"... there was a man in the unit directly across from mine — bags in the hallway, sitting on a five-gallon bucket, barefoot, writing on a notepad and eating cup noodles. As I approached, he pulled down a makeshift curtain of old plastic sheeting hung on a rope where the door would close. I was too surprised to get a good look inside, but I did see a large jar of yellow liquid and a semi-used roll of toilet paper, along with floor-to-ceiling bags and boxes that looked as if they had been there for many years. Behind the plastic it sounded as if he just continued to write. I had planned on organizing my unit that day but was so uncomfortable I just threw my things inside and left.
On almost every subsequent visit of mine, he has been in there. He always pulls the plastic down, but it doesn’t cover the whole doorway, and it’s deeply uncomfortable shuffling around my own things (or using the hallway) while someone sits there five feet away. We don’t interact; sometimes I think I hear a pen scratch, but once I heard rhythmic squelching and got really grossed out jumping to an obvious conclusion...."
Observing the structure of my own thoughts — you can tell me yours — I saw:
"... to masturbation. He practiced abstinence—it was, he said, a 'crazy idea to me. . . . Don’t have sexual release for several months in a row'—but, eventually, he 'got out of the cycle.' His emotions started coming back. 'I saw everything really differently,' he said. 'I saw that everything that had happened with me was because of me. And, by the way, that’s great news, because that means you could do something about it.'... [And] this is what enabled him to write his book. He recently finished a second one. 'I’m writing novels because I don’t jerk off every fifteen minutes,' he said. 'It’s really all it is.'"
That reminded me of the old after-sex punchline. Attributed to Balzac: « Là… encore un roman de perdu ! » (“There… another novel lost!”). There's a line in "Annie Hall": “I read a thing about Balzac. He used to, uh, after he’d have sex he’d go, ‘Oh, there goes another novel.’”
"And, hey, I’m not going to do that, but... [d]oing something physical, like putting on a song or getting yourself a snack or going to get a coffee, that’s all good. Text a friend or call someone. A lot of people have told me that they find their partner and have sex or get out the vibrator — which you can’t do at work, obviously, but if you’re at home, get after it. Whatever works. These are skills that you build over time...."
Said Ashlee Piper, author of "No New Things," quoted in "How I Quit Shopping" (NY Magazine).
"First titled 'Sick, Sick, Sick,' it eventually became 'Feiffer.' (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.) With his signature sketchy, scribbly lines, Mr. Feiffer sought to bring to a six- or nine-panel format a level of visual simplicity and intellectual sophistication akin to what William Steig and Saul Steinberg had done with their cartoons in The New Yorker. Often devoid of backgrounds and panel borders, Mr. Feiffer’s strip focused almost exclusively on dialogue, gestures and facial expressions.... He would present a couple bickering with each other in profile, or someone in therapy, often with the speaker facing the reader.... Complacent, self-satisfied white liberals were a frequent target, and he upbraided them mercilessly.... The leotard-clad Dancer, who first appeared in 1957, was inspired by a girlfriend. She was... Mr. Feiffer wrote, 'abused and exploited by men.... but where [her male counterpart, based on himself] grew defensive and angry over the years, the Dancer retained her faith. She danced, fell, got to her feet, tripped, sailed aloft, came crashing to earth, rose stubbornly and kept dancing.'"
Feiffer also wrote the screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge" and the Robert Altman version of "Popeye," and his play "Little Murders" became one of my favorite movies from 1971:
"'I wouldn’t trust them to move my couch,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said of the GOP ticket on the final night. 'I know a couch commando when I see one,' Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said minutes later. The jabs were just part of a more expansive case against Trump that Democrats laid out over four nights in Chicago. But they reflected a broader shift in tone for Democrats toward a no-holds-barred kind of rhetorical warfare many in the party once eschewed. Eight years after the Philadelphia convention cheered Michelle Obama’s famous line 'When they go low, we go high' — and with Trump still waging a campaign full of personal insults and baseless accusations... some Democrats said they are tired of being polite...."
This gets my "civility bullshit" tag, which in this case reflects my belief that the old "When they go low, we go high" was just a strategy choice, to be abandoned when it didn't seem effective... or when the low material is tantalizing enough, like that well-upholstered couch that seems be calling out to you.
"Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, has targeted Mr. Trump for his many legal problems — 'I know Donald Trump’s type,' she now likes to say, to uproarious applause and chants of 'Lock him up' that she only recently began to discourage. Mr. Walz has castigated Mr. Trump for 'servicing himself' instead of helping others, and made an off-color reference to a debunked rumor about Mr. Vance and furniture. Both Democrats do it with a smile, and the crowd eats it up.... Of course, Ms. Harris’s joyful-warrior approach has so far not been substantive from a policy perspective...."
But maybe get-happy is policy enough: "In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt adopted the song 'Happy Days Are Here Again' to offer a promise of a bright future to Americans stricken by the Great Depression.... In a time of war and economic recession, Barack Obama’s likeness was plastered on a poster [with] the message... 'Hope.'"
It gets my "civility bullshit" tag, because civility has been advocated in the past, and Democrats are in a phase where they see an entitlement to reject it.
"There are trends on TikTok about going 'boysober'... 'Platonic life partners,' meanwhile — friends who commit to owning a home and even raising children together — insist that sex and romance are not necessary to lifelong unions. The sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski is resistant to the idea that frequent sex should be a chief component of every committed relationship. Nagoski — who has been open about her own hiatus from marital sex — doesn’t endorse obligatory sex, nor does she encourage aiming for any sexual base line in terms of regularity or behavior. Drawing on the work of the Canadian sexologist Peggy Kleinplatz, Nagoski believes that low desire can sometimes be evidence of good judgment. 'It’s not dysfunctional not to want sex you don’t like,' Nagoski says.... For couples measuring themselves against what Nagoski calls the 'fictions' of sex, or for those worried that their relationship is on the line whenever they enter the bedroom or don’t meet some monthly number, there may be too much pressure for sex to be enjoyable. It’s more important that couples establish what kind of sex is worth having...."
"... because it creates more children.... But the Alabama decision 'is a very morally honest opinion,' said Andrew T. Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and public theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. The ruling, he said, shows the direct line of reasoning between belief that life begins at conception, and opposition to abortion and I.V.F. 'It’s going to force conservative Christians to reckon with potentially their own complicity in the in vitro fertilization industry,' he said. The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps the largest institution in the world that opposes I.V.F. Nearly all modern fertility interventions are morally forbidden. The I.V.F. process typically includes many elements that the Catholic Church opposes. There’s masturbation — an 'offense against chastity,' according to the catechism, or teaching — often required to collect sperm. There’s the fertilization of an egg and sperm outside a woman’s body — outside the sacramental 'conjugal act' of sex between a husband and wife. And there is the creation of multiple embryos that are often destroyed or not implanted — an 'abortive practice.'..."
"... make you stronger, cure depression, make you more successful, clear your skin.... And there is no medical evidence that it does any of those things."
The experts are worried — worried about respect for their authority. But whether there is "medical evidence" or not, individuals will experiment with their own body and mind and observe the results and make their own choices.
"... and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on 'Saturday Night Live' against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone...."
If only there were blogging back then! The "dopey moralizing scandals" — is that the right phrase? — of the time had to do with fearsome sexuality. I don't think it's wise to explain them as transitory dopiness. We can always predict that 3 decades later we will look back and think we were dumb, but it's also dumb to think that there's no worthy morality, just "dopey moralizing."
Here's the text of the rule: "A Proud Boy may not ejaculate alone more often than once every thirty days. That means he must abstain from pornography during that time and if he needs to ejaculate it must be within one yard of a woman with her consent. The woman may not be a prostitute."
"He was off air for eight months; I was off for seven. One month was the difference between punishment for jacking off at work versus commenting on the inadvisability of jacking off at work.
On one hand, the people who made this call about me are gone from the network, so maybe I could let it lie. But on the other hand, many of my colleagues no doubt knew about my banning from air, but not the reasons behind it, thereby leaving the impression I must have done something tantamount to Toobining. I did not.
I was told it was Jeff Zucker, now gone, who put this order in place and a deputy, also gone, who kept it there. I was also told I wasn't informed of the network's displeasure because I had just had a baby and someone in the old leadership thought I might be a 'loose cannon.' Not as loose as Toobin's.... In the #MeToo era, I have been asked to make public comment on basically every errant penis in the media, government, sports, and entertainment worlds, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else in the news, and at the expense of some amount of professional dignity. It is ironic that in shining a light on bad behavior, which is the right thing to do, you're still a woman on TV talking about penises...."
"The Proud Boys have four 'degree'” of membership. For the first degree, one merely takes an oath; for the fourth and highest degree, writes Campbell, 'a Proud Boy must commit a significant act of political violence or get arrested.' A more unexpected, and revealing, requirement faces second-degree hopefuls: They must swear not to masturbate more than once a month. This comes from McInnes’s belief that pornography-induced masturbation drains away the testosterone that would otherwise make men better fighters for the beleaguered white race.... Although Campbell does not explore it, far-right paranoia about pornography goes all the way back to 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'... These anxieties reflect a greater fear: that what’s being lost is not just testosterone but masculinity itself.... A researcher who studied 43 McInnes videos that drew more than a million views each on YouTube found that only three had to do with race, while 26 concerned women, gender or feminism. One, entitled 'Single Moms: Stop Talking About How Brave and Cool You Are,' drew 2.1 million views....."
Astronauts have been warned against masturbating in space over fears female astronauts could get impregnated by stray fluids.
There are strict guidelines over “alone-time” onboard in zero gravity.
Scientists have warned even the slightest rouge droplet could cause chaos on board.
Rouge droplet? In space, is semen red? No, it's just the kind of typo spell-checkers don't catch, the funniest ones, the ones that are other words, like "rouge" for "rogue."
Conan O’Brien was interviewing a NASA engineer, who said, “Three female astronauts can be impregnated by the same man on the same session … it finds its way.”
The nominations were unveiled on Tuesday, and C.K. earned a nod in the category of Best Comedy Album for Sincerely Louis CK. This was the comedian's first stand-up special since his career was derailed in 2017 after multiple women came forward to accuse him of sexual misconduct. He admitted at the time that stories of him masturbating in front of women or asking to do so "are true."
The nomination prompted me to look for the album on Spotify, and it's there, not canceled, completely accessible. I listened to the whole thing right after I saw the nomination. It was great!
And he talks about the "stories," at least some aspects of the stories. He doesn't concede that everything they're saying about him is true. Is there anything about the problem of a man using his power within the entertainment industry to gain consent from women who don't really want the sex he's offering but might be hoping for other advantages? Not overtly, but he does say that he knows that a woman may give consent and then, without saying so become unconsenting, so you have to keep "checking in." At least. In the end, he says that if you ask a woman if you can masturbate in front of them — which everyone knows is his thing — and she says yes, ask again, and then don't do it.
Of course, you have to listen to how he says it. He's a comedian. To write out the "ideas" as I've done is to drain out the comedy. His comedy depends a lot on shifting from cruelty to sensitivity, and he's brilliant drawing the audience into cruelty and then turning on them. To see what I mean, listen to the track "Wheelchairs and Legs and Retarded People":
"In the words of one of the brand’s designers, the core customer was 'coastal or urban, with a diverse cohort, aware of what’s going on in culture, cares about how they look.' The Hims Man could order sildenafil while waiting in line for Sweetgreen, changing in the Equinox locker room, obtaining knitwear on Mr Porter.... Hims claimed there was an undiagnosed epidemic of erectile dysfunction among men under 40, which made them eager to buy these wares. Or perhaps there was another explanation behind the sales figures, a combination of cultural forces that was changing the way men behaved in secret.... In a phrase the CEO uses constantly, Hims wants to become the 'front door' of the entire health-care system, the country’s main platform for nonemergency medicine...."
"Try instead to cultivate what psychologists call freely moving thoughts. Such nimble thinking might start with a yearning to see your grandmother, then careen to that feeling you get when looking down at clouds from an airplane, and then suddenly you’re pondering how deep you’d have to bore into the earth below your feet before you hit magma. Research suggests that people who do more of that type of mind-wandering are happier.
Facilitate unconstrained thinking by engaging in an easy, repetitive activity like walking; avoid it during riskier undertakings like driving."
It's funny that walking, that is, physically wandering, helps the mind wander. That makes me think of one of my favorite songs, "I Wonder as I Wander" — sung here by the man who wrote it, John Jacob Niles. And there it is, the mind wandering once again, and I'm not even walking. Just blogging, not slogging. Tripping along.
I like walking, but I find I get my best mind wandering done while running. I do 1.6 miles at sunrise nearly every day, and I like the quality of thinking that happens with that activity — at that time of day, in that setting. If I start thinking about, say, a movie I just watched — e.g., today, "Little Murders" — I can access all sorts of ideas about it and tangential to it.
Maybe I could do even better mind wandering while walking, but there's so much mind space in walking that I use an audiobook to fill it up. I rarely use headphones while running, but I nearly always use headphones while walking alone (and conversation when walking not alone). Maybe I should leave the headphones out — they're fixing 2 holes that stop my mind from wandering.
The other thing I do for exercise lately is mountain biking. Now, mountain biking is terrible for mind wandering. It's something I like about mountain biking: My mind automatically stays focused on precisely the task right there in front of me. It's great for flow. Flow, the mental state. There's also flow, the type of mountain bike track. That flow/flow is like the wander/wander mentioned above.
Anyway, here's the original trailer for that movie, a weird and very dark romcom about what happens when a thoroughly apathetic man (Elliott Gould) goes along for the relationship with a entirely energetically optimistic woman:
I don't think there's a better bad wedding than in that movie, with Don Sutherland as the hippie priest:
Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won't put any of these reasons down. Each in its own way is adequate, each is all right. Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating. Please, don't be startled, I'm not putting him down. That marriage did not work. But the man tried. He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society's way.
So did I use all the ideas my mind wandered into as I wrote this post? No, not yet anyway. There was that Donovan, but the lyric ran through the head with a misremembered word, "trip" for "skip": "Rebel against society/Such a tiny speck... -ulating whether to be a hip or/Skip along quite merrily." It fits now, though — don't you think? — with that priest's wedding homily.
A local feminist organization plans to protest comedian Louis C.K.’s performances at Comedy on State next week, while seven female comics are offering counter-programming at Bos Meadery on Madison’s Near East Side.
C.K. faced public shaming in 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, after he admitted to masturbating in front of five female comedians after years of denying rumors about that behavior.
“Join us in the streets outside the venue July 25-27th during Louis C.K.’s performances to let Comedy on State know he’s not welcome here!” the Socialist Feminist Working Group of the Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America said in a social media post.
That is, you have 2 choices, not including actually getting in to see Louis, whose shows all sold out quickly. You can join the socialism feminists in the street outside the the comedy club, downtown. Or you can head out to the "meadery" on East Washington for the alternative comedy show, which I see is called "Babe-apalooza" (not to be confused with babesiosis).
Is it good feminism these days to use the word "babe"?
"Masturbating in front of five female comedians"... There were five of them? At the same time? Or is that just how the newspaper prose makes it sound? If he was really masturbating in front of five female comedians, you'd think they'd have destroyed him with their comedy powers right then and there.
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