"When I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past... But tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as..."

"... something like 'imperial Chinese harem'... None of this non-hierarchical bulls–t; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks.... I’m less hedonistic and more masochistic. I get a lot of pleasure from doing things that are hard, unpleasant, physically taxing, or emotionally painful..."

So wrote Caroline Ellison, quoted by the NY Post in "Sam Bankman-Fried ex Caroline Ellison made ‘foray’ into ‘Chinese harem’ polyamory."

Ellison has whatever legal/financial problems that motivated the press to go reading her now-deleted Tumblr account. I realize that I'm piling on by quoting what the NY Post chose to quote, but I want to say that we're not able to tell how speculative/humorous this statements might be if we had the context to know what kind of writer — what kind of person — Caroline Ellison is.

All of us? Or all except you?

Twitter speaks to the inner masochist in all of us

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022

I think this is his theory of why we're going to want to pay $8 a month to use Twitter. But maybe not. Maybe he deplores our love of pain and aims to lead us out of our lowly condition. Or is it meaningless chatter — alluringly enigmatic?

ADDED: I created the tag "masochism" for this post, then added it retrospectively to many posts in the archive. I found a few interesting things, and I'll excerpt them here, because it may shed some light on today's Muskism or spark some creative thinking:

November 25, 2008: Christopher Hitchens accused Obama of "foolhardiness and masochism" for selecting Hillary Clinton — "the unscrupulous female" — as Secretary of State.

January 19, 2011: My commenters were redesigning the Gadsden flag and Dr. Weevil — quipping "Here's my submission" — came up with this: 

          

November 1, 2013: I found what I called "a frisson of masochism" in something Ana Marie Cox attributed to Hillary Clinton.

May 28, 2015: I quoted Bernie Sanders, writing in 1972: "Many women seem to be walking a tightrope now. Their qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism." 

February 2, 2018: I quoted William Safire, writing in 1970: "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." 

October 30, 2018 — a study showed that Republicans and Democrats have different sexual fantasies: "The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism...."

"Despite the camp absurdity of her scenes, she is not a clown, and despite her nakedness, her work doesn’t straightforwardly concern..."

"... either masochism or self-love. Instead, fat stigma is toyed with, embodied, and satirized, sometimes through sexualized caricatures of gluttony. 'Good Morning' shows her—with her underpants pulled down and stuffed with a loaf (or more) of sliced white bread—holding a knife and a jar of Nutella.... A fat woman is by cultural default already an object of ridicule; inviting laughter by clenching a baguette between her legs, or ironing a pizza to her chest, could easily spin out of her control. Perhaps Susiraja’s blank affect is the key to her peculiar power to retain the upper hand. Indifference is one of the purest forms of defiance, but her disciplined impassivity, her refusal to cue the viewers’ reaction, is more than that. Her unwillingness to feed us meaning is more provocative, and disquieting, than an obvious dare, and it leaves a more lasting impression."

Writes Johanna Fateman, in "Iiu Susiraja’s Self-Portraits Are More Than a Dare/The photographer uses her own body without straightforward interest in either masochism or self-love" (The New Yorker). Lots of stunning/hilarious photos there. Perhaps a paywall will stop you, but here's her webpage. You can see the same photos there — and even more.

Wait. How do we know "she is not a clown"? It can't be the "blank affect." One of the prime ways of clowning is to do ridiculous things while maintaining a flat facial expression. There's a special and well-known word for it: deadpan.

The OED tips me off that "pan" was once American slang for "face" or "mouth." To quote "Great Comics" (1924): "Open yer pan afterwards about this and you'll be in stir for the next thousand years."

And I see that Nathanael West used "dead pan" in "Miss Lonelyhearts":

"Republicans and Democrats Don’t Just Disagree About Politics. They Have Different Sexual Fantasies."

Writes Justin Lehmiller, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute (at Politico). I'll just read this and see if it can help me decide once and for all if I'm really a Republican or a Democrat.

I surveyed 4,175 adult Americans from all 50 states about what turns them on and published the findings in a book entitled Tell Me What You Want....

While self-identified Republicans and self-identified Democrats reported fantasizing with the same average frequency—several times per week—I found that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to fantasize about a range of activities that involve sex outside of marriage. Think things like infidelity, orgies and partner swapping, from 1970s-style “key parties” to modern-day forms of swinging. Republicans also reported more fantasies with voyeuristic themes, including visiting strip clubs and practicing something known as “cuckolding,” which involves watching one’s partner have sex with someone else.

By contrast, self-identified Democrats were more likely than Republicans to fantasize about almost the entire spectrum of BDSM activities, from bondage to spanking to dominance-submission play. The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism, which involves deriving pleasure from the experience of pain....

What connects Republicans and Democrats, I believe, is that their fantasies are at least partly driven by what they can’t have... Nothing makes us want to try something like being told you can’t do it. This is why taboos, no matter what they are, often become turn-ons...

Oh, he's coming at this from a completely different angle than I wanted! He's assuming that first, you commit to some values, like monogamy or equality, and then, after you've decided how you're supposed to be, you know what is transgressive, and that's what feels sexy so you go there with your fantasy. I thought the eroticism would come first, and you'd begin with some mysterious, bodily feeling for cuckolding or dominance, and your being that sort of person would explain what you found attractive in the Republican or Democratic party.

In that view, you could analyze the results to mean that people who get excited by a great variety of choices are also attuned to the Republican message of a free market and individual responsibility, and people who get excited by bondage and domination respond the the Democrats' offer of greater regulation and impositions from above about what you ought to be doing. I could see how, intellectually, you might say the Republicans have the better set of values but still find yourself getting excited by what the Democrats say they will do to you.

I've said enough!

Etymology question of the day.

Is the word "effete" related to "fetus"?

ADDED: Perhaps you, like me, first notice this word when Vice President Spiro Agnew read these remarks in Houston, Texas in May 1970. These words (written by William Safire) are interestingly relevant today, so I'll print this out in full:

Sometimes it appears that we're reaching a period when our senses and our minds will no longer respond to moderate stimulation. We seem to be reaching an age of the gross, persuasion through speeches and books is too often discarded for disruptive demonstrations aimed at bludgeoning the unconvinced into action. The young--and by this I'd don't mean any stretch of the imagination all the young, but I'm talking about those who claim to speak for the young--at the zenith of physical power and sensitivity, overwhelm themselves with drugs and artificial stimulants. Subtlety is lost, and fine distinctions based on acute reasoning are carelessly ignored in a headlong jump to a predetermined conclusion. Life is visceral rather than intellectual. And the most visceral practitioners of life are those who characterize themselves as intellectuals. Truth is to them revealed rather than logically proved. And the principal infatuations of today revolve around the social sciences, those subjects which can accommodate any opinion, and about which the most reckless conjecture cannot be discredited. Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim, rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated, and a contemporary antagonism known as "The Generation Gap." A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

ALSO: I cut and pasted that text from The Pacifica Radio/UC Berkeley Social Activism Sound Recording Project, where "corps" was transcribed as "core," perhaps under the misimpression (recently displayed by President Obama) that "corps" is pronounced "corpse."

AND: I came across this topic reading a David Foster Wallace essay, "Twenty-Four Word Notes" (in this collection):

Effete — Here’s a word on which some dictionaries and usage authorities haven’t quite caught up with the realities of literate usage. Yes, the traditional meaning of effete is “depleted of vitality, washed out, exhausted”— and in a college paper for an older prof. you’d probably want to use it in only that way. But a great many educated people accept effete now also as a pejorative synonym for elite or elitist, one with an added suggestion of effeminacy, over-refinement, pretension, and/ or decadence; and in this writer’s opinion it is not a boner to use effete this way, since no other word has quite its connotative flavor. Traditionalists who see the extended definition as an error often blame Spiro Agnew’s characterization of some liberal group or other as an “effete corps of impudent snobs,” but there are deeper reasons for the extension, such as that effete derives from the Latin effetus, which meant “worn out from bearing children” and thus had an obvious feminine connotation. Or that historically effete was often used to describe artistic movements that had exhausted their vitality, and one of the main characteristics of a kind of art’s exhaustion was its descent into excessive refinement or foppery or decadence.

"These pants embody a masochist aesthetic. They are ostensibly 'chill' and yet they are not comfortable..."

"... high waist, no stretch, devious center seams. At their most extreme they have the potential to be punishing both physically (you don’t feel good) and visually (you don’t look so good, either), which seems like a remarkable achievement. We have arrived at wide-leg pants that are somehow more restrictive than the typical tight ones. These pants propose a pants-strategy that is the exact inverse of jeggings."

From "Succumb to the Siren Song of Unflattering Pants."

To augment your understanding: "11 Pairs of Unflattering Pants That Will Make You Look Ugly-Cool."

You have to think about the idea that to look ugly is to be cool. You might never believe that idea, but just get your head around it. Put yourself in the shoes of — inhabit the pants of — somebody who believes that, yes, it's true. Hmm. Jeesh. Levi's has pants called "Wedgie Icon Jeans." Wedgie! This is what's so interesting here. Pants that are not ugly because they're nice and comfortable. They are ugly and uncomfortable. If you're wearing something odd looking, you don't want people to infer that you're wearing it because you don't care about fashion and just want to be comfortable. It's humiliating to wear something that elicits the noncompliment "That looks comfortable."

By the way, many years ago, in the 1970s, before I went to law school, when I fancied myself an artist, I had a day job that consisted of reading all the magazines, including all the fashion magazines. (All is only a slight exaggeration.) For 2 years, I saw the trends come and go, and the insight I remember 40 years later is that some designs are brought forward and promoted as good mostly so that a year later it could be trashed as "suddenly" looking awful. The funniest lines in the intro from the editor in chief of Vogue were making fun of something that I knew very well Vogue had quite recently, mischievously told us looked exactly right "today."

I was reading Vogue in the Grace Mirabella years, and now I feel like reading her book, "In and Out at Vogue."

What Bernie Sanders wrote about rape fantasies in an alternative newspaper in 1972.

This is the feeblest controversy of all time, but it's worth noting that some people think it's worth noting and it probably needs to be said that if a GOP candidate had ever written anything like this, it would be considered significant:



I've read the whole thing, and it's mostly a call to all humanity to avoid "slavishness" and "pigness." Don't be oppressed and don't be the oppressor.

Many women seem to be walking a tightrope now. Their qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism.

There's a little blaming of the victim there, but it's an insight that was common in the feminism of the time. And he's endearingly sincere about bringing men and women together:

How do you love — without being dependent? How do you be gentle — without being subservient? How do you maintain a relationship without giving up your identity and without getting strung out? How do you reach out and give your heart to your lover, but maintain the soul which is you?

And Men. Men are in pain too. They are thinking, wondering. What is it they want from a woman? Are they at fault? Are they perpetrating this man-woman situation? Are they oppressors?

ADDED: I see hypocrisy at the Washington Examiner. On the one hand, there's "Bernie Sanders: Woman 'fantasizes being raped'":

Democratic presidential candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders once penned an essay claiming that men fantasize about abusing women and women fantasize about being raped. Not exactly what you'd expect from the far left candidate whose campaign runs on the idea of equality for all Americans....

And on the other hand, there's "Scott Walker attacked over abortion quote that he didn't actually say":

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker believes forced ultrasounds are "just a cool thing for women," a handful of online news sites reported Wednesday. Problem is: That's not exactly what the Republican governor and likely 2016 presidential candidate said.

By the way, what Scott Walker did with his official power 2 years ago is a hell of lot more important than what Bernie Sanders said as a private citizen 43 years ago.

I'm having trouble reading Ana Marie Cox's "Dear Senate women: grow up and don't pass Hillary Clinton 'secret notes.'"

I don't know. Maybe it's because she's writing in The Guardian now. This could be some British way of writing that just can't make it into my American mind. Anyway, Cox — going on about a letter 17 female Senators wrote to Hillary Clinton urging her to run for President — is working with the premise that "male representatives are boys and women are the grown-ups." That premise is not the part I'm having trouble with. I understand it. I understand it as: Feminism-as-sexism is funny; come on, give us a little room to get in some harmless girly slaps after all the millennia of suffering.

But let's move on. Cox writes:

No one in the media has seen the letter, so I guess it's possible that it contains some kind of burn-book-level intel: Jeff Session (Alabama Republican senator) is a grotsy little byotch, Lindsay Graham (South Carolina Republican senator) made out with a hot dog, Ted Cruz (Tea Party Texan) is almost too conservative to be anything but a robot. 

"Grotsy" isn't even in Urban Dictionary, but I understand it. It's like "grotty," which was understandable as a variation of grotesque when the British comedian George Harrison said it in "Hard Day's Night." Grotsy is as understandable as ugsly.

(Maybe the "s" absconded from "Sessions," which she has as "Session.") [ADDED: Commenters say it should be "grotsky," and the phrase "grotsky little byotch" is from "Mean Girls."]

I understand the rest of those insults and why it's funny to just make up insults about Republicans to pad out a column and why — when you're talking about Republicans — it's okay to apply the mustard of homophobia. That's all well within the rules of American political humor.

"But I've often had the feeling that the existential dilemma is a very subjective matter..."

"... entirely depending upon the individual and the circumstances of his life, and that we 'Western intellectuals' with our wrenched and tormented psyches have often imposed the need to find a purpose which may be in the end only an exercise in masochism," wrote William Styron in a letter to his daughter.

A fisherman in the Arabian Gulf finds purpose in life by fishing, a Wyoming shepherder by tending his sheep and remaining close to Nature that big sky. On a somewhat higher level intellectually; a person like James Joyce, a profoundly pessimistic man at bottom, could find reason and purpose through these moments of termed "epiphanies," — instances of intense revelation (through love, or a glimpse of transcendental beauty in the natural world) which gave such a sense of joy and self-realization that they justified and, in effect, ratified the existence of him who experienced them. In other words, the existential anguish becomes undone; through moments of aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment we find the very reason for existence.

Styron suffered from depression and stopped writing novels in the last 27 years of his life. The passage above is from a new collection of letters. His nonfiction account of suicidal depression is "Darkness Visible."

The letter above goes on to talk about his great novel "The Confessions of Nat Turner." He says:

The creative act in art often approaches this, but it can work on humbler levels as well. If you'll pardon my pointing to my own work, I think I tried to render this quality of revelation — "epiphany" in a part of Nat Turner. I'm thinking of the passage beginning on p. 119 of the Random House edition (you may want to re-read it) where Nat as a little boy is waiting on the table during a spring evening and experiences the combined ecstasy of (a) being alive and healthy in the springtime, (b) being appreciated as a human being, and (c) being given some marvelous unspoken promise about the future. For him at this moment all these things were enough. Existence and its joys justify everything and remain sufficient.

That reminds me of the the Dostoevsky quote we've loved so much we have a button:

"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.

"Tread on me, please, I'm a masochist!"

Dr. Weevil adapts Hazy Dave's version of the Gadsden flag.


 

You can collect all the entries in my "Redesign the Gadsden flag" enterprise by clicking here.

Powerline picked up "It's OK to Tread on Me Now/I Have Health Insurance" for a post about Obamacare.

ADDED: I like Dr. Weevil's quip: "Here’s my submission."

Christopher Hitchens hates the idea of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

"A president absolutely has to know of his chief foreign-policy executive that he or she has no other agenda than the one he has set. Who can say with a straight face that this is true of a woman whose personal ambition is without limit; whose second loyalty is to an impeached and disbarred and discredited former president; and who is ready at any moment, and on government time, to take a wheedling call from either of her bulbous brothers? This is also the unscrupulous female who until recently was willing to play the race card on President-elect Obama and (in spite of her own complete want of any foreign-policy qualifications) to ridicule him for lacking what she only knew about by way of sordid backstairs dealing. What may look like wound-healing and magnanimity to some looks like foolhardiness and masochism to me." 

So Obama is a babe in the woods or Hitchens is a hothead... a bulbous hothead.