The carrots tag.

Meade read the previous post — which ends with the old University of Michigan "cooked carrots" test — out loud, helping me proofread, and said, "Carrots! We know what carrots mean to Althouse," and I said, "Yeah, the carrots tag. There's a lot of great stuff under the carrots tag."

I was scrolling through the taggage, looking for the thing Meade was referring to, and I found this guy...



Here's another reference to the cooked carrots test, which "purported to place everyone on a spectrum from very masculine to very feminine, and perhaps the authorities imagined that they could identify the homosexuals."

What were the questions? — you may wonder. Famously, one question was do you prefer cooked or raw carrots. In my family, we only ate raw carrots, so I'd always regarded cooked carrots as gross. I suppose that made the University regard me as more of a lesbian. I seem to remember a question that asked what would you rather do, where one option was to take apart a clock and then put it back together again. I don't know what the other choice was, but I suspect that clock project skewed a lot of the boys gay.

I wonder what these sexuality authorities would have thought of Jeff Bezos's grandiose clock inside a mountain that ticks once every year for 10,000 years. Most macho man ever?

Here's what Meade was referring to, my analysis of a Hillary Clinton ad:

Bill says "No onion rings?" and Hillary responds "I'm looking out for ya." Now, the script says onion rings, because that's what the Sopranos were eating in that final scene, but I doubt if any blogger will disagree with my assertion that, coming from Bill Clinton, the "O" of an onion ring is a vagina symbol. Hillary says no to that, driving the symbolism home. She's "looking out" all right, vigilant over her husband, denying him the sustenance he craves. What does she have for him? Carrot sticks! The one closest to the camera has a rather disgusting greasy sheen to it. Here, Bill, in retaliation for all of your excessive "O" consumption, you may have a large bowl of phallic symbols! When we hear him say "No onion rings?," the camera is on her, and Bill is off-screen, but at the bottom of the screen we see the carrot/phallus he's holding toward her. Oh, yes, I know that Hillary supplying carrots is supposed to remind that Hillary will provide us with health care, that she's "looking out for" us, but come on, they're carrots! Everyone knows carrots are phallic symbols. But they're cut up into little carrot sticks, you say? Just listen to yourself! I'm not going to point out everything.

Some cranks chided me, but I doubled down with "Let's take a closer look at Bill's carrot and Hillary's onion ring."

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"The student was McGinn’s paid research assistant on a project relating to the evolution of the human hand."

"McGinn, who is 63, admits to engaging in sexual banter with his assistant. He notes, however, that the subject of his study, the human hand, tempted such banter.... McGinn describes his relationship with the student as an 'intellectual romance.' But the student says she received an email from him saying that the two should have sex in his office during the summer when no one else is around. McGinn denies sending such an email. However, he admits sending an email that said 'had a hand job imagining you giving me a hand job.'"

That's Paul Mirengoff writing about the case of the philosophprof Colin McGinn, whom we were talking about the other day here. Mirengoff links to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that says:

While he resigned of his own accord, he says that he “couldn’t win,” because Donna E. Shalala, the university’s president, was determined to drive him out.

I remember when Donna Shalala stood by men accused of sexual harassment:

The highest profile members of the administration, no doubt, will also be sorting out their feelings. In January [1998], Clinton assured his Cabinet he was innocent, and Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, stepped out onto the White House driveway to back him up.

"I believe the allegations are completely untrue," she said.

"I'll second that. Definitely," said William Daley, the commerce secretary.

"Third it," said Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services.

Third it. Ha. That's a lot to live down.

As for McGinn and "hand job." Should we empathize with a brilliant writer's impulse to riff amusingly with images and puns? The need for the inclusion of women in all of the academic fields trumps male complacency about sexual banter. I can't imagine wanting to use a student as a sounding board for anything that could be misconstrued as a sexual advance (unless one really were moving in on this student). McGinn openly attests to his high opinion of his own intelligence, but how can you not see all that risk? I've got to hypothesize that the risk was titillating and he chose to take it. I suspect the presence of Shalala as the authority figure in his territory only made the risk hotter.

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At long last audiotape: Monica Lewinsky micromanages Bill Clinton's next blowjob.

National Enquire seems to have a cassette that was supposed to have been destroyed long ago. On it, we hear Monica handling the sexual logistics:

"Since I know you will be alone tomorrow evening, I have two proposals for you, neither of which is you not seeing me... Now the first thing that has to happen is that you need to pre-plan with Betty..."

Betty Currie was Bill's secretary.

"... that you will leave the office at, I don't know, at 7, 7:30 so that everyone else who hates me that causes me lots of trouble goes home... Then you quickly sneak back and then in the meantime I quickly sneak over and then we can have a nice little visit for, you know, 15 minutes or half an hour. Whatever you want."...

“Maybe we could go over and watch a movie together and just have kind of, I don't know, boxed dinners or something like that... And then that way we don’t have to deal with the problem of me… of there being a record of me going upstairs and we can spend some time together and see a good movie. So I don’t know, those are two proposals and you can’t refuse me because I’m too cute and adorable and soon I won’t be here anymore to pop over."

Ah, those were the days. When relationships had context. It was more dinner and a movie, an elegant trajectory of feeling, not merely those phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness we hear so much of these days.

"I’m hoping you will hear this and you will choose which one you want to do and go tell Betty and then she can call me and let me know so I don't have to stress out all day and I don't have to call her every two hours and bug her because, I know you will find this very hard to believe, but I can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I’m very persistent, but um… I really want to see you."

How feminism has regressed since that golden era! Back then, a girl knew how to demand what she wanted and to get it.

ADDED: How blinded by sex do you need to be not to hear your future nemesis in her words?  I have two proposals for you, neither of which is you not seeing me... I can be a pain in the ass...  I’m very persistent, but um... But um, indeed! Think about how these  personality quirks will play out when you cut off her access. If you can. I bet you can't.

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"We’re... baffled by Huma’s choice because women no longer need to be professionally affixed to a man to make inroads in business or politics..."

"... especially when they’ve got a résumé like hers. Two decades ago, Hillary needed Bill, that much we could understand."

What bullshit! Written by Ann Friedman in New York Magazine under the heading ("Stand by Your Man? How Huma Can Do What Hillary Couldn’t"). I don't give a damn about Huma or what happens to her, but this is unmitigated trash about Hillary. Hillary did not need Bill. Not 2 decades ago, when he was running for President, and not 4 decades ago, when she graduated from Yale Law School.

In fact, there was strong pressure on women back in 1992 and 1973, even more than now, to go it alone and not stand behind some man. Hillary knew it was a career risk to go to Arkansas with Bill, and she chose it with eyes open. Friedman is purveying some made-up social history, asserting that we "understand" it, like it's in our cultural memory. But it's completely untrue.


I was around back then, and I remember the messages to women in 1973, the year Hillary graduated from Yale Law School, which was the year I graduated from college (and I read all the feminist books of that era). By 1981, the year I graduated from law school, the message that woman had independent careers and were not destined to be helpmeets to their men was itself so old-fashioned that it wasn't even said anymore. And by 1992, the year of Hillary's sit-by-your-man interview on "60 Minutes," radical feminism — with its active distancing from patriarchy — had been tearing through the culture for years.

Such pathetic nonsense about Hillary and her place in history. And as for Huma, the notion that she could now be some pathbreaker is so stupid I don't know where it came from. Some people — who are they? — got fixated on her — why? Because she's somewhat attractive? Because she's somewhat attractive and Muslim? Because she's somewhat attractive, Muslim, and close to Hillary? I'd like those people to confess what they're so enamored about. I bet they won't, because it's nothing but stupidity.

ADDED: I suspect that Hillary and Bill are responsible for screwing up the cultural memory. So many people subordinated their feminism to Democratic Party interests during the Lewinsky scandal. It erased memory of earlier feminist progress.

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"The Clintons are upset with the comparisons that the Weiners seem to be encouraging..."

"... that Huma is 'standing by her man' the way Hillary did with Bill, which is not what she in fact did," according to an unnamed "top state Democrat."

“The Clintons are pissed off that Weiner’s campaign is saying that Huma is just like Hillary,’’ said the source. “How dare they compare Huma with Hillary? Hillary was the first lady. Hillary was a senator. She was secretary of state.”

She wasn't any of those things in 1992 when she sat by her man on "60 Minutes" and claimed to be doing something more than whatever it was Tammy Wynette was singing about in "Stand By Your Man." And what Bill had done was worse than what Weiner seems to have done. Bill had sex with other women. Weiner merely sexted. And Bill was sitting there lying about it and Hillary backed him up big time, whereas in the recent Huma-and-Anthony TV stunt, the misdeeds are admitted.

If Hillary is pissed off, I would think it's because she doesn't want people reminded of her old stand-by-your-man routine:

“Hillary didn’t know Huma would do this whole stand-by-your-man routine, and that’s one of the reasons the Clintons are distancing themselves from all this nonsense,’’ the source said.

I put up the old 1992 interview in my post about Weiner yesterday, and we watched the whole 10 minutes and laughed a lot. I scoffed: "This is the first female President of the United States?!"

I encourage you to watch the whole thing. Watch Bill bullshit to avoid telling an outright lie, and watch Hillary nod as her man wriggles through — lip bite at 6:15 — and marvel at her delight in his equivocations — her smug smile at 6:38! At 7:02, Hillary does a little "zone of privacy" riff that should feel irksome to women's rights advocates, since it's the key phrase in the law relating to women's bodily autonomy and Hillary is using it to say don't look at the selfish, women-exploiting things my husband has done.

After that, Bill is very animated and smiley, waving his hands about, theorizing about privacy, and at some point we see his big hand resting on and weighing down Hillary's demurely clasped hands. When did his hand get there? I ask out loud and scroll back to see how he managed to plunk it there. It's just suddenly there at 8:01 after a cut to Steve Kroft's face. CBS made that cut! We weren't allowed to see him segue from expansive explaining gesture to holding the woman down. At 9:03, after another cut, Hillary says they will not say anything more, no matter how much they are pushed.

And Kroft pushes, suggesting that they have reached — to use the classic adultery-tolerating buzzwords — "an understanding" and "an arrangement." Bill's all "Wait a minute, wait a minute" — and his big mitt is back on top of Hillary's hands — "You're looking at 2 people who love each other. This is not 'an arrangement' or 'an understanding.'" And then, in a very sincere, whispery tone: "This is a marriage. That's a very different thing."

Here's where Hillary jumps in (9:38) — with a harsh, Southern-accented twang and waggling her head around — "You know, I'm not sittin' here like some little woman standin' by her man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sittin' here because I love him and I respect him... and if that's not enough for people then, heck, don't vote for him."

The soft gentle man, and the sharp modern-but-not-modern woman. That moment was the triumph of a lifetime for Hillary. It made everything happen. It got her man elected President. That's so much more than anything Huma accomplished in her balky wan press conference with Weiner. Hillary is rightly pissed.

ADDED: Meade — who's sittin' by me right now — reads the post out loud and says "Bring in the comments... I think it will be great." So go ahead. Do comments. I have to moderate them, so there may be a delay and comments must relate to the text of the post to be approved.

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I condemn Kedem.

"According to two people told of the decision, the campaign manager, Danny Kedem, no longer wished to oversee Mr. Weiner’s bid for New York mayor after a week of bruising revelations about the candidate’s latest online conduct...."

What kind of campaign manager bugs out on you right when you need him? He should be your trusty champion! So inappropriate. Defend your guy! What? Are you trying to save your career? Your career is in campaign managing, and you dropped your guy when he was down.

Unacceptable. I don't really care that what Weiner did is is also unacceptable. This is a campaign. Did James Carville and George Stephanopoulos abandon Bill Clinton in 1992 when the Gennifer Flowers story hit?

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