Saturday morning roundup

How neurotic are the demands of the cultural Left? This neurotic: Cosmopolitan magazine publishes an article maintaining that the sensitive guy who really tunes in to his woman's holistic array of needs and wants during intimacy is actually a sexist pig. Bookworm unpacks:

 . . . one of feminism’s chief complaints starting in the 1960s was that too many men had a “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” approach to sex. Women, said the feminists, were complicated and therefore needed delicacy and attention in order to get sexual pleasure. Meanwhile, men were single celled amoebas would could pop out their own orgasms and then just walk away.

For the last forty or fifty years, the message to American men has been that, to be a good partner in bed, it’s not enough to say, “This is great, wasn’t it?” Instead, men need to be attentive, skilled, caring, compassionate, empathetic and, above all, patient so that their partner can get as much pleasure from sex as men routinely do. No wonder that men, most of whom really can orgasm through very simple stimulation, feel proud when they delay their own pleasure, and make the extra effort and take the extra time to see to their partner’s pleasure. I applaud those men.

Modern feminists, though, do not applaud those men. The problem, you see, is that, to the extent that men get pleasure from pleasuring women, those evil men are robbing women of control over their own orgasms. And no, that is not bad writing on my part. That is utterly appalling thinking on the part of Sara Chadwick and Sari van Anders, the *ahem* researchers behind the study:

In a separate statement from Chadwick and van Anders, they explained why it’s a bad thing for men to gain masculinity points for bringing female partners to orgasm. “One reason is that it might pressure some heterosexual men to feel like they have to ‘give’ women orgasms, as if orgasm is something men pulled out of a hat and presented to women,” they wrote. “This ties into cultural ideas of women as passive recipients of whatever men give them.”

They also mention another sexist orgasm trope: women feeling pressured to fake orgasms in order to appease a male partner, or in their words, “to protect men’s feelings.” For women who have sex with male partners, the pressure to orgasm is a relatable feeling. Hence all the faking that we know is going down in hetero bedrooms all over the country.

[snip]

The researchers draw a fairly frightening conclusion from the research findings. When women’s orgasms begin to serve as a masculinity achievement for male partners, the orgasms cease to be about women’s liberation or sexual pleasure. They just become another opportunity for men to flex, or “shore up their sense of masculinity.”(Emphasis mine.)

North Korea is set to conduct another nuclear-weapon test. All relevant personnel are just waiting for Kim to give the go-ahead.

Obviously, I've perused a lot of reactions to yesterday's repeal-and-replace fiasco. So far, Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner has the best take, for my money.  His piece is titled, "GOP Cave on Obamacare Repeal is the Biggest Broken Promise in Political History."

Here's the bottom line: Republicans didn't want to repeal Obamacare that badly. Obamacare was a useful tool for them. For years, they could use it to score short-term messaging victories. People are steamed about high premiums? We'll message on that today. People are angry about losing insurance coverage? We'll put out a devastating YouTube video about that. Seniors are angry about the Medicare cuts? Let's tweet about it. High deductibles are unpopular? We'll issue an email fact sheet. Or maybe a gif. At no point were they willing to do the hard work of hashing out their intraparty policy differences and developing a coherent health agenda or of challenging the central liberal case for universal coverage. Sure, if the U.S. Supreme Court did the job for them, they were okay with Obamacare going away. But when push came to shove, they weren't willing to put in the elbow grease.

I'll have more to say about this dark episode.


Count on the indispensable Kevin Williamson at NRO to deliver just the right perspective on the head of Squirrel-Hair's National Trade Council:

n the collected works of Peter Navarro, there is a peculiar paradox: Some of the dullest prose imaginable challenges the sharp edge of Hanlon’s razor, the aphorism that advises us: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Professor Navarro of the University of California at Irvine has hanging on the wall of an office or a den somewhere a doctorate in economics from Harvard; barring some Forrest Gump–level chain of coincidence, it does not seem likely that anything as innocent as stupidity explains his literary output, which consists of a few how-to-make-money-in-the-stock-market books (an actual title: “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks”) from earlier in his career and a half dozen or so low-minded books about China with such talk-radio-ready names as “Death by China” and “The Coming China Wars,” two books that contain 80 exclamation points between them, as well as several pamphlets summarizing the main points of his books.

He is President Donald Trump’s house China intellectual, the only one of his close advisers who is a credentialed academic economist, albeit one whose area of specialty is utility companies, not international trade. (Our most famous scholar of trade economics, Paul Krugman, apparently was not available for service in the Trump administration. Pity.) Navarro has been named head of the newly created National Trade Council, a position in which he is well positioned to do a great deal of damage to the Trump administration, to the United States and its economic interests, and, possibly, to the world. That’s quite a step up for a man who was teaching undergraduate econ to business students until a few months ago.

The decline of US naval power isn't front-and-center on the public's radar screen, but it should be.

Let's end on a positive note: The State Department makes it official - issues a permit to TransCanada for the Keystone XL pipeline.