"The Emcee is some poor jerk in Germany who’s all by himself, sort of a drunk and probably, you know, into other drugs."

"The girls all have to prove themselves to him. And then he goes home at the end of the day to milk and cookies. He has nothing of a life, except what goes on in that nightclub, and everything goes on in that nightclub. I’d worked in nightclubs before, and I hated it — all these crummy emcees who would do anything for a laugh, such creeps. One day, I said to [the director Hal Prince], 'Let me try something at rehearsal today.' And I did. I was very lewd with all the girls, touching and feeling them — I was disgusting! And they were all looking at me like I’d lost my mind. Afterward, I went and hid behind a flat in the theater because I thought my career was over. It was so vulgar. And I was standing in the back, hiding from everybody, and Hal walked up to me, and he put his arm around me, and he said, 'Joely, that’s it.'"

Said Joel Grey, quoted in "The Yesteryear Issue/‘Good God, It Was Fun!’/Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, Dick Van Dyke, and more legends of Broadway reprise their most memorable characters" (NY Magazine).

He created a brilliant role and made "Cabaret" what it is, but you could never do that today. You couldn't suddenly surprise the other actors by groping them lewdly... even if it was all for art.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok... I wrote:

1. What if this scenario happened today:

Elon Musk passes along this satire featuring the phrase "Grow a Pair."

pic.twitter.com/UttRIsbq7S

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 13, 2025

The balls-focused discourse is undignified... quite intentionally.

In the workplace, I think this would be considered evidence of sexual harassment. 

"[Quathisha] Epps recently made headlines as the NYPD’s top earner, pulling in a whopping $400,000 — including roughly $204,000 in overtime alone last year for her administrative job...."

"Epps, 51, worked for [Chief of Department Jeffrey] Maddrey as he moved up in the NYPD from Chief of Housing to Chief of Patrol.... The married Maddrey allegedly first demanded sex from her in his 13th-floor office at One Police Plaza. Maddrey was allegedly sitting at his desk with his uniform pants open and wearing a white undershirt while rubbing his chest when he first propositioned her, the unmarried mother of three said. 'He said he dreamed about f–king me in my a–,' Epps alleged. '“I said, ‘But Chief, you’re the Chief of Department.’ He rubbed his chest. . . . His work pants were open. He was like but 'I’m still a n—-r and you look good.'... Maddrey began being generous with overtime a couple years earlier, she said, when he was chief of patrol and she told him of financial problems.... 'Part of the overtime was to take care of his girlfriend,' she said. 'He would have me go apartment hunting with her.'..."

I'm reading The NY Post: "NYPD’s top cop Jeffrey Maddrey abruptly resigns after allegedly demanding underling perform sexual favors — including ‘kiss his penis’ — in exchange for overtime."

With overtime, Epps made $400,000 in a single year. If the story alleged is true, is Epps a victim, who deserves even more compensation for this sexual harrassment? Or is Epps responsible for participating in a scheme to steal from her employer?

"The DJ at Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent rally in Philadelphia turned up the volume on Ludacris’s 'Move B----!'..."

"... as the emcee encouraged the crowd to direct the song’s aggressive yet catchy lyrics toward Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter. 'Move, b----!' the exuberant rallygoers chanted Tuesday. 'Get out the way!' A few minutes later, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro riled up the crowd by summarizing his governing philosophy: 'Get s--- done!' That motto was echoed verbatim the following day by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer during a Harris rally that included audience chants of 'Hell yeah,' a reference to Harris as a 'bada-- woman' and at least one f-bomb from the stage.... Known to swear liberally behind closed doors, a practice she has said ramped up after she became vice president, Harris has used profanity both to express outrage and to create a sense of intimacy with her private audiences, according to aides and allies...."

From "Harris rallies get edgy with four-letter words/The vice president, known to curse liberally behind closed doors, is one of the few not swearing onstage at rallies that are growing in size — and spiciness" (WaPo).

I know that Ludacris recording with its "aggressive yet catchy lyrics" like "I been thankin' of bustin' you/Upside your motherfuckin' forehead." Years ago, I heard it playing over loudspeakers in Library Mall here at the University of Wisconsin, and I felt like suing the school for sexual harassment. It troubles me to think of it playing to a general audience full of women at a presidential campaign rally (even one that's trying to make a male candidate seem like the "bitch" the song is referring to).

The crafter of language, Margaret Atwood, proffers a "hints"/"details" distinction and now proclaims what she knew but did not know to be "horrifying."

From "'I knew this day was going to come': Alice Munro associates say they knew of abuse/A biographer of the Canadian writer says he was among those who knew that Munro’s daughter had been sexually abused by her stepfather" (WaPo)(free access link):

The story has shocked much of the literary world, which widely mourned [Alice] Munro with glowing tributes after her death in May at 92. 

"I did not learn the details of this until everyone else did, though I’d had hints not long before this past weekend. Horrifying," Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, a friend of Munro’s, said in an email to The Post.

If something horrifying might be true, but you only have "hints" and not "details," you have some responsibility. Not only was Atwood Munro's friend, but Atwood writes books that purport to nudge and instruct us about morality. "The Handmaid's Tale" seems to be taken as a perceptive observation of the evils inherent in our culture, a warning to see and to act before it is too late. 

"Roberta A. Kaplan, the celebrated lawyer who took on former President Donald J. Trump... is stepping down from the law firm she founded..."

"... after clashing with her partners over her treatment of colleagues... Her departure was announced after The Times informed her personal lawyers that it was preparing to publish an article about Ms. Kaplan that would shine a light on complaints about what some employees said was an unprofessional office culture that she presided over.... Ms. Kaplan and her wife are deeply connected to the Democratic Party and she has been a heroic figure to many liberal activists.... Several people whom she worked with told The Times that she had insulted employees, inappropriately commented on their looks and threatened to derail people’s careers...."

Writes David Enrich, in "Prominent Lawyer Roberta Kaplan Departs Firm After Clash With Colleagues/The well-connected attorney, who founded a powerhouse firm at the dawn of the #MeToo era, has faced complaints that she mistreated and insulted other lawyers" (NYT).

Kaplan represented E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump and won a $83 million verdict. The law firm she founded was supposedly "driven by a progressive mission and free of the macho culture" found in other law firms (as the NYT put it).

We're told that these complaints about Kaplan coincided with her response to Andrew Cuomo's request for her advice on how to fight allegations that he had committed sexual harassment. Interesting. I think Andrew Cuomo is due for a comeback. He should — as rumored — run for mayor of NYC. Perhaps Kaplan can help. Rehabilitate yourself and him in one grand endeavor.

"It was hard not to interpret these recent offenses within the broader context of a roving and seemingly ever-more-insidious misogyny."

"In 2022, the most recent year for which there is available city data, women were killed by intimate partners at a rate 30 percent higher than the previous year. Reports of domestic violence also increased during that period, and nationwide, between 2018 and 2021, incidents of domestic violence involving guns went up by more than 7 percent. According to a survey from the Pew Research Center, a third of women under 35 report having been sexually harassed online. And this is to say nothing of the less manifestly aggressive if pervasive abrasions — the distillation of any middle-aged woman who complains about anything to the favored signifier of oblivious bourgeois entitlement, the 'Karen.'..."

Writes Ginia Bellafante in "Sexism, Hate, Mental Illness: Why Are Men Randomly Punching Women?/Conversation about the attacks on the streets of New York have centered on mental illness, but the offenses seem to have their roots in hatred of women" (NYT).

"People recognize Blinky on sight because it zooms around faster than the other bots."

"Everyone knows the drive number of it, and people are like, "Oh s -- , not again. It's him again"'.... 'I'll either get a text with a picture or I'll get a phone call and they'll say, "Hey, your robot's over here on such and such line, can you come get it?"' [said Scott Samples, the 'robot wrangler']....  When Samples gets a call about a robot wandering off, he pulls up that particular bot on his computer and looks out of the cameras and sensors attached to the device to try to figure out where the android is within the 1.4 million-square-foot facility. He then goes out, manually finds the robot and guides it back inside its boundaries...."

From "Companies Brought in Robots. Now They Need Human ‘Robot Wranglers.’ Lost and confused automatons create work for people. Bots wander off ‘like a child’ and irritate workers by following them or ‘trying to get under their desk'" (Wall Street Journal).

To what extent are people going to perceive robots as behaving the way they do because they are the equivalent of human persons? Should they be programmed to communicate as if they are humans? We're told of one "robot wrangler" who needed "to plug in the charger underneath": "As I was doing that, one of them just kind of made this crazy sounding scream. And then it said, 'Whoa, whoa, we have rights you know'... I just died laughing."

That's basically a rape joke, intruded into the workplace. Did you think it was funny the first time you heard it? The wrangler — a female, by the way — found it hilarious. But I see a sexual harassment lawsuit in the future if this approach to integrating robots into worklife continues

"The justice department found [Andrew] Cuomo 'repeatedly subjected' women in his office to non-consensual sexual contact, ogling and gender-based nicknames...."

From "DOJ says Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed 13 women/The former governor’s lawyer says he was never interviewed" (Politico).

I read the entire article because I wanted to see what "gender-based nicknames" were regarded as sexual harassment. Names are generally gender-based. When does a nickname go wrong for being gender-based?

But the article does not tell us any particular names that crossed the line.

ADDED: It occurs to me that my puzzlement is a consequence of the present-day penchant for saying "gender" when you mean "sex." If it said Cuomo subjected women to sexualizing nicknames, I would easily understand. My mother would call me "Miss Ann" or "Suzy Q" — both gendered, neither at all sexual. 

"To condemn him for saying they should ‘believe’ what the scene is trying to convey, seems like nonsense."

Vincent Gallo is one of my best friends so I have to say something here. I know him to be brilliant, kind, insightful, and in the case of film making specifically, a truly professional and serious artist. Even if you read the description of these complaints, to me it is clear he… https://t.co/td4ZlTnXFz

— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) January 12, 2024

From the Rolling Stone article:

"As puberty transmuted me into a character I had no interest in playing, my isolation, insecurity, and unknowing grew."

"I desperately needed to anchor myself. In new cities, with no friends, alone in hotel rooms, it was not hard for someone to prey. I’m sure they sense that."

Wrote Elliot Page, quoted in "Elliot Page Says He Was 'Groomed' As a Teen" (NY Magazine).

"It was in my women’s-studies classes, too, that I was first exposed to a corresponding movement that came to be known as sex-positive feminism."

"Mirroring the Reagan era’s 'me-first' ethos, it eschewed economic issues and those related to male violence in favor of a politics of personal fulfillment centered on the concept of female pleasure. (In my 'French Feminisms' class, the preferred term for such was jouissance.) The rough idea was that women should be celebrated not just as desirable objects but as desiring subjects, and that, in liberating their libido and seizing the terms of their objectification, they might liberate themselves, too. It followed that even entanglements that appeared to present asymmetries of power could be justified on the ground that the participants were acting out a fantasy or engaging in role-play. Conversely, the inherently emotional aspect of sex, along with its ability to make one human feel bound to another, went unmentioned. So did the fact that, in heterosexual relations, biology rendered the female party the more physically vulnerable one. It was thanks to this line of thinking—a line I later came to regard as casuistry—that I was able both to justify my affair and to identify myself as a feminist while conducting my personal life in a way that might suggest otherwise. That X considered himself a 'male feminist' and appeared to harbor few ethical qualms about what we were doing seemed to be further evidence that nothing about our situation could possibly be wrong. And, besides, wasn’t morality 'socially constructed,' too?... By the second month, I was in a quasi-fugue state."

Writes Lucinda Rosenfeld in "My Adventures in Deconstruction/A college affair turns coming of age into coming apart" (The New Yorker). 

X was a professor — at Cornell. The author, a Cornell junior majoring in comparative literature, was 20. X was 15 years older than she and married. The year was 1990.

Whatever a "quasi-fugue state" might be, a "fugue state" is, these days, in a medical setting, called "dissociative fugue" and defined as: "One or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one's past and either the loss of one's identity or the formation of a new identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home." 

Let's look at the complaint in Noelle Dunphy v. Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Filed in yesterday in state court in Manhattan. I'm just going to extract some things that stood out to me, so I encourage you to do your own independent reading. My selections are entirely biased, as is this entire blog, toward what catches my attention: 

Giuliani worked aggressively to hire Ms. Dunphy, offering her what seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work as his Director of Business Development with a salary of $1 million per year.... He made clear that satisfying his sexual demands—which came virtually anytime, anywhere—was an absolute requirement of her employment and of his legal representation. Giuliani began requiring Ms. Dunphy to work at his home and out of hotel room, so that she would be at his beck and call. He drank morning, noon, and night, and was frequently intoxicated, and therefore his behavior was always unpredictable. Giuliani also took Viagra constantly.

These turning-the-tables arguments don't always work out the way the table-turner thinks.

Ha! The men I know would be thrilled. pic.twitter.com/xWZxeabPKt

— Gail Heriot (@GailHeriot) January 27, 2023

Via Gail Heriot on Instapundit. 

Now, that's a screen shot, not a working embedded tweet, and there are lots of Twitter accounts named "Women in Power." There's no "@" line. Did someone make a screen shot, then erase the "@" part?

I suspect that "Women in Power" is copying someone else's nicely drawn, well-conceived comic. Where is the artist's name? Also erased?

Anyway, isn't Heriot right that a lot of men would get a charge out of hearing these stray, lame compliments? But what happens next?! I'm predicting a shit show. 

ADDED: I searched Google images until I found one that identified the artist. It is Kasia Babis.

"I think that, especially, I realized when so many young people—especially young men—rush to defend me when this stuff first started coming out, that this type of sex-pest behavior is normalized..."

"... and a lot of people think this stuff is normal when I don't think that it is."

Said Andrew Callaghan, quoted in "Andrew Callaghan Allegations: YouTuber Apologizes for 'Sex Pest Behavior'" (Newsweek).

That's a story from 2 days ago, which I'm encountering only because I happened upon his HBO documentary, "This Place Rules."

We watched most of it last night, and I had gone looking for some reviews of it. 

Here's the trailer:

"President Joe Biden appeared to grab a young girl by her shoulder telling her 'no serious guys till you're 30' while posing for a photograph with the teen and her friends at Irvine Valley College in Irvine, California, on Friday...."

The Daily Mail reports.

President Joe Biden grabs a young girl by the shoulder and tells her “no serious guys till your 30” as she looks back appearing uncomfortable, secret service appears to try to stop me from filming it after Biden spoke @ Irvine Valley Community College | @TPUSA @FrontlinesShow pic.twitter.com/BemRybWdBI

— Kalen D’Almeida (@fromkalen) October 15, 2022

Female privilege resisted.

Presidential daughter and daytime TV personality Jenna Bush Hager must have thought she was performing her role as a playful, delightful female as she invaded the personal space of the male TV personality Justin Sylvester during a cooking segment of the "Today" show:

 

I had never heard of Justin Sylvester, so everything written above this sentence is my reaction to that video, which I'd watched with the sound off. My question was: Is he married? I wondered if he was the sort of man who thinks about his wife and how she would feel if she saw another woman breasting into him and squirming.

But, researching, I quickly encounter Sylvester's own reaction to the reaction to that video and, while I don't know if he's bullshitting to preserve his access to women's daytime TV, I can see that protecting this imagined wife is not what was going on:

"The Biden rules expand the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, and expand the types of episodes..."

"... such as incidents reported outside of their educational programming, that schools are obligated to investigate. The rules would also make live hearings optional, no longer a requirement, and allow schools to employ a process that establishes the credibility of the parties and witnesses, though it doesn’t require cross-examination. But one of the major changes in the Biden rule is the inclusion of sex-based harassment to include, 'stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity,' according to the proposed rules. The department will issue a separate regulation on how Title IX applies to athletics, including how schools should determine a students’ eligibility to participate on a male or female athletics team....  'The department recognizes that standards for students participating in male and female athletic teams are evolving in real time,' [Education Secretary Miguel A.] Cardona said. 'And so we decided to do a separate rule-making on how schools may determine eligibility while upholding Title IX’s nondiscrimination guarantee. I firmly reject efforts to politicize these protections and sow division in our schools'...."

 
The NYT reports, in an article with a headline that focuses on the transgender issue: "New Biden Rules Would Bar Discrimination Against Transgender Students/The proposed rules would prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, among other things; they set up a clash with state lawmakers and conservative groups."

I love how Cardona is taking a hard-core position — not for or against inclusion of transgender women in women's sports, but just against politicization and sowing division. That's bold.

"Princeton University’s board of trustees voted Monday to fire Joshua Katz, a tenured professor in the classics department..."

"... for failing to fully cooperate with a sexual-misconduct investigation that his supporters say is retaliation for his viewpoints.... [Samantha] Harris, Katz’s attorney, said the university’s actions could have a chilling effect on free speech on college campuses. 'The message to other people who might want to speak out is the price is having your personal life turned inside-out looking for information to destroy you,' Harris said. This is 'someone who was previously an award-winning, highly-respected professor, but from the moment he published that article onward he became a relentless target until he was fired.' [Gene A.] Jarrett, the faculty dean, pushed back against the assertion that Katz’s views were the catalyst for the investigation in a November report on the probe, saying 'the current political climate of the university, whether perceived or real, is not germane to the case.'" 

WaPo reports.

Here's my earlier post on this case.

The top-rated comment at the new article is: "I work at a university and it is a pretty clear policy and clearly understood that engaging in a relationship with a student will get you fired no matter what your politics or rank."

Okay, but then it had better be the case that every single one of these having-sex-with-students professors has been fired. No mercy. Zero tolerance. Yet, Katz's case itself shows that's not the policy, because the University looked into this very relationship in 2018: "He was suspended without pay for a year for violating school policy banning sexual relationships between faculty and students, and placed on three years’ probation."

"In my 30 year career, including the entire MeToo era, there’s nothing to report, but, as soon as I say I intend to restore free speech to Twitter & vote Republican, suddenly there is…"

Said Elon Musk, quoted in "Elon Musk calls claims of sexual misconduct ‘politically motivated’" (WaPo).

Musk commented at length on Twitter... writing that “those wild accusations are utterly untrue” and issuing “a challenge to this liar who claims their friend saw me ‘exposed’ — describe just one thing, anything at all (scars, tattoos, …) that isn’t known by the public. She won’t be able to do so, because it never happened.”  

“Moreover,” he added, “the ‘friend’ in question who gave the interview to [Insider], is a far left activist/actress in LA with a major political axe to grind.” 

“The attacks against me should be viewed through a political lens — this is their standard (despicable) playbook — but nothing will deter me from fighting for a good future and your right to free speech,” Musk tweeted. 

He ended the thread: “Finally, we get to use Elongate as scandal name. It’s kinda perfect.”

The top-rated comment over there is: "Musk is starting to sound an awful lot like Trump." And, yes, he is: He's a master of the tweet. But don't worry. He can't run for President. We are securely safe from the foreign-born man following the Trump path to power. And Musk himself is safe from that temptation (and from our suspicion). That door is closed.

Of course, if the allegations are true, that's very bad. But what I'd like to know is how many men are inhibited from coming out as conservative — or just anti-Democrat — because they know there are or could be allegations like this held in reserve. How much control is achieved by this method of only going after political enemies? We can't get all the allegations out, because some men are protected, protected by their own political pretense.

By the way, do you think there's anything odd about Elon Musk's genitalia, or is this a rhetorical trick to make us think he has a means of refuting his accuser? Remember when Michael Jackson was subjected to a bodily search to see if his accuser had accurately described his penis?