"One reason female comics often seem to run afoul of Facebook’s guidelines is that the company’s content moderators fail to recognize the humor in their posts."

"Popular tropes such as 'ban men' are interpreted literally under Facebook’s current set of community standards, and women suffer the consequences for attempting to express themselves. In the past, ironic misandry has been a popular way for women to deal with living in a world where they’re exposed to frequent abuse at the hands of powerful men. Yet, if a woman takes to Facebook to vent about how she 'wants to imprison men and milk them for their male tears,' she could quickly lose access to her account. Trolls know this... Feigning outrage at statements that were clearly not written to be interpreted that way has become a favored tactic of the alt-right, Gamergate, and movements known for their coordinated harassment efforts. When moderators can’t make this distinction they punish innocent parties and embolden trolls."

From "Facebook Is Banning Women for Calling Men ‘Scum’/Women had accounts banned from Facebook for responding to male trolls with sentences like ‘men are trash,’ in part because the company classifies white men as a protected group" (in The Daily Beast).

Read the whole thing. I don't support what Facebook is doing, but I do think the use of the word "scum" warrants a historical note on "SCUM" — The Society for Cutting Up Men. The author of "The SCUM Manifesto," Valerie Solanas wasn't joking:

According to Solanas, this genetic deficiency [the Y chromosome] causes the male to be emotionally limited, egocentric, and incapable of mental passion or genuine interaction. She describes the male as lacking empathy and unable to relate to anything apart from his own physical sensations. The Manifesto continues by arguing that the male spends his life attempting to become female, and thereby overcome his inferiority. He does this by "constantly seeking out, fraternizing with and trying to live though and fuse with the female." Solanas rejects Freud's theory of penis envy, and argues that men have "pussy envy". Solanas then accuses men of turning the world into a "shitpile" and presents a long list of grievances... 

Due to the aforementioned grievances, the Manifesto concludes that the elimination of the male sex is a moral imperative.... The Manifesto argues that SCUM [a revolutionary vanguard of women] should employ sabotage and direct action tactics... "If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade."

It was 1967, and the President with the "stupid, sickening face" was LBJ.

Solanas told the Village Voice that the SCUM Manifesto was "just a literary device." And some scholars call it satire. But I wrote "Valerie Solanas wasn't joking," because she did go out and shoot Andy Warhol. Maybe the point should be that joking isn't inconsistent with violence. You'd be a fool to think that a person who expresses herself (or himself) in a joking form is necessarily safe. Often hostility fuels humor, and the fact that the hostility finds its way into humor does not mean it will always and only channel into humor.

"The world of ballet is a fuzzy area, those involved say, in which people are regularly touching one another through choreography and instruction."

"An artistic leader like [Peter] Martins looms large — particularly among up-and-coming, young dancers — as a producer who decides which ballets are performed; as a casting director who determines which dancers land the best parts; and as a father figure who designates dancers for promotion."

From "New York City Ballet Investigates Sexual Harassment Claim Against Peter Martins," in the NYT. Martins is "the longtime leader of New York City Ballet."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art declines to remove a painting that is — according to a petition — "undeniably romanticizing the sexualization of a child."

The painting, by Balthus, is “Thérèse Dreaming." The NY Post has the article, showing the painting (which shows a young girl posed so we get a good look at her underpants).

From the petition: "I am simply asking The Met to more carefully vet the art on its walls, and understand what this painting insinuates. Ultimately, it’s a small ask in consideration of how expansive their art collection is… how overtly sexual the painting is, and the current news headlines highlighting a macro issue about the public health and safety of women."

The NY Post informs us not only that Bono sang at Malthus's funeral, but that Elle Macpherson was also in attendance. Does that vouch for him somehow or is it just a way to nudge us idiots to understand that Balthus was famous? (Not famous enough for my spellchecker to lay off changing his name to Malthus.)

Anyway, the museum's spokesperson shows no empathy for the feelings of our era — The Reckoning  — but loftily informs us that its "mission is to collect, study, conserve, and present significant works of art across all times and cultures in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas." And "Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present."

So here's the painting:



Let's have the conversation.

I'll just start by saying that I saw the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit in Boston in 1990, and one of the photographs showed a young girl — younger than "Thérèse" — and she was posed so that we could look up her skirt and there were no underpants. I remember that the elite media portrayed those who said this was wrong as unsophisticated. The photograph conveyed the charming innocence of a child, we were told.

Ah, yes, here's a NYT article, from 1996, "PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; The Child, the Adult Within and the Blur Between," by Vicki Goldberg, talking a bit about that photograph, "Rosie."

The fact that, though clothed, [4-year-old Rosie] unwittingly displays her genitals puts the spectator in a slightly uneasy position; besides, her expression could be read as wariness.

Mapplethorpe had an agenda: "Children are sexual beings," he said, "but it's an area that makes most people feel uncomfortable."...

[In the 19th century, c]hildren were not yet considered sexual beings, which is why Lewis Carroll could get away with taking nude shots of little girls, at least for a while, and why Freud would later encounter such resistance to his theories of infantile sexuality....

Speaking of Lewis Carroll, here's an excellent New Yorker article from 2015, "Go Ask Alice/What really went on in Wonderland," by Anthony Lane. Excerpt (beginning with a letter from Carroll):

I have a little friend here, Lily Gray, child of Dr. Gray, and one of my chief beach friends at Sandown this year. She is 5, a graceful and pretty child, and one of the sweetest children I know (nearly as sweet as Gertrude)—and she is so perfectly simple and unconscious that it is a matter of entire indifference to her whether she is taken in full dress or nothing. My question is, are you going to allow Gertrude (who I think is also perfectly simple and unconscious) to be done in the same way?

It is impossible to read this now without horror. The politesse, the pointing up of sweetness, and the ascribing of “entire indifference” to the child evoke the classic stratagems of the pedophile, planning his campaign and convincing others (and, more important, himself) that he is doing no wrong—that there is no victim but merely a willing collaborator....

"The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries."

"The justices, with two dissenting votes, said Monday that the policy can take full effect even as legal challenges against it make their way through the courts. The action suggests the high court could uphold the latest version of the ban that Trump announced in September," AP reports.

The dissenters were Sotomayor and Ginsburg.

The cases are still at the circuit court level, and these courts must hear oral argument and reach decisions.

At the Bicycle Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

And shop about whatever you want through the Althouse portal to Amazon (which is always in the sidebar).

The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature writes a ludicrously bad sentence that the NYT publishes...

... with no editor catching the embarrassing ambiguity:

As ever, we must resist authoritarian instincts that restrict our liberties, demonize anybody who appears to be different and — as is happening in Turkey — outlaw freedom of expression, judiciary independence and pluralism.

That's from the op-ed "Why Does Our Side Keep Losing Elections?," by Orhan Pamuk.

Of course he means:

As ever, we must resist authoritarian instincts

that

1. restrict our liberties,
2. demonize anybody who appears to be different and...
3. outlaw freedom of expression, judiciary independence and pluralism.

But the first time I read it I saw:

As ever, we must

1. resist authoritarian instincts that restrict our liberties,
2. demonize anybody who appears to be different and...
3. outlaw freedom of expression, judiciary independence and pluralism.

That's such a terrible thing to say that I was puzzled and reread it until I saw the other meaning.

Now, why does this guy get the Nobel Prize?!

I chose not to slog through the rest of his prose, so I don't know why he thinks "our side" keeps losing elections or even what side he's on. He's Turkish.

"I'd like to read what Althouse has to say about this year, of all years, Hollywood preparing to celebrate 'Call Me By Your Name' about a 24-year old man and a 17 year old teenage boy."

Writes MayBee (in the comments to the post about James Levine).

In my pre-Meade days, I saw a lot of the end-of-the-year Oscar-bait movies, so I don't know much about things after 2008, but in December 2008, I wrote:

I'm seeing all the well-reviewed year-end movies, and there's an awful lot of wrong-age sex. "Doubt" is about a priest accused of molesting children. "Benjamin Button," with its backwards aging character, had scenes of an old man in love with a young girl and an old woman in love with a toddler. "The Reader" had a 36-year-old woman seducing a 15-year-old boy. "Milk" had a man in his 40s pursuing relationships with much younger (and more fragile) men. "Slumdog Millionaire" shows a young teenage girl being sold for sex. I say that Hollywood is delivering pedophiliac titillation with the deniability of artistic pretension.

"Donald Trump is going all out to persuade seven-term Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch to seek reelection..."

"... a push aimed in no small part at keeping the president’s longtime nemesis, Mitt Romney, out of the Senate," according to Politico.

"For decades, the Met was essentially the Levine Company. Its identity was intertwined with his. His taste in composers..."

"... his relationships with singers, his hires, orchestra, conducting style... Audiences burst into applause as soon as his corona of springy curls bobbed into the spotlight... His cheery, seemingly eternal presence thrilled the board and helped keep the spigot of donations open. I’m not sure the Met can survive Levine’s disgrace. The company is an outgrowth from, and a uniquely regressive example of, the 19th-century commercial opera houses that flourished through specialization, activity, and growth. August companies erected massive buildings, mounted expensive shows, packed in audiences, and concentrated prestige in the hands of very few gatekeepers, all of them men. That power structure produced a century and a half of lavishly misogynistic operas in which women are constantly going mad, turning into prostitutes, dying, or all three...."

Writes Justin Davidson in "The Met May Not Survive the James Levine Disgrace" (at NY Magazine).

How can an organization that big become so dependent on one individual? Quite aside from the potential for a scandal that would require him to be banished from society, he, like everyone else, could die or become mentally or physically incapacitated. What an absurd risk to take, to go on so long and build so much, all intertwined with one man! And it looks as though the Metropolitan Opera has had reason to know for a long time that James Levine was susceptible to a colossal scandal.

Did the people who were so dependent on him believe that his magic extended to silencing the boys upon whom he (allegedly) transgressed? What arrogance, and yet perhaps the entire enterprise of the Metropolitan Opera is arrogance upon arrogance, an overweening — operatic — conglomeration of arrogance.

Or was it that the Met had gone so far in the direction of Levine's "uniquely regressive" idea of opera that only Levine could maintain the crazy, outdated vision it has for itself. Davidson seems like he knows what he's talking about. I don't know what it takes to maintain a gigantic opera enterprise in our day. There is something magnificently archaic about it, making it a shared delusion that perhaps requires a charismatic cult leader. And when that's who you've got running a grandiose game, the transgressions may seem like part of the necessary craziness, and you may get to thinking that special rules apply to your leader.

And when the great man of opera falls, the fall should be operatic. He must take the whole overblown set crashing down in the final scene.

I've heard of talking out of your ass, but not talking out of other people's asses.

"James Comey posts weird collage of FBI agent rear ends in apparent response to Donald Trump."

A man "trying to bend metal and make a hammer or something" — inspired by the TV show "Forged in Fire" — sets off a fire that burns 3 city blocks.

The NYT reports.

John Gomes, 51, wanted to emulate the characters on the History channel reality show where "bladesmiths compete to create swords and other edged weapons." But the wind was 30 mph in his city (Cohoes, NY) and the sparks had a mind to create a reality show of their own.

“He’s a father of two,” Christopher Ritchey, an Albany County public defender who is representing Mr. Gomes, said in an interview on Saturday. “He’s a hard-working plumber. And this is just a terrible, unfortunate accident, but it’s not a crime.”

He's charged with felony counts of arson and reckless endangerment.

"I asked if he is a feminist. 'Of course,' he said. 'The opposite of feminism is ignorance.'"

From "A Man Among Female Leaders: ‘The Risk of Mansplaining Is Very High,'" by Katrin Bennhold (in the NYT), about Xavier Prats Monné, a Spaniard, who spoke about maternal health at a meeting of female political leaders. I love the quote, because he had to say yes, but he made the extra effort and generated an aphorism.

Who knows if he believes the aphorism or even if it's true? Truth is rarely the point of an aphorism.* And truth can't be why Mr. Prats Monné generated this particular aphorism. He's performing in the theater of feminism, where men must continually make an effort to understand what is happening.** Prats Monné speaks of ignorance, and he demonstrates his non-ignorance not by making a truthful assertion — surely there are some non-ignorant ways to stand apart from feminism — but by making the extra effort, taking the trouble to construct an aphorism.

The meeting took place in Iceland, which is, we're told, a "tiny gender utopia where selling pornography has been banned since 1869*** and the world’s first openly lesbian prime minister was elected in 2009."

The ground floor was packed with women and a sprinkling of men, most of them security guards and journalists. Mr. Prats Monné, a regular at conferences, said the room not only looked different, but sounded different, too: “It’s so quiet,” he said.

Next to us, two women — a center-left lawmaker from Europe and a conservative one from the Middle East — met for the first time. They hugged and kissed. Mr. Prats Monné mostly shook hands.

“It is a cohesive group that has its own signs and body language,” he said, his inner anthropologist emerging. “They acknowledge each other as being from the same tribe. I’m not from their tribe — although I do feel very welcome.”

Kissing. You can't go up to women and just kiss them. Even to say that's what you do can get you in trouble. I'm thinking of Trump's much-reviled remark: "I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait."

Who gets to do the social kiss? Only people who feel no sexual attraction to each other? But how do you know the person you're kissing isn't attracted to you? You could make sure you're not attractive.

Anyway, Trump didn't say he likes to kiss everyone hello. He specified beautiful women and feeling "automatically attracted." Unless you spread your kisses around, you can't palm them off — lip them off — as social kissing. You need to be part of a "tribe," a "cohesive group that has its own signs and body language."

If you read far enough into the linked article, you'll see some contradiction to the "gender utopia" characterization of Iceland:

Iceland is living its own #MeToo moment, after the country’s youngest female lawmaker, Aslaug Sigurbjörnsdottir, 27, went on television last week to share her experience: of rumors that she had slept her way up, of a rival candidate putting his hand on her thigh every time he addressed her in front of a room full of students.

An hour after the program aired, Ragnar Önundarson, a banker, had reposted one of her Facebook pictures. “I want you to think about the kind of image you project,” he had written.

A day later you could buy T-shirts featuring a troll with the caption “Don’t be like Ragnar,” and by now 500 people have signed a petition supporting Ms. Sigurbjörnsdottir.

And there's this illustration. Note the caption (click to enlarge):

_____________________

* You disagree? You're disagreeing with an aphorism. Checkmate!

** We're seeing some ludicrous performances in this making of an effort, like the one we were laughing at yesterday:

I just want to say I am going to take time to reflect on this, to educate myself daily, and to strive towards a more enlightened path. I want to ensure that all voices around me are heard, and that everyone is treated respectfully and empathetically. More than anything, I want to create an environment that is a better, safer and fairer place.

*** They have a ban on pornography because — like us — they banned it long ago. Unlike us, they failed to get around to recognizing free speech rights, so the ban survived. I'd be more impressed at the strength of the feminism in Iceland if they'd first embraced strong free-speech rights and got rid of the old censorship based on fear and prudishness and then banned it, despite the recognized value of free speech, specifically because they'd determined that suppression of pornography was necessary to the even higher value of the equality of women.

"In this vast and troubled world, we sometimes lose our way, but I am never lost/I feel this way because...."

"It was Mr. Margo’s idea for the Happenings to do an up-tempo version of the Gershwin brothers’ 'I Got Rhythm,' his nephew Noah Margo said. The record reached No. 3 on the Billboard singles chart in 1967."

That's from the NYT obituary: "Mitch Margo, an Original Member of the Tokens, Dies at 70." You think of The Tokens — if you think of them — as the group that did the much-loved early-60s song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." But I see that The Tokens went on to produce records for The Chiffons, Randy and the Rainbows, and Tony Orlando and Dawn. Mitch Margo was one of the producers on the sublime Chiffons hit "He's So Fine." *

And I know the most famous Randy and the Rainbows song without looking it up: "Denise." That also seems to have been produced by The Tokens (under the production company name Bright Tunes). "Denise" was redone in 1978 by Blondie as "Denis," which — apart from the masculinization of the love interest  — aurally copies the Randy and the Rainbows version, though the visual effect is quite different:



Denis Denis, oh with your eyes so blue/Denis Denis, I've got a crush on you...

And Mitch Margo wrote "Laugh," the Monkees song, and "Slow Dance," which, we're told, The Carpenters released in 1989.

Speaking of dying, did Karen Carpenter survive to the year 1989? No, she died in 1983. But you can listen to the song while looking at video of Karen slow dancing with her brother Richard, here.

If that's too sad, here's "Laugh," replete with way-too-frenetic Monkees antics.
___________________

* "He's So Fine" was written by Ronnie Mack. You know that song "Jimmy Mack" — "Jimmy Mack, when are you coming back?" — which seems to be about a boyfriend who's staying away too long, was inspired by Ronnie Mack, who had died of Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was only 23.

Jay Siegel of the Tokens later said of Mack's songs: "They had the most incredible lyrics; not intellectual lyrics, but just the things that people speak of in everyday language. Most people don't have the talent to write them down as music, but he did.... [Had he lived] he...would have been one of the most successful songwriters of the '60s."

Sunset, last night, just up the hill.

Notice the person in the shot. She got out of a car to scurry over to that spot to get her own picture of our dear sun.

ADDED: And when you're a star, they let you do it.

"Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge... a bizarre documentary... immediately devolves into gratuitous naked-groupie footage..."

"... (although at least now we know exactly how those famous plaster-casts are made). Ostensibly because this was Rolling Stone’s first significant story? It’s not really clear. It’s actually less clear when we go from Jefferson Airplane’s San Fran mansion to Ike and Tina Turner’s living room, to delve into a RS feature story on the couple. We’re left with a troubling quote by Tina that she has to do what Ike says, and then we’re on to the first of many John Lennon interviews. Sure, we know how Ike and Tina turn out, but the cuts are discordant enough to be jarring.... Even more frustrating are the brief glimpses of the offices filled with overflowing ashtrays, and the typewriters, and the galleys, laid out using rubber cement and X-Acto knives; since today’s publishing world is a far cry from all that, a closer look would have been welcome...."

From "HBO’s Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge is a hell of a puff piece" in the AV Club.

I got about an hour into the show before pausing, perhaps never to go back. I could not believe how they plunged into the groupie material. And there was absolutely no critique, no perspective on groupies. Just these young women, presenting themselves as culture heroes, charting their own course, which is, supposedly, having sex with as many rock stars as possible and — in the case of the Plaster Casters — doing their own art project and taking home trophies.

What could go wrong? Who's still alive and in any condition to speak of the aftermath? Nobody shows up to say the women's point of view presented in Rolling Stone was fake (like the recent Rolling Stone article about the UVa gang rape). And in the background — as if we're still living in 1969 and not in the days of The Reckoning — the music that plays is The Rolling Stones, "Stray Cat Blues." The lyric jumped out at me:

I can see that you're fifteen years old
No I don't want your I.D.
You look so restless and you're so far from home
But it's no hanging matter
It's no capital crime...

We're still adulating the Rolling Stones, despite their raucous celebration of sex with a 15 year old.

I'm happy to watch a documentary about Rolling Stone and the people it covered over the years, but can't we get some edge? It's all a soppy love fest — ironically the opposite of the style of journalism that made it worth doing a documentary about in the first place.

"We're running out of time... I'm going to urge the Pentagon not to send any more dependents to South Korea."

"South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour. It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea. So I want them to stop sending dependents. And I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea... I think the president has inherent authority as commander-in-chief, has the ability to strike North Korea to protect the American homeland.... He's got the best national security team of anybody I've seen since I've been in Washington. The president, himself, early on, made the right decision. I'm not going to allow North Korea to hit America with a nuclear weapon. We're not going to live under that threat. If I have to go to war, and I don't want to, to stop it, I will. Everybody before President Trump screwed it up, including Republicans. Now we need to get it right. And I think he's got the right approach. He's got the right team. I hope China will help us. We're running out of time."

Said Lindsey Graham (on "Face the Nation" today).