What does MacKenzie Bezos care about the "blockbuster potential" for anything? She is on track to receive half of the $137 billion fortune she and her husband amassed. She will be the richest woman in the world. The challenge for her is — I would think — to maintain a motivation to do serious, valuable work.MacKenzie Bezos has been — as far as we can see — a serious novelist. She has absolutely no reason to hanker after what would be big bucks for an ordinary writer. She's far too rich.
“Toxic masculinity” is either sloppy language, or a slur against all men.I've been meaning to write a post about the phrase. There is a big problem with it, because there are basically 2 ways to understand it and one is so offensive that it should probably be avoided, because if you mean the one that I think is okay, you're still likely to be misunderstood and you are — even if only unwittingly — emitting some hate vibes.
If you want to be a writer that Althouse enjoys, make sure you are born with the right voice, and I am not using ‘voice’ figuratively. You have to have that Spike Jones type voice mentioned in “Up On Cripple Creek” that tuned on Bessie.Tuned on? I think that was supposed to be "turned on," but you know what they say, "tune on, turn in, drop over."
By the way, do you find "editrix" jaunty and amusing, annoying and groan-worthy, or evidence that Dowd isn't doing feminism right?It doesn't really matter who the "editrix" in question was, but it was some former editor of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire.
"Editrix" is anachronistic, as are terms such as "waitress" and "actress," etc. The terms "editor," "waiter," (now "server"), and "actor" are not innately masculine in their connotations, and so are suitable--preferable--when referring to females working at these jobs.Mary Beth did the research:
"Editrix" is anachronistic, as are terms such as "waitress" and "actress," etc. The terms "editor," "waiter," (now "server"), and "actor" are not innately masculine in their connotations, and so are suitable--preferable--when referring to females working at these jobs.
Yeah, like early 20th Century, when the word was first used. Google Ngram shows it becoming popular in 1911, except for one fluke blip in the graph in 1838. It actually looks like it's becoming more popular.Though rhhardin joked us in a childish direction — "Editrix is for kids" — quite a few minds went straight from "-trix" to "dominatrix." Owen said:
We don't need gendered nouns in a non-gendered language so the use of one seems like an affectation. It was still the most interesting thing in what I read.
"Editrix" should be "editrice." Sounds less like black leather and fishnet stockings, more classy.And Ignorance is Bliss said:
I find a sudden urge to check if PornHub has and editrix category, just to see what that might involve.And I think that's something of what's going on in the mind of tim in vermont:
As a man, I can only say "editrix" communicates female power and competence. But we men know nothing, we think that the sexes are different in many ways not visually obvious.Similarly, FIDO:
["Editrix"] is perfect for a controlling female authority figure, adding a little panache to an otherwise dreary field.I'm front-paging all that because I thought this was quite a coincidence yesterday: I was continuing my reading of Mary McCarthy's "Up the Ladder from Charm to Vogue" (in the essay collection "On the Contrary: Articles of Belief"), first blogged about in this post on April 3d (which I was reading because I'd done the research and discovered that it is the first published appearance of the word "Orwellian" (in 1950)). And I encountered the word "editress."
Unlike the older magazines, whose editresses were matrons who wore (and still wear) their hats at their desks as though at a committee meeting at the Colony Club, Mademoiselle was staffed by young women of no social pretensions, college graduates and business types, live wires and prom queens, middle-class girls peppy or sultry, fond of fun and phonograph records....There are 2 other appearances of "editress" in the essay, including one, I realize now, that was in the excerpt I put up on April 3rd:
But beyond the attempt [by Vogue] to push quality goods during a buying recession like the recent one, or to dodge responsibility for an unpopular mode (this year’s sheaths and cloches are widely unbecoming), there appears to be some periodic feminine compulsion on the editresses’ part to strike a suffragette attitude toward the merchants whose products are their livelihood, to ally themselves in a gush with their readers, who are seen temporarily as their “real” friends.
As an instrument of mass snobbery, this remarkable magazine [Flair], dedicated simply to the personal cult of its editress, to the fetichism of the flower (Fleur Cowles, Flair, a single rose), outdistances all its competitors in the audacity of its conception. It is a leap into the Orwellian future, a magazine without contest or point of view beyond its proclamation of itself, one hundred and twenty pages of sheer presentation, a journalistic mirage....I'm not going to insist that Maureen Dowd read my blog post, but if it's more than coincidence that her next column uses a feminine form of "editor," I wonder if she considered the word "editress" and opted instead for "editrix" and, if so, why? I think the answer is up there in what various commenters said: "editrix" sounds more exciting and dominating and "editress" is condescending. Mary McCarthy certainly meant to sound condescending as hell.
Daily Caller reporter Ian Miles Cheong had harsh words for Myers, tweeting, “Male feminists who claim the moral high ground, who turn their noses up at the ‘misogynists’ below, are the very demons they claim to fight.”Yes, of course, that's fun to do — and liberals often deserve it — but Myers seems to have written mainly about British politics, not gender. There is at least one Myers article in the gender category: "Men’s Rights Activists are cave dwelling idiots."
MRAs routinely deny the existence of what many feminists call "rape culture" by suggesting that failures to prosecute sexual violence are the result of endemic false rape allegations, rather than societal attitudes towards consent. When the founder of MRA site "A Voice For Men" Paul Elam wrote a piece entitled "Bill Cosby's victims? Or just a bunch of drug whoring star fuckers?" he was displaying an overt hostility towards women that characterises the movement. Over 50 women have accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. Yet Elam goes to bat for Cosby.But who will go to bat for Myers? Any Men's Rights cavemen want to step up for this guy? He's all alone now. Sad!
Robert Downy doesn't need techniques to pick up women, a simple "wanna fuck" would probably work at least half the time for him. In Wedding Crashers, the PUA was Will Ferrel, that was more believable.If you look like like Robert Downey Jr. in 1987, go ahead and quip "I’ve got enough mates, I’d rather fuck you," and I suspect the worst you'd get is a laugh and a no from a woman who feels flattered and still hopes to be friends. But here's Rupert Myers:
A pair of ads allegedly created by President Trump’s father, Fred, for a 1970s mayoral bid circulated widely on the Internet this week. They were ads, one titled “Dope Man” and the other “Real New Yorkers,” presenting two depictions of the city during that decade. The first showed a black drug dealer wandering the streets of New York, culminating in a shot of two frightened-looking women with a “Paid for by the Committee to Elect Frederick C. Trump” banner at the bottom of the screen. The second was more optimistic — though the “real New Yorkers” depicted were only white New Yorkers.Here's the tweet WaPo's Fact Checker Glenn Kessler scrambled to delete:
If the ads were real, they would certainly be among the more racist ads in American political history, even by the standards of the 1970s. But they weren’t real.... The footage of the black drug dealer, which is available on at least one stock-footage site, is from a short film called “A Day in the Death of Donny B.” from 1969....
The idea that Trump’s father would have created starkly racist ads fits neatly into existing narratives about Trump and his family.
A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes.There's the old "fake but accurate" bullshit. The evidence is bad, and we tried to palm it off, but trust us, we were still correct about the facts were were trying to prove with fake facts.
Forty-six percent of voters now have a very favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of the president-elect. Twelve percent have a somewhat unfavorable opinion and 34 percent have a very unfavorable opinion of him.... Trump’s favorability has grown 9 points, 37 percent to 46 percent, compared to a Morning Consult poll right before the election -- while his unfavorability has dropped 15 points, from 61 percent to 46 percent.Why do you think this happened? It might be that the accomplishment and glory of getting elected cast a bright glow on the man and made a lot of people think he looks pretty good. It might be that people process election results and move past the conflict of the campaign and that the common natural impulse is toward serenity and hope for the future. And it might be that the hostility and over-dramatic acting-out by Trump haters backfired, driving people right into the plush, beefy arms of President Trump.
You have to ask why because you don't understand the counterproductive phenomenon you are part of. If you understood why, you might do something else. But go ahead, keep doing what is not working and wondering what the hell just happened. It's part of what I'm finding so funny in post-election American life.And tim in vermont says:
My wife voted against him, but all of this nonsense is making her rethink it and she is actually defending him. She rolls her eyes now when she gets off the phone with some of her friends.
Unlike the rest of America, we the people of Wisconsin have been thinking about Walker for 5 years. I can't remember ever dreaming about him. I don't normally dream about celebrities. That's why this dreaming about Trump is freaky.That reminded me of an old Isthmus advice column, published in back in 2012, blogged here, with a letter from a woman who loathed Scott Walker but kept having dreams — sexual dreams — about him. She signed her letter "Violated." The advice columnist gives stupid advice, but Meade does a comment over there that still amuses me after all these years: "Dear Violated: First of all you have not been violated. You have been the violaTOR... of your marriage, of your husband's due respect, and of your own fantasies."
What if Trump is invading everyone's dreams? It's as good an explanation as any for what's been going on lately.UPDATE ADDED IN APRIL 2020: On May 9, 2016, I told you something extra about what I thought was this same dream:
And have you ever considered that all of existence is a dream dreamed by Donald Trump? Perhaps we are all unreal, just scenery in his dream. The question then is whether he has achieved the lucid dream state and knows that he can do anything he wants to us, and what does he want?
I thanked him, effusively, for teaching us to have the courage to speak freely.In that post, I also said:
I especially like the idea that Trump is teaching us that it works to speak forthrightly about what we think. That might not be true. It might work only for Trump — maybe he has some weird communication genius — but I hope people can absorb and process the lesson and make it work for themselves.I did not go on to vote for Trump. I considered him too weird to be President (forcing me to vote for his opponent, whom I did not like at all). But he's meanT something important to me all this time, and I've been immunized from hating him. I always want to understand him, and I'm really listening to him.
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.If the allusion was intended, it should make sense. Surely, Meade didn't mean that he's finally beaten down to the point were he submits to Obama-as-Big-Brother. And it's Obama that just got beaten down. The idea, it turns out, is that Obama has loomed over us for years as a kind of Big Brother figure, but now he's cut down to human size. He's not so big anymore. He's a real person who needs love and who becomes lovable, at long last, to those who have resisted the cult of personality.
The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t—it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford)....IN THE COMMENTS: tim in vermont makes perhaps the funniest comment in the history of this blog:
"Like Jesus, Obama also sports the middle initial of 'H'."
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