"Let me be clear. I don't think the homoeroticism is the weird part...."

Says Democratic Congresswoman Becca Balint (D-VT), talking about Pete Hegseth and testosterone:

"There are so many people in this administration that have some weird, like, intense homoerotic feelings toward men while also being incredibly homophobic and not just homophobic but, like, hate mongering, fear mongering about the LGBT community. Let me be clear. I don't think the homoeroticism is the weird part. The weird part is that they pretend that that's not what it's about. And so, Pete Hegseth was, like, the example of this, like the manly-manly rugged macho man, and I don't know if you know who Tom of Finland is. Tom of Finland — this is gay male porn that was drawn by a man, and, like, Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of that. So I feel like they must be looking at that as, like, their example of what men look like...."

I blogged about Tom of Finland back in 2014 in a post titled, "Finland issues stamps honoring an artist whose 'sleek sado-masochistic drawings with abundant amounts of beefy male nudity' portrayed 'a sensual life force and being proud of oneself'" ("The first quote in this post title is the way the NYT described the work of Touko Laaksonen, AKA Tom of Finland, and the second quote is from someone in Finland who chose the particular images for the stamps, who added: 'There is never too much [sensual life force and being proud of oneself] in this northern country'")(the only image at my post is of one of the stamps issued by Finland).

Balint gets pretty excited about her ideas in that clip, and that made me want to look up what she studied in college.

"Any sport where the man is wearing panties is not a sport."

Said Riley Gaines's father, when college recruiters were interested in Riley both for both swimming and for softball.

Quoted in "Riley Gaines: If JK Rowling agrees with me, I’m doing the right thing/America’s most famous opponent of transgender athletes in women’s sports is celebrating a Supreme Court win. She is ‘vindicated’ — and emboldened by her British husband" (London Times).

There's also this quote from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Maybe if you channeled all this anger into swimming faster you wouldn’t have come in fifth."

That's from last October, when JK Rowling tweeted, "@Riley_Gaines doesn’t defend women’s rights for attention or money, any more than I do. We fight because it’s the only thing to do if you’re not a coward, a pick me or a living doormat."

The London Times is very interested in the British husband, Louis Barker, who, we're told, "is on his way to becoming a jeans-wearing, truck-driving, job-creating American man, with a beard and a mullet and a construction company. Gaines says she has recently caught him saying 'y’all' and 'ain’t.'"

Gaines says:

Maxxing out.

"Texas looksmaxxing influencer Connor Michael Murphy has drowned in Thailand after he was seen acting erratically and jumping in a lake to avoid cops.... The 32-year-old self-proclaimed 'giga chad,' or alpha-male, had earlier sparked alarm with his erratic behavior as he argued with a security guard at the estate.... His 22-year-old girlfriend said she had no idea what caused the outburst — but claimed he had previously splattered paint in the property while she was sleeping...."

The New York Post reports.

Here's how he looked before he maxxed out:

McDreamy.

From "Here Are the Maine Democrats Who Might Replace Graham Platner/Mr. Platner has not yet withdrawn from the race after a rape allegation, but Democrats in the state and nationally are already exploring potential alternatives" (NYT):

Platner was presented by the Democrats as fulfilling the people's supposed longing for masculinity, so, yeah, replace him with Patrick Dempsey. That makes sense.

"He was so arrestingly good-looking, with his black hair and blue eyes, and the ruddy complexion of someone who couldn’t be contained within the walls of a New York apartment."

"No one else looks like that, I thought. I was twenty-one. On a shelf at the literary agency where I was working as a secretary, I’d recently found a copy of Jack’s first novel, 'The Town and the City.' I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me, that I could have been one of the characters trying out some new, free way to live after leaving home."

Writes Joyce Johnson, in "What Gets Kept/More than half a century after 'On the Road,' Jack Kerouac is still a literary celebrity. But fame undid the man I knew" (The New Yorker).

I’d stayed up all night reading it, with the feeling that it was reading me.... that killed me. I read the line out of context to Meade and he laughed.

When do you ever say, I thought I was reading that book, but, really, that book was reading me?

More generally, when do you ever speak of interacting with an inanimate object and reverse the usual directionality of actor and acted upon?

I can only think of one example, something I considered the funniest thing in "A Hard Day's Night" when saw it the first time:

 

"[His wife] might have knitted it"/"She knitted him."

I asked Grok to help me think of other examples, and it gave me the highbrow answer: "When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."

"The Trump administration’s spotlight on testosterone and its increasing availability through online clinics come at a time when exaggerated, uncompromising, even aggressive masculinity is in vogue..."

"... in Hollywood and online in the so-called manosphere. Wildly popular figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman have spoken about their own use of T.R.T., framing it as a medical treatment for aging. But many influencers go much further, amplifying the message that being 'low T' is synonymous with low status, weakness and sexual inadequacy — and often profiting off promotional links to T.R.T. clinics, or even starting their own. That message seems to be reaching younger men in particular. Clavicular, the 20-year-old streamer who popularized the 'looksmaxxing' subculture, which casts the relentless pursuit of physical attractiveness as the clearest route to social capital, has said that he started using testosterone at age 14 to achieve 'a more dimorphic look.'..."

From "Why So Many Men Are Obsessed With Testosterone/From the Trump administration to online influencers, the hormone is increasingly seen as the key to achieving a new male ideal" (NYT)(gift link).

"Some time ago my older brother became obsessed with Korean skincare, which he discovered on TikTok."

"In his early fifties, he spends nearly all of his spare time on this app, imbibing a steady stream of drag queens, Democrats and women washing their faces. This formula had sufficiently influenced him to plan a trip to Seoul, where he wanted to get 'skin treatments that are illegal in the US.' Would I like to come with him, he wondered? If it isn’t clear by now, my brother is gay. So am I, but he’s better at it than I am...."

Writes Ben Kawaller, in "My gay brother and I went on a beauty trip to Korea. It hurt/At 41, Ben Kawaller crossed the globe for a skin treatment that’s illegal in the US. Was the pain — and the four-figure price tag — worth it?" (London Times).

A brief description of one procedure: "the general idea is they burn off your face and the one that grows back is nicer."

"I wasn't worried. I understand life. We live in a crazy world."

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A post shared by Bransen Gates (@branhattan)

"You know, the hot one, with polio."

My son Chris took a photo of a sign in an ice cream shop in Austin, Texas:

Chris happens to reading a book about FDR at the moment — "FDR." On Sunday, he sent me this passage that describes FDR’s first public appearance after being paralyzed from polio:

"Androgenic Reacts After Reports Of Clavicular Suspected Overdose."

A Newsweek headline. Can you even read it?

I know Clavicular is a person, and I've got to presume Androgenic is also a person. By their names alone, I would have guessed they were corporations or health-care products of some kind. But in the context — reacting, overdosing — I can see that they are human beings. Sad.

Clavicular is only 20, and he's gotten far too much attention for a young person. Yes, he's been asking for it, but don't give young people everything they ask for.

Sample paragraph from his Wikipedia page: "On December 27, 2025... [Clavicular] described Vice President JD Vance as 'subhuman' for his "recessed side profile' and for being 'obese,' asking, 'How are you fat and expected to lead a country?' He agreed with [a] criticism of California governor Gavin Newsom as both a 'degenerate' and a 'liar' but said that, in a potential 2028 United States presidential election in which Newsom ran against Vance, he would vote for 'Chad' Newsom for 'mogging,' or being more attractive than, Vance."

Trump is wowed by himself.

"Wow!"

ADDED: At the link, which goes to a Trump post at Truth Social, there's video animating a series of photos of Trump, in chronological order, beginning with him as an angelic toddler. We get the sense of Trump through the years, but there is one glaring problem, and it's funny that he chose to share this video anyway. There is only one photo where he is shown with one of his wives, and that wife is Marla Maples.

"I was walking with my girlfriend when we saw him. Shirtless, in late-afternoon sunlight, J.F.K., Jr., was playing Frisbee, wearing nothing but black athletic shorts..."

"... tennis shoes, and droopy white socks. This was the Ivy League. Nobody worked out. (Nobody I knew, anyway.) And so I wasn’t prepared for the muscularity, the anachronistic virility, on display. John’s physique was so classically ideal he might’ve been throwing a discus instead of a Frisbee and been carved out of stone. You looked for the defect in him and you couldn’t find it. There had to be something wrong somewhere, but it would take a magnifying glass to detect. Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood. I mentioned it was 1979. Bisexuality was undergoing one of its periodic upticks. I’d fallen into some confusion on that score myself. But I had a girlfriend now. That wasn’t what was going on. The urge I felt wasn’t to possess. It wasn’t even to resemble. It was to draw near. To be allowed to draw near...."

Writes Jeffrey Eugenides, in "My Unrequited Love Story with J.F.K., Jr./I knew John F. Kennedy, Jr., not that well and not that long, but enough to have experienced the gravitational pull he exerted, like some great big moon"
 (The New Yorker).

"The euphoria of the first moon landing was directly connected to our ambivalence about the science that made it possible."

"Rocket technology, which lifted man to the moon, could also hurl hydrogen bombs across the planet. Like the promise of artificial intelligence and bioengineering, the promise of space was shadowed by the possibility of planetary annihilation.... The original space program had fierce and cogent critics in the United States, but the allure of the technology, the bravery and telegenic decency of the astronauts, and the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon eventually won out.... [O]n a nervous night, the world watched us again... wondering whether there might be nuclear bombs.... Trump backed down, but...[t]he distant, wide-eyed wonder of unprecedented achievement of the Space Age had been eclipsed by a deferred promise to return an entire people to the Stone Age...."

Writes Philip Kennicott, in "Trump’s dark rhetoric eclipses the new wonders of the Space Age" (WaPo).

I'm a little older than Kennicott, who was probably a young child at the time of the first moon landing. I was 18 and completely disaffected because of the Vietnam War. I didn't experience anything like "wide-eyed wonder." The boys my age were all in danger of being drafted and sent to fight in a war people were justifiably pessimistic about. Nixon was just as horrible to us as Trump is to the Trump-haters of today. I declined to respond with the awe the news shows told us to feel because I didn't want to see anything going well for Nixon. Less than a month after the moon landing, there was Woodstock. Who was a sucker for "telegenic decency" in the summer of 1969? Were we conned by "the symbolic power of winning the race to the moon"? Five years before the landing, we were laughing at Bob Dylan's sarcastic lines, "I ask you how things could get much worse/If the Russians happen to get up there first/Wowee! pretty scary!"

"Most striking, Mr. Newsom has drawn on the idiom of the manosphere and online right, communities noted for their unembarrassed racism and misogyny."

"In July, he called Mr. Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller a 'fascist cuck,' the latter being a term used to fault men for lacking sexual power and racial pride. In March, his press account shared a video of Mr. Newsom with the caption 'mog or get mogged.' This term describes a man who shows himself to be physically superior to other men and thus the 'alpha male of the group,' or AMOG, who 'mogs' lesser men.The most startling example of Mr. Newsom’s strategy came last week when he posted an image on social media comparing his looks to those of the immaculately groomed fictional villain Patrick Bateman, as played by Christian Bale in the 2000 film 'American Psycho.' The Bateman character, a serial killer whose hatred of women is rivaled only by his contempt for Black people, has become an object of fascination for the manosphere and online right, with memes coursing across X and TikTok.... The point is not that Mr. Newsom secretly desires the subjugation of women or minorities.... The point is that he is responding to a political and cultural energy that has shifted away from the celebration of feminism and diversity and toward the concerns of alienated, and especially white, men...."

Writes Matthew Schmitz, in "For Democrats, the Era of the Girl Dad and Male Ally Is Over" (NYT).

"It is unclear whether one particular photo — or the sum total of the day’s shots — led to consternation among Hegseth’s staff."

From "Pentagon bars press photographers over ‘unflattering’ Hegseth photos/Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s staff took issue with images taken in a rare briefing last week and decided to shut out photographers from two subsequent news conferences" (WaPo).

"If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful..."

"... people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma."

Writes Becca Rothfeld, in "The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement/In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty" (The New Yorker).

I'm not up for reading another article about Clavicular (or "his compatriots"). I'm more concerned with those who are actually successful in Hollywood who are ruining their natural beauty with "looksmaxxing." I can't look at them anymore, except in horror.  

Does Gavin Newsom have a Zoolander problem?

That question was asked and answered a few days ago.

The answer is yes. And I think people know what that means. A man is so under the spell of the notion that he's good looking that he has absurd confidence in himself.

It's causing him to blabber inanely, with ridiculous confidence:

This is actually really wild

Gavin Newsom is asked to define what he wants to do politically, what’s his goal

He rambles and doesn’t have an answer

He’s asked again

He doesn’t have an answer

He’s asked again

Newsom tells the person interviewing him to answer it for him… pic.twitter.com/Ig3SU2LKw4

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) March 7, 2026

"The bachelor banker admitted to Interview magazine that he had not yet made it onto the elite dating app Raya, confessing that he only uses Hinge."

"Nelson, a dirty vodka martini enthusiast, listed swanky Manhattan spots Jac’s on Bond, Bar Pisellino, and Mace as the top places that he would take any lady lucky enough to match with him.... Johnson, a Dallas native, laid out his thoughts on crypto investing and AI, but also confessed to buying 'a painting for $1,400 that is simply a bunch of lines.' He says he owns 'approximately six vests and seven Vineyard Vines quarter zips': an essential part of any finance bro’s wardrobe when kicking off their career on Wall Street. Barclays associate vice president Tommy Doherty, who said he owns up to ten vests, tells Interview readers that they should 'know your risk tolerance and have a well-diversified portfolio.'"

I'm reading "Baby-faced Goldman Sachs bankers could be fired over ‘unauthorized’ magazine photo shoots: sources" (NY Post).

"Unauthorized" is in quotes because, as the last line of the article says, "It is unclear whether Johnson and Doherty obtained approval to be interviewed by the magazine." I'll bet they were authorized and that Goldman Sachs likes getting inane publicity in this form. It's Interview magazine, and the guys are good looking — and they have vests!!! and quarter zips!!!

As for the type of painting that is "simply a bunch of lines." I looked:

Ha ha. Everything turns back on itself these days. In the early days of image searching, I think I'd have turned up something more like Cy Twombly.

Anyway, here's the original Interview article, formatted nicely, with all the "Finest Boys in Finance" answering the same small set of questions, including"What’s the most you’ve spent on something stupid?" 

Trump and "good looking men."

PRESIDENT TRUMP jokes as he hosts the 2025 Major League Soccer Cup champions Inter Miami CF at the White House: “These are good looking people. Marco, I don't like good looking men.” pic.twitter.com/k6wsrvK9SD

— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 5, 2026

And speaking of good looking men, Katie Couric asks Gavin Newsom if he's "just ridiculously good looking" and whether he has "a Zoolander problem":

Couric: Do you have a Zoolander problem? Are you just ridiculously good looking as Vogue said? What do you do about that?

Newsom: You don’t do anything about it…It’s just who I am.

Good. Lord. pic.twitter.com/aFmvpDLlaa

— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) March 5, 2026

Slip.

"You've had sex with him... all 3 times."