"I was in my twenties then, and I’d grown up with a certain expectation, watching films, of what my sexual life was going to be like, and then it wasn’t that."

"The world had begun to be so saturated by sexual imagery in porn and the expectations were shifting. Not that there’s anything wrong with porn, but it does change the way people are expecting you to behave in a natural sexual situation. And so I was just confounded, and I think Girls expressed a lot of that confusion, anxiety, and frankly, pain."

Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Lena Dunham on Too Much and her long-awaited return to TV: 'I stepped back from acting after my body was dissected'/Eight years on from ‘Girls’, the HBO comedy that made her name – and made her a lightning rod for criticism – Dunham is back with a 10-part romcom, ‘Too Much’. Ellie Harrison hears from the writer, along with her new lead stars Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe, about their London-set love story, which is well worth the wait" (Independent).

Did Lena Dunham have her body "dissected"? When I read that in the headline I thought it was a reference to her health problems (notably, endometriosis). But no: "When Girls was on television, discourse about Dunham’s appearance was rabid. Howard Stern called her 'a little fat girl' on national radio. One newspaper described her as a 'pathological exhibitionist.' 'Having my body dissected was a reason that I chose in general to step back from acting a little bit more and focus on my writing and my directing, and also just make different kinds of choices as an actor,' she says now."

"For the first time, my insides don’t feel like fire. They feel like warm, golden love."

Says Penelope, a child in the book "Born Ready," described by Justice Alito in the new Supreme Court case, Mahmoud v. Taylor:

The book Born Ready...  follows the story of Penelope, an apparently biological female who asserts “ ‘I AM a boy.’ ” Id., at 458a. Not only does the story convey the message that Penelope is a boy simply because that is what she chooses to be, but it slyly conveys a positive message about transgender medical procedures. Penelope says the following to her mother: 

“ ‘I love you, Mama, but I don’t want to be you. I want to be Papa. I don’t want tomorrow to come because tomorrow I’ll look like you. Please help me, Mama. Help me to be a boy.’ ” Id., at 459a.

Penelope’s mother then agrees that Penelope is a boy, and Penelope exclaims: “For the first time, my insides don’t feel like fire. They feel like warm, golden love.” Id., at 462a. To young children, the moral implication of the story is that it is seriously harmful to deny a gender transition and that transitioning is a highly positive experience....

A child's "insides" described as feeling like fire or, alternatively, warm, golden love! Quite aside from the topic of transgenderism, that is — if not blatantly sexual — too closely approximate to sexuality to belong in reading material for children. If I say I'm amazed that school authorities would adopt such a book for classroom instruction, I am sure commenters will scoff at me for being too naive to perceive the deliberate "grooming."

"Squiffy."

I learned a new word reading "I love camping and have done for 40 years — these are my best tips" (London Times):

1. Put the tent up as soon as you arrive

The biggest dilemma you face is not where to pitch the tent, but whether to crack your first beer before you do. I camp most often with a group of friends, and the temptation to leave the practicalities for later and throw ourselves down on a rug for a few drinks and a chinwag is a powerful one. On no account give in to this urge. As anyone who has tried to follow small-print Decathlon instructions in the dark while squiffy can confirm, it is always an error. Remembering which poles go in which slots first is hard at the best of times, so delay the fun until you are fully erect, so to speak.

That's written by a woman, by the way, Gemma Bowes. I don't think a male would indulge in such low humor, but I'm leaving it in my excerpt, having copied it and encountered it after deciding I wanted to blog because of "squiffy." I don't want to seem prudish, so I'll just say I think that kind of double entendre has gone out of style.

Anyway, let's talk about "squiffy" — meaning "drunk." It is in the OED, with the oldest use from a letter written around 1855: "Curious enough there is a Lady Erskine, wife of Lord E, her husband's eldest brother living at Bollington, who tipples & ‘gets squiffy’ just like this Mrs E." 

"The two frogs in your video, filmed on April 28, 2025, at Picnic Point Marsh near Lake Mendota, were... engaged in atypical amplexus (a misaligned mating attempt) or territorial wrestling."

"The reversed, head-to-tail position was caused by the chaotic breeding environment, with males possibly clasping incorrectly or fighting for dominance during a spring breeding chorus. The loud frog noise confirms a high-density breeding event, common in Wisconsin marshes at this time. The human-like appearance of the posture is due to the frogs’ flexible bodies and the dynamic nature of their interaction...."

So said Grok, answering my questions about a video made by Meade and uploaded to YouTube under the title "Froggy went a courting." I'd embed it here for you, but

An update on Valerie.

You remember Valerie, the miniature dachshund who escaped into the wilds of Kangaroo Island, blogged here.

Today, I see "Valerie the dachshund rescued after 17 months in Australian wilderness/The eight-pound miniature dachshund had transformed from an 'absolute princess' into a rugged survivor" (WaPo).

I had to blog that... in case you were on tenterhooks.

What are tenterhooks anyway?

"Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel..."

"... not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity."

Writes Merve Emre, in "An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals" (NYRB).

I know you're unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you're thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, "Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955."

That's one of the best photos I've ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" got a lot of attention when it came out in 2004, and it will be interesting to see reactions to it 20 years later. 2004 was the first year of this blog. I read the book.

"An A.I. tool may learn how to superficially mimic the end result of writing, but it will never mimic a writer’s soul or how he or she actually produces meaningful writing..."

"... that process by which an individual idiosyncratic mind works out a problem, granting readers access to the inner life of another actual person, that constitutes the lifeblood of writing and storytelling.our institutions embrace a totally unproven technology. University administrators routinely announce new partnerships with A.I. startups, and well-meaning instructors — perhaps imagining an ideal student in an ideal world, or just wanting to feel like they’re on the cutting edge — incorporate these tools in their classrooms.... I will continue to teach students that, whether they go on to write a best-selling memoir or simply scribble in their journals occasionally, we can try to do the work as honestly and earnestly as possible, bringing our full obsessive selves to the page. The act of writing itself can be an act of self-preservation, even one of defiance...."

Writes Tom McAllister, in "I Teach Memoir Writing. Don’t Outsource Your Life Story to A.I." (NYT).

Good luck enforcing student authenticity. They're writing for you, but what you want is for them to do what's for their own good. So you must structure things so that when they do what's for their own good you will reward them. I'm tempted to... I mean, here I am, going straight to A.I. with: "A creative writing teacher wants students not to use A.I. How can that rule be enforced?" Grok gave me 7 ways to detect the use of A.I., then suggested "flipping the script: allow AI as a brainstorming tool but require students to document how they transformed its suggestions."

I've never taken a creative writing class, but I have thought of writing a memoir. If I did, at this point, I would definitely use Grok, not because I want help composing sentences and paragraphs, but to get encouragement to see the value of the material. 

Bill Burr goes on "The View" and insults nerds... sexistly.

NEW: Comedian Bill Burr says he is mad at Elon Musk, calls him a "nerd" who doesn't "know how to talk to hot women."

The comments come days after Burr directly compared Elon Musk to Adolf Hitler.

Behar: "Is there anybody getting your ire up more these days than usual?"

Burr:… pic.twitter.com/6aOOtacajl

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 20, 2025

I'm saying it's sexist because of the line: "All these tech nerds that want to build robots because they don’t know how to talk to hot women." This is the kind of sexism you used to hear all the time half a century ago. A negative personality trait — or even just an interest in science or a hobby — would be attributed to a failure to have sexual intercourse. People with very little comic talent would think they were witty to say things like "You need to get laid."

I heard Tim Dillon — who's kind of my favorite comedian — make a similar joke on his podcast that came out on March 13th: "Now I understand there's man children out there that wanna fly rockets to Mars because they can't fly their penis into a vagina."

Did Burr just steal Dillon's joke, sanitize it, and run over to talk about it with the "hot women" on "The View"?!

"Most men live lives of quiet desperation," said Joe Rogan.

On the new episode of Duncan Trussell's podcast — audio and transcript here.

The guys were not talking about Henry David Thoreau. They were talking about men struggling to live with women. Here's the context (which begins at 00:57:11):

ROGAN: I had a buddy of mine who was an actor and he got this part, I think it was in a movie. It was good, you know, good little, small part. He was real excited and his girlfriend started crying and she said, when is something gonna happen for me?... That was her response....

TRUSSELL: Jesus, dude. That's so dark.

ROGAN: I think about that guy sometimes. 'cause I was, I was on a, a show with him, one day, just bit part on a show. And I was like, this guy's gonna be a movie star.... But I remember him telling me, he's like, she started crying, man.... She was crying saying, when is it gonna happen to me? So [he says] I don't know what to do. And I was like Captain Fucking Jettison — I'm Captain Fucking Pull the Parachutes — that's me.... So I was like, dude, you gotta bail out.... You gotta bail now. This one, you can't fix that girl....

TRUSSELL: That's so fucked up.

ROGAN: But she's pretty hot.... 

TRUSSELL: Dude, I wouldn't have bailed.

ROGAN: She had the heavies... she had natural heavies.

TRUSSELL: Natural heavies. It's worth it!

"Across the country, there is no clear guidance for young people on how to have healthy relationships and hookups..."

"... no collective understanding of what consent means. They need this desperately, especially now, with a president who was found liable for sexually abusing one woman and who has bragged about assaulting others. This essential education cannot come just from squeamish gym teachers. One idea would be to put more of this work into the hands of teenagers themselves. This is not without precedent. In 1973 a group called the Student Committee for Rational Sex Education conducted workshops in a dozen New York City public schools. Peer educators ran learning centers that they called 'rap rooms,' where students could stop by during free periods. Unlike their adult counterparts, the teenage educators made sex ed fun and playful, motivating their peers to voluntarily seek answers to their questions or to watch a demonstration of a contraceptive device."

Writes Hillary Frank, in "Our Kids Cannot Learn About Sex Just From Squeamish Gym Teachers" (NYT).

I don't like "how to have healthy relationships and hookups." Does "healthy" modify "hookups" as well as "relationships"? "Healthy hookups"? I'm sorry, I have no "collective understanding" of what that might be.

I enjoyed seeing the old term "rap rooms." There was a time when "rapping" just meant talking. 

As for "squeamish" teachers... I can think of worse problems. Just do your job and teach the material. It's a science topic. Skip the dogma.

The fact that I'm wondering if the things said to be "a real program" are perhaps not actually real — that says enough.

I found this because it's easy to find things tweeted by Elon Musk in the last 24 hours:

pic.twitter.com/VyFYXCDG9p

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025

I am reminded of the old "Golden Fleece Award":

The Golden Fleece Award (1975–1988) was a tongue-in-cheek award given to public officials in the United States for squandering public money....

One man controlled this award: Senator William Proxmire. His idea of what sounded stupid ruled. You had to be careful about how your research project looked, at first glance, to a politician who wanted to make a general point about out-of-control federal spending.

"I used to love feeling her body, her big body, next to me in bed, the softness of it. The extra tummy and..."

"... extra booty was comforting and reassuring. I miss that. The voluptuousness, being able to lean up next to her and feel her, for lack of a better word, draping over me or onto me. That’s no longer an option.... I’ve told her: 'I don’t recognize you. I need a road map.' I think she’s become a different person."

Said one husband, quoted in "How Weight-Loss Drugs Can Upend a Marriage/Doctors warn about their physical side effects, but they can also have unexpected effects on intimacy" (NYT).

When I clicked to read this article, I assumed it was going to be about the loss of sexual desire as a side effect of the drug. I was surprised to see that it was about the loss of desire in the partner who was not the one taking the drug.

But wait, the drug-taking partner is part of the problem (which is that they haven't had sex since she started the drug). She's finding it "easier to say no" to what she doesn't want, but purports to "want to want to have sex." 

If the drug removes the desire for food, why wouldn't it also affect that other physical desire? How closely related are these desires?

"I was a committed virgin till 22 and a committed slut from 55 on."

Said Hattie Weiner, quoted in "Hattie Wiener, Sex-Positive ‘Oldest Cougar,’ Dies at 88/She was an evangelist for older women having sex with younger men, and the health benefits that she said came with it" (NYT).

“People are always imagining that a cougar, that they’re clawing, they’re beasts of prey going after a boy toy or a cub,” she told “In the Know,” a Yahoo program, in 2020, “and I have turned that around. At no time have I ever gone after a young man. I wait for a man to come on to me, and that happens quite often.”

She's in this video, which I'm surprised to see linked in the NYT (with the warning that it's "truly raunchy").

"He writes graphically of his own deflowering; how he passes on the favor to his friend Carrie Fisher; of the almost-hand job he gets..."

"... in the back seat from someone’s wife when hitchhiking, as everyone used to do before the Manson murders; how Tennessee Williams grabs his testicles when he’s waiting tables at a dinner party — for better and worse, people always seem to be making a run at Griffin’s crotch — and Martin Scorsese’s wrath when he violates an order of celibacy during the filming of 'After Hours' (1985).... Much of [this memoir] is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born.... dropping Timothy Leary’s finest acid. Sean Connery, then playing James Bond, saved him from drowning! Bob Denver from 'Gilligan’s Island' had a temper!"

Writes Alexandra Jacobs, in "Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe/In his memoir 'The Friday Afternoon Club,' the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s 'After Hours,' recounts his privileged upbringing" (NYT).

Here's the book, "The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir" (commission earned).

"On set, Scorsese made one big stipulation. He ordered Dunne not to have sex for the duration of the shoot."

"I am gobsmacked by this, but the actor was unfazed. 'It made perfect sense to me,' he says. 'I knew what he meant. The character had to be boiling over with this unfulfilled anxiety. You had to see …' He pauses. 'Not to be crude, but you had to see the semen build up to where it’s practically coming out of his eyes.' One Saturday night, though, Dunne cracked and broke the rule. The next day of filming, Scorsese spotted the change and went berserk. 'You’ve fucked up the whole picture,' he shouted. 'I don’t think I can finish it now.' Dunne says that he was probably being directed here, too. 'Because now I’m afraid. I’m terrified. And it turns out that a certain level of fear is the same as not having sex. So [Scorsese’s] second piece of direction is telling me that I’ve ruined his movie. That’s excellent direction. It brought all the old anxiety back.'"

From "I’ll never forgive or forget’ – Griffin Dunne on the darkness that overtook his gilded Hollywood upbringing/Griffin Dunne’s memoir is full of wonderful tales about Martin Scorsese, Carrie Fisher and Madonna. But the killing in 1982 of his 22-year-old sister – and the subsequent trial – overshadows everything" (The Guardian).

If a male director did that to a female....

Anyway... the Scorsese movie in question is "After Hours":

"[P]erhaps one-third of today’s young Americans will never marry, with couples living together not replacing marriages."

"More people, [says sociologist Brad Wilcox], are simply detached and on their own. Some women in America have publicly proclaimed that they are distancing themselves from men, abstaining from sex or going 'boy sober.'... One window into gender tensions is a viral meme on TikTok in which women discuss whether they would rather encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Many go with the bear. Young people are not only marrying less and partnering less; they’re also having less sex.... To me, the fundamental problem is the struggle of men to adapt to a world in which brawn matters less than brains, education and emotional intelligence.... I fear that I’m a romantic in a world that is becoming less romantic."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "Less Marriage, Less Sex, Less Agreement" (NYT).

Excerpting that quote, I was stunned by the last sentence — where the word "romantic" appears twice — because my post from an hour ago — the one about gendered architecture — features a quote with a distinctive use of that word from an essay called "The Gender of Genius," by Hilde Heynen. I'll re-excerpt from Heynen's essay:

According to Christine Battersby, the way we understand the term genius is rooted in 19th-century Romanticism, which admired originality and creativity in the individual. The Romantic notion of genius referred to men of great intellectual and artistic capacities, who were in touch with their feminine side – for great art requires sensitivity, emotionality and love. The great artist, for the Romantics, was thus a feminine male.... The gradual disappearance of women during the long march towards the top is in part explained by our romantic notion of the architect as artist and genius. As Naomi Stead has noticed, the figure of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, the ‘arrogant and virile hero architect, casts a long shadow over any discussion of authorship in the discipline’, infusing it with a mystique heralding the creativity of the individual artist-designer

Kristof's usage of "romantic" is so different, but it's an intriguing difference. Kristof is worried that men and women won't enter into romance with each other, and he associates maleness with "brawn" and seems to think men are impaired when it comes to the life of the mind. Heynen is talking about 19th-century Romanticism and an idea that the greatest minds are male.

Would you rather encounter a bear in the woods or 19th-century Romantic genius?

@susankehoe1 This bear likes my company. So he climbs on the deck and sits nearby. I truly believe he likes my company. Please don’t say otherwise🙏 #foryou #bear #love #wildlife #viral #woods #funny #laugh #smile #spirituality #bear #animals #enjoy #hangout #mountains #camp #country ♬ original sound - Susan Kehoe

"So we’re left with a two-bit case that has devolved into dirty bits, filled with salacious details...."

"Trump came across as a loser in her account — a narcissist, cheater, sad Hugh Hefner wannabe, trading his satin pajamas for a dress shirt and trousers (and, later, boxers) as soon as Stormy mocked him. The man who was the likely source of the 'Best Sex I Ever Had' tabloid headline, attributed to Marla Maples at the time, no doubt loathes Stormy for having described their batrachian grappling, as Aldous Huxley called sex, as 'textbook generic.' Like a legal dominatrix, Stormy continued to emasculate the former president after her testimony, tweeting: 'Real men respond to testimony by being sworn in and taking the stand in court. Oh … wait. Nevermind.' The compelling part of this case is not whether Trump did something wrong with business papers. The compelling part is how it shows, in a vivid way, that he’s the wrong man for the job."

Writes Maureen Dowd in her new column "Donnie After Dark" (NYT).

1. Dowd seems to approve of using the criminal process not for its proper purpose — to enforce specific written law — but to expose and humiliate one's political enemy. Let's look at him in his underwear and sneer at his sexual fumblings, as described by someone who openly hates him — please, emasculate him! — and let's laugh.

2. It's so exciting — sexually and politically — that she doesn't see the downside. The aggressive desire to humiliate and crush him makes him sympathetic and makes you look like a bully. 

3. I'm imagining the jurors talking about this testimony and trying to connect it to the elements of the crime — assuming they can get their mind around what this crime even is. In my vision, they say: What was that Stormy Daniels testimony even about? Why did we have to know what material his pajamas were made out of? Satin! A shiny fabric. Waved about... to distract us.

4. "Batrachian" — it means "Of or pertaining to the Batrachia, esp. frogs and toads" (OED). It wasn't Daniels's adjective. Dowd got it from and credited Aldous Huxley. I found the relevant passage, in his "Point Counterpoint":

‘But what has love to do with it?’ asked Slipe. ‘In Beatrice’s case.’

‘A great deal,’ Willie Weaver broke in. ‘Everything. These superannuated virgins—always the most passionate.’

‘But she’s never had a love affair in her life.’

‘Hence the violence,’ concluded Willie triumphantly. ‘Beatrice has a n*gger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.’

‘Perhaps she likes being well dressed,’ suggested Lucy.

Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.

‘That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.’ Willie hesitated a moment. ‘Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,’ he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.

"Many younger women, for instance, shaped in part by the #MeToo movement, are engaging in intentional abstinence."

"There are trends on TikTok about going 'boysober'... 'Platonic life partners,' meanwhile — friends who commit to owning a home and even raising children together — insist that sex and romance are not necessary to lifelong unions. The sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski is resistant to the idea that frequent sex should be a chief component of every committed relationship. Nagoski — who has been open about her own hiatus from marital sex — doesn’t endorse obligatory sex, nor does she encourage aiming for any sexual base line in terms of regularity or behavior. Drawing on the work of the Canadian sexologist Peggy Kleinplatz, Nagoski believes that low desire can sometimes be evidence of good judgment. 'It’s not dysfunctional not to want sex you don’t like,' Nagoski says.... For couples measuring themselves against what Nagoski calls the 'fictions' of sex, or for those worried that their relationship is on the line whenever they enter the bedroom or don’t meet some monthly number, there may be too much pressure for sex to be enjoyable. It’s more important that couples establish what kind of sex is worth having...."

Writes Amanda Montei, in "Can a Sexless Marriage Be a Happy One? Experts and couples are challenging the conventional wisdom that sex is essential to relationships" (NYT).

My excerpt deprives you of a lot of anecdotes, so I'll just give you one as an example... an absurd example:

"I was initially startled in early 2020 when... a 16-year-old girl asked, 'How come boys all want to choke you?'"

"In a different class, a 15-year-old boy wanted to know, 'Why do girls all want to be choked?'... Another sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be 'properly educated' — pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea. (Note: There is no safe way to strangle someone.) A male freshman said 'girls expected' to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a 'simp.' And a senior in high school was angry that her friends called her 'vanilla' when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her.... I’m not here to kink-shame (or anything-shame)...."

Writes Peggy Orenstein, in "The Troubling Trend in Teenage Sex" (NYT).

I know it's a puff piece, but I want to quote the first 2 paragraphs of this WaPo article about Joe Biden.

From "The private chats and chance encounters that shape Joe Biden’s thinking/After conversations with his grandchildren, fellow churchgoers and Delaware neighbors, the president brings their worries to the Oval Office" (WaPo):

In the early months of his presidency, as the pandemic dragged on with its stifling restrictions, President Biden often delivered a favorite monologue to aides: He was worried about young people’s mental health, he said. High school seniors were missing prom and graduation. He wanted to know how college students went on dates.

Specifically, Biden wondered how young people could “make love” under the circumstances, according to two aides who heard the president use that phrase multiple times during his first year in office. Biden’s fixation on loneliness among young people, the aides said, grew out of his near-daily conversations with his grandchildren.

Biden had a "favorite monologue" about teenagers "making love."