"After mostly avoiding interviews as her campaign began, the vice president will hold several this week, including with Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of 'The View.'"

A funny subheadline at the NYT — funny because if she's just going on Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and "The View," Harris is still avoiding interviews. That those are the 3 interviews the NYT names makes it obvious.

The headline is "Harris Will Appear in a Whirlwind of Interviews, Most of Them Friendly."

Most of them? Who's the unfriendly interviewer she dares to face? I am really appalled by the timidity. She needs to prove she's strong and can stand up for us. 

I noticed that article because I went looking for Kamala Harris articles on the front page of the New York Times. You'd think she'd make more news!

There's also this Susan Faludi thing at the top of the right hand column, sitting atop a musing about celibacy:

So let's stare slack-jawed and cross-eyed at a rose. Mmmm. America's protector, eh?

Yeah, that kind of was my question about Kamala Harris when I saw that she dared to speak to Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of "The View."

So let's see if Susan Faludi makes the case for KH as a protector. Much of that column is generic: Women have not, traditionally, been regarded as the protector. Some of it is an attack on Trump. Let's skip to something specific about Harris:

"Coupling the fortunes of feminism to celebrity might have been worth it if it had led to meaningful political victories...."

"Pop feminism’s Achilles’ heel is a faith in the power of the individual star turn over communal action, the belief that a gold-plated influencer plus a subscription list plus some viral content can be alchemized into mass activism.... If pop culture can make being a feminist a 'cool' personal identity, can’t that translate into doing feminism and thereby advance old-fashioned shoe-leather organizing? Perhaps. But the new individualist style of feminism so often cast itself as an alternative instead of as an aid to the old-fashioned communal activism.... It’s hard to gussy up pocketbook issues in sequins, and celebrity feminism has preferred to focus on problems of sexuality and identity over bedrock economics...." 

Writes Susan Faludi in "Feminism Made a Faustian Bargain With Celebrity Culture. Now It’s Paying the Price" (NYT).

I'm trying to extract the meat of this overlong opinion piece. I think my quoted portion has done that, but I can shorten it even more. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think what Faludi is trying to say — and won't say with gut-punch clarity — is pop culture celebrity is inherently right wing.

There's something fundamentally incoherent about mixing left-wing politics and celebrity. These celebrities can mouth left-wing concepts, but they are individualistic — they are the winners in an ongoing tough, meritocratic competition — and left-wing politics is a matter of "old-fashioned communal activism." 

Something else that peeks out from Faludi's verbiage: Feminism might be right wing.

"The great shame is not that Mr. Trump brought an anachronistic masculinity into the Oval Office, but that he used the Oval Office to market a very modern brand of compensatory manhood — with a twist."

"The hallmarks of contemporary ornamental masculinity — being valued as the object of the gaze, playing the perpetual child, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing — are the very ones that women have, for half a century, struggled to dismantle as belittling, misogynist characterizations of femininity. The preoccupation with popularity, glamour, celebrity, appearance — what are these qualities but the old consumer face of the Girl? If Mr. Trump is reclaiming a traditional stereotypical sex role, it’s one that long belonged to women. Why have so many of the modern-day grunts who mourn the loss of 'old-fashioned' manhood hitched their wagon to a silk-suited flyboy? Since at least the 1990s, and at full tilt in the era of social media, men have been faced with a quandary: how to define their sex in a culture where visibility, performance and marketability are the currency. You could say that Mr. Trump has, if nothing else, found a way. But he’s done so not by defending the Greatest Generation man, but by abandoning him."

From "Trump’s Thoroughly Modern Masculinity/The president isn’t a throwback to old-school masculinity. He’s a he-man specifically engineered for our image-based, sensation-saturated times" by Susan Faludi (NYT).

"Flyboy" is explained elsewhere in the column. It's a WWII epithet for aviators who posed in silk scarves, Faludi explains, and were disparaged as not showing true manliness.

By the way is Trump "silk-suited"? I presume his suits are wool, not silk. I looked it up and found a lot of articles about how cheap Trump's suits look! Here's an example of such an article from right before he won the 2016 election. We were told it matters because "you can tell a lot about someone by the way they dress," and Trump's baggy clothes show that "he isn't detail-oriented." The article ends: "Next Tuesday, vote with your sartorial conscience."

"Spend some mind-numbing hours tracking the origins of 'Believe All Women' on social media sites and news databases — as I did..."

"... and you’ll discover how language, like a virus, can mutate overnight. All of a sudden, yesterday’s quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize. In this case, that foreign intrusion is a word: 'all.' 'All' insertion was all the rage during the Kavanaugh hearings. When senators from Kamala Harris to Mazie Hirono had their regard for Dr. Blasey’s credibility elevated by Fox News pundits to universal gender credulity, their actual words, 'I believe her,' became believe all women. 'That’s literally the hashtag,' former Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus said in February 2019.... Is there 'literally' a hashtag? Well, kind of.... Type in #BelieveAllWomen for 2017, when the #MeToo movement took off in October, and you get several dozen references, followed in 2018 (the year of the Kavanaugh hearings) by many more. But here’s the thing: I found that the hashtag is, by a wide margin, used mostly by its detractors. It seems that #BelieveAllWomen first appeared on Twitter in late 2014, in three tweets — by an Ontario midwife.... Then, in the fall of 2015, Hillary Clinton posted a tweet: 'To every survivor of sexual assault … you have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed.' To which Juanita Broaddrick, who alleges that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, responded on Twitter on Jan. 6, 2016, 'Hillary tried to silence me.' Conservative editor David French, who has a large Twitter following... retweeted Ms. Broaddrick at once — attaching the hashtag #BelieveAllWomen, followed by four question marks.... As happens, the canard, blown into a bonfire by the right, became accepted truth in mainstream media...."

From "'Believe All Women' Is a Right-Wing Trap/How feminists got stuck answering for a canard," by Susan Faludi (NYT).

I appreciate that tracking down the origin of a saying that can't possibly be right. It is a good taunt coming from the right, and it's important to know how to keep from getting tangled up in it.

But I can't resist taking a shot at that "canard, blown into a bonfire." A "canard" — as all of us who took French class should remember — is a duck. The French word has been used in English since the 1840s to mean "A false or unfounded story, rumour, or claim, esp. one that is deliberately misleading; (originally) spec. an extravagant or absurd story circulated to deceive the credulous; a hoax" (OED). It's a dying metaphor, so you have to watch out for putting it with other metaphors, like a bonfire. I can't read "canard, blown into a bonfire" without picturing a poor waterfowl bursting into flames...

"Toward the end of the book, Kantor and Twohey devote two chapters to Christine Blasey Ford and her decision to air her sexual-assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."

"This, and the book’s finale, 'The Gathering,' seem appended, an anticlimactic climax. In 'The Gathering,' the reporters assemble 12 of the sexual abuse victims they interviewed (including a McDonald’s worker, Kim Lawson, who helped organize a nationwide strike over the fast-food franchise’s failure to address sexual harassment) at Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brentwood mansion to talk, over gourmet Japanese cuisine, about what they’ve endured since going public with their charges. The testimonials inevitably descend into platitudes about personal 'growth' and getting 'some sense of myself back.' At one point, Paltrow starts crying over the way Weinstein had invoked his support for her career to get women to submit to his advances, and Lawson’s friend (a McDonald’s labor organizer who came with her so she wouldn’t feel alone in a room full of movie stars) hands the actress a box of tissues. These therapeutic scenes paste a pat conclusion onto a book that otherwise keeps the focus not on individual behavior or personal feelings but on the apparatuses of politics and power."

From Susan Faludi's review of "SHE SAID/Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement" by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. (Kantor and Twohey are NYT reporters, and the review is in the NYT.)

Interesting detail about Paltrow, the tissues, and the McDonald's workers.

Since I used the word "phallocracy..."

... I decided to look it up in the NYT archive. I was surprised that it has only appeared 3 times. The Times is big on feminism, and it's a real word, defined in the OED as "A society dominated by males; the dominance of men over women; the distinguishing belief of a phallocrat."

January 27, 1985:

["Sisterhood Is Global/The International Women's Movement Anthology"] abounds with emotions and opinions, and has little of the style of a standard reference work. And despite its stress on statistics, accuracy is not its strongest suit.... The editor, Robin Morgan, chose the contributors and then gave them a free rein... For the Dutch contributor, the major issue is ''Do we still make love with our oppressor?'' The problems are rather different in Haiti, where teen-age girls stitch baseballs for 14 cents an hour. Elsewhere, the titles tell much of the story: ''Women in a Warrior Society'' (Australia); ''Fighting for the Right to Fight'' (Colombia); ''Elegance Amid the Phallocracy'' (Senegal)....

August 15, 1999:

For nigh on 20 years, Mary Daly, who is widely considered the world's foremost radical feminist philosopher and theologian, has barred men from her classroom at Boston College, arguing that they marred the learning experience of women.

For 20 years, too, the university objected to her separatism and penalized her with reprimands and denial of promotion, but never fired her. Nor could it change the strong mind of a woman who... even uses her own lexicon, with words like phallocracy and academentia....

This week, Boston College, a Jesuit-run Catholic university, officially took Dr. Daly's office back from her....

December 21, 2010:

She had names for what she was fighting. “Phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy — call it whatever,” [Mary] Daly said. In 1987, with a co-author, she published her own dictionary — seventh in a line of nine books she wrote — meant to spell out a new lexicon for women... Anyone who didn’t bother to question male dominance was a snool; anyone who promoted it, a dickspeaker....

There's also "phallocrat," which the OED defines as "A person who advocates or assumes the existence of a male-dominated society; a male chauvinist or supremacist." The NYT has used that word only twice, and the first one predates the earliest publication found by the OED. Hey! I beat the OED on something. Here, from July 1972:

Nelly Kaplan, the French writer‐director whose “Papa, Les Petits Bateaus” and “A Very Curious Girl” were shown at the recent Festival of Women's Films, has writ ten two more screenplays which she hopes to put before the cameras soon in France. The first is called “Phallocrat,” and it deals with a man who is, tyrannical in his relations with his wife and daughter.

The other one, from 2010 is an article about Susan Faludi's memoir "In the Darkroom":

It is... a project as high concept as a sitcom pitch: What if a famous feminist author — whose activism was spurred by her father’s bullying machismo — discovered that said phallocrat had become a woman? Complications ensue. But Ms. Faludi mines her material less for easy ironies than for insights into the very meaning of identity.

So how did I happen to use that word today? Commenters have been pushing me to watch the video of James Damore — the memo-writing ex-employee of Google — with Jordan Peterson.

All I said was:

I watched the entire Peterson video. I should write something about it. Peterson had no idea how to draw Damore out and seemed only too willing to fill up all the available space on his own. Phallocracy in action??

"decided to become" — Is that politically correct?

I'm reading the front page of the paper version of the NYT. There's this, right at the bottom:



Is that just a slip by the NYT or did I miss a memo?

Here's the underlying article, in the "Fashion & Style" section — is it fashion/style?! — "My Father, the Shapeshifter/In a book about her enigmatic father, Susan Faludi explores the very meaning of gender and identity."

"Decided" is Faludi's word: