"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.

"It would be impermissible for the court to base its decision of recidivism on its unsupported theory of genetics."

Oh, but maybe the poor judge was born with a tendency to believe that his gut instincts and stuff he's seen on the internet are scientific fact.

"Are there any 'unlovely aspects' to female sexuality? And, if so, what social institutions legitimize them?"

Glenn Reynolds reacts to Natasha Vargas-Cooper "going on and on and on about 'the unlovely aspects of male sexuality that porn legitimizes.'"

The Story of O.

There's this one and this one.

Both written by authors who hid their identity... as to the second one:

Washington is awash with rumours over the identity of the anonymous author of a new novel written by an Obama insider.

Oh, blah. Does anyone really care? As to the first one, people cared intensely!

"Perhaps that sounds to you like an archaic feminist assertion - the kind of thing that hip women no longer say."

Rachel Henes — a social worker and "youth violence prevention specialist" — takes up the anti-pornography cause:

During countless classroom discussions, boys have told me that from a very young age, they have been taught that for a "real" man, sex is about the aggressive conquest of female bodies and scoring with as many of them as you can. While these ideas have long been around, they are more socially sanctioned now than ever before.

So what happens when individual risk factors become societal norms? And when pornography, because of its ubiquity and availability, effectively becomes sex ed?...

[Girls are] feeling depressed and worthless as they realize that real-life translations of porn don't make them feel sexy or powerful at all, since the sexual personas they're trying to emulate have been created by - and for - men.

Rachel Henes is...
	1. an unhip, archaic feminist.
	2. a social conservative who just doesn't call herself conservative.
	3. smart and correct and we should listen to her.
	4. a great wake up call to those "sex positive" feminists.
	5. a boring sex-phobe.
	6. all of the above.
	7. 1 and 4.
	8. 2 and 3.
	9. 1 and 5.
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"FBI issues warning over Barbie 'Video Girl' which could be used by paedophiles to make child pornography."

The doll has a camera built into it.

"Lillian McEwen breaks her 19-year silence about Justice Clarence Thomas."

The Washington Post has the scoop, including what may be the key sentence: "She has written a memoir, which she is now shopping to publishers."

UPDATE: McEwan in a interview reveals that she had an intimate relationship with Thomas. She says he liked pornography, especially depictions of large breasts. What is the point of revealing something so incredibly banal? Does it corroborate Anita Hill's testimony in any significant way? The issue, in the confirmation hearing, was whether Thomas engaged in sexual harassment in the workplace. McEwan is talking about his private life. First, that's really creepy. Imagine if a man revealed private, sexual things about a woman. McEwan even admits that she's speaking now because she is politically opposed to Clarence Thomas. She doesn't like the way he's deciding the cases.

Since McEwan never says that Thomas talked about pornography in the office, the supposed corroboration is virtually nil. It's true that if we know a man is interested in pornography, it makes it more likely that he talked about that interest somewhere, more likely than if we didn't know whether the man liked pornography. But huge numbers of men are interested in pornography, and only  a small subset of them who pester women by talking about it graphically in the office environment. So it just doesn't matter enough to bring it up.

McEwan also talks about the way Thomas thought about women, but it comes across as sheer speculation. She somehow knows he thought about whether women he met in the office would make good sexual partners. Again, this is perfectly banal. It says little about how he might attempt to initiate a relationship with a coworker. Doesn't nearly every single adult look around at other people and think about whether they are attractive and might make a good sexual partner?

This is just sad and embarrassing.

Hey, what happened to Kausfiles?

I was complaining yesterday that in 3 days, there were only 2 paragraphs showing on the front page of the blog that got all us bloggers noticing that it went to Newsweek.

Today, I go there and not only is there no new post on this, the fourth day of the blog, the whole page is blank. The original 2 posts are gone!

I do see some sidebar links to other stuff in Newsweek, like "GOP 'Pledge to America' Looks Unlikely to Inspire." Ha. Well, to me, Newsweek looks unlikely to inspire. What ridiculous writing! How does one look unlikely to inspire? What a phrase. Could they hide their bias a little better? They can't report on something new that the other side does without getting the jump on it and assuring their brain-dead readers that it can't possibly be any good.

Jeez, the Kausfiles blank page looks likely to be the most readable thing over there.

UPDATE: Now, the page is back, with the original 2 posts, plus a new post, "Isn't Anybody Against Porn?"

Are we really such an advanced nation that even an extreme "staunch social conservative" has to deny opposing pornography? There's something depressing about that. If not Christine O'Donnell, who?

Not just "staunch," but "extreme 'staunch'"! What's that like?

"I tell you if there's anything worse than dealing with a staunch woman... S-T-A-U-N-C-H. There's nothing worse, I'm telling you. They don't weaken, no matter what."

Also, there's a difference between "opposing pornography" and wanting opposition to pornography enacted into legislation. Her old statement about pornography and adultery was her interpretation of religion. You can have a very high standard as a matter of religion and still leave people alone as a matter of law.

"Looking for confidential minded person that is a people person and well manicured."

"We do some work with the adult entertainment business so it is not for everyone. Looking for the classic super manicured secretary at a younger progressive firm."

A Craigslist ad... in need of interpretation.

What's with the double use of "manicured"? Are we to think of something like this (SFW!)?

"The online dating industry is even bigger than the porn industry, and more than 30 percent of first dates end up in coitus yet its customers are much less satisfied than the customers of the porn industry."

"Let me break it down for you, those who go out, partake in a social activity and perhaps later on, sleep with a living human being feel more miserable than those who look at naked women, with fake breasts, online, all day, and alone…. But why?"

Hmmm. What I wonder is: Why is he surprised? Real people — in the flesh — cause a lot of trouble. Works of art — including bad but amusing art like porn — can be enjoyed at leisure and turned off at will.

***

I arrived at the linked blog post — "Algorithmic Online Dating and the Paradox of Choice" — after I Googled "The Paradox of Choice," the title of a book that I referred to yesterday. This notion that choice won't make us happy is — or I've been calling it — a liberal meme.

From the Algorithmic Online Dating" post:

[Barry Schwartz’s "The Paradox of Choice"] basically says if you need a jar of jam and you go to a supermarket that has 3 types of jams you’ll leave much happier than when you go to a supermarket that has 30 different types of jams on the shelf. This is a beautiful dilemma, in the first case your chance of buying the best jam available is 33 percent and even if you fail to chose the best jam there is 66 percent chance that you will get at least the second best jam or better. In the second case the likelihood of buying the best available jam is only 3 percent. So you’ll be less happier knowing that you have probably selected the jam that is not the best.

But what do I care about whether I'm picking the best of the 3 things the store happens to have? It might have 3 mediocre jars of jam. A store with 30 jams probably has some excellent jams in there. Is Schwartz saying that when you can only see 3 jams, you don't get any big ideas about how good jam can be, so you're happy with Smucker's, but when you see 30 jams, you imagine that jam can be really amazing, and you're left feeling hollow and hopeless when the Bonne Maman doesn't give you an orgasm?

The problem is that assortative mating is a very complex game theoretical problem. If you have watched the movie, beautiful mind, you probably remember that John Nash (Russell Crowe) talks about the best strategy to get the blond lady!

Here. Watch that scene.

Now add 5 million more online single guys to the pool of competitors and you got yourself an unsolvable game theoretical problem....

Why? First of all, the John Nash character in the movie was talking about the group dynamic in a real-life room in which 4 males encounter 5 women. If the men all go for the most beautiful one — "the blonde" — then no one gets anyone because the guys block each other's way to "the blonde" and simultaneously alienate the 4 less-than-most-beautiful women. By contrast, a dating site is virtual space in which you interact one-to-one without seeing your rivals and without letting your target see her/his rivals. If you arrange to meet in the flesh, the rivals won't be there. Of course, it's probably going to go badly, but whose fault is that?

"Everything that was once cutting-edge becomes reality-TV fodder."

Andres "Piss Christ" Serrano as a guest judge on "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist":

The contestants had less than a day to create their "shocking" works of art....

Miles, who has won two previous rounds, created a large illustration of Mickey Mouse involving penis-like embellishments. Last week's winner, John, attempted a painting of a man performing fellatio on himself, while Jaclyn created a series of low-res nude photos of herself. Ryan made a portrait of himself as a transsexual prostitute. Both Erik and Mark created works addressing child sexual abuse.

Works addressing child sexual abuse, eh? And when you do that, you're not making child pornography, right? Can't have been or it wouldn't have been on TV. You have to shock without really doing anything wrong.

Taking a different approach, Abdi chose to create a series of molds depicting young black youths as bombs ready to go off.

Sounds racist — but racism is still shocking, right? — and like a rip off of the infamous Muhammad-with-a-bomb-turban cartoon. Abdi is a Muslim name, by the way. But a little research shows that Abdi is black, so presumably that was TV-okay.

Because of the nature of the challenge, the episode featured a lot of bleeped words and blurred images.

All the better for DVD sales.

They criticized John's work for its cartoon-like execution and for the fact that he misspelled "fellatio" as "follatio."

Ha ha. Spelling error! Ding!

"I saved the money from the Army. Army, Army, Army, Army money. My personal Army money."

That's Alvin Greene's answer to the question a lot of people are asking:

How did Alvin M. Greene, an unemployed military veteran who lives with his father, come up with the $10,400 filing fee for the Democratic Senate primary he won Tuesday?...

South Carolina has a history of political plants being placed in elections to skew turnout. In 1992, Republican operative Rod Shealy was convicted of hiring an African-American fisherman to run for congressional office in hopes of stimulating white turnout to help his sister get elected lieutenant governor. The case of Greene, who is African American, has reminded many here of the Shealy incident, though political sleuths have not come up with any logical meddler or motive.

Wait. One thing that's not much like what just happened is being used to show a "history" of things like this happening?  And it's from 19 years ago?! What would be the point of using Greene this way? Speaking of patterns, isn't there a pattern of quirky outsiders blowing their own money running for office?

Is it in the Democratic Party's interest to hound this man? He got 60% of the vote for some reason. It's not as if the guy he beat had any chance of winning. Without harder information, it seems as if people are trying to humiliate and intimidate Greene. He's already got a criminal charge pending against him. And what kind of a criminal charge is that anyway? Asking another adult to look at a pornographic picture? Would you call the police on someone who did that? Would you want your tax money used to prosecute someone who did that?

The people picked their candidate, but he's so terrible that it must be a conspiracy.

Democrats freaking out about Alvin Greene. Here's Balloon Juice:

I’ve seen a lot of shitty primary candidates in my time, so I’m ready to buy that a relatively inarticulate nobody with a closet full of skeletons would spend $10K on a quixotic run for Senate. What feels off about Greene is his complete lack of excitement and engagement. Usually a nut who’s going to blow his last dollar on a campaign does it for some crazy reason that animates them, and they talk about it incessantly. Greene has none of that. Put that together with his resume, and I smell a ratfuck.

Well, at least he's only "relatively inarticulate." What induced that restraint? Why not call him inarticulate? There's a longstanding issue of patronizing black people by calling them "articulate." Remember discussions like this after some clueless folk — e.g., Joe Biden — called Barack Obama "articulate"? (And here's the old "He speaks so well" Chris Rock riff about Colin Powell.)

Now, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has called for an investigation. Into what? People had to vote for Alvin Greene, and he got 60% of the vote. It would be interesting to know why the people of South Carolina voted the way they did, but I don't think you should sic the government on someone who wins against the odds. Bring out the information informally, if you like. Don't use the government to intimidate him.

And then there is the obscenity charge, based on Greene's supposedly asking a woman "to look at pornography on his screen at a computer lab in a University of South Carolina dormitory" and saying "Let's go to your room." That could have been talked about during the primary campaign, but apparently, no one saw fit to say anything until afterward. Now, Greene says:

"I'm on the not-guilty side of things...  I have to be. I mean, I mean, I mean. I have no comment, I mean."... Greene is at first reluctant to talk about the charge. But once he starts, he goes on at length.

"It can go away," Greene says. "Just think about a charge. It can be dropped by the solicitor. It can be dropped and erased like it never happened. . . .

I kind of think it will be remembered.

"Folks should be given a chance to correct themselves. Somebody could just be trying to get somebody in trouble. You see, somebody, you know -- you just can't work around somebody. It's hard. I'm just trying to talk about something, frankly. I'm just trying to talk from my perspective. People should be friendly. I mean, leave it alone."

"I don’t see Judge Weinstein as a judge."

"I see him as my father. He helps people. He doesn’t destroy lives the way the prosecutor has. He’s the one who is going to set me free from the court."

The too-easy satire of The Onion's "Supreme Court Upholds Freedom Of Speech In Obscenity-Filled Ruling."

Everyone's linking to this thing, and it is pretty funny, but see what my problem is with it:

"It is the opinion of this court that the right to speak without censorship or fear of intimidation is fundamental to a healthy democracy," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.... "In short, freedom of speech means the freedom of fucking speech, you ignorant cocksuckers."

The decision came Monday in response to the case of a Charleston, WV theater troupe that had been sued by city officials for staging a sexually explicit play with public funds. Reversing the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the theater, an outcome free-speech advocates are calling a victory and Justice Ginsburg called "a bitch-slap in the face of all those uptight limp-dicks."...

The Onion goes after social conservatives clamping down on sexually explicit speech.

"I'm beginning to wonder if you really understand what 'abridging the freedom of speech' means at all," said Stevens, a 34-year veteran of the court known for his often-nuanced interpretations of the First Amendment. "I'm also wondering whether you and your fat-faced plaintiffs over there need to have some respect for constitutionally protected expression fucked into your empty hick skulls."

Hicks.

Are hicks the threat to free speech? Maybe 20 or 30 years ago.

The Onion quotes Justice Breyer:

It likewise bears noting that, even if everyone on this court got brain damage and ruled against protected speech, we're sure as fuck not starting on some harmless bullshit play. We'd start on that ignorant-ass, Bible-thumping, Fred Phelps homophobe shit. How would those Jesus-blowing backwoods cracker motherfuckers like that?

See? The liberal urge — which is what motivates The Onion's writers — is to repress the speech it disapproves of. And that is the real threat to free speech that we experience today. At first glance this satire appears to be vigorously pro-free-speech, but I suspect that it's only pro-liberal speech. Maybe my suspicion is wrong, but I'd find The Onion a lot funnier if its satire caused its readers a little pain, instead of nudging them to laugh at people they already hold in contempt.

To test your commitment to free speech rights, think of some expression you hate and imagine protecting that. Don't think of something you love and imagine someone else repressing it. That's the test of whether you support free speech rights. The Onion doesn't test itself or its readers. And that makes The Onion's speech too bland. Come on, it's The Onion. Onion. Bland isn't true to that name.

"High-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."

Other people's money is so much less interesting than other people's naked bodies.

The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years....

• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.

• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.

• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.

• The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.

I wonder what people who read about this are thinking. I'll bet a lot are outraged — and the GOP is banking on that outrage as it makes this an issue right now (because attacking the SEC is something they want to do for reasons utterly unrelated to porn). But I bet a lot of people — guys — feel really nervous about it because they are looking at porn at work too.

Is it good politics for the GOP to go on an anti-porn rampage?
	Yes.
	No.
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Explain your answer in the comments, if you like. I have my answer, but I'll wait to say it so I don't over-influence the discussion.

"A raised photograph cannot turn me on, because a photograph itself is meaningless to me."

"This is a sighted person's idea of what turns me on, and it's not even close."

"To any of the ladies I’ve offended, I apologize.."

"I say this to the men out there who have never opened a graphic image on the Internet: Don’t vote for me. For those who have, I welcome your vote."

"Picture an addiction so lethal it has the potential to render an entire generation incapable of forming lasting marriages..."

"... and so widespread that it produces more annual revenue — $97 billion worldwide in 2006 — than all of the leading technology companies combined."

National Review freaks out about pornography... in an article by an anonymous woman who thinks her husband rejected her and left her for another woman because of pornography.

"I write about the TeePees because it's so sad how they've been manipulated to oppose their own best interests."

Says Roger Ebert, who tweets about politics now and does not, on Twitter, eschew the cruder term "teabaggers" for participants in the Tea Party movement.

When Ebert tweeted that he was unaware of the term's pornographic connotation, Big Hollywood countered that he had referred to such a context in past movie reviews.

Ha. It must have been "Pecker." I love that movie. Yeah. Here's Retracto the Correction Alpaca calling gotcha on Ebert — complete with "Pecker"-clip. Frankly, I can see how someone could have reviewed "Pecker" and even talked about the teabagging in "Pecker" — which is pretty silly — and not realize that the word had moved beyond that context into the general parlance and was implied by the term that is now used to mock tea partiers.

That movie also uses the expression "shopping for others." I remember that, but remembering that doesn't tell me that it's become a term for something people are really doing these days. [ADDED: I see that the link within that link now goes to the absence of a YouTube clip from the movie. It was a scene in which Pecker, a budding young photographer, and his friend go into a store and put embarrassing items in other people's shopping carts when they're not looking. Pecker then takes pictures of their reactions at the checkout counter.]

Anyway, I welcome Roger Ebert to the Tweet-o-sphere. It's great when an excellent, interesting writer takes to the 140-character art form. Follow him here. I am.