"After an uncredited part as a masseuse in the Peter Sellers comedy 'What’s New Pussycat?' (1965), written by Mr. Allen, and a voice-over in 'What’s Up, Tiger Lily?' (1966), Mr. Allen’s directorial debut..."

"... Ms. Lasser had full-fledged roles — with character names and screen time — in Mr. Allen’s next three auteur efforts, which he wrote, directed and starred in. In 'Take the Money and Run' (1969), she was a bank robber’s neighbor, impressed by his fame. In 'Bananas' (1971), she was the hero’s activist girlfriend who drops him because he shows no political leadership skills. The next year, in 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask),' she played a woman who could achieve orgasm only in public. In the middle of all that filmmaking, in 1970, the Allens divorced...."

From "Louise Lasser, Star of TV’s ‘Mary Hartman,’ Is Dead at 87/She began her screen career in Woody Allen movies (he was also her husband), but she was best known for her portrayal of the Ohio housewife in the pigtails and puffed sleeves" (NYT).

"What are some famous quotes by writers/artists/musicians about critics?"

That's I question I had, a couple hours ago, as I was gathering my thoughts in preparation, I thought, for blogging this article by the New Yorker's movie critic, Richard Brody, "In Defense of the Traditional Review/Far from being a journalistic relic, as suggested by recent developments at the New York Times, arts criticism is inherently progressive, keeping art honest and pointing toward its future."

I got a bunch of great quotes out of Grok with my question, including the one that deserves to stand in for them all: "Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read" (Frank Zappa).

Then there was this, from Pablo Picasso: "The critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." And that got me tumbling down a side path with an issue I'd encountered yesterday, the idea that there are individuals who identify as eunuchs and the notion that castration is, for them, medically necessary. I was told: "The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care (Version 8) includes a chapter on 'eunuch' as a gender identity, suggesting that castration may be considered 'medically necessary gender-affirming care' for some who identify as eunuchs and experience distress from their genitals."

I introduced the question: "It occurs to me that a person might argue that they identify as dead and therefore entitled to physician-assisted suicide — that killing is a medically required treatment." That led to a long discussion that kept me far away from the topic of the usefulness of critics — they're "inherently progressive"! — and I'm not going to go into the details. I'm just going to list a few phrases that came up in the Grok discussion that's displaced blogging for me this morning:

"Conditions like Cotard’s syndrome, where individuals genuinely believe they are dead or non-existent, are rare and classified as a psychiatric delusion, treated through therapy or medication, not affirmation," "So you're saying that if only doctors had been killing people who 'identify as dead' for a longer period of time and managed to fight off those who think it's wrong, it would be analogous to transgender surgeries," "You’re correct that genital transgender surgeries, like vaginoplasty or phalloplasty, are... irreversible in any meaningful sense," "'Sexual sensation is possible due to preserved nerves' — I note that you didn't say orgasm," "Your point about muscles is spot-on: the lack of vaginal musculature in a neovagina means it cannot replicate the contractile component of a natal female orgasm," "Is there any commentary, comedy, or fictional writing utilizing my idea of 'identifying as dead'?," "Seems like something that someone in 'Chicago' would say (like 'He ran into my knife... 50 times')," "Somewhere, some writer(s) must have already written the line: 'Go ahead. Try to kill me. You can't. I'm already dead.'"

That went on and on, with the discussion of many movies, and it wasn't the only A.I. conversations that kept me away from the blog this morning. There was also, among many others, "Summarize this article... and explain why Brody thinks arts criticism is 'progressive.'" Which led to: "What is 'progressive' supposed to mean? It strikes me as utter bullshit." And: "Weave into this discussion what Tom Wolfe wrote in 'The Painted Word.'" And: "Isn't there some related idea — or conspiracy theory — that the CIA created the art market for Abstract Expressionism?"

All of that was more interesting to me than what I would have produced reading Brody's article and blogging it in my usual way. And my "usual way" is to follow whatever interests me, not to feel obligated, but to do what is intrinsically rewarding for me. You see the problem!

"Winners at the April tasting... included melt​ed snow that had been filtered through Peruvian volcanic rock, and deep-sea water that had been pumped up 80 miles off the coast of South Korea."

"There was water gathered from nets hung in a misty Tasmanian pine forest, and a Texas brand laced with lithium called Crazy Water.... Hotels are adding precisely designed water bars. Home wine cellars have become water cellars, where children are encouraged to select bottles with their parents. Water sommelier programs continue to grow. And of course, water influencers gather more and more followers...."

From "You’ve Heard of Fine Wine. Now Meet Fine Water. Bottled waters from small, pristine sources are attracting a lot of buzz, with tastings, sommeliers and even water cellars" (NYT).

It sounds like comedy, but it's really happening. As for that water pumped up from the "deep sea," it sounds salty, and it had me wondering if it's possible for unsalty water to somehow exist below the salt water. The NYT article doesn't impinge on the fantasy of the specialness of the water, but I believe these waters are processed, are they not? That deep-sea water must be desalinated and then a chosen mix of minerals is added, right? And "water gathered from nets"? Does that sound ethereal to you... or unclean? Why not water gathered from towels hung in a steamy bathroom?

"This is a patient that was very sick.... It went through an operation on Liberation Day, and it's going to be... a very booming country."

"It's going to be amazing, actually.... The operation's over, and now we let it settle in. You see the plants are starting to construction, already. We have many plants — Indiana massive auto plant...."

Do you like the reasoning through analogy? The economy is a person, its supposed problem is a sickness, the tariffs are a surgical procedure, and the patient is in the post-op stage. That might be a difficult stage, with various pains and struggles. Even if this is a good analogy — economies are like human bodies, and tariffs are like an operation for an illness, and the immediate effect is a stage in the recovery from surgery — we still don't know if the right medical treatment was chosen and performed successfully.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: "Could you summarize the Susan Sontag book 'Illness as Metaphor' and say whether it has some use in critiquing the above-stated analogy about the economy?"

That book is less about using illness as a metaphor to explain something other than illness and more about using something other than illness to explain illness. From "Illness as Metaphor" (commission earned):

"There’s almost nothing I like more than a laughing fit. It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm or a sneeze."

"I wish I could say that only the comedies of Aristophanes make me laugh, but then my pants would catch on fire. I have cracked up at bons mots, but also at dirty jokes, dumb pets, and all sorts of things I 'shouldn’t' laugh at. Someone recently told me a joke that involved the pun 'a frayed knot,' and I laughed like a lunatic. I don’t know why, and I don’t care. Laughing is laughing."

Writes Roz Chast in "Roz Chast on George Booth’s Cartoons/Every object is lovingly drawn, in a way that only Booth could draw them. Every detail enhances the scene" (The New Yorker).

That reminds me, I recently laughed hysterically — way way too much — at the tiniest little non-joke on the old TV show that Meade puts on sometimes, "Leave It to Beaver." Somehow, the father (Ward) saw fit to ask his wife (June), "What is it, mattress-turning day?" It is a non-brain response, like an orgasm....

"There is a lot of sex in 'Fear of Flying,' but the novel is rarely sexy. Intercourse, relentlessly anatomized..."

"... fails to delight Isadora, much less the reader. 'I longed to have orgasms like Lady Chatterley’s,' she sighs. 'Why didn’t the moon turn pale and tidal waves sweep over the surface of the earth?'... Jong [fought in] the struggle for women’s pleasure... during that fleeting moment when sex struck some feminists as the thing that would set us once and forever free. The decades have proved them wrong.... Today every woman is Isadora. Or maybe none is. Americans are lonely — marrying less, partnering less, even having less intercourse than ever.... The marriage plot, the abortion plot, the screw-me-sideways-without-a-zipper plot: Each has run its course without effecting the longed-for revolution. Many of today’s feminist narratives wallow in pain more than pleasure...."

Writes Jane Kamensky, in "'Fear of Flying' Is 50. What Happened to Its Dream of Freedom Through Sex? With its feminist take on sexual pleasure, Erica Jong’s novel caused a sensation in 1973. But the revolution Jong promoted never came to pass" (NYT).

I'll just quote Bob Dylan:

Then she says, “You don’t read women authors, do you?”
Least that’s what I think I hear her say
“Well,” I say, “how would you know and what would it matter anyway?”
“Well,” she says, “you just don’t seem like you do!”
I said, “You’re way wrong”
She says, “Which ones have you read then?” I say, “I read Erica Jong!”

"I was three years divorced, living in leafy, small-town New Jersey, when I looked out my kitchen window and saw a neighbor friend drop off some wildflowers he promised for my nascent woodland garden."

"He didn’t ring the bell. It was hot outside, so he placed them under the shade of a crape myrtle. As he pulled away, I felt, to my great surprise, maybe a half dozen little orgasms ripple through me. From that moment, I had touch-free orgasms whenever I saw him or heard his name. Suddenly, this man’s physical beauty was unparalleled. He was a creative genius. As I slid into an 11-year delusion that overtook my life, he became 'my beloved.'..."

Writes Teresa Riordan, in "My 11-Year Relationship That Never Happened/At 50, divorced and suffering from delusions, I experienced the greatest love I had ever known. If only it were real" (NYT).

ADDED: It's only by chance that this post follows the previous post, which is about "bristling" at the touch of a partner with whom you have an established sexual relationship. The shared topic is puzzling automatic bodily reactions. What do they mean? 

Bill Maher has a podcast. Watch him talk with Bella Thorne about sex.

 

My favorite thing about this discussion — the reason I'm blogging it — is the disconnect on the question whether music is a key component of a sexual encounter. Bill: "No music?? NO MUSIC?!!??" Bella doesn't want the distraction, the sense of fucking to this song. And Bill seems as though he can't conceive of sex without music — it would be "dry" — and how can you not have "a soundtrack." The overall vibe here is weirdly fake — the decor, the lighting, the we're getting high together ....

Meanwhile, Bill was on Joe Rogan's show. That's where I found out about Bill's new podcast. And you can tell that Bill and his people are trying to create a similar aura of intimacy, but there's a big difference. What Joe has isn't easy to copy. There's something that's missing in Bill Maher's setup. It's hard to figure out exactly what!

"'If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty's blocked, it's very difficult to achieve that afterwards... I consider that a big problem, actually.'"

"'It's kind of an overlooked problem that in our ‘informed consent’ of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.'... [Dr. Marci Bowers] can build a labia, a vaginal canal and a clitoris, and the results look impressive. But, she said, if the kids are 'orgasmically naive' because of puberty blockade, the clitoris down there might as well be a fingertip and brings them no particular joy and, therefore, they’re not able to be responsive as a lover. And so how does that affect their long-term happiness?" 

From "Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care" by Abigail Shrier (at Common Sense with Bari Weiss).

Also: "[I]n natal males, early blockade might lead to 'non-normal pubertal phallic growth,' meaning that 'the genital tissue available for vaginoplasty might be less than optimal.' But... [m]any American gender surgeons augment the tissue for constructing neovaginas with borrowed stomach lining and even a swatch of bowel. Bowers draws the line at the colon. 'I never use the colon,' she said. 'It’s the last resort. You can get colon cancer. If it’s used sexually, you can get this chronic colitis that has to be treated over time. And it’s just in the discharge and the nasty appearance and it doesn’t smell like vagina.'"

"Granted, I surprised myself with the ire that bubbled up over the course of writing this essay; I hadn’t realized how much lingering resentment I had..."

"... toward those men—and later, toward the female-orgasm industrial complex in which I saw the self-interest of such men reflected—who made me feel deficient and ashamed for a situation out of my control, and one that I had long ago made peace with. As grateful as I am to Dr. M and Justin for their support, moreover, for offering a safe space in which to further explore the frontier of my own body, I find myself wondering, when I think too hard about it, whether their professed 'calling' is actually just more male selfishness in disguise. ('Do you work with men?' I asked Justin before he left. 'No, only women,' he said. 'I’m not trained in the lingam.' Shocking, I couldn’t help thinking.) Yet I refuse to believe that there aren’t at least a few men out there with the necessary confidence and generosity to want me regardless of whether or not I ever come, and Justin made a good point: How will I ever find something authentic if I am inauthentic from the start?"

From "The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex/What one woman’s quest for sexual satisfaction reveals about desire, hysteria, feminism, and capitalism" by Katharine Smyth, who has never had an orgasm (The Atlantic). 

(To comment, you can email me here.)

Orgasms and sandwiches.

From a post at Reddit about the 1973 book "Understanding the Female Orgasm" by Dr. Seymour Fisher:

something I found googling his name.... "Part of the early research leading to that book found that women who enjoyed food were likely to enjoy sex as well, and that put a twist into the Fishers' social life, Rhoda Fisher said. 'When we got to somebody's house for dinner,' she said, 'no women wanted to sit near him. They thought he'd analyze their food.'"

If I had to choose between an orgasm and like a really good sandwich, I'd pick the sandwich. I don't know what that says about me. 

Absolutely. If I had to live without orgasming for the rest of my life, I'd feel a bit sad and frustrated, but if I had to live without really good sandwiches, I would be undone...

Just yesterday, I complained on another post my orgasms are pretty meh so it was such an easy choice. Give me a fricken sandwich with everything on it!!

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says, "And remember— you can’t fake a sandwich."

I google "marcel marceau eats a sandwich"... 

 

 ALSO: "Once I ate a hamster sandwich...."

AND: We all remember when Warren Zevon said "Enjoy every sandwich and you know what I mean by sandwich."

"Hite did not create the clitoris or discover the female orgasm, but she pointed a lot of women — and men — in the right direction."

"The Hite Report, published in 1976, examined surveys completed by 3,000 women and concluded that, for most women, conventional sexual intercourse was an ineffective means of achieving orgasm and that they did not need men and penetrative sex to find sexual satisfaction. For many women, her findings were a comfort and a potential liberation; for many men, they were shocking and outrageous. Inevitably her report was compared with other landmark sex studies, such as those by Kinsey or Masters and Johnson, although some saw little new in her findings.... Hite was inevitably criticised by male, moral-majority America, which always had a problem with her message. Some declared that her work did not survive serious scrutiny.... She then turned her attention to men, with The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (1981), featuring an analysis of responses from 7,239 men to questions about rape, pornography, homosexuality, adultery and male-female relations. The answers led her to conclude that repressed anger and infidelity were common characteristics of American marriage. 'There is a gut feeling that something is wrong — that although there are beautiful elements to sex as we know it, somehow there are unnecessary problems, too,' she wrote, blaming 'patriarchal culture” as the root of the problem.... She was born Shirley Diana Gregory in St Louis, Missouri, in 1942... She died from complications of dementia on September 9, 2020, aged 77."

From "Shere Hite obituary/Groundbreaking if controversial sexologist and feminist who shed new light on the female orgasm and once posed for Playboy" (London Times).

I was one of the women who completed the original Hite Report survey! I don't know why the survey got to me, but it did. I was living and working in NYC in the early 70s. I thought I wrote a lot of interesting things, and I read "The Hite Report" very carefully hoping to find something of mine, but no, I'm not in the book, other than as part of the statistics. I didn't feel much connection to the findings in the report, and the failure to use any of what I thought were my excellent quotes made me suspect that the quotes that were used were picked to fit a preexisting framework. The book certainly made a big splash back in the 70s.

Here's Hite exploring male sexuality with Mike Douglas and David Hasselhoff in 1982:



Wait. This is better, with Geraldo Rivera in 1977:

"The queen of coming is going. At the end of July, Betty Dodson was admitted to a hospital following complications from failing organs."

"She is in the Riverside Premier Rehabilitation and Healing Center in Manhattan with around two to three weeks to live, according to her doctors. And yet she has chosen to die as she lived: outrageously. This Sunday I attended one of her solo sex classes with a difference. At 4 p.m. ET, 55 women from around the world checked in for a Zoom circle jerk in honor of the self-styled 'rowdy cowgirl' from Wichita, Kansas. Visuals were a shadowy checkerboard of knees splayed, breasts old and young, vibrators and vulvas, hips pressing down into pillows.... The last time I saw Betty was at her New York home in January 2019. Betty was 89 at the time, but we drank two and a half bottles of Veuve Clicquot between us, smoked a couple of joints, and spent the night swapping sex gossip until she finally keeled over at midnight on the carpet of her living room A.K.A 'the Temple Of The Goddess'—the location of her now-legendary masturbation master classes, which has witnessed thousands of orgasms over the years. She refused to let me help her get up, so I watched her crawl to a nearby chair and use it to gradually right herself.... In a way, Betty really has been preparing to die her whole life. 'We need to embrace death like it’s our final orgasm,' she told me when I first interviewed her in 2014....  Betty had observed something from being present at the hospital death of her beloved mother. 'The top half of her body suddenly lifted up and then fell back,' she writes... 'It wasnʼt a disturbing sight at all. It was as though death had come to her as a final orgasm.'... In her seventies (a decade she named 'the youth of old age') she took a lover, Eric Amaranth, who was in his twenties. It was a 'fabulous' 10 years but she said that when she turned 80 she knew she had to give him up. 'I didn’t want to turn into Hugh Hefner.'"

From "How Is Betty Dodson, the Queen of Female Masturbation, Dying? Not Quietly" (The Daily Beast).

I'm enjoying this Twitter spat between Greg Gutfeld and Molly Jong-Fast (the journalist/daughter of Erica Jong who got the big scoop interview of Lisa Page).

I don’t want to call it too early, but I think @greggutfeld may have the dumbest take on my Lisa Page interview. https://t.co/b9FDjYl1c9

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) December 2, 2019

Thats no rebuttal. You’re the recipient of media welfare and the drooling posts after your “scoop” prove it. https://t.co/tXdb6xJ9Jb

— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) December 2, 2019

We talked about the interview yesterday, here. I didn't think there was anything in it worth reading. I just was fascinated by Page's calling attention to Trump's imitation of her boyfriend's orgasm. So I'm inclined to believe Gutfeld's "You’re the recipient of media welfare and the drooling posts after your 'scoop' prove it."

And while I'm here and talking about the attention given to the imitation orgasm, let me show you this other tweet from Jong-Fast:

Honestly, I’ve watched that clip a bunch of times and I think at this point it’s done some psychological damage. https://t.co/ZGJVtGngjW

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) December 3, 2019

We'd have all forgotten Trump's fake orgasm if Page and Jong-Fast hadn't dug it up and thrust it in our face yesterday. Take some responsibility.

And I think there are quite a few of us who remember having kids who suddenly needed explanations about Bill Clinton having oral sex in the White House.

But the news is the news. Keep your children away from all the news if knowing about the world as it is seems more damaging than protecting them from reality. There are so many things in the news that could hurt a youngster. Hearing a hard-breathing "I love you, I love you" from Trump is close to nothing unless the parent chooses to go graphic about it and explain what adults know. Why couldn't you just say "Oh, he's being silly and exaggerating how these 2 people were so in love with each other"?

I'm giving this my "using children in politics" tag because Hasan and Jong-Fast are just dragging children into view for their own political purposes. It's the desperate old what-about-the-children? plea.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Windows 10 was popping up little news notifications on our new computer, so when my ten year old logged on to math class this morning, he was greeted with the news that teens tortured a deer and a woman hung her children with a leash. The notifications are now disabled.

I think I can handle explaining Trump's impression.

Lisa Page talks like Trump.

That's the way things look at The Daily Beast.

For the nearly two years since her name first made the papers, she’s been publicly silent (she did have a closed-door interview with House members in July 2018). I asked her why she was willing to talk now. “Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she says. The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on Oct. 11, 2019.

Yes, it was that fake orgasm! That was the last straw! Did he really do that? I had to track down the video myself. Here (I think the "orgasm" is between 1:20 and 1:32):



Anyway, it was the headline that got me. Page is talking like Trump. I did nothing! No crime! But the "orgasm" motivation icing on the cake.

ADDED: Big Streisand effect on that fake orgasm. I had forgotten it, and now I'm watching it over and over and laughing a lot. Maybe Page thinks she can get women stirred up on her behalf, because the fake orgasm was "demeaning." But Trump was imitating Strzok, the man, so let's just see if the men of America take umbrage that Trump did a comical male orgasm.

"TPUSA Members Quit in Protest of ‘Exploiting’ Mollie Tibbetts’ Death/Iowans in the right-wing campus org resigned..."

"... after accusing Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk of seeking to ‘exploit’ a student’s murder to suit an anti-immigrant ‘political agenda'" (The Daily Beast).

In a letter penned by executive board members of the university’s chapter of Turning Point USA—a pro-Trump non-profit organization for campus conservatives—the University of Iowa chapter said that following the discovery of rising sophomore Mollie Tibbetts’ body in a cornfield on Tuesday, the chapter’s president purportedly received a message from a Turning Point field director that “insisted” that Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk and communications director Candace Owens visit the University of Iowa to host an immigration-related event.

“We respectfully decline this invitation,” the board members wrote, adding that they found the idea of using Tibbetts’ death “to suit a political agenda” distasteful....

The board members later updated their statement, writing on Twitter that the offer to host the event came from “students not affiliated University of Iowa Turning Point USA.” Owens condemned the chapter online, accusing the chapter of lying about having been contacted by a field director and “exploitation” of Mollie Tippetts’ death. (She also misspelled Tibbetts’ name.)...

ADDED: I have been declining to write about Candace Owens, but having at long last created a tag for her, I noticed "Candace Owens, con artist" at Spectator USA. Excerpt:

Candace launched Social Autopsy in 2016, after dropping out of college, a brief stint of working at Vogue magazine (yes, with those awful globalists!), a gig as an assistant at a private equity firm, and a failed founding of an editorial website which carried such high-minded and moral articles as ‘I Think Affairs Are Romantic’ and ‘I’m So Sorry Ladies, But We Can NEVER Stop Faking the Orgasm.’ The warring tribes of left and right both vehemently opposed Social Autopsy at the start.

Because I think the fake orgasm could be a good analogy to fake news, I read the "I'm So Sorry Ladies" piece. Excerpt:

You could lay there politely...

Lie there politely...

.... and allow him to continue, perhaps secretly hoping that he’s the marathon-type—saving his best tricks for the final laps. And if he’s not then you can suppose he’ll grow tired eventually. Eventually—while you mentally go through your grocery list (I think I have another bag of pine nuts in the cabinet somewhere) and he continues to do his absolute best to get you there. You can bet he’ll be using the same fool-proof moves that drove the last girl to a fake orgasm.

Yep that’s the your final alternative, and quite frankly, it’s just sad. Sad for you, sad for him, sad for the pine nuts even, which would really rather not be thought up into this pathetic situation at all.

Come on, it's a great analogy! Fake orgasm... fake news...

AND: Nick Gillespie in the NYT: "Republicans Are Exploiting the Murder of Mollie Tibbetts/Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. But the party doesn’t want to talk about that."

The killing of Ms. Tibbetts, who went missing on July 18 but whose body was found only this week, is an unspeakable tragedy. Her killer should be prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law. Yet many conservatives who have long assailed the government as incompetent at best are now so blinded by xenophobic rage over her murder that they’ve turned into the thing they claim to despise: vociferous boosters of big government....

Mollie Tibbetts’s murder is profoundly disturbing. But it is a very rare event in a country where the violent crime and homicide rates are near 40-year lows. It does her memory and the country no good to greatly increase the power of the state as if there are no costs to such plans.

“There is a girl who went against me. She was going to talk about something I did. I am going to tell you, and this is a promise, if she ever tells anybody..."

"... no matter how much time she thinks went by, I have people who will pull up in a car, kidnap her and throw her in the Hudson river with cement blocks on her feet. You understand what I’m talking about, right?”

Said the movie director James Toback, according to the actress Selma Blair, reported in The Guardian, "Selma Blair: James Toback threatened to kill me after sexual harassment/The Hellboy star claims the disgraced film-maker sexually harassed her and then suggested that he could have her killed if she told her story."

So movie directors talk like characters in bad movies.

There's something so sad about referring to Blair as "The Hellboy star." It's a boy's world.

IN THE COMMENTS: Laslo Spatula wrote:

From the article:

"When he asked her to have sex with him, Blair refused, but Toback insisted she let him pleasure himself in front of her and said: “You cannot leave until I have release.”

“You cannot leave until I have release.”

Say what you want, but that is a great line. Very Ming the Merciless.

"... a Reese’s peanut butter cup gave her such a rush that it was... 'like an orgasm of pleasure in my brain.' Now... 'It’s just peanut butter and chocolate. What’s the big deal?'"

A bariatric surgeon tells us about one of his patients, in a NYT article (by Gina Kolata) that takes the position that the weight loss after the surgery is not due simply to the reduction in the size of the stomach. We're told that "scientists have discovered that it actually causes profound changes in patients’ physiology, altering the activity of thousands of genes in the human body as well as the complex hormonal signaling from the gut to the brain."

I can't help feeling skeptical. "Scientists" — what scientists? There's a huge financial interest in performing all this surgery, and there's a lot of pressure to reduce medical spending. Doesn't that skew the research?

It's a long article, but the actual science part is minimized. Here's the most technical part addressing my skepticism:

"Edward Albee, widely considered the foremost American playwright of his generation, whose psychologically astute and piercing dramas explored the contentiousness of intimacy..."

"... the gap between self-delusion and truth and the roiling desperation beneath the facade of contemporary life, died Friday at his home in Montauk, N.Y. He was 88...."

He introduced himself suddenly and with a bang, in 1959, when his first produced play, “The Zoo Story,” opened in Berlin on a double bill with Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” A two-handed one-act that unfolds in real time, “The Zoo Story” zeroed in on the existential terror at the heart of Eisenhower-era complacency, presenting the increasingly menacing intrusion of a probing, querying stranger on a man reading on a Central Park bench....

“Albee is not a fan of mankind,” the critic John Lahr wrote in The New Yorker in 2012. “The friendships he stages are loose affiliations that serve mostly as a bulwark against meaninglessness.”

From a nice, long obituary in The New York Times.

I've only written the name Edward Albee once in the 12 years of this blog. It was in the context of an interview that Alec Baldwin did with Elaine Stritch. Stritch had "described having 'an orgasm for the first time in my life' on stage in a very emotional moment of Edward Albee's play 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' ("'You know, that big scene? "Our son," he yells in my face, "is dead." And I went "No!" At the height of my force, I said no to him.')" And Alec Baldwin said to her: "Honey, I just think it speaks volumes about you, about what a real creature of the theater you are that the only time that you ever had an orgasm was saying the words of a homosexual man. It was as far from a heterosexual orgasm as you could possibly get."

I guess I never wrote about it, but we did go out to see an Edward Albee play in 2014 at The American Players Theater. It was "Seascape," the one with talking lizards...



... a male-and-female couple of lizards encountering male-and-female married humans.

"Five myths about sharia."

From my UW Law colleague Asifa Quraishi-Landes in The Washington Post.

The myths are:

1. Sharia is “Islamic law"... 2. In Muslim countries, sharia is the law of the land.... 3. Sharia is anti-woman.... 4. Islam demands brutal punishments.... 5. Sharia is about conquest....

Debunkings at the link (which seems open to nonsubscribers, so don't skimp on doing the reading before opining — the idea is not to be ignorant). Key thought:

The human interpretation of sharia is called “fiqh,” or Islamic rules of right action, created by individual scholars based on the Koran and hadith (stories of the prophet Muhammad’s life). Fiqh literally means “understanding” — and its many different schools of thought illustrate that scholars knew they didn’t speak for God.

ADDED: Actually, the pay wall is a barrier. You could try getting in through private browsing. Anyway, I was looking at the comments over there. The top-rated one was:

That might be the most hilarious and absurd Islamic apologist statement I've ever heard... claiming that Sharia law and, thus Islam, is actually "feminist" because it allows women to orgasm during sex. I can't stop laughing. 

From Quraishi-Landes's text: "Fiqh scholars...  have concluded that women have the right to orgasm...."