Sex and the single-minded journalists

Strange, strange essay by Michael Wolff in the newest Vanity Fair.

Its very premise is strange, Wolff seems to have a strange conception of who is middle-aged and what it is to be middle-aged, and he includes an anecdote that is strange in itself and which is very strange of him to have bought and passed along, but I'll get to that.

First, the strange premise.  We are all fascinated by the sex lives of elderly politicians and spend our time wondering about what they do in bed.

Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race...

We want to know. That’s a big part of Bill Clinton’s legacy: there’s always a sexual explanation. We’re savvy. Sex completes the picture—it explains so much. Tim Russert and other Sunday-talk-show hosts might maintain the illusion that politics is, or should be, a formal dialogue about impersonal issues, with sex only a topic of surprise, scandal, and shocked-shockedness, but in real life everybody is constantly and openly speculating on the sexual nature and needs and eccentricities of every rising and demanding political personality.

Openly speculating?

Really?

Can't recall that I have.

Doesn't seem to come up very often on the blogs I read either.

Lots of talk about health care plans, gas tax holidays, the collapse of the economy, and isn't there a war we're involved in somewhere?

People I know in the analog world don't seem to be doing that kind of speculating either or thinking that "there's always a sexual explanation."

My mother called me up just before the New York primary to ask me my opinion on Obama and Clinton.  She didn't want to know which one I thought was sexier.

Or kinkier.

The only people I know who have done any speculating on the question are journalists like David Broder, Patrick Healy in that voyeruistic article for the New York Times about how much alone time Bill and Hillary were managing, and now Michael Wolff.

The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.

I shouldn't speak ill of the dead since by now a mob of "the post-sexual set" has probably dragged him from his office in the Conde Nast building and hauled him uptown to Central Park where they've hung him up by his genetalia from Cleopatra's Needle, but that paragraph alone should consign Wolff to his shrink's couch for several hundred hours of psychoanalytic unraveling.

Listen, normal people do not speculate about the sex lives of politicians and not because we're all that virtuous or prudish or hypocritical or because most politicians are not very pretty and picturing them in the sack causes us to shudder.

It's because normal people do not spend their time speculating on other people's sex lives.  It's the mental equivalent of being able to walk by our neighbors' houses at night without having to rush up to press our noses against each and every lighted window.

Part of what scandalizes us about political sex scandals is that they force us to consider things we don't think it's any of our business to consider...things like Eliot Spitzer's socks.

For people who do want to speculate on the sex lives of strangers, that's why we have movie stars and teenage pop idols, who are at least blessed with beautiful and photogenic naked backs and bare shoulders.  But even among the most gossip-addicted readers of People and the National Enquirer, the real interest is in the romantic lives of their favorites.  The sex is part and parcel.  And the point is to live vicariously through the likes of Brad and Angelina.

And it's not so much the case that people want to be Brad and Angelina as they want to be what Brad and Angelina are, beautiful, rich, famous, and adored, living lives in which romantic misadventures are the worst of their worries.

With very few exceptions---Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Bill and Hillary Clinton in their prime---most people do not look to politicians for the same vicarious thrills and escapes into fantasy as they do movie stars.

We want our politicians to represent us but that's far from saying we want them to stand in for us as surrogate selves.  We hire them to do a job and our interest in them is in how well they do that job and that's why, to the consternation of the professional scolding class in the Media, we often don't care at all about their personal oddnesses.

Wolff, though, believes otherwise.  Stranger than this, however, is Wolff's contention that while we're all imagining our political leaders naked we're creeped out by what we're imagining and what creeps us out is the fact that all these naked politicians are middle-aged.

Middle-agedness is in itself creepy.  To be middle-aged is to be grotesque, repulsive, and ridiculous, and all of this creepiness, grotesquery, repulsiveness, and ridiculousness is, tautologically, both caused by middle-aged sexuality and makes sex in middle-age creepy, grotesque, repulsive, and ridiculous.

Which, according to Wolff, is why folks like Barack Obama so much.  He's not middle-aged.

There is next to no speculation about Barack Obama’s sexual secrets. This is a seismic shift in racial subtext. The white men are the sexual reprobates and loose cannons (while Mitt and Hillary are just strange birds) and the black man the figure of robust middle-class family warmth.

Against these middle-aged people, he’s the naturalist, the credible and hopeful figure of a man who actually might be having sex with his smiling, energetic, and oomphy wife. (During the Spitzer affair, a friend of mine, a middle-aged white doctor and an active Obama supporter, curiously dropped into something like street talk to say Obama would never have the sex problems of middle-aged politicians, “because Michelle would whip his skinny ass.” A good man, in other words, is a controlled man.) He’s the only one in the entire field who doesn’t suggest sexual desperation. He represents our ideal of what a good liberal’s sex life ought to be.

A couple more paragraphs for Wolff to talk over with a professional, but note that, besides the strange racial and marital hang-ups, Wolff is saying that we don't have to worry about Obama making himself ridiculous or creepy in our dirty minds' eyes because he and his wife are young and good looking, as if no one with an "oomphy" spouse would ever be tempted to anything besides healthy, uncreepy, monogamous and conjugal sex.

This is in an essay that includes discussions of the sex lives of John Kennedy and Eliot Spitzer, both of whose spouses rate fairly high on the oomphy-scale.

But JFK and Spitzer cheated on their oomphy wives and, as the title of Wolff's article gigglingly proclaims, "It's the adultery, stupid."

(Wolff says Obama is young.  But he's only two years younger than Eliot Spitzer and, if and when he's sworn in as President, he will be older than John Kennedy was when he died.  Wolff also calls the 65 year old Fred Thompson middle-aged.)

Adultery, here, is what makes middle-aged sex creepy.  Forget that.  Adultery is middle-aged sex.  Adultery is also the defining characteristic of middle-age.

Middle-aged sex is middle-aged men making fools of themselves by cheating on their wives.

Middle-aged women cheating on their husbands don't exist in Wolff's article.  Hillary Clinton is an object of sexual curiosity only because when we look at her we can't help thinking about what Bill is up to and what thong-flashing young woman he might be up to it with.

Wolff is limited to a degree by the examples he has to draw on.  Politics is still a male-dominated world.  But go back up to that passage I quoted where Wolff describes Hillary Clinton as the "special interest candidate of...the post-sexual set."   He's saying that middle-aged women are done with sex.

Actually, look over his description of the Obama marriage and you'll see that he doesn't seem to think that even a young woman like Michelle Obama has a real interest in sex for the sake of pleasure or love---young women use sex to keep their men in line; older women, having lost all sexual desire, no longer have control over their men, and that's why those men make fools of themselves in the beds of younger women or men, which would seem to imply that Mrs Senator Larry Craig could have kept her husband out of airport bathrooms if she'd still been willing to get nasty with him.

Middle-aged sex is defined by male desire and adultery, and besides being ridiculous and repugnant it is pathetic.

Now, why Wolff thinks we are fascinated by the sex lives of the ugly, pathetic, and foolish is beyond me.  As I said, for those who want to live vicariously through the sexual and romantic psychodramas of strangers we have movie stars.  And for those who get off on fantasies about what strangers are actually doing when they get naked we have pornography.  Why then anyone would waste a minute contemplating what John and Cindy McCain might enjoy when all the kids are out or in bed and they turn the lights down low is a mystery.

I can guess where he gets the idea that people are indulging themselves with such unerotic erotica.

Sex sells.

It sells newspapers and it sells ads on TV.

When criticized about the Media's obsession with sex and scandal and other trivial pursuits, various Media types will defend themselves and their industries by claiming something along the lines of "We're only giving the public what it wants!"  Which isn't much of a defense in the mouths of the heirs of P.T. Barnum.  In the mouths of the supposed heirs of Edward R. Murrow it ought to cause their tongues to snap off their rollers.

But some people will buy anything and there are nearly 300 million people in this country.  A very small percentage of 300 million is still an awful lot of people.  If you make a buck off of just one percent, that's 3 million smackers right in your pocket.

Besides the fact that getting rich off of exploiting suckers doesn't tell you anything about the people who didn't buy your snake oil, there is also a chicken and the egg question to consider.  Are you selling what the people want or are the people buying because that's all you've got to sell them?

You can't tell what the public wants from what some members of the public buy.  What you can see is that our National Press Corps is very interested in the sex lives of the politicians it covers, whether that's because they're all a bunch of hacks who think it's their job to feed the suckers a steady diet of sex and scandal or because it's the members of the Press Corps themselves who have this very strange compulsion to openly speculate on how soon Bill will embarrass Hillary with another bimbo eruption and to swoon over the size of George Bush's package and tell us that Jerri Thompson looks like a pole dancer and assure us that John McCain must be a vital old codger because well, look at his wife, for crying out loud!

Journalism is a voyeuristic endeavor by nature and reporters have to be in a way and to a degree spies and gossips, and just as among the ranks of shoe salesmen there are bound to be foot fetishists, journalism probably attracts a fair share of Peeping Toms.

But over the last few decades, as the coverage of national politics has become more obsessive and endless it has also become more and more driven by the superficial and easily managed---process has trumped policy and personality has trumped both.  It's a whole lot easier to employ some cheap Freudianism---"Sex explains everything"---than to try to find out and explain what any given candidate for any office actually plans to do when elected. 

I'm not saying that the sexual misadventures of politicians are never news.  (I would argue that it's not the sex but the corruption and mis- and malfeasance that are often contingent upon the misadventure that make the sex news.  Rudy Giuliani's cheating on his wife is none of my business except that he got the City to pay for it.  I don't care if John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist; I do care if he was bought off by the corporate interests on whose behalf she was lobbying.  And as for Eliot Spitzer, well, being stupid has never been a disqualification for holding elected office, but breaking the law while being stupid...?)  But sex doesn't explain everything.

It's a matter of character, they'll say.  JFK's recklessness about sex should have told us how reckless he'd be in office.  Reckless?  Really?  Does that explain why he was so cautious about Civil Rights?  Does that explain why he didn't get us all blown up in October of 1962?  Wait a minute.  How about the space race and his decision to set us on the challenge of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade?  He was sex obsessed and what are rockets anyway if they aren't the ultimate phallic symbol?

So, speaking of JFK, that brings me to the final strangeness in Wolff's essay.

Kennedy had affairs with Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe.  It's been reported that he used to go skinny dipping in the White House pool with various young women who worked in the Executive Offices.  If there was a politician whose sex life might reward the temptation to openly speculate about it as if he was a movie star like Errol Flynn, it was JFK.

So what story does Wolff tell us about Kennedy's sex life?  A distinctly non-erotic one concocted to make JFK look creepy.

There is a story Gore Vidal tells about J.F.K.: having sex in the bath, he liked to suddenly push a woman’s head back underwater, causing her to fight for air, just as he was about to climax.

I'm not saying this never happened, but...I don't think it ever happened.

Why not?

Well, first because Kennedy's back was so bad he couldn't have managed it, and second because the source of the story is Gore Vidal.

I wouldn't call Vidal a liar, but I have suspected him of embellishing his anecdotes on occasion.  And he also has some issues when it comes to John F. Kennedy.  Vidal wrote a novel, Washington, D.C., in which he implies that Kennedy's heroics after the sinking of PT-109 were made up.  The Kennedy-esque politican who is the anti-hero of the novel is a phony war hero.  When I first read the book back in college I just figured Vidal was engaging in a wicked game of "What if?" and consciously making fiction by imagining an alternative reality.  But then Vidal announced upon the publication of The Golden Age, the novel that concludes a historical cycle that begins with Burr, in which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and other heroes of the Revolution are portrayed as clowns and scoundrels, that he wrote that FDR more or less engineered the bombing of Pearl Harbor to get us into World War II not out of a sense of wicked fun or as a game of What If? but because he believes that FDR engineered the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

In short, Vidal doesn't see himself as a satirist writing fiction.  He sees himself as a realist writing history.

Kind of forces the question, is the Kennedy character in Washington D.C. based on Vidal's conception of John Kennedy or is Vidal's conception of John Kennedy based on the character in Washington D.C.?

Vidal has apparently lost track of the boundary between fiction and history or has decided he doesn't have to bother keeping track, which ought to warn people not to take the stories he tells about real human beings without a Morton's box full of salt.  You can never be sure if he's not talking about a character in one of his own novels instead.

But here's the thing.

As Bob Somerby has been pointing out for a long while now and as Elizabeth Edwards has recently noted the National Press Corps covers politics as if they are writing a novel and interpreting that novel at the same time.  Which means they are treating politicians as if they were fictional characters.

And with fictional characters, sex does explain everything.

Ask Hamlet.

________________________________

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Comments

[Lambert Strether, Philadelphia, PA]

Actually, that's not true. With fictional characters, sex and money explain everything. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Adding money in there will help everybody understand the Village a lot better, don't you agree?

[Lance]

Lambert,

Excellent point and the aptest of apt quotes.

[Ken Muldrew]

The novel "Restless", by William Boyd, is centered around the British spy ring who planted stories in the American press prior to Pearl Harbor in order to hasten America's entry into the war. The book wraps up some story lines in an overly hasty manner that leaves one with a lot of hanging questions, primarily the idea that this operation evolved into peacetime political dirty tricks and, eventually, into the normal operation of the press (eliminate the middle man). When I first read about the "socks" angle of the Spitzer story, I couldn't help but think that it was a direct descendant of the fake news planted by the British spies (the book goes into the hallmarks of a good plant - unrefutable, strange enough to make people curious, keeps popping up to make sure that the story can't fade away, etc.). Noble beginnings ... unintended consequences ... the trouble with normal is it always gets worse ... etc., etc.

As Fast Eddie Nelson says, "money won is twice as sweet as money earned". If you can get people to pay to buy propaganda, and also get the benefactors to pay, that's a win-win situation that has to taste mighty sweet on some palates.

[Susie from Philly]

Excellent post, Lance.

[Linkmeister]

I expect Wolcott to simply expropriate this entire post for his blog over at Vanity Fair.

Nicely done, Lance. The only thing you might have added was the phone listing for the NYC office of the American Psychiatric Society.

[julia]

I think you're giving him way too much credit. I don't think he's ever considered her in terms of her sexuality to the point of considering what affect her libido might have on their marriage. Clearly the idea of sex with old ladies creeps him out way too much for that.

I think he figures Michelle Obama is keeping her husband satisfied because he would hit it, and hittability is what keeps husbands home.

I also think that it takes a whole pile of wishful thinking for the not-46-year-old Michael Wolff to announce that the 46-year-old Barack Obama isn't middle-aged yet. Apparently youth, like sex, is something only for people Michael Wolff likes to picture having sex.

I'm guessing, counterintuitively, that group includes Michael Wolff.

[SweetSue]

I do not remember Brits always speculating about the sexual activites of Maragret and Dennis Thatcher: are they still shagging and, if not, how will that effect Maggie's ability to be Prime Minister?
Is the political discourse that much more stupid in America than it is in Britain?
Is fellatio expertise vital in a female CIC? Will we begin to rate male pols as good or bad cunnilinguists?
This is all pretty revolting and Wolf is pathetic.

[AZrider]

I'm surprised you didn't tie this in with "Lars and the Real Girl," a movie that features an anatomically correct sex doll, but which goes on to say that people aren't really interested in the sex part.

[Jodi]

Post-sexual set? A group of women who don't have to worry about pregnancy and have shed most of their youthful inhibitions? What a maroon!

[AndrewJ]

"We're only giving the public what it wants!"

I recall a regional theatrical director who opened a new, innovative company to instant raves. She said, "It's a funny thing... The public didn't know they wanted our work until we presented it to them." Think about it.

[Arundel]

Well done, Mr. M. I appreciate any and all examinations of Michael Wolff's self-absorbed reflections, screwy premises and dirty mind- plus the fact he's always wrong- but this one was especially accurate and precise.

I agree with you about Gore Vidal, another dirty mind who'll gladly tell you that ALL great minds are dirty ones, from Julius Augustus to the exquisite depravities of Tiberius bla la la... I enjoy Vidal very much, but he really is a malicious gossip, and that particular JFK anecdote has always struck me as quite wickedly untrue. (And as you say, physically improbable.) Gore has never recovered, it seems, from that fabled night he was booted from a WH party; he's had lawsuits and respun the tale so many times, I've no doubt his Kennedy animus- against all of them- dates to that one night.

[mad6798j]

The character in question in Vidal's "Washington DC" was not a direct stand-in for JFK. They were similar, but not enough for you to accuse him of suggesting Kennedy was a phony war hero. Also, Washington and Jefferson don't come off as clowns and scoundrels in Burr. Washington comes off as aloof and not extraordinarily intelligent, but has a definite commanding presence. Jefferson comes off as intelligent, manipulative and vindictive. Neither are inaccurate portrayals.

Vidal did go a bit loopy by the time he wrote The Golden Age, though.

[Canid]

As I remember it in Vidal's memoir, Seymour Hersh called him while working on his JFK book. He asked Vidal to confirm the dunking story, and Vidal did. Hersh asked, Why was he doing this. "Vaginal spasms," Vidal explained....

[aimai]

Lance,
I'm a frequent reader, mostly lurk. Brilliant post. Really worth bookmarking and circulating widely.

aimai

[sfmike]

Enough with the Vidal bashing. If he says FDR basically orchestrated Pearl Harbor so we could get into the war, I'm inclined to believe him, and the JFK anecdote was written in the context of a book review he was writing about some scandalous tell-all about JFK, where Vidal was refuting some rumours and substantiating others.

The Wolff article just sounds awful and the type of crap that keeps me from reading "Vanity Fair" (that, and my inability to actually find the articles among 900 pages of glossy ads).

[AndrewJ]

Vaginal spasms," Vidal explained....

And what first-hand knowledge would Vidal have about those...?

[sfmike]

@AndrewJ: If you'd read any of Vidal's memoirs, you'd realize that Vidal's first-hand knowledge of every kind of sexual spasm with both genders is vastly more extensive than most of us have experienced, and I've experienced a few.

[Lance]

SFMike, Andrew,

For the record, Vidal is one of my favorite essayists and Burr is one of my favorite novels. Palimpsest is beautifully written. But he has axes to grind and his own interpretation of American history that borders on the crackpot (and the brilliant at the same time) so I always approach his writing with skepticism. I frankly don't believe that anecdote about Kennedy and don't understand how Vidal could know it and know it's true and I don't know why Hersh would have called Vidal of all people for confirmation of such a story.

But my point in bringing it up in the post was that there was no good reason for Wolff to pass it along except to make JFK sound creepy and it's Wolff's portrayal of middle-aged sex as creepy that creeps me out.

[Mary]

Excellent post. And in reading it, the Great Light Bulb finally lit up in my dim little skull. I finally understood why Hillary is hated by so many Democrat women - one of whose posts I just read in another place, where the poster brought up the boring Monica thing again to explain her loathing. She dressed it up with a load of highminded stuff about women and job opportunities, none of which applied the the actual situation. So - why is she hated for this? Because if she had been a "real" woman (like Michelle), Bill wouldn't have been looking for a dish on the side. It's seen as Hillary's failure as a woman, and for this failure, women hate her. She wasn't enough of a wife, they believe at some deep, visceral level. Which makes these supposedly high minded, ultra liberal women no different from the conservative "a woman's place is in the kitchen sink" - they too are demanding their women know their place and keep their men in it, even if they don't know they are. They think we're living in a soap opera driven by sex too.

[Chino Blanco]

I don't think the situation is nearly as dire as Mary would have us believe.

Even if a certain campaign would indeed benefit from us believing that it's as bad out there as all that.

Why I'm skeptical:

Otherwise worthy post:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/sexual-politics-by-digby-we-are-seeing.html

Embedded link:

http://makethemaccountable.com/index.php/category/media-news

Click through:

http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/05/04/despicable-sexist-sign-outside-indiana-dinner/

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And voilà. It's all Obama's fault.

[calliopejane]

"It's seen as Hillary's failure as a woman, and for this failure, women hate her. She wasn't enough of a wife, they believe at some deep, visceral level."

I hate this sort of internalized misogyny, but can understand its motivation of self-reassurance. It's the same reason that some women want to find some reason to blame a rape victim for her rape (e.g., what she was wearing, where she was, with whom, etc.) -- they want to believe that THEY would never do that thing, so that means they are safe from rape. Just like they want to believe if they are a "good wife" then their own husbands will never cheat on them. That sort of belief in one's own control over men's sexual/aggressive/adulterous behavior can only be maintained by asserting that women who have been wronged must have done something themselves to cause it.

[Doctor Jay]

"In short, Vidal doesn't see himself as a satirist writing fiction. He sees himself as a realist writing history."

Maybe he sees himself as a guy trying to sell more of his novels by generating publicity with outrageous claims.

[4jkb4ia]

Alongside Mary's comment, there is my mom's (64 years old). During the Wisconsin primary, my Mom said that Hillary's fatal mistake was that she let her husband loose. My Mom also said that if it was not for Bill, Hillary would be a "CORPORATE LAWYER!" or at least not a Senator from New York. I could agree and see Hillary Rodham as a potential Donna Edwards figure.
Here the resentment is that when Hillary hitched herself to Bill, and having sex with him, she hitched herself to many long years of not being an independent person. Family connections work because the family member inherits a comfort level from the one who was already in office.

[dark1p]

I never thought I'd say this, but I miss Tina Brown.

[julia]

Hey, Lance, are you going to the DMI do?

[Heartfelt]

Nice post. I agree that the Wolff article (that I read in it's sad entirety) said far more about the author than those he was speaking about. He is clearly a man with sexual issues, generalizing his personal demons to the public and the politicians who serve them. As you say, there may be a small percentage of citizens who resonate with his words, and sadly, that even a small percentage is a lot of actual people... but my personal experience agrees with your own...
the overwhelming political talk that I have heard and read (online and off) is not in line with Wolff's declarations. The American public generally does not appear to care much about the sexual lives of their politicians unless it interferes with their job or exposes them as hypocrites who cannot, therefore, be trusted.

[Jim Carlile]

Actually, I believe Vidal on JFK because they were on a friendly basis as Jackie was his step-sister. They talked alot about this kind of thing.

Also, Vidal never ridiculed ALL the Founding Fathers. But this is correct about young people's view of 'middle age.' It's sad because not only is it unwarranted and false, but they have nothing else to rebel against except age.

And, if anything, they're the ones who are fucked up sexually as well. Gotta get drunk and all, they do-- just like their grandparents.

[Jim Carlile]

"I frankly don't believe that anecdote about Kennedy and don't understand how Vidal could know it and know it's true and I don't know why Hersh would have called Vidal of all people for confirmation of such a story."

Vidal was Jackie's step brother--his mother married Hugh Auchincloss. He knew JFK very well. He campaigned for him. Those stories are true.

He has great stories about Jackie 'preparing' herself when she was younger, before dates. Those are true, too.

[Jim Carlile]

"I frankly don't believe that anecdote about Kennedy and don't understand how Vidal could know it and know it's true and I don't know why Hersh would have called Vidal of all people for confirmation of such a story."

Vidal was Jackie's step brother--his mother married Hugh Auchincloss. He knew JFK very well. He campaigned for him. Those stories are true.

He has great stories about Jackie 'preparing' herself when she was younger, before dates. Those are true, too.

[Nancy]

Any woman over 30 who subscribes to Vanity Fair should cancel her subscription immediately. This essay is the Mein Kampf of misogyny.

[tinfoil hattie]

For people who do want to speculate on the sex lives of strangers, that's why we have movie stars and teenage pop idols, who are at least blessed with beautiful and photogenic naked backs and bare shoulders.

Aaah, yes. The male idealization of what is "beautiful and photogenic." -- teenage pop idols. This is different from Wolff's characterizations of Hillary Clinton and other middle-aged women...how, exactly?

[Nancy]

Aaah, yes. The male idealization of what is "beautiful and photogenic." -- teenage pop idols. This is different from Wolff's characterizations of Hillary Clinton and other middle-aged women...how, exactly?

The saying that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people was only true as long as politicians were men. Women are judged harshly on appearance no matter what line of work we are in.

The problem with the essay is the undercurrent of evolutionary psychology that says that while men desire young beautiful flesh, women don't, just because women don't generally go to ho's.

But much of the media, even the so-called liberal media, accepts this propaganda without question.

[julia]

Well, remember, Vidal comes from a Very Old Family - he wrote a disturbing essay once about Eleanor Roosevelt where he said that her populist ideals were overridden by her patrician upbringing because she would only socialize with people like him, and never with the vulgar, ill-born people she advocated for publicly.

Which probably had something to do with his issues with Joe Kennedy's kid.

[forked tongue]

I don't have an opinion on whether that JFK anecdote is true, but I remember reading it in the New Yorker--it creeped me right the fuck out for days, not only for its sheer evilness but for Vidal's slimey tone and dubious motives for retelling it--and, as far as the "physical improbability" goes, what Vidal said was that JFK would have one of his Secret Service guys do the dunking. Eeeesssh.

[Tom Wells]

Excellent essay. The media gives us entertainment. Who does it serve to make politics like Hollywood?

Meanwhile, as the journalists trivialize, the Great Class Stratification grows wider.

[swmbo]

That article is one big steaming heap of WTF? Older women are post-sexual, except when they're not, and love Hillary, except when they resent her, and ...

Brain hurt.