"The problem is less a 'boys will be boys' tolerance than a sense of resignation among politicians, staff and other members of official Washington that powerful, ambitious men are built differently."

Writes Michelle Cottle, in "How Many People Heard About Swalwell and Did Nothing?" (NYT).

Cottle does not delve into this "built differently" hypothesis or the reasons why people believe it and choose to condone bad behavior. She seems to hope to light a fire under these weaker people and motivate them to oppose the "powerful, ambitious men" who — supposedly — are fueled by sexual desire. 

Maybe she doesn't delve into the hypothesis because she thinks it's true and self-evident. Maybe she's too puritanical to open up the subject. "Built differently." Say it clearly and explicitly. When I was a child, circa 1960, I asked my mother how babies were born. That was long ago, but I remember her answer verbatim: "Well, you know how men and women are built differently."

Can we please grow up and say it bluntly? There's no reason to be polite here. Powerful, ambitious men are built differently... the idea is if we want truly great men in our positions of power, we need to accept the component of their psyche that is a drive for sex — a lot of sex, with young, beautiful women. We're diminishing ourselves if we filter out the men who have it. Look at JFK. Look at Trump. And by the way, it's also the reason why none of the women are truly great political leaders.

That's not my personal belief. That's the hypothesis Cottle gestures at, and I'm just putting it bluntly. Maybe you can put it more bluntly, so I'll turn the conversation over to you.

"I want you to imagine a guy today, if R. Crumb never existed, but he emerged as R. Crumb today and put that work out. He would 100% be labeled in the Andrew Tate camp, right?"

 

Duncan Trussell had sent Joe Rogan an R. Crumb drawing, and it sets Joe off:

"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love.

"In earlier writing, [Lindy] West presented her union with the musician Ahamefule Oluo... as a kind of feminist fairy-tale ending."

"'My Wedding Was Perfect — and I Was Fat as Hell the Whole Time,' said the headline of a 2015 column she wrote in The Guardian. But if the wedding was idyllic, West reveals in 'Adult Braces,' the marriage was not. Almost from the beginning, she writes, Aham conditioned their relationship on his being able to sleep with other women. She gave in because she was desperate to keep him, but his dalliances made her intolerably insecure. Because West lived in a left-wing milieu in which nonmonogamy is common, she felt an extra layer of shame over her inability to accept Aham’s extramarital sex life. ('At the time, being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,' she writes.) Her anguish was exacerbated by an excruciating degree of bodily self-hatred, which, as she knows, contradicts the persona she’s built her career on. 'Do you think I have ever felt like I deserved to demand anything from men?' she asks.... [Aham] used her politics against her; West reports that Aham, who is half-Nigerian, 'believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership.'... [At the end of 'Adult Braces,' West writes] 'If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.'"

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking" (NYT).

Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy.

"But a recent tragedy-exploiting television series about John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette features a character using my name and presents her as me."

Writes Daryl Hannah, in the NYT.

The choice to portray her as irritating, self-absorbed, whiny and inappropriate was no accident. In discussing the show, “Love Story,” one of its producers explained: “Given how much we’re rooting for John and Carolyn, Daryl Hannah occupies a space where she’s an adversary to what you want narratively in the story.” Storytelling requires tension. It often requires an obstacle. But a real, living person is not a narrative device. 

There is also a gendered dimension to this thinking. Popular culture has long elevated certain women by portraying others as rivals, obstacles or villains. Isn’t it textbook misogyny to tear down one woman in order to build up another?... 

I have never used cocaine.... I have never desecrated any family heirloom.... I never compared Jacqueline Onassis’ death to a dog’s....

What was so bad about 1976?

That's the teaser on the front page of the NYT for an article with a different headline, "The Conservative Conspiracy Against Women’s Progress Is Real" (by Jessica Grose).

The article says nothing about the 1970s. I do see a reference to the 1960s: "The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid." The 60s were 60 years ago, and the article does call the report "a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change."

Usually the 1950s are selected as the era of the traditional wife and the 1960s represent the exciting period of changing gender roles. The 70s were the heyday of feminism. These decades feel quite distinct from each other to me, a person born in 1951. Jessica Grose was born... when? Maybe to millennials, the 50s, 60s, and 70s seem like one big chunk of boomer oldness. 

"It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like 'White Fragility' seriously."

"So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets. Fox News’s Will Cain described a 'weird kind of smugness' in the way 'some of these liberal white women interact with authority.' For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women" (NYT).

There's a link on "casual contempt for white women." It goes to a 2020 BBC article about the mythic figure known as Karen — "What exactly is a 'Karen' and where did the meme come from?"

Contempt toward women is pervasive throughout the world and throughout history, but it can also be a special left-or-right problem happening at particular times and in particular places. Social media keeps feeding me videos of women acting hyper-privileged and oblivious of the risk or screaming and losing her mind over practically nothing.

"Erika Kirk is walking a fine line...."

Here, that's a gift link to The Washington Post.

I was puzzling over that headline at 4 a.m., but I'm only getting to blogging it now, and I don't want to go on too long at this point. So I'll just give you a numbered list and leave it to you.

Enough of that "and his wife" business.

This is too little too late:

They're playing catch up now, after the arraignment, but decent journalism should have required referring to her by name all along. She was arrested for a reason, so there should be some specificity in the charges against her. Without that, we got the false impression that she was swept in as an appendage of the man.

Every time I heard "and his wife," I thought of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song. The subordination of the female character even in those lyrics has always bugged me.

Now, if you're charged with a crime, you'll prefer to be downplayed, but Cilia Flores doesn't deserve that benefit. 

In the world of Chappell Roan, Brigitte Bardot might as well be Milkshake Duck.

I'm reading "Chappell Roan walks back tribute to Brigitte Bardot over late star’s 'insane' beliefs" (NY Post).

It looked like this on Instagram:

Quick turnaround. 4 minutes. Made me think of Milkshake Duck:

But "Red Wine Supernova" came out in 2023. It begins "She was a playboy/Brigitte Bardot/She showed me things...." The reference to Bardot is not obscure, but in your face, line 1. Chappell Roan has been trading on that famous name for 2 years.

Bardot has openly expressed the ideas that got her accused of racism since 2 years before Chappell Roan was born. (Bardot published "Mon cri de colère" ("My Cry of Anger") in 1996.)

How is it that no one told Chappell Roan that Brigitte Bardot was something more than a sex object until Roan made herself part of the story of Bardot's death?!

"Many, of course, now live in fear of Pornhub not paying up and of being exposed. 'Great,' says another user, a teenager..."

"... who shouldn’t be on the site but is. 'You just try to carve out a safe space where you can learn to objectify women and then this happens,' he continues. 'I don’t know what my mum will say if she ever finds out.' And as yet another user tells us: 'Gleeful feminists will be all over this, like we need a lecture about patriarchy on top of everything else.' He doesn’t have much time for feminists. Whether they are first, second, third or fourth wave, what they all need, and have ever needed, 'is a good seeing-to if they’re not frigid, which, chances are, they are.' His wife, he adds, won’t be best pleased if she finds out, 'but, frankly, she’s brought it on herself by not allowing that choking thing. She needs to take a good look at herself. I think we all know where the blame truly lies. Most women, from what I’ve seen, are gagging to be choked.'"

Writes Deborah Ross, in "Oh no! How will Pornhub’s users cope with being exposed? A hacking group now has the details of 200 million premium users" (London Times).

That's why I read the London Times, new-to-me expressions like "a good seeing-to." 

"I'm pretty sure the whole Karen meme is a sophisticated psy-op."

TikTok, below the fold:

Did Trump say something about Karoline Leavitt's mouth?

I'm trying to understand the background to the satire in last night's "SNL" cold open:

It's better to know the background before attempting to get the satire. The fun is lost if you have to research it after the fact, but that's what I did. The question in the post title was my Google search, and I came up with this:

Wow, he actually said, about Leavitt, "When she goes on television, Fox, like I mean, they dominate. They dominate when she gets up there with that beautiful face and those lips that don't stop — pop pop pop — like a little machine gun."

"SNL" is so lucky to have him. The best lines are straight from the transcript of his ad lib remarks. What can they add?

Well, what they add is the sexualization. Trump was admiring her professional performance as press secretary. "SNL" is turning it into something completely sexual. They think they have a privilege to set back the progress of women in the workplace.

My tiny, squeaky voice says they don't.

"Looking out on a pool of less marriageable men, young women are turning their backs on the institution, bolstered by cultural messaging..."

"... from academia to Hollywood that remains critical of more conservative lifestyles. While the country rightfully spent recent decades boosting the educational and economic prospects of women, it deindustrialized, axing and outsourcing jobs in heavily male industries, and leaving men and women increasingly out of step with one another. Efforts to make the workforce and education system more friendly for girls have led to emphasizing literacy and verbal skills, a hemorrhaging of male teachers, and the decline of shop classes and vocational programs.... The trend line of women reporting a declining desire to marry may indeed reflect pessimism about their prospects rather than the institution itself — and not for ideological reasons so much as practical ones...."

Writes Emily Jashinsky, in "A marriage gap is growing — and it could spell disaster/The 'war on boys' could be resulting in some women shunning marriage" (WaPo).

Jashinsky, as a 7-year-old girl, was one of the kids portrayed in the Christina Hoff Sommers book “The War Against Boys,” which came out in 2000, and she also worked as an intern on the re-release of the book in 2012.

It seems that both men and women regard the members of the opposite sex as unworthy of marriage. 

Melanie Hamlett has a word to say about Scott Galloway.

You know Scott Galloway — he has a new book, he was on Bill Maher's show, I blogged about him back in '23 after he talked about men "garnering the skills and strength."

Melanie Hamlett was new to me but I see she's written lots of mainstream media articles, including "Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden/Toxic masculinity—and the persistent idea that feelings are a 'female thing'—has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally-stunted island, unable to forge intimate relationships with other men. It's women who are paying the price" (Harper's Bazaar 2019).

Before I read any of that I decided based on this one TikTok that she is a comic genius:

Prompts that occurred to me the morning after I read the Vanity Fair excerpt of Olivia Nuzzi's "American Canto."

I am protecting you from A.I. writing. Every word below was written by me except “hex memoir” and “cursed-dick lit." Grok came up with those 2 terms. 

Here's my blog post from yesterday quoting the book and mocking the prose style. And here are Grok's answers to my prompts. I'm just sharing my prompts:

1. Olivia Nuzzi's "American Canto" belongs in a literary genre with E. Jean Carroll's "Hideous Men" [actual title: "What Do We Need Men For?: A Modest Proposal"].

2. It's a style of writing that is exaggerated and beset with literary pretension — used by a woman who had a brush with a powerful man. It's related to memoirs by women (the "Bell Jar" genre) but it's deployed against political characters that are of great importance to people who wouldn't otherwise read florid subjective verbiage.

3. “hex memoir” or “cursed-dick lit” — these are established terms? Quote sources.

4. I'm a woman myself, 74 years old, but I just want to say that American women read some godawful trash.

5. What's the feminist argument that it is NOT feminist to immerse oneself in this kind of reading?

"Sure, even I get caught up in the romantic notion that a life exists beyond the grueling 9-to-5 of our capitalist society. A simple life, baking bread and caring for children..."

"... bestows a sense of comfort. But the promise of a tradwife is nothing more than fiction. And the idea of a womanhood that’s 'natural' has been completely determined by a white, male-centric society. Tradwife content allows young women to shrug off any sense of self-blame or responsibility for their role in society.... Tradwives get so caught up in their echo chambers that protecting the nuclear family seems like safeguarding existence itself, and they become completely insulated from what they deem 'unnatural': queerness, diversity, difference of thought. Without this exposure, they are unable to strengthen their sense of empathy.... They become so segregated from the rest of the world that they begin to believe that they will never achieve more—should not achieve more—than the conservative 'natural' role of womanhood.... Starting an article with the headline 'Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?' does nothing more than appeal to those who try to keep lower-income women oppressed and drive young people into a tradwife future that keeps them caged."

Said Kenneal Patterson, one of the participants in a Vanity Fair conversation called "Women of Vanity Fair Consider Ross Douthat’s Question: Did Women Ruin the Workplace? Today, The New York Times published a conversation between the conservative columnist and two writers about just how bad ladies have screwed up corporate culture with their presence. We felt we should engage."

"Today" was a few days ago. We talked about the Ross Douthat piece here, 3 days ago (and that post has a gift link to the provocatively titled Douthat conversation).

"You hear that language of personal choice, not only on the left with regard to abortion, but for conservatives in opposition to things like SNAP benefits for unmarried women..."

"Well, you chose to have this baby while you were poor, and everyone knows you could have chosen differently — when that could entail not having sex or killing the baby in the womb after sex has been had. So there is this sense that the base-line person does not have someone to depend on in this way. I think pregnancy is the starkest example, and it’s the gendered example, but the sense that the fundamental nature of the human person is someone who isn’t constrained by someone else’s need isn’t just a problem for women — it’s a problem for all of us. Each of us has people who depend on us, even if we go through our whole lives childless...."

Said Leah Libresco Sargeant, in an interview in the NYT with the provocative title "Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace? And if so, can conservative feminism fix it?" That's a free-access link to the transcript of the new episode of Ross Douthat's podcast. Also in the interview is Helen Andrews. As Douthat puts it, the guests are "both conservative writers, both critics of feminism, but they have very different views of what a right-wing politics of gender should look like."

"It’s about generational politics; mothers against daughters; an older, tougher feminism versus 'woke' millennials."

"It’s about whether 'being kind' is truly important or just another way to get women to be submissive.... Here we have what we so rarely see in movies, two powerful women in a showdown over something other than a man...."

From "Why did J K Rowling pick now to hit back at Emma Watson? The author has posted a withering statement about the actress’s views on trans issues, says Helen Rumbelow."

Should the widow stand back and know that her place is to quietly mourn and to express no opinions?

I'm reading The Washington Post: "Erika Kirk emerges as vocal public figure, redefining role of political widow/Vocal and stridently determined to advance her husband’s work, she has embraced her public role" (gift link).

In modern times, the number of women who have found themselves in this unenviable and tragic situation in the United States is small. The group is largely limited to the widows of the men slain in the tempestuous mid-1960s. Some biographers who chronicled the lives of those men — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John F. and Robert F. Kennedy — are wary of drawing historical comparisons that might by extension elevate Charlie Kirk, who made numerous disparaging remarks about Black people...

Inflammatory characterization casually inserted. 

... to the stature of an iconic civil rights leader or a president. But they see important distinctions between the ways the widows of the ’60s acted in their unwanted roles and the ways Erika Kirk is defining it.

“It’s such a different era and the partisanship is so much more extreme now,” said David Margolick, who wrote a book on the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and whose journalism is being turned into a documentary about Coretta Scott King and the Kennedy widows flying RFK’s body home after he was killed. “And people are all in their respective political communities and have very little interaction with people on the other side. In [the era of the earlier widows], as partisan as it was — and some people really hated the Kennedys — there was respect for the presidency that crossed party lines. The mourning wasn’t red and blue.”