At the Just Out Walking Café...

... get going.

"I just had a wild idea. What do we need men for? Let’s get rid of men! But then I thought, 'Well, maybe we do need them.' So let me check."

"Let me get in the car with Lewis [her dog] and go to towns named after women and ask women: What do we need men for? And then at the end I would know whether we should really get rid of them...."

From "E. Jean Carroll, in Her Own Words/The writer who has accused President Trump of sexually assaulting her in the 1990s speaks to The New York Times" (NYT).

Would we ask of any other group, what do we need them for? It's fundamentally immoral to believe that other people exist for your purposes, but there are so many things you can say about men — as long as you're assuming that they're white — that you'd never say about any other group. (By the way, it's white supremacy — isn't it? — to always be assuming that, if race is not mentioned, the group is white.)

Carroll's book is titled "What Do We Need Men For?" and I wonder what Maureen Dowd thinks of that. I have her 2005 book, "Are Men Necessary?" in my Kindle.



I know you can't copyright a title, and you can get away with using exactly the same title as another book, but it looks disrespectful for an Elle columnist to use what seems like an awkward effort at paraphrasing the title of a New York Times columnist.

I say "looks" and "seems" because I don't really know what's in her head, and I want to emphasize the impossibility of mind reading because Carroll's book is a memoir, and that means she’s telling her stories as they've lived inside her head, and she's telling of an encounter with Donald Trump, and we don't know what was in his head at the time. Did he believe he was proceeding without her consent, or did it seem as though they were engaged in a playful acting out? The NYT interviewer asks:

In the book, you write that you and Trump recognized each other at Bergdorf’s, talked playfully about what gift he might buy for a woman and ended up in the lingerie department, challenging each other to try on a lilac bodysuit. It was there that you claim he pushed you against the wall, pulled down your tights and put his penis inside you. But why would you go into the dressing room with him in the first place?

Wouldn't he think that sex was in the offing, even if she's "stamping on his feet, and I think I’m banging him on the head with my purse." I heard in the NYT podcast (blogged here) that she laughed the whole time and never said a word — no "no" or "don't" or "stop." What was in his head? You won't hear it from him, because he's taken the position that it never happened at all.

"I think I’m banging him on the head...." Doesn't she know? It's a memoir: She's viewing the old movies in her head and relaying what she sees there to us.

There's some honesty to the "I think." She's showing us that she knows she can't really know. What are memories? What is a memoir? But what is the morality of all this writing? One answer is that she consistently refrains from calling it "rape." She does not accuse him of a crime. Other people step in and do that for her, of course. That's the world we live in.

"And that little girl was me."

Maureen Dowd deploys the Kamala Harris catchphrase:

In January, a reporter contacted the nascent Biden campaign to request an interview. She wanted to ask the former vice president about lingering criticisms that were bound to come up on the trail: how, as a senator, he failed Anita Hill; his lead role in the 1994 crime bill; his vote for the Iraq war; his mixed record on abortion rights; his handsy ways; the hot mess that is Hunter.

And that little girl was me.

From "Kamala Shotguns Joe Sixpack" (NYT).

That really is a great beginning. Anyway... Biden wouldn't do her interview, so Dowd was primed to enjoy Harris's taking advantage of her proximity to him on the debate stage. The idea is that old man Biden is "irritated and unprepared to address inevitable jabs from his younger, more nimble rivals."

The column is illustrated with a close-up photograph of one of Harris's high-heeled feet.

That's apt, because Dowd uses the metonymy of the shoe: "Harris was grinding her stiletto on a vulnerable part of Biden’s record."

If the sexes were reversed, that gleeful "vulnerable part" language would be decried as misogyny of the worst kind, finding fun in viciously crushing genitalia.

Or is it not apt? A female in stilettos, grinding vulnerable parts, is not a little girl.

Apparently, women in politics and journalism can take on whatever iteration of femininity suits the rhetorical fun of any given sentence.

ADDED: How much violence is there in that headline, "Kamala Shotguns Joe Sixpack"? It took me a few seconds to get beyond the gun violence of "shotguns" and the torso-admiration of "sixpack" — was Harris metaphorically shooting Biden in the stomach? — and to remember that "Joe Sixpack" is the guy who just enjoys drinking some beer after work and that Joe Biden lazily expects to be regarded as that sort of man and that "shotgunning" is a way to drink beer. From the Wikipedia article "Shotgunning":

To shotgun a beverage [usually a beer], a small hole is punched in the side of the can, close to the bottom. In order to prevent the liquid from spilling out while the cut is made, the can is held horizontally and the hole is made in the resulting air pocket. The hole can be made with any sharp object—typically a key, bottle opener, pen or knife. The drinker then places their mouth over the hole while rotating the can straight up. When the can's tab is pulled, the liquid will quickly drain through the hole into the drinker's mouth.

That's what we're invited picturing Kamala Harris doing to Joe Biden?! Okaaay. I love that the Wikipedia "Shotgunning" article is illustrated with a photograph of a woman:


CC Evil Erin, "Shotgun Woman with a hat shotgunning a beer."

It's demeaning to Kamala Harris to depict her (in words) as sucking liquid that quickly squirts from Joe Biden. If you're using words comically, you are very aware of the images you're creating. Or maybe you're only aware of the images that serve your purposes and not thinking of other ones. I'm just telling you the one you put in my head. Did you mean to do that? Or are you just out of control?

Is it true that "The term 'tomboy' has long sounded alarms among conservative parenting factions for its perceived association with lesbianism and departure from traditional femininity"?

I'm trying to read "'Tomboy' is anachronistic. But the concept still has something to teach us," by Lynne Stahl (a humanities librarian who teaches popular culture, gender theory, and critical information studies at at West Virginia University)(in WaPo).

I'm interested in the idea of a "tomboy," which I remember from my long-ago youth. There was a girl in our neighborhood who was the tomboy. It was what she was. What did she do? I remember only 2 elements: 1. She ran around with no shirt on in the summertime, and 2. She loved the 3 Stooges — especially Moe.

From the second paragraph of the WaPo article:

The term “tomboy” has long sounded alarms among conservative parenting factions for its perceived association with lesbianism and departure from traditional femininity...

With my memories of childhood, I wondered if that's true. Do conservatives look askance at tomboys? I haven't consorted with many conservatives in the last 50 years, but, growing up, it seemed that people were pleased to see a tomboy. I heard pride. So I clicked that link on "conservative parenting factions" and got:

[IMAGE MISSING/LINK HAS GONE DEAD]

Did the link go to just one book (as evidence of "factions")?

Click the image to enlarge it and clarify and you'll be able to see the URL: "https://www.amazon.com/Parents-Guide-Preventing-Homosexuality/dp/0830823794." I wondered if there was a parents guide to preventing homosexuality and, if so, whether it represented real "conservative factions."

I tried searching Amazon for parents guide to preventing homosexuality and the top item — and the only even remotely apt item — was this:



That's not the Richard Cohen who was my husband in the 1970s and 80s (and it's not the Richard Cohen who's a Washington Post columnist). This person is presented as a "psychotherapist." The description of the book says: "Did you know that every day people change from 'gay' to straight? This is a must read for every parent, teacher, counselor, clergy, and all who wish to understand what drives homosexual feelings and how to respond in love." I don't know how much that has to do with feeling alarmed about manifestations of tomboyism.

Stahl (the author of the WaPo article) continues, saying that the term "tomboy" has...

... come under scrutiny in progressive circles, too, with some critics arguing that it upholds the essentialist notion that anatomy largely determines children’s behaviors and inclinations. The author of a 2017 New York Times essay who wrote that her daughter was more a tomboy than a transboy sparked debate around gender-nonconforming children, and the argument about this trope has also unfolded across Facebook communities and clinical studies.

Yes, I blogged about that 2017 article ("My Daughter Is Not Transgender. She’s a Tomboy," by Lisa Selin Davis). I said:

Davis is trying so hard to be politically correct, and everything she writes is so scrupulously polite. But in the process she's shedding light on an important problem: More pliable parents and children are being urged to interpret gender-role fluidity/nonconformity as a condition that needs treatment with medical interventions.

Stahl, in the WaPo column, is bringing up this topic because there's another Hollywood adaptation of "Little Women" in the works, and "Little Women" has a character, Jo, and she's explicitly called a tomboy. From Chapter 1:

"Jo does use such slang words!" observed Amy, with a reproving look at the long figure stretched on the rug.

Jo immediately sat up, put her hands in her pockets, and began to whistle.

"Don't, Jo. It's so boyish!"

"That's why I do it."

"I detest rude, unladylike girls!"

"I hate affected, niminy-piminy chits!"

"Birds in their little nests agree," sang Beth, the peacemaker, with such a funny face that both sharp voices softened to a laugh, and the "pecking" ended for that time.

"Really, girls, you are both to be blamed," said Meg, beginning to lecture in her elder-sisterly fashion. "You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks, and to behave better, Josephine. It didn't matter so much when you were a little girl, but now you are so tall, and turn up your hair, you should remember that you are a young lady."

"I'm not! And if turning up my hair makes me one, I'll wear it in two tails till I'm twenty," cried Jo, pulling off her net, and shaking down a chestnut mane. "I hate to think I've got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China Aster! It's bad enough to be a girl, anyway, when I like boy's games and work and manners! I can't get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it's worse than ever now, for I'm dying to go and fight with Papa. And I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!"

And Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.

"Poor Jo! It's too bad, but it can't be helped. So you must try to be contented with making your name boyish, and playing brother to us girls," said Beth, stroking the rough head with a hand that all the dish washing and dusting in the world could not make ungentle in its touch.

"As for you, Amy," continued Meg, "you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you'll grow up an affected little goose, if you don't take care. I like your nice manners and refined ways of speaking, when you don't try to be elegant. But your absurd words are as bad as Jo's slang."

"If Jo is a tomboy and Amy a goose, what am I, please?" asked Beth, ready to share the lecture.

"You're a dear, and nothing else," answered Meg warmly, and no one contradicted her, for the 'Mouse' was the pet of the family.

These 4 female stereotypes, so crisply reeled out in Chapter 1, are seared into the American mind. I remember reading that, and I thought it was obvious that the one to be was Beth (who's so good it's — spoiler alert — the death of her). But then I thought it was obvious that the best Stooge was Curly, but our local tomboy loved Moe.

Anyway, what are we doing here? Does the WaPo writer, Stahl, have anything new today, anything beyond The Great Tomboy Foofaraw of 2017? She notes — remember, she's a librarian — that "fictional stories about tomboys... also feature plotlines that inevitably pair these characters off with boys, offering uncomplicatedly happy, tidy conclusions in which the tomboy drops her resistance and acquires a boyfriend." (Was tomboyishness "resistance" to love from a man?)

It’s a process that constricts their characteristic independence, and it can feel torturous for those of us who don’t identify with traditional femininity — and who see something of ourselves in fictional figures who reject it. Empathetic viewers might want to see a character embrace her singleness, even if an actual lesbian pairing is too much to hope for.

The attempt to fix the tomboy by marrying her off invites disturbing associations with real-life medical practices that “correct” high levels of hormones associated with masculine characteristics.

Isn't that inviting disturbing associations with real-life medical practices that 'correct' hormones in transgender youths? Speaking of correct, I'm assuming Stahl wants to be politically correct (and she does inject some pro-transgender material near the end, the maximum distance from this disapproval of hormone "correction").

And can't women "who don’t identify with traditional femininity" find happiness with a man? Is there something inherently independent about "an actual lesbian pairing." It seems to me, people who pair up — whether with a man or a woman — may sacrifice their individuality, but they shouldn't, and they don't need to. I'm sure there are plenty of women "who don’t identify with traditional femininity" who pair up with a man, maintain their identity, and have a great time with their man. And the man likes it too. I mean, the lady will go camping.

Stahl observes that writers of popular stories, including Louisa May Alcott, go for the predictable plotline of having the tomboy put on some feminine clothes and realize how much she wants a man. Stahl makes the solid point that readers can and will "ignore contrived endings" and find satisfaction in the meat of the story, where there is expression of tomboy individualism. She concludes:

If we want greater gender autonomy, we have to understand how traditional ideas about gender linger in the stories we tell and the endings we envision for ourselves. Beyond resisting gender norms, tomboys give us a way to see the complex dynamics that shape our expression and perception of identity. And even if the word “tomboy” is reaching its own ending, the tomboy’s refusal to conform keeps its power still.

I still don't see why "tomboy" must die. If you like this character type, why not keep it alive? Beth may have  — spoiler alert — died of her own overflowing dearness, but doesn't the tomboy have the wherewithal to survive?

Stahl purports to value "the complex dynamics that shape our expression and perception of identity," and once we fully understand that — helped, per Stahl, by the tomboy — the tomboy, a stereotype, has no environment that can support her continuing life.

But if we ever got there, all stereotypes would be anachronisms.

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandistein says, "ngram of tomboy shows the popularity of the word almost linearly increasing since 1860":

Trump pays a spontaneous visit to Kim Jong-Un, who, with one day's notice, comes to meet him at the DMZ.

From the Bloomberg raw footage (which is replete with photographers jockeying for position and expressing annoyance at each other), there's the moment when Trump pats Kim on the back and Kim lights up the DMZ with his smile...



Here's the whole 10 minutes:



TRUMP: "I didn't really expect it. We were in Japan for the G20 — we came over — and I said, hey, I'm over here, I want to call up the Chairman, Kim, and we got to meet, and stepping across that line was a great honor. A lot of progress has been made. A lot of friendships have been made. And this has been, in particular, a great friendship. So, I just want to thank you. That was very quick notice, and I want to thank you."

Kim, hearing the translation, breaks into a (seemingly) natural smile:



Kim makes no statement at that point, but we did hear him speak, at the point where Trump stepped across the border. You know how important borders are to Trump. The translator called out the words: "I never expected to meet you — at this place.... You'll be the first U.S. President to cross the border."

As I watched, I noticed that I was smiling.

I'm fascinated by the mixture of spontaneity and stateliness. There's the symbolism of friendship we know from childhood — you're near your friend, so that's a reason to ask if he can come out, and he does. Simultaneously, there's the grand symbolism of meeting on this dire borderline. Here they are, really there, and we know they are both men of the theater, striving to look natural on the unfathomably big stage — that narrow, pebbled alleyway.

At the Saturday Night Cafe...

...talk all you want.

"AGE 24/'Atlas Shrugged'/BY AYN RAND/'Marvel at the profundity of its objectivist themes — then, in a few years, marvel at your naivete."

From "Books for the ages/The best books to read at every age, from 1 to 100" (WaPo).

The book that caught my eye and that I downloaded from Kindle is the one chosen for age 92:

“Nothing to be Frightened Of”
BY JULIAN BARNES

Don’t avoid the big questions of life and death and faith: Tackle them straight on with help from some of the greatest thinkers.

The one chosen for my age, 68, is something I've already read, “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion ("Grief can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s normal").

And, no, I've never read "Atlas Shrugged." I tried a little, but I have to like the sentences. I'm a sentences reader.

That reminds me, I wanted to recommend this Malcolm Gladwell podcast that has a lot to say about the kind of people who are slow readers:

The Tortoise and the Hare

A weird speech by Antonin Scalia, a visit with the some serious legal tortoises, and a testy exchange with the experts at the Law School Admissions Council prompts Malcolm to formulate his Grand Unified Theory for fixing higher education.

Gladwell is himself a "tortoise" — a slow reader — and he doesn't like the way his kind are disadvantaged on the LSAT.

A "tortoise"-type reader is not going to do well with "Atlas Shrugged"!

By the way, Gladwell talks about the condition of being a slow reader and a fast writer. I have that too. It's why blogging works well for me. I can find and isolate the sentences I find rich and readable — slowly readable — and I can flow very quickly writing about them. In this light, you can see that this tortoise/hare thing is not binary. There may be tortoises and hares, but there are also "hortoises" and "tares." If it's just tortoises and hares, it might be easy to say, yeah, it's just that some people are smarter than others. But if you see reading and writing (or reading and analyzing) as separate axes, with fast to slow on both, people are more complexly differently abled. Diagram to come....

ADDED: Oh, no, no, no... my idea of a diagram with axes and quadrants is defective. I had to try to draw it to see the problem!



Reading does not progress to writing the way slow progresses to fast. Please suggest a way I can draw this idea!

AND: Allison explained the solution and, with her help, I easily got it right:

"I'd like to think that sometime, maybe 10 or 20 years from now... there'd be something I could laugh at... anything."

Said Spencer Tracy, as the thoroughly disgraced Captain T. G. Culpepper, encased in a body cast, at the end of "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World," which I watched — all 2 hours and 39 minutes of it — as the 1963 entry in my imaginary movie project. This is a movie I saw in the theater when it came out. I was 12, and I didn't know much about gigantic epic comedy chase movies. In fact, I still don't. It's been more than 50 years since then, and I've found any number of things to laugh at along my way, but I can't say I laughed much rewatching this sprawling, raucous monster. I wasn't in a theater full of people who'd assembled to enjoy the hell out of themselves, as I was back in 1963. I'm sure I laughed a lot back then, but I only half-laughed twice in the present-day rewatch.

Tracy, musing about ever laughing again, in fact gets to laugh almost immediately. Buddy Hackett (also in a full body cast) peels a banana, throws the peel on the floor, and Ethel Merman, who's been yelling at everyone throughout the film, comes strutting in, yelling at everyone, and she slips on the banana peel and falls hard on her ass. Do we really want to see a woman get hurt? Yes, in this case, we've been conditioned to wish harm on her, because she's been the loud-mouth mother-in-law visiting aural pain on all the men (except her beloved son Dick Shawn) for the entirety of the movie.

I get it. And yet, I do not get it. And I did not get it the first time around. Yes, I understand the old comic convention of The Mother-in-Law — specifically the mother-in-law to a man. She's got her daughter's devotion and she's going after the daughter's husband, crushing his masculine pride at every turn. You don't ask why these people are like this. They just are. They're characters. They're assigned these positions. Do not pause to reflect or all is lost. That is, nothing is funny. It's just loud. And — oh! — Ethel Merman is loud. Did you know her original last name is Zimmerman — just like Bob Dylan? She lopped off the "Zim." Why not lop off the "man" — it would be more castrating-y — and be Zimmer?

"... an especially apposite response..."

"Go fuck yourself" sounds like an especially apposite response here https://t.co/aW8ZjCq4tb

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) June 28, 2019

ADDED: Rothstein's question made me think of something in that book I recently read twice, "Kafka on the Shore," by Haruki Murakami:

“Is it okay if I imagine you naked?”

Her hand stops and she looks me in the eyes.

“You want to imagine me naked while we’re doing this?”

“Yeah. I’ve been trying to keep from imagining that, but I can’t.”

“Really?”

“It’s like a TV you can’t turn off.”

She laughs. “I don’t get it. You didn’t have to tell me that! Why don’t you just go ahead and imagine what you want? You don’t need my permission. How can I know what’s in your head?”

“I can’t help it. Imagining something’s very important, so I thought I’d better tell you. It has nothing to do with whether you know or not.”

“You are some kind of polite boy, aren’t you,” she says, impressed. “I guess it’s nice, though, that you wanted to let me know. All right, permission granted. Go ahead and picture me nude.”

"Thanks," I say.

"When you talk about a wall when you talk about a border that's what they call a border. Nobody goes through that border. Just about nobody. That's called a real border. We're going there. Going to look at it. That's really a point of interest."

Said President Trump, quoted in "'That's what they call a border': Wall-obsessed Trump praises the effectiveness of the DMZ - which contains two MILLION landmines - and says 'nobody' goes through it/President Trump said he will visit the DMZ Sunday" (Daily Mail).

At the Bright Purple Café...

... you can talk all you like about whatever you want.

Google seems to be playing "One of these things is not like the other" with me.

Click image to enlarge and clarify:

I had to show you this.

Clearest MRI of pregnancy ever recorded. This is crazy.pic.twitter.com/7IHJpxfrAQ

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) June 28, 2019

"You have harnessed fear for political purposes and only love can cast that out. So I, sir, I have a feeling you know what you're doing."

"I'm going to harness love for political purposes. I will meet you on that field. And, sir, love will win."

this is weirdly terrifying pic.twitter.com/abMf7nSuRj

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) June 28, 2019

And here's a new NYT article, "Is Marianne Williamson a Fringe Candidate? Or a Likely One? After Donald Trump, what should a president be, anyway?" Excerpt:

A political campaign is also a chance to exhume everything a candidate has said in her career, from all the tweets to exactly what she meant 30 years ago when she called herself a “bitch for God” at a charity event.

“I think it’s fair to say I wish I had never said that. Something was going on many years ago, in a situation that had to do with some AIDS patients. I would open my course with a prayer. There was something we were doing, and somebody was saying, ‘Marianne, I don’t think we should open with a prayer.’ And I said, ‘No, I think we should open with a prayer.’ And I was getting all this resistance to opening with a prayer. And they said, ‘You’re being a real bitch about this.’ And I said, ‘If I’m a bitch, I’m a bitch for God,’” Ms. Williamson said. “I think it was something about fund-raising, and some very chic people in Manhattan who were going to be there. And I just took umbrage at the idea, whatever.”

Her call for reparations, maybe the most radical yet timely point of her policy proposals, isn’t new to her either. She has been talking about it since the publication of her mid-1990s book, “Illuminata,” and she says that without it, America’s racial and economic divide will never heal.

And click through to the thread here...

AMAZING OLD TWEETS BY PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE MARIANNE WILLIAMSON: A THREAD

— Ellie Hall (@ellievhall) June 28, 2019

The stuff is really amazing. I like:

Everyone feels on some level like an alien in this world, because we ARE. We come from another realm of consciousness, and long for home.

That's a Marianne Williamson aphorism. She also wrote:

You're a lamp; God is the electricity. You're a faucet; God is the water. You're a human; God is the divine within you. ALLOW the flow.

As Kirsten Gillibrand might say: The woman is on fire!

"But camp was always something that was so bad it was good, and didn’t know it. Trump ruined that. Even camp he ruined."

"It isn’t really camp, but some people said he looks like a white James Brown impersonator. Which he does now. But that’s not camp. You have to like what’s camp. It has to be so bad, it’s good. He’s so bad, he’s bad.... When I was on Bill Maher with Andrew Breitbart, [Breitbart] said to me, 'I do the same thing you do; we’re just on different sides.' Which is true. So I get why Trump supporters like [Trump], because he is doing what he said he was going to do and we hate him so much he makes us crazy....  I think I love everything I make fun of, and certainly Trump does not love what he makes fun of. Although he used to be what he makes fun of. He was a liberal, wasn’t he?... [Does he make you laugh?] Never. But neither do most of the Democrat character candidates running now either. And you could argue it’s not a funny time, which is true.... There are 40 [Democrats] that are going to divide it all up. You know, the gay one I like. I’d vote for any of them, even though it would be really hard for me to vote for Elizabeth Warren who has never once said a funny thing in her entire life.... I think she will lose. Any of the ones that have already been out there will lose, big time. And any of the ones that try to be super left wing will really lose, too. And all the other ones just haven’t been around. I don’t know. I’m very much against Kamala because she is a prisoner’s enemy.... What’s the one, Mayor Pete? Is he the gay one?... It’s a civil war, and I believe that it could be decided by one vote.... It’s just exhausting to me. But I get why they like [Trump], because he infuriates us."

Said John Waters, interviewed in "In Conversation: John Waters The pope of trash on Anna Wintour, staying youthful, and why Trump ruined camp" (The Vulture).

"Let's Fix All The Bird Logos In Pro Sports."

At Deadspin.