Althouse

Said J.K. Rowling, interviewed in Chapter 7 — "What If You're Wrong?" — of the podcast "The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling."

AND: Here's the full transcript, which I'm delighted to see. I wanted to highlight the part where Rowling agonizes over the politics of the left wing, which she wants to be a part of. It's very difficult without a transcript. The interviewer, Majorie Phelps Roper, prompts: "There are a lot of critics who say, you and your comments are giving fuel to the right."

Rowling answers:

Well, my answer would be, I think you’re giving fuel to the right. This is why many left-wing feminists in particular are sitting with their head in their hands. The right has wanted for years and years, not all of the right, but certainly the further the right and the religious right, have wanted to castigate the lesbian and gay and bisexual movement as is inherently degenerate and part of the left’s broader degeneracy. 

When you defend the placing of rapists in cells with women, you are handing the right a perfect opportunity to say, you see, we told you the moral degeneracy that would result if you say homosexual relationships are okay, and I think for many leftists, for many feminists, we are despairing of the fact that people are, in our view, colluding with a deeply misogynist movement, which is benefitting, politically speaking, the far right. 

And I worry very deeply that, as the left becomes increasingly puritanical and authoritarian and judgmental, we are pushing swathes of people towards not just the right, it’s pushing them to the Alt Right.

She said "Alt Right." I've corrected the transcript here and below. ("Alt Right" was mistranscribed as "OutRight").

That’s what scares me, that particularly young men, when they’re being told everything in the world is their fault, and they have no right to a voice, and they are everything that is wrong with society. It is, unfortunately, a human reaction to go to the place where you will be embraced, and if the only place where you can make a joke or be accepted is a place that is full of poisonous ideas, then you’re likely to go there, particularly when you’re young. 

So I think that the left is making a tremendous mistake in espousing this kind of, in my view, quasi-religious, incredibly sort of witch hunting behavior, because there will be people who will just feel when they’ve been shamed and abused, and they feel it was unfair, where are they going to go? That worries me very deeply. 

In my lifetime, we’ve seen such a shift on the left, and I still would define myself as of the left, but I was born in the 60s when transgression really was the preserve of the left, when challenging authority, and when making the dark joke, and when breaking societal norms was very much the preserve of the left. 

I’ve lived to see the left become incredibly puritanical, and rigid, and watching the Alt Right, and this isn’t a new phenomenon. The Alt Right is not the conservative right, with whom I disagree on many, many things. I’m just saying, we’re seeing a growth of something very much facilitated by the internet, that the alarms and disturbs me, and it worries me that the left are absolutely playing into that demographic’s hands.

ALSO: Let me comment on that quote, the one line that made me check the time stamp as I was out running this morning, because I wanted to hand-transcribe it for you: "Women are the only group — to my knowledge — that are being asked to embrace members of their oppressor class — unquestioningly, with no caveat." 

Women are expected to be empathetic and giving — whether it's in our nature or whether we're conditioned and disciplined into it. It's central to the subordination. We're loved and valued — by others and by ourselves — because we take to this role, so naturally or fakely. It's part of the oppression that we can only win by not winning. Sacrifice! Give! And what a fine woman you are.

"... this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: 'The Coddling of the American Mind.' Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was 'Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.' He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title. After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse...."

I'm reading "Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest/Evidence for Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis," by Jonathan Haidt.

Let me add the radical feminist hypothesis: The subordination of women is the age-old way of the world, and we ought to suspect that any new efforts to protect or help women are new mechanisms of subordination.

In December [2016], as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world), the Korean government launched an online “National Birth Map” that showed the number of women of reproductive age in each municipality, illustrating just what it expected of its female citizens....

Women were outraged by the map, observing that the government appeared to consider them “livestock”... Several... digital feminists responded with a boycott to the reproductive labor expected by the state and decided that the surest way to avoid pregnancy was to avoid men altogether. It was through these online communities that 4B emerged as a slogan, and ultimately a movement.... 

Like any social movement, 4B has its own internal rifts and divisions: Can 4B women be friends with men? With women who still want to date men? Does lesbianism privatize relationships, destroy feminist solidarity, and resexualize women, or is it a necessary foundation for a world without men?

A quote from one women: “I don’t need to try being a lesbian, because in political lesbianism, I can just be a person, like a normal person — a human being. I can be in a safe place.... Always, when I use the word ‘safe place,’ it means the place for women.”

Political lesbianism.

The propaganda is working. Now I want a suffragette girlfriend.

You drive a hard bargain. But I'm buying whatever you're selling.

Was that supposed to be against the[m]?

Don't threaten me with a good time!

Kinky!!!

Yes please 

There’s something upsetting but also hilarious about this “If women get the vote, they’ll automatically become your supreme overlords” fearmongering. I saw some Spanish right winger the other day saying very seriously on an interview that we can't give political power to women because sexism exists for a reason. We'd only fuck when they want, he said. He argued that that's such a powerful tool of mind control that they'll become our overlords in no time if we supported the si es si 'yes means yes' law we recently passed in Spain; the law defines consent so rapists don't get away with it, btw. 

The thing is that it didn't feel like propaganda to me. It seemed like the guy truly believed what he was saying. Made me think. Like, wtf. If that's how they think, then it makes sense they defend sexism so bad. It's natural too that I defend feminism so bad, given there's people like that out there.

Or, as another commenter puts it: 

"What chance has a mere manchild"

There's no decent, ethical argument against equal rights for women. The argument — evident in both of those Reddit themes — is that men's minds are so subordinated to their sex drive that women must be subordinated because if they are given equality they will easily and naturally rise to dominance. It's an argument written in nature: The best chance at equality is male dominance. What an awful argument! But that is the argument, put clearly and bluntly. 

What do outer space capsules, submarines and office buildings have in common? Each was conceived as a closed system―a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary prohibiting the transfer of matter or energy. As partial reconstructions of the world in time and space, closed systems identify and implement the basic materials necessary for the sustenance of life. 

From the space program to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living, The Architecture of Closed Worlds documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consciousness. It presents an archive of 39 prototypes from 1928 to the present, creating a genealogy of closed-resource structures. These include the FNRS Balloon (1931), Aqualung (1943), House of the Future (1956), Disney's EPCOT (1966), Bios 3 (1972), Rocky Mountain Institute (1982) and the EDEN Project (2000).....

You have to freeze the frame and do research to grasp what an intellectual/poseur Albie is.  

SPOILER: This is the moment when Albie sees that another man is quickly winning the young woman he's been attempting to slowly win. The young woman, Portia (my favorite character), has been telling Albie that he needs to be more sexually exciting, but he went to Stanford, where he, apparently, learned that men should never pressure a woman to feel at all as though they are interested in having sex.

If I had read "The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit?," I could probably say something quite smart about college feminism as a closed world. I haven't, so I'm just gesturing at the idea.

Maybe Mike White hasn't read it either, and he's also gesturing and creating a place where we can think about such things to which he doesn't purport to have the answer. And that's the answer to the question How is "White Lotus" like a blog?

"...  in a deposition at Mar-a-Lago last year, potentially undermining one of the common defenses he has used to deny an attack. Trump... has repeatedly said Carroll is not his 'type'.... 'That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,' Trump said...."

WaPo reports.

Here's the photo:

That sure does look like Marla Maples! 

I think Trump should also be in trouble — not legally, personally — for saying "That’s my wife" when he meant Marla. But sometimes people use the present tense when they're speaking of the past. I'd be mildly irked if I were Melania, but I'm sure Trump knows how to say It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.

IN THE COMMENTS: jaydub asks:

When Trump said she was "not his type," why does the Wapoo automatically assume he's talking about her appearance rather than her character, personality or other trait? Isn't that sexist?

He's accused of making a sudden, quick attack, so the deeper qualities of a woman's attractiveness are highly unlikely to matter. And this is a civil case, where the plaintiff only needs to show that the greater weight of the evidence supports her version of the story. Trump's statement that she was not his type is evidence. The words must be interpreted but we don't need certainty about what the words mean. They will be weighed in context with all the other evidence.

But you need to know that Trump engaged in what has been a longstanding approach to casting doubts on claims of rape — declaring that the woman was not worth having sex with. It's often put in the very crude form: Who would want to fuck you? Trump's statement was not that cruel. It leaves open the possibility that there are others who might want to have sex with her, but it's the same category of argument, and the whole category has a long history and is well-known to people who are educated on the subject of rape and the subordination of women.

The sexism question I see is whether Trump is a sexist. His saying she's not my type — in response to a rape allegation — is evidence of sexism. That means it has some probative value. It belongs in the set of things we look at to decide if he's a sexist or — to put it more aptly, because practically everyone is at least a bit of a sexist — to decide how much of a sexist he is.

ADDED: Looking at the full-frame version of the photograph — here, at The Daily Mail — I can see that Ivana Trump is also there, so the "That's my wife" in "That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife" may refer Ivana. That's Trump with his back to the camera on the left.

"Another offering — 'Vodka makes you drunker quicker' — was rejected by her bosses."

From "Fay Weldon, ‘She-Devil’ Author Who Challenged Feminist Orthodoxy, Dies at 91/By turns elusive and confessional in public, she used dark satire to explore the divides between men and women" (NYT). 

I'm not sure if I ever read the novel "She-Devil"...

The book tells the story of Ruth Patchett, a tall, clumsy woman whose husband, Bobbo, embarks on an affair with Mary Fisher, a wealthy, successful novelist who lives “in a high tower, on the edge of the sea,” as the opening lines put it.

Ruth narrates: “I am fixed here and now, trapped in my body, pinned to one particular spot, hating Mary Fisher. It is all I can do. Hate obsesses and transforms me: It is my singular attribution.” 

... but I love the movie: