President Donald J. Trumpet went all “Kumbaya” in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, proclaiming the pablum platitude that every president proclaims – that the state of the union is strong, because the American people are strong and together they’ll continue to be strong, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Look, it’s too little, too late. The mean-spirited, divisive damage is already done, with more always just an unscripted tweet away. And in case you didn’t get that message ...
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Read MoreWe get, it is often said, the art we deserve – that is, the art we need, the art that the times demand.
That certainly could be said of the new Steven Spielberg thriller, “The Post.” The story of a First Amendment showdown between a rising newspaper, The Washington Post, and the Nixon White House, “The Post” works on several different planes – politically, professionally and personally, as Edie Demas, executive director of the Jacob Burns Film Center, noted at the screening I attended. As such the movie speaks to an era in which “fake news” and #MeToo have become buzzwords. ...
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Read MoreWith the anti-abortion rally this past Friday and Women’s March Saturday, I thought it was time I address a subject that I have avoided writing about for most of my life – choice.
I have always been pro-life, though not in the way the pro-life movement might think. I’m not only personally anti-abortion but I’m also against the death penalty. Heck, I don’t even like to kill bugs. I feel bad when buildings are taken down, and don’t even get me started on historic buildings. ...
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Read MoreEvery revolution has a counterrevolution. We push a pendulum away from us and it comes back to us with equal force. That’s just physics.
And, as it turns out, politics. A pair of Catherines – actress Deneuve and writer Millet – have joined with 100 Frenchwomen to sign a letter in Le Monde stating that #MeToo has gone too far. They want men to be treated fairly. They don’t want women to appear as wimps. And, most of all, they don’t want sexual freedom curtailed. The “freedom to bother” – as in a man bothering a woman – is “indispensable to sexual freedom.” ...
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Read MoreThere were no less than three sexual harassment stories in Tuesday’s New York Times.
A story headlined “300 Strong: Hollywood Women Unite to Fight Harassment” detailed the agenda of the new Time’s Up initiative, which includes a legal defense fund, already backed by $13 million in donations, to protect underprivileged women “from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.” The initiative is also calling for women to turn the Golden Globes’ red carpet Sunday into a bully pulpit as they don basic black to talk about the sexual harassment issue instead of what they’re wearing. ...
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Read MoreIn his acclaimed new book “The Evolution of Beauty” (Doubleday, 428 pages, $30), Richard O. Prum theorizes that evolution is not just about what we need but what we want. And that has profound implications for gender issues, including what I describe on this blog as “the beauty trap.”
The hourglass shape and youthful facial features, such as large eyes, of the female and the particular characteristics of male genitalia (boneless phallus, large scrotum, small testes) are beyond what is necessary for reproduction, Prum writes. Rather, he says, these features are what each desires in the other.
But it is not a level playing field ...
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Read MoreIt’s the season in which we give thanks for our blessings as a nation and as individuals. But that’s not what prevails in certain quarters.
Here we must begin at the top. Usually, American presidents use the Thanksgiving holiday as an opportunity to express how grateful we all are. Instead, El Presidente Trumpet, issuing a decree from his cell phone at the Winter White House (Mar a Lago) in Florida, is using the holiday to complain about how ungrateful certain people are toward him. Namely LaVar Ball, father of LiAngelo Ball, the UCLA basketball player picked up for shoplifting in China. ...
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