Why are we suddenly hearing about the New York Magazine editor who says she engaged in "sexting" with RFK Jr.?

I've been reading reports in various newspapers, and I'm going to select the one in the London Times to link to and quote: "Reporter put on leave after admitting personal relationship with RFK Jr/Olivia Nuzzi allegedly exchanged sexual messages with Robert F Kennedy Jr while covering his campaign."

The magazine said a review of Nuzzi’s work had found no evidence of bias but described the relationship as a “violation of our readers’ trust” and its own standards. “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign,” it added.

Although Nuzzi did not identify the other person in the relationship, it has been widely reported that it was Kennedy....

It's a "relationship"? I'm only seeing that there were text messages and that they were "sexual." What are we talking about? Photos of naked body parts? Written invitations to have sex? Prompts to masturbate? Sexual words, such as saying that someone can go fuck himself? I don't know what we are talking about, and I suspect New York Magazine of wanting to hurt RFK Jr. and making sex-and-politics theater out of nothing.

According to the New York Post, Nuzzi had been “sexting” with Kennedy, who is married to Cheryl Hines, the Curb Your Enthusiasm actress, when Nuzzi was engaged to Ryan Lizza, the chief Washington correspondent for the Politico website. The couple called off the wedding a few weeks ago, said the newspaper.

Was Ryan Lizza involved in revealing these "sexts"? What's going on there? Here are Ryan and Olivia in happier times:

What nonsense! The photo, I mean. Who can look at that and not laugh? Can someone please tear off the veneer of middle-class respectability and tell us what the hell really happened?

"A very liberal man in New York who said he doesn’t even consider dating people who put 'moderate' in their dating profiles..."

"... said, 'It’s probably unfair, but with such a deep left-leaning dating pool, there’s no scarcity mind-set forcing us to interact and test that assessment.' A very liberal woman in Denver had the opposite perspective because she felt that liberal men were scarce: 'I was in a pretty bad relationship, but I stayed in it so long in part because I worried I wouldn’t find another man who is a Democrat,' she said."

Writes Jessica Grose, in "When It Comes to Dating, Ambition Might Matter More Than Politics" (NYT)(free-access link).

If you live in a big city that has lots of people who are politically like-minded, you can afford to filter out the people who don’t align with you very closely. If you live in a smaller or more politically mixed environment, you can’t afford to be so choosy without severely restricting your dating pool.

This is phrased in terms of the person doing the choosing, but the same kind of "scarcity" thinking must influence the person writing the profile. That very liberal New York man sees a "deep left-leaning dating pool," but isn't it full of people who figured they'd better say they're on the left? But maybe that's all New York man is himself and all he wants. 

"Do you screen potential dates or partners for their political beliefs? If so, how? Please include specific examples and funny stories..."

"How do you signal your own values and political beliefs on your dating profile? Are you intentionally leaving off any beliefs? If so, which ones and why? Are there lines you won’t cross when it comes to dating someone who disagrees with you on a politically charged topic — such as, abortion, vaccinations, gun control, climate change, immigration or President Trump? How important are a person’s politics when you’re dating or beginning a relationship? Do you refuse to date outside of your own political party or identity, or are you rolling your eyes at all of this?"

The NYT asks its readers.

This reminds me of the time — back in 2004 — when I did a "normblog profile." One of the questions was "Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own?" My answer was "Sure, if he wasn't an ass about it."

"The familiar public narratives about black women don’t fit Kamala Harris. She’s not a jezebel, a mammy or an Omarosa."

"She’s also the first viable woman running for president who has had an entire adult dating life. Elizabeth Warren got married (the first time) at 19, Michele Bachmann at 22, Carly Fiorina 23, Hillary 28 and even 2020 candidate Kristen Gillibrand got married at 35. Harris, who married her husband at the age of 49 was living her best life into her 30s and 40s. So yes, we were bound to hear about Willie Brown and yes, at some point, it will come out that she dated talk show host Montel Williams too. She was an attractive high profile single black woman in California, what else was she supposed to be doing when she wasn’t prosecuting people?"

From "Sen. Kamala Harris Is a 54-Year-Old Black Woman, and Yes, She Dated Willie Brown. So What?" by Jason Johnson at The Root. With this video:



I like that phrase "living her best life." Here are "10 Tips on How to Live Your Best Life" from the editors at the Deepak Chopra website. ("Set Intentions... Visualize... Meditate... Journal... Travel... Invest in Your Health... Practice Daily Self-Love...") And here's the Cardi B song, "Best Life," which begins "I'm livin' my best life, yeah, yeah."

Anyway, Johnson seems annoyed to have to address the sex life of Kamala Harris: "I have to write about her dating past because her ex-bae, 84-year-old former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown decided to have a Quincy Jones moment and spill tea on their relationship."

MSM's ham-handed protectiveness toward Kamala Harris: "The unique harm we cause when we dissect a powerful woman’s love life."

Oh, it's just exquisite, the harm we inflict on the delicate female candidate! It's unique! It hurts their tender feelings, so shush now, and allow this fine woman to become President, where we can continue to feel responsible for protecting her.

Yeah, that makes sense. Sorry. I want a President who will protect us. So your protectiveness toward Kamala Harris completely backfires.

I'm reading Monica Hesse in WaPo. The quote in the post title is the headline for her column. She's fielding the news that former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown has confirmed that years ago he dated Kamala Harris and he appointed her to 2 commissions, which — as Brown put it — "may have influenced her career." At the time, Brown was 60 years old and 30 years older than Harris. He was the speaker of the state assembly, and she was an assistant district attorney.

Why aren't we supposed to talk about that? There are at least some questions. In the #MeToo era, we have to wonder about whether the man sought sexual favors. In the case of Harvey Weinstein, we've heard from women who say he pressured them to give sex in exchange for career advancement, and that implies that there were women who said yes and received the advancement that was denied to the women who said no. That is a system of discrimination that matters a lot, even if we're disinclined to condemn the women who went along with it. But it's one thing to refrain from condemning them and quite something else to say these are the women we want to trust with the heaviest responsibilities.

If Kamala Harris is fit to represent the United States in confrontations with the greatest thugs in the world — Putin, et al. — she doesn't need kid-gloves treatment, and saying she does and impugning us for not getting in line makes me much more suspicious of this old love/"love" affair than I would have been if MSM weren't bending over backwards to protect her.

A little of Hesse's verbiage:

Plenty of us have... spent an awful lot of time discussing Bill Clinton’s willie and Anthony Weiner’s wiener: it’s not that we don’t talk about the sexual predilections of male candidates. But we do talk about them in a different way. We talk about men abusing power. We talk about women not even deserving power. The distinction matters, because the conversation isn’t really about sex, it’s about legitimacy. It’s about who we think has earned the right to be successful, and what criteria we’ll invent, and who we’ll apply it to.

“Maybe we should stop accusing women of ‘sleeping their way’ to the top,” Erin Gloria Ryan wrote in the Daily Beast in 2017. “Maybe because men have been the ones sleeping women to the middle and bottom.”

It takes two to "sleep." Both the man and the woman are trying to get something, and whether the woman gets as much as she wants — whether she gets to "the top" or only "the middle" — is no more interesting than whether the man got really great sex out of the arrangement or not. If, later on, we the people are judging a candidate, we look at what that candidate has done — whether it's the one that wanted to get sex or the one who traded sex for something else — and we judge them on the individual details. Why would sex be off limits just because women are more likely to be the ones in a position to give sex in exchange for something else, and the men tend to be the ones who want the sex so much they dole out non-sex favors to get it? Yes, it's different for men than for women, but so what? We the voters are the ones in the down position, stuck needing to vote for one of these fallible human beings. Don't tell me what not to talk about!

Does it help your career, to date someone powerful? I’d assume so. Does it also help to play golf with someone powerful, or smoke cigars with someone powerful, or belong to Skull and Bones? I’d assume that, too. But for decades we’ve accepted those relationships — many of which benefited only men — as standard procedure for how executives and politicians get ahead.

No, actually we haven't accepted it. Feminists have been denouncing the "old boy network" for as long as I've been listening to feminists, which is about half a century. The "standard procedure" has been under attack and deserves to be under attack.

We're supposed to throw feminism out the window now in order to help the fragile flower Kamala Harris? Ridiculous!

"It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power."

"Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige."

From "Maybe They’re Just Bad People/Not all Trump support is ideological." by Michelle Goldberg (NYT).

The phrase "literally or figuratively" makes more sense if you've read the previous paragraph which quotes from a 2011 book — "Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All" by Lisa Baron — which Goldberg disparages as "tawdry" and "shallow":

Lisa Baron was a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, hard-partying Jew who nonetheless made a career advancing the fortunes of the Christian right. She opened her book with an anecdote about performing oral sex on a future member of the George W. Bush administration during the 2000 primary, which, she wrote, “perfectly summed up my groupie-like relationship to politics at that time — I wanted it, I worshiped it, and I went for it.”

ADDED: Is Goldberg saying that pure ideologues are better people? Does she say they are "easier to understand"? Not exactly. She posits a subcategory of people who are "interested in politics because of values and ideas" and says that for them it can be easier to understand other people who are interested in politics in the same way, which I think just means that ideologues can understand other ideologues. I don't know if that's true. It depends on what you mean by "understand." I would wonder what made that ideologue an ideologue. And what does it mean to be an ideologue? Are you devoid of pragmatism and any willingness to compromise? I doubt if anyone successful is a complete ideologue. And who are these people "who don’t have ideologies at all." Is that even possible? And what makes a piece of writing "tawdry" and "shallow"?

If Roy Moore wins, says David Brooks, Republicans are "for a generation...repulsive" and "repulsive to people of color forever."

Brooks gets awfully grandiose and contemptuous (on "Meet the Press" today), especially at the end when he tells Republicans "you end up, not only making yourself unpopular but sort of corrupting a piece of yourself... There is no end to what they are going to be asked to tolerate, and that is just, internally, so corrosive."

Does a win by Roy Moore really mean all that? Why can't it just mean that the voters of Alabama — deprived of these allegations (about old events) until after the primary — were stuck with a choice between a particular, possibly morally flawed Republican who would represent them in Congress by voting for the policies they want and a Democrat who might be less morally flawed but would vote against the policies they want, and they voted according to their policy choices and not as a judgment on the morality of the man?

If Roy Moore's opponent wins, I would expect Democrats to exult at the fabulous new political opportunity and even to laugh openly at the Alabamans (who will be on the receiving end of contempt no matter what they do).

And I do not believe that after this election there's going to be any great shift to voting based on which candidate is more moral. I watched the Sunday shows this morning. All that cheesy emoting in the Theater of Sanctimony. Such scenery chewing! Especially by Brooks.

Isn't he too a sinner?

The disgust factor.

"According to some assessments, a pivotal factor in last week’s elections was a sense of disgust with the President—and one of the results was a sharp increase in the number of female candidates and winners," wrote David Remnick in that New Yorker piece I've already blogged about this morning.

I was struck by the idea that rising disgust had potential to lift the Democratic Party to new success, because a couple days ago we were talking about a test that uses susceptibility to feelings of disgust to determine how conservative or liberal you are. There, I noted reports of research that sees liberals as resistant to disgust. Psychology Today had a piece called "Are You Easily Disgusted? You May Be a Conservative," which said:

Evidence suggests that harm avoidance and the need for fairness underlie people's moral judgments in a number of cultures. While liberals rely primarily on these two values, conservatives also rely on desires for group loyalty, authoritative structure, and, most importantly here, purity. Following this logic, Kevin [Smith] and other researchers became interested in the potential for a relation between disgust and political orientations. They speculated that conservatives are more disgust sensitive than liberals as a result of their concern with purity-related norms and that this difference would manifest itself on issues that some may associate with sexual purity (e.g., homosexual sex and, therefore, gay rights).

Sure enough, Kevin and his co-authors found that conservatives are more easily disgusted than liberals....

If we assume this research has got it right, Democrats might want to reconsider the use of the disgust factor. Maybe the effort to disgust liberals will fall flat, and they won't get excited and out to the polls to vote for Democrats. Meanwhile, the disgust talk might stimulate conservatives, and they'll be running out to vote, presumably for Republicans. Or do you think the disgust-oriented ones, the erstwhile Republicans, will go for Democrats because the Republicans — Donald Trump, Roy Moore, etc. — have been successfully portrayed as just so disgusting?

I'm trying to look at the big picture, the long-term effect, and I think there's some risk for the Democrats in going too far into sexual negativity. I think those of us who are disposed toward liberalism — and I say "us" because I came up 59% liberal on that disgust test — will tune out or come to view them as too fussy and nosy about sex.

ADDED: I'm talking about persuasion at the emotional level, so I naturally thought of Scott Adams's book "Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter," which I've read in full. Adams talks about how persuasion is all about emotion, but he doesn't get into the role of disgust. The word only comes up once, quoting the famous Megyn Kelly debate question that began, “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals . . .’” Trump (as you must remember) broke in to say, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

It wasn't Kelly's effort at using disgust that got Adams going. It was Trump's interruption:

He created an emotion-triggering visual image (Rosie O’Donnell) that sucked all the attention from the question to the answer, and it wasn’t even a real answer...  He also picked a personality who was sure to trigger the emotions of his base. Republicans generally don’t like Rosie O’Donnell because of her outspoken liberal views. Trump knew his Republican base has a strong negative reaction to O’Donnell, so he bonded with them on that point. This is the persuasion method known as pacing and leading. First you match your audience’s emotional condition to gain trust, and later you are in a position to lead them. 

Another way to look at that is Trump was able to stimulate conservatives — the disgust-susceptible human beings — by confronting them suddenly with a particular "disgusting" woman.

But why should Trump benefit from attaching himself to disgustingness? Elsewhere in the book, Adams says Carly Fiorina made a terrible mistake when she attempted to showcase her opposition to abortion by vividly describing a botched abortion:

Fiorina paired her brand with a dead baby. I knew voters wouldn’t want to think about Fiorina’s horrible story of a dead baby for one second longer than they needed to. I doubt anyone consciously interpreted the situation as I describe it. But humans don’t make political decisions for rational reasons.

If that's correct, maybe it shouldn't have worked for Trump to "pair his brand" with a (purportedly) disgusting woman. You could say Trump was (essentially) offering to defend us from disgusting women, but Fiorina was offering to defend us from dead babies. Adams says "Fiorina lost support because she polluted her brand beyond redemption by associating it with the most horrible image one could ever imagine, on live television." He's really talking about disgust there: the emotional reaction to something that seems "horrible" and "polluted." There's an idea that particular, reasoned arguments don't matter. If what is disgusting gets all over the person, we'll feel aversion, at an instinctive emotional level. And that doomed Fiorina.

But why, then, wasn't Trump doomed? Maybe Trump would have fared worse if Megyn Kelly had been able to ask her question uninterrupted, speaking generically about women and Trump's bad mouth. She sought to ruin him by making him disgusting to the disgust-susceptible conservatives, and he interposed the image of a lady comedian. It's funny. It's all in good fun.

Why did Josh Marshall title his column "The Trumpian Song of Sexual Violence"?

This is a very verbose thing that Josh put up at Talking Points Memo yesterday. I slogged through it, even read some sentences aloud to Meade to test the intelligibility of the multiple negatives and piled up phrases:

The simple fact is that there's no evidence or logic to the idea that anyone who doesn't already hate Hillary Clinton with a passion will believe that she is culpable in some way for her husband's acts of infidelity against her.

But what's up with the title to his column? There's no music to Marshall's prose. There is a musical metaphor at the very end: 

As I've written in similar contexts, when we look at the messaging of a national political campaign we should be listening to the score, not the libretto, which is, like in opera, often no more than a superficial gloss on the real story, mere wave action on the surface of a deep sea. You're missing the point in trying to make out the logic of Trump's attacks on Clinton. The attacks are the logic. He is trying to beat her by dominating her in the public sphere, brutalizing her, demonstrating that he can hurt her with impunity.

Oh, I get it. He shouldn't attack her. That should be seen as sexual violence. If you listen to the music. Not the words. Hmm. Not any logic. Just how it feels. I know how I felt reading this piece, on the wave action of the deep sea that is Josh Marshall. Kinda seasick.

But to answer my question up there in the title. I think he meant to evoke the great song from "The Threepenny Opera," "Ballad of Sexual Dependency." Here's Marianne Faithfull's version:



Here are the lyrics. Read along and contemplate. Count how many times you think sounds like Trump and how many times you think sounds like Clinton and how many times you think Idiots, all of them....

"You’re a Trump supporter, and you frequently refer to him as Daddy."/"I do because that’s what he is."

"I assume that’s not in a purely father-figure sense. Are you sexually attracted to Donald Trump?"/"Oh, yes. I call myself a Trump-sexual. I have a very antiwhite bedroom policy, but Trump is kind of like the exception to that rule."

From a dialogue — in the NYT — between Ana Marie Cox and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Camille Paglia says "Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions" (in the course of comparing the Bills, Cosby and Clinton).

A Salon interview:

In most of these cases, like the Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized–“Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!” “Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written–in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions...

Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile–they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power–and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy....

We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac... to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia–this fear and envy of a woman’s power.

And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother.  He felt smothered by her in some way...

Oh, for the old days, when we analyzed the minds of others and made up stories — Oedipus and all! It was so interesting. And it's so boring now. And these young girls today just don't understand. They don't know the joys of the intellectual life. It's so thin and dull dull dull today. We made up a lot of stuff back then. Sigmund Freud and the antics he unleashed. Now, you can't say a thing that the young people can hear and understand. You can't talk about what it meant when Hillary served Bill carrot sticks instead of onion rings. No one knows how to have deep fun with celebrities and their psyches anymore.

Whose leg felt that thrill?

The NYT book review of Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Roger Ailes, "The Loudest Voice in the Room," is written by Janet Maslin, who trashes the book, but not because she likes Ailes. It's that Sherman failed to get the goods on Ailes.

I just want to focus on one sentence:

The second half of “The Loudest Voice in the Room” is mostly devoted to recent and familiar news, beginning with the moment Fox began getting thrills up its leg over Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky debacle. 

Come on. MSNBC owns the expression "thrill up my leg." Even though the Bill-and-Monica story had lots of sex and Fox News may have been eager to cover it, the eagerness didn't arise out of a vector of thrill going toward the groin. The journalistic enthusiasm described as a "thrill up my leg" came from Chris Matthews and he was titillated not by anybody's sexual activities but by the speechifying of Barack Obama.



That's on the list of nominees for most ridiculous, embarrassing thing ever said on a TV news show, and we're never going to forget it. Have at Fox News, perhaps by mocking some schoolboy furtively masturbatory outburst if you can, but if you talk of thrills up a leg, that leg is attached to MSNBC.

Etymological sidenote: The original meaning of "debacle" — used above in the phrase "getting thrills up its leg over Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky debacle" — was, according to the (unlinkable) OED "A breaking up of ice in a river; in Geol. a sudden deluge or violent rush of water, which breaks down opposing barriers, and carries before it blocks of stone and other debris." The figurative meaning is: "A sudden breaking up or downfall; a confused rush or rout, a stampede." Yes, it's a dead metaphor, but it goes nicely with blowjobs, don't you think? Not that Bill ever was icy.

When you're hanging out in your café and you get told "the president will be stopping by... You’re welcome to stay, but one of our agents will be coming around to swipe you."

You get swiped. You find that "ignoring [the President] in person is as easy as ignoring a TV." You see that he's good lofting a baby. You experience the details of his handshake... "like the rough surface of your favorite baseball." You try to eavesdrop, but the only interesting thing you get is: "It seems like they don’t use Facebook anymore." But you're not sure who "they" are. Probably young people, maybe the 18 to 34 year-olds who need more prompting to buy insurance.

Also, you hear that the President's wife watches the TV show "Scandal," and that the White House isn't as exciting as that because they "don’t have enough time to engage in too much scandalous behavior." By "scandalous behavior," he didn't mean to touch off rejoinders about the IRS, the NSA, and Benghazi, and so forth. He meant sexual things.

Which amusingly resonates with Rush yesterday saying, "Why can't we have Obama running around on Michelle or some, good, old-fashioned, just... just wishful thinking, just for the media. You know how the Drive-Bys love to have exciting things happening in the news. I mean, wouldn't that be a much better scandal than Christie and bridge lane closures, for crying out loud?  Now, this Hollande guy, he's not even married, and he's in a love-triangle scandal."

"I think he has little grip on what it actually means to govern a country or run a war."

"He’s a purist in a way that, in my view, constrains the sophistication of his work."

He = Glenn Greenwald. The quote, from Andrew Sullivan, appears at the end of a NYT profile of Glenn Greenwald, the man who received and publicized the leaked secret court order about the NSA acquisition of phone records.

Selecting that Andrew Sullivan quote for this post, I didn't think about the fact that it's one gay man commenting on another gay man, but I'm thinking about it now, as I read the linked article more carefully and see this quote from Greenwald:

“I do think political posture is driven by your personality, your relationship with authority, how comfortable are you in your life,” he said. “When you grow up gay, you are not part of the system, it forces you to evaluate: ‘Is it me, or is the system bad?’ ”

By the way, I believe there's a deep connection between a person's individual psychology and his political positions. It's a central topic of mine on this blog, as you may have noticed (or not, depending on the kind of person you are). Whenever I encounter someone who insists that he's purely reasoning about the issues and deciding everything rationally, I always wonder what's going on in his psyche that's given rise to his need to be seen that way.

And now, here's Greenwald, inviting us to analyze his politics based on his homosexuality. "When you grow up gay...." One might say, when you grow up gay, you might have an exaggerated fear of surveillance by the authorities. Or when you grow up gay, you're critical of others who grow up gay and are too pure and lacking in sophistication....

But I doubt if Greenwald really wants other people analyzing him that way. He only wanted to leverage his specialness into a super-power to see when the system is bad. 

"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression toward women or men. Their social responsibility goes beyond the gate or the door. Maybe the answer is for the towns like Williston to heavily tax the companies so that they can afford to police the men the companies employ. If business doesn't see itself more broadly as a player in the overall health of our society, government needs to step in."

That's a reader comment at the NYT article about all the single men working out in the oil fields of North Dakota, which we've been talking about over in this earlier thread. Please go to that thread to talk about the article more generally. I'm opening up this new thread for discussion of the proposition that business should be responsible for the after-work activities of their employees, that the tendency of men to go out after work looking for female companionship calls for the heavy taxation of business, that individuals looking for sexual relationships in their own free time ought to be conceptualized as an issue of collective "health," that overall societal health requires big "players," and that if businesses don't want to see themselves as the players, they leave a gap that government must fill.

"What sexbots will do is widen the already growing chasm between the sexes, until only the fittest of the fit... can successfully leap across it to woo a human companion in the way that our genetic overlord intended."

Writes Heartiste, noting that "fitness is whatever gets one’s genes to the next generation, whether beneficial to civilization or note." I got there via Instapundit, who got there via Helen Smith, who makes the present-day observation that "20% of the alpha males [get] about 80% of the women" and says:

Those men who have more trouble getting women turn to porn and seem to ignore or be oblivious to women. I wonder how Sexbots will further change the landscape?

Here's my long-term view of that landscape. As men get absorbed into virtual-reality sex, there will be sex machines for women, replete with the elaborate stories women find titillating (including many things that are too dangerous to pursue in real life about which they currently read voraciously). The women, further relieved of motivation to form loving partnerships with men, will turn more and more to the government for support. Witness "The Life of Julia." There will be more and more of that as men depart from real life and submerge themselves more deeply in machines and women consequently feel more entitled to the government's functioning in the role from which men have escaped.

Women have the voting majority, and what will stop us from employing it in the interest of women as men demonstrate their lack of interest in us?

Will women still want to raise children? Some will, especially when it is well incentivized with government support brought about by unstoppable female voting power. We will have our choice of prime semen for artificial insemination. I'm sure the government will provide us with free services and facilitate our selection of the genetic traits we think will make the best children. Who knows what the next generations will be, as mothers produce children not because they found love from a man, but because of their ideas — possibly delusional — about what would make an excellent child? That's a new experiment. Presumably, in a world where men absent themselves from the real-world life of love and relationships, these women will choose, overwhelmingly, to have daughters. Those daughters will grow up and become part of the Electorate of Julias, further depressing any political power for men.

As this process goes on, perhaps that 20%/80% split Dr. Helen observes will be the actual ratio of men to women. But those men will not be alpha men. They won't even be beta men. And the men in the women's sex machines will be The New Alpha+++ Men. There will be no way to go back.

But this can only happen in America and whatever other free, wealthy, technologically advanced democracies there may be. So don't worry. It won't last that long.

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

An H.L. Mencken quote from 1916.

Now, here's something Rush Limbaugh said yesterday. He was talking about Sandra Fluke, "a student at Georgetown Law, who admits to having so much sex that she can't afford it anymore." Fluke is a woman who testified last week at an unofficial hearing (set up by Nancy Pelosi) in support of requiring health insurance coverage for birth control, even for those who get their health insurance from institutions affiliated with religions that see birth control as sinful. Opponents of that requirement had crafted their argument around respect for religious belief, and before Rush's loud voice took over, they seemed to want us to think about the exalted religious feeling underlying the objection to birth control. But Rush dragged our attention to the spectacle of a woman having sex, over and over — 3 times a day! — and she wants us "to pay for it." Heh heh. Wants us to pay for it?!! So she's a slut! A prostitute!

When [President Obama telephoned Fluke and] asked her if she's okay, she said that Obama told her that she should tell her parents they should be proud. (pause) Okay, I'm button [sic] my lip on that one.  The president tells Sandra Fluke (chuckling), 30-year-old Sandra Fluke, that her parents should be proud.  Okay.  Let me ask you a question.  I might be surprised at the answer I would get to this question.  Your daughter appears before a congressional committee and says she's having so much sex, she can't pay for it and wants a new welfare program to pay for it. Would you be proud?  I don't know about you, but I'd be embarrassed.  I'd disconnect the phone. I'd go into hiding and hope the media didn't find me.  See, everybody forgets what starts this, or what started this whole thing. Or maybe they don't! Maybe that's normal behavior on the left now, for all I know.

If that were your daughter, you should be ashamed. Shame! She's having so much sex. Shame. 3 times a day. Wants to get paid. Shame. That's Rush's theme. He can't let it go. That's where he found the resonance with the audience he imagines as he speaks. Who are those listeners? They're not those people on the left. (Who knows what "normal behavior" for them is now?) But his audience, he knows how to talk to them, and he's sounding the theme of shame — shame for the woman who openly enjoys her sexuality. Rush is plying the audience, playing on their haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. So much sex!

Now, I know he's also got the small government theme in there. "We" shouldn't have to pay for it. There shouldn't be "a new welfare program" for it. That's distorted. It's not a welfare program funded by taxpayers. It's an insurance regulation that will have some effect on insurance premiums. That's a conservative theme that resonates with listeners who don't worry about how much sex other people are having. But he doesn't bother to get the conservative argument straight. He has to distort it so it works with his joking about prostitution, and he's only talking about it in connection to sex — that very, very frequent sex that somebody else is having.

And whatever happened to religion? I mean religion as the exalted aspiration toward God, the theme that other Republicans had worked so hard to refine and articulate before Rush's big voice drowned them out. Now, the connection to religion seems to be about the old sexual Puritanism. This is a theme that makes many modern American women suspect that what people like Rush are really about is preserving the body's uncontrolled sexual function for the purpose of subordinating women. How dare women seize the power to disconnect sexuality from the consequences God built in!

But it is fundamental to women's freedom that we have the ability to decide for ourselves when our bodies will go through pregnancy and bear children. At some point, society ought to intervene to protect a developing child, and we will argue until doomsday about exactly where that point is, but it is nevertheless crucial to the equality of women that we control our bodies' reproductive function. There are in this world societies that appropriate the reproductive function and use it as a means of intimidating and punishing women who might act upon sexual desire, but that is not the United States, not since quite a long time ago. Now, we could become a society like that, and I suspect some of Rush's listeners, if not Rush himself, love that idea.

Yes, yes, no one is currently proposing taking away birth control. The debate is about who pays for it. Of course. But the political effort to channel public opinion reaches more deeply into the human mind. Politicians make choices about what emotions to stimulate. The Republican Party and the Republican candidates seem to have decided that their emotional theme would be freedom of religion. That might elegantly balance the Democratic Party's theme of reproductive freedom. And then Rush lumbered into the spotlight and spouted about sex. Sex! The women are having too much sex! Sex, sex, sex, all the time, 3 times a day! Sex!

In the long comments thread on yesterday's post about Limbaugh and Fluke, Mark O said:

This is part of a wonderfully orchestrated maneuver to distract the voters from Obama's economic failures to something nearly irrelevant.

And I said:

Nice of Rush to sit in on Obama's orchestra.

Did you hear about President JFK and the 19-year-old? They took lots of baths where they played with rubber duckies.

Mimi Alford tells her tale, and she didn't call it rape, even though some of her friends prompted her with that word. She says that even at the point when the President overwhelmed her and took her virginity on Jackie's bed, she felt "the thrill of being desired." After that first encounter he was "attentive.. gentlemanly ... [and sometimes] seductive." Their "sexual relationship was varied and fun, and we spent an inordinate amount of time taking baths together, turning his elegant bathroom into our own mini-spa."

The only discordant note was the yellow rubber ducks, which a friend had sent him. Every time the President saw those ducks, he’d become irresistibly playful.

We named them after his family members, made up stories about them, and often set them racing from one end of the tub to other. It was part of his charm that he was a serious, sophisticated man with extraordinary responsibilities, yet willing to be completely silly.

Sounds like they had a fine time together. She was sleeping over all night when Jackie was out of town:

I was so pleased with myself at being chosen by the President that I didn’t feel self-conscious at all about wearing the same clothes at work two days in a row.

If my office mates noticed, I didn’t care. I felt invulnerable, as if I were cloaked with the President’s power.

What a trip. A power trip. Too bad for those other women (and men) who were not chosen. Did Alford wait until these inconvenient women passed away to preen about her powerful chosen-one status?

It shames me to admit that I don’t recall feeling any guilt. In my 19-year-old mind, I wasn’t invading the Kennedys’ marriage; I was merely occupying the President’s time when his wife was away. If he wasn’t troubled, why should I be? It was hardly by chance that in the 18 months I knew him, I never once met his wife.

Isn't it funny that the "19-year-old mind" came up with exactly the same set of trite justifications that almost every lover of a married man/woman comes up with if they don't want to admit they know it's wrong?

As the summer wore on, I was pulled deeper into his personal orbit. But despite the increasing level of familiarity between us, I never rose above being the obedient partner in our relationship.

Even in our most intimate moments, I called him Mr President. To do otherwise would have seemed inappropriate.

Inappropriate... and way less sexy. And speaking of obedience, there's the dirtiest story, the one where she gives a blow job to Dave Powers, the President’s special assistant after JFK whispers to her "Mr Powers looks a little tense — would you take care of it?"

I don’t think the President thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did.... Perhaps I was carried away by a spirit of playfulness.

Later, she realized it was sordid, and JFK apologized, but nevertheless tried it again, asking her to "take care of my baby brother" — that is, Teddy.

Over at The New Republic, Timothy Noah, absorbing the blow-job incident, calls JFK a "monster."

What do you think?
	Noah's right, he was a monster to do those things.
	It's complex, and JFK isn't around to tell us what domination and submission games they played.
	She was an adult, she consented, and she was callous toward Jackie (and her coworkers).
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: "The rubber swan is mine" is a punchline from Vaughn Meader's "The First Family" album — a big hit comedy record at the time — in a segment in which Meader as JFK explains whose bath toys are whose. (Thanks to Hagar in the comments for the tip.) (I note that "schwanz" is slang for penis, so I wonder if Meader was in on the joke of JFK with his toys in the bath.)

A Slate resident feminist hears Gov. Christie talking about oral sex when he's obviously not.

What a joke! Christie — responding to hecklers who used the words "going down" in connection with jobs — said: "You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart." Torie Bosch calls this "an offensive oral sex joke" and acts amazed that Christie put video of it on his YouTube site as if he were "proud" of it "rather than recognizing it as flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic."

Now, obviously, the words "going down" mean happening, especially when the subject of the verb isn't a person and when there's no object preceded by the word "on." That is, to refer to oral sex, he would have something closer to "somebody's going down on something tonight." Moreover, if one were inclined to make an oral sex joke when the word "jobs" is already in the mix, you'd jape about "jobs." Going down? Oh, there will be some going down tonight, and there will be jobs, maybe not the kind of jobs you want, but there will be jobs.

If Christie wanted to make a blow-job joke, he'd make a much better blow-job joke. The joke here is Bosch. If Bosch were not already a joke at this point, it would be easy to make a joke about Bosch. Wordplay is easy when your name means "nonsense."

But it's not enough here to say Bosch is an idiot or that Bosch's idiocy exemplifies the pathetic present-day feminist web-writers and impugns the entire enterprise of feminism — which has been and should be noble.

It's not enough, because Bosch has infected the internet with a meme, and it's powerfully viral. There will be many, many people now who will get the idea that Chris Christie is a sexist. They just know — they feel — he's an immense misogynist. He's got misogyny on him — and like a blue dress kept in the back of the closet, that stain isn't going to get washed out any time soon.

Bosch has propagated the lie, and her liberal allies — who would love to destroy a rising conservative star — are hard at work spreading it. And I do mean hard at work. These slimy little dweebs who write at places I won't link to, but whom you can find by clicking on that last link, get obscenely excited at the prospect of wrecking a righty.

"President Obama, who took office pledging to put science ahead of politics, averted a skirmish with conservatives in the nation’s culture wars..."

"... by endorsing his health secretary’s decision to block over-the-counter sales of an after-sex contraceptive pill to girls under age 17."

So begins the New York Times report, and it's hard not to read this as criticizing Obama, who phrased his support Sebelius in terms of his role "as the father of two daughters."

“And as I understand it, the reason Kathleen made this decision was she could not be confident that a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old going into a drugstore should be able — alongside bubble gum or batteries — be able to buy a medication that potentially, if not used properly, could end up having an adverse effect. And I think most parents would probably feel the same way.”...

Odd that all the attention is on the child's health. Who is impregnating 10- and 11-year olds? We're talking about serious crimes! One reason very young girls shouldn't be able to purchase this drug on their own is that it prevents criminal behavior from coming to light. The Times quotes James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University saying “Where is an 11-year-old going to get the $50 to buy this product?” What willful blindness! There is a male in the picture somewhere, a male facing a severe criminal penalty.

The NYT refers to "[s]ome Democrats" offering reasons for "avoiding a divisive debate over teenagers’ sexuality." Teenagers' sexuality? When we talk about the Penn State scandal, there's no discussion of the "teenagers' sexuality." What "divisive debate" are these Democrats talking about?