Glenn Loury and I don't see what's so bad about Anthony Weiner's sexting.

We question the denouncement of Weiner, speculate about the nature of the "arrangement" or "understanding" between Huma and Anthony (and Bill and Hillary), and compare the wrongness of sexting to pornography, adultery, and prostitution:

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"As a feminist, I find it infinitely sad to imagine a vibrant young woman sitting alone at her computer..."

"... and turning herself into a sex object for a man... she does not know — even if she is also turning him into a sex object. Twentieth-century feminism always linked the social progress of women with an expanding sense of self-worth — in the sexual as well as intellectual and professional spheres. A willingness to engage in Internet sex with strangers, however, expresses not sexual empowerment but its opposite — a loneliness and low opinion of oneself that leads to the conclusion that any sexual contact is better than no contact at all."

So writes Susan Jacoby, in the context of the Anthony Weiner story. I suspect that Jacoby was sitting alone at her computer when she wrote that. And I'm sitting alone at my computer writing this now. Is anything infinitely sad about writing at the computer? Is it sadder when you expect someone is waiting to read what you write and you expect them to write back? These days I choose, for each post, whether I want to allow comments or not, and for this one I haven't chosen yet. Is the sadness of what I'm doing right now dependent on whether I allow comments?

Or is this infinite sadness dependent on whether you are writing about sex, which I kind of am, or writing about sex while hoping that your reader finds you sexy?

As a feminist, she finds it infinitely sad, so perhaps you have to be a feminist to feel what's so terribly sad about a woman sitting at a computer, writing sexily to someone she expects will write back sexily. And perhaps the woman at the computer needs to be vibrant and young for it to be extremely sad for her to chose bodily solitude and sex in written form. Those are the words of the self-identified feminist, feeling sad about women writing alone and sexily at computers. Jacoby is 68 years old. Is she like Paul's grandfather in "Hard Day's Night," scoffing at Ringo for reading — "tormenting your eyes with that rubbish" — instead of "gettin' out there and living... Parading the streets!"?

That's not about sexting. It's timeless advice from the old to the young. Perhaps the elders in Jane Austen's life pressured her to quit writing about love relationships and get out there and fall in love.

But Jacoby seems most concerned with context:

Sex with strangers online amounts to a diminution, close to an absolute negation, of the context that gives human interaction genuine content. Erotic play without context becomes just a form of one-on-one pornography....

Deep down, what does a man really think of himself when he must feed his ego with phony gasps of erotic pleasure from strangers in a digital vastness? What does a woman think of herself in the same arid zone of sex without sensuality?

Sex without context is pornography (to Jacoby). It's arid and fake. Even the man's orgasm is fake: "phony gasps." Even the man must lack self-esteem. That's the wrong kind of equality, with the woman straying out into the "arid zone" where meager men satisfy themselves. That's "not the sort of equality envisioned by feminism," she says in the end.  Women should shun this "lowest common denominator" sexuality that "debases the passion and reason of both men and women." Jacoby claims this end for feminism, but it's the oldest task in the world for women: channeling male sexuality, taming them, civilizing them, lifting them up, pumping the phallic lever for the elevation of us all.

(I'll put the comments on to make this more sad.)

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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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The consequences of blushing.

1. I was reading this Wall Street Journal essay — "The Appeal of Embarrassment/Blushing, fidgeting, looking down — the more contrite a wrongdoer looks, the more likable he seems" — written by Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and author of the enticingly titled "The Trouble with Testosterone" and "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers."

2. I don't give a damn about zebras and their freedom from ulcers. (I'll just guess that when any given zebra slips toward ulcer-producing mental activity, some lion eats him, and that's the end of that trajectory.) But I am interested in the trouble with testosterone in connection with the subject of Sapolsky's essay, which is Anthony Weiner. Something about that ravaged face. Is he using testosterone to build up those muscles he shows off in his selfies?


3. Sapolsky's essay is not, however, about testosterone, but visible signs of embarrassment, like blushing. Is Weiner one of these people who do not blush like normal people? If so, Sapolsky suggests, we shouldn't trust him. "Numerous studies have shown that autonomic responses to strong emotions are blunted in sociopaths. Thus, in individuals there is a positive and statistically significant covariance between concern about violating social norms and concern with pro-sociality." (I'm resisting inserting an old joke here.)

4. Sapolsky's essay pulled me in enough to read it, but it didn't make the cut into bloggable. Something unsatisfying about the maundering. And it's just the same old thing about Weiner, really. Why isn't he embarrassed? The Stanford prof doesn't have anything new to say: Why doesn't Weiner blush? Maybe he did blush? Was anyone checking to see if he blushed? That's how Sapolsky ends it, saying it would be "nice" if there were some kind of blush-o-meter to check.

5. I thought I could find a way into blogging the essay I'd dumped time into reading with an almost-remembered song lyric with the word "blush." Was it Bob Dylan? I do a word search at bobdylan.com I see Bob's used the word exactly once: "Now, there’s a certain thing/That I learned from my friend, Mouse/A fella who always blushes/And that is that ev’ryone/Must always flush out his house/If he don’t expect to be/Goin’ ’round housing flushes."

6. That's not helpful. This friend Mouse always blushes. I thought the line was never blushes, which might help me with the Weiner/Sapolsky quandry, and anyway, it's a dumb Dylan verse, just some off the top of his head Basement Tapes foolery, where Bob not only wasn't above rhyming "mouse" and "house" but he also double-used "flush" in his low-effort rhyme for "blush."

7. I'm not getting any good material about blushing, and I'm completely distracted by the title of the song, "Open the Door, Homer." If you've listened to "The Basement Tapes," you know it as "Open the Door, Richard." What's with the Homer/Richard switch?

8. That turns out to be a much better question than did Anthony Weiner blush? For one thing, it's perfectly answerable, via Wikipedia. "Open the Door, Richard" was an old vaudeville routine:

Pigmeat Markham, one of several who performed the routine, attributed it to his mentor Bob Russell. The routine was made famous by Dusty Fletcher on stages like the Apollo Theater in New York and in a short film. Dressed in rags, drunk, and with a ladder as his only prop, Fletcher would repeatedly plunk the ladder down stage center, try to climb it to knock on an imaginary door, then crash sprawling on the floor after a few steps while shouting, half-singing "Open the Door, Richard." After this he would mutter a comic monologue, then try the ladder again and repeat the process, while the audience was imagining what Richard was so occupied doing.

Jack McVea was responsible for the musical riff which became associated with the words "Open the Door, Richard" that became familiar to radio listeners and as many as 14 different recordings were made....

"Open the Door, Richard" was an early R&B novelty record, a song category that became a basic genre of rock and roll in the 1950s. It started the fad of answer song records. It was also the first commercial record to use a fade out ending....

The phrase "Open the Door, Richard" passed into African American Vernacular English and became associated with the Civil Rights Movement. When college students marched in 1947 to the state capitol demanding the resignation of segregationist governor Herman Talmadge, some of their banners read "Open the Door Herman." The Los Angeles Sentinel used "Open the Door Richard" as the title of an editorial demanding black representation in city government and a Detroit minister used the title for a sermon on open housing.

"Open the Door, Richard" became a catchphrase in broader American society, as well; the line appeared in routines by Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and Phil Harris. Jimmy Durante and Burl Ives each recorded versions of the song; opera star Lauritz Melchior performed it on national radio. Molly Picon recorded a Yiddish language version; it was also covered in Spanish, Swedish, French, Armenian and Hungarian. There were "Richard" hats, shirts, and jeans, and ads for products ranging from ale to perfume incorporated references to the song....

In 1967, Bob Dylan and The Band recorded an homage to the song as part of The Basement Tapes. Entitled "Open the Door, Homer," the chorus nevertheless repeated the phrase "Open the door Richard."

9. The door never opens, I think. What's that old line, when a door closes, a window opens? I immediately remember the lyric I was searching for at stage #5:

Some people, they like to go out dancing
And other peoples, they have to work...
And there's even some evil mothers
Well they're gonna tell you that everything is just dirt
Y'know that, women, never really faint
And that villains always blink their eyes, woo!
And that, y'know, children are the only ones who blush!
And that, life is just to die!

10. Children are the only ones who blush... that's what the evil mothers tell you. The evil mothers are the sociopaths who don't blush, and they'd like you to believe that no adults blush, so you won't attribute any significance to the failure to blush when caught in a shameful act.

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"I've found the perfect woman. Gorgeous, sexy and like a bit of crazy."

Texted Anthony Weiner to Sydney Leathers. I imagine that about what Bill Clinton might have thought about Monica Lewinsky. Oh, these men who marry excellent wives and then find there's not enough sex and — more perversely — none of the old crazy.

That made me think about the old political phrase "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." It was an attack, not a description of the perfect woman. Here's David Brock explaining the phrase:

If [Clarence] Thomas was completely innocent, Anita Hill would have had to be insane to go on national television and tell a lie under oath. Grasping for an explanation of the inexplicable, doing everything I could to ruin Hill's credibility, I took a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory—and often contradictory—allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix.... She was, in my words, "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty."...

Some conservative friends... did warn me quietly that the "little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" line, a reference to the classic nuts-and-sluts defense in sexual harassment cases, was in poor taste, or at least politically foolish, in that it handed my critics a club with which to beat me. The phrase certainly stuck, and it would be unearthed and brandished in my face in all future controversies over my work... I had fallen in with radicals of the Gingrich-Limbaugh stripe. After all, how far was the "nutty/slutty" line from Newt's rants about the "grotesque" and "sick" Democrats, or Limbaugh's slurs on blacks and women?

What works as an attack on a woman's fitness for public life is also a description of the perfect woman.

My Imaginary Reader gasps and splutters out: Different times, different parties, different purposes.

Have I made you uncomfortable enough to call me crazy?

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"He once described himself to me as an argumentative, perpetually horny, middle-aged man — and that’s completely correct."

Said Sydney Leathers — if that really is her name — about Carlos Danger — which is the dorky and possibly anti-Hispanic name Anthony Weiner devised for himself.

Leathers said after meeting on Facebook last summer, their private chats turned from politics to steamy sex almost instantly.

“I had messaged him, he poked me, we started talking a lot, became Facebook friends and started talking on other, more private channels,” she said. “It quickly got sexual, obviously. Which is strange. I was disappointed in him [in 2011], I thought he was a better man.”

People have some strange ideas about what's strange. And they also lie — even to themselves — about what's strange.

“Anthony Weiner was not good at phone sex,” said [TheDirty.com editor Nik] Richie, quoting Leathers. “[He] would orgasm in 30 seconds.”

It depends on what the meaning of "good" is. We are talking about phone sex. Some people hate long telephone calls. You can never get off the phone. They'll talk your ear off. But when Carlos Danger was on the phone, Leathers would never have to think I don't have time for this. It could always be simply Good old Carlos, what a funny, fast talker, and quite efficient at getting what he wants. But then he didn't call anymore. Sads!

Then: I'll finally get my satisfaction. I can be famous. Hey, journalist boys! I've got a story for you!

ADDED: I had the wrong link before. Fixed.

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"When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing?" asked Anthony Weiner.

I know what you're thinking, but — and this is from March 2011, when Weiner was still a Congressman and while in the presence of Mayor Bloomberg — he said: "I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes."

I got there this morning via Dan Savage, because I wanted to react to the current denouncements of Weiner, and I knew Savage had written in support of Weiner. On his podcast, he'd said something like: All your kids are already sexting constantly, and you'd better adjust, the sooner the better, to a future in which everybody's going to have pictures like that out there. Here's some relevant Savage writing (from before Weiner resigned):

While I hope Weiner comes clean, I hope [he] comes out swinging: He didn't do anything wrong, he didn't do anything millions of other Americans aren't also doing, he didn't break any laws. His privacy has been invaded. He's being attacked. He is the victim here. And if doing what Weiner has done disqualifies a person from public life, there won't be anyone qualified to be [in] public life in ten years time save the Amish.

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The incorrigible Weiner kept sexting even after his resignation from Congress.

New texts and pics have gone up on line, forcing Weiner to do an emergency press conference.

Huma was by his side:

And in her first public remarks on the scandal, a clearly nervous Abedin said it took “a lot of work and a whole lot of therapy” to put her marriage back together.

"It was not an easy choice in any way but I made the decision that it was worth staying in this marriage,” she said. “I didn’t know how it would work out but I did know that I wanted to give it a try. I love him. I have forgiven him. I believe in him.... And, as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward.”

They're a power couple, yoked for power. Of course, they move forward. It's not that complicated. I don't even believe they indulged in "a whole lot of therapy."

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"She approached in a knit white top and navy-blue business skirt, her dark, almost black hair down to her shoulders."

"She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race."

#1 on a list of "The Four Silliest/Creepiest Huma Abedin Descriptions in 'New York' Magazine's Weiner Piece," compiled by Isaac Chotiner, at The New Republic, who says "Abedin always gets good press, but this piece takes it to a new level." But it's not true that "Abedin always gets good press." Chotiner's wrong about that. And the selected lines from the New York piece (which is written by Mark Jacobson) are so gloriously absurd, that they must be intentional satire and not a new level of good press, so Chotiner must also be wrong about that. I'm giving the win to Jacobson, and I haven't even read his article yet. It's a tad early on a Monday for that. Here's one pull quote:

If it was a mystery why Huma Abedin decided Anthony Weiner was the man for her, there were clear practical reasons to stay with him. It was far more than the fact that she worked for Hillary, learned the haute Tammy Wynette drill from the best. Weiner was, after all, the father of her child. If the candidate didn’t want Jordan to grow up hearing how the naughty pictures had ended his father’s political career, why should his mother feel any differently? Then again, they could just love each other.

I suspect that by the time Jordan is grown up, he and all the young people he knows will be sending photos of themselves in their underpants as the normal friendly way to say "hello." What will be hard — hard — to explain is why his father had to resign from elected office for such a thing. Why didn't Huma leave him? Maybe it was to say to the people of the future — including her grown-up child — that she knew, even back in the old days, that sexting is trifling, and the only real infraction was the husband idly flirted with other women. Who resigns from Congress or gets divorced over that?

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