We’re perhaps past the point where outbreaks of violence at a Donald Trump rally come as a total surprise, but that doesn’t make what transpired between a Trump supporter
Footage shows a rally attendee lunging out of the crowd to grab at a protester’s face. The protester shouts back but does not appear to retaliate, and is eventually escorted from the rally by security.
Rafael Edward Cruz was born in Calgary on December 22, 1970. He is currently 45 years old. The following is a list of people who are older than him.
Stunning.
[all images via Getty / inspiration via this tweet as retweeted by very good Gawker commenter Rom Romberts]
Last night Bill de Blasio defended a joke he made about “colored person time” by explaining the joke for people who didn’t understand how funny it was—a strategy as old as time.
http://gawker.com/hillary-clinto...
The “joke,” as it were, was a play on the term “cp time,” or “colored people time,” which is used to indicate that a person is running late. De Blasio used the term onstage with Hillary Clinton and Hamilton actor Leslie Odom Jr. yesterday, providing a lead-in for Clinton to joke that in this particular case the term referred to “confused politician time.”
A very funny joke to de Blasio—people just must not get it, he apparently concluded.
“It was clearly a staged show, it was a scripted show. The whole idea was to do the counterintuitive,” de Blasio said on CNN. “Every actor involved, including Hillary Clinton and Leslie Odom Jr., thought it was a joke on a different convention, that was the whole idea of it, so I think people are missing the point here.”
Now that he’s explained it... huh. Still not funny.
On Monday evening, reporters received two vastly different press releases from members of Eagle Forum, the conservative interest group. One, sent by Anne Cori, the group’s newly appointed executive director, alleged that a telephone meeting between Eagle Forum board members held that afternoon “[ensured] that Eagle Forum will continue long into the future as a viable force.” The other, sent by Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum’s 91-year-old founder, called that same meeting “improper,” “unprecedented,” and “invalid.”
http://gawker.com/is-conservativ...
Yesterday’s meeting marks the culmination of weeks of tension within Eagle Forum
After Schlafly’s Trump endorsement, members of the two emergent Eagle Forum factions took shots at each other in the press, in emails to members, and on social media. Cathie Adams, an Eagle Forum board member and former chair of the Texas GOP, told the Dallas Morning News that Trump had taken advantage of Schlafly’s old age and misled her into supporting them; Ed Martin, who until yesterday served as Eagle Forum’s president, said Adams’ remarks were indicative of a “terrible betrayal” of Schlafly and the organization.
Which brings us to yesterday’s telephone meeting. In a frantic email sent to supporters Saturday, Martin warned that a “Gang of 6" anti-Schlafly board members including Adams and Cori were conspiring to push the Eagle Forum founder out of her organization, and that they would execute their coup at the meeting unless they were stopped. Schlafly herself told Gawker hours before the meeting that the Trump-Cruz split was one reason for the internecine tension. The agenda of the meeting had been hidden from her, she said, but she did not believe she was about to be ousted from Eagle Forum. Still, earlier in the day, she had called for the resignation of each of the Gang of 6 members and said that the meeting was a “hostile takeover.”
As the dust settles, it looks like Martin and Schlafly were both correct, to a degree. The Gang of 6 did vote to remove one of Eagle Forum’s most powerful members, but it was Martin who saw the axe, not Schlafly. According to a tartly worded press release, Martin was removed as president, effective immediately, to be replaced temporarily by Eunie Smith, octogenarian leader of the Alabama Eagle Forum and a member of the Gang of 6. Smith will serve as the national president until a permanent candidate is selected. Anne Cori, who is Phyllis Schlafly’s daughter, was named as the group’s executive director.
Schlafly herself does not appear to have been formally ousted, but it is clear that she sees the removal of Martin, one of her supporters in the organization, as a move against her. In her statement from yesterday evening, Schlafly called the meeting an attempt to “wrest control of the organization from me.”
Her statement reads in full:
At 2:00 pm today, 6 directors of Eagle Forum met in an improper, unprecedented telephone meeting. I objected to the meeting and at 2:11pm, I was muted from the call. The meeting was invalid under the Bylaws but the attendees purported to pass several motions to wrest control of the organization from me. They are attempting to seize access to our bank accounts, to terminate employees, and to install members of their own Gang of 6 to control the bank accounts and all of Eagle Forum.
The members of their group are: Eunie Smith of Alabama, Anne Cori of Missouri, Cathie Adams of Texas, Rosina Kovar of Colorado, Shirley Curry of Tennessee, and Carolyn McLarty of Oklahoma.
This kind of conduct will not stand and I will fight for Eagle Forum and I ask all men and women of good will to join me in this fight.
(Followers of right-wing political antics may remember Rosina Kovar as the grandmother who memorably testified that “the anus is an exit, it is not an entrance...nature put a tight sphincter at the entrance of the anus—it’s there for a reason” when speaking about the evils of sodomy to Colorado legislators in 2011.)
Schlafly, Cori, and the Eagle Forum press office could not be contacted to comment on this story, and other members of the Gang of 6 did not respond to requests for comment before the meeting Monday afternoon.
The future of Eagle Forum is uncertain, but according to Schlafly, it will likely involve considerably less guidance from its founder. Before the Ted Cruz-Donald Trump race destroys the entire Republican party later this year, it seems to be tearing apart one of the party’s renowned institutions as a warm-up.
For the past several days, including today, the most trafficked piece of content on Politico.com has been a slideshow of 17 wire pictures featuring Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton and her long-time aide Huma Abedin in various settings, including the 2008 campaign trail and several countries Clinton visited as Secretary of State. Its description refers to Abedin as Clinton’s “body woman”—an appellation borrowed, it seems, from a 2006 Observer article—and Abedin’s job as “assisting the former secretary of state’s move back into her private life.” Its title is, “How close are Huma Abedin and Hillary Clinton?”
What’s noteworthy about this particular slideshow is not its subtext, which is easy enough to guess. What’s noteworthy is its timestamp. These 17 photos were arranged and published nearly three years ago, in July 2013. The staffer who selected them no longer works for Politico. And the photos themselves are equal in their banality: in several of them, the two women are seen walking down nondescript hallways, or standing on rural tarmacs, or looking at the same piece of paper. Why, then, have these images continued to gobble up so much of Politico’s traffic?
A review of Politico’s assorted social media accounts indicates the political news organization is not intentionally driving traffic to these 17 photos. Neither its Facebook or Twitter pages have recently promoted them. That suggests the slideshow’s popularity is entirely organic. It’s true, of course, that determining the cause of an older item’s surge of popularity remains fraught with error—remember Gawker’s “vajazzling” mystery?
Where did this sudden surge of interest come from, though? Clinton is perhaps the most famous woman in the world and currently the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Abedin is one of her closest aides, so there is going to be a certain amount of built-in attention toward them as a pair. But the recent popularity of Politico’s Abedin-Clinton slideshow points to the resurgence of something else entirely: The conservative movement’s unique fixation on Abedin’s relationship with Clinton, and the power of its corresponding media outlets—The Drudge Report, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and on and on—to shape, steer, and reward the same fixation.
The Drudge Report, the bare-bones website operated by Matt Drudge since 1997, appears to be partly responsible for this renewed attention. On April 5, two days before Politico’s slideshow resurfaced at the top of their most-read list, Drudge prominently linked to a Daily Mail article detailing the most interesting bits of Abedin’s recent appearance on the popular “Call Your Girlfriend” podcast, during which the aide recalled meeting Clinton for the first time: “I still remember the look on her face. And it’s funny, and she would probably be so annoyed that I say this, but I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, she’s so beautiful and she’s so little!’”
By itself, Abedin’s recollection is not particularly interesting. Based on the way he linked to Mail article, however, Drudge apparently detected notes of sexual desire, or maybe jealousy, between Abedin and Clinton:
There is some truth to the suggestion that Clinton and Abedin are remarkably close for women of their age and prominence. But their closeness is not necessarily illogical; they have, after all, worked together for the past two decades, during which women began to hold higher and higher offices within American politics. And Clinton and Abedin have navigated these tumultuous years despite their respective marriages to Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner, two male politicians who repeatedly cheated on their wives.
The idea that Clinton and Abedin are romantically involved, however, stems from a decades-old rumor—which has never been substantiated—that Clinton is secretly a lesbian or bisexual. The most well-known evidence for this rumor is either circumstantial (she attended Wellesley, a women’s college in Massachusetts; she married Bill Clinton, who repeatedly cheated on her; she seeks to become President of the United States, an office no sane heterosexual woman would ever think of filling) or so old as to cast doubt on its legitimacy. This is not to say there is a lack of people who will claim, on the record, using their own names, that Hillary Clinton is gay. Last year, for example, a woman named Gennifer Flowers, whom Bill Clinton had sex with in the 1970s, told media outlets that the former President had confided in her several decades ago that his wife is attracted to women, and that he had made peace with her sexuality: “He said Hillary had eaten more pussy than he had.” Two months ago, another one of Clinton’s alleged mistresses from the same era, Sally Miller, claimed he had told her that his wife “liked females more than men.”
Now, it is entirely possible that Clinton is in fact a lesbian; that she has had sex with women on the side; and that she has tolerated her marriage to Bill Clinton, even through his humiliating affairs, in service of her own political ambitions. Human sexuality is a mysterious thing. But the persistent intrigue surrounding Clinton’s relationship with Abedin, whatever its contours or secrets may be, appears to be only tangentially related to the former Secretary of State’s rumored homosexuality.
There aren’t any scientific polls concerning the American populace’s opinion toward Abedin, but you can get a sense of what certain segments of populace are thinking pretty easily via social media. When you search for “Huma Abedin” on Twitter, for example, you won’t see very many tweets about her rumored coupledom with Clinton. You will, however, see a lot of tweets about her religious upbringing, and how she may or may not be manipulating Clinton into carrying out the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood, the militant Islamist social movement founded in 1928:
This particular conspiracy theory did not burble up from the dredges of the right-wing internet. It came from the halls of Congress. In July 2012, five Republican U.S. Representatives—Michelle Bachmann, Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Thomas Rooney, and Lynn Westmoreland—sent a 4-page letter to the State Department’s deputy inspector general, requesting an review of Abedin’s required security clearance. Their chief allegation: “The Department’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Huma Abedin, has three family members—her late father, her mother and her brother—connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.” The same letter asserted that the Secretary of State has “taken actions recently that have been enormously favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood and its interests,” thereby implying that Abedin’s alleged sympathies to the Brotherhood were influencing State Department policy. (As you may have guessed, many tweets similar to those embedded above link directly to Politico’s Clinton-Abedin slideshow.)
It is true that Abedin was raised as a Muslim by two immigrant parents who had emigrated to Kalamazoo, Michigan (her father from India and her mother from Pakistan) before her family relocated to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her parents found work as academics. It is also true that her father, mother and brother have belonged, at certain points in time, to organizations that have been funded by or associated with individuals or organizations with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. You can even read about these connections on conservative websites, whose competing write-ups feature highly variable degrees of sobriety, but none of them claim to show a) that Abedin has anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood, or b) that Abedin constructed State Department policy to assist the Brotherhood.
Indeed, the insinuations that Abedin was guilty of either charge were so unfounded, and so outrageous, that John McCain, a Republican and the senior Senator from Arizona, publicly rebuked Michelle Bachmann and the letter’s other authors for leveling “an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated American and a loyal public servant.”
McCain’s defense of Abedin did not exactly squelch the rumors about her ties to Muslim Brotherhood; if anything, it inflamed them. But it’s hard to say what the Senator or anyone else could have done to get rid of them entirely. Through a series of foreign wars and domestic surveillance programs, the U.S. government has systemically marginalized Muslims here and abroad, which has in turn bred intense mistrust between Muslim communities and more conservative segments of society. (The speed in which Muslim voters migrated from the G.O.P. to the Democratic Party following the September 11, 2001 attacks is unprecedented.) And that mistrust has not abated. Despite his promise to ban the travel of Muslims to the United States, Donald J. Trump remains the Republican frontrunner in the 2016 election.
It is unlikely that Trump will be President. If current polls hold, the next President of the United States will be Hillary Clinton. Which means that Abedin, should she remain in Clinton’s circle, is poised to become one of the most prominent and powerful Muslims in the United States, one with the longstanding trust of the future chief executive. Considering the treatment of Muslims over the past fifteen years, many people would consider this a sign of progress.
Those who think otherwise—those inclined to believe that Abedin’s future office amounts to a profound betrayal of the American presidency—are ultimately less concerned with Abedin’s personal qualities, or the strength of her relationship with Clinton, than the scary idea of a Muslim inhabiting the White House, if not the Oval Office proper. You only need to look at what happened in 2008, between an ascendant U.S. Senator named Barack Hussein Obama and the vociferous conservative media, to see how such a fear can infect the political process, including Clinton’s own failed campaign, and how the same fear can be overcome.
The Missouri primary, which took place on March 15, concluded with the races on both sides too close to call. Then we all forgot about the Missouri primary. But today, Secretary of State Jason Kander announced the winners: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
http://gawker.com/nobody-knows-w...
Both Clinton and Trump were leading in the polls with 99% of the vote counted, but a recount was triggered with both up by just 0.2 percentage points. Alas, nothing changed. The final vote tallies according to Politico:
In the finally tally, Trump pipped Texas Sen. Ted Cruz by just 0.2 percentage points — 40.9 percent to Cruz’s 40.7.
On the Democratic side, the former secretary of state also led Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also by 0.2 percentage points — 49.6 percent to his 49.4.
Per Politico, the delegate count is as follows. On the Republican side:
For the Dems, including superdelegates:
Missouri’s superdelegate process is already notably fraught, as this article published last week in the Kansas City Star elucidates. Politico’s updated math differs slightly from the Star’s, but the end result is essentially the same: 36 pledged delegates for Hillary and 35 for Sanders. Plus:
But 11 of Missouri’s 13 superdelegates have already expressed a preference for Clinton. Nationally, her share of the superdelegates, at least for now, is far bigger than her share of the popular vote.
Please forward to the Bernie Bro in your life.
In the history of the modern American stock market, the chance of an extreme one-day crash is about 1% in any give six month period. So why is everyone constantly terrified that it will happen?
If you blame the media... well, you’re kind of right. But we’re not here to assign blame. (Are we not all products of sin, at last?) We are here, rather, to delve into the broken, twisted, dysfunctional machine that is the human psyche: The Place Where It All Goes Wrong (our title).
For decades, the economist Robert Shiller has been regularly surveying investors on their thoughts. One thing he asks them to do is to estimate the probability of a catastrophic market crash in the next six months. As we pointed out, the historic probability of such an event, like the “Black Monday” crash of 1987, is about 1% in any given six months. But over the past 25 years of investor surveys, “the mean and median probability assessments of a one-day crash were 19% and 10%, respectively.”
This tells us investors are very “wrong,” in their predictions.
But why? Is it because even the most “sophisticated” financial titans are, like the rest of us, naturally stupid sheep easily misled by the latest hype-filled report on any trashy TV network or blog? Friends, we are sad to report that yes, this is the case. All the experts know nothing. A new research paper by Shiller and two other economists finds that disproportionate negative media coverage of financial markets has a disproportionately negative impact on the minds of investors leading to the sort of wacked-out terrified predictions that we see in Shiller’s surveys. Why? Because even people who allocate money for a living fall prey to the most basic psychological flaws of the world’s most dangerous animal—mankind.
We find evidence that investors use recent market performance to estimate probabilities about a crash. We also find that the press makes negative market returns relatively more salient and this is associated with individual investor probability assessments of a crash... Finally, we also find evidence consistent with an availability bias when examining the crash probabilities of investors who recently experienced exogenous rare events; in this case, moderate earthquakes.
“Availability bias” simply means that people use the freshest things on the tops of their minds to make broad judgments, even when doing so is statistically stupid. So people read a bad Wall Street Journal and internalize that fear like a bunch of god damn, I don’t know, dogs, being trained to fear things. Even people who experience earthquakes are susceptible to the psychological trick of subsequently believing that rare events like stock market crashes are more likely, despite the fact that the two things have little or no real correlation. Combine this with the fact that the tawdry, click-hungry news media tends to focus more on negative events than on positive or neutral ones, and you have a formula for an irrationally worried populace—high-paid men in pinstriped suits who are, at hear, little more than terrified children, as we all are deep down.
The human condition is that most humans are wrong and the rest of them are out to rip you off. Not us, though. We are your friends.
[The full paper. Photo of rational financial professionals making well-reasoned risk assessments: AP]
In December, according to a lawsuit, NYPD officers prevented a family from entering their Queens apartment for several days because of allegations that drugs were being sold there. A great bust for the cops, except that the suspected drug dealer had moved out in August.
http://gawker.com/the-nypd-is-ta...
The officers were operating under a municipal law known as “nuisance abatement,” which allows them to shut down properties that they believe are being used to commit crimes, without actually charging anyone with criminal wrongdoing, which would allow them the chance to argue their side in court.
The law was drafted in the 1970s to target brothels in Times Square, but has been increasingly used against New Yorkers in their homes in recent years. Extensive New York Daily News and ProPublica reporting on the subject reveals that cops often execute these nuisance abatement actions, based on very little evidence, for crimes like selling drugs and gambling.
The aforementioned lawsuit, filed today in Brooklyn federal court by Austria Bueno, alleges that Bueno and her husband and sons were barred from entering their Queensbridge Homes apartment after a police executed a nuisance abatement action meant to target the apartment’s previous tenant. In January 2015, the tenant allegedly sold crack to an undercover informant, and drugs and guns were found in the apartment shortly after.
But Bueno and her family did not move into the apartment until August, after that tenant moved out—a fact that should have been very easy for the NYPD to discern. Queensbridge Homes is a public housing complex, meaning all the cops would have had to do is call up the housing authority and ask. The family spent three days unable to enter their apartment under threat of arrest before their attorney successfully argued their case in court.
Bueno’s suit makes specific reference to the Daily News and ProPublica’s reporting, pointing to those organizations’ findings that nuisance abatement is carried out in a racially and economically biased manner.
Bueno’s suit seeks unspecified damages. It also asks that New York City’s nuisance abatement be declared an unconstitutional violation of due process.
The gender pay gap plus the racial pay gap equals this: “As compared with the hourly wage of the median white man, the median black woman earns 65.1 percent as much, and the median Hispanic woman earns 58.9 percent as much.”
Last Friday, the media industry toasted BuzzFeed for successfully drawing the attention of nearly 800,000 Facebook users to a livestream of two employees wrapping hundreds of rubber bands around a watermelon until the fruit exploded. The gambit capped another quarter of widespread confidence in BuzzFeed’s business model, which sells native advertising against a mix of silly listicles and enterprise reporting published on an ever-increasing number of third-party platforms, with everything heavily underwritten by periodic injections of venture capital.
According to a new report by the Financial Times, however, the company may need to recalibrate:
BuzzFeed missed its revenue target for 2015 and has slashed its internal projections for 2016 by about half [...] The company, known for its lists, irreverent content and fast-growing editorial operation, had projected about $250m in revenues for 2015 but generated less than $170m, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. The company has halved its internal revenue target for 2016 from $500m to $250m, the people said.
The paper notes that BuzzFeed challenged the quoted figures but refused to clarify what its actual revenue numbers were. Instead the company provided F.T. with a statement which reads, in part, “We are very comfortable with where the digital content world is going and think we are well-positioned.”
http://tktk.gawker.com/internal-docum...
$170 million, give or take, is still a staggering amount of revenue, so it’s not as if BuzzFeed is suddenly closing down. Following NBCUniversal’s $200 million investment in the company last year, BuzzFeed’s valuation reached an estimated $1.5 billion, so revenues of $170 mm would produce a revenue-to-valuation multiple of 8.82x for 2015. Assuming the underlying numbers are correct, the resulting metric would represent only a slight aberration from the prior year, at least as judged by CB Insights analyst Michael Dempsey, who spoke to Gawker last August when we published several quarters’ worth of BuzzFeed’s confidential financial statements.
Their revenue to valuation multiples are pretty high compared to public comparables like New York Times (NYT is currently trading around 1.38x 2014’s revenue, vs. BuzzFeed which you can peg somewhere south of 9.2x if you very conservatively pro-rate 1H [first half] 2014 revenue ($46.16M) to $92.32M and use the $850M valuation from their August 2014 $50M financing.
(The second set of numbers are based on the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s $50 million investment
There are still a number of lingering questions about BuzzFeed’s future health, such as the long-term viability of investing in platform-specific content, which, despite being created by BuzzFeed (or any other publisher), is by definition beholden to its respective platform and the corporation that owns and operates it. It’s unclear, too, whether BuzzFeed’s cash cow—custom BuzzFeed-style content created on behalf of brands—will endure. One source told F.T., “It takes too long to do each campaign, and you can only do so many.”
If BuzzFeed did indeed fall $80 million short of its internal revenue projections, you have to wonder how many other media organizations of the same species—your Vocativs and Voxes and Mics and Mashables—committed the same error, too. And if this aberration turns out to be a long-term trend, the era of the Millennial-focused, growth-obsessed, venture capital-funded media organization may be ending sooner than we think.
A spokesperson for BuzzFeed did not immediately respond to our request for comment regarding F.T.’s report; we will update this post if we hear back.
“You’ll never believe how hard Mark Zuckerberg just DEMOLISHED presidential candidate Donald Trump!” erupted the internet earlier today.
Which would have been noteworthy, but that’s not what happened. Facebook kicked off its annual developers’ conference with a keynote address from yes, Mark Zuckerberg. During his speech, the boy genius espoused some widely held (and for Silicon Valley dwellers, financially beneficial) beliefs: The internet is good, staying connected is good, cutting yourself off from people is bad, etc. Here’s how he put it:
As I look around the world, I’m starting to see people and nations turning inward, against the idea of a connected world and a global community. I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as “others.” I hear them calling for blocking free expression, for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases even for cutting access to the internet.
It takes courage to choose hope over fear. People will always call you naive but it’s this hope and optimism that’s behind every important step forward.
We already knew Mark Zuckerberg liked the internet. We already knew Mark Zuckerberg wholly supported immigration. And we already knew Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of a massive cooperation, likes free trade. But now, we also know that Mark Zuckerberg is okay trotting out that tired, unsubtle reference to Donald Trump’s affection for building walls.
Which is fine! As the ostensible gatekeeper for the medium by which one-seventh of the world consumes a good portion of their media, nothing Mark Zuckerberg says about politics will ever be entirely benign; it makes sense for him to play it safe. And to his credit, Facebook’s users love him for it:
What doesn’t make sense, however, is heralding Mark Zuckerberg as a champion for getting as close to benign as someone in his position can possibly get.
And still, we get this from The Weekly Standard:
And Fortune:
And The Next Web:
And Gizmodo
And Recode:
And also The Verge:
Mark Zuckerberg does not need to be called a hero for saying exactly what every sane human is already thinking. “The nazis shouldn’t have killed all those people.” “Princess Diana’s death was sad.” “Donald Trump is a Bad Man.” Each statement exactly an ATTACK as DECIMATING as the one before it.
A not unrelated rule of thumb for bloggers: Before claiming that anyone “targeted,” “blasted,” or “slammed” Donald Trump, make sure they actually said the man’s name.
The New York Observer, which was once a good newspaper, is endorsing the owner’s wife’s dad for president.
“Donald Trump is the father-in-law of the Observer’s publisher,” the endorsement begins. “That is not a reason to endorse him. Giving millions of disillusioned Americans a renewed sense of purpose and opportunity is.”
The Observer goes on to reject the anti-Trumpism of the “the media elite, the professional political class and the people largely insulated or directly benefitting from the failures of the last seven years.” The Observer is owned by a millionaire real estate developer who is the son of a millionaire real estate developer and the son-in-law of a billionaire real estate developer who was himself the son of a millionaire real estate developer. The paper is edited
We extend our deepest sympathies to the remaining journalists at the New York Observer.
In an interview with Cosmopolitan.com, Hillary Clinton lay responsibility for the “C.P. time” skit she appeared in with Bill de Blasio and Hamilton’s Leslie Odom Jr. at the New York City mayor’s feet.
“Well, look, it was Mayor de Blasio’s skit,” Clinton said. “He has addressed it, and I will really defer to him because it is something that he’s already talked about.”
The skit was ostensibly intended to mock the mayor’s hesitance to endorse Clinton, but de Blasio ended up spending Monday on damage control. “It was clearly a staged show. It was a scripted show,” he told CNN. “I think people are missing the point here.” His office clarified further, in a later statement: “In an evening of satire, the only person this was meant to mock was the mayor himself, period. Certainly no one intended to offend anyone.”
http://gawker.com/bill-de-blasio...
In any event, as tedious as it is to watch politicians play hot potato, there is a certain amount of schadenfreude in seeing de Blasio—who, following his delayed endorsement, has spent the better part of the past six months stuck in the wilderness of Clinton’s favor, begging to be let back in from the cold—get burned like this.
In early 1946, a woman from Carmel, California wrote the Hollywood fan magazine Screenland to say how much she had enjoyed the recent Christmas release Frontier Gal—not just for its lovely performers and dazzling Technicolor vistas, but for saving her marriage by teaching her husband to spank her.
After he’d returned from the war, she’d struggled to warm up to him again, she wrote, which caused a problem—and here was the solution. “In desperation, after seeing the show, he tried little Beverly’s philosophy,” wrote Mrs. J.B.M. “Daddies spank mamas because they love them. While this old-fashioned approach probably wouldn’t work in all cases, it did for us, and I would appreciate an opportunity to publicly thank Universal and Frontier Gal.”
The letter is mysterious—is it describing erotic play, or spousal abuse?—but the context is less so. Frontier Gal was one of at least five movies with scenes of women being spanked released in 1945 alone. Though the movie culminates in a minute-long spanking of its star Yvonne De Carlo, the plot device was so unremarkable as to not even make the reviews. From the beginnings of cinema up through the 1960s, a spanking was just a routine part of a certain type of screen romance: watch the supercut below.
For decades, in movie after movie, wily women were rendered the children of the men who loved them. It was entertaining. It was light fun. It was comfort for a culture uneasy about the advance of women’s liberation. It was, in countless period pieces, a way to revise history, to reassure Americans that the liberated woman had always been a problem and there was a time-honored, lovingly disciplinary solution. The film spanking was both a mirror and a model—Mrs. J.B.M. wasn’t the only one getting spanked, just one of few women off-screen who didn’t mind.
In the 1963 movie Mclintock!, when a young man is upset by the actions of a young woman he barely knows, he grabs her and puts her across his knee, forgetting that her father, John Wayne, is standing right behind him. As the young man reaches back for a wallop, Wayne stays his hand—and puts a small shovel in it. In a moment, Wayne’s daughter is being spanked, yelps and the clangs of the shovel are resounding through the house, and Wayne is smiling and lighting a cigar, happy to share his parental duties.
Days later, the young man and woman are engaged. “I guess this is the only engagement that ever started off with a spanking,” Wayne says when he finds out. But in the film world, it was quite the opposite. Spankings stirred romance all the time. A couple meets; she wrongs the man somehow, and he puts her over his knee. It takes them a while to admit it, but soon they’re in love.
In Lucky Star (1929), In the Navy (1941), The Flame of Araby (1951), and other films, the spanking is the first serious step toward romance. Indeed, a spanking has as much predictive power as Chekhov’s first act gun. In Reap the Wild Wind (1942), Paulette Goddard and John Wayne appear madly in love, but when Ray Milland spanks Goddard for deceiving him midway through the film, it suddenly becomes clear who she’ll end up with. Like chumps in films such as Streamline Express (1935), Public Deb No. 1 (1940), and Captain Lightfoot (1955), John Wayne soon sees his girl’s heart stolen by a firm hand.
Even when the spanking doesn’t occur, the mere threat usually assures a romance, a connection as clear to a film’s characters as to viewers. In Oklahoma! (1955), a young man tries to calm his girlfriend down by telling her, “You quit your worryin’ or I’ll spank you.” Suddenly, as he steps away from her, the import of his words hits him. He slowly turns back: “While I think of it, how about marryin’ me?” Somehow, he realizes that a dominion over her buttocks is also a dominion over her heart. Similarly, in Streamline Express, the hero only learns he loves the girl when he is startled to find himself shouting “I love you” as he lands a blow against her backside.
Usually, however, the man knows all along he loves her, and the major conflict is in getting women to acknowledge their true feelings. In The Living Ghost (1942), the hero must trick the girl into thinking their death is imminent to get her to admit her love—and even then the film still concludes with a spanking. In Flying Down to Rio (1933), we see the woman’s internal dilemma visualized. Trapped on an island with her would-be lover, Dolores Del Rio shouts her contempt of him, but then her inner self steps outside her body and mocks her faux reserve. Soon, she drops that reserve and kisses the guy, but when she refuses to marry him, she’s spanked.
She’s a rich girl who’s used to getting her own way, one of many overly-independent women these movies put in place. Some are spoiled, like her; some meddle in their husband’s business, like Myrna Loy in The Thin Man Goes Home (1945); some are stuck-up, like Elizabeth Allen in Donovan’s Reef (1963); some refuse to perform, like the singers in And the Angels Sing (1944) and Look for the Silver Lining (1949); some are even too forward, like the women in The Naughty Flirt (1931), Stronger Than Desire (1939), and The Female Animal (1958). They’re all guilty of stepping out of their sphere, of assuming an independence that many viewers were surely eager to see restricted.
In Forsaking All Others (1934), Joan Crawford begins a harangue about her right to date a married man by telling Clark Gable that she’s “free, white, and twenty-one,”
Even when the spank comes alongside greater violence, like punches in Professional Sweetheart (1933) and Love, Honor, and Behave (1938), the woman remains devoted. In Frontier Gal, the hero twice forces himself on his wife sexually, with only her blissful smile after the act to assure the audience that this was not rape but her secret desire. While other films aren’t as extreme as this, in all it holds true that the independent woman wants nothing more than to be overwhelmed.
Some of these women are explicit about their need for a spanking. In Union Pacific (1939), when told that a coquette will only play her games until “the right man comes along and gives her the spanking she deserves,” Barbara Stanwyck replies, “Ah, that’s the man she dreams of!” In State of the Union (1948), Katherine Hepburn laments that her wayward husband no longer cares enough about her to spank her. “I’d do anything for one good smack on my south end,” she says wistfully.
The women in these movies are portrayed as guilty not just of offenses against their men, but also against their community, and so their spankings are often public affairs. In Frontier Gal, nearly every key player in the film watches. In Mclintock!, when John Wayne spanks wife Maureen O’Hara, the entire frontier town observes, laughing riotously. “My father would be proud of you!” a man shouts. In Public Deb No. 1, the spanking of a young woman for promoting communism is documented by photographers, sparking a wave of girlfriend spankings across the country. The women need to be humiliated out of their pretensions—O’Hara even gets accidentally tarred and feathered before the spanking. The community laughs, delighted to finally see her corrected back into womanhood. And as the camera alternates between shots of the spankee and the eager audience, the viewer joins that community.
To get an idea just how common this trope was, consider the following data:
The numbers come not from a scholarly database but from the fetish site Spankings in the Movies, one of several cataloguing this film favorite. It lists 280 entries by 1963, the year of Mclintock!, after which TV entries began to dominate, and, because of changes in censorship law, sexual spankings began to appear.
As the bottom listing indicates, the idea of spanking a woman was so popular that some studios would release publicity photos of spankings even when no such activity occurred in the movie—even when the characters barely interacted. When the spanking did occur, it frequently appeared on ads.
Studios apparently felt confident audiences wanted to see Hollywood’s most popular actresses disciplined. It’s true that if Americans feared liberated women, there were surely none more frightening than these rich, young, promiscuous stars. Fan magazines frequently reported their antics and noted how much they deserved a good spanking in reward, and fans in turn wrote to say who they would like to turn over their knee. She “needs a spanking and I’d like to be the one to give it to her,” a fan wrote of Ginger Rogers in 1943, disturbed that she’d married a younger man. (She’d already gotten one in Professional Sweetheart.) “I’d like to spank her for her attitude toward fans and publicity,” a former acquaintance of Katherine Hepburn wrote in 1934. (She’d ask for one in State of the Union.) “You should be spanked good and hard,” a fan chided Joan Crawford in 1931, on account of her dyed hair. (She’d received one already in Rose-Marie (1928) and would again in Forsaking All Others.) If you couldn’t see them punished in life, you could on screen.
But sometimes they were punished in life. In 1934, the Hollywood press reported that Lupe Velez, spanked in Hot Pepper (1933) and Mexican Spitfire’s Blessed Event (1943), had been spanked off camera—by her director: “In the midst of some of her didoes, Director Van Dyke reached the end of his patience and grabbing Lupe, threw her across his knee and administered a good, old-fashioned spanking where it should be delivered. And Lupe was a good girl for the rest of the picture.” She was 25.
Ten years later, 21-year-old Linda Darnell was struggling to play a part in Summer Storm, take after take failing to muster the right emotions. Finally, director Douglas Sirk walked over to her, “administered a few sound swats” to her behind, and then asked her to do it again. The next time, she got it right, and she said her relationship with Sirk was wonderful from then on.
With the camera rolling or not, stories coming from Hollywood studios presented a consistent message that spankings were a healthy part of a woman’s life. At the same time, all across America women were getting spanked by their husbands—and taking them to court.
To many American women, a spanking was the fruit not of charming adoration but domestic tyranny. Sometimes these spankings were precipitated by violent behavior on the part of the wife—but just as often it was for her failure to be a docile servant.
In 1949 a Dallas husband spanked his wife for not making breakfast. In 1942, an LA husband spanked his wife for refusing to play poker with guests. In 1897, a Providence husband spanked his wife for speaking with a minister. In 1927, a DC husband—like husbands in Santa Monica and Chicago before him—spanked his wife for getting her hair bobbed. In 1914, a Hagerstown, MD husband spanked his wife for not having dinner ready. All across the country, wives were spanked for talking too much, for political differences, for returning late from Bible class, for not addressing him as “sir,” for objecting to their child being spanked, for a misbehaving poodle, for refusing to buy a motorcycle, for nagging, for sleeping in, and for not doing the dishes.
Sometimes, judges applied the wisdom of Hollywood. In 1949, when a New York woman in her sixties was spanked by her drunken husband for “running around with the boys,” the judge urged her to drop the charges, telling her the man “must still consider you pretty and attractive or he wouldn’t be jealous of you that way.”
He “must love you an awful lot,” the judge added.
It’s an idea not of romantic but parental love—and one key to the logic of film spankings. In Frontier Gal, the hero first gets the idea to spank his wife after he spanks his five-year-old daughter. The girl cries, but, previously uncertain of the affections of her estranged father, she’s also pleased. Through sniffles, she says, “Fathers spank little girls because they love them…. Oh gosh, you love me.”
“I do,” he responds, just realizing it himself. At the end of the film, he puts the idea to use on his wife, spanking her as their daughter watches. While his wife is confused, the little girl is thrilled, finally saying, “Daddy, you spanked mama.… That means you love her.” Suddenly, the wife catches on and a kiss forced against her stammering lips seals the arrival of marital harmony.
In spanking films, the husband is a surrogate father. In Cow-Catcher’s Daughter (1931), a father tires himself out spanking his daughter over 50 times, finally saying he’s glad she’ll soon have a husband to take over the responsibilities. In Captain Lightfoot, Rock Hudson first spanks his love interest after declaring “Your father asked me to take his place.” In Too Young To Kiss (1951), the spankee is disguised as a child and the man actually proposes adopting her just a day before they declare their love. Meet John Doe (1940) really gets at the complications of this dynamic when Gary Cooper tediously recounts a dream in which he shifts roles from Barbara Stanwyck’s father to her lover, to a priest, each trading smacks on her posterior.
They all express the same idea: the “best wives and noblest mothers are, after all, but grown up children.” This statement comes not from a movie but a Long Island judge making his declaration validating wife spanking in 1902. The victims’ childishness repeatedly comes up in these proceedings. In justifying spanking his wife in 1958, a Santa Monica psychiatrist said, “Well, what can you do with a child?”
Many of these men treating their wives like children were, quite simply, married to children. Teenage wives as young as 13 reported being spanked. In 1908, a New York husband spanked his 16-year-old wife for standing on the street talking to some “strange men.”
“They were not strange men,” she asserted in court. “They were schoolboy friends.”
Of course, often, a spanking wasn’t all that went on. There was more severe beating as well. The spanking might seem comparatively trivial, but the fact that women reported it says a lot about its humiliating effects. A woman in Massachusetts in 1936 said during divorce proceedings that her husband “had beaten her and given her black eyes on other occasions, but it was the spanking he gave her that proved the last straw.”
Newspapers would overlook the more severe violence and put the spanking in a headline. They’d fill their reports on these cases with jokes, sometimes noting laughter in the courtroom, approaching the whole thing with the distance of a moviegoer and adding more insult to injury. In a 1910 case of a New York man spanking his wife for letting his dinner go cold, a piece in the Washington Post noted, “It did not develop in court whether Mr. Miller used the flat of his hand, a rubber shoe, an old slipper, a razor strop, or a shingle. These have all been tried at times and given satisfaction to the user.” Papers were so eager to trivialize domestic violence that some spanking stories can’t be trusted. In 1928, the LA Times proclaimed another case of a woman spanked for getting her hair bobbed, this time in Des Moines, but the court record mentions no such spanking; she was punched.
In movies, public humiliation helps bring women out of their pretensions or hysterics. In life, it was sometimes too much to bear. In 1949, an 18-year-old woman who the previous year had been crowned “Miss New Orleans” was spanked by her new husband in a hotel lobby. The strange story made national headlines. “It Must Be Love” one paper captioned a photo of the spanking. At the time, the woman played it up herself, but eventually the humiliation got to her. A year later, she attempted suicide. “I felt that people were laughing at me,” she said. “I couldn’t hold up my head in public.”
Publicity had just the opposite effect of what the movies depicted. In 1907, a Waterbury, CT woman testified in divorce proceedings that her husband spanked her daily, but it was not until he did so in public that she finally decided to take him to court. Again, the newspaper treated it as a lark.
The legality of the act depended on the decency of the judge. In one courtroom, a judge would declare, “Our scale of civilization has not entirely outgrown the efficacy of the more drastic corrective measures.” In another, a judge would assert, “Spanking belongs to the caveman age.” Amid this uncertainty, newspapers and magazines discussed where a husband could get away with it and whether it was proper in the first place.
Advice columnists continually returned to the question. Dorothy Dix endorsed spanking: “Bad wives are just as much their husbands’ fault as bad children are their parents’.” She and others frequently ran letters from women claiming they were saved from becoming “a miserable divorcee” by a timely spanking. In several such letters, it is the girl’s mother, guilty of having spared the rod, who instructs the husband to give her daughter what for.
Some of these letters sound fake, but newspapers were eager to believe them. In 1937, a widely circulated AP story told of a club formed by women advocating marital spankings. “Spare the hairbrush and spoil the wife,” they asserted. Six months later, another widely circulated story reported that the club now had 59 national chapters and young girls were opening an auxiliary, “Daughters of Spanking Parents.”
It didn’t matter that the AP stories couldn’t distinguish between Sioux Falls, South Dakota and Sioux City, Iowa, sourcing both in the same article, or that one year the club was represented by “Lora Lane” and the next by “Rita Rae.” It didn’t matter that no paper in Iowa or South Dakota reported on the club first. Or that nobody followed up on these stories, or that neither woman was in either Sioux’s directory. The idea of women clamoring to be disciplined with a paddling was a story people were prepared to believe. All those movies couldn’t be that mistaken.
And modern science seemed to support the idea as well. In 1939, the Boston Globe ran a piece by a Northwestern University psychology professor who presented case studies to get to the bottom of the scourge of nagging wives. One case involved the college-educated woman, a habitual marital problem because husbands need to feel superior and wives can’t be happy unless inferior. But there is a solution, the Globe said:
Women secretly wanted to be dominated: it’s precisely the logic of all those films where the spanking is returned with a passionate kiss. A psychologist wrote in Sensation magazine the same year that wives “would probably be happier” if spanked, though “the American woman is too busy trying to prove her equality with men to admit her masochistic yearnings—except in her choice of movie heroes.” (He then rejects spanking while advising “a hint of ruthlessness in love-making.”)
In movies, this idea of “taming” is often expressed literally: if the woman wasn’t a child, she was a horse. Before Frontier Gal’s Rod Cameron meets Yvonne De Carlo, she’s described to him as a “lively filly” who is “well worth stable room—once she’s broken for the bridle.” In The Flame of Araby, Maureen O’Hara is a princess who bristles at the roughness of the Bedouin who used a horsewhip on her backside when they first met, but as she later watches him methodically tame a wild horse, she sees the affection underlying his violence: “You speak to me insolently and without regard, and yet at no time were you brutal to the mighty Sherzade. Perhaps beneath your cloak of arrogance there is a softness in your heart.” Soon, it’s love.
Film women are so desperate to be dominated that when the spanking is denied it has ruinous effects. In In This Our Life (1942), Bette Davis is twice threatened with a spanking, but she’s spoiled instead and soon dies while reckless driving. In North West Mounted Police (1940), a young man stops the spanking of his girlfriend and soon the uncorrected hellion brings about his death.
In life, things could be just as dire. “Do you think a man should spank a nagging wife or suffer in silence,” the Toronto Globe and Mail asked the public in 1938. One man endorsed spanking: “I have seen some terrible shots made at the eighteenth hole on the golf links just because it was getting late and players were worrying what their wives would say when they got home. Such things should not be.”
Defenders of wife-spanking were often explicit about the politics behind it. A1900 Chicago Tribune editorial titled “Invasions of Men’s Rights” asserted that protections against wife spanking were none other than “the dreadful influence of woman suffragists and society leaders.” A Chicago judge in 1933 insisted, “Women may be emancipated but it’s still a man’s prerogative to spank a misbehaving wife.”A 1962 letter to Ann Landers lamented:
For insecure men like this, it must have been comforting to watch movies such as West of the Pecos (1945), Beauty and the Bandit (1946), Stagecoach Kid (1949), On Moonlight Bay (1951), and The Guns of Fort Petticoat (1957), where the spankee doesn’t just assume the prerogatives of a man, but actually tries to pass as one. Each time, she gets her comeuppance, assuring the audience that such barrier-breaking women not only could be returned to their proper roles but also secretly wanted to be. (The girl in Beauty and the Bandit even requests a second spanking.)
“ALL MAN” links the rise of liberated women to the first World War, but the “problem” was perhaps more acute after the second, and with it a rise in domestic violence. A widely circulated 1946 story on veterans beating their wives—trivialized with a cutesy spanking cartoon—quoted a psychiatrist who blamed the victims: “Women who don’t want to go back to being housewives are bringing a lot of friction into the home.” Appearing a month after Frontier Gal’s release, perhaps the story, or others like it, colored how Mrs. J.B.M. understood her marital struggles.
Regardless, she soon would find a model in the sweetly patriarchal on-screen marriages of Hollywood stars, even as, off-screen, some of those stars evinced a darker version of the movie story. In 1968, Cary Grant, who threatened women with spankings in To Catch a Thief (1956) and Charade (1963), was divorced by his young wife Dyan Cannon, who alleged among other things that he had spanked her. In 1953, Susan Hayward, who received a publicity shot spanking for Hit Parade of 1943, testified in her divorce that husband Jess Barker had spanked her. In the 1950s, Marlon Brando, who did no on-screen spanking, spanked his wife, Anna Kashfi.
Maybe the stars really believed what their industry was selling. Real marital spankings gave rise to screen ones, but with all that attractive celluloid action, it’s hard to imagine the influence didn’t extend the other way as well.
On a forum on the website Taken in Hand, for couples who enjoy male-dominant relationships, a commenter writes of the 1938 Ernst Lubitsch film Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife: “It’s the only film I’ve ever seen with a spanking scene where the heroine is entirely impervious to any beneficial effects of being spanked. It’s one for people to remember if they get carried away by the idea that spanking can solve any problem.” Indeed, the film is unique in the way it defies movie spanking formulas. Where traditionally the woman must have her will broken, here it is Gary Cooper who is tamed, ending up in a straightjacket. Where traditionally the man must force a kiss on the girl, here it is Claudette Colbert who forces it on Cooper. Colbert is a modern woman, and the film suggests that the old ways must yield to her. There is a spanking, but it doesn’t take. Cooper gets the idea after picking up a copy of The Taming of the Shrew, but it gets him nowhere, and in the next scene he throws the book in the fireplace.
Many of the spanking films seem to have Shakespeare’s play in mind, most obviously 1955’s quasi-adaptation Kiss Me, Kate. In alluding to the play, they suggest there’s something timeless about this kind of violence. Men have always had to spank their women when they’ve gotten out of line. Yet one thing you can say for Shakespeare’s play is that Kate isn’t physically abused. Indeed, a fetish site has looked through the stage history of the play and been unable to find any spankings until after World War II.
Repeatedly, in movies, newspapers, and Mrs. J.B.M.’s letter, the phrase “old-fashioned spanking” is used to align the act with a long tradition. A spanker is guilty, one story notes, of having “backslid into the past.” Another spanker “exercised a once universal but now frowned upon right.” Yet it’s a struggle to find examples of this form of marital discipline occurring very long ago. The spanking forums, which revel in finding precedents for their kink, come up really short on any before the last century. Of course, the more violent practice of wife beating, and the law of coverture that authorized it, has a long, ugly history—but wife spanking was new. It makes no appearance in histories of domestic violence. It was a particularly modern response to modern anxieties.
However much people—especially spanking advocates—believed there to be one, there was no history for this type of practice to harken back to. Except on film. The cinema offered the spanking history the real history books could not provide. There spanking occurs in medieval Europe (The Flame and the Arrow (1950), The Vagabond King (1956)), early nineteenth-century Ireland (Captain Lightfoot), timelessly Orientalized Arabia and Algeria (The Flame of Araby, Prisoners of the Casbah (1953)), and, in dozens of films, the old American West. The Western genre that is so focused on reinventing American origins, also invents origins for a benign form of domestic violence. Just as spanking was a way of reclaiming the liberated, frightening woman by infantilizing her, it was a way of reclaiming brutal, tyrannical violence by infantilizing it. It was an act of retrenchment.
But could it be something else as well? For Mrs. J.B.M., it really may have been healthy—loving, sexual. And perhaps it was for other viewers too. The older fetishists like to recount the thrill of watching some of these scenes in the theater as a child.
In a classic essay on the practice of anthropology, Clifford Geertz discusses the difficulty of determining the meaning of a gesture as simple as a child’s wink. Is it a twitch, a signal, a goof on a friend? There are “winks upon winks upon winks.” Surely some film spankings were intended to be erotic; surely some follow-up kisses occurred less because violence proved a man’s love than because of baser stirrings. Surely people didn’t always know themselves. “I don’t know whether to kiss you or spank you” was a common expression.
Academics have pored through the historical evidence to try to determine just when spanking became primarily a sexual thing. As you might expect of a serious academic, even one named Trevor Butt, all they can tell you is that it’s complicated—that one can’t quite define the precise nature of the live spank any more than the film one, can’t pinpoint just when in history “the sexual discourse has become hegemonic.”
In Adam’s Rib (1949), when Katherine Hepburn attempts to delineate the difference between a vengeful and a playful spank, Spencer Tracy responds, “What have you got back there, radar equipment?” Fetishists often root their spanking passion in childhood spanking trauma. Conversely, some women wrote advice columnists lamenting that a marital spanking that started as a joke soon turned into a husband’s reign of terror. It’s a problem that persists in today’s Christian domestic discipline movement. The boundaries are flexible. Spanks upon spanks upon spanks.
For some parties, there was always more to it. That “Wives of Spanking Husbands” club that newspapers were having fun with in 1937, for instance, made its first appearance in 1936, when a “Reta Rae” wrote Liberty Magazine announcing the formation of the club and—ulterior motive alert—soliciting women to send stories about being spanked. Similarly, a few years earlier, a man slipped into a Broadway studio and tricked a talent agency into sending a woman with whom he could “rehearse” a spanking scene. The frequency of such scenes made it easy for him to palm off his fetish undetected.
The spanking message boards are full of nostalgia for classic film spankings, but stark differences in how to take them. “I enjoy some of the old clips as well,” writes one, “but I have to say that I’d have a problem with a mainstream movie that implied that it was somehow ok to discipline a woman for being ‘bad’.”
“Yes wives should be spanked,” asserts another, “but only with their consent.”
Others pine for the ethic of those days. “i dont think it matters if your a mother in law, wife, sister in law or whatever.” writes one, “If you need a spanking you need a spanking. If spanking was still done nowadays people and families would be better off.”
While the era itself had to invent a history to look back to, now it presents a real one to enjoy. Some look back for the erotics, some for the politics. Newspaper stories like those quoted above are shared eagerly. One “spanko” posts a copy of a Detroit News advice column from 1948, in which a woman complained of her husband’s recent decision to start spanking her, sparked by two things: the advice of her mother and “a movie we recently saw in which a husband spanked his wife.”
“Yesterday,” she writes, “I bit and scratched when he spanked me. He only spanked harder, so here I am much the worse for it.” On the forum, someone comments on the letter: “I hope it is true, but I fear it may be more fiction than fact.”
It’s a pretty callous wish, but no different from a half century of newspaper reports getting pleasure out of a woman’s pain and humiliation. And of course the work of all those film spankings, intentional or not, was to make it easy for people to interpret the suffering of women as both deserved and secretly desired.
Every backward aspect of the gender politics of these old films—the justifications of violence, the belief women can only express desires when pressured, the belief they want to be demeaned—is still available today. Every fetishistic thrill was there for the taking back then. One is moving out of the mainstream; one is moving in. Then as now, you can see a spanking as heinously retrograde, wrongly maligned, or deliciously erotic. It’s not the act itself but how it’s used. Only Mrs. J.B.M. knows what she really meant in that letter.
Video by Andrew Heisel, top illustration by Bobby Finger
Andrew Heisel is a writer living in New Haven, CT. Follow him @andyheisel.
Haggar clothes, a Samsung 4K TV, and an affordable Logitech Harmony remote kick off Tuesday’s best deals.
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Stick-anywhere LED lights from OxyLED have been incredibly popular
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If you need a lot of extra battery capacity, $15 is about as cheap as you’ll ever find a 20,000mAh battery pack from a reputable manufacturer. This would be perfect for long plane rides, remote camping trips, and unexpected power outages.
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Mpow’s excellent, minimalist, universal magnetic smartphone vent mount is back down to $5 today.
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These ridiculously cheap mounts are among the most popular products
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If you still haven’t picked up a pair of Audio-Technica’s coveted Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones, BuyDig will sell you a pair for $110 today, along with a $30 VUDU voucher and a 3-month Rhapsody membership. Note: Use code PROAUDIO at checkout to get the discount.
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Your phone might not support it yet, but if you want to be ready for the Quick Charge 3.0 revolution, these are some of the best charger deals we’ve seen yet.
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You never want to be in a situation where you need a solar and hand crank-powered weather radio with a flashlight and USB port for charging your phone, but when you can get one for $18, you probably should buy it
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There’s nothing particularly special about this corkscrew or wine stopper, from a feature perspective. But to get both for $7? That’s a pretty fantastic deal if you don’t already own things like them.
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Citing “misinformation, misinterpretation, confusion, a lot of passion and frankly, selective outrage and hypocrisy,” North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory has issued an executive order amending his state’s outrageous House Bill 2
(Previously, McCrory said a question about the practical implications of his bill had “blindsided
According to The News & Observer, the five provisions of this order are as follows:
▪ It would encourage legislation to reinstate the right of employees to sue their employers in state court for discrimination. House Bill 2 took that right away, and requires those lawsuits be filed in federal court only, reducing people’s access to the courts.
▪ Expands North Carolina’s policy for state employees to cover sexual orientation and gender identity. Attorney General Roy Cooper, who is running against McCrory for governor, previously said he would not defend a lawsuit against the bill because he is already representing two state departments — the treasurer’s office and his own office —that have their own discrimination policies. This provision appears to give all state employees the same protections as already exist in those two departments. Cooper has called for the law to be repealed.
▪ Reaffirms the new law’s requirement that gender-specific restrooms and locker rooms in government buildings and schools be maintained.
▪ Reaffirms the provision in the new law that gives businesses and local governments the right to establish non-discriminatory policies for their own employees.
▪ Reaffirms the law’s provision that allows the private sector to establish its own restroom and locker room policies.
So basically, it affirms much of the bill (including its controversial bathroom portions), suggests reinstating the right of all North Carolinians to sue for discrimination, and expands discrimination protections for LGBT state employees.
In McCrory’s own words (in the video above), this order “maintains common sense gender-specific restroom and locker room facilities in government buildings in schools.” He says “maintains,” I say “rubs already established state-sanctioned disparity in your face.” There’s no common sense in assuming that trans people are predatory. There’s no common sense in assuming that all that’s keeping a rapist from hiding out in a bathroom is a sign on its door. (“I’m cool with sexual assault, but I’m far too polite to enter what the state says is the ‘wrong’ bathroom. You got me.”)
Mark Joseph Stern at Slate points out that among these addenda and reaffirmations, expanding North Carolina’s policy for state employees to cover sexual orientation and gender identity is “important,” but then again:
...How can that be when a state law still forbids trans state employees from using the public bathroom that aligns with their gender identity? After today, one North Carolina law (the executive order) prohibits discrimination against trans government employees—and one law (HB2) mandates it.
Great point. Could it be that McCrory just doesn’t have the best interests of all of his state’s citizens in mind? In his video announcement, he claims that the Charlotte City Council’s approval of LGBT protections in February, to which HB2 was a direct response and a reversal, was a “solution in search of a problem.” You can see how he’d think that if he never considered any existence beyond his own. It’s just common sense.
The ACLU of North Carolina Acting Executive Director Sarah Preston called the order “a poor effort to save face after his sweeping attacks on the LGBT community,” citing the “impressive and growing number of businesses, faith leaders, and public figures have come out to condemn House Bill 2 as an unnecessary and dangerous measure that unfairly targets gay and transgender people.”
At 4:21 p.m., on April 12, in the Year of Lord 2016, Kid Rock sent a bold message to authority members everywhere.
As the genre-defying artist sang in his 1998 hit single “Cowboy:”
Call me Hoss, I’m the Boss, with the sauce in the horse
No remorse for the sheriff, in his eye I ain’t right.
I‘m gonna paint his town red, and paint his wife white HUH
As always, great work from Banksy.
Update 6:25 p.m.
Upon further research, a pattern emerges:
If you have any more information, please do not hesitate to let us know.
In 2010, Giovanni Micheli and his parents sued Brentwood School District, where Micheli had been a student, alleging that he had been targeted on account of his race. According to the suit, Micheli, who is white, was bullied Hispanic and African-American students, who called him “cracker” and “white boy.” Lawyers for both sides gave opening arguments in the trial on Monday. The case was resolved on Tuesday, pursuant to a confidential settlement.
From the beginning of his freshman year, in 2007, to the fall of his sophomore year, Micheli “was subjected to racial remarks, taunts, epitaphs, episodes of spitting, and physical assaults inflicted by non-Caucasian students at the District,” his complaint alleged. He also “felt himself at risk due to his minority ethnicity, the absence of any network of social contact and the lack of any support from the school staff.”
As a result of this “racial harassment,” Micheli underwent two psychiatric evaluations in November 2008. Each concluded that he was suffering from anxiety and depression. Starting in November 2008, Micheli was homeschooled. He enrolled at St. John the Baptist, a private school in West Islip, for his junior and senior years. His parents, John and Michele Micheli estimated, according to court documents, that tuition for the two years cost approximately $20,000.
The complaint, filed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, claimed $200,000,000 in damages, and accused the school district of “discriminatory behavior.” At one point, court documents say, Micheli’s parents requested that he be transferred to another school district. Officials told them: “If we were to do that for him, then we would have to do that for all the other white children who requested it.” (In its initial response to the complaint, the school district contested that Micheli actually qualified as a disabled person under the IDEA or ADA.)
The case went to trial in Brooklyn federal court on Monday. “Giovanni was a minority because he was Caucasian,” Wayne Schaefer, one of Micheli’s attorneys, said in his opening statement. “This case is about discrimination against a minority student...Our claim is that there was deliberate indifference because he was a Caucasian student complaining in a district where Caucasians are a minority.”
Lawyers for the school district, meanwhile, said that Micheli never provided teachers or administrators with adequate information about those bullying him. According to the New York Post, defense attorney Jack Shields said that at one point Micheli simply described those attacking him as black and skinny:
“Had the district rounded up all African-American students who were thin, we’d be here for another reason,” Shields told jurors.
The attorney said school brass did everything they could to help Micheli acclimate to his surroundings, including placing him in clubs. But the measures had little impact—and Micheli used a racial epithet during one confrontation with black students, Shields alleged.
Finally, staffers ordered that he leave campus as a safety precaution.
On Tuesday morning, however, the Micheli family and the school district agreed to a confidential settlement. “The family has asked me to respond to inquiries by stating that they are happy this matter is now behind them and they can move on with their lives,” Schaefer, their attorney, told Gawker. Attorneys for the school district have not responded to a request for comment.
Donald Trump’s turn as a presidential candidate has been powered by such a pure streak of singular, bizarre energy that the prospect of him having a running mate gets steadily weirder the longer I think about it.
Who could actually do this job? It’s one thing to curl into a ball and submit your halfhearted vote of confidence
On Monday, Trump told USA Today that he favored Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Walker as potential running mates. Upon hearing the news that the man who’s been steadily lambasting him on the campaign trail would consider him for the role of VP, Walker understandably had a hearty chuckle:
“I literally just heard it in the car and I said — I laughed — it’s kind of interesting to hear that after the things that were said about me a couple weeks ago,” Walker said in Madison, Wis., on Monday. “But I’m focused on being the governor of the state of Wisconsin.”
Kasich was—to put it mildly—not tempted by the offer. CBS asked him this morning if he’d ever hop on the ticket for the Donald Express, to which he replied, “Zero chance.”
Harsh, but fair.
