"My daughter has repeatedly brought home books from the school library that I have a problem with. I'm a feminist and I'm anti-censorship. I'm lost."

So wrote a woman at Ask Metafilter:

Yesterday, for the THIRD time, LittleTaff brought home a fairy tale... this time Rapunzel. Objectified women with little or no agency, basing marriage decisions on the appearance or wealth of the men, and WITCHES!!!!

After the second version of the Little Mermaid came home, I had a phone interview with the head and told her that I wasn't happy about the way women were portrayed, that I could see some historical merit in the books, but thought they were more appropriate for older children... but also that the Disney version of the Little Mermaid had no literary nor historical merit and did the school need some fundraising for books. (I'm on the fundraising committee. )

We were just talking about the Disney "Little Mermaid" yesterday, specifically the song "Part of Your World" — remember the singing "dads" — and my son John emailed me a link to his Ask Metafilter answer to that worried woman:

Really, [the Disney "Little Mermaid"] has no merit? Listen again to the song "Part of your World." Do you not hear the feminist themes in that song — about "bright young women . . . ready to stand?" What could be more feminist than a young woman expressing her interest in scientific discovery — "what's a fire, and why does it burn?" (The lyrics are fresh in my mind since I sang it in karaoke the other day along with a female friend.) I'm sure there's a great feminist critique of the movie to be made. But do you really want to prevent your daughter from seeing anything that could potentially be the subject of such a critique?

You seem to assume that you've seen all the truth that exists to be seen in your world, and educating your daughter is just about transmitting these truths to her. On the contrary, it matters relatively little whether your child shares your views. What matters more is equipping your child to deal with the world in her own individual way.

So I say, let your daughter be exposed to all of this. I'll bet she can handle it. Focus on talking to her about it instead of trying to create the perfect parental filter (considering that the filter is never going to last anyway). You might even learn something from her in the process.

You can probably tell I didn't filter my children's reading/watching. And I can't remember my own parents ever saying one thing about my choices — even my choice to watch just about anything that was ever on television (when they themselves rarely watched television). (My parents spent nearly every evening sitting around talking to each other. Not reading and talking. Just talking!)

Speaking of controlling your children, I was just listening to one of my favorite old Lovin' Spoonful songs "Younger Generation" (video and lyrics at the link):

Why must every generation,
Think their folks are square?
And no matter where their heads are,
They know mom's ain't there....

Listening to it now, I'm not sure whether it's a sincere expression of a desire to let children range free — "I must be permissive... all my deepest worries must be his cartoons" — or making fun of hippie-style parents who don't know where to draw the line:

Hey, Pop, my girlfriend's only three,
She's got her own videophone,
And she's taking LSD,
And now that we're best friends,
She wants to give a bit to me,
But what's the matter, daddy,
How come you're turning green?
Can it be that you can't live up to your dreams?

Crazy dreams! (And yet, today the little girl does have her own videophone.)

"Japan’s first masturbation bar for women opens in Shibuya."

That's the headline, but it's not what it sounds like. It's a place for women to talk about masturbation:

The wall behind the counter is adorned with dozens of colorful sex toys. Megumi Nakagawa, the bar’s proprietor, explains that typically a bar will have bottles of alcohol lining the wall. The appearance of vibrators, however, provides women with more confidence in speaking about spanking.

“Once they take a seat, customers are able to experience a pleasant place in which they can openly discuss masturbation,” says Nakagawa. “Since most people view female masturbation as something of a mystery or taboo, it is not a usual topic at typical bars.”

ADDED: Clicking around over at the Tokyo Reporter, I've finding other hard to fathom headlines, like "Erection of Tokyo Sky Tree leads to mobile prostitution service":

A 45-year-old who runs a tangerine (mikan) farm in Wakayama Prefecture encountered the operation towards the end of August, when he went to see the 634-meter-tall structure with three of his colleagues.

So... tangerines are involved...

"Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

Roy Edroso cuts and pastes some of my very best material onto his blog, but leaves me out of his Village Voice column "Dog Soldiers: Rightbloggers Meld with Mitt over Obama Mutt Meal Story." He just doesn't know how to "meld" my material with his "rightbloggers" shtick. It's too meta (and meat-a) for him to grind up into the usual sausages the folk at VV use to metaphorically masturbate.

But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."


1. "Cap'n Crunch is a product line of sweetened corn and oat breakfast cereals introduced in 1963," and I was already 12 in 1963.  My sweetened corn cereal of choice was Corn Pops, born in 1951, like me. Here I am explaining my cereal preference to 2 guys including a guy who looks like my dad and has a name like some guy in my adopted home town, Guy Madison.

2. Since carrots were never cooked in my 1950s childhood home, but were served raw, I liked them. Now, if it were something like spinach, which my mother always served with slices of hard-boiled egg on top, I would have avoided it, perhaps, along with the other kids in the family, with some simple commentary like "ew, spinach."

3. My parents never sighed about anything like this. At most, they would inform us that we were saying something that wasn't good "dinner conversation" and they would continuing modeling what was to their ear good dinner conversation.

4. My parents wouldn't get up from the dining table and go back into the kitchen to get different food if we didn't want to eat what we were served. They might say something like "That's dinner" and then move on, in the usual fashion, to good dinner conversation.

5. I was left to my own devices at the dinner table, devices I pursued silently and without parental comment or intervention of any kind: I drank milk, I ate plenty of potatoes, and I sprinkled sugar — copiously — on the wedge of iceberg lettuce. Later, after I was excused from the table — we said "May I be excused?" — I ate all the ice cream I wanted.

IN THE COMMENTS: At Roy's, Halloween Jack says:

Althouse probably thinks of her blogging self as a shorter, snappier Maureen Dowd, but she doesn't have the detached hollowness at the heart of MoDo's mean-girl act; she's usually petty, often smug, and when she gets like this, downright creepy. 

If it were a dinner party and she started in on this, people would probably laugh at first, mostly out of politeness, but a strained silence would ensue as she went on and was obviously getting into it. Then she realizes that not only is everyone else silent but almost everyone is averting their gaze; she clears her throat, murmurs "Well, anyway," and drains her wine glass. The guests can hand-wave it away as an odd tic (although one or two might reach for their list of handy excuses on the occasion of subsequent invitations), but on the blog it sits there, generating a veritable miasma like the stench of garbage left in a warm apartment for a week. 

Fortunately from her perspective, unfortunately from anyone else's, she's got her regulars to reinforce her behavior, with Meade piping in with a HuffPo piece about the amount of lead in the White House lawn, and she'll have a virtual dinner party at which she's always the toast of the town.

Enjoy the party!

"Are you just occupying space?"

The Occupy Wall Street — or Occupy [Your City] — movement made me remember an old expression: "Are you just occupying space?" It was normally preceded by another question. For example: "Are you getting any work done or are you just occupying space?" In the expression, to "occupy" is to be irritatingly passive and ineffectual. In my experience, it was a relatively mild insult, usually deployed by mothers and schoolteachers.

Should protesters want to convey an aura of inaction? Perhaps! Think of the old protest slogan: "We're here/We're queer/Get used to it." The message is: look, we exist. The onlooker is challenged to stop denying the existence of the people who are making their existence apparent by just occupying space. That's all.

What's perplexing about Occupy [Your City] is that the onlookers already know that people affected by the economy exist. Everyone is affected. The onlookers don't feel that they are at any sort of distanced relationship to the problem the protesters are attempting to highlight. The protesters are simply the people who have taken up urban camping as a manifestation of concern about the problem.

The onlookers might admire the protesters for their stamina and hardiness, but they might also be annoyed by the filth and chaos, especially if it undermines their ability to pursue their own livelihood. Why do these people who are just occupying space think they are heroic when I work all day and go home at night to take care of my family?

The protesters should be able to connect with the nonprotesters, since the economic problems are shared and there's little emphasis on solutions. (Did you see this Onion piece: "Nation Finally Breaks Down And Begs Its Smart People To Just Fix Everything"?) There shouldn't be an us/them relationship between the protesters and onlookers. It's a shared predicament, and the protesters don't have superior knowledge about the problems or what to do about them. But they are there, out on the street. Then what?

They could turn inward and resist communication, like the Occupy Oakland protesters who wore masks and then turned their backs on a reporter who wanted to interview them about what they were doing. But it would be better for them to turn outward, adopting a demeanor that would allow onlookers to talk with them and have real conversations about shared problems. Of course, a conversation goes both ways. You can't just harangue people. There must be back and forth, and since the protesters don't really know what to do about the problems, they can demonstrate their good faith by really engaging.

An outsider to the protest should be able to move into the crowd and get a dialogue going, the way investment guru Peter Schiff did the other day:



Last March, during the height of the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol, we were impressed by a man — we call him "The Man in the Middle" — who was not one of protesters, who took a seat in the center of the rotunda and invited people to sit down and talk to him one on one. That was one of the best moments in the protests.

Why don't people talk to each other? There was a popular chant last winter — now taken up by the Occupy crowds — "This is what democracy looks like." But democracy should look like people talking to each other. Not staring each other down from a secure distance.

"Plenty of people on the right and on the left are not comfortable with a free marketplace of ideas."

Says Meade, after I read him a blog post that calls me "obtuse" for writing about how 2 men were talking past each other about affirmative action. This blogger simply agreed with the man who stated the crisply clear position that race discrimination is always wrong and bad, and since I did not — I was more interested in the way the 2 men could not interact — I was obtuse.

My response to Meade was: "A lot of people don't really like shopping."

"It’s Alinsky vs. Alinsky now. Rational debate has long been a loser’s game."

Instapundit quotes commenter Pogo on this post of mine and adds "You get more of the conduct you reward, and less of the conduct you punish."

I see the point, and I know very well from long experience that it's nearly impossible to have a rational, serious debate about affirmative action. But I am trying. I am trying to make this blog a place where we can do that.

IN THE COMMENTS: Sloanasaurus said:

The problem with this subject is that most people from the conservative side who have jobs should be advised not to touch it. All it takes is a misconstrued post or a false accusation of racism and your career is finished.

I agree, but as a person of tenure, I'd be pathetic if I did not take that risk here.

When Mennonite pacifists meet "the stereotypical God-and-country Midwestern" patriots.

There's a current controversy about playing the nation anthem at Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana. There, the tradition was pacifist and the anthem was not played.

About a year and a half ago, some athletes approached the president, James E. Brenneman, to ask if the anthem could be played before some games. Dr. Brenneman, a former pastor who has led Goshen since 2006, said yes, “as an expression of welcome to the half of our student body who are part of other religious traditions,” he told [the NYT reporter]....

Dr. Brenneman stressed that even when the anthem was played, “it wasn’t like you would see at a pro football game or the World Series, with the F-16 fighters flying overhead.” The music was played, without anyone singing the lyrics over the public-address system, and the anthem was followed by the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. ...”). This was Goshen’s “way of saying, if we are going to do it, we won’t do it as they do it elsewhere,” Dr. Brenneman said....

In 2009, Goshen unveiled a marketing campaign called “Peace by Peace,” emphasizing its pacifist roots. “Not everyone was enamored of this marketing campaign,” Dr. Berry said. “That included some folks in the athletic department, and the reason was that for sports — soccer is a bit of a different animal, but for baseball, golf and particularly basketball — Goshen College recruits students who aren’t from a Mennonite or Anabaptist background. And they reflect a little more of the stereotypical God-and-country Midwestern approach to patriotism.”

Dr. Brenneman wished to “quibble” that the request to play the anthem “came in direct response to Peace by Peace.” And Dr. Berry acknowledged there was more at stake than athletes’ gripes. There is a theological question, “which was that if we talk so much about peace, that will make it hard to attract non-Mennonite students.”

“And if we can’t attract non-Mennonite students, are we being hospitable?” Dr. Berry said.

Hospitality is, like pacifism, a core Christian virtue, and some Mennonites believed that playing the anthem was justified to help students from other backgrounds feel welcome.

After a year of "really intense dialogue," the college adopted the policy of playing "America the Beautiful" before sporting events.

I love the emphasis on hospitality and conversation. Really beautiful. Thank you, Mennonites.

Sarah says: "I think there’s room for more, though, because..."

"... spirited debate and more competition will allow an even better discourse and more rigorous discourse that the public deserves."

Rigorous, spirited discourse. I love it.

When America thinks of rigorous, spirited discourse, it thinks of...
	Sarah Palin!
	The current field of Republicans plus Sarah Palin.
	The current field of Republicans.
	Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, head to head.
	Thaddeus McCotter!
pollcode.com free polls

Don't call me Shirley/Buddy.

The file on the police investigation of the Wisconsin Supreme Court "chokehold" incident contains accounts of 2 incidents in which someone used a too-familiar name and the immediate consequence was an inappropriate touching. In putting these 2 accounts together here, I don't mean to vouch for their truth. I simply want to juxtapose them for the purpose of examining their similarity.

First is the "chokehold" incident itself, as described by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley (page 34):  Justice Bradley said when she approached Justice Prosser, she said to him, "Buddy, get out of my office." Justice Bradley explained that the sobriquet "Buddy" put her "in control" and Justice Prosser "in the diminutive." By "in the diminutive," Bradley meant something like making him seem small or putting him in the state "of being familiarly known, lovable, pitiable, or contemptible." There were accompanying gestures from Bradley, and, as we know by now, Prosser proceeded to put his hands around her neck.

In the second incident, from 2008 (page 64), Justice Gableman "remembers making a comment to the chief justice in a joking manner and used her first name, Shirley, during this comment towards her."

Justice Gableman said right after he said the chief justice's first name, Justice Bradley came over to him, hit him on the back of the head and told him that he needed to show respect to the chief. Justice Gableman said that he believed Justice Bradley was not joking because nobody was laughing at the time. Justice Gableman said he has not told anyone about that incident and has not talked about that incident with anyone, including Justice Bradley, after it happened.

In both instances, a name is used and it's Justice Bradley who regards the name as disrespectful. In both instances, the name immediately precedes a regrettable touching. In one instance, Justice Bradley is the person who says the name and receives the regrettable touching, and in the other, she hears the name and performs the regrettable touching.

In the first instance, the person who used the name did so with an intent to express disrespect, and the named person is the one who does the touching. In the second instance, the named person's reaction isn't even described. We don't know what the Chief Justice thought of Justice Gableman calling her "Shirley." (It's simply her first name, not a diminutive.) It is Justice Bradley who imposed the interpretation of disrespect and who inflicted retribution (in this story, as told by Gableman, whose veracity remains in issue).

So we have 2 stories depicting Justice Bradley as having a heightened sensitivity to the wounding effect of an over-familiar form of address. In one, she deliberately uses a hostile epithet to diminish and control someone who is already the target of her anger. In the other, someone becomes the target of her anger after he uses someone's real name in what seems to have been a reasonably friendly if awkward effort at conversation.

"One family. One room. Four screens. Four realities, basically."

"While it may look like some domestic version of 'The Matrix' — families sharing a common space, but plugged into entirely separate planes of existence through technology — a scene like this has become an increasingly familiar evening ritual. As a result, the American living room in 2011 can often seem less like an oasis for shared activity, even if that just means watching television together, than an entangled intersection of data traffic — everyone huddled in a cyber-cocoon."

It's a NYT culture article.

Is there a problem here? If a family of 4 were sitting around together reading books, it would seem better than if they were all watching the same show on TV. And yet, with books, you wouldn't be able to IM stuff to each other.

With either books or computers, if you're with other people, you can easily read something out loud to the people in the room and start a conversation. My grandfather used to do that with the newspaper, and I've come to think of it as a kind of proto-blogging.

These days, if I'm reading something and finding it interesting, I might blog it to the whole world and try to start a conversation on line, but we still interact in real space. Meade might read something out loud to me, and that might lead to a long conversation, or it might get one of my all-too-typical responses: 1. "IM me the link," 2. "I already blogged that." 3. "I'm blogging that right now."

David Foster Wallace's marginalia-filled self-help books.

Maria Bustillos got access and reports in great detail.

That Wallace even had a copy of Bradshaw On: The Family came as a great surprise to me, as I mentioned earlier. But later I talked with my very old friend, S., who went into recovery almost exactly when Wallace did. S. explained that John Bradshaw was all the rage in AA circles at that time. (Bradshaw is the guy who popularized the idea of the "inner child" in the '90s, and he had a TV show on PBS that was hugely popular.)...

A highlighted passage in Bradshaw On: The Family:

Thought Disorders:
You are always reading about your problems, learning why you are the way you are.
You are numb
You control your emotions and feel shame when you can't
You gauge your behavior by how it looks–by the image you believe you're making.

Lots more at the linked piece, which reads a bit too much like the author's raw notes. The extensive thing ends with this, a quiz Wallace gave to students:

WIN A LUNCH WITH DAVE, SPARKLING CONVERSATIONALIST, WELL-MANNERED EATER, BY SIMPLY IDENTIFYING WHAT ALL THE FOLLOWING WORDS HAVE IN COMMON:

Foreign
Big
Diminutive
Incomprehensible
Untyped
Pulchritude
S-less
Unwritten
Indefinable
Misspelled
Vulgar
High-class
Invisible
Unvowelled
Obscene

Bustillos offers her answer: "My only stab at a guess is that these are words that can be used to describe writing itself, though I feel like 'pulchritude' is kind of wrong, that way. I would love to hear other ideas." No way she'd win the lunch! Isn't it obvious that Wallace was offering up an inkblot to open up the writer's minds? He could then pick the person who'd be most amusing to talk to for an hour. If you just want a correct answer, it's: They're all adjectives. But who wants to eat lunch with someone who'd say that?

ADDED: As several commenters point out, "pulchritude" is a noun. I need to be more careful. At lunch, I would spill the iced tea.

"It's always been dream of mine to interrupt a Supreme Court justice."

Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) to Justice Anthony Kennedy. 

At oral argument, the Justices interrupt the lawyers all the time, and what all the lawyers do is instantly stop talking when the Justice begins to speak. Now, members of Congress get the same thing at hearings. The person testifying shuts up as soon as the member speaks, even to say something entirely inane (like "It's always been  dream of mine to interrupt a Supreme Court justice").

The essence of conversation, revealed...

... by the complete absence of meaningful words.



These twin boys say nothing but "da da da" — call The Police — but the gesture and expression are elaborate and vital. They even get each other's jokes.

(The mother blogs here.)

"I got on the subway and accidentally bumped his leg and it started. He called me a pussy..."

"He called me a pussy and I told him 'I am what I eat.' When a girl laughed he went ballistic."

The saga of Daniel and "Bloody Loco."

Wisconsin protesters branch out into picketing M&I Bank... and some of them seem suspicious of Meade.

Yesterday, while I was in class, around 4 p.m., Meade went down to the Capitol Square to see what was going on. The main thing was this picket circle in front of M&I Bank. The protesters have some theory justifying dragging the bank into the protests, but I don't think you can figure it out from the signs. They're using the same chants they used against the government, notably "This is what democracy looks like." Democracy against a bank? But they are so passionate. Especially that one guy.



But what's really interesting here is the attention some of them give Meade. Watch for the lawyer with the Walker-as-Marie-Antoinette sign. Remember him from the graffiti-on-the-Civil-War-monument video? Watch for him to step out of the line and talk to some other guy, who then takes a picture of Meade. And then there are those 2 other guys who are suddenly up in Meade's face, who follow Meade as he leaves to go into the Capitol. Are they going to intimidate Meade?

This is edited video, and I've left out what happens when they get into the rotunda. Standing in the center of the rotunda, the 3 men converse/argue about freedom of speech. I've uploaded the 14-minute video separately and unedited. If you have the patience to watch that, it's funny to some extent, particularly because the young men are so fervent about their cause that they can't hear how bad some of the things they say are. They persist for a while, but they can't shake Meade and they can't answer the questions he asks. In the end, they walk away. And there's Meade standing alone in the center of the rotunda.

"Figures like Rush Limbaugh and to a much lesser extent, bloggers like Kos and Glenn Reynolds, are powerful because they represent a movement and ideology."

"They are the leaders of a team. Ann Althouse doesn't represent anything but herself."

True! There is no Team Althouse.

The Daily Cardinal came up with a list of the top 10 most influential figures in Madison....

Number 10 was absurd. Ann Althouse? There's a difference between being big and being influential. She might have been noticeable enough for Isthmus to run a cover story about her, but...

Ha. This is written by Jack Craver, who wrote that cover story in the Isthmus. He insulted me in the article, portraying me as an egotist, and he's doing it again here as he says I "don't represent anything but [my]self." His problem is that, as a lefty, he doesn't get individualism. It's not egoistic to write, representing myself. Who am I to represent if not myself? I am myself! The writing isn't egotistical. It's honest and expressive. People read what I write because I'm a specific person, and you can tell. It's influential to the extent that other people, as individuals, identify with what I've written or have their own thoughts inspired by it or feel like coming in here to talk with other people because a post set up an interesting conversation. If that's influential, maybe it's because there are a lot of individuals like me who enjoy free speaking and don't want to be led.

That time George Bush — at the dinner table with his wife and parents — said "What is sex like after 50?"

From an interview to air Monday:

"So I'm drunk at the dinner table at Mother and Dad's house in Maine. And my brothers and sister are there, Laura's there. And I'm sitting next to a beautiful woman, friend of Mother and Dad's," says Bush. "And I said to her out loud, 'What is sex like after 50?' "

After that, one could hear a pin drop. It was "total silence," says Bush. "And not only silence, but like serious daggers" from my mom and my wife.

He says that, with a case of "after-dinner remorses," he later called the woman to apologize. But she got the last laugh. Bush says that on his 50th birthday, when he was Texas governor, the woman sent him a letter reading: "Dear Governor, Well, what's the answer?"

Why can't adults talk about sex? This is only a story about the depredations of alcohol... but why? Why must conversation be so boring that an interesting question draws "serious daggers"?

Althouse's needs are met!

We're happy to find a place that might be okay, open for lunch in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Bellarietta. I misread it as Bellateria and joke that it's deleterious.



I'm cheered by the colored pencils and paper-topped table. (You know how I feel about drawing on table-paper. ("1 part Homer + 1 part Moai + a dash of Redon + sprinkle with love = Meade.") Ha. Those links go to last summer, in the early days of the Meadhouse marriage.) And there's a book too, in case we run out of amusing things to say: "The Little Book of After Dinner Speeches."



(Enlarge to read the text of the open book... and the messages we've penciled on the table.)

After extensive consultation with our excellent server Tanya, I trusted them with a Philly steak sandwich and Meade, oddly enough, went for a black bean burger. It looked like this and tasted as good as you'd hope upon seeing it, and it's hard for bread to meet my high standard:



Computer on the table? Damned right: There was WiFi! Yay! The wifie got her WiFi, and her hubby is happy with that. So marriage can work. It was possible to find a husband who suited my eccentric needs.



And it was possible to find a great place to eat in this little town in the middle of Wisconsin.

Life is good!

Dangerously contagious writing.

What writers should a good writer avoid getting tainted by?

The list discussed at the link is all about protecting the delicate sensibilities of novelists. To write, you need a good "ear." (Sorry, that's a metaphor. And a penchant for metaphors is something you might pick up from reading "Blood Meridian" by Cormac McCarthy.) The problem with reading is that it puts some author's way of saying things in the place in your mind that would otherwise be occupied by the way real human beings speak.

I think you can immunize yourself from the disease of overly influential writers by getting out there in the world listening to people and doing some talking yourself. Have conversations. Listen to other people and watch how they interact with you when you speak. Develop your voice in real life. Even if you don't end up with a good ear and an original writing style, you will have lived and you'll have your friends. Maybe even some stories to tell.

So put down that book...



... and go parading before it's too late.

And stop looking so scornful, it's twisting your face.

"The majority of Chatroulette users are male and under thirty-five, and many of them are trolling for girls, so they 'next' each other at barbaric rates."

"When you do decide to stop and engage, things can get a little awkward. On one of my first Chatrouletting attempts, I found myself talking to a man from Lyons, who had muted the sound. We watched each other typing and reacting to the words that scrolled next to our images, co-stars in a postmodern silent film.... Striking up a conversation with the person next to you on the subway is risky, and potentially time-consuming. On Chatroulette you can always just disappear."