"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.

"An online debate has been simmering for years over what constitutes an acceptable date, especially if it’s your first as two singles."

"Some people embrace the idea of a cheap date, like a walk in the park or a chat over coffee, to build connection. For others, it’s dinner or nothing — preferably with a $200 minimum spend.... Riding bikes side by side through the city, [said Chester Martin, a 33-year-old musician in Brooklyn], is a 'slightly more elevated version' of going on a walk. And in case his date isn’t in the mood to ride her own bike, he doesn’t mind putting in extra work. 'The person I’m dating now is of the size where she can comfortably sit in the Citi Bike basket,' he said. 'I’ll just grab a bike, she’ll sit in the basket and we’ll go literally from, like, Brooklyn to Manhattan and just talk the whole way.'"

From "Would You Go on a Bike Date? Celebrities have recently been hitting the bike lane with their beaus, but the 'Bicycle Boy' was once branded a type to be avoided" (NYT). 

1. The Citi Bike rental agreement says "You may not exceed the maximum weight limit for the Bicycle (260 pounds) or the basket (17 pounds), and You may not otherwise use the basket improperly.... You understand the basket is not a child seat." But do you understand that it's not a woman seat? And how much does this teeny tiny woman weigh? More than 17 pounds I bet, but who knows?

2. "Once upon a time there was a woman who very much wanted to have a little tiny child.... so she went to an old witch.... 'Oh, we can manage that," said the witch, "there's a barleycorn for you!...'... [T]he woman... went home and planted the barleycorn; and very soon a fine large flower came up.... 'That's a charming flower,' said the woman, and gave it a kiss on its pretty red and yellow petals. But just as she kissed it the flower gave a loud crack and opened. You could see it was a real tulip, only right in the middle of it, on the green stool that is there, sat a tiny little girl, as delicate and pretty as could be. She was only a thumb-joint long, so she was called Thumbelina...."

3. Now, I don't know how well Thumbelina would do in Chester Martin's Citi Bike basket:

4. Be careful, Thumbelina! Shouldn't the musician take better care of you? Is this merely a "slightly more elevated version" of something else you shouldn't be doing? Don't you deserve a bigger "spend"?

5. Do you like "spend" as a noun?

"OnlyFans was launched in 2016, the same year as TikTok, and started out by connecting models directly with fans to sell them photos and videos."

"Where pornography had mostly been viewed for free on online sites, OnlyFans developed a subscription-based model for creators with their own OnlyFans accounts, with most being sex workers. In 2021, OnlyFans banned sexually explicit video content on its site as it looked to bring on outside investors and responded to requests from banking partners and payment providers, including major credit card suppliers."

From "OnlyFans Owner Leonid Radvinsky Dies at 43/The adult entertainment platform owner ran the company since 2018 and passed away after a battle with cancer" (Hollywood Reporter).

The link on "banned sexually" goes to the 2021 article "'Am I Going to Lose My House?': OnlyFans’ Pivot Leaves Adult Content Creators With Fewer Options/As the social platform unveils a ban of sexually explicit content starting in October, sex workers say the company is placing them back in a financially precarious position that they had previously gotten out of because of the platform" (Hollywood Reporter).

I'd never noticed this ban until now, mixed in with the news of the death of the man who got very rich building the platform and who died at the age of 43.

UPDATE: This post seems like a deliberate trick to lure readers into revealing their familiarity with OnlyFans! It was only after posting that I realized that Hollywood Reporter was bad at reporting the complete facts. Neither the new article nor the 2021 article revealed that the ban was never implemented. I suspect it's because of an assumption that its readers know what goes on at OnlyFans. I knew enough to write "I'd never noticed this ban until now." I never noticed what was not there to be noticed. Noted.

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

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

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

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

"I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through fifty years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama..."

"... should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function—they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter ones thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced anti-Semitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.... Islamists at home and abroad have been demonizing the Jewish State since 1948: Why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by 'changing the narrative'? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated; they merely wanted peace, which to their minds might be achieved rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding...."

I'm reading "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" by David Mamet (Amazon Associates link).

Wait. What about "The Birth of a Nation"? Did Mamet consider the movies and plays that have changed people for the worse? How about all the pornography? 

"'Sexual expression and imagery were common, widespread, legal and quite explicit' in the American colonies...

"... Professor Stone wrote in a 2019 law review article.... 'In the 18th century, bookstores in the American colonies carried an extraordinary array of erotica... and there were no statutes forbidding obscenity during the entire colonial era. To the contrary, throughout this period, the distribution, exhibition and possession of pornographic material was simply not thought to be any of the state’s business.' Indeed, Professor Stone wrote... Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin collected such works...."

From "What Would the Founders Have Thought About TikTok and Online Porn?/The Supreme Court will hear arguments next month in First Amendment challenges to laws banning the app and shielding minors from sexual materials on the internet" (NYT).

How does that connect to the TikTok problem?

"Seventeen pornographic film actors on Monday announced that they had launched a $100,000 ad campaign on porn sites warning that Project 2025.... wants to ban pornography and imprison people who produce it."

"The online ads will run in the states that will decide the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.... Vice President Kamala Harris is losing to former President Donald J. Trump among men, but younger men might be winnable — and pornographic websites are among the most heavily trafficked on the internet.... Mr. Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025, saying he knows nothing about it or the people involved in its creation...."

The NYT reports.

If you're genuinely concerned about censorship, why would you choose the Democratic Party as the one to trust? 

"The case has garnered national attention both for the salaciousness of a high-profile university official making pornographic movies and publicly talking about it..."

"... and the questions it raises about free speech rights. [Joe] Gow argued that his videos and two e-books he and his wife, Carmen, have published about their experiences in adult films are protected by the First Amendment. 'You don’t need the First Amendment to protect "The Star Spangled Banner,"' Gow’s attorney, Mark Leitner, told the committee. 'You don’t need the First Amendment to protect easy and comforting speech. It’s exactly the opposite. We need the First Amendment precisely when the danger of stifling, controversial, unpopular speech is at its highest. And that’s what we have here.'... The school is pushing to fire Gow for unethical conduct, insubordination for refusing to cooperate with an investigation and violating computer policies.... Gow has maintained that he and his wife produced the pornographic materials on their own time. He insists the videos and the books never mentioned UW-La Crosse or his role at the university...."

From "Porn-making former University of Wisconsin campus leader argues for keeping his teaching job" (AP)." Gow, formerly chancellor of UW-La Crosse, made his argument to the personnel committee of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents.

I don't know if these free-speech arguments garnered the attention of the regents. We're told they "asked no questions."

"As I see it, Google and other search engines are recklessly directing traffic to porn sites with nonconsensual deepfakes."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "The Online Degradation of Women and Girls That We Meet With a Shrug" (NYT).

That's a free access link so you can read the description of how easy it is to "nudify" real individuals and make stills and video. Ugh! I realize that giving out that information will cause more people to produce that material, but how else are those of us who loathe this sort of thing going to get outraged enough to have any effect?

"One image shared by a user on X, formerly Twitter, was viewed 47 million times before the account was suspended on Thursday."

"X suspended several accounts that posted the faked images of Ms. Swift, but the images were shared on other social media platforms and continued to spread despite those companies’ efforts to remove them.... Researchers now fear that deepfakes are becoming a powerful disinformation force, enabling everyday internet users to create nonconsensual nude images or embarrassing portrayals of political candidates."

From "Explicit Deepfake Images of Taylor Swift Elude Safeguards and Swamp Social Media/Fans of the star and lawmakers condemned the images, probably generated by artificial intelligence, after they were shared with millions of social media users" (NYT).

Combining a photo of the head of a famous person with a photo of someone else's body is an old trick. I remember when Jon Stewart did it to the Supreme Court Justices in his book "America (The Book)." From 2004:

"My wife and I live in a country where we have a first amendment. We’re dealing with consensual adult sexuality. The regents are overreacting.”

"They’re certainly not adhering to their own commitment to free speech or the first amendment.... I got an email last night saying I was terminated. I wish I would have had the opportunity to have a hearing. When reasonable people understand what my wife and I are creating, it calms them down."

Said Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse chancellor Joe Gow, quoted in "Wisconsin university chancellor claims he was fired for appearing in porn videos/Joe Gow says that his free speech rights were violated after the Universities of Wisconsin board of regents decided to fire him" (The Guardian).

"When people see an age gap, they tend to imagine there is something intrinsically unequal about it — that the older partner wants someone they can control..."

"... and the younger partner has daddy issues or is just out for money.... And even if the older partner is calling all the shots, or some of them, that isn’t necessarily abuse. While Me Too made us all too aware of the way power dynamics can be and have been exploited, it didn’t do away with the fact that desire for these dynamics continues to exist. (Daddy, for instance, was the most-searched term on the porn site xHamster among women in America in 2018.) Sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, who is seven years older than his husband and 22 years older than his boyfriend, has found much of the conversation about age gaps to be fundamentally unrealistic about what human relationships are. 'We are status-obsessed, power-obsessed primates always jockeying for control — socially and also in our interpersonal relationships,' he said. 'There’s no interpersonal relationship without power differentials, without advantages or disadvantages on both sides. And if you want to correct for that, or eliminate that, you have to eliminate human relationships.'" 

From "The Age Gappers/They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?" (New York Magazine).

"I think a lot about the fact that I’ve had the privilege of censorship — that my body would be considered worthy of censoring. There are many people whose voices are not even listened to in the first place."

Said Karen Finley.

Quote in "Conservatives Called Her Artwork ‘Obscene.’ She’s Back for More. Karen Finley, one of the N.E.A. Four, revisits culture wars 25 years after a Supreme Court ruling — amid today’s culture wars — with a work at Art Basel Miami Beach" (NYT).

"Casino owners discovered in the late 1980s that people who gambled on screens became addicted three to four times faster..."

"... than those who gambled at tables. The rest of America had learned that lesson by 1992, when a third of homes had Nintendo systems. Men without jobs have video games the way men without girlfriends have pornography, and growing numbers of men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage. The historian David Courtwright calls this 'limbic capitalism,' the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions."

From "Boomers/The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster" — a 2021 book by Helen Andrews (and I earn a commission if you buy it using that link).

Here's a 2019 Vox interview with Courtwright. Excerpt: "I make a distinction between ordinary capitalist enterprises like companies that sell people rakes or plows or nails or whatever.... But I think of limbic capitalism as capitalism’s evil twin, a really cancerous outgrowth of productive capitalism. There is a certain class of brain-rewarding products that lead to a form of pathological learning that we call addiction...."

"For better or worse, she wished the lawsuit were done with. 'It’s in God’s hands now,' [Olivia Hussey] said."

"'It’s all in God’s hands in the end.' Even if it failed, she said, she’d be okay. 'Most people on their deathbeds, even the most evil people, have to say, What have I done? And what was wrong? And what did I do right? I’m not afraid to die because I’m not scared of my reckoning.' She’d made her share of mistakes, and sometimes she wondered whether filing the lawsuit was one of them. But she could live with that. 'Nobody’s perfect,' she said. 'If we were perfect, there’d be no need for all this charade, this illusion that we call life. If we were perfect, we’d all be angels.'"

From "Romeo and Juliet Was a Tragedy/In 1968, Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting were the world’s most famous teens. In 2023, they sued Paramount for abuse" by Lila Shapiro (New York Magazine).

The lawsuit, filed the day before the Child Victims Act expired, is based on the idea that Hussey and Whiting were traumatized by the way the director, Franco Zeffirelli, forced them into appearing naked. They say the movie is "essentially pornography," "a poisonous product," and "evidence of a crime."

"When a man in Ohio found out that someone online had manipulated his 11-year-old daughter into sending intimate photos of herself, he called police for help..."

"... according to a video shared widely on social media. The man was hoping officers could speak with the girl to help her 'realize what this was,' the video shows. But when two Columbus police officers responded to the man’s home, one of them said that his daughter 'could probably get charged with child porn'... 'Who? She can?' the man responded in the video. 'She’s 11 years old.'... 'Doesn’t matter,' the same officer replied. 'She’s still making porn.'"

From "Police told a father his 11-year-old could get ‘child porn’ charge, video shows" (WaPo).

"So What if a Candidate Livestreamed Sex Acts with Her Husband?"

For this story, I'm linking to Jack Shafer at Politico, because his headline is — almost verbatim — the question I had for my search as I looked for an article about Susanna Gibson, a Democratic nominee for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates.

"Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily."

"She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends. Today I’m 16, and my peers are suffering from an addiction to what many call 'the new drug.' Porn is the disastrous replacement for intimacy among my sexless, anxiety-ridden generation."

From "I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway. Porn is not content. It’s a substance. And it must be controlled like one, argues 16-year-old Isabel Hogben" (Free Press). 

This is one of 2 winners in what was an essay contest for high schoolers. The other winner is "Why I Traded My Smartphone for an Ax/At 15, Caleb Silverberg made the most important decision of his life. He ditched technology and headed to the forest."

You see the common theme: Kids challenged to break away from the screens that captured them at an early age. I note that the young woman, whose mother couldn't rescue her, expects the government to rescue her. The young man rescued himself. 

By the way, the observations Hogben makes about on-line porn have been around as long as on-line porn. There's nothing "new" about them. And the idea that porn isn't speech was very well developed by Catharine MacKinnon in the 1980s. I'm not surprised that a 16-year-old doesn't know much about that, but why would she know about what "intimacy" has consisted of in all the various generations? Of course, it's pretty standard to think your generation is different from those that came before and sound, to older ears, like the same thing all over again. 

"Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced..."

"... 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...."

Writes Jason Zinoman in "In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird/Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character" (NYT).

That awful arrest took place in 1991, O'Connor's tearing of a photograph of the Pope happened in 1992. If you lived though that era — the NYT considers it an entire "age"! — do you remember with any specificity the kind of "moralizing"? I remember the Robert Mapplethorpe photographs and the obscenity case against 2 Live Crew. I remember "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice." If the "age" that is 1991-1992 is expansive enough to go back to 1985, I remember when 11-year-old Karenna Gore activated her mother by playing Prince's "Darling Nikki."

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."

By the way, the opposite of "dopey" — which means stupefied by sleep or a drug — is "woke."

"Job centres in Belgium have started asking if out-of-work Belgian actors would like to try their hand at starring in pornographic films.

"Actiris, a public employment agency in Brussels, has been the subject of criticism from politicians, who are demanding that the question be struck from a list for jobseekers. Penalties can be imposed by Actiris on people refusing to work, which has only intensified the controversy.... "

The Express reports.