"I’m sorry to be crass about it, but I don’t think the point of the magazine is for self-pleasure. You no longer need a print magazine for that."

"It weirdly offers an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude, at a time when that is hard to come by."

Says Phillip Picardi, quoted in "I’ll make Playboy playful again, says its new gay editor/Phillip Picardi, a Catholic former Condé Nast wunderkind, also wants to attract women to the £30 magazine with more ‘artistic’ nudes and robust writing" (London Times).

He wants to “destigmatise male sexuality”, he says, and “help men to build a healthier relationship” with the women in their lives. “I’m hoping we can be a space for men who feel caught between needing to be manosphere-adjacent and needing to be the performative liberal male,” he says.... “We should promote the idea that we can be excited about sex and we can be excited about each other and excited about touching each other,” he says with a cheeky grin.

How Catholic is he? We're told he's "a lapsed Catholic who recently completed a master’s at Harvard Divinity School in order to rediscover his faith (his thesis was titled: Is Jesus Kinda Hot?)." Is religion part of making "playful again"? You can find "an artistic and highbrow view of the female nude" in church:

This reminds me of a sequence in the movie "Blue Moon," about the songwriter Lorenz Hart, who was gay, though not openly. The character has this conversation with the bartender. From the brilliant screenplay by Robert Kaplow (commission earned):

HART: You know what the sexiest thing on the planet earth is? A half-erect penis. 

EDDIE: Jesus Christ, Larry, nobody wants to hear this. 

"The gig also made me remember what rockstar fandom, as a young girl, had been: a gateway drug to the opposite sex and sexual attraction in general."

"I remembered chasing Sting (as part of a mob of 14-year-old girls) as he rode with the other members of the Police in an open-top Jeep down Hammersmith Broadway in 1978. I remembered ogling his poster in my bedroom.... Aged 58, I felt as though I was somehow repeating a level on the multi-player game of life that I’d previously completed at 14: sexual and emotional infatuation with a rock star as a prelude and initiation to the real thing...."

From "A moment that changed me: I’d lost my libido – then I saw Richard Ashcroft on stage and it came bursting back/I was nearly 60 and hadn’t had sex in 10 years. And I was fine with that. But seeing the Verve’s former frontman reminded me how much fun it is to fancy someone" (The Guardian).

"Whenever celebrities say that they're just getting nude as a form of self-expression... I have a question."

"How often are they just walking around their house nude, like by themselves, or are they just wearing PJs like a normal person? Like, as as a normal part of self-expression, do you just like walk around nude... do you walk nude to the grocery store as a form of self-expression? You know, just walking around in public nude... Would you be walking around as a form of, you know, just knowing yourself? Would you be walking around naked?"

Ben Shapiro — listening to Miley Cyrus talk to Monica Lewinsky — asks, rhetorically, because he's very sure the answer is no.

 

But maybe you yourself or somebody you've known does walk the face of the earth nude because that's who they really are.

I know I've said this before and maybe I was quoting someone else, but I just spent an absurd amount of time searching for that, unsuccessfully, so I'm just going to try to say it again, though I'm quite convinced I said it better that other time: Nudes have virtually no role in human history.

"Given all the lovemaking, it’s remarkable any of them had time for painting or poetry. But each activity reinforced the next, sex flowing into art..."

"... art turning into sex, all of it transforming what was ostensibly a holiday by the sea among friends into a frenzy of erotic and creative expression — an outpouring that, as Europe girded for war, acquired a rebellious political charge. 'It’s as if the group were thumbing their noses at fascism,' Thomasson writes, their lives and work serving as a 'manifesto for an alternative world to the one that was coming into being.'"

From "Sex and Surrealism on the French Riviera/A group of artists gathered at a hotel on the Côte d’Azur in 1937. A new book by Anna Thomasson captures the art and escapades the holiday inspired" (NYT).

I'm skeptical... but envious.

Is the book readable? Sample text: "We get a powerful sense of physicality. Of bodies, of limbs and breasts and bottoms and penises, alone or entwined, still or in action. We feel the warm sun and salt water on bare skin and sand between toes, intimacy and proximity and responsiveness and desire." It's really hard to write about sex! Actually, that writing reminds me of a podcast I like: "Boring History for Sleep." It goes on and on about how everything looks and feels and smells and sounds. 

"Sex’s history, its forms, and its uses all turn out to be far stranger and more various than biologists had imagined...."

"Lixing Sun... a biologist at Central Washington University, begins his story with a protozoan called Tetrahymena thermophila. T. thermophila are tiny—just a twentieth of a millimetre long—yet can reproduce two different ways: by splitting themselves in half or, when they’re starving, by engaging in a kind of proto-sex called conjugation, in which two cells briefly fuse and swap genetic material. The protozoa come in seven distinct 'mating types,' which means that there are twenty-one possible pairings... The common white-button mushroom... comes in eighteen mating types, the fairy inkcap mushroom a hundred and forty-three, and the split-gill mushroom an astonishing twenty-three thousand three hundred and twenty-eight. In organisms that reproduce via the union of types—this group also includes yeasts and slime molds—partners are functionally equivalent and the exchange of genetic material is symmetrical, an arrangement called isogamy. The way Sun tells it, the shift from isogamy to sex as we know it began with a cheat. Some 'crafty' creature figured out a way to game the system by skimping on its reproductive contribution. A two-sided scramble ensued. On the one hand, an edge could be gained by pumping out ever smaller, nimbler gametes; on the other, there was an advantage to be had in manufacturing fewer, larger gametes for the small fry to vie for. Eventually, Sun writes, 'a minor size gap' turned into an 'uncrossable divide.' The 'go-smallers' evolved into sperm-makers; the 'go-largers' into egg-bearers...."

From "What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? The world’s life-forms reproduce sexually in a bewildering variety of ways, even though scientists still aren’t sure why they bother" (The New Yorker).

"For years, Judge Eleanor Ross’s secret was passed down from law clerk to law clerk. They whispered about..."

"... the sultry jazz music that emanated from her chambers when a uniformed police commander, a man they called her 'visitor,' disappeared into her private office. The clerks could sometimes hear the unmistakable sounds of sex from behind the door.... While the clerks said they might have been willing to overlook isolated personal foibles, they were more broadly disturbed by the lack of attention Judge Ross paid to the civil disputes that came before her.... It was not unusual to go weeks without hearing much from her except for a brief email — 'Please docket.' — a few minutes after they sent her a draft order, three clerks told The Times. They estimated that she provided edits on roughly 5 percent of the civil orders that they drafted in her name, and even then mostly just for grammar or typos...."

From "Sex, Lies and Secrets: A Federal Judge’s Trysts Go Public Now, Judge Eleanor Ross’s career and caseload are under scrutiny. And her punishment, a private reprimand, has sparked backlash" (NYT).

The Times tells us that "the décor in her chambers" included a photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg festooned with a quote from a Beyoncé and Drake song: "All them fives need to listen when a ten is talking."

I tried to find out exactly what "sultry jazz music" the judge played. I was unsuccessful, but here's a Spotify playlist titled "Sultry Jazz":

To what extent can a judge — or anyone else — use her/his private office for activities other than the job? I assume it's fine to take a nap or do calisthenics or read a novel or stare into space.

ADDED: "Was that wrong? Should I have not done that?... Because I've worked in a lot of offices and I tell you people do that all the time."

Squelching, Part 2.

Having already written a blog post called "Squelching" this morning, I feel compelled to show you this London Times article: "Mumbling, [squelching] and the danger of badly captioned TV subtitles/Half of the nation like to watch with words appearing on screen. For most people, it’s not that they can’t hear":

[S]ubtitles can be worse when they get it right, especially during a sex scene. No one wants to be sucking peppermints with their Aunty Pam when the words, “Yes! Yes! Harder!” and “Is that good for you, baby?” pop up on screen. Descriptions of sound effects can be quite appalling, such as “[groans of pleasure]”. Or just “[squelching]”. In Stranger Things there was once a caption reading “tentacles undulate moistly”, though I don’t think it was describing sex, mercifully....

Why would it have been considered good comedy to use naked "full plump butts" to celebrate Hillary's victory?

Last night's "Late Show with Stephen Colbert," the first night of the last week of the show, featured various segments from over the years that were never aired. The first one is from election night, 2016, where they were prepared to gloat over Trump's defeat. Unlike the usual show, this thing was live and on Showtime, which meant they had the option to use nudity, and they did:

"We were so sure that the New York Times prediction needle was right, we hired a bunch of naked male models with the words, 'I'm with her,' painted on their full plump butts. Sadly, all of those models had to be put down. But first, we tried to save the bit. And as the outcome became clear, we repainted their butts to say 'We're fucked.'"

When I saw that clip on X this morning — at 3 a.m. — I hit the Grok button and got into a conversation that I'm only going to give you my side of. No Grok-writing below. This is all me:

"This foray into looking at humans as creatures that are governed by instinct and biology offered little in the way of advancing Darwinist theory..."

"... nor was his explicit approach of studying man as a mere ape a novel one. What ensured the popularity of The Naked Ape was first its clarity of prose, and second, the era in which it was published, where a popularised 'back to nature' philosophy and sexual liberation were all the rage.... [T]he salacious manner of the book helped to guarantee it success. During copulation, he wrote, 'the female breasts … shows a significant increase in size. By the time orgasm has been reached, the breast of the average female will have increased by anything up to 25 per cent of its normal dimensions. It becomes firmer, more rounded and more protuberant.' Elsewhere, Morris would tell readers that the human penis is the largest of all primates, and the only one without a bone, making it harder to achieve an erection.... The Naked Woman (2004) was a similar blend of zoological observation and detailed titillation, with an analysis of women’s backs ('even at rest … naturally more arched than a man’s back'), legs ('part of the sexual fascination … is that they focus attention on the point where they meet'), buttocks (they 'transmit a powerful gender signal') and breasts (which 'operate first as visual stimuli and then as tactile ones'). Never short of ideas, Morris also advanced the theory that female breasts had developed as imitation buttocks 'to shift the interest of the male to the front.'..."

From "Desmond Morris obituary: natural world expert/Zoologist, broadcaster and author best known for The Naked Ape dies aged 98" (London Times).

"The problem is less a 'boys will be boys' tolerance than a sense of resignation among politicians, staff and other members of official Washington that powerful, ambitious men are built differently."

Writes Michelle Cottle, in "How Many People Heard About Swalwell and Did Nothing?" (NYT).

Cottle does not delve into this "built differently" hypothesis or the reasons why people believe it and choose to condone bad behavior. She seems to hope to light a fire under these weaker people and motivate them to oppose the "powerful, ambitious men" who — supposedly — are fueled by sexual desire. 

Maybe she doesn't delve into the hypothesis because she thinks it's true and self-evident. Maybe she's too puritanical to open up the subject. "Built differently." Say it clearly and explicitly. When I was a child, circa 1960, I asked my mother how babies were born. That was long ago, but I remember her answer verbatim: "Well, you know how men and women are built differently."

Can we please grow up and say it bluntly? There's no reason to be polite here. Powerful, ambitious men are built differently... the idea is if we want truly great men in our positions of power, we need to accept the component of their psyche that is a drive for sex — a lot of sex, with young, beautiful women. We're diminishing ourselves if we filter out the men who have it. Look at JFK. Look at Trump. And by the way, it's also the reason why none of the women are truly great political leaders.

That's not my personal belief. That's the hypothesis Cottle gestures at, and I'm just putting it bluntly. Maybe you can put it more bluntly, so I'll turn the conversation over to you.

"What about sex dolls?"

Chris Williamson asks Dr. Debra Soh (who's got the perfect demeanor and speech style for talking about sex research):

"His doctors hit the cancer with chemotherapy and radiation, then focused on medications to deprive it of male hormones, or androgens, which fuel its growth...."

"Brian’s treatment took away his libido and left him sometimes with brain fog. Without testosterone in his system, Brian lost sexual function and libido, which had been a core of his identity. 'That has been the hardest part of this,' he said, with typical directness. 'Because I love being a man. I love being in a man’s body.'... Brian asked his doctors about taking a three month 'holiday' from the drugs — allowing his testosterone levels to rise for a short spell so he could feel like himself again, without the fatigue and brain fog and sexual dysfunction....  After deliberation, they slated it for the summer of 2025, when he planned to spend several weeks on Fire Island, long a mecca for gay men and women.... Here was a chance to briefly reinhabit his old energetic, sexual self.... One day he set out for the beach, eager for an outing not shaped by his cancer. But when he came to a slight incline in the footpath, he realized he could not make it.... By midsummer, it was becoming clear that his drug holiday was not going to deliver as he’d hoped. He still had no libido, let alone sexual function.... "

From "A Role Model for How to Die/What if you really did live every day as if it were your last? That was Brian’s plan" (NYT).

"I used to love feeling her body, her big body next to me in bed, the softness of her body — you know, the extra tummy and the extra booty, you know, next to me...."

"I miss that — that voluptuousness — being able to, you know, lean up next to her and feel her — for lack of a better word — draping over me. That's no longer an option. Now it's, it's cuddling and it's cuddling as tight and closely as we can — or as I can. And that's, that's the extent of the intimacy. I'm at a loss for why there's no physical intimacy. There hasn't been any...."

Said a man who's wife lost a lot of weight on Ozempic, in "Marriage and Sex in the Age of Ozempic: An Update," today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily." (Link goes to audio and transcript at Podscribe.)

"[Theo] Von introduced C.K. to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, where he began working to address his addiction..."

"... to masturbation. He practiced abstinence—it was, he said, a 'crazy idea to me. . . . Don’t have sexual release for several months in a row'—but, eventually, he 'got out of the cycle.' His emotions started coming back. 'I saw everything really differently,' he said. 'I saw that everything that had happened with me was because of me. And, by the way, that’s great news, because that means you could do something about it.'... [And] this is what enabled him to write his book. He recently finished a second one. 'I’m writing novels because I don’t jerk off every fifteen minutes,' he said. 'It’s really all it is.'"

Writes Tyler Foggatt in "Louis C.K.’s Next Chapter/In a new standup special, and a début novel, the comedian navigates murky, post-#MeToo terrain: not quite exiled, not quite welcomed back" (The New Yorker).

That reminded me of the old after-sex punchline. Attributed to Balzac: « Là… encore un roman de perdu ! » (“There… another novel lost!”). There's a line in "Annie Hall": “I read a thing about Balzac. He used to, uh, after he’d have sex he’d go, ‘Oh, there goes another novel.’”

"'U r better at understanding Chinese women than at probability theory,' [Larry] Summers told [Jeffrey] Epstein."

"The two men bantered about probability and mathematics, but repeatedly steered the conversation back to Summers’ relationship. Epstein joked that 'the probability of you in bed again with peril was '0,' before reversing course and assuring Summers that 'she is never ever going to find another Larry summers. Probability ZERO.' Summers went on to describe what he saw as his 'best shot': that the woman finds him 'invaluable and interesting' and concludes 'she can’t have it without romance / sex.'... The final messages, dated July 5, 2019, show Summers still in regular contact with Epstein. That morning, Summers wrote he was in Cape Cod with his family — 'Bit of an Ibsen play,' he joked — and the two men exchanged a brief flurry of literary one-liners.... Epstein was arrested the next day."

I'm reading this in the Harvard Crimson: "As Summers Sought Clandestine Relationship With Woman He Called a Mentee, Epstein Was His 'Wing Man'/When former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers was pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, he turned to a longtime associate for guidance: convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein."

1. "Peril" was the code name for the woman the 2 men were discussing. If the Crimson has correctly identified her, she was already a tenured professor — at the London School of Economics.

2. Stop and think about what Summers was saying when he wrote that his "best shot" was for her to find him "invaluable and interesting" and to realize that "she can’t have it without romance / sex." I would interpret that to mean that he wanted sex (and romance) from her that he knew she didn't want. He just hoped she'd give it in order to receive professional and social benefits from him. No one should want sex that the other person does not want. It doesn't matter that you conceive of it as an even exchange because you are giving other benefits.

3. Imagine asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice on how to handle it!

4. I wonder how "peril" feels about all this — then and now. 

"Get out, drink more, and make a series of bad decisions that might pay off."

Earlier in that "Real Time" interview, not on that clip, Scott Galloway said, "We've unwittingly built an economy dependent on our ability to evolve a new species of asocial, asexual men. And what you have is Big Tech is trying to sequester people — especially young people, especially young men — from the most important thing in their life and that is relationships."

AND: Here's the "Overtime" part. Galloway brings out beers for the boys:

This topic reminds me of some thing I've quoted before — from Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" — about the playwright Henrik Ibsen:

"Ruth told me that a couple of decades ago her daughter was prescribed Zoloft, an S.S.R.I., at 11 by a psychiatrist..."

"... after a humiliating incident at school 'left her feeling out of sorts and anxious.'... Her daughter wound up staying on the drug for a decade, until 2011. Only over the past few years has Ruth learned, from her daughter, about the sexual side effects she still lives with and about her grief. 'Her erogenous zones don’t work,' Ruth said. 'It makes me deeply sad, because our sexuality, the pleasure we get from our bodies and our intimacy with another person, it’s such a beautiful experience; it helps us to feel not alone.' Thinking back, Ruth said, 'I have huge, terrible regret' about allowing her child to be medicated. 'I can’t believe I so easily said yes.'"

From "More Teens Are Taking Antidepressants. It Could Disrupt Their Sex Lives for Years. Research on adults who take S.S.R.I.s shows they tamp down sexual desire. Why aren’t we studying what that could mean for adolescents who take them?" (NYT).

In the comments over there, from someone who says he's a doctor: "Overmedicalizing normal variations in children will bite us in the behind."

"Spend enough time speaking to women who are taking testosterone — specifically, in very high doses — and you start to notice that they sound messianic."

"They’re often talking fast and intensely; they’re amped up; they’re describing what they clearly consider a miracle drug; and they have no intention of lowering their dose, despite the unknown risks or some problems with facial hair. After all, how can they worry about facial hair when they feel so alive?"

From "'I’m on Fire': Testosterone Is Giving Women Back Their Sex Drive — and Then Some/There is no F.D.A.-approved testosterone product for women. Insurance won’t cover it. Many doctors won’t prescribe it. It’s become a cultural phenomenon" (NYT)(free-access link).

Raw trading instinct.

I'm reading "Ex-Wall Street Star Accused of Abusing Women in Penthouse Sex ‘Dungeon’/Federal prosecutors say Howard Rubin, who faces sex trafficking charges, took victims to his apartment, where a bedroom was painted red, soundproofed and fitted with devices to use on the women" (NYT).

Mr. Rubin was prominently featured in Michael Lewis’s 1989 book “Liar’s Poker,” about Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. Mr. Rubin, according to the book, joined the firm in 1982 and became known as one of its wiliest traders. He left in 1985 for substantially more pay at Merrill Lynch.

“Of all the traders, Rubin displayed raw trading instinct,” Mr. Lewis wrote.

He became an object of fascination on Wall Street, Mr. Lewis wrote, for his application of behavioral research to mortgage sales. He later became infamous for his role in a $250 million loss in 1987 at Merrill Lynch.... After leaving Merrill Lynch, Mr. Rubin became a fund manager at Bear Stearns and then Soros Fund Management.....

"I was in my twenties then, and I’d grown up with a certain expectation, watching films, of what my sexual life was going to be like, and then it wasn’t that."

"The world had begun to be so saturated by sexual imagery in porn and the expectations were shifting. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, but it does change the way people are expecting you to behave in a natural sexual situation. And so I was just confounded, and I think Girls expressed a lot of that confusion, anxiety, and frankly, pain."

Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Lena Dunham on Too Much and her long-awaited return to TV: 'I stepped back from acting after my body was dissected'/Eight years on from ‘Girls’, the HBO comedy that made her name – and made her a lightning rod for criticism – Dunham is back with a 10-part romcom, ‘Too Much’. Ellie Harrison hears from the writer, along with her new lead stars Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe, about their London-set love story, which is well worth the wait" (Independent).

Did Lena Dunham have her body "dissected"? When I read that in the headline I thought it was a reference to her health problems (notably, endometriosis). But no: "When Girls was on television, discourse about Dunham’s appearance was rabid. Howard Stern called her 'a little fat girl' on national radio. One newspaper described her as a 'pathological exhibitionist.' 'Having my body dissected was a reason that I chose in general to step back from acting a little bit more and focus on my writing and my directing, and also just make different kinds of choices as an actor,' she says now."