A couple random things friends have emailed me:
- A friend of mine went undercover as a “sugar baby” to explore the sleazy world of quasi-prostitution. It’s a good read. I know there’s a gender politics point here, but I’m too lazy to make it.
- I’ve often thought there were some similarities between contemporary conservatism and doctrinaire Marxism. An NYRB article here makes the comparison explicit. Has anyone else seen this written about? I feel like it’s in the air.
I’ll give a little excerpt from each piece. From the NYRB piece:
The problem with this sort of economic determinism is that it is Marxism in reverse, with the problems of the original kind. Planning by finance capitalists replaces planning by the party elite. Marx’s old dream, the “withering away” of the state, is the centerpiece of the Ryan budget: cut taxes on the rich, claim that cutting government functions and the closing of unspecified loopholes will balance budgets, and thereby make the state shrink. Just like the Marxists of another era, the Republican ticket substitutes mythical thinking about the economy for loyalty to the nation.
From the sugar baby piece:
These kinds of arrangements aren’t that unusual in New York, where I live. Having interviewed an escort and married man who hires escorts, I was curious about signing up for one of the websites that hooks them up with each other. What did people derive from the transaction, beyond quick sex and quick cash? Maybe it was shockingly normal — alluring beyond the obvious reasons.
I also wanted to find out why these kinds of relationships persist. Sure, they’ve always existed somewhere. But it seemed to me that the proliferation of post-collegiate debt, an atrophied job market, and rising unemployment for single ladies — not to mention the speed and anonymity of the internet — might make these arrangements more attractive to young women with rent to pay and dreams of living The Life in New York while they were still young.
Update. Things are slow here today, let’s try to get things going.
rlrr
I’ve often thought there were some similarities between contemporary conservatism and doctrinaire Marxism.
Back in the early 80’s, literature from the College Republicans and the Young Communist League looked like they were produced by the same people…
beltane
I can only hope to see the day when conservatives are as laughably irrelevant as doctrinaire Marxists. Sadly, as long as there are rich, entitled assholes walking the earth doctrinaire conservatives will always be with us.
woodyNYC
I was just thinking that all this “job creator” versus “moocher” talk completely turns the labor theory of value on its head. Here’s hoping we have reached some kind of dialectical inflection point.
Bill in Section 147
I think the neo-cons are politically Soviets.
sherparick
Rick Perlstein I think discusses this in “Before the Storm” (which I still have to read) and Nixonland. And although I can’t think of a particular source, I heard it discussed many times about original neo-conservatives were often former Trotskyites (Bill Kristol’s Dad, Irving Kristol, for one and Sidney Hooks), while the younger generation picked up ideas from Leo Strauss that were really similar to Lenin’s, although on opposite side of the ideological spectrum.
In my own day I saw David Horowitz go from being an SDS Weatherman in the 1960s and 70s to the right-wing hack he is today.
Ultimately, I think its a matter of temperment and human type, the “True Believer” as Eric Hoffer described them in the book of that name. Whether it religion or political ideology there is type of person who finds it very empowering to have a checklist on what to do and think so long as it provides a rationale for them to put their boot on another human’s face.
” lieve t an
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
“I know there’s a gender politics point here, but I’m too lazy to make it.”
From the article
“But what I found is that the men often have to sell themselves just as hard — perhaps harder — than the women.”
My, what fun, just like dating, plus an extra $5,000 in expenses.
KG
@Bill in Section 147: Nah, they’re just standard grade imperialists. Imperialists always believe that they are bringing civilization to savages and will do so through the most bloody means if necessary, and will take resources as compensation
MattF
Well, Hegel/Marx includes the ‘mystery of the dialectic’ that encourages believers to take both sides of any argument. Not sure if there’s anything quite so logically omnipotent on the Right.
Linda Featheringill
Now, Laddie. Calm down.
There is a reasonable amount of surface similarity between today’s anarchic right and the left, which is sometimes anarchic. But it doesn’t go below the surface.
The right doesn’t profess the two driving forces of Marxism, namely exploitation and class conflict. The right only uses of the same surface paint that some of the lefties use. That’s all.
Some liberals also aren’t fully invested in exploitation and class conflict and therefore they aren’t Marxists. They are progressives and reformers but not Marxists.
Now an ideological connection between Marxism and Occupy? Maybe.
[Yes. Yes, I am a Marxist.]
WereBear
In a world that made Fifty Shades of Grey into a bestseller, (I’m only reading it in this recap,) open speculating on the numbers of men and women who seem to really really really want some big strong male figure to RULE over them is suspiciously squicky, right from the get-go.
MonkeyBoy
The soft sciences are often said to engage in “physics envy” and physics is said to engage in “math envy”. Crudely this regards physics and math as closer towards describing ultimate truth in a way that is impressive with terminology and notation that is opaque to lesser mortals. Softer sciences can become more impressive by borrowing some of the trappings and mysticism of the harder disciplines.
I’ve often regarded Libertarianism/Randianism as just anti-Marxism where any “depth” or “richness” to the philosophy results from taking Marxist thought and just substituting in the opposite.
// now off to read the linked article.
DougJ
@MonkeyBoy:
That’s a very interesting point.
SenyorDave
As long as we have minorities in this country the GOP will always be able to get a substantial portion of the vote. because when Romney said the 47%, what his audience heard was the 47% who are entirely made up of blacks, Hispanics, and other people who aren’t like us (but of course they didn’t hear the words blacks or Hispanics – that would be way too politically correct).
Romney/Ryan are the worst pair of candidates put forth by the Dems/Reps in my lifetime, and I am 53 years old. They are a pair of soulless fucks who could care less about making this country a better place. I feel confident that there will be a place in hell reserved for these two.
They’ve run the worst campaign in memory and they still have a shot – a large portion of the American people will still eat the shit sandwich they are serving.
Wag
My current favorite quote from that RINO, Abe Lincoln.
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abraham Lincoln
Read more at brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/abrahamlin395631.html#xTr9JOEG5KLDIqSt.99
BGinCHI
Cole should check into the WV version of this escort thing. By that state’s standards he’s Sugar Daddy material.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linda Featheringill: I think the similarity is based more around how doctrinaire adherents to a political concept behave and think rather than any ideological congruence.
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
@WereBear: In a world that made Fifty Shades of Grey into a bestseller, (I’m only reading it in this recap,) open speculating on the numbers of men and women who seem to really really really want some big strong male figure to RULE over them is suspiciously squicky, right from the get-go.
That’s not what’s going on in those stories. BDSM is opposite land. If Grey was real he would be the biggest door mat in the world because all he does is spend every waking moment pandering to some chick’s sex fantasies.
Brachiator
I always thought that “quasi-prostitution” was a synonym for “marriage.”
@MonkeyBoy:
Isn’t “Marxist thought” a contradiction in terms?
Punchy
Seemingly a prerequisite for sex to actually happen…
aimai
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques:
I kept getting a “the Man Who Was Thursday” vibe from the piece. I kept hoping that one or more of the guys would turn out to be a journalist going undercover. But no. It was just incredibly sad and creepy.
aimai
Chris
@Linda Featheringill:
You sure? Seems to me that they do believe these things, just come at it from the opposite perspective.
WereBear
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques: I’m not very far into the recaps, but I gather the BDSM is just kicky frosting on the same old “reforming the bad boy who is impossibly gorgeous and terribly rich” fantasy.
It is a terribly written book; and thus we have a fantasy in a fantasy. Real characters exploring a real world with such themes would be too much for most. I’m starting to think the true appeal of badly written fiction is that is does not engage; it only acts as a crutch for the reader’s untrained imagination.
DougJ
@BGinCHI:
Ha ha hah ha.
catclub
“I’ve often thought there were some similarities between contemporary conservatism and doctrinaire Marxism”
In Capitalism, Man exploits Man.
In Socialism, it is the opposite.
Can’t believe I am first with this.
ding dong
Slate has a piece up saying that Paul Ryan is lying about his body fat percentage. Color me shocked. He would tell you the sky was green if he thought he would look better with a green sky.
Cris (without an H)
I only read a few paragraphs of the buzzfeed piece, but can somebody explain to me how this “escort” business is not prostitution? I mean, the first douchebag she meets actually says he’ll give her $550 for a blowjob. Isn’t that pretty straightforward?
ruemara
I’ve thought long and hard about the sugar daddy thing. Sometimes I wish I was younger and prettier. It would make the basics easier. But I can’t stand the thought of having to touch some person simply because he can afford it. yech.
DougJ
@Cris (without an H):
It seems to vary a lot. But, yeah, some of it seems to be straight-up prostitution.
DougJ
@ruemara:
We all wish were younger and prettier.
Calouste
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques:
Well, what do you expect? You have these guys who have a lot of spare cash, can live the good live, can have the nice clothes, the good hair, and if they need it, a good shrink, and still can’t make themselves attractive to women. These guys are single for a reason, probably a few of them.
BGinCHI
@DougJ: Wow, the one time I was serious.
Violet
@ding dong: Oh good! Are we back to Paul Ryan’s lies again? We’d stopped paying attention to that what with the Middle East stuff and the 47% stuff. There is just too much to follow with the Money Boo Boo/Lyin’ campaign.
Brachiator
I also suppose that turnabout is fair play. Interesting story from the BBC about women in South Korea going to host bars for conversation, and more.
There is also a BBC podcast about this phenomenon.
And of course, there’s the recent movie Magic Mike, which should be on DVD soon if it is not out already, featuring Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey in a story about male dancers. Women I know who saw it in the theaters said that they had a good time.
M31
@aimai:
HAHAHA I was hoping for that too–maybe they all were journalists. Someone needs to write this now from the guy’s perspective:
“I wondered what kind of woman–who would have to be educated and well-spoken as well as attractive and also willing to have sex for money–would set up a sugar daddy situation, so I opened account at sugardads.com to try to meet them and get their real stories.
I completely blew my first meeting–I was so worried that I’d forget my fake name, my fake work identity, and above all, my fake weird sexual persona, that I overdid the creepy sweaty-guy vibe and she fled.”
No, unfortunately the guys were all completely believable.
(I’m also glad to see another fan of that crazy-ass book.)
WereBear
Nope. People like this are just fine with themselves. Shrinks require time and effort and actual personality improvement, such as getting one.
The reason they are going the Sugar Daddy route is that it supports the illusion, for both of them, that it is paid dating for sex; and not buying a whore.
The amazing thing about the article is that it is apparently difficult for most women to do; this cheers me that the soul-dead are still rare.
Violet
DougJ:
Did you see that Atrios found you a job:
DougJ
@Violet:
I saw that. Honestly, I think I could do a better job than Tina.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Sidnye Hook was a progressive/social democrat, but a strongly anti-communist one, like Irving Howe. Not all ex-Trotskyists went all the way to the right.
Evil Parallel Universe
It has been many years since I posted anything on a blog, and even longer since when I was a “meaningful” (whatever that might mean) blog commentator. But, back in the day – that would be the mid-’00s, when I was the Evil Parallel Universe, I wrote this on Firedoglake (which admittedly was a different place back then, but I don’t have anything against them now like many of the readers here):
START BLOCK QUOTE
END BLOCK QUOTE
So, yes, I have seen this thought previously. Where do I pick up my royalty check? As is often quoted here, the party/ideology can’t fail, only you can fail the party/ideology, that, and the doctrinaire nature of everything repug seemed as obvious then as it does now [though it does help to be omniscient ;-)]
Footnote – And yes, all the block quote code is in the right placce, and why it doesn’t work? Omniscience!
MonkeyBoy
@Brachiator: Isn’t “Marxist thought” a contradiction in terms?
Huh? You could fill buildings with examples of published Marxist theory. Externally it looks very impressive with all sorts of special terminology and conceptual frameworks elaborated to the point that it is hard for an outsider to judge coherence, and like the Bible one can gin up support for almost any position.
My basic point was that current right wing philosophies suffer from Marxism envy and borrow from the Marxist intellectual framework (with substitution of opposites) to build a philosophy as complex and impressive to outsiders as Marxism.
aimai
@Cris (without an H):
It is straight up prostitution but the men pretend to think that what they are doing is renting longterm, or getting it wholesale, rather than retail. They prefer this model because it means they have to negotiate terms only once a year, rather than over and over again. Its more like buying a time share, for them, than taking an hour in a hot sheet motel.
aimai
Frankensteinbeck
@WereBear:
Yeah, what I’ve seen of 50 Shades is less classical BDSM than a mix of rape fantasy and bad boy mystique – both very common, since our messed up sexual paradigm twists everybody in one direction or another.
Violet
@DougJ: I’m very sure you could.
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
@aimai: I kept getting a “the Man Who Was Thursday” vibe from the piece. I kept hoping that one or more of the guys would turn out to be a journalist going undercover. But no. It was just incredibly sad and creepy.
I don’t know but a lot of that piece sounded like bullshit to me. Escorts run in $200 range, NYC is infamous for the $1,000 an hour hooker because of the Masters of the Universe showing off their big bonuses. And this woman is getting $5,000? On top of it her clients are telling her their life story, yet blowing her off after one night.
cmorenc
@SenyorDave:
Ryan genuinely DOES care about making America a “better place” The problem is with what constitutes his concept of a “better place”: a dystopian tough-love kind of society where the more economically successful you are, the more you deserve to fuck over those less economically successful and thereby less deserving than you, and the government’s primary legitimate domestic policy goal is to protect the economically successful (“producers” in eco-glibertarian speak) from the would-be moochers.
Brachiator
@WereBear:
This stuff is not about male power over women. It’s actually about Narcissism. The cliche is that the bottom has all the power, since he or she controls the flow of the relationship. And ultimately it is about the woman voluntarily submitting as long as the man spends time, energy and effort thinking about her, what he is going to do to her, and doing it to her because in some way she is … altogether now … SPECIAL.
Anya
I think I watched most of Ann Romney’s interviews, (like this one), and they all basically say: “I am really awesome and a woman and I love Mitt. He’s not horrible at all. You gotta believe me. Did I mention I am a woman and I met a bunch of women who care about debt and are scared? You should like Mitt because I like him.” Does the Romney campaign really believe this sways anybody or is this their way of saying, “We’ve got nothing?”
A moocher
@Brachiator asks if “Marxist thought isn’t a contradiction in terms.”
No, it isn’t. Get back to me when you’ve read any. You could start with the 18th Brumaire…the treatment may be shallow enough for you, and you’d certainly find the tone agreeable, if lacking in nastiness.
I thought my expressed opinion of you in the comments last night was perhaps over hasty and too strong. But I see it wasn’t.
Cris (without an H)
Well said. This is the same point Bill Clinton made, in what I thought was the most important part of his convention speech:
aimai
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques:
But she’s not getting 5,000 for the meeting. She’s getting 5,000 for (potentially) a month or a year’s worth of availability so he never has to go through this again. He’s getting “fly in, bang me, and no relationship” which for (some) high flyers might seem like a good deal. Arranging for escort services through a madame is potentially embarrassing and time consuming.
I actually see this as a “who is zooming whom” kind of situation. A guy who is rich enough to be able to afford anonymous sex in a city not his own just buys it, straight up. Some of these guys are faking being able to afford to purchase a year’s worth of sex and escort services precisely because they fall into the gray area–not as rich as they pretend to be, definitely not as successful as they pretend to be, definitely, definitely not as attractive as they pretend to be. They have neither the time nor the hope of pursuing and attracting a woman of high enough social status and beauty as they think they deserve for free. So they go for a rent-to-not-own agreement.
I don’t know why they call them “sugar babies” because the whole industry is so obviously modeled on Pretty Woman fantasies.
aimai
A moocher
@Linda Featheringill: thanks for this dollop of educated and serious commentary. I can’t believe we are veering into “Nazis were socialists” territory on this blog.
Yutsano
@Cris (without an H): They are, indeed, who we thought they were.
BGinCHI
@A moocher: No one who actually reads Marx comes away thinking the man was stupid or wrong about almost everything he was writing about in its context.
Generalizing about academic Marxism and dismissing all of it is always the way of the dilettante.
Corner Stone
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques: I found it boring because it seemed she was trying too hard.
DougJ
@aimai:
I think it’s a bit more the “girlfriend experience” thing. Men are more fucked up than you imagine them to be.
There are more things in heaven and earth, aimai, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Brachiator
@MonkeyBoy:
Marxism is an inane pseudo-religion masquerading as philosophy.
If only insiders can judge it, it’s bullshit.
Current right wing philosophies have no intellectual framework of any sort as far as I can see, and are little more than an assertion that Americans are special, loved by God, and can kick anybody’s ass to get what they want.
And it is obvious that Tea Party People have not even read Groucho Marx, let alone Karl Marx.
I get the impression that some academics with time on their hands are inventing parallels where there are none because that is the only way that they can understand the raw stupid politics behind the current conservative movement.
eric
@Brachiator: how can quasi-prostitution be like marriage, when quasi-prostitution is about having sex. I haz a confuzed.
eric
@DougJ: how typically sexist of you.
Frankensteinbeck
@Brachiator:
That’s classical BDSM, which is indeed opposite land where the sub has all the power. Like all sexuality and human psychology that’s only the center point of a vast cloud of individual desires. There are no shortage of men and women where ‘domination’ is more important than the ‘bondage’ and ‘sado-masochism’.
Violet
Apparently one to two minutes of the Mother Jones tapes are missing.
And the wingnutosphere is now claiming the whole thing can’t be believed:
Links to those various sources are in the original article if you want to see them.
Hilariously, there is a new Twitter hashtag #missing2min with lots of good speculation about what’s missing, like:
or
TribalistMeathead
@ Ding Dong –
Great, now we know what this election cycle’s equivalent of “Did Obama start smoking cigarettes again?”
rlrr
@Violet:
Unless Romney says in the missing 2 minutes he was just kidding about what he said previously, so what?
Maybe the juiciest tidbits are in the missing 2 minutes…
WereBear
@Violet: Yep, because snipping out two minutes means the Rombot 3.0, only operated at $50,000 a plate dinners because the unobtanium power pack exerts a No Tipping Field and this would be obvious in other venues, was successfully imitated, by a human, in the entire rest of the video.
Is that how this train of thought stays on the track?
And yes, this scenario was created by my first viewing of the tape, wherein I mused, “If only they were better tippers, this would not have happened.”
aimai
Its only two minutes? Maybe its a zip drive of Rosemary Wood’s missing 16 minutes.
aimai
Cris (without an H)
@Violet: Beautiful. Those missing two minutes prove that Mitt’s remarks are being taken out of context! The part the cut out is Mitt going all “lol j/k”
BGinCHI
@Violet: Probably the guy who took the video had to deliver some crab rangoons to the naked plutocrats.
Sly
This part of the analysis is problematic, because traditional Marxist theory privleges class identity above national or cultural identity (especially the latter), and nationalism only enters into the Marxist discourse when analyzing the failures of class solidarity.
Much of modern Marxist theory about nationalism (and, indeed, our general discourse on nationalism) comes from the work of Benedict Anderson of Cornell, who in the late 70s and early 80s was looking for a reason why nominally socialist states in Asia were hostile towards one another. Traditional Marxist theory posits that the class solidarities of such states would bring them closer together, especially in response to the imperial ambitions of capitalist states. That simply didn’t happen. So Anderson developed the notion that “imagined communities” created by the nationalist impulse formed a buffer between peoples with purportedly similar economic interests. Much in the same way the liberal discourse positions racial identity, i.e. poor blacks and poor whites have a lot in common economically, so why do we not see more class solidarity between the two groups?
Brachiator
@A moocher:
Been there, done that.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Don’t much care, either.
@BGinCHI:
Marx, like Freud, is pretty good as fiction. It’s not stupid, but neither is it science or economics or anything accurate or useful.
Lefties cling to Marx like wingnuts cling to guns and Jesus.
It’s your right to do so. It’s not worth arguing about.
BGinCHI
Anyone else remember the SNL skit where Aykroyd played Nixon (I can’t remember who played Kissinger or whoever) and they pretended to know they were being taped so made the most outrageous jokes then laughed their asses off?
Classic.
beltane
@aimai: There is something extremely antiquated about these sugar baby/sugar daddy relationships. In fact, these sorts of arraignments were quite common in the Victorian era among girls from “good” families with good educations who had fallen into bad luck and could not marry into their own social class. Employment opportunities for such women were pretty much limited to being a governess for a wealthy family. If this didn’t work out for any reason at all, such women were usually forced to resort to high-end prostitution with “gentleman” clients in order to support themselves. There is absolutely nothing new in any of this. In fact, as we make a return to Victorian style income inequality we can expect to see a commensurate return to the Victorian addiction to paid sex. If p*ssy is a commodity, then the spectrum of possession ranges from ownership (marriage) to theft (rape). The sugar daddy thing appears to fall into the monthly or yearly lease part of the spectrum.
Ruckus
@DougJ:
I’m easy, I’ll settle for younger.
BGinCHI
@Brachiator: Man, you’re the biggest contrarian idiot on this blog. Points for consistency.
If you’ve read, say, Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and you still think a Marxist thinker can’t make brilliant arguments then there’s really no hope for you.
Please drop this class.
And Freud? You think the practice of psychoanalysis is a fiction? It saved my life and surely many others. I feel sorry for people who dismiss big ideas and are only left with small ones.
dmsilev
@Violet: I like this one:
Violet
@BGinCHI: David Corn says the tapes were given to him in two parts. The guy who took the tapes says the recorder cut out for some reason.
What I find interesting about that is that whoever did the taping was paying attention to the recording device enough to see that it cut out. And he was able to access it and turn it back on without either being caught or, if someone did see him, being kicked out of the event. So the device wasn’t hidden so much that it was difficult to see or access during the event.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
The invisible hand cannot fail – it can only be failed. Its the same basic outlook hard core commies took about their ideology.
Dr. Omed
I remember an essay by Henrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker long about 1994-95 in which he compared “Gingrich-Tofflerism” to Lenin-Marxism. So the meme has been around at least that long.
rlrr
@BGinCHI:
I can’t remember who played Kissinger
Al Franken
M31
In those missing two minutes he extols the virtues of his mother, the Wise Latina, reminds everyone that they can’t visit the buffet until after he’s finished eating, refers to the President as Obummer Fartbongo, tries but fails to pull the tablecloth out from under the plates on the table next to him, and then he shouts “The Aristocrats!”
JGabriel
__
__
Timothy Snyder @ NYRB:
__
I blame Ayn Rand.
Seriously. There’s a scene from … Anthem, I believe. I’m paraphrasing here, but it went something like:
__
Pretty much sums up Post WWI Conservatism in a nutshell.
Also, I’m reminded of this observation from Atrios yesterday:
__
Marxists do/did the same thing.
.
BGinCHI
@rlrr: Ohhh, perfect.
BGinCHI
@M31: And…..scene.
Raven
Wonder how much Mornin Joe pays Mistress Mika to whack his ass?
Napoleon
@Violet:
I read he turned it off during dinner and was a little slow in turning it back on when Mitt got up after dinner.
Sly
@BGinCHI:
The primary problem I have with Marxism (and I think a lot of academics do as well though I couldn’t possibly give a number) is that it is teleological. There is some truth to the role of class antagonisms in the role of social conflict and the notion that culture is emergent from material circumstance, but to posit that such historical forces are inexorably leading somewhere specific is one of the worst kinds of historical thinking.
Napoleon
@Raven:
I turned them on after you mentioned her choice in clothes in the morning thread. Geez.
Chris
@Sly:
For my money, nationalism is easily the most powerful drug when it comes to these belief systems, far more than ideology or religion. Given the choice between fighting their countrymen and fighting their brothers in God/Marx/wev, most people will choose their countrymen every time, no matter how religious or orthodox they might otherwise be.
(Orwell made a similar point back in the day, and said the fact that Hitler understood this was a huge part of his popularity).
Roy G.
Escort/Hooker/Stripper IS the Republican plan for new jobs – they even admitted as much when pressed about the nature of the new jobs that would supposedly be generated from the Keystone XL boondoggle.
Somewhere there are non-Mormon Mitt Romney types who like being able to fire their sex workers.
gelfling545
@SenyorDave: His audience heard that all right because they are 1%-ers but the happily among my acquaintance even the more conservative & older folks are up in arms over it. I’m working on a project at the moment that involves veterans’ housing and the people there who tend to be, by and large, politically conservative are enraged because they feel that the GOP has once again dissed the veterans & active duty military. Most common comment has been some variation of “We’re all 47% here & so is Romney because you know he didn’t pay any tax of he’d release his returns.” We are living in interesting times.
Steeplejack
@Evil Parallel Universe:
For future reference, you have to put two underscores on each blank line between the paragraphs of the blockquote.
BGinCHI
@Sly: Absolutely. Same here. But you have to struggle with those 19th-century ideas before you can critique them. Marx wrote in a particular context, and turning Hegel on his head had consequences. The whole fetishization of the proletariat was never going to work, but it’s understandable in Marx’s universe.
What I have always appreciated about Marx is that he teaches critical thinking: don’t accept idology, get below the surface of what those in power are selling, and so on.
You can’t just dismiss his thinking tout court.
Omnes Omnibus
@DougJ: I think this is about right. The central illusion being purchased by the guy is that the girl finds him appealing – in actuality, she may or may not but it is immaterial. On the girl’s side, she is left with the illusion that she can say no. Well, she can, but it will probably end the gravy train.
Why isn’t it considered straight-up prostitution? Traditionally, a mistress has always been different than a prostitute. Why should it be different now than it was in Ancien Regime France?
Evil Parallel Universe
Akroyd – here is a link to the SNL archives, and it should be to Akroyd as Nixon and the all the skits. If not it is easy enough to find snl.jt.org/imp.php?i=11
JGabriel
JGabriel:
And yes, I did mean WWI, lest anyone think that was a typo for WWII. After all, we can see the authoritarian impulse in Conservatives/Republicans manifesting itself as early as Prohibition — aka the Volstead Act, named after the Republican House Rep. who sponsored and championed it.
.
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck:
Fifty Shades, feh.
Here’s Samuel Richardson, writing in 1740, using the voice of a servant girl (Pamela) writing letters home about her experiences with the young lord of the manor (Mr. B) — who, in this scene, has dressed in women’s clothes to surprise Pamela in the shared servants’ bedroom. And another servant helps him:
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Also, too, courtesans.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
For the same reason it’s not considered “welfare” when white conservatives accept it.
Brachiator
@eric:
Are they having sex sex or quasi sex?
@Frankensteinbeck:
I guess. But 50 Shades of Grey is just fantasy fiction. The key is that the protagonist is more a center of attention than someone who is dominated by the male figure.
And I guess that classical BDSM is like classical Doctor Who. Some people like New Who better.
BGinCHI
@FlipYrWhig: I would have guessed this was from Shamela and spoken by the great Squire Booby.
Violet
@JGabriel:
No kidding. Liberals or Progressives or people on the left or whatever don’t seem to need to shoehorn policy decisions into some overriding belief system. Here’s an example from Andrew Sullivan (I know, I know) yesterday (he’s just quoted Benjamin Disraeli and is commenting on it):
Why do we “have to rebuild” conservatism? Why not just recognize that some aspects of it are useful, some are not, and implement the useful ones. Why the need to see everything through this philosophical lens and decide that “conservatism has been failed” by today’s wingnuts? Or whatever. It’s bizarre to me. Who the hell cares if something is “conservative”? It works or it doesn’t. It’s good for the country or it isn’t. Those should be the metrics we use for deciding if something is a good policy or not. Not some romantic notion of whether or not something can be shoved into some philosophical box.
Ruckus
@Sly:
I see this as the basis for despising any rigid thinking about the future. The if we all do x we will get y. Other than the heads on pikes response (at least historically) no one can predict what humans will do. And as we see here almost every day no one can predict what they will even say.
eric
@Sly: this was a large part of Camus’ rejection of marxism — any a priori necessity is an ideology/religion that is posited to account for the factual absence of an Absolute that one “feels” first and “understands” later, hence there is only one serious philosophical question: whether one should commit suicide.
FPers can we have an all-hands-on-deck nerd discussion on matters of cultural history the way we do technology? Preferably an evening. Thanks, and feel free to go about your business.
Lurking Canadian
I’m always surprised when these guys name-check Hayek. I actually read The Road to Serfdom. In Chapter One, (on like page 3) he comes out in favour of worker safety laws and environmental protection laws. In about Chapter Five, he says that it would be appropriate for the government to guarantee a minimum standard of food, clothing and shelter to each citizen.
Rand was as evil as the wingnuts think she was. Hayek, on the other hand, unless he changed significantly later in life, would be drummed out of the party as a just another liberal RINO.
Downpuppy
I just have to know if the Sugar Daddys site is the same one that ran the ad here with the naked chick & the roadster?!
eric
@Ruckus: my favorite quote: Ideology is spiritual imperialism.
I thought it was camus, but i cant find an attribution anywhere.
beltane
@FlipYrWhig: And don’t forget Richardson’s Clarissa where the heroine/victim is ultimately raped in a high-end brothel after an elaborate series of ruses and deceptions. Even Jane Eyre and every single Jane Austin novel largely deal with the confluence of sex, money and power in a very direct manner.
FlipYrWhig
@BGinCHI: It’s been too long since I worked through “Shamela”…
The part I quoted was one moment that the “anti-Pamelists” found least consistent with Richardson’s purported intention to teach proper virtuous conduct to young men and women. I mean, it’s three-way cross-dressed bondage-rape.
And, BTW, the popularity of that book is the reason why people even today are named “Pamela.”
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Aren’t courtesans simply freelance mistresses? But, yeah, my reading has always suggested a huge social distinction between the mistress/courtesan on one hand and the streetwalker/brothel worker on the other. I think it recurs here.
Evil Parallel Universe
@Steeplejack: Thanks. Omniscience isn’t all it is cracked up to be.
And I don’t think I am going to be doing much more commenting, unless my ideas from years earlier are somewhat offered by others in supposedly respectable publications. How often does that happen?
I think the real problem with comparing Republicans and their ideology to classical Marxism is that classical Marxists never ruled anything; but there are (and were) actual nominally Marxist states with ruling Communist Parties that they can be compared to, where fealty to the party is the be all and end all. And the two ideas – classical Marxism and “Marxism” as practiced can, and do, get conflated. At the end of the day, I think the point has been, and always was, the idea of fealty to party ideology in “as practiced” Marxist states (though you can pick any totalitarian ideology), which always makes me think of things like this when I think of the Republican Party and why they have no future.
In the Republican context you can replace relativity with evolution or global warming, or anything else really (47%, Birtherism). “Known” truths vs. the actual truth – trutherism – that is where the real analogies lie.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes and it does. Different strokes for different
folksclasses.Corner Stone
@Omnes Omnibus: Not to converge our two streams here and get overly Hegelian, but I would suggest a mistress offers an alternate life and lifestyle. The rather boring arrangements written about in this article seem to offer only an alternate for sex. The author went out of her way to very strongly make three points, IMO, a)this was NOT like those dirty prostitute escorts, b)men really wanted her to like them and c)men hate commitment and rich men buy their way out of it.
Clearly what was being described in these vignettes was just prostitution, no matter the length of contact.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: There is an important distinction between a mistress and a courtesan in that a courtesan is shared and passed around while a mistress never is. Or, to put it another way, the relationship with a courtesan is purely sexual while the relationship with a mistress is usually more long-term and complex, almost marriage-like in nature.
WereBear
I suggest the difference is that a mistress is expected to sleep only with the man paying the rent; reciprocal fidelity is not expected on the man’s side, who is married.
While renting a brothel worker’s time comes with the expectation that a whole bunch of other dudes have come before you (pun just happened.)
Brachiator
@BGinCHI:
Haven’t we been here before? I dismiss Marx, therefore must be contrarian because …. ? Sorry. Is this junior high school? Are you really that frightened or need to have whatever you believe reinforced and approved?
There’s a lot of writing that is brilliant. Marx certainly qualifies on this alone. But whether it is accurate or useful or meaningful is another question. It’s kinda like Hobbes and his description of a state of nature. Powerful writing underlying an interesting philosophy. But an actual state of nature never existed and is contradicted by what we know about human evolution. Is Hobbes a fraud? Nope. But you have to look at him in a different, and lesser light.
I would never dispute whether psychoanalysis helped you. But the skeptical investigation of whether psychoanalysis is based on anything substantial and whether its purported cures can be verified has been going on for decades. No simple answer, but the notion that Freud represents an unshakeable pinncale of science has tottered if not been totally demolished.
A summary of the strengths and weaknesses is pretty good.
Why you think this is either contrarian or even particularly controversial is amazing.
beltane
@WereBear: Yes, in many cultures, including pre and early-Christian northern European ones, the “mistress” role is taken by subordinate wives who might not have all the perks and privileges of the primary wife (mostly having to do with the inheritance rights of children) but who are still expected to limit their sexual relations to one man and one man only. A prostitute is not, and never has been considered in the same light as a mistress/concubine/secondary wife.
schrodinger's cat
@Downpuppy: I have never seen this ad that you mention, is it because I am not a man, or is it because I have both NoScript and Adblock installed.
On topic, I remember reading an article about strippers and apparently the men who were their most frequent patrons, were more interested in conversation and just to have some one listen to them more than anything else.
beltane
This is truly the strangest thread I’ve ever seen here.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
At the risk of nut-picking, I saw a conservative commentator on Dr.Wang’s polling blog
Getting intellectuals out of their ivory tower and doing good honest work until their achieve conservative consciousness is what he wants.
So Maoist-style re-education camps for liberal intellectuals is now popular with at least one conservative. It begs for someone to go around C-PAC and seeing who else would go for it.
schrodinger's cat
@beltane: True and this on a blog that has posts about naked mopping.
Djur
That’s one of my favorite videos in the world, DougJ. I’m pretty sure I’ve watched it a few times a year ever since it was posted.
Omnes Omnibus
@Corner Stone: You are probably right. The proposed relationships described in the article are transactional and the transactions are strictly availability for sex in return for money. A mistress/courtesan relationship, while transactional and involving sex, generally involved more. Conversation, entertainment, whatever else.
Bruce S
@sherparick:
“In fairness…”
David Horowitz was NOT an “SDS Weatherman.” I doubt that Horowitz was ever actually a member of SDS, although he was deeply involved in earlier iterations of “the New Left” on Berkeley campus. Horowitz was a relatively non-doctrinaire neo-Trotskyist under the influence of Isaac Deutscher. He was extremely critical of the Weathermen, as editor of Ramparts magazine. Horowitz’ Achilles heel, which accounts for his idiotic involvement with the Panthers that turned into a personal disaster (he lured a friend into becoming the Panthers accountant who was killed when she found deep – and frankly predictable – corruption) and his eventual need to resurrect and reinvent himself as an embittered right-winger settling scores with former comrades, was a large ego. I think he was also amazed at how easy it became to raise large sums of money as a professional right-wing grifter and hack. He was never as loony or politically reductionist on the Left as he eventually became on the Right.
While there’s a very obvious similiarity among folks who are fundamentally ideological or become dogmatic adherents of a reductionist philosophy, comparing Marx to Ayn Rand or even Hayek and Von Mises is a stretch, at best. Marx was a brilliant political philosopher who, perhaps wildly, over-reached. Ayn Rand and the rest are mediocrities who benefit from being wildly over-rated.
El Cid
Chomsky used to remark several decades ago that if you read the business press, you encountered hard-line Marxian analysis, just with the values reversed.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: Courtesans have started wars. Get back to me when a prostitute has done that.
DougJ
@Djur:
I watch it all the time.
Sly
@Chris:
Personally, I think it’s a mistake to make the assumption (which you still find on the left) that organic movements rising from below are an inherently more powerful means of social cohesion and transformation. Nationalism isn’t organic or bottom-up, but is rather an artifice created by a particular leadership class to create a binding identity for others. Japan, for instance, went through dramatic social, political, and cultural change within a single generation at the behest of an empowered elite following the Meiji Restoration. Everything from the clothes people wore to the kinds of houses they lived in, from the way they practiced their religion to their political identities. And it was to a shocking degree planned that way.
The same with China, Russia, and, yes, even the United States following their own revolutions. Thirteen colonies with heterogeneous political cultures, social systems, religious sensibilities, etc. that were bound together, on purpose, to form a quasi-national identity within the first few decades after the Revolutionary War. Washington Irving actually wrote Rip Van Winkle, the story of a man who fell asleep shortly before the revolution and woke up 20 years later, to show how much American society had changed.
@BGinCHI:
Not just Hegel. Teleology is the most ubiquitous feature of pre-20th century historical scholarship. And the mass rejection of teleology came as a result of, unsurprisingly, WWI and WWII. It’s very easy to understate how two wars occurring in close proximity to each other, largely due to the same issues, and resulting in the deaths of approximately 90 million people could shake the preconceived and dominant notion that “Western civilization” was on an fixed path toward utopia. Nor is it surprising that some of the more interesting and reflective movements in philosophy and politically theory resulted from those conflicts, because a lot of smart people were trying to figure out how and why everyone before them got it so wrong…
@eric:
… like Camus. In many ways movements like absurdism and existentialism are the direct product of the implosion of Western civilization and various people trying to figure out why and how that implosion occurred.
Bruce S
@Sly:
If the implication is that Camus committed suicide, for the record he was killed in an automobile accident (and he wasn’t driving, so there’s no possibility it was some suicidal act.)
Sly
@Bruce S:
No. The implication is that Camus’ work was predicated on the collapse of a political and philosophical consensus brought about by the first and second World Wars. As was the works of Sartre, Leo Strauss, Walter Lippman, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt… the list is too numerous to fully contemplate, and includes thinkers from a wide range of philosophical schools and political leanings.
Omnes Omnibus
@Yutsano: Hey, I was not bagging on courtesans. It sounds like a tough gig to do well with a shitload of downside risk.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: There are those who did it quite well, specifically Madame de Pompadour. But what else was there really for a smart beautiful middle-class French girl to do in the France of Louis XIV? Especially since she seemed to detest the idea of marriage.
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: If I was going to sell my ass for money, I’d choose courtesan for sure.
Or advertising executive.
El Cid
@Bruce S: I think he’s also hysterically embarrassed and guilty about the degree to which his attention- and excitement-seeking ego got him involved with the Black Panthers, and his entire campus anti-leftist paranoid McCarthyite / Bircherite crusade is based on the notion that all young people are as vulnerable as he was to being sucked into some cultish environment, and that even the tiniest whiff of leftism is too much for them to handle, those poor young people all being just as vain, impulsive, egotistical, foolish, and attention-seeking as he was.
WereBear
@El Cid: An excellent point, and confirms a lot of the well-off I’ve encountered. Goes something like: I got rich by being devious and underhanded, and I’m an idiot. Why can’t everyone else do that?
Chris
@Sly:
Doesn’t matter how it originates, whether it’s grassroots or astroturf; the point is that it’s taken root and you’d be hard-pressed to find a more powerful counterpart.
Sly
@Chris:
It does matter, actually. Relying on organic movements obviates the necessity for direct participation, planning, and organization and instead inculcates a “wait and see” attitude with respect to the necessary ingredients for systemic change. It results in a cadre of people with good intentions shouting “WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!” at the wind, while far more organized forces in the opposition continue to enact their own agenda.
Nationalism is such a potent force because it is astroturf.
Bubblegum Tate
@Violet:
I like how BreitbartCo is complaining about tape editing.
WereBear
@Bubblegum Tate: They well know what tape editing can do, don’t they?
Another Halocene Human
@Herbal Infusion Bagger: I believe Dr. Wang hilariously rewrote that comment. You’ll see he left a note up top about editing it.
Brachiator
@Yutsano:
Wasn’t that a Doctor Who episode?
On the other hand, French King Henry IV loved his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées and treated her with more affection and courtesy in public than he did his wife. This inflamed the Village known as the French Court.
Even a good mistress can have it tough.
When Gabrielle died soon after giving birth to a stillborn son, Henry had the gall to wear black in mourning for her sake, and gave her a lavish public funeral.
Bruce S
@Sly:
Got it. I read that ellipsed phrase as a literal continuation of the last line.
libarbarian
I’m re-reading the Gulag Archipelago and I just read a quote by Krylenko which sounded just like Cheney:
Essentially “We are obliged to treat a threat to the revolution that may yet arise as a threat to the revolution that has already risen!”