"Prostitution is just a form of dating."

Writes Chester Brown in Appendix 1 of "Paying For It":

There is no regulatory or legal framework for unpaid dating. Nothing happens during paid dates that doesn't happen in unpaid dates. From a legal perspective they should be seen as identical. No regulatory or legal framework is necessary for paid dating.

What I hope we're moving toward is a time when giving and receiving money is part of the normal give-and-take of sexual activity. It won't be what everyone does, but it will become so common that no one will think it odd, disgusting, or unusual if one adult (male or female) pays another adult (male or female) for sex. It will be seen as normal.

Brown writes from years of experience having sex with prostitutes (after forswearing sexual relationships of the unpaid kind). He gives a clear, easy-to-read, matter-of-fact, nonpornographic account of it in "Paying For It," which I read yesterday.

I'd be especially interested in talking about this subject with people who have actually read the book (and I'd appreciate it if you would use the link above to buy it). There is rich material for thinking about the legal aspects of the subject. The discussion of the difference between "decriminalization" and "legalization" at pages 191-197 is especially interesting.

Erica Jong, who's nearly 70, would like you all to know that she's so much sexier than her daughter, who is 32.

Molly Jong-Fast will be 33 on August 19th, and Erica Jong, writing in the NYT, says that her daughter is "in her mid-30s." Ouch. Mom! That hurt. Let's take a closer look at that mother-daughter relationship. Jong prattles on, purportedly revealing what young people think about sex but really revealing how she, an aging woman, looks at young women:

Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.” Her friend Julie Klam wrote “Let’s Not Talk About Sex.” 

Klam! What a great name — an aptonym — for a woman who doesn't want to talk and specifically wants to close off the topic of sex!

The novelist Elisa Albert said: “Sex is overexposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.” Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictional retelling of “Lysistrata,” described “a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex.” Min Jin Lee, a contributor to [Jong's] anthology, suggested that “for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective.”

Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom....

Not only did we fail to corrupt our daughters, but we gave them a sterile way to have sex, electronically....

Jong thinks young women use the internet for "simulated sex without intimacy."  Jong was famous in her youth for seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy . Or... no, she wasn't! She was famous for writing about seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy. Writing... reading... hello? That's a simulation. On the internet, women find actual real partners and then meet them in person. How many women are just hanging out on porn sites? Men, maybe, but Jong purports to tell us about young women. And Jong's evidence is what other women writers are writing. These are the writers, the simulators. What are other young women doing, the one's who aren't cogitating and regurgitating cogitations?

Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter’s generation seems to be control....

In this intergenerational battle, who is the real control freak?

The backlash against sex has lasted longer than the sexual revolution itself. Both birth control and abortion are under attack in many states...

Lust for control fuels our current obsession with the deficit, our rejection of passion, our undoing of women’s rights....

Now, she's all over the place. I think it's funny that she made "control" a big theme, then mentioned "birth control" and didn't notice the irony. Birth control... why not say the feminists who wanted to control birth were the ones obsessed with control?

The ultimate in control is determining the things that will be controlled and the things that will be kept uncontrolled. Can we talk honestly about that? After you've finished preening over how free you are about the things that you like to be free about?

Charging with fists raised at Althouse: from the right, it's Robert Stacy McCain, from the left, it's Thers.

I'm thinking of ducking down the alleyway and letting the 2 men collide with each other. I'll find a high vantage point and watch the fracas. First one to unball his fists and put his palms up defensively loses... unless the other one, sensing a touch to the chokepoint on his neck, backs off and shrieks "You choked me."

Robert Stacy McCain should be pleased that Thers decided to attack me on the same day, because I wouldn't have rewarded his attack with a link if it wasn't funny to find myself in the "Clowns to the left of me/Jokers to the right" position.

McCain's post is titled "Ann Althouse: Rube." The word "rube" denotes a dumb rural character, but McCain uses it not for it's actual meaning, but because he's noticed there's a way that Glenn Reynolds uses it, and he seems to imagine that using Glenn's word will bring Glenn in on his team. Which is fine with me, because I've ducked down the alleyway, and Stacy is going to be fighting Thers, who might have "Eli" with him. I doubt if Glenn answers to the dogwhistle "rube," but I do think the fracas will be more amusing with Glenn there. (By the way, the expression "hey, rube" is traditionally "a rallying call, or a cry for help, used by carnies in a fight with outsiders." It's not a way of saying "I think you are a dummy from country.")

Anyway, Stacy's in a dither because, last Friday — predicting Obama's 2012 campaign strategy and referring to the emotionalism of the 2008 Obama campaign — I dropped a footnote to say that even though I voted for Obama, I wasn't caught up in the emotionalism. I observed it and critiqued it. I was in my high vantage point. I was sober and rational, but — confronted with the 2 major party candidates — I picked Obama. I have never apologized for that choice, because I still think McCain — John McCain — would have been worse, and the Republican Party would be in a far weaker spot right now if McCain were President. You can disagree with me, but don't portray me as another "Yes We Can" dreamer. My 2008 posts are all there in the archive. You can see how distanced I was from the Obama love cult.

But Robert Stacy McCain doesn't seem too familiar with the Althouse blog... or even the one post he purports to write about. He's bouncing off of some other blogger's post about me (in the style of Emily Mills who attacked me using material she got not from my blog but from some other blogger who purported to know what I'd written). (Stacy also nicks a photograph from my Flickr stream and uses it without complying with the Creative Commons license I was nice enough to provide.) Anyway, Stacy's point seems to be that I was wrong to vote for Obama. But my post wasn't even saying I made the correct choice, only that I chose based on sober reasoning, not emotionalism.

In any case, R.S. McCain doesn't say I should have voted for John McCain or that every rational person choosing between McCain and Obama would have picked McCain. In fact, sounding damned emotional, he says: "If you put a gun to my head and told me to vote for John McCain, I’d tell you to go ahead and pull the trigger." He calls McCain "a treacherous bastard." Okay, then, why wasn't it rational to vote for Obama? At the point of voting, either McCain or Obama was going to be President. Pick one. No, R.S. McCain voted for Bob Barr. Like that was rational!

At least McCain's commenters are critical. Donald Douglas is the first commenter, linking to his own post: "Ann Althouse a Rube? Nah, Robert Stacy McCain's Just Trolling for Traffic." He accuses McCain of liking to post my picture, and Douglas posts another picture of me. (Douglas does make that picture link back to the Flickr site, but he too fails to follow the Creative Commons license, because he doesn't include the photographer's name. Douglas chose a picture taken 30 years ago by my first husband. McCain chose a picture taken last year by my present-day husband.)

Now, let's swivel leftward and see what's going on with Thers. Thers has been attacking my blog for many years, and usually I ignore him. I don't know why he's so fixated on me. He didn't post a picture of me, so take that for what it's worth. He illustrates his post with a video clip called "Detachable Penis" from a band called King Missile, so apparently he's trying to waggle his wiener in my direction. Thers is writing to defend his confrere Eli, whom I took a shot at yesterday, because he said something stupid that everyone was attacking yesterday because it was on Memeorandum. I don't know who, exactly, detached Eli's penis, but I got my cut in, and I understand that it caused Thers sympathetic pain.

Thers quotes me saying something that exemplifies the way I speak when I'm observing the fray from a high vantage point: "People who are immersed in politics ought to take a good look at their own minds." His idea for a comeback is pretty prosaic. Do you even have to go over there and read it? You can guess: I don't follow my own advice. It's the "I know you are but what am I?" Pee-Wee Herman-type riposte that's supposed to answer a personal attack, which that quote of mine isn't. And Thers, of course, doesn't follow my advice either. He's not self-reflective. He attacks me:

All the evidence shows that Althouse has been long separated from her mind; if she originally removed it in order to give it a proper gawking, that is a perfectly laudable motive. 

A grisly image. A man who's musing about his detachable penis pictures a woman with her brain removed from her skull.

And let us be charitable! 

A reflexive line, by a man whose conscience perhaps nagged him. He knows that after the Tucson massacre, we weren't supposed to be using graphic metaphors like that. He could have edited that out, but writhing over Eli's detached penis, he had to lash out.

Perhaps there is a perfectly sound reason that as soon as her mind departed her skull it promptly escaped, never to be heard from again; and very likely all she had on hand to fill the resultant cranial void was Franzia and guano.

He's straining so hard for comedy, and he can't decide whether to call me a drunk or a shithead. And what's with the Franzia? Didn't he get the memo about Paul Ryan? Yesterday was the day to attack right-wingers for drinking expensive wine.

Then he gets to my little joke on Eli: "I have no interest in these hysterical little men who obsess about whether their 'base' is getting served or stiffed." He rolls his eyes and says:

Althouse is watching consonants whirling through onion rings, yet once more. 

See? Go to those links. He's been reading my blog for a long time, and he remembers my old comic riffs about genitalia. Unlike Stacy McCain, he's familiar with the archive here, and he's been trying to to get the better of me in the genitalia humor department for years. But he can't. He says:

She’s got a dirty mind, don’t she, Yossarian? The dirtiest. 

So... a reference to "Catch-22"... disembodied. The book is funny. The detached reference? The sad waggling of a man who would be erudite, who's trying to show that he's smart and the woman is dumb. A literary reference. I typo'd "litterary" a Freudian slip, indicating that I think his writing is trash. He ought to pick that thing up.

I've got a "dirty mind"? Oh, okay. Thanks. I suppose Freud had a "dirty mind" too. Isn't it funny the way lefties are, at bottom, puritanical about sex? Sex is dirty? As Woody Allen famously said: "Only if it's done right." And if it's done left, it's done with a detachable penis. Put some ice on it.  Maybe you can get somebody to sew it back on.

Quick, because here comes Robert "Stacy" McCain, fists a-flying!

"If you don’t ever have 'bad' sex, then you probably haven’t been looking hard enough for the really great sex."

Writes Annie Sprinkle, reviewing Chester Brown's graphic novel "Paying For It" (the purportedly true story of his giving up romantic sex for sex with prostitutes):

Brown documents his sad, curious and disappointing paid encounters — always amusing — along with his abundance of sweet, satisfying and successful ones. He appears to be relatively nonjudgmental, like a person who can equally relish both junk food and a gourmet feast....

At the end of “Paying for It,” Brown provides 23 meticulously drawn appendixes, most of which are devoted to deconstructing just about every argument you can think of against prostitution. He presents the typical objections (e.g., “Prostitution is wrong because it gives a man sexual power over a woman”) and counters with utterly rational and incisive responses (“Prostitutes aren’t passive puppets, and most johns aren’t dictators”), backing up many of his points with observations from sex workers themselves. In the process he makes as convincing a case for the decriminalization and destigmatization of prostitution as anyone I’ve ever come across in the prostitutes’ rights movement.

Sprinkle is "the author of 'Dr. Sprinkle’s Spectacular Sex,' is an artist, activist and ecosex educator. She worked as a prostitute for 20 years." Ecosex educator? That jumped out at me as a dubious occupation... from a list that includes prostitute!

I'm going to buy "Paying For It," because I like Chester Brown. (I've read "The Playboy.") The page you can click to enlarge (over at the first link) looks excellent. I used to consume a lot of these graphic novel things, back in the time period between the publication date of "Maus" and the publication date of "Understanding Comics." I had to look up the dates to figure out when that actually was. It was to 1986 to 1993. I was interested in zines then too. Pre-internet.

“The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men."

Says Dan Savage (in a big NYT Magazine story about him):

“Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.”

Fairsey? I suppose that's fairs-y — signifying a childish approach to fairness. Am I right? Just trying to understand. Appeals to fairness may sometimes be oversimplified and not really — at some deeper level — fair. He seems to be saying that the female-driven concept of fairness in marriage is a caricature of fairness that favors women, because man's needs are different/greater — as the history of marriage shows. (And yes, I know there are heterosexual couples where the woman has the greater demand for frequency and variety and that Dan Savage is well aware of that.)

In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

In their own marriage, Savage and [his husband Terry] Miller practice being what he calls “monogamish,” allowing occasional infidelities, which they are honest about. Miller was initially opposed to the idea. “You assume as a younger person that all relationships are monogamous and between two people, that love means nothing can come between you,” said Miller, who met Savage at a club in 1995, when he was 23 and Savage was 30. “Dan has taught me to be more realistic about that kind of stuff.

“It was four or five years before it came up,” Miller said. “It’s not about having three-ways with somebody or having an open relationship. It is just sort of like, Dan has always said if you have different tastes, you have to be good, giving and game, and if you are not G.G.G. for those tastes, then you have to give your partner the out. It took me a while to get down with that.”

Interesting for the NYT to publish this the week that New York legalized same-sex marriage.

A song by men in knickers, searched out because Meade just said "Quit It" like that.

"I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore" — the first single by the Young Rascals. That clip is their first TV appearance (in 1965). I remember when their 2d single — "Good Lovin'" — came out: the radio DJ expressed relief that the band had improved the moral level of their music, as if "I Ain't Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore" was rather smutty. I was 14 at the time, and it was only much later that I was able to imagine that the DJ had disaggregated the words "eat out" from the idiomatic expression "eat your heart out."

The lyric at 1:11 prompts a search for that Prince song... what is it? It's one of the "Purple Rain" songs. Ah! Here.

Was Prince influenced by The Rascals? Did Prince misconstrue the 1965 lyric like that DJ maybe did? We all know Prince got terribly smutty. It upset Tipper Gore so much:



MORE: On the great lyrics scare of 1984:

"Weiner is the modern, high functioning man."

Writes Alec Baldwin:

[Weiner] is a very busy man.... He exists under a constant pressure cooker of self-analysis and public appraisal. Like other politicians, he needs something to take the edge off. For some people, regardless of occupation, that could mean booze, drugs, gambling, food or shopping. For high functioning men like Weiner and other officials who have lived through such scandals, who are constantly on the go, that leaves one tried and true source of a reliable high. The affirmation that comes when someone lets you know they want to sleep with you. Or even cyber-sleep with you.

This is sex for many people now....  No time for slowly moving toward one another with a combination of hope and caution, lust and integrity. One can push a button and get something beyond porn. Porn is essentially two dimensional. One sees and hears. Internet sexting can be perceived as three dimensional by adding the component of "feel", regardless of how cheap and unearned those feelings are. That person on the screen is doing whatever they're doing... just for you.....

We tell ourselves that these devices help us communicate more effectively. What they actually do is allow us to bypass the person lying right next to us, across the room from us or at an airport heading home to us, in order to meet our immediate, even inconvenient, needs. To bypass their moods, their current view of us and their own desires, or lack thereof.

It's so sad, isn't it? Baldwin feels sorry for Weiner... and for the modern man.

Kirsten Powers on Anthony Weiner: "This is not about sex. It’s about dominating and inflicting physical pain on a woman."

Powers, who dated him a decade ago, and defended him last week, is now calling on him to resign:

By far the most disturbing information that we have been privy to—there is, no doubt, more out there that we don’t know—is the transcript of a nine-month "sexting" relationship Weiner had with a Las Vegas blackjack dealer. Radar Online posted the transcript, and it is rife with misogyny and distorted views about women. In referring to oral sex, Wiener tells her, “You will gag on me before you c** with me in you” and “[I’m] thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***.” This is not about sex. It’s about dominating and inflicting physical pain on a woman, a fantasy the hard-corn porn industry makes billions of dollars on selling to men. You don’t want to gag a woman with your penis unless you have some serious issues with the way you see women.

Hard-corn porn? Hilarious typos aside... let's not go all Women's Studies about the man's efforts at writing about sex. It is not an easy literary task.

Okay. I just went and read the entire Weiner/Weiss transcript. (PDF.)  Read it out loud, in fact! A few thoughts:



1. This is my favorite exchange. (Boldface is Weiner.)

are you as passionate in the sack as u are about politics? I'm getting bored of my f*** friend

baby you'd be crawling for the door to prevent me from f***ing you silly

nice, just what I'm looking for. I want to bang the future mayor of nyc!

making me h**d

It's the idea of getting to be mayor that really excites him.

2. I don't think it's "rife with misogyny and distorted views about women," as Powers put it. The quotes she extracts follow an approach to texting that the 2 have established in which they get each other going with blunt sex talk.

aahh...wish I was in the shower with you to help

you give good h**d?

i've been told really good...I love doing it

wow a jewish girl who sucks c***! this thing is ready to do damage

and swallows every drop. god damn how do I get you here to f*** me?

<= thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***

the anticipation of f****** you is driving me crazy! come to vegas so I can suck your c*** for an hour. you must be in the shower...i am getting very nice visual before bed. I'll probably have some filthy dreams about you (again!)"

It goes on like that. He's not saying anything she doesn't welcome. You can easily see that in context. Powers says "This is not about sex." But it obviously is.

3. Based on the entire transcript, I would say that the only problem with his attitude toward Weiss is not "misogyny," but the way he maintains a minimal contact with her over the course of nearly a year, when she keeps begging him to come to Vegas and to "f*** the s***" out of her. I think he knows there's no way he's traveling out there for her, yet she might imagine that he will. It would be decent to tell her that, but, really, she seems like a strong person who knows what she is doing, getting a thrill out of playful intimacy with a celebrity she admires.

4. I have no idea whether Huma Abedin objects to his fooling around like this. For all we know, she reads these written dialogues aloud to him and the 2 of them laugh about it. We do not know.

A sex therapist on CNN attributes Anthony Weiner's troubles to "high levels of testosterone."

Not long after Weiner's news conference yesterday, at about 5:20, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dr. Laura Berman, who said (my transcription):

[Weiner is] known for being very aggressive, for being very volatile. He clearly — even his hairline and his jawbone — he clearly is a man who has a tremendous amount of testosterone. That's not an excuse, but if you look at him, if you look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you look at most of these high power men, who are highly aggressive men, and they get into all this sexual trouble. It's often hand in hand with high levels of testosterone, which means that he has an extremely high libido.

His hairline and his jawbone, eh?

Interestingly, Berman's website calls her "America's leading expert in female sexual health." She has a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network called "In the Bedroom with Dr. Laura Berman."

Watch as this New York Times best-selling author and a Sirius XM radio host makes house calls to help couples confront their intimacy issues head on.

House calls, eh? That's so Dame Edna's Neighborhood Watch.

Anyway. Speaking of Dame Edna and high testosterone, here's Dame Edna interviewing Charlton Heston (in 1987):



By the way, Heston talks about his gray velour g-string. "What a practical color, Chuck — gray! — isn't it?"  Not to be confused with Weiner's gray panties.

Where's Huma Abedin? What should she do?

The Daily News headlines: "Huma Abedin is notably absent from husband Anthony Weiner's tearful sexting confession."

Huma Abedin wasn't standing by her man....

A top aide to Secretary of State Clinton, Abedin issued no statements of support for her embattled husband. She was a no-show Monday at two public State Department events.

"I love my wife very much, and we have no intention of splitting up over this," Weiner insisted. "I love her very much, and she loves me."

No intention of splitting up over this. Those last 2 words jumped out at me.

Several political pros cheered her absence yesterday.

"In general, it's very difficult for women constituents to look at the grieving wife up there," said Democratic consultant George Arzt. "It's bad PR."

The better move for Weiner, Arzt said, was "to look like he can take it all by himself and stand up there."

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato took to Twitter with a similar view: "At least Weiner didn't make his wife come out and gaze lovingly at him."

Ha ha. He's a PR expert! He's not advising Weiner in advance. He's dealing with the facts he's stuck with. This is what the PR man says when the wife isn't there. What did the Democratic consultants say when Silda Spitzer stood by her man?

The New York Post headlines: "Weiner & wife worlds apart/:Snake slithers when Huma is globetrotting with Hill."

As the "body woman" to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Huma Abedin is tasked with accompanying the former first lady on diplomatic globetrotting missions.

Weiner, it seems, uses the timing of her foreign affairs to pursue domestic ones online.

For instance, last month, while Abedin and Clinton were in Rome meeting with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Weiner was chatting up Texas nursing student Meagan Broussard.

I wonder what conversations Huma is having with Hillary — the world's most famous stander by of her man.

The political power couple met while Abedin was on the campaign trail during Clinton's 2008 White House bid. By 2009, they were engaged....

Didn't Abedin know the kind of man she was marrying? He was 45, and had never married previously. As Hillary's close assistant, she had to be sophisticated about the ways of oversexed, extroverted, narcissistic husbands. What was the marriage supposed to be, anyway? They were conspicuously a glamorous "power couple," for public purposes, but what was he allowed to do in private? What were their understandings? At the press conference yesterday, Weiner said that she asked how he could be so dumb, which made me think what mattered most was that people found out and she was shamed and embarrassed. Was it the public image that mattered, or was it to be a loyal, deeply bonded marriage in private?

Unlike Bill and Hillary, Weiner and Abedin have only been married a year, and they have no children. And the husband's career is deeply compromised at this point. They're not going to become the Democratic Party's next Bill and Hillary. The glamorous power couple is defunct. What happens to the private Tony and Huma?

Will Abedin divorce Weiner?
	Yes.
	No, she'll stand by her man.
	Divorce? She should be able to get an annulment!
pollcode.com free polls

"I've really never understood the business... of sending these pictures to women."

Can someone please explain to Mark Schmitt — and everyone else with this comprehension problem — why some men send pictures of their genitalia to women?

AND: Here's an even more awkward effort by a Blogginghead to talk about erections. I especially love the way this clip — which I edited to enhance the humorous effect — begins with the diavloggers being all out of synch talking about how lovers can be out of synch. (Warning: the phrase "morning wood" pops up.)

"Passing the sexual Turing test."

It's not easy! The computer hears the laughter on comedy shows and thinks it's porn.

If you want to maximize the likelihood that your description of a politician's sexuality will be remembered...

... include a specific animal:

IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn acted like a "chimpanzee in heat" during a creepy previous grab-and-grope with a French journalist -- an incident with eerie similarities to his alleged attack on a Manhattan hotel maid Saturday, according to an explosive interview.

Other examples? The one that springs immediately to mind and hops up and down yapping until I notice it is:

I squirmed to try and get out of his grasp, telling him stop, don't, several times and I finally told him and said, 'You're being a crazed sex poodle,' hoping that he'd realize how weird he was being, yet he persisted.

"I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring."

Said Richard Feynman, who died in 1988, at the age of 69. There's a new book about his life, which was marked by the death of this first wife, who died after only 2 years of marriage:

Feynman was stricken and turned, as some kind of compensation, to the predatory pursuit of women – dating undergraduates, visiting prostitutes, and sleeping with the young wives of several colleagues while an academic at Cornell University.

At the age of 31, having never ventured outside the United States, he visited Rio de Janeiro, where he lectured at the Centro Brasiliero de Pesquisas Friscas during the day. In the evening, he played drums for a samba band or picked up women – he particularly liked air stewardesses – in the bar of the Miramar Palace hotel.

He was eventually snared by Mary Louise Bell – "a platinum blonde with a penchant for high heels and tight clothes," according to Lawrence Krauss. They married in 1952 and divorced shortly afterwards. "He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens," Bell complained to a divorce judge. "He did calculus while driving, while sitting in the living room and while lying in bed at night."

He also did calculations "while sitting at the strip bars [which he] visited because he claimed they helped him concentrate."

The topic is: the intersection of death, sex, and math. Discuss.

Spider sex moves...

... are very intense. The spideress makes a strong implicit argument for relentless passivity.

"I’m sad... They’re already talking online, so they don’t need a club."

So said "event organizer" Darwin Bebo, quoted in this article about the obsolescence of "social groups" for gay people.

The tug of war between the virtual and physical worlds is happening in every strata of society, but in the gay community the shift has been especially poignant and with significant implications. Social groups helped start the gay civil rights movement, and in recent decades they have raised millions of dollars for causes like same-sex marriage and the battle against H.I.V./AIDS....

The roots of many gay and lesbian social groups date to when homosexuality was a crime and gatherings were illegal.

“Social groups and networks founded the G.L.B.T. community as early as the 1950s,” said Paul Boneberg, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society. “It represented an ability to find each other.”

I wonder how the gay rights movement would have unfolded if the internet had been available all along. I imagine that gay people would have remained more physically dispersed if they could have found each other and formed relationships on a much more decentralized level. I'm guessing there would have been far less intertwining of gay rights issues and liberal/left politics. The core rights have to do with individual expression in the private sphere. These would have been won without forming large groups that meet in person.

The linked article ends with a second quote from Boneberg: "I don’t see the transition as a weakening of the community." Life on the internet is different. It's weaker in some ways and stronger in others. The "event organizer" is sad. People who used terms like "community" are equivocal. But I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't want to be organized and don't feel like they're in a community just because they have a particular sexual preference. The internet makes you stronger, if you're inclined toward individualism.

If the internet had been around all along, then, many private persons would have created satisfying lives for themselves, and some expressive, individualistic voices would have gained immense influence. And the amassers of groups would have had a lot less to do.

More sex. More speech. Less community organizing.

"A 63-year-old man... was arrested... after police were informed he was seen touching a female horse in what appeared to be a sexual fashion.... The animal looked to be in pain during the incident."

For touching a horse, a man is arrested, gets his picture in the paper, and will be mocked for the rest of his life. 

Some bystander reported that the horse "looked to be in pain during the incident"? I was going to ridicule the notion of expression on a horse's face, but I Googled "horse face expression pain" and didn't come up empty. I'm no horse expert, but I tend to think there's a lot of subjectivity involved when people look at an animal's face and think they perceive the animal's feelings. And do I even need to mention the difficulty of distinguishing expressions evincing sexual pleasure and those that express pain — even on human faces?

I care about cruelty to animals, but the man had his pants on. I would leave him alone, even if he had his hand somewhere that unsettled an onlooker. Don't the police have better things to do? Putting this poor guy's picture in the paper with this story is the real cruelty.

"More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated..."

"... by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school’s popular 'Human Sexuality' class. The woman said she showed up at the Feb. 21 lecture in the Ryan Family Auditorium in Evanston expecting just to answer questions, but was game to demonstrate. The course’s professor on Wednesday acknowledged some initial hesitation, but said student feedback was 'uniformly positive.'"

And now? Still uniformly positive?

“One of the students asked what my specific fetish was and mine is being in front of people, having the attention and being used,” [said the woman]. “The students seemed really intrigued.”

Being used, eh? Who feels used now?

[Prof. John Michael] Bailey said in his statement Wednesday that during the Feb. 21 after-class lecture, “I was not in a mood to surrender to sex negativity and fear.”

“Do I have any regrets?” he wrote on Wednesday. “It is mostly too early to say. I certainly have no regrets concerning Northwestern students, who have demonstrated that they are open-minded grown ups rather than fragile children.”

I have to take a 3rd shot at Larry Tribe's op-ed: That big word "choice."

Here's my first shot and here's my second shot at Larry Tribe's op-ed purporting to say why the Supreme Court will come down in favor of the constitutionality of the individual mandate to buy health insurance. I didn't set out to write one post after another about the op-ed, but I must go on to talk about his use of the word "choice" — which is monumentally important in the discussion of abortion rights. Tribe's op-ed has nothing to say about abortion. I wonder if he would have written it differently if abortion had crossed his mind, but I can't believe that a constitutional law professor would overlook the abortion-related significance of the word "choice."

Tribe's op-ed, as I wrote in the first post, rests very heavily on misrepresenting the Supreme Court's commerce power doctrine as referring to "commercial choices." In fact, the cases refer to "commercial activities," and a switch from "activity" to "choice" is immensely important in the health care litigation, in which opponents stress that the failure to buy insurance is inactivity, not activity, and therefore beyond even the broadest interpretations the Supreme Court has ever given to the Commerce Clause.

Tribe attempted to skew opinion by substituting "choice" for "activity," and I have called him on that. But I need to go further, because someone who uses words to get things done needs to be kept honest not only about shifting from one word to another, but also about changing the meaning of the same from case to case. Let's look at how Tribe talked about "choice" and health insurance and then see how that squares with what "choice" is supposed to mean in the abortion context.

In today's op-ed, Tribe wrote:

Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system. They know that if they need emergency-room care that they can’t pay for, the public will pick up the tab. This conscious choice carries serious economic consequences for the national health care market, which makes it a proper subject for federal regulation.

You can see that Tribe has given a very broad definition to the notion of choice. People bumble along, doing what they want, aware of the chance of an undesirable outcome, vaguely expecting to take advantage of an out that isn't very nice. That's a choice. It is something real and specific that the individual has done. Society can, as a group, based on our idea of the good, say to that person: We are now going to require you to take responsibility at that early decision point of yours. So Tribe says.

Now, apply that to abortion. If we take a similarly broad view of choice, we could say — as anti-abortion advocates do — that women who know they may be fertile have a choice when they go ahead and have sexual intercourse with a man. They can refrain from having sex, but if they go forward, they know that if they need emergency-room care get that they can’t pay for get pregnant, the public will pick up the tab they can get an abortion.

Of course, the Supreme Court case law does not present the woman's right to choose in terms of taking responsibility at that early point. It says:

These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

The choice that matters is an elaborate process of high-level reflection that occurs after the woman becomes pregnant — that is, when it's too late to take the precautions that the majority might have liked her to take so that she would not show up with the demand for something it wants to prevent.

I realize there are many distinctions that can be made between health insurance and abortion, but there is so much sophistry around the word "choice" that I think it's important to concentrate on what choice means and how it matters in the law. It seems to me that society, acting through a legislature, may have a preference about when an individual should be required to make a choice, and that the individual, valuing autonomy, may want a broader range of choice than the majority would like to permit. When we think about government power and individual autonomy, how consistent must we be about what "choice" means?

"You know... some people get shocked about sex. I was shocked that everyone was so shocked."

What a fuss everyone made about "I Am Curious (Yellow)," back in the 1960s. The star, Lena Nyman, has died at the age of 66.

Just 2 days ago, we were talking about the death of Maria Schneider, another woman we knew through a movie that shocked us with sex long ago.

Where are all the other women, who shocked us with mere sexuality back then, when naked actors simulating sex got everyone's attention? They are all old now, almost 60 years or more. We notice their obituaries and we remember the olden days, when it was possible to shock people with nothing more than nudity and sexual intercourse.

The U.S. Supreme Court had to deal with the fuss over "I Am Curious (Yellow)."  There's an opinion by Justice Douglas where — it's hard now to understand why — he saw fit to quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

It is time to remember that the first thing we belong to is humanity. And humanity is separated from the animal world by thought and speech, and they should naturally be free. If they are fettered, we go back to being animals. Publicity and openness, honest and complete - that is the prime condition for the health of every society, and ours too.

Justice Douglas said: "If 'obscenity' can be carved out of the First Amendment, what other like exceptions can be created?"

There seemed be be a lot at stake back then. It seems so creakily irrelevant today, as the once-naked, once-beautiful bodies are buried in the earth, but free speech is on the line today too. Do you notice? Do you care?

Humanity is separated from the animal world by thought and speech, and they should naturally be free.