Save the Date: Saturday, March 21

On Saturday March 21, I will be discussing my new book, The Last Psychoanalyst at CMPS, 16 West 10th Street, New York City. Entrance is under the stairs. The meeting will begin at 11:00 a.m. and will last until 2:00. It has been sponsored by the Unbehagen Salon, associated with Division 39 of the American Psychological Association.

The conversation is entitled: The Last Psychoanalyst: Does Psychoanalysis Have a Future or Is It All in the Past?

Participants will also include psychoanalysts Scott Von and Christopher Bandini. The discussion will be introduced by psychoanalysts Tracy Morgan and William Braun.

It promises to be a fun time. 

Netanyahu's Moment; Obama's Shame

Yesterday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered the speech that President Barack Obama never gave, would never have given and could never have given.

Never wishing to miss a chance to demonstrate its legendary ineptitude, the Obama administration enhanced the speech’s importance by surrounding it with what Bret Stephens called “a campaign of vilification.”

As Stephens explained yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration would never have shown the same contempt for Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan. In addition, Obama always speaks respectfully of the Muslim Brotherhood and has bent over backwards to make nice with Iran.

While showering Israel and its prime minister with contempt, Obama always speaks reverentially of the Prophet Mohammed. He even speaks reverentially about Minister Farakhan.

Administration spokespeople were oozing contempt and hostility for the Israeli Prime minister, before and after his speech. To be fair, they were attempting to have it both ways. While Susan Rice declared that the speech would have a “destructive” influence on Israeli-American relations, John Kerry said that it wouldn’t.

The administration rightly feared that Netanyahu would humiliate President Obama. Considering the immediate reaction of the more unhinged Democratic representatives, Netanyahu succeeded.

Nancy Pelosi was caterwauling about how she felt insulted that Netanyahu imagined that the Obama administration did not understand the threat posed by Iran. Other Democrats called the Israeli prime minister a child, accused him of fearmongering, and said it was all political theatre.

There is little doubt that it was orchestrated by the White House to show how Obama really, really felt about Israel.

Taking a page out of the Zionist conspiracy chapbook, commentator Chris Matthews denounced Netanyahu for trying to take over the American government. Christiane Amanpour called the speech that it was “Strangelovian.”

One expects that television talking head try to say something that will get them quoted. But, coming from Democratic members of Congress, the rudeness was grotesque. Directed against a foreign leader, who was duly invited to speak to Congress, it smacked of anti-Semitism.

In trying desperately to save Obama’s face they lost their own.

If anyone had offered the same invective about an Africa-American he would have quickly been denounced as racist and run out of town.

Such is the confidence of the Democratic party in their ability to control Jewish voters—perhaps through witchcraft—that they believe that Jewish voters will continue to vote for them, no matter what.

By giving the speech that Obama could never have given, Netanyahu exposed the administration’s failure to name Iran as the greatest threat to international peace and order.

In comparison with Netanyahu, Obama looked very bad. He looked weak. He looked cowardly. His strategy of being nice to Iran looked like appeasement. Clearly, he was humiliated, less by what Netanyahu said about him as by the way that the presence of a true leader made him look.

Peter Baker in The New York Times captured the scene and the event:

... for nearly an hour, Mr. Netanyahu seemed in command of the chamber, with his baritone voice and bracing message generating a passionate response. Glancing down occasionally at a written text, he quoted Moses and Robert Frost, introduced the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in the gallery and displayed the colloquial English and almost American political mannerisms that have served him through three terms in office.

Mr. Netanyahu argued that Iran’s “tentacles of terror” were clutching Israel and that failing to stop it from obtaining nuclear weapons “could well threaten the survival of my country.” Tehran already dominates the capitals of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, he said, and the United States should demand that it stop aggression against its neighbors and threats to annihilate Israel before agreeing to any deal.

All you need to know is the name of the man who was running America’s foreign policy while Iran was marching across Western Asia. While Obama did nothing, a rebellion against the mullahs in Iran was crushed mercilessly. While Obama sat on the sidelines, Iran’s Syrian proxy massacred his people. When Obama pulled out of Iraq, the Iranians were more than happy to fill the vacuum. And, of course we know what happened in Yemen.

The question is not what Netanyahu said and did. By presenting himself as a leader, a man who understood the threat posed by Iran, who refused to coddle the mullahs, who was willing to call things by their names… he humiliated the president by exposing him as an incompetent poser.

Note also a Saudi columnist, Dr. Ahmad al-Faraj who declared that Barack Obama was “one of the worst American presidents,” and that he was:

… working to sign a deal with Iran at the expense of America's longtime allies in the Gulf…

The American deal with Iran does not merely threaten the state of Israel. It also threatens Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Al-Faraj added that:

… therefore Netanyahu's campaign against the deal is justified and serves the interests of the Gulf states.

He concluded, making the point that Netanyahu made when he declared that “the enemy of our enemy is our enemy:”

Since Obama is the godfather of the prefabricated revolutions in the Arab world, and since he is the ally of political Islam, [which is] the caring mother of [all] the terrorist organizations, and since he is working to sign an agreement with Iran that will come at the expense of the U.S.'s longtime allies in the Gulf, I am very glad of Netanyahu's firm stance and [his decision] to speak against the nuclear agreement at the American Congress despite the Obama administration's anger and fury. I believe that Netanyahu's conduct will serve our interests, the people of the Gulf, much more than the foolish behavior of one of the worst American presidents. Do you agree with me?"

When a leader speaks clearly and forcefully, when he achieves moral clarity, other players are willing to align themselves with him.

We know that the Saudis despise Obama. They despise him for abandoning Hosni Mubarak. They despise him for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. But they despise him for helping Iran to expand its power and influence in the region.

The Saudi government is very unlikely to embrace the Israeli prime minister openly, but columns like the one I quoted must at least receive the tacit approval of the authorities in that country.

Compare it to the fact that Nancy Pelosi’s disrespect for Netanyahu led the news in Tehran.

The Case of Ellie Clougherty

What does it all mean? What does it tell us about the culture and what does the story tell us about how therapy is practiced?

Emily Bazelon has written a long and thoroughly-researched article about the relationship between Stanford undergraduate Ellie Clougherty and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jon Lonsdale.

We are left to examine, not only Clougherty’s charges of sexual abuse, rape and psychological kidnapping, but also the role that therapists played in allowing her to formulate the narrative that she used to understand her experience.

Clougherty’s therapists-- helped by her mother-- persuaded her that she was the victim of a predatory older man. She was a Catholic virgin before she met Lonsdale, the conservative Jewish libertarian who is now accused of having inflicted severe psychological and physical harm on her.

Bazelon only mentions the political and religious differences in passing, but the story of an evil Jewish conservative preying on an innocent Catholic girl ought to raise a few warning flags.

Clearly, Clougherty was naïve and inexperienced. Just as clearly, she suffered, apparently from the relationship itself, and from the fact that it did not end in marriage.

But, whatever she pain Lonsdale afflicted, Clougherty was also the victim of an ambient culture that imposed a narrative that framed and diminished her experience.

Today, the relationship has entered the world of competing lawsuits, charges and countercharges. Clougherty moved back to Virginia and finished her degree online. While she still wants to work in the tech world, she now sees herself as an advocate for abused women.

Bazelon concludes her article thusly:

He says he’s relieved to finally confront her accusations in open court. She says going public is liberating. “Now I’m free to live my life, knowing I sent this up into the world and more people can respond to it other than just me.” She has no plans to return to Silicon Valley and says she wants to advocate on behalf of abused women. She’s also looking for a path involving brain research and tech that would include social activism. “My only fear now is that people will judge me, and then if I become a neuroscientist, they won’t believe what I have to say,” she said a few days after filing suit. “It’s a risk, but I have to do this.”

Clougherty has abandoned her career plans in order to take up a cause. In effect, she has sacrificed her hopes and dreams to become a martyr for a cause.

One might say that, for her, the gesture is a consolation. She seems to prefer seeing herself as a powerless victim than imagining that she agreed to participate in experiences that she felt were degrading. Apparently, it’s the best that certain therapists can do.

A self-described good Catholic girl, Clougherty had wanted to save her virginity for marriage. So, we are within our rights to ask whether she would have employed the same narrative if she had married Lonsdale.

Were the sex acts she seems to have consented to intrinsically abusive, or did they become so when the couple broke up? Or did they become abusive when she discovered that she, an undergraduate was not being treated as an equal by Lonsdale’s friends?

One hesitates to doubt any woman’s word on so serious a matter, but one recalls Laura Kipnis’s description of Clougherty’s situation. Clearly, Kipnis does not sympathize with Ellie Clougherty:

The New York Times Magazine recently reported on the tangled story of a 21-year-old former Stanford undergraduate suing a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur she’d dated for a year. He’d been a mentor in a business class she was enrolled in, though they’d met long before. They traveled together and spent time with each other’s families. Marriage was discussed. After they broke up, she charged that their consensual relationship had actually been psychological kidnapping, and that she’d been raped every time they’d had sex. She seems to regard herself as a helpless child in a woman’s body. She demanded that Stanford investigate and is bringing a civil suit against the guy—this despite the fact that her own mother had introduced the couple, approved the relationship every step of the way, and been in more or less constant contact with the suitor.

In Bazelon’s account Clougherty lost her virginity to Lonsdale in a hotel room in Rome. Since they had agreed to share the room before their arrival, one imagines that Clougherty had freely decided to consummate her relationship at that time, in that place. There is no suggestion that she changed her mind at any time during the consummation.

Clougherty had very little experience in romantic relationships with men. Tall and beautifully striking, she had been ogled and harassed by men since she was a girl and was very sensitive to unwanted sexual advances.

Before she met Lonsdale she had attended numerous events in the tech world, a world which was mostly male and whose denizens mostly saw her as a prospective love interest. She did not know how to deal with the situation and developed an eating disorder. She had to fly home and seek treatment, finally in a clinic:

At the tech events that Clougherty went to, she was one of few women, and when men pursued her, she often felt overwhelmed and intimidated. She told her mother about it and could feel Anne’s concern radiating through their daily texts and phone calls. In the winter of her sophomore year, Clougherty developed an eating disorder. “I wanted to be invisible,” she told me. Alarmed, Anne flew from Virginia and spent two weeks on campus trying to get her daughter back on track.

But Clougherty was struggling, and she withdrew from her classes and went home for therapy for her eating disorder, including eight days of inpatient treatment.

After whatever happened in Rome, Lonsdale and Clougherty engaged in a relationship. Clougherty’s friend, Rachel described the scene.

Bazelon reports:

Spending evenings with Lonsdale and Clougherty, Rachel felt like a third wheel. She also found Lonsdale condescending. When Lonsdale hosted dinners at his house with other executives, Rachel said, she and Clougherty were sometimes the only women, and Rachel felt they were belittled. Sometimes Clougherty would sit on his lap. “It was like she was the pretty wallpaper,” Rachel said. He talked about marrying Clougherty and made jokes like, “ ‘I have no power with you — I’m a powerful man but I’m at your mercy,’ ” Rachel said. Clougherty told me that she wanted to believe she and Lonsdale could eventually be equals, using their joint influence for good. “I thought it would be so nice to have the chance to have an impact,” she said. “There are respectable women married to respectable guys in the valley. I wanted to think, I could be happy like that, too.”

Note that Clougherty, an undergraduate, sees herself as the equal of a Silican Valley entrepreneur. She is offended that she and her friend are treated like undergraduates by the tech entrepreneurs. Apparently, they believe that their accomplishments are equal to those of the men around them, regardless of what they have accomplished. One does not need to use too many little gray cells to figure out where she learned that.

Note also that Clougherty also saw herself as a respectable woman who could be married to a respectable guy. For many women, being respectable is enormously important. In some cases a woman will believe that there are certain sex acts that a respectable woman does not perform, period. She will not perform them, even for her husband. And some women believe that sex acts that might have signaled a lack of respectability can be redeemed by marriage.

At the very least Cougherty seems to have been of two minds about her sexual activities:

In emails Clougherty wrote at the time, she told Lonsdale that she found him attractive. “Kiss kiss kiss, you are super handsome,” she wrote in June, and later, “You are a sexy man” and “It was so nice sleeping with you.” But around the same time, she also told Rachel that she never wanted to have sex with Lonsdale, beginning in Rome. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be having sex, but he’s not listening to me,’ ” Rachel said.

Lonsdale seemed to be confused:

The first [email from him to Clougherty] read: “Sometimes I feel it’s very clear you are eager to engage sexually, but other times you will talk about me taking advantage of you and forcing myself on you as if there is this dirty old man/young innocent student dynamic, and I should feel badly about it. We will do something and then just a bit later you’ll talk as if ‘how can I stop you from making me do that?’ and yet earlier I honestly thought you wanted to.”

At one juncture in the relationship, Clougherty started feeling that her status was changing. Instead of being a girlfriend and a potential spouse, she started feeling like a booty call. Worse yet, Lonsdale was spending less time with her, something she saw as a bad sign.

If Clougherty was feeling abandoned, she must also have been feeling that she had given up her virginity for nothing.

Later, a therapist would convince her that she had suffered from psychological kidnapping. Perhaps it's too obvious, but feeling that your boyfriend is abandoning you is not the same as feeling psychologically kidnapped. To correct the apparent contradiction you would need to think that the distancing is a manipulative manoeuver designed to make her more dependent.

Bazelon reports the situation:

Lonsdale hit a crucial period of fund-raising for Formation 8, and Clougherty expressed resentment when he would ask her to come over late at night. He responded impatiently. “I don’t know what analogy makes sense to you, and Odysseus is probably not the right one,” he wrote in the fall. “But I am on a really big, difficult, critical mission the next several weeks.” It would be hard for the relationship to work, he warned, “if my darling is actually just sort of annoyed at me and isn’t in a position where of course she is eager to see me anytime I can.”

Perhaps Clougherty was distressed because she was not engaged. Perhaps she was distressed because she saw that she would not be marrying Lonsdale. Perhaps she was distressed because she did not feel like an equal.

As her relationship ended, she fell into despair and anguish, probably for feeling that she had lost her self-respect.

Whatever the reason, Clougherty was clearly in trouble. Her mother flew to California to help her daughter. She brought a book that offered a narrative explanation for Clougherty’s anguish.

In Bazelon’s words:

Clougherty’s fragility reminded Anne of the state her daughter was in when she had to leave school more than a year earlier. She decided to go to California again. On the flight, she read a book suggested by a friend who had been in an abusive relationship called “Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men,” by a domestic-violence counselor, Lundy Bancroft. The book riveted Anne. She saw Lonsdale in the descriptions of an abuser and she saw Clougherty in the role of a victim in denial. Anne got to Stanford bent on an urgent rescue. “I was bringing my daughter home no matter what,” she said.

Clougherty’s despair sounded to one psychologist like a clear case of post-traumatic stress. One hastens to note that this diagnostic category has lately been applied to far too many cases.

The psychologist also believed that the victim narrative made a lot of sense.

Another therapist, Keith Saylor, with whom Clougherty consulted in Virginia taught her how to reconstruct her experience within the bounds of a narrative that made her a helpless and hopeless victim.

Bazelon summarizes the approaches taken by two therapists, one a psychologist at Stanford, another Keith Saylor:

She said that Lonsdale had forced her to have sex when she didn’t want to and also talked about the man who accosted her in the restaurant bathroom when she was 10. The university psychologist noted in a report that she “seems to have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from current and past trauma.” Clougherty went home to Virginia and spent days crying and rocking in a corner of her family’s living room. Clougherty embarked on therapy twice a week with Keith Saylor, a clinical psychologist who treated her eating disorder. He used prolonged-exposure therapy, a treatment developed for combat-related disorders, in which a therapist prompts a patient to describe deeply traumatic events. Later, patients listen to tapes of their sessions at home every day in an attempt to drain the memories of their power.

As he typically does when conducting prolonged-exposure therapy, Saylor reflected back Clougherty’s account, saying that she had experienced “multiple traumas over a prolonged period of time that did repeated damage.” In one session, he told Clougherty, repeating her words, that Lonsdale “held you captive,” continuing, “You were essentially brainwashed over a year.”

Bazeon listened to the therapy tapes herself. I quote her description at length:

On the tapes, Clougherty swallows sobs and speaks in a thin, small voice. She described particular sexual acts that she didn’t want to take part in and how Lonsdale cajoled, begged and insisted until she gave in. She also said that during sex he slapped and shoved her and put his hands around her neck. “It was rape in a sadomasochist way nine times a day,” she said. In a later session, Saylor again mirrored what she told him: “You didn’t have personal agency, you didn’t have personal choice, all of those things had been robbed from you.”

Before she went into therapy, Clougherty told me, she didn’t want to admit even to herself that she had been raped. She wanted to believe that the relationship was loving, and she also felt she had a lot to lose. “It was like I could call him a rapist, and I could get judged and get in big trouble and not know how to handle it or I could say, ‘He’s great, look at these emails, I want to date that person,’ ” she said. “Trauma therapy was the first time I felt allowed to talk about how I felt.”

She now calls it a “psychological kidnapping,” a term she came up with after watching a video about domestic abuse on the Internet, and she says she was raped every time she and Lonsdale had sex. Saylor, who agreed to speak with me at Clougherty’s request, said, “People in these kinds of dramatic circumstances sometimes don’t tell anyone.” He also said that prolonged-exposure therapy doesn’t “encourage perspective-taking” and that Lonsdale might have an entirely different view of the relationship. “My role is not to question her veracity but to help her get well.”

Saylor might have believed he was offering a version  of cognitive therapy, his approach had less to with science and more to do with forgiving sins and offering a special kind of absolution, a kind in which the individual does not need to take any responsibility for her actions.

He was absolving Clougherty of all responsibility for anything that happened. The notion that every time she had sex with Lonsdale was a rape seems contradicted by some of the facts we know.

Saylor told Clougherty that she was a mere victim, that she did not exercise free will at any time in the course of the relationship. Might we not recognize that this is wildly judgmental, that it defames and slanders Lonsdale and that it tells Clougherty that she was a mere puppet, manipulated by a brutal male oppressor.

Besides, if she was so easily manipulated by a male oppressor, how can we know whether she was also being manipulated by her therapist?

In essence, Saylor seemed to be saying that Clougherty’s experiences were not hers. Thus, perhaps she can now tell herself that she remains innocent. And yet, once she went public with her allegations, the world would see her within the context of those experiences.

Would it not have been better for Clougherty to take responsibility for some of her decisions? If she bears no responsibility, then she is being diminished and also deprived of the power to do anything more than to make her narrative, with herself in the starring role, part of a larger a cause. 

In other words, she was given no chance of escaping the narrative. Therapy taught her to sacrifice herself for a cause.

She did not do it for herself, but for other women:

Clougherty and her mother were rattled but undeterred about speaking out. “It’s not an easy decision, but I just see it as a moral obligation,” Clougherty said. “I really want to help other women.” In January, Clougherty filed a civil suit against Lonsdale, accusing him of sexual abuse. She called his behavior “violent and deviant,” saying he employed “psychological manipulation and coercion” including “isolation, sleep deprivation, food deprivation.” She also accused him of “strangling her, slapping her, scratching her, yanking her by the hair so hard that he would lift her torso off the bed and slamming her body against the walls and bed boards.” In addition, she sued Formation 8 for being negligent in its supervision during the summer she was doing the project with Rachel. The lawsuit states that she “wrote him numerous emails and love letters to let him know how much she cared about him in the hope that it would end the abuse.”

And yet, what do you think that this level of public exposure will do for her future dating and marital prospects. One needs to understand that making oneself a public spectacle, even for a good cause, even when one is in the right, exacts a heavy price.

Alternately, we might imagine that once her relationship with Lonsdale was over, Clougherty believed that she could never again be a virgin, never again be innocent, and thus that she could never be the respectable wife of another man. If that was her belief, her therapist inadvertently sustained it. 

As for the way therapy changed Clougherty, her friend Jane noted this:

In the months after Jane helped Clougherty break up with Lonsdale, she says that she watched with increasing unease as Clougherty’s accusations mounted, from emotional abuse to rape. “In March 2014, she texted me that she considered herself a ‘sex slave’ during her relationship with Joe,” Jane wrote in her statement. “This is far, far beyond anything that she ever said about the relationship when it was happening or for a long time afterward. It also made no sense in light of her clear enthusiasm about the relationship.”

Laura Kipnis on Rape Culture

Whatever you think of its influence feminism still has the power to drive an idea. Most recently, it has taken up the fight against what it has labelled a rape culture on college campuses.

It is easier to atttack rape culture than it was to defend hookup culture. I suspect that the brouhaha about rape culture is an effort to shut down the hookup culture, culture that was often promoted by sex-positive feminists but that was surely not in the best interest of women.

Given the current mood, it is nearly impossible for anyone of the male persuasion to take a stand against the idea of rape culture. Happily, several high-profile women have done so. They deserve considerable credit for their excellent work on the topic.

Among them Emily Yoffe stands out. Her articles in Slate have exposed the simple fact that the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses has been exaggerated.

And let us not forget that many liberal law professors have spoken out against the new college rules that are designed to deprive accused rapists of due process of law.

In order to increase the incidence of rape, promoters of the idea of rape culture have expanded the definition of the term to the point where almost any unwanted sexual advance can be considered a violation.

Now, Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis has written a long and detailed critique of what she calls the “paranoia” about rape on college campuses. She might have used the word “hysteria,” but that would certainly have gotten her expelled from the sisterhood for blatant sexism.

Kipnis begins with the concept of power imbalance, that is, with the idea that when a less powerful woman is seduced by a more powerful man she is being abused and exploited, even if she has nominally consented.

To expose the illogic in this idea, Kipnis notes that no small number of college professors are married to former students. Some are married to students who were in their classes as undergraduates. Some are married to students who were graduate students when they met. Some are even married to students who never attended their classes at all.

The new rules that are currently being proposed by college administrators would condemn all of these marriages.

Kipnis writes:

You have to feel a little sorry these days for professors married to their former students. They used to be respectable citizens—leaders in their fields, department chairs, maybe even a dean or two—and now they’re abusers of power avant la lettre. I suspect you can barely throw a stone on most campuses around the country without hitting a few of these neo-miscreants. Who knows what coercions they deployed back in the day to corral those students into submission; at least that’s the fear evinced by today’s new campus dating policies. And think how their kids must feel! A friend of mine is the offspring of such a coupling—does she look at her father a little differently now, I wonder.

It’s been barely a year since the Great Prohibition took effect in my own workplace. Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring).

Of course, the residues of the wild old days are everywhere. On my campus, several such "mixed" couples leap to mind, including female professors wed to former students. Not to mention the legions who’ve dated a graduate student or two in their day—plenty of female professors in that category, too—in fact, I’m one of them. Don’t ask for details. It’s one of those things it now behooves one to be reticent about, lest you be branded a predator.

She describes the current policies at Northwestern:

According to the latest version of our campus policy, "differences in institutional power and the inherent risk of coercion are so great" between teachers and students that no romance, dating, or sexual relationships will be permitted, even between students and professors from different departments. (Relations between graduate students and professors aren’t outright banned, but are "problematic" and must be reported if you’re in the same department.) Yale and other places had already instituted similar policies; Harvard jumped on board last month, though it’s a sign of the incoherence surrounding these issues that the second sentence of The New York Times story on Harvard reads: "The move comes as the Obama administration investigates the handling of accusations of sexual assault at dozens of colleges, including Harvard." As everyone knows, the accusations in the news have been about students assaulting other students, not students dating professors.

Speaking of predators the most egregious instance of a very powerful male taking sexual advantage of a powerless female occurred when Bill Clinton met Monica Lewinsky.

One notes with chagrin that the champions of the power-imbalance theory of sexual abuse went to the mat to champion Bill Clinton and to destroy Monica Lewinsky. Hillary Clinton herself declared that the story had been ginned up by the vast right-wing conspiracy. Why does this make her the perfect feminist candidate for president?

To keep it fair and balanced, Kipnis notes that some women students took pride in their ability seduce their male professors. One tends to ignore this fact because it does not fit the narrative, but it is worth noting anyway.

She explains:

As Jane Gallop recalls in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), her own generational cri de coeur, sleeping with professors made her feel cocky, not taken advantage of. She admits to seducing more than one of them as a grad student—she wanted to see them naked, she says, as like other men. Lots of smart, ambitious women were doing the same thing, according to her, because it was a way to experience your own power.

Feminists, Kipnis continues, are selling a fiction. And they are forcing everyone to live as though that fiction were true.

In her words:

It’s the fiction of the all-powerful professor embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. And the kowtowing to the fiction—kowtowing wrapped in a vaguely feminist air of rectitude. If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

To make college women weaker, schools have more recently discovered the concept of “trigger” words, words that can cause exceptional trauma.

Kipnis says:

Students were being encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark could impede their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke was likely to create lasting trauma.

Later, she adds this reflection:

But what do we expect will become of students, successfully cocooned from uncomfortable feelings, once they leave the sanctuary of academe for the boorish badlands of real life? What becomes of students so committed to their own vulnerability, conditioned to imagine they have no agency, and protected from unequal power arrangements in romantic life? I can’t help asking, because there’s a distressing little fact about the discomfort of vulnerability, which is that it’s pretty much a daily experience in the world, and every sentient being has to learn how to somehow negotiate the consequences and fallout, or go through life flummoxed at every turn.

The irony is rich indeed. For years feminists have insisted that no one should pronounce the word “woman” without adding the qualifier “strong.” They believed that their ideology would “empower” women beyond anything the patriarchy had imagined. Now, feminists are working to enfeeble women, weak, making them feel vulnerable and hypersensitive.

Unwanted fondling and groping have suddenly become rapes. And yet, as Kipnis says, how can a man know whether the touching was or was not wanted if he did not do it.

By these standards Joe Biden should have been indicted for his clearly unwanted manhandling of the wife of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

And yet, a disagreement or a misunderstand might now become a matter, not merely for campus authorities, but for public shaming. A woman feels she was taken advantage of. She denounces the professor who did it. He believes that she was consenting. He fondled her but they did not have carnal relations. He fights back in the courts.

The result: a public brawl that compromises the reputations of both parties.

Clearly, Kipnis notes, the power to shame is an extremely potent weapon, capable of destroying a person’s career and his life… without giving him very much recourse. It is even more powerful than the power imbalance.

For Kipnis, what matters is how well the people who get caught up in the public drama about whether or not an act was a violation play roles in a drama. Her analysis is excellent:

To a cultural critic, the representation of emotion in all these documents plays to the gallery. The student charges that she "suffered and will continue to suffer humiliation, mental and emotional anguish, anxiety, and distress." As I read through the complaint, it struck me that the lawsuit and our new consensual-relations code share a common set of tropes, and a certain narrative inevitability. In both, students and professors are stock characters in a predetermined story. According to the code, students are putty in the hands of all-powerful professors. According to the lawsuit, the student was virtually a rag doll, taken advantage of by a skillful predator who scripted a drunken evening of galleries and bars, all for the opportunity of some groping.

Kipnis, like Emily Yoffe and many others, believes that rapists and molesters should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Those who insist on keeping it all on campus—beginning with the federal government—believe that the court system unfairly protects the guilty at the expense of the innocent.

They protest because they feel that the court verdicts have often been unjust and because women are treated very badly by defense counsel in such cases.

To be continued.

Netanyahu, Obama, Israel, Iran

As has been widely reported, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s upcoming speech before Congress has provoked anxiety in Israel, and not only from his political opponents.

It signals the power of the American president and the wish of Israelis to stay on the right side of their most important ally.

Be that as it may, the Israeli website, Debkafile responds to those who have criticized Netanyahu. They explain the Obama policy toward Israel and Iran.

Debkafile reports:

It took time to catch on to Obama’s two-faced policy towards Israel because it was handled with subtlety.

On the one hand, he made sure Israel was well supplied with all its material security needs. This enabled him to boast that no US president or administration before him had done as much to safeguard Israel’s security.

But behind this façade, Obama made sure that Israel’s security stayed firmly in the technical-material-financial realm and never crossed the line into a strategic relationship.

That was because he needed to keep his hands free for the objective of transferring the role of foremost US ally in the Middle East from Israel to Iran, a process that took into account the ayatollahs’ nuclear aspirations.
This process unfolding over recent years has left Israel face to face with a nakedly hostile Iran empowered by the United States.

While Israelis and American Jews are worrying about whether or not Netanyahu will make Obama look bad, they ignore more important events:

Netanyahu’s political rivals, while slamming him day by day, turn their gaze away from the encroaching Iranian forces taking up forward positions in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where they are busy fashioning a Shiite Crescent that encircles Sunni Arab states as well as Israel.

It must be obvious that to bolster its rising status as the leading regional power, Iran must be reach the nuclear threshold - at the very least – if not nuclear armaments proper, or else how will Tehran be able to expand its territorial holdings and defend its lebensraum.

This is not something that Barack Obama or his National Security Adviser Susan Rice are prepared to admit. They are not about to confirm intelligence reports, which expose the military collaboration between the Obama administration and Iran’s supreme leader Aytatollah Ali Khamenei as being piped through the office of Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Israel is not the only country that is threatened by the expanding Iranian power. And it is not the only country that will be targeted by Iranian nuclear weapons. Israel is not alone in suffering the fallout of any deal that legitimizes the Iranian regime:

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the rest of the Gulf are as dismayed as Israel by Obama’s regional strategy, which, stripped of its diplomatic veneer, boils down to a straight trade: The US will allow Iran to reach the status of a pre-nuclear power and regional hegemon, while Tehran, in return, will send its officers and ground troops to fight in Iraq, Syria and even Afghanistan.

Perhaps the American Congress can do something to stop the advancing Iranian forces. But, if it is to do so, it will need to be sufficiently courageous to cause President Obama to lose face.

"Moody Bitches"

According to psychiatrist Julie Holland women are naturally moody. In her new book, Moody Bitches, Holland notes that psychiatrists have increasingly and unfortunately chosen to medicate women’s emotions.

She begins by noting a point that, for some feminists will count as heresy:

WOMEN are moody. By evolutionary design, we are hard-wired to be sensitive to our environments, empathic to our children’s needs and intuitive of our partners’ intentions. This is basic to our survival and that of our offspring. Some research suggests that women are often better at articulating their feelings than men because as the female brain develops, more capacity is reserved for language, memory, hearing and observing emotions in others.

These are observations rooted in biology, not intended to mesh with any kind of pro- or anti-feminist ideology. But they do have social implications. Women’s emotionality is a sign of health, not disease; it is a source of power. But we are under constant pressure to restrain our emotional lives. We have been taught to apologize for our tears, to suppress our anger and to fear being called hysterical.

Holland then outlines the current situation:

At least one in four women in America now takes a psychiatric medication, compared with one in seven men. Women are nearly twice as likely to receive a diagnosis of depression or anxiety disorder than men are. For many women, these drugs greatly improve their lives. But for others they aren’t necessary. The increase in prescriptions for psychiatric medications, often by doctors in other specialties, is creating a new normal, encouraging more women to seek chemical assistance. Whether a woman needs these drugs should be a medical decision, not a response to peer pressure and consumerism.

The new, medicated normal is at odds with women’s dynamic biology; brain and body chemicals are meant to be in flux. To simplify things, think of serotonin as the “it’s all good” brain chemical. Too high and you don’t care much about anything; too low and everything seems like a problem to be fixed.

Holland has objections to the overuse of SSRIs like Prozac:

The most common antidepressants, which are also used to treat anxiety, are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (S.S.R.I.s) that enhance serotonin transmission. S.S.R.I.s keep things “all good.” But too good is no good. More serotonin might lengthen your short fuse and quell your fears, but it also helps to numb you, physically and emotionally. These medicines frequently leave women less interested in sex. S.S.R.I.s tend to blunt negative feelings more than they boost positive ones. On S.S.R.I.s, you probably won’t be skipping around with a grin; it’s just that you stay more rational and less emotional. Some people on S.S.R.I.s have also reported less of many other human traits: empathy, irritation, sadness, erotic dreaming, creativity, anger, expression of their feelings, mourning and worry.

She continues:

If the serotonin levels of women are constantly, artificially high, they are at risk of losing their emotional sensitivity with its natural fluctuations, and modeling a more masculine, static hormonal balance. This emotional blunting encourages women to take on behaviors that are typically approved by men: appearing to be invulnerable, for instance, a stance that might help women move up in male-dominated businesses. Primate studies show that giving an S.S.R.I. can augment social dominance behaviors, elevating an animal’s status in the hierarchy.

Were we to ask where these ideas come from we would have to face the fact that feminists have, for decades now, insisted that gender identity is merely a social construct.

Remember the feminist who explained that in order to get raises and promotions women must lean in. Why should they do so? Because, according to Sheryl Sandberg, that’s what men do.

Sandberg may or may not be right about men. In some cases they are more assertive than women. And yet, leaning in, which feels like getting in someone’s face, is certainly not the royal road to a raise or promotion, regardless of gender.

It’s not so much that women have been implored to act like men. Too often they have been encouraged to act like caricatures of men.

Holland’s point is cogent and well-argued. I am not, evidently, qualified to agree or disagree with her judgment about whether psychiatric medication is over-prescribed, but I suspect strongly that she is right.

Perhaps she mentions it in her book, but in her Times op-ed she should have explained how contemporary feminism has contributed to the problem.

After all, many of today’s psychiatrists are women. Many of them are feminists. Even many male psychiatrists consider themselves to be feminists. I am confident that there are very few Tea Party psychiatrists currently practicing.

The feminist culture influences the way women construct their lives and the way they behave. It influences their attitude toward their feelings. It has even influenced the way the therapy culture addresses women’s feelings.

Feminists have declared gender identity to be a social construct and have actively encouraged women to follow life plans that resemble those undertaken by men.

Surely, the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatrists (more and more of whom are women) are colluding in this enterprise by overprescribing medication for women’s emotions. But if the cultural environment is contributing to the problem, we must recognize that feminism has powerfully influenced the way women see themselves and the way they understand their emotions.

Credit or debit where credit or debit is due.

Egypt Rising

When nearly two dozen Egyptian Christians were beheaded by ISIS terrorists in Libya, the Obama administration first refused to call them Christians. It did not want to imply that they were murdered for their religious beliefs. And it did not want to imply that the killers were acting in the name of their religion.

Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi reacted angrily to the offense against his Christian citizens, sending bombers into Libya to attack ISIS strongholds.

Now, he is planning an invasion of Libya, the better to destroy more of ISIS.

Moreover, a court in Egypt has just declared Hamas a terrorist organization. Recall that when Israel countered Hamas attacks in Gaza the Obama administration decided to be even-handed, working to stop the Israeli counterattack, even endorsing a principal Hamas demand—to end the blockade of Gaza.

The Debkafile site has the stories, barely reported in other news outlets:

Egyptian President Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi has massed his troops for all-out war on ISIS strongholds in Libya, the first Arab ruler to challenge Islamist terrorists in a fellow Arab country, DEBKAfile reports. His initiative dramatizes the spillover of the Islamist State’s threat across the Middle East, and the ineffectiveness of the US-led anti-terror coalition’s efforts in Iraq and Syria. Egyptian commando and marine forces stand ready for imminent sea landings to seize Darnah and wipe out the Islamist militias, coupled with an air and ground campaign against their hideouts in Sinai.

Compare this to the Obama administration’s efforts to retake Mosul. Debkafile reports:

Our Washington sources report that the Obama administration’s planned spring campaign to free Iraqi Mosul from the Islamic State’s occupation is stuck in the sand. Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike accuse the president of having no clear war strategy and of holding back from the US-led coalition the fighting manpower necessary for a successful operation.

And also in Egypt:

While Hamas' armed wing was previously branded a terrorist organization, Saturday's Egyptian court ruling was against the entire group on the basis of incriminating evidence of collaboration for terror between the Gaza Strip’s Hamas rulers and Al Qaeda-linked Sinai terrorists. Hamas condemned the verdict as “shocking and dangerous.” Recordings were presented to the court of Hamas leaders congratulating each other on the success of attacks they and Al Qaeda had conducted against the Egyptian army in northern Sinai.

When people bemoan the difficulty of fighting ISIS and declare that they do not know what can possibly be done, they can look to the example set by the new Egyptian president.

But, naturally, this is difficult when the Obama administration has engaged a fight against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a man who apparently threatens the administration’s unseemly lust for a deal with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. 

It is worth emphasizing that the Obama administration has always been in conflict with Israel. Its decision to be even-handed when Hamas attacked Israel and to support Hamas demands was certainly not the gesture of a friend.

As everyone knows, the election of President el-Sisi has ushered in more cooperation between Egypt and Israel.

Considering that the Obama administration favored the election of former president, now convicted criminal Mohamed Morsi, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, one is not surprised to see him working to have the Muslim Brotherhood, a designated terrorist organization, brought into the Egyptian government.

Obviously, there is something wrong with this picture.

[Addendum: A Kuwaiti newspaper is reporting that the Netanyahu government was about to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It aborted the mission when the Obama administration threatened to shoot the Israeli jets down.

And you were wondering why Netanyahu does not feel beholden to respect Barack Obama.

I am sure that the American Jews who voted for Barack Obama are reassured to know that he has Iran’s best interests at heart.]