Playboy: Would you support [Bill] Clinton [for president again if you could]?

Maher: Sure. He has a reputation as a party animal because of the Monica Lewinsky situation, but basically he’s a wonk. He can do Monica and run the country. He’s a multitasker. If he had been president when Katrina hit, he would have been in New Orleans three days before the storm. He wouldn’t have slept. Yes, he would have been getting blown—come on, Slick Willie in the Big Easy? He would have had some excellent étouffée. But he would have been working the whole time. I think the country has learned a lesson: If he can do the job, let the guy be who he is. People don’t care about sex.

Playboy: They cared about Mark Foley.

Maher: Monica Lewinsky was an adult. Foley went after boys. [sic: The 16-year-old in question was above the age of consent in the District of Columbia.] Actually, I wasn’t terribly taken aback by Foley. He was like a college professor, in a job where every year there’s a new wave of fresh meat. He would look over the field and decide. He probably had pretty good radar to know which kids were amenable. From the evidence we have, he tried to do something only after they were out of the page program. If a 19-year-old gay kid wants to go out with an older guy, why not? The guys his own age are probably dumb doofuses [sic: doofi].

Playboy: But even after leaving their jobs as pages, they were far younger than Foley.

Maher: Look, I’m a 51-year-old man, and I go out with girls in their early 20s. I’d be hypocritical if I said it’s ridiculous for a gay man to do that. I’m very libertarian about love. I’m the only guy I’ve ever heard who defends Mary Kay Letourneau.

Playboy: Are you saying teachers should be allowed to have sex with their 13-year-old students, as she did, and not go to jail?

Maher: I think it’s a little offbeat, but you know, I believe in the double standard. If a 28-year-old male teacher is screwing a 13-year-old girl, that’s a crime. But with Debra Lafave [another teacher who had sex with a student] screwing her 14-year-old boy student, the crime is that we didn’t get it on videotape. Was he being taken advantage of? I wish I had been taken advantage of like that. What a memory she gave him! I would think he’s a champion among his friends. Are you kidding? Even with Michael Jackson—

Playboy: You’re being remarkably open-minded.

Maher: Woody Allen is the one we might have been wrong about. I was pretty hard on him on my show, but how many years has his relationship continued? Maybe that, like Letourneau’s, was true love. If you look at him or Letourneau, who is still with the guy after her time in jail—they have two kids—the lesson is love will take the form it’s going to take. Sometimes it’s at great variance with the mainstream. I don’t think teachers should be allowed to do that. I think they should be fired. But to send that woman to jail and separate them all those years?

Labels: AgeMaj, ArtPic, Lib, MorPa, MR, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:03 PM

March 12, 2007

Maybe Andy Rooney is a bigot after all

I’m not talking about the remarks attributed to him in emails, either. I’m talking about what he said last night on 60 Minutes. He’s come out in favor of the draft, which means he wants slavery for those born at the wrong time in history.

No type of war—not even a class war—justifies the draft.

A related earlier post:
The draft makes it easier, not harder, for politicians to wage dubious wars

Labels: AgeMaj, Cintv, ForPo, Lib, MR

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 10:11 AM

February 28, 2007

The Great Prude War of February 2007

Who can predict the outcome when two logically challenged, self-righteous bigots go to war? Thanks to the intrepid correspondence of Hit & Run, this epic struggle has been thoroughly documented.

Orthodox feminist blogger Amanda Marcotte, who hates Catholicism and men, was fired from John Edwards’ presidential campaign, thanks in some significant part to Catholic League president William A. Donohue, who hates Judaism and gays. In hindsight, I think I see why Donohue was more likely to win. His Catholic education, complete with the seven deadly sins, probably gave him an edge in worldly wisdom over Marcotte and her doctrine of the noble savage. Not enough of an edge to actually know what he’s talking about, of course. Just enough to win between the two of them. (To be fair, Andrew M. Greeley has been rather well served by his Catholic upbringing.)

As I’ve said recently, American conservatives have a problem with sex while American liberals have a problem with money. Just as sex scandals encourage people who otherwise wouldn’t to talk about sex, any corporate malfeasance (no matter how small the consequences in comparison to government malfeasance) encourages some of us in the free, developed world to make a big show of feeling guilty about the relative misfortune of other parts of the world. As a libertarian, I strongly support the right to self-flagellate. (I should; I’ve done it.) But I resent the implication—as in this elaborate guilt trip from one of Marcotte’s colleagues at Pandagon—that libertarians simply don’t know or don’t care about the children who work in factories to make our clothes. We’re just pure evil, aren’t we?

My earlier skirmishes with Amanda Marcotte:
Libertarianism as Pandagon misunderstands it
Playboy can no longer tell friend from foe
File this under “No such thing as bad publicity”

Labels: BGC, BlaSla, Femi, Lib, MorPa, MR, OthBlo, RS, Sc, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:08 PM

January 29, 2007

The cultural right and left agree: misery loves company

What do The Atlantic’s Jon Zobenica and National Review’s John Derbyshire have in common? Probably without knowing it, both of them invoke George Orwell’s essay “The Art of Donald McGill” to justify their moralistic views on sexuality. If he knew I existed, Zobenica might think I appreciate his use of that reference to describe Playboy as essentially the lightsaber to Maxim’s blaster. (Star Wars analogies can go surprisingly far here. I recently told an attractive female friend that she has Jedi powers over the weak-minded, i.e. most of us guys.) But on the contrary, I take his essay as an unintended lesson in humility for all us Playboy freaks.

Zobenica wants us to know that he regards his youthful Playboy-ish days with embarrassment:

Looking back, I realize it’s not only the clothes that make me laugh. The restaurants we went to were “classy” at best. And none of us particularly enjoyed those New Orleans strippers (one looked like a rheumy sharecropper’s daughter). But there was, in all of it, a deliberate effort at contemporary maturity, an effort that was encouraged by Playboy magazine. Maturity was the key to that great Playboy Club of life—your all-access pass to the jumping realm of adult pleasures and preoccupations. We may have come of age clumsily, but no one doubted that it was the thing to do.

Where did those days go?

One need not be clairvoyant or trained in counseling to suspect him of misremembering those days. If the clothes, restaurants, and strippers were really as unimpressive then as he now says they were, why didn’t he ditch that scene immediately? Zobenica’s boomer exceptionalism makes Playboy a lonely voice for the inherent moral superiority of “commitment” in a lad-mag wilderness of Peter Pan complexes. He scolds an article in FHM for urging its readers to stay single, naïvely thinking that this message distinguishes the magazine from Playboy. I’m no fan of Barbara Ehrenreich’s crypto-Marxist feminism, but I give her credit for documenting Playboy’s original concept as the Maxim of the 1950s in her book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Although I’ve found more aesthetic value in Playboy than in Maxim or FHM, I cannot honestly claim moral superiority for it as a consequence. Oscar Wilde warned against conflating aesthetics with ethics. To paraphrase that brilliant aesthetician, there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral men’s magazine. Men’s magazines are well published, or badly published. That is all. However sincere and deeply felt, my wish for Playboy to outsell the competition has no more ethical weight than my support for any given sports team.

Besides, what’s so bad about the pro-bachelorhood message? It may be simply rational for a heterosexual man to put little of his energy into romance these days. In 2007, many American women still see their relationships with men as fixer-upper projects. And isn’t it interesting that both conservatives and establishment feminists find ways to justify this condescension? The preferences of the male of the species are widely presumed wrong whenever they conflict with a female agenda. Thus, for example, are paternity suits not recognized as a hypocritical restriction of male reproductive choice in a society that is slowly learning to tolerate abortion. Women protest to liberate themselves; men whine to avoid responsibility—even though the U.S. hasn’t been functionally patriarchal since 1920.

(Hat tip to Playboy assistant managing editor Matt DeMazza, who made me aware of Zobenica’s article by email.)

Update, 3:23 p.m.: A subsequent email:

Well, you took away from it something a little different than we did (we see it as a nod to our more-mature approach to being a man vs. the frat boys of Maxim/FHM/Stuff, etc.), but hey, any way to get more people to read it is fine with us!

Thanks, Brian.
Matt

Labels: AesthEth, ArtEnt, ArtPic, BGC, Femi, Lib, Lit, MorPa, MR, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 1:52 PM

January 2, 2007

The Playboy hater’s code of machismo

If I date infrequently, am I a wimp? At least one of the manly men at The New York Times would say so. Thanks to Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, I’ve discovered an NYT review of a new anthology of fiction and essays from Playboy’s first half century. Reviewer John Leland calls the magazine a plot “to create a race of men more boring and insecure than any before”:

Was there really a time when swingers imagined themselves in silk jammies chatting about Nabokov and Brubeck and the latest Cognac? No doubt. Ring-a-ding-ding. The right literary reference, the right hi-fi gear, and voilà: the freedom to go home alone, unswung, to a bit of light fiction, corny jokes and an airbrush that liberated the white-collar male from the uncomfortable burden of human curiosity.

In other words, men aren’t fully human unless they pursue intimate relationships with women. Or, at least, straight men aren’t; I would assume that Leland doesn’t put the same expectation on gay men. Admittedly, heterosexual males have had more sexual freedom than others in most times and places. But feminism has rightly told women that they don’t necessarily need husbands or boyfriends to lead complete lives, and I see no reason to deny men the equivalent option. Attributing male fascination with erotica to laziness or cowardice, as “liberal” criticism of Playboy often does, amounts to reverse puritanism, which I find every bit as despicable as the usual kind.

Labels: Femi, MR, OthBlo, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 9:48 PM

November 20, 2006

The draft makes it easier, not harder, for politicians to wage dubious wars

“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way,” says Congressman Charles Rangel of New York.

I very much doubt it. As Thomas DiLorenzo at LewRockwell.com has observed, the saddest irony of Rangel’s endorsement of involuntary servitude is that he happens to be black. Considering the misery-loves-company mentality by which parents rationalize the time-wasting, humiliating drudgery of high school for their own teenagers, I don’t believe the older generation can be trusted with the power to force the younger generation to pay for its geopolitical fuck-ups.

As a thought experiment, consider what would have happened if the crowned heads of Europe had been politically incapable of conscripting their subjects in 1914 or thereafter. Some unfortunate young men might still have been swept up in early war mania and volunteered for service in the trenches, but their leaders would have had so much trouble replacing them that peace would soon become the only option. Almost certainly, the madness of war wouldn’t have lasted long enough to beget the madness of the Treaty of Versailles, which begot the madness of Hitler and another war. The twentieth century would have been much happier.

Labels: AgeMaj, ForPo, Lib, MR, OthBlo, Ra, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 7:26 AM

March 9, 2006

Hooray! Roe v. Wade for men is finally here

I wish Matt Dubay of Saginaw, Michigan, all the luck—and all the publicity—in the world in his lawsuit against the double standard in reproductive choice.

Paternity suits oppress men in the same way that laws against abortion oppress women. An unscrupulous woman can use the family law courts to pick a man’s pocket in order to raise his offspring, even if the man did not freely choose to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood. If a woman can refuse to become a parent even after the fact of pregnancy, a man should be able to do the same. And don’t tell me a guy just needs to keep it in his pants if he doesn’t want to pay child support. That’s like saying that women should keep their legs together if they don’t want to have babies.

If you’re anti-choice for both men and women, then I can at least credit you with consistency. But for the second time in a day, I’ve had to publish a post about liberal-left hypocrisy in matters of personal choice.

I tip my hat to men’s activist Fredric Hayward, whose article in the April 1994 issue of Playboy made me aware of this injustice.

Update, March 10, 2006, 5:11 p.m.: It doesn’t happen often, but Reason has disappointed me so far with its take on the story. In a glib, anti-intellectual cop-out, Tim Cavanaugh shrugs his shoulders and says, “Life is unfair.” But paternity suits are a mere legal construct, as opposed to an inevitable source of unfairness like the uneven distribution of beauty, brains, and talent. In this instance, therefore, political discourse and political activity could legitimately claim to help make the world a little less unfair.

Update, January 16, 2007, 5:55 p.m.: the outcome of the Dubay case.

Labels: ArtPic, Femi, Lib, MorPa, MR, OthBlo, Rom, UCL, VW

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:57 PM

October 31, 2005

The bourgeois arrogance of the anti-porn left

Women can be seen as the victims of pornography in the same way as boxers are victimized. But how can they be cast as victims if they chose to participate? “No one held a gun to their heads and said ‘Do it,’” remains a facile ploy to avoid confronting the issue. Freedom of choice is illusion. How many working-class men would choose boxing in a world of truly free choices, in which they might just as easily become brain surgeons? And how many working-class women would choose to be pornographic film stars, or prostitutes, if they could just as easily become Supreme Court justices? (That’s why it is always big news when an upper-class woman is “discovered” to have a double life as a porn star.)

—sociologist Michael S. Kimmel, in the essay collection Men Confront Pornography, edited by Kimmel, 1990, p. 314.

Kimmel assumes that almost anyone would rather have a white-collar than a blue-collar job. Pardon me, but it seems inconsistent for a left-wing egalitarian to presume the natural superiority of the values and tastes of his own social class. Some men are too aggressive to enjoy being brain surgeons; boxing may suit them better. Some women have sensation-seeking personalities; they may be happier trading sex for money than writing judicial opinions. There are more varieties of human temperament, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Camille Paglia, in one of her columns for Salon.com, has a better explanation for the headline-making rarity of an upper-class woman’s involvement in porn: bourgeois social pressures limit her career options.

A gigantic, self-perpetuating school system is forcing students along a pre-professional track whether they want it or not. Perhaps as many as half the college students currently enrolled in the elite schools may not really want to be there but have just numbly followed along in the track of their parents’ and peers’ social expectations. They have no other options. If our pampered students have the best of all possible worlds, why are so many of them binge-drinking and anesthetizing themselves with brain-wrecking designer drugs?

...[T]here’s no way that the daughter of prosperous, successful, white upper-middle-class parents could decide to drop out of an Ivy League school in her sophomore year to get married and be a stay-at-home mom. She would be upbraided and shamed, accused of “wasting” her education and betraying her “real” talents—and embarrassing her status-conscious parents.

Similarly, it’s scarcely imaginable that the son of such a family could opt for the career of auto mechanic or trucker instead of physician, lawyer or businessman.

When left-wing academics express pity over sex workers’ lack of freedom of choice, it may be an example of what psychoanalysis calls projection.

This post was modified on November 13, 2005, at 11:17 a.m. The word odd was replaced by the word inconsistent.

Labels: AgeMaj, Educ, Femi, MR, OthBlo, Sp, UCL

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 11:58 PM