of Democratic plans for the future..."

"I have one drawer," says Facebook billionaire Zuckerberg. "Like men everywhere. Like men everywhere."

"I mean, I wear the same thing every day, right?" The closet is used by his wife, and he just has like 20 gray T-shirts. And that's not 50 shades of grey. Just 20. All the same shade.

It's a miracle the fashion industry stays alive. If we — or I mean, you men — didn't have to get dressed up for work, what would you spend a year?

"Self-reliance — the new edgy lifestyle for the trendsetters among America’s youth?"

Glenn Reynolds asks in a NY Post column.

In today’s culture of immediate reward, a work ethic centering on self-discipline and the ability to defer gratification is almost, to use a favorite term of the avant-garde, transgressive. Hmm: With so much of our economy and politics now based on the absence of those characteristics, maybe it really is a bit transgressive.

He's looking at a new reality show — "Princess" — that makes entertainment out of forcing young women how to live within their means. And he's comparing it to pornography, which isn't exciting anymore. Supposedly. Despite the big "Shades of Grey" trend (which he mentions).

Could self-reliance become trendy? Maybe if it's imposed on some annoyingly bratty girl on television, but self-reliance is a low-profile matter in real life. It's about not getting noticed, not asking for help. Pornography is truly exciting when it interacts with shame. That's why the word transgression comes into play. There used to be shame in taking advantage of handouts and welfare, and people would apply themselves quite seriously to the tasks of remaining independent — staying off "the dole," as people used to say.

These days, half of Americans are getting government benefits. We've gotten comfortable leaning on each other, and where's the shame? People feel entitled, and we don't want to lose what we have, even if we perceive that what we're depending on might be/must be collapsing. But even if we did feel shame about our dependence, becoming independent would not be the escape from shame that one feels from pornography. When a person escapes shame through pornography, he is going ahead and indulging in the things that were the cause of shame. In the analogy, it's dependence on others that would be the source of the shame, and avoiding that dependence would be refraining from doing that which you're ashamed of. So quite aside from the present-day absence of shame, the analogy doesn't work.

You can't get to excitement and edginess unless you transgress — you move toward the behavior you were ashamed of. It might nevertheless — and for different reasons — feel beautifully rewarding to behave so well that you don't suffer from shame. But let's be clear about the analogy: self-reliance corresponds to chastity.

"What sexbots will do is widen the already growing chasm between the sexes, until only the fittest of the fit... can successfully leap across it to woo a human companion in the way that our genetic overlord intended."

Writes Heartiste, noting that "fitness is whatever gets one’s genes to the next generation, whether beneficial to civilization or note." I got there via Instapundit, who got there via Helen Smith, who makes the present-day observation that "20% of the alpha males [get] about 80% of the women" and says:

Those men who have more trouble getting women turn to porn and seem to ignore or be oblivious to women. I wonder how Sexbots will further change the landscape?

Here's my long-term view of that landscape. As men get absorbed into virtual-reality sex, there will be sex machines for women, replete with the elaborate stories women find titillating (including many things that are too dangerous to pursue in real life about which they currently read voraciously). The women, further relieved of motivation to form loving partnerships with men, will turn more and more to the government for support. Witness "The Life of Julia." There will be more and more of that as men depart from real life and submerge themselves more deeply in machines and women consequently feel more entitled to the government's functioning in the role from which men have escaped.

Women have the voting majority, and what will stop us from employing it in the interest of women as men demonstrate their lack of interest in us?

Will women still want to raise children? Some will, especially when it is well incentivized with government support brought about by unstoppable female voting power. We will have our choice of prime semen for artificial insemination. I'm sure the government will provide us with free services and facilitate our selection of the genetic traits we think will make the best children. Who knows what the next generations will be, as mothers produce children not because they found love from a man, but because of their ideas — possibly delusional — about what would make an excellent child? That's a new experiment. Presumably, in a world where men absent themselves from the real-world life of love and relationships, these women will choose, overwhelmingly, to have daughters. Those daughters will grow up and become part of the Electorate of Julias, further depressing any political power for men.

As this process goes on, perhaps that 20%/80% split Dr. Helen observes will be the actual ratio of men to women. But those men will not be alpha men. They won't even be beta men. And the men in the women's sex machines will be The New Alpha+++ Men. There will be no way to go back.

But this can only happen in America and whatever other free, wealthy, technologically advanced democracies there may be. So don't worry. It won't last that long.

What happened to all the manly men?

The NYT asks a bunch of people, including Natasha Scripture, who says:

Come to think of it, I haven’t met a manly man in quite some time. Maybe because most of them live in Montana. Or Texas. Or Sicily! They’re certainly rare sightings in New York City because here the abundant local species seems to be the metrosexual.

Oh! Metrosexual. I haven't seen that word for a long time. I'm thinking it fell out of fashion because... Barack Obama? But it's reviving because somebody at the NYT thinks Obama is manlier than Mitt Romney. (He just points at a name on a list and a guy half a globe away explodes — to smithereens.) But, no, maybe it's not that. Maybe it's "50 Shades of Grey" being a big bestseller and somebody at the NYT inferring that their female readers are tired of less manly men, so it's time to bring back the old epithet. Or, hell, maybe ladies are reading "50 Shades of Grey" because of Barack Obama. Whatever. Anyway, back to Natasha Scripture (love the name):

And as much as I can appreciate a man who knows his sashimi, the more carnal, female side of me wants to see him tuck into a heaping plate of meat and potatoes; and to toss aside the cologne and let pheromones take charge. Yes, gentlemen, you’re allowed to sweat in my divine presence.

Also, when it comes to so-called manly traits, I would be kind of a masochist if I didn’t want a man with some level of emotional availability. But please, is it too much to ask that he not cry on a first date?...

I hope we don’t become so much like each other that we end up essentially morphing into one androgynous being. That would just be plain weird.

Lots of things are weird. Like longing for masculinity, then calling yourself "divine" and dispensing precise instructions for just enough but not much manliness. But it's not so weird to sigh about how everyone you think you might want is somewhere other than on the small island where you live. But what can you do? Go to Montana?

There are 7 other essays in this NYT set....

Mark Simpson, author of "Metrosexy: A 21st Century Self-Love Story," says:

Continuing to fret about [manliness] means men being sold prissy lists of “manly” dos and don'ts. Or reactionary ideology, such as the mendacious “menaissance.” Or a dodgy daydream of a “manly” past, such as an impossibly pretty, fastidious advertising creative, who is also a basket-case army deserter. And entirely fictional.

What? Those are words, and I know what they all mean. But I don't know what they mean together. Presumably: Stop thinking about it.

Joel Stein,  author of "Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity," says:

I got messed up by my feminist mom in the 1970s, who taught me that gender was a social construct. I can’t believe that social experiment went on as long as it did, since it’s clear by month six of having a child that William does not want a doll....

His boy is masculine. Problem solved for Joel Stein.

Still 5 more essays, but that's it for me.

50 Shades of Gary.

Typo I just made, observed the comic potential of, and, after Googling, discovered had already been deployed.

Speaking of typos and "Shades of Grey," there was some discussion of the 2 spellings of "grey/gray" in the first "Shades of Grey" post of the day. (This is the 3d.) I said I meant to do that:

"Gray" is the long-term spelling on this blog and the normal spelling used by Americans.

"Grey" is the title of the book, the name of the character -- Christian Grey -- the British spelling, and the spelling used by Americans who have been over influenced by the British and that damned book.

You know how you know "gray" is the right spelling for Americans? You look at your Crayolas!

"I am interested in the culture... and in sexuality, so I'll talk about what it might mean that so many women are reading a novel that depicts sado-masochism."

Said I, in the comments to this morning's Drudge in B&W post, which invoked the popular novel "Shades of Grey, " and prompted a commenter (Surfed) to ask "to what effect have these novels affected [sic] Althouse that they are constantly (if not on an everyday basis) referred to? Is this a question best posed to Meade?" I said:

I don't read many novels, and I don't read any novels that are not on a fairly high literary level. So, genre romance and porn aren't in my Kindle. 

I am interested in the culture... and in sexuality, so I'll talk about what it might mean that so many women are reading a novel that depicts sado-masochism. In fact, Meade and I just had big conversation about that. I wondered whether women's fascination with this kind of fiction indicated that something is missing in present-day sexual relationships. Meade expressed the view that this is what women over the ages have in fact found titillating. I didn't disagree, so it's not as though we were opposed. I think it's a good issue, worth discussing, so feel free to carry on with that.

I'm making this into a new post, because I really do think it's a good topic for discussion and would like you to carry on — in this discussion or whatever other activities you have in mind. For example, Surfed asserted that he has "used the novel to great effect in my own personal life these last 6 months or so." All right then!

I've made a "Shades of Grey" tag so you can see the old posts on the subject and see what I've already said about this series of books.