3 views of Reedsburg, Wisconsin.

This is the storefront that made us stop and get out:



I wisecracked "Weedsburg." But the town is more focused on fermentation:



The fest was last week. We missed it. But we enjoyed our brief sojourn in Reedsburg...



... one of the places we stopped as we were out driving, looking at orange and red leaves.

"Or maybe your soul is telling you that sex is supposed to mean something, that, in fact, sex is supposed to be the accompaniment of love — the type of love that commits for a lifetime."

"Could be that your soul is sane in a culture that is not."

That's the top-rated comment at a NYT "Modern Love" column by a young woman named Ali Rachel Pearl who's trying to understand why she hasn't had sex in 2 years:

Maybe my secondary abstinence...

Secondary abstinence is abstinence by someone who has been sexually active in the past.

...  isn’t in allegiance to God but to my own broken heart and the fear that seems to produce a kind of magnetic repellant [sic] whenever I come close to someone I desire.

My friends don’t seem to understand my secondary abstinence. They ask if I’ve had sex yet. “How can you go so long?” they ask. “I can’t imagine.” They say: “You have to lower your standards.” “Go to the bar more.” “Join a dating website.” “Make really good eye contact.” “Get rid of your hang-ups.” “Be more open.” “Stop being afraid.” “It’s just sex,” they say. “You have to stop refusing to sleep with people just because you don’t immediately want to marry them.”...

Every night that I go to a concert or a party, every day that I walk around the neighborhood, I find my secondary abstinence trailing me like a sad ghost or an unwanted dog.

"I even turned around to Bernie Sanders at one point and said, ‘Bernie, say my name, will you? Say my name.'"

"In that kind of environment, I was either going to be Mr. Angry or I was going to be a potted plant. That was the only way to try to get into the conversation," said Jim Webb, complaining about the "rigged" debate.

I love the "say my name" business. So "Breaking Bad"...

"I identify as grey-asexual (can't bring myself to call it greysexual) and for me it's a useful term."

"I experience sexual attraction vanishingly rarely and when I do it's often not strong enough to even act on, more of an intellectual curiosity. Some folks in the asexual community can be absolutists about the identity, so that a person with my history, for instance, wouldn't be considered asexual, even though my lived experience is more in line with asexuality than not. Grey-asexual identifies those who fall between asexual and non-asexual and can help those of us who fall on that part of the spectrum understand ourselves. It's not a term with an exact definition and people who identify with it often have their own interpretations, but it's functioning in an area where the language is evolving rapidly as people work to more accurately express their feelings, hence the host of identities in the article."

From the Metafilter comments on a post about a HuffPo article collecting a bunch of words that purportedly identify various sexual conditions. The HuffPo article is not good. It seems like it could be a joke, but if so it would be: 1. not particularly funny, and 2. disrespectful toward some people you'd expect HuffPo to swath in dignity. The HuffPo article can be experienced as funny, as Metafilter commenters point out, if you concentrate on why the various stock photos were chosen to illustrate the particular sexual conditions. Why is the "graysexual" a man in a hat walking down the middle of a country road?

The serious question — the one that made me choose the quote above — is whether having more specific words for feelings helps people understand who they are and what they are doing with their lives? Off hand, I say it depends on what you do with that word once you learn it.

How should you dress to go to the theater?

Point: "For the love of God, stop dressing like crap."

[T]he slobs who turn up at Broadway shows [are] dressed as though they’d just walked in from a tailgating party — one with a three-figure admission price, mind you. When people were invited onstage at a recent performance of “Penn & Teller on Broadway,” many women looked as if they had stepped out of a jazzercise class, while men ambled around in hideous cargo shorts....

Counterpoint: "Wear Whatever The Hell You Want To The Theater":

Theater today is ridiculously inaccessible as it is, and to tell people they have to dress a certain way to participate is unfair.... There are many ways in which the industry is trying to become more accessible to younger people, those who have had little exposure to theater and people with less disposable income.... Theater is changing. Playbills often include hashtags. People wait in line to take selfies with actors post-show, rather than get their autographs, and all of that is great! As time hurtles forward, our traditions change. Not every tradition is worth holding onto.... Finally, I would venture to guess that professional actors do not care what the audience wears. They're picturing you naked, anyway! But seriously, they can't see you; the lights are too bright.

Well, that counterpoint was a jumble of discontinuities. I'll just say 4 things:

1. Traditions change, of course. Tradition is what we've kept as we've left some things behind. The question is what do we want to leave behind.

2. In some theaters, the actors can see you. We frequently see plays at The Touchstone Theater, where the front row of seats is on the same level of the stage and curves around 3 edges of the stage. The people in these seats are full-body visible to the actors and to the rest of the audience. What possesses the minds of theatergoers to choose front row seats and then to arrive in blazing white sneakers and other conspicuously over-casual duds? If I knew I was in the front row, I'd take care to wear dark and respectful clothing. I feel sorry for the actors, who, I think, need to be able to believe that the audience members have the minimal sense needed to understand the play.

3. Don't blame the young and the poor for the sloppy playclothes in the audience. I see mostly older, affluent people in the theater, and they are not bothering with the minimal level of appropriate clothing.

4. A minimal level of appropriate clothing is really all that is appropriate. You should be comfortable sitting still for 2 hours and you shouldn't be distracting. Something simple, inconspicuous and dark. That's not expensive and burdensome. Playing the class card is disingenuous.

"Obama is no socialist. A socialist would have nationalized General Motors, instead of returning it to capitalistic solvency."

"A socialist would not have presided over a doubling of the stock market, without adding significant new taxes to Wall Street’s biggest beneficiaries. For true socialism in action, look to the billionaire Trump. As a developer, he’s tried to use eminent domain — 'state-sanctioned thievery,' in the words of National Review Online — to get other people’s property. There’s your communist. He has no problem taking from others to serve the public 'good.'"

That's Timothy Egan in a NYT op-ed called "Guess Who Else Is a Socialist?"

The NYT deploys a National Review Online quote — presumably for corroboration, conservative opinion backing up liberal — but doesn't bother to give us a link. Here's the article, from April 2011, "Donald Trump and Eminent Domain." Excerpt:

The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment allows the government to take private property for “public use,” so long as “just compensation” is paid. In the infamous 2005 Kelo decision, the Supreme Court held that “public use” could include, well, private use, so long as the new property owner paid more in taxes than the previous one. In other words, it allowed developers and the government to gang up on homeowners. The developer gets more land, the government gets more tax money. The only losers are the original owner and his property rights.

A decade and a half ago, it was fresh on everyone’s mind that Donald Trump is one of the leading users of this form of state-sanctioned thievery. It was all over the news. In perhaps the most-remembered example, John Stossel got the toupéed one to sputter about how, if he wasn’t allowed to steal an elderly widow’s house to expand an Atlantic City casino, the government would get less tax money, and seniors like her would get less “this and that.” Today, however, it takes a push from the Club for Growth to remind us of Trump’s lack of respect for property rights....

The "this and that" link goes to a John Stossel 2004 article at Reason.com titled "Confessions of a Welfare Queen/How rich bastards like me rip off taxpayers for millions of dollars." Excerpt:

It looked to me like the government was robbing Vera Coking to pay off Donald Trump. The government officials wouldn’t talk to me about it, but Trump did.

Stossel: In the old days, big developers came in with thugs with clubs. Now you use lawyers. You go to court and you force people out.

Trump: Excuse me. Other people maybe use thugs today. I don’t. I’ve done this very nicely. If I wanted to use thugs, we wouldn’t have any problems. It would have been all taken care of many years ago. I don’t do business that way. We have been so nice to this woman.

"Nice" is Trump's favorite word. People think it's "huge," but it's actually "nice."

Trump: Do you want to live in a city where you can’t build roads or highways or have access to hospitals? Condemnation is a necessary evil.

Stossel: But we’re not talking about a hospital. This is a building a rich guy finds ugly.

Trump: You’re talking about at the tip of this city, lies a little group of terrible, terrible tenements -- just terrible stuff, tenement housing.

Stossel: So what?

Trump: So what?...Atlantic City does a lot less business, and senior citizens get a lot less money and a lot less taxes and a lot less this and that.

Sadly, claims that people will be deprived of "this and that" can now be used by politicians to condemn your house. It didn’t seem right to Vera Coking. "This is America," she said. "My husband fought in the war and worked to make sure I would have a roof over my head, and they want to take it from me?"

Stossel goes on to say that Trump lost that case: "Vera Coking got to keep her home. She still lives there, surrounded by Trump’s hotel." That was written back in 2004. I looked up Vera Coking to see how she's doing these days, found a Wikipedia article, and it had this picture of her house:



That's one of what Trump called "terrible, terrible tenements." I guess if you say the adjective more than once it seems more true.

(The structure built around Coking's house in the picture isn't Trump's. It's an erection of Bob Guccione's that never achieved completion and got torn down later as Trump was building his hotel in 1993 and offering Coking a quarter of what Guccione had offered in the 1970s. Trump wanted to put a parking lot in that area. Trump built his hotel, which went out of business in 2014, which was also the year Coking finally sold her house. She got twice the amount Trump had offered in 1993, half what Guccione had offered in the 1970s.)

Obama has a long conversation with the novelist Marilynne Robinson, who's got a new book, a set of essays, on topics like fear and politics.

Obama — who professes familiarity with and love for Robinson's novels — calls attention to the essay "Fear," which, as he puts it, looks "through the prism of Christianity and sort of the Protestant traditions that helped shape us." Basically, he's interviewing her. I can't think of a time when I've read a dialogue with a President where the President is the interviewer:

The President: Tell me a little bit about how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy.

Robinson: Well, I believe that people are images of God. There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it.

The President: But you’ve struggled with the fact that here in the United States, sometimes Christian interpretation seems to posit an “us versus them,” and those are sometimes the loudest voices. But sometimes I think you also get frustrated with kind of the wishy-washy, more liberal versions where anything goes.... How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?

Robinson: Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity, because if you take something seriously, you’re ready to encounter difficulty, run the risk, whatever. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously. I don’t know—I mean, this has happened over and over again in the history of Christianity, there’s no question about that, or other religions, as we know. But Christianity is profoundly counterintuitive—“Love thy neighbor as thyself”—which I think properly understood means your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, not that you’re actually going to be capable of this sort of superhuman feat. But you’re supposed to run against the grain. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge....him—that he was old, that he had a young son, and so on—they create the narrative.

From the essay "Fear":

Is Barack Obama a Christian? He adopted Christianity as an adult, true, having been unaffiliated with institutional religion until then, but the whole history of the Spanish Inquisition proves how hard some people find it to trust a convert. There was a time when we Calvinists felt the force of the terror and antagonism that can be raised against those who are not Christian in a sense other people are willing to accept. This doleful trait is being played upon in our current politics....

When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like “everlasting.”...

"Yes, the debate was comfortable to Democrats concerned about their front-runner, but it should also have been worrisome to Democrats concerned about their bench."

"'The fact she did well should surprise no one,' a Biden activist told me. 'If she didn’t do well against those guys, then God help our party.” If something serious were to happen to Clinton — self-inflicted or not — the party would be entering a presidential race on favorable terrain but with a substantial talent problem. Martin O’Malley presented no rationale for a campaign; Jim Webb sounded bitter and bizarre; Lincoln Chafee at times appeared confused why he was even onstage. Sanders electrified his core supporters but didn’t suggest any newfound ability to sell his far-left platform to the general public. In a scenario where a Clinton campaign implodes, Democrats will again be desperate for a new candidate and will again review the options. Al Gore’s name will be floated. 'Al Gore is doing nothing,' said a Democrat who sits on a board with him. Same with John Kerry. 'John has not given the slightest indication he would do this,' Bob Shrum, who ran Kerry’s 2004 campaign, told me. What will be real is Biden."

From "We Are Already Months Into the Biden Campaign," by Gabriel Sherman in New York Magazine. 

"These things just sortof happened. I needed a job, and I got a job in a day-care center, and it was horrible."

"I started playing the guitar and doing role-play, which is what they do at that age. And the other teachers were like, ‘Are you drugging these kids? Why are they listening to you? Why are they not bored? Why are they not whining?’ I was like, 'I was speaking their language.'" The kids asked: "'Are you a kid or an adult? And also are you a boy or a girl?' They had no idea."

Explained Peaches, who's somebody I'm aware of because she was on Marc Maron's podcast. And I just watched "Dick in the Air."

"If I read it right, you start out scared to talk to women, you learn all these techniques and score a lot..."

"... and then... you meet this woman for whom none of it works and you fall in love and swear off your player ways."/"Yes that’s exactly it, " says Neil Strauss. "Obviously I was a journalist, this community [of pickup artists] already existed, and I went in to describe my experience of it. But because no one had even heard of this world, and the techniques, let’s face it, are so objectifying and horrifying, that the book became the bible of what it was trying to chronicle in a more neutral way. So I think all of a sudden there were these horrid ideas that people read about in The Game and ... The Game became the origin of those ideas...."

The supposedly reformed Mr. Strauss proceeds to blame mothers, saying that what he and Robert Greene ("The Art of Seduction") and Tucker Max all have in common is:

We all have narcissistic mothers. So what happened? What happens when you grow up with your identity being squashed by this mother who never sees you but only sees herself, is you grow up with a fear of being overpowered by the feminine again....

He's still overpowered, in his mind, if he needs to say that. Picture it. His mother exists, and he's telling the world she "squashed" him and only saw herself. Who's squashing here and who's only seeing himself?

"I've never seen anything like that before, and I've lived in Southern California since I was 11."

"It got really scary really quick."

Mudslides.

"Nearly 200 vehicles, including 75 tractor-trailers, are trapped on California 58 east of Tehachapi in up to 20 feet of mud and debris after torrential rains pummeled the area and forced drivers to flee."

"There has been this band of brothers idea that there is something special about having only men, and adding women will ruin it."

"The study doesn’t bear that out.”

The [Marine] Corps approached the question of integration differently from other branches. It commissioned the nine-month ground combat study that put 300 men and 100 women in teams that performed combat skills ranging from shooting to hiking and climbing walls.

“Instead of seeing if women could meet standards, they essentially set up a race to see who was better,” [said  Ellen Haring, a senior fellow at the advocacy group and a reserve Army colonel]. The study found all-male units overwhelmingly outperformed integrated units in physical tasks — particularly tasks requiring upper body strength, such as evacuating an injured Marine from a turret or throwing a backpack onto a wall. But, the report said, integrated groups excelled at complex decision-making. It also concluded that adding women to all-male groups would probably improve the behavior of the groups as a whole.

At the Harvest Café...

... you can pick your own topics.

"Does this article say anything I couldn't just easily guess?"

I ask Meade after he sends me a link to a MarketWatch article titled "Why men are threatened by smart women/A new study suggests men might not want to date women who are smarter than them."

He says "no," but then explains that it connects to the themes that have been raised on the blog recently. He perceives the article as advice aimed at men, advice that resembles the kind of advice that's been aimed at women over the years. He's read the article. I haven't. So I was skeptical: "Is this really aimed at men?" At the headline level, it looks like more massage for the female mind, and I'm tempted to translate the title uncharitably to: Why men avoid you: You're smart! A new study suggests that the men who don't want you are not good enough for you.

Okay, now I've read the article. In the study, men were prepped for an encounter with a woman by being told that the woman scored higher than he did on an intelligence test. The men then met the woman and judged her to be relatively unattractive.

MarketWatch asked psychologists about how men can overcome bias (if they have it) against smart women.

This supports Meade's perception that it's advice for men. (It is, at least, if you get all the way to the last 3 paragraphs of a 13 paragraph article.) One psychologist tells men to focus on "appreciating" the woman and to "realize that this is an issue with your own self-esteem." Another psychologist says men could try to become more intelligent and to concentrate on other "areas of your self-concept."

This article was really aimed at...

Men, and it worked rather well.

Men, but men aren't going to listen to this.

Women, of course. Seeming to talk to men is an effective angle in talking to women.

Women, but it may lose them by failing to be all about them.

Both! Men who want to work on their flaws and women who want to help them.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Do you need vulva emoji? Or do you want to keep typing ({|})?"

"Feministing has done an article on Flirtmoji's recent release of 15 vulva emoji, realistically asymmetrical and in a variety of pleasant colors. Designer Katy McCarthy did an interview on her work on these sexually explicit emoji and the necessity of inclusivity."

So says Metafilter. The linked Feministing article is "THESE NEW VAGINA EMOJIS ARE THE BEST." So you've got Metafilter subtly prodding the feminist blog to be a tad more accurate with the genitalia terminology.

Here's the interview with McCarthy, going into the depth of why people need sexy emoji:

What’s really beautiful about sex, and emoji, is that sex is really playful and also really difficult. And at the core of good sex is good communication. So to that end, I think that whatever it takes for you to be able to communicate what you want or need, or what you don’t want and don’t need is fine... I think with sex there are things that are really hard to say and hard to ask for, and that’s such a beautiful window to be able to provide someone with language....

This takes me back to something we were talking about yesterday, the "yes means yes" movement and how it privileges those who are language oriented. 

"We prefer to live in a world where the orgasm-inducing Hawaiian lava mushroom is real."

"A few readers have expressed doubt about the orgasm-inducing mushroom I mentioned yesterday.... None of our readers have, as far as I know, sniffed the mushroom, but they do know their way around Snopes, and they have kindly provided a link to the site's page, which says the mushroom's orgasmic power is UNPROVEN...."

Unproven doesn't mean disproven.