It's Complicated, Ross

 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has a new complaint, or meta-complaint, above and beyond the usual ones that liberals are too permissive about sex (1960s hippie edition) or not permissive enough (2010s feminism)—that we can't make up our minds between the two at all ("Can the Left Regulate Sex?"):

in its retreat from the Polanski era, its concession that sometimes it’s OK to forbid, cultural progressivism entered into a long internal struggle over what its goal ought to be — to maximize permissiveness with some minimalist taboos (no rape, no sex with children) or to devise a broader set of sexual regulations that would reflect egalitarian and feminist values rather than religious ones.

This tension is visible all over recent history. The mood in which liberals defended Bill Clinton’s philandering was an example of the more permissive option. The mood of the #MeToo era, which condemned cads as well as rapists, is an example of the more regulatory approach.

Taken for granted that "we" literally have to "regulate sex", because

Karmic Relief

Sadly, armies of YouTube fans have been unable to locate the channel, which seems likely to have been deleted.

"Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" is gonna be lit on Saturday with stories of hubris brought low.

For one thing, 53-year-old Italian Marc Feren Claude Biart, a made member of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, wanted in Italy for cocaine smuggling to the Netherlands, was living his best life in retirement with a fake identity in the Dominican Republic, but done in, they say, by his "love for Italian cuisine", or really by the temptations of the Internet, where he and his wife started a YouTube channel for cooking videos. He didn't show his face in the videos, but failed to hide his tattoos, which cooking-video fan Interpol agents recognized, and they busted him, along with 354 other defendants in an enormous 'Ndrangheta sweep. (NPR, but I'd like the record to show I got the story from Frankfurter Allgemeine Twitter.)

Brooks on the Gender War

La Dixième Symphonie, Abel Gance, 1918.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Gender War Is On! And Fake", New York Times, 3 July 2018:

Of course it's silly to say gender equality will lead to men and women being equal, for instance the Nordic countries have more gender equality than anywhere else but fewer women in top management positions than Estonia and Latvia, not to mention the United States, Mongolia, Belarus, Colombia, Saint Lucia, and Jamaica, which proves that this method of counting how many women are in top management is an infallible statistical tool. In America, gender equality is advanced, as all millennials agree that the best system is to have feminism in the workplace and neotraditionalism at home. Nevertheless young women insist on mobilizing in America, insisting they are economically worse off then men, which ironically forces young men to follow Jordan Peterson and complain that they are the real victims. Yes, women are to blame for Jordan Peterson, who I used to like but it turns out he's not as fashionable as I was expecting. And Donald Trump's cartoonish masculinity is clearly a response to women cartoonishly asking "Why can't we hate men?" But anyway not to worry, they'll calm down when they settle down and have kids, thank you all.

That assertion about how young folk prefer an egalitarian office and an authoritarian home—

Adding incels to injury

Illumination by Loyset Liédet for the Roman de la Violette of Gerbert de Momtreuil, 15th century. Pinterest.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, once again dipping his toe into the waters of crazy, monarchists and Falangists, unreconstructed bigots ("What happens if the bigoted sometimes get things right?"), and now ("The Redistribution of Sex") the involuntary celibates, basement-dwelling boys who have been going all Martin Luther King about their civil right to get laid ("I have a dream tonight, that my two little balls will be cherished not for the smoothness of my dating profile but for the smartness of this interesting argument I just came up with...") and on a couple of occasions literally murdering people to express their disappointment that others don't see things the same way:

Which brings me to the sex robots.

Well, actually, first it brings me to the case of Robin Hanson, a George Mason economist, libertarian and noted brilliant weirdo. Commenting on the recent terrorist violence in Toronto, in which a self-identified “incel” — that is, involuntary celibate — man sought retribution against women and society for denying him the fornication he felt that he deserved, Hanson offered this provocation: If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?

It's a "provocation"! Not saying the killer did the right thing, just saying he had an interesting point?

Stormy Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Barbara Stanwyck in Alfred Santell's Breakfast for Two (1937).

The brethren on the "Sure Trump is awful but he's not a criminal like Hillary" right have had an easy time as you'd expect deciding that "he fucked her and lied about it to the American people" is a triviality after all and they're mystified as to why anybody should care about it—

People didn't vote for Trump because of his marriage fidelity. No one cares. https://t.co/j5wZjMLfVZ

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) March 25, 2018

—but cannot comprehend that we don't care about it either, any more than we did when Bill Clinton was president, beyond the sheer fun and Trumpery of it; I especially liked the detail that the rolled-up magazine she spanked him with was not Forbes but Trump, and the scene as Stormy narrated it could just about have been played by Barbara Stanwyck:

Hi, It's Stupid: Eros, Sex, and Comedy, Not

Eros, or sexual love, discovers Psyche, the soul, asleep in the garden. Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1870, Yale Center for British Art.

Hi, it's Stupid to say I'm boycotting stories about the sexual errors, from misbehavior to actual crime, of male comedians, except maybe Bill Cosby, on whom I'm pretty sure I've passed judgement already so it's too late, and Fatty Arbuckle if any new evidence turns up. But I am. I'm not proud of this.

I might be interested in asking why it is that the current crop of stories of men abusing women fall so neatly into two categories, those involving men wielding immense political or financial power from Dominique Strauss-Kahn (a socialist, but that didn't stop me from denouncing him) through Harvey Weinstein (a noted supporter of liberal causes, but I'm not impressed) to Roger Ailes and President Trump, and those involving men who tell jokes for a living. With the peculiar overlap case of the man who used to tell jokes for a living and later became a Senator from Minnesota. What's up with that?

Inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt

Kenneth Starr, via Daily Beast (check out the story!).

What

asks Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street,

if Ken Starr Was Right?

Wait, right about what? On why Congress ought to impeach Clinton?

F. Summary

In this case, the President made and caused to be made false statements to the American people about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. He also made false statements about whether he had lied under oath or otherwise obstructed justice in his civil case. By publicly and emphatically stating in January 1998 that "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and these "allegations are false," the President also effectively delayed a possible congressional inquiry, and then he further delayed it by asserting Executive Privilege and refusing to testify for six months during the Independent Counsel investigation. This represents substantial and credible information that may constitute grounds for an impeachment.

No, Ross thinks he should have been impeached for not resigning:

Pissed off by Kristof

There was an old Timesman called Kristof
Who just got me royally pissed off
   By fudging his points
   With invidious joints
That I couldn't quite follow the gist of.

Discussing the "paradox" according to which "Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Preach":

The liberal impulse may be to gloat: Those conservatives thunder about “family values” but don’t practice them. But there’s also perhaps a measure of hypocrisy in the blue states. As Cahn and Carbone [Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, 2010] put it: “Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

Brooks on sexual predation

Image via The Hairpin.

It's world-famous sexopathologist Dr. David F. Brooks, here to give us the skinny on why it is that some men become sexual predators ("Lovers, Prospectors and Predators"), because

I don’t think good men wake up one morning and suddenly start thrusting their tongue down the throats of women they barely know. 

Gosh no, I don't suppose they do. Unfortunately he can't find out what does happen, whether because the research assistant called in sick or because it's just too darn complex and ambiguous, so he'll just have to make something up:

You’ve got to walk through a certain number of doors before you’re capable of that kind of behavior.

That's the high-metaphorical language of a Brooks who is about to tell us something theological but that he didn't quite understand at the time he heard it, so he's trying to reconstruct how it sounded. And his theory is indeed theological, a narrative of the Fall, those doors being analogues to the chutes down which we slide toward perdition (the architecture of Brooks's path to Hell is of course suburban, so it's set on a single ranch level), starting with the state of grace we know as childhood:

What kind of animal is Maureen Dowd?

Crouching wolverine, via National Geographic Kids (an outfit that you'd think might know how to provide a photo credit, but never mind).

So Sister Maureen Dowd has gone beyond worrying about what gender Hillary Clinton is to what kind of animal:

Since we cannot know if a woman is going to overcompensate on machismo — as Hillary did on the unjustified Iraq invasion — we may want to look at it a different way.

It may be more relevant to ask if someone is a cat or a dog.

Or, in Shorter form:

The Brooksy Awards 2015. III: High-Class Savagery

The problem of the middle class savagery: Dear Readers, Across the country, drunken teacher, menedzhershi staff, nurses and young mothers are of serious concern to their behavior. Each night they get drunk to swinish state, have sex with unfamiliar men in the back of stores, dirty curse word and celebrate the natural needs of the street. A home at the time they are waiting for their husbands and children… The above realities — not domestic. They are taken from Special report British newspaper "Daily Mail" on October 9, 2011 with the title "Why intelligent nurses, teachers and mothers across Britain to get drunk every night out?" (Clearly a Google translation, via Survincity. Menedzher is Russian for "person who orders you around".) 

OK, so maybe this one'll turn out funny:

Writing “The Meaning of Sex” in The Weekly Standard, the anthropologist Peter Wood describes the damage done when natural and social constructs like virginity, fatherhood, intimacy and romance are done away with or watered down. The result can be a sort of high-class savagery leading to brutal pain and victimization.

I like the deconstructionist sound of "writing the meaning of sex", and the adventure of trying to find out what David Brooks imagines "social construct" means, which might be pretty wacky, and how you do away with virginity and fatherhood or water them down. And what kind of anthropologist writes for the Weekly Standard?

Cheap shots: Double Take

John Barrymore in Sam Taylor's Tempest (1928).

I abhor, of course, all kinds of cheap and prurient gossip, even in the realm of Brooksiana, but I feel I have to say something about this opening graf of the Acknowledgments to The Road to Character:

Evolving views

Oh, you conservatives, you're such ethical relativists!

From Geisha School Dropout.

Cal Thomas, 12/14/2011:

Cal: There has long been a debate in Washington about private behavior and public integrity. Some have argued they can be a lout in private but a stand-up person in public. I disagree. You can't put on integrity like a coat after taking it off to be with someone to whom you are not married. Who you are in the dark is what you are in the light.

Bob: So you're saying that a bachelor president, for example, is persona non grata if he has sex with his girlfriend?

Cal: Let me put it this way: If I am looking for a financial adviser, I am less concerned about how he behaves privately than I am about his ability to help me make money in this economy. Unless, of course, he cheats on his wife and cheats me, too. I just find it difficult to accept you can be one thing in private and another in public.

Cal Thomas, 10/4/2012:

Let’s pick another word – “fornication” – and consider its definition: “voluntary sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons or two persons not married to each other.”

It’s an old-fashioned word that has fallen out of favor, but doesn’t it describe Schwarzenegger’s behavior better than “mistake”?

Perhaps the saddest moment in the “60 Minutes” interview with Lesley Stahl is a video of Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, defending him when he was accused of groping several women.

Schwarzenegger’s interviews reveal a man without a moral center.

Cal Thomas, 11/15/2012:

The resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an extramarital affair has raised and will continue to raise a number of questions.

First among them (OK, maybe not first, national security being more important, but stay with me) is why should he have resigned? I am always amused when journalists use the words "sex scandal" when writing about such things. Having abandoned most standards for what used to be called "upright behavior," culture now "tsk-tsks" when someone is caught in a compromising position....

Wouldn't it be helpful to have a guidebook? Are there separate guidelines for military and civilian personnel? Should it be tied to one's security clearance? If the secretary of agriculture, say, is engaged in an adulterous relationship, would that be a lesser offense than adultery by the CIA director, or the secretary of defense? Should one stay in office and the others resign?

What would Carrie Bradshaw advise?

I'm not sure about Carrie, but it's conceivable she could have ended up with Schwarzenegger. Then again she kind of likes a moral center or am I thinking of chocolates? Miranda would have totally fallen for the FBI guy, though, and then regretted it. Really, they have nothing in common.

Anonymous Quickmeme, after a 1793 self-portrait by Joseph Ducreux.

Make it one for my baby...

Just in from Science (via the New York Times):

Offer a male fruit fly a choice between food soaked in alcohol and its nonalcoholic equivalent, and his decision will depend on whether he's mated recently or been rejected by a female. Flies that have been given the cold shoulder are more likely to go for the booze, researchers have found. It's the first discovery, in fruit flies, of a social interaction that influences future behavior.

Yes, it is speculated that human males may do something similar.