When it comes to the Constitution and the Affordable Care Act, one must wonder who is the little lamb brought up as a pet.

"This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word..."

That's the beginning of paragraph 4 of Maureen Dowd's attack on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Her rant includes many of the hackneyed phrases we're accustomed to seeing in anti-Court writing:

It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.

How do hacks writing NYT columns dress up?

All the fancy diplomas... cannot disguise the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal brief.

I elided "of the conservative majority" to highlight how political liberals bitching about conservative judges talk just like political conservatives bitching about liberal judges... and all their fancy diplomas cannot disguise it!

But I'm interested in the phrase that sounded new "cosseted behind white marble pillars." Can one be cosseted by pillars? What exactly is cosseting anyway? Did you picture something like this?



No. That's a corset. Do you let similar words affect your understanding of a word? (I once lost a spelling bee because I allowed the word "ostrich" to intrude upon my understanding of "ostracize.")

But cosset... it's something soft, not pillarlike, is it not?

cosset
1650s, "to fondle, caress, indulge," from a noun (1570s) meaning "lamb brought up as a pet" (applied to persons from 1590s), perhaps from O.E. cot-sæta "one who dwells in a cot." 

When it comes to the Constitution and the Affordable Care Act, one must wonder who is the little lamb brought up as a pet.

"I cut the feet off my pantyhose and wore them underneath... But they rolled up my legs all night."

"I remember thinking, 'I've got to figure out how to make this.' I'd never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn't exist."

How Sara Blakeley invented Spanx... and became a billionaire.

"How to Undress a Victorian Lady in Your Next Historical Romance."

"Authors Who Crave Verisimilitude Learn to Unlace a Corset in a Good Bodice Ripper."

Apparently, it was much harder to get the lady's clothes off than the average fiction-writer would have you believe. But, generally, in fantasies, clothes come off — even fall off! — much more easily than in real life.

This makes me think about "The Peculiar Art of Mr. Frahm."

What everyone wore at the Grammys, beginning with a man in shorts...

... tight gold plastic short shorts — panties really, almost Spanx, don't you think? He's carrying Lady Gaga inside a prop left over from "This Is Spinal Tap."

More tight shiny men's pants at #25 (Ricky Martin). Justin Bieber also models the comically male, spoofing adulthood, I think, doing bagginess instead of tightness, at #36. Katy Perry, at #40, seems to be spoofing the old mishap of unwittingly dragging toilet paper with you out of the bathroom. Rihanna, at #47, seems to have collected all that toilet paper and crimped it into millions of tiny ruffles to band around her body in stripes — alternating with — apparently! —nakedness.

It's the Grammys. It's perfectly apt to dress as a joke.

"It gave me pecs, gave me definition, it gave me confidence."

Spanx for men.

Fabulous, for the unnaked man.

February, 2009 — Part 2 in a 12-part blog series.

1. I scan 2 photos of me in the 1970s.

2. "WiFi on airplanes. What's the downside? Terrorists coordinating things? The fact that the mere suggestion of terrorists coordinating things has me instantly eagerly ready to have the government monitor anything sent to or from an airline laptop? Come on, we let them X-ray the intimate items our bags and look at us in that machine that lets them see us naked. And you know how ridiculous you look naked but with your invisible clothes squishing your body into the dressed shape? Or do you think you look better that way, what with your Spanx and your push-up brassiere? I'm thinking of belts and waistbands. So, come on, WiFi on airplanes. It will be great...."

3. "I would rather do the right thing and have 1 term than be mediocre and have 2."

4. I leaned out the bedroom window to capture the moonset.

5. "Speaking of Japan my neighbor was in Japan and everywhere he went Japanese people yelled Yes We Can at him. I guess because he is an American. He said this lasted an entire week. Restaurants, stores, on the street, everywhere, Yes We Can. How scary."

6. "I, however, as a man am an exception to the rule: I love purple. In fact, I wear a purple hat and a purple scarf. Men leave me alone while women can't seem to keep their hands off me. That is, as long as I wear the hat and scarf."

7. "For the love of God, people, be careful. If you're going to take any risks, I hope it's worth it for you." = What I said the day I fell in love.

8. "Nobody has to be ashamed of being a Hoosier."

9. The Rainbow Connection.

WiFi on airplanes. What's the downside?

Terrorists coordinating things? The fact that the mere suggestion of terrorists coordinating things has me instantly eagerly ready to have the government monitor anything sent to or from an airline laptop? Come on, we let them X-ray the intimate items our bags and look at us in that machine that lets them see us naked. And you know how ridiculous you look naked but with your invisible clothes squishing your body into the dressed shape? Or do you think you look better that way, what with your Spanx and your push-up brassiere? I'm thinking of belts and waistbands. So, come on, WiFi on airplanes. It will be great. The time once spent doing that crap crossword in the in-flight magazine and snoozing to a half-heard audiobook will feel just like all those hours you willingly sit in your desk chair on a beautiful warm February day when you could be out traipsing around your beautiful city.

What year was it?

My history blogging continues. Before clicking, see if you know the year.

"Boston Corset Maker Says Women Have Grown Stouter" — and the the 21-inch waist is a thing of the past.

The Chief Justice spoke of Lincoln's "Christ-like character," but the President said Lincoln was a "natural human being with the frailties mixed with the virtues of humanity" — as the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated today.

Mrs. A.N. George of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is offended by the reference to "the tactics of the pole-cat when badly frightened" that appeared in a resolution by the New England Woman Suffrage Association.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyles visits New York and opines on Coney Island, suffragists, plumage laws, and skyscrapers.

Why hasn't the Women's Party put up a female candidate for President?

"Every man turned into a devil. We ran fighting and clawing and scratching and swearing for the ladder leading up to the deck. We found the hatches battened down. Great God, how the men did curse!" A terrible ship fire.

The NYT tries to explain the physics of "Young Professor Heisenberg," and Lady Grace Drummond-Hay talks to General Hermann Wilhelm Goering.

Tom Wolfe "suggested that intellectuals are attracted to socialism because it seems in 'good taste"" and it has the '''secret promise' ... that intellectuals will wind up with power."

The NYT wonders why it is that the 12 greatest women alive in the United States today are all childless.

Okay, so I saw the "Sex and the City" movie because I thought I could get some good blogging out of it.

So if I have nothing to say then I wasted 148 minutes. To try to salvage my lost time, I'll go with a numbered list:

1. Why is a comedy 148 minutes long? Especially a comedy based on a half-hour sitcom. It was like 5 TV episodes stuck together. Except 5 TV episodes would have been more fun because there would have been a lot more random, go-nowhere plots and not a true-romance story arc for each of 4 characters. They'd have thrown in some extra bad boyfriends. Instead, each aging diva has the love of her life to come to terms with.

2. Hollywood is back to casting black women in the role of the maid: Jennifer Hudson won an Oscar, then plays the "personal assistant" to Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City." My heart is too full to tell you how just how I feel:



3. Why did Carrie Bradshaw even need a personal assistant? She's been using that damned Apple laptop for over a decade. Doesn't she know how to click the "junk" icon in Mail? Also, if she's such a big Apple user, why did she shun the iPhone? Well, the answer is, of course, these were all plot devices. How can you generate enough miscommunication to make a modern love story when everyone has instant communication? You have to have kids hiding cell phones, cell phones thrown into the ocean in anger, unusual cell phones that a person who isn't supposed to be an idiot can't operate, and personal assistants to set up password-protected email boxes.

4. She also needed a personal assistant so there could be a black person in her life to help her understand what really matters in this world. Guess what? It's love. And being true to yourself. And very expensive handbags.

5. I thought the extreme, grotesque materialism was extreme, grotesque and pretty amusing:

It’s easy to bash the show’s over-the-top materialism, but “Sex and the City” has never bothered to rationalize it, no matter how absurd or overpriced an item may be. (Nor has the show explained how a freelance writer could afford all those clothes.) It simply accepts that fashion is good and assumes the audience, just like Carrie, so badly wants to be a part of Vogue.

It's a little game we play. Does it hurt anyone? We all like a walk-in closet, so why not show us the ultimate dream closet... and show our Carrie having glorious make-up sex in it?

6. I say "our Carrie," because it seems we're supposed to identify with her, but why on earth do we? Is she our fantasy? We might like to maintain our skinniness as we age, but we don't visualize it turning out that stringy. How many tendons are there in the human body anyway? I tried counting that one time when we got a horrific closeup of the axilla:



7. Meanwhile, Samantha is supposed to get shockingly fat (from living in Los Angeles and having to consume food instead of the usual smorgasbord of men that she got in New York). But the actress, Kim Cattrall, declined to put this kind of dedication into acting:



8. But credit where credit is due: Cattrall puts in the effort where the result is to make her look pretty. I'm thinking about that sushi scene. (Which was another place where they figured out how to make the telephone unanswerable.) And let's be fair. Cattrall has a beautiful body at age 51, and stretching it out at this point could be catastrophic. Couldn't they have made some sort of fat prosthesis to make the fat scenes big and believable? What percent of the women in the theater were slimmer than the supposedly fat Samantha?

9. And if Carrie is so horrified by fat, why is she so hung up on Mr. Big, who is fat? Hey, I'm just seeing that Chris Noth (who plays Big) was born in Madison, Wisconsin. That's nice! But still, the man is substantially overweight, and in profile, at least once, it was very obvious that he was wearing a powerful girdle.

10. Noth had to act like a pussy about going to his giant wedding, and it was completely unbelievable. I can't believe the whole audience didn't audibly scoff.

11. Because the audience was breathing and sighing along with ever emotional moment in that damned movie. Dog? Awwww. Baby? Oooohhh. Women go to that movie to have their emotions played. Suspend your critical mind and flow with it. If you don't want to do that... really, you shouldn't go. (It's like pornography.)

12. The most pornographic part of it all is the fashion and the interior decoration. You'll never be bored if you can pay attention to the details of costume and set decoration.

13. For me, the most astounding thing in the movie was the chest of drawers in the Vogue office. I have this old chest of drawers — my parents bought it in the 1960s — that earlier in the day I decided I had to get rid of. I was thinking about rearranging the furniture in my living room and I realized that the awful thing had to go. It's black with three wavy gold squares on each drawer and a big gold door-knocker pulls. Then — unbelievable! — there's that very chest in the Vogue office. Weird!

ADDED: Sean says:

My parents had that exact same chest (at least as described: I didn't see the movie). It's by Dorothy Draper. You can google her. My sister saw one in the window of an antiques store in Greenwich so it's worth something, although she didn't stop to check the price.

Palladian says...

Althouse, can I have the Dorthy Draper piece?

... and links to this picture:



That's it!

Well, is this NSFW?

It's Susan Hallowell, the director of the Transportation Security Administration's security laboratory, as X-rayed by the "backscatter" machine. She's willing to appear in this form, so why not you? What's worse, that or a pat-down search? Take your pick.

This reminds me of the discussion of X-Ray glasses in Bill Bryson's new memoir of his boyhood. Wouldn't people look creepy, seen naked under their clothes? They wouldn't look like a naked person, because the clothes would be smooshing various parts of their body in strange ways. (And speaking of creepy: "Do I Creep You Out?" (via Drawn!).)

Then there's this book, "Seeing Through Clothes," that contends that paintings of nudes tend to do just that, depict the bodies pushed into a form that could only be achieved with a corset or some such device.

Nude people. You don't really want to see them. Believe me.

AND: I'm still going to watch "Positively Naked" on Cinemax tonight:

On an early morning in March 2004 some 85 adults gathered at a restaurant in Manhattan's meatpacking district, removed their clothes and posed for Mr. Tunick's camera. Arlene Donnelly Nelson and David Nelson's moving 38-minute documentary, to be shown tonight on Cinemax to commemorate World AIDS Day, captures the moment gracefully.

Like a lot of their fellow human beings, some of these men and women are a little apprehensive about revealing their naked bodies to total strangers, not to mention the world. One man says he is much more nervous about showing his distended abdomen (a side effect of medical treatment) than his penis. Many seem nervous at first but soon relax into the equality that nakedness creates. Not surprisingly, one man reports "a sense of camaraderie" in the experience.

At first the sight of scores of naked adults milling about and looking confused about what is expected of them bears an unsettling resemblance to a scene from a Holocaust film. But as the photo session proceeds, an energizing dignity takes hold. Neither the documentary nor the magazine cover photograph focuses on genitalia. The scene really does convey, as publicity materials suggest, the spirit within the flesh.

We'll see if it's quite as spiritual as all that. I tend to doubt it. I hate the idea that it's supposed to be profound because we're told it's about AIDS, as was done so often years ago.

ADDED: "The equality that nakedness creates"??

UPDATE: I've now watched the documentary "Positively Naked," and, despite all the talk about an art "installation," it was very much a documentary about people living with HIV/AIDS. An art-focused documentary would have been entirely different. I'm not knocking it for using AIDS to add weight to art, because it wasn't enough about art. It was about AIDs, and the feelings of the people who got naked and photographed were the subject of the documentary. Yes, photography on this level is art, but there was no pomposity about this art, and Tunick was an appealing and reasonably modest character. He wasn't at all like the stereotypical "installation" artist. As far as the nudity, it was really the standard nudist material. Getting nude in a group has some meaning. It's not art. It's a psychological phenomenon that isn't edgy or new in any way. So basically, this was a conventional documentary about struggling individuals. They also got nude and posed for a big photograph. But there was no pretension about the quality of the photography as art. The emphasis was entirely on the camaraderie. Nice. I wouldn't have watched it if I'd known what this was going to be, but it's perfectly fine for what it set out to do. Really, I would have preferred a full-of-himself artist revealing a lack of sensitivity toward the subject, but that's speaking only of the documentary I'd like to watch. Tunick seems like a decent guy, and that's a good enough thing in itself.

"I can always make a pretty butt even prettier."

Says the buttock-augmenting plastic surgeon.

Last year 2,361 Americans had buttock augmentation surgery, almost four times as many as in 2002, the first year that the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery kept statistics on the procedure. The operation typically costs about $20,000....

Some women over 50 get the surgery to bulk up deflating derrières, while younger patients say they want larger buttocks to complement prominent busts. "I always got compliments for my front but never for my back," said Natalie Del Rio, 18, a high school student in Miami who had the procedure last month with Dr. Mendieta. "Now my mom says I look like a Coca-Cola bottle."

Presumably, the mother put up the money for all of this. What kind of a culture does this girl live in that she fretted that no one was talking about her ass?

Go to the link to read about the elaborate procedure that involves relocating two pounds of your own fat and that requires you to wear a "surgical girdle" and to avoid sitting down for weeks. All of this is supposed to make you more sexually attractive, but you have to be extremely pleasure-denying to go through with it. Well, what's the point of sex without irony?

And then there's the whole question of what the ideal ass is:

Two Mexican plastic surgeons, Dr. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra and Dr. Jorge Quezada, examined 132 patients and more than 1,000 photos and concluded that a beautiful bottom has four features: slight hollows on each side, a curved fold where the buttocks meet the thighs, a V-shape crease that looks like cleavage at the top and two dimples in the lower back. Dr. [Constantino] Mendieta also examined hundreds of photos but came to a different conclusion: that the overall shape of the buttocks is most important. He proposed that female buttocks come in four basic configurations: square, round, V-shape and A-shape.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous, the doctor who collects $20,000 for injecting a small bucket of fat into your ass had damned well better have done a lot of hard thinking about what shape he's after. And you'd better think it through carefully before going through the ordeal.

Celebrity corsets.

Check out the celebrity-designed corsets. (It's an auction to benefit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.) Not that I'm bidding, but may I recommend the Julianne Moore? And note the Eve Ensler. It's really Eve Ensler-y.

UPDATE: Chris emailed me that link, by the way, which he found at The Dent, a Tori Amos news site. Tori has a corset in the show. It's bee-themed.

ADDED: Chris adds: "The corset benefit is for an organization that Tori Amos runs. Also,the bee theme is a double reference that her fans would get--one of her best B-sides is called Honey."