"The reason men resort to the ‘nuts and sluts’ defense is because it may be the only way to undermine the credibility of a woman who is not, in fact, telling the truth."

Said Susan Estrich, defending Bill Clinton in 1998. Estrich — a prominent lawprof politico — had herself coined the term "nuts and sluts" back in 1991 to characterize attacks on the woman who accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Estrich is now defending Roger Ailes. Does that add up?

Here's Alessandra Stanley in the NYT with "The Curious Case of Susan Estrich":

For many years, Ms. Estrich was a lively liberal commentator on Fox News... Ms. Estrich described Mr. Ailes...  as a close friend.

“In the 18 years I was at Fox News, Roger has never told me what to say, what to do or what to wear,” Ms. Estrich said. “He kept me on the payroll for seven months when I was too sick to work.”...

Ms. Estrich, a partner in the Los Angeles office of the litigation firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, said that she first heard the allegations against Mr. Ailes on her return from London, and that by the time she got to her apartment there were 10 messages from her old friend on her home voice mail. She didn’t hesitate to take the case, aware that some feminists say that she sold out.

“It is painful, but at the same time I am a lawyer: Once she takes on a case she stands by her client,” Ms. Estrich said in a phone interview. “Roger needs someone to help him through this extremely difficult process. The last thing any client needs is a lawyer sitting in judgment.”

She's a lawyer. A lawyer and a politico and a media personality and a feminist. It's hard doing all these things. But when you do them all, you lose the ability to leverage your status as a feminist to vouch for somebody. If you want to stand aloof from the fray so you can palm off your judgments as cruelly neutral, you can try to do that. It's a different kind of life. Nothing really "curious" about these choices.

Big UK lefty George Galloway fired for saying something about rape.

There's Todd Akin over there on the right, but the left is screwing up over rape too:

Mandy Rhodes, the editor of Holyrood, said the Respect party MP's remarks that Assange was guilty of just "bad manners" by failing to ask permission to have sex with a sleeping woman, had left her "frankly gobsmacked".

See? Galloway thought the incident was outside of the category that Todd Akin would label "legitimate rape" (and, to drag in another lefty, Whoopi Goldberg would call "rape rape").

[Rhodes] said it was impossible for [Galloway] to continue his column following his remark that having sex with a sleeping woman was "not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it" if she had already had sex with that man.

"There is no excuse, ever, for sex without consent, and regardless of the details of the Assange case, Galloway's comments and inappropriate language about rape per se are alarming," Rhodes said in a statement on the magazine's website....

"So where'm I goin' wrong there, Juan?" — a question from that nice man/monster, Bill O'Reilly.

The Juan Williams moment, prompted by Bill O'Reilly, who just a few days earlier, had this immensely more dramatic-looking moment on "The View":



I got to the Juan Williams video via Donald Sensing (via Instapundit). Sensing has old quotes from Jesse Jackson and Susan Estrich, who both conceded that black men make them anxious in some situations. Jackson's painful admission was that he feels "relieved" when he's walking down the street, hears someone behind him, and looks back and sees that they're white. Estrich said:

Every woman I know, black, white, green or yellow, gets a little bit nervous, if she’s being honest, when she sees an 18-25 year-old black guy dressed in gang attire, walking behind her on the street. I’m not afraid of old black men. I’m not afraid of old white men.

She purports to speak for all women, but limits the nervousness to encounters with "an 18-25 year-old black guy dressed in gang attire, walking behind her on the street." It's funny to see those 2 quotes together. Jackson describes the realistic situation of hearing someone behind you and looking back to see who it is. Estrich too has the person walking behind her, but somehow the nervousness is restricted to the young black man in gang clothes. Her political correctness made her layer in extra details, but if the guy is behind you, you don't see him yet. Were you not nervous just to have someone following you? The supposed revelation of feelings doesn't really add up, which makes the phrase "if she’s being honest" particularly telling.

Now, if Jackson and Estrich could say that, how was Williams different? Actually, there are a lot of differences. I won't try to list them all. But I don't assume that Jackson and Estrich got a free pass for saying what they said. And Williams has gotten a ton of support. It's not all about treating Muslims with more delicacy than black people receive. One thing about Williams is that he made himself available to Bill O'Reilly and gave him support and comfort. I think many people wanted to use that "View" fracas to demonize O'Reilly for good. And then Williams sat down on camera to shine a glow of humanity on the man the good people would have us see as monstrous. And so it became necessary to demonize Williams too.

Lawprof Patricia Williams is giving a talk called "Moaning in America."

Now, I'm at the feminism conference here at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Pat Williams is giving the keynote speech. She begins with the image of a "twinning doll" – an image she used in this column in The Nation.

She's looking at "3 narrative models": 1. the "neo-kumbayan moment" (denial, cynicism, Ward Connerly... "just stop talking about it"), 2. the "neo-biologizing moment, through the discourse of DNA," 3. economic choice ("I want to engage with the Law and Economics movement").

She's talking about the Democratic primary, the toxic identity politics. What can we do?

Pat is very interesting and funny talking about multiracial families: Angelina Jolie and her mixed race brood and a woman who is suing because a medical mix-up led to her giving birth to a partially black child.

What would Barack Obama look like if he were a woman? Would he look like Susan Estrich, Geraldine Ferraro, or Oprah Winfrey? When Oprah endorsed him, "race rushed in."

UPDATE, next morning: I have to apologize for not conveying more of what Pat said last night. It is extremely hard to convey the sense of what she says without giving long quotes, which I can't do in real time, because she also speaks very quickly and continually makes surprising connections. She has a beautiful voice and brings in a lot of detailed stories and images. This is mesmerizing, and I enjoyed listening closely, but I could not bring it to you convincingly. I don't want you to think this was because she wasn't saying anything. She was saying too much. This was not, however, an extemporaneous speech. She was reading. So go read some of her columns. I've linked one.

AND: Scroll down on this page and you'll find capsule descriptions and links to many of Pat's columns, some of which were the basis of the talk she gave last night. There is, for example, this one:

The March 22 [2007] New York Post offered a fascinating study in the contradictions of our culture. The top half of the front page was consumed by "a stunning mother-child portrait" of Angelina Jolie with her newest adopted child, or as the Post put it, her "Viet man." The lower half of the page was given over to a more lurid headline ("Baby Bungle: White Folks' Black Child") trumpeting "a Park Avenue fertility clinic's blunder" that "left a family devastated--after a black baby was born to a Hispanic woman and her white husband."

The story about Jolie's magical mothering of her rainbow brood was a fairy tale of happily ever after. The bungled baby story, meanwhile, was considerably less heartwarming: Long Islanders Nancy and Thomas Andrews had trouble conceiving after the birth of their first daughter. They employed in vitro fertilization and baby Jessica was born. Jessica is darker skinned than either of the Andrewses, a condition their obstetrician initially called an "abnormality." She'll "lighten up," said that good doctor. Subsequent paternity tests showed that Nancy's egg was fertilized by sperm other than Tom's. The couple has sued.

That column is old enough that you have to subscribe to The Nation to read the whole thing, but there are many others available in full, and I realize I've been remiss in not reading them and blogging them on a regular basis.

Here's her piece on Oprah and Obama. Excerpt:

[T]heir particular form of raced celebrity enshrines the notion of American mobility at a moment when it is--in reality--sorely vexed. ... Obama radiates a kind of hope that crosses the immigrant epic with a romantic desire for rainbow diversity. Similarly, Oprah is the black, female, Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches story of our day. From her humble beginnings as a traumatized little girl, albeit pluckier even than Orphan Annie (we Americans do love "pluck"), Oprah reinvented herself by sheer will and rose against all odds to the very top of the phantasmagorical bubble machine we call the entertainment industry. There's a general fear of, as well as attraction to, that bubble. Is the celebrity a platform or a dog-and-pony show? Is it serious debate or entertainment? How easy the purchase of cynicism.

But if we're lucky, maybe something enduring comes of artfully imagining our ideals.

"There's an edgy attitude. Not toughness. Not meanness."

It's Betsey Johnson, talking about fashion.



Several points:

1. I used to buy Betsey Johnson clothes when they were at Paraphernalia (which she left in 1969). Does anyone else remember shopping for clothes at Paraphernalia in the Betsey Johnson days? I loved that stuff.

2. I love the version of "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" that plays at the end of the video.

3. Betsey has worked out a really nice image for herself as an aging woman. It's almost clownish, but it suits her. I could get my hair cut like that. What stops me?

4. "She lived in the Chelsea Hotel in the late '60s. Edie Sedgwick was her house model. She became a friend-of-Andy. She designed the costumes for 'Ciao, Manhattan.' She made velvet suits for the Velvet Underground. She made Lou Reed's pants too big in the crotch, provoking his anger. She married John Cale, making matters worse. She shocked the fashion establishment. She hung out at Max's Kansas City. She shocked the fashion establishment at Max's Kansas City. She played Yoko Ono to Lou Reed's Paul. She broke up the Velvet Underground."

5. She reminds me a little of Susan Estrich.

"As a woman... I wanted to be liked - not attacked."

Responding to "[t]he kerfuffle over female columnists started when Susan Estrich launched a crazed and nasty smear campaign against Michael Kinsley," Maureen Dowd explains the travails of a female editorialist:

Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman. It taps into myths of carping Harpies and hounding Furies, and distaste for nagging by wives and mothers.

Hmmm... that's a thought I've had a few times in my twenty years as a female lawprof.

This job has not come easily to me. But I have no doubt there are plenty of brilliant women who would bring grace and guts to our nation's op-ed pages, just as, Lawrence Summers notwithstanding, there are plenty of brilliant women out there who are great at math and science. We just need to find and nurture them.

Nuture?! If we want women to go on the attack, we've got to nuture them? Well, actually, yes! It takes a lot nerve to put your harsh, straightforward words down on paper. You can feel entirely squelched and intimidated, yet still have those things inside you, and you could say them if somehow someone managed to give you the go-ahead. I know I've found myself able to write a lot of things down in this blog, but I've also gone many, many years holding my tongue. There may be a lot of men clamoring to speak first, easily finding a way to talk over the women who have just as much to say. It may take a little something more to unleash what women can say. Maureen Dowd doesn't explain how she was able to let loose. Someone saw she had it in her and gave her the forum, and from there she had to force herself to do it. But clearly, she could.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links here for the point I think women are more sensitive to harsh attacks. This post is really more about how women are more harshly punished if they go on the attack, which is what Maureen Dowd wrote about. It's not just that we (generally) feel worse when we are attacked, but that we are (generally) more likely to be perceived in a negative light if we do attack. Anyway, I have written before about wanting more civility and rationality in blogging, such as here, where I respond to a post by Kevin Drum, who wrote:

[D]oes this mean that women need to change if they want to enter the fray, or does it mean that the fray needs to change in order to attract more women? As usual, probably some of both. Unfortunately, the blogosphere, which ought to be an ideal training ground for finding new voices in nontraditional places, is far more vitriolic than any op-ed page in the country, even the Wall Street Journal's, and therefore probably turns off women far more than it attracts them.

My response was:

I don't think women or the blogosphere needs to change. Each blog is a place unto itself, where a writer establishes a tone and a voice. As long as you keep the comments function off, you control your own space. A thousand vitriolic male blogs don't prevent one woman from setting up her own blog and making whatever she likes of it.

Reynolds was noting how vicious people were being to Zephyr Teachout -- in the comments. Well, I definitely turned off my comments long ago and after a very short experience with them, because I was not going to tolerate people talking to me like that on my own blog. I want to decide whom to ignore and when to fight back.

For Democrats looking for ways to spin the devastating Time poll.

I emailed the link to the Time poll to my son, John Cohen, and he wrote back what seemed to me to be a fine effort at putting the best face on it. So, with his permission, here it is:

Clearly Bush has a really good trajectory. Remember that in 2000 Nader got surprisingly few votes. There might be a lot of people defecting from Nader to Kerry at the last minute out of pragmatism. Nader has 3%; assuming (arbitrarily) that two-thirds of Nader voters will end up defecting to Kerry, then we should consider Kerry to be at 43% right now instead of 41, which would mean we should consider the split among likely voters (which is the headline of the story) to be Bush 51 / Kerry 43. The margin of error is 4%, so that's a statistical tie. (Even if you don't buy my calculation about Nader voters, it's still CLOSE to a statistical tie.) So I would consider this one poll obviously a great sign for Bush, but it's not proof that Bush is in the lead. Bush can only be considered to have a strong lead if other polls corroborate this one.

He adds:

The poll was done from Aug 31 to Sept 2. It will be interesting to see what the numbers are like after the convention. As I've said before, considering that Kerry got almost no bounce from the convention, I think it will be terrible news for Kerry if Bush gets a significant bounce out of his convention, since people's views of Bush are more solidified. If Bush doesn't get much of a bounce out of his convention, then you could say that both conventions were ineffective for reasons unrelated to the specific candidates or parties (the country is polarized, the conventions got relatively little coverage, etc.).

Yes, when Kerry got no bounce, the spin was: conventions don't really produce bounce anymore. So what can you say now? I predict: the Republicans did very bad things at the convention and thereby unfairly obtained the bounce that they got; if they had conducted an honorable convention, like the Democrats, there would have been no bounce.

UPDATE: An emailer observes:

I wanted to note this:  a 51/43 split with a margin of error of +-4 is not a statistical tie.  It does indicate that there is the possibility that there is a statistical tie in the actual populace, but there is no reason to think that the likelihood of this possibility is any different from the likelihood of a 55/39 split in the actual populace (which would render Kerry about as significant as I am in the coming election).  Moreover, neither of those extreme possibilities is as likely as a 51/43 split in the actual populace.  Similarly, rolling a sum of 2 on two dice is as likely as rolling a sum of 12 is, but neither is as likely as 7.  Obviously, the dice rolling is not correlated in the same way that the polling is, and while this correlation does support your son's comment, it does so only weakly.

I agree, definitely. But what I like about my son's comment is that it's amusingly in the vein of what would Susan Estrich say if she had to figure out something positive to say. I'll see if John comes back Estrichishly and re-spins.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If you want to shore up your knowledge of what "margin of error means," go here. And Matthew Yglesias argues about that here. I don't think you really need to invest a lot of time in studying all that, but if you're bummed out about the poll, it might cheer you up. Especially the first link. I'm pretty sure John is literally correct about the meaning of the term "statistical tie." At the same time, the emailer is right about likelihood of different results. But if you were trying to spin the bad news, you would avoid pointing that out. Indeed, I think Yglesias, who supports Kerry, was saying what he was saying because he was enjoying polls that showed Kerry ahead and he didn't want his pleasure spoiled by people wielding the "statistical tie" concept.