From The New Yorker

The Big Shag

We aren’t talking about “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert’s megaselling memoir of her attempt to get over a failed marriage.

Laura Jane Williams found her own way to overcome the pain of heartbreak, or, as she would put it, being dumped. She decided to travel around the world shagging as many men as she could. (Since, Williams is British, the correct word for what she did is shagging… though the prudish Sun refuses to print the word in its entirety.) For the record, the Sun entitles the story: "Around the World in Eighty Lays." 

A child of the therapy culture Williams believed that when a man accepted her offer of free love she had chalked up a new conquest. Memo to the young and naive: just because you call it a conquest doesn't mean that it's a conquest. It means you are confused. 

Better yet, Williams persuaded herself that by tramping around the world she was now in control. In another context this is called gender dysphoria—believing that you are something other than what everyone knows, as an objective fact, that you are.

Her therapy—if you want to call it that—made her feel like she was a man—detached and emotionless about sex. To her mind, and to the popular mind in general, being a liberated woman means behaving like you are a man.

You’ve come a long way, baby!

She writes:

I COULD not go to the pub, a party or a work event without looking at a man and saying to myself: “That one will be next.”

There always had to be somebody to take home, a conquest.

I felt like an emotionally detached and liberated woman.

My need for meaningless sex started after my long-term boyfriend dumped me and within a year had got engaged to my friend.

We had been dating for six years and I fell off the rails.

After he left that day I drank half a bottle of vodka and within 45 minutes had thrown it all back up again.

The heartache made me want to go and be someone else for a while.

One notes that we are not in the world of the zipless shag. We are not even in the world of the big bang. As it happened the sex was sometimes not very good. Laura describes it thusly:

I planned my next liaison via the internet — an obvious choice now, but unchartered territory for a booty call back in 2009. I chose dating website OK Cupid to meet Jay the DJ.

Thirty-five minutes after meeting at a bar, he was throwing me down on a Travelodge bed, hitching up my dress.

I pulled at zips, belts and buttons with frantic whispers and then, just like that, I was naked with a man who was not my ex-boyfriend.

Quite the conquest, quite the self-esteem boost-- being thrown down on a Travelodge bed by a man you met thirty minutes ago. And if she had been thrown against a brick wall….

And then for the climax:

Unfortunately, the action was all over in 60 seconds.

Turns out, there is no etiquette for such encounters. You have to, in my experience, have soul-crushingly mis-matched sex four times, until 6.30am brings with it a spate of new friction burns that will take a pot of Sudocrem to soothe, after which you can finally say: “I’ve got an early breakfast meeting to get to — I’ll text you.”

Where did the romance go? Well, for this male-identified liberated woman, there was none. And, she was happy there was none. Because she believed that if she had no feelings her feelings would never be hurt.

Being a free woman Williams was free to do as she pleased. But, any adult could have told her that she was engaging in highly risky behavior. And let’s not forget that, however much she believed that she was acting like a man, she was still a woman, and that as a woman she was degrading herself. Not that we want to shame her inordinately--she is trying to sell a book-- but still.

I will not leave you in more suspense. Williams does eventually come to her senses:

I started to pride myself on keeping everyone at a distance. I was a s*** because none of them was the answer. I didn’t want any of them to love me or treat me with respect because I didn’t respect myself. I was teaching English to Italian teenagers when I finally realised I was on a destructive path and decided to change my life.

How does she heal herself? By checking into a convent, which is more monastery than convent, and going cold turkey… embracing celibacy:

So I signed up to live in an Italian convent. I moved into Chiostro di Sant’Agostino, near the seaside town of Loano in the Riveria.

I thought it was a convent with nuns, but it was actually a monastery with elderly monks, who took me in and helped me recover.

I vowed to be celibate while I was there. It was amazing, the perfect place to heal and reflect.

After my wild years being in such a slow, easy place made me consider life. It was just what I needed. The doors were pretty much open to anybody who needed a bed. People would bring gifts for the monks and ask for help. I did too.

At least it was in a good neighborhood.

Naturally, the book has a happy ending. And it shows that religion is more therapeutic than many forms of therapy. You will note that she did not check herself into rehab for sex addiction, but got in touch with a more spiritual side of her sexuality. And she also learned to make small gestures of kindness toward other people. Fancy that!

Of course, the prototype of her book is Hephzibah Anderson’s memoir of her year of living sexlessly: Chastened: The Unexpected Story of My Year without Sex.

Hillary's Projective Identification

In an editorial yesterday the New York Post made the obvious point about Hillary Clinton’s fatuous foreign policy address—you know, the one that everyone is praising to the skies:

But what she delivered was a 45-minute rant against Donald Trump — with nary a clue about her plans for leading America on the international stage.

Worse, her string of dump-on-Trump quips might’ve worked better if she had substituted her name for his, starting with her attack on Trump’s “series of rants” — a perfect description of her own speech.

Clinton tried to portray Trump as “dangerous.” But what do you call it when a secretary of state, to shield herself from accountability, stores classified emails (some beyond “top secret”) on her private, unsecured server, leaving them vulnerable to hackers the world over?

Or who goes home for the night with a US consulate besieged by al Qaeda-linked terrorists — then later lies to the victims’ families about how a YouTube video was to blame?

Clinton called Trump “temperamentally unfit” to be commander-in-chief. But how would you describe an ex-top official who continually lies to the public and holds herself above the law?

Trump “doesn’t understand” the world, she said — but then denied that the world has laughed at President Obama’s weakness. She even claimed we’re “safer” with Obama’s deal with Iran, which gives the mullahs a clear path to nuclear weapons and hundreds of billions to fund terrorism.

Who doesn’t understand the world?

More: Hillary said Trump would “embolden” our enemies. Yet, like Obama, she can’t even bring herself to call ISIS what it is: “radical Islamic extremists.” How does she think the terrorists are reacting to that?

Clinton’s aides say her speech is just the start of a push to paint Trump as “dangerous” and unpredictable. But maybe America would be safer if world leaders — from Russia to North Korea to Iran — actually worried about how our president might respond to aggression.

As opposed to a president like, say, Clinton — who can’t be trusted by Americans.

In the psycho world this is called projective identification.

The Wall Street Journal makes the same point, advising Trump to attack Clinton on her foreign policy record, you know, the one that is conspicuous for its lack of achievement:

Mrs. Clinton as Secretary of State was a key first-term architect who bears some responsibility for the tide of global disorder and proliferating threats to U.S. security and interests.

The rise of authoritarian powers on the Obama-Clinton watch includes China in the Western Pacific, Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East. All are bidding to become regional hegemons, and they’ve made substantial gains amid Mr. Obama’s global retreat.

The Obama-Clinton team overthrew Moammar Gadhafi in Libya but then did nearly nothing to restore public safety. Even discounting the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, this indifference has allowed ISIS to establish a beachhead in North Africa.

Speaking of which, the failure to intervene in Syria has created what former CIA Director David Petraeus calls “a geopolitical Chernobyl.” Along with the total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, which Mrs. Clinton championed, this abdication has created the space for Islamic State to thrive and swamped Europe with refugees.

ISIS did not exist when Mr. Obama took office, and Mr. Trump could gain an advantage by proposing a better strategy to defeat the jihadists. The FBI estimates that “thousands” of Americans may have been radicalized online or overseas, and they could soon perpetrate more attacks akin to Paris, Brussels or San Bernardino.

The battle is engaged.

Rock Bottoming

It is well understood that 12 Step programs have proven to be effective treatment for different kinds of addictions. Nearly all treatment programs for addiction are based on the 12 Steps, so the fact has clearly been embraced by the psychiatric community.

At the least, this fact ought to alert us to the shortcomings of most of what is called psychotherapy. Alcoholics Anonymous began in the heyday of psychoanalysis and obviously exposed that treatment’s many shortcomings.

Now, Maia Szalavitz argues in her new book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, 12 Step programs contain errors that need to be corrected. One principle error has been compounded by the introduction of the Synanon approach, a treatment that replaces love with hate and rejection.

She explains that the most important flaw in 12 Step programs is the assumption that an addict must hit “rock bottom” before he can truly work the program.

For the record, rock bottom has nothing to do with buns of steel.

For my part I have always found the notion of rock bottoming to be dangerous.  I have opined on it at length in several posts, among them this one.

If you tell someone that he must hit rock bottom, and if he is still somewhat functional and coherent, you will be encouraging him to continue his descent.  In truth, as Szalavitz notes and as I have observed, people are perfectly capable of overcoming an addiction before hitting rock bottom. Why would you tell someone that the worse it gets, the better will be his chances of recovery?

True enough, some people have reached rock bottom before beginning a treatment program, but that does not mean that it is essential to do so or that, as AA suggests, that you will never compete the program unless you have nothing more to lose.

Jesse Singal summarizes Szalavitz’s point:

It’s only when your alcoholism (or other addiction) has gotten so bad you’ve been kicked out of your house by your spouse, have alienated all your friends, and are down to the last $50 in your checking account, that you’ll finally be able to realize just how far you’ve fallen — or something. Fully buying into the program requires desperation, in other words, and to “help” addicts get to that desperate point is to help them recover: “From this perspective,” writes Szalavitz, “the more punitively addicts are treated, the more likely they will be to recover; the lower they are made to fall, the more likely they will be to wake up and quit.”

The worst part is that some treatment programs, especially those that have been mandated by courts, set about to facilitate an addict’s descent.

In Singal’s words:

In many cases, drug-court advocates argue against treatment and in favor of harsh punishment, simply because it fits into the 12-step, “bottoming out” framework — a bare prison cell certainly feels more like “hitting bottom” than a treatment program.

As Szalavitz recounts, the rise of mandatory 12-step programs led to some truly grotesque “treatment” programs (she views 12-step programs as fairly benign when they are administered voluntarily, even despite the lack of evidence underpinning the individual steps), particularly in the second half of the 20th century. 

Sadly, this produced a cult to a treatment program called Synanon, an offshoot and apparently a perversion of A.A.

Singal continues:

Forcing patients to hit bottom had results that were, in retrospect, predictable: It gave rise to “attack therapy” in programs like Synanon, launched in 1958, where “[t]he idea was to demolish the ego, using intimate secrets people revealed to find their weak spots and try to obliterate the ‘character defects’ believed to be found in all people with addiction.” “Alcoholics Anonymous is based on love, we are based on hate, hate works better,” said Synanon founder Chuck Dederich. 

One understands that there is a significant difference between love and hate. And one also understands that most A.A. programs are voluntary while court ordered programs are not.

In time, Synanon was exposed as the dangerous cult that it was.

By the 1970s, Synanon had basically devolved into a cult: Dederich “made members stockpile weapons, forced spouses to swap partners, and coerced men to get sterilized and women to have abortions.” He was eventually arrested and imprisoned for slipping a derattled rattlesnake into the mailbox of an attorney who had tried cases against his group.

And yet, Szalavitz notes that many of the court-mandated therapy programs today have their roots in Synanon.

For decades, Szalavitz writes, programs like Phoenix House and Daytop used “sleep deprivation, food deprivation, isolation, attack therapy, sexual humiliation like dressing people in drag or in diapers, and other abusive tactics in an attempt to get addicts to realize they’d ‘hit bottom’ and must surrender.” Even when the “hitting bottom” idea wasn’t implemented quite this dramatically and harmfully — unsurprisingly, evidence emerged along the way that these programs could cause lasting psychological damage — it echoed throughout the national conversation on addiction in the 1980s and ‘90s, giving rise to the “tough love” movement in which “[m]embers urged fellow parents not to bail out their kids if they were arrested,” and to cut off contact with them if they displayed disobedience.

Ostracizing addicts tells them that the only companionship they can ever have is with other addicts. Once they are totally rejected by normal society they will gravitate inexorably toward a society where membership is defined by one’s addiction.

This can be good or bad.

Most 12 Step programs offer a fellowship of recovering addicts, addicts who have chosen to work the program. They forge a connection by attending A.A. meetings regularly, a good habit that is designed to replace the bad habit of hanging out in bars. In the absence of such a recourse, the addict is more likely to spend more time with other non-recovering addicts.

Of course, if A.A. is based on love, not on hate, as Dederich says, then clearly the recovering addict needs to have a pathway to reintegration into society.

One understands that most children have two parents, one male and one female. A child’s mother tends to love the child unconditionally while a father loves his child contingently. Surely, a recovering addict needs both: he needs to know that he will always have a home and will need to know that his behavior is socially unacceptable. While he always has a home his ability to interact with others in society is based on good behavior.

It is as bad to marginalize and humiliate the addict as it is to offer him unconditional love and acceptance. And yet, it is important for the addict to know that his behavior will exact a social price and that there is more to life than unconditional love.

Unpatriotism at Northwestern University

We may now add Northwestern University to the list of American schools that have succumbed to the thuggish bullying of the politically correct.

And we ought to add that the graduate students and faculty who imposed their will on the pusillanimous university administration ought to be called out as unpatriotic. One understands that they will squeal at the notion that anyone would impugn their patriotism, but the real problem is that they have no patriotism to impugn.

One imagines that they see themselves as citizens of the world, thus about notions involving loyalty to country. Welcome to the Age of Obama.

Anyway, here is what happened, via Kyle Smith:

Gen. Karl Eikenberry was tapped by the university to lead its new Buffett Institute for Global Studies, a position he seemed easily to have earned by having actual knowledge of the globe.

Eikenberry was ambassador to Afghanistan. He was deputy chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Brussels. He has lived in Hong Kong, China and South Korea, and taught in Rwanda.

What happened next?

Yet faculty and grad students led a revolt against the appointment, assuming that being a military man automatically meant Eikenberry was a warmonger…. They also sniped that, having served the US overseas, Eikenberry might actually think in terms of US interests, and we can’t have that.

Of course, we can’t have that. When did our current president think in terms of our national interest? Heck, when did he treat our allies like allies and our enemies like enemies? Don’t strain yourself trying to answer the question.

Smith continued, exposing the advanced thinking of a Northwestern graduate student and certain faculty members:

A graduate student named Charles Clarke supported a petition to block the appointment of Eikenberry with these words: “An ex-US general will likely think about international politics in terms of war and from the perspective of the US’s interests, and the research agenda will be negatively skewed as a result. Instead, why not appoint someone who will encourage research that is less belligerent and tainted by US bias?”

“As faculty who are deeply committed to academic integrity,” chimed in 46 faculty members in a letter, “we believe that it would be irresponsible to remain silent while the University’s core mission of independent research and teaching becomes identified with US military and foreign policy.”

Eikenberry withdrew his acceptance of the appointment:

Northwestern effectively blackballed someone for being perceived as pro-military and pro-US (ah, now I think I understand why hiring Obama wouldn’t be an issue for Northwestern).

Northwesterners are upset that their academic mission would have been indirectly tainted by association with someone who formerly worked for the Amerikkkan military.

Perhaps the university should decamp from the United States to the world. These academics might feign neutrality, but they have clearly aligned themselves with the interests of the enemies of the United States. Is this what they are teaching their students?

[If you think this is an outlier, check out the new radical leftist anti-American curriculum that is being adopted in California public schools.]

And, of course, they were all concerned that a man without a Ph. D. would be taking an administrative job for which he was eminently qualified. One notes that in the Age of Obama, job qualifications are easily trumped by ideology.

Smith notes that when Dwight Eisenhower served as president of Columbia University, no one cared a whit that he did not have a Ph. D.

As I and many others have often noted, this nonsense will only stop when alumni start withdrawing their contributions and stop sending their children to study such schools.

New York City Solves the Transgender Restroom Problem

The sun must be shining. Another liberal has been mugged by reality. This time, it’s Maya Dillard Smith, the head of the Georgia chapter of the ACLU.

As you undoubtedly know, the ACLU has been vigorously defending all of the new transgender restroom and locker room laws. It’s in the constitution, don’t you know?

But then, Smith had the following experience:

I have shared my personal experience of having taken my elementary school age daughters into a women’s restroom when shortly after three transgender young adults, over six feet [tall] with deep voices, entered. My children were visibly frightened, concerned about their safety and left asking lots of questions for which I, like many parents, was ill-prepared to answer.

For wanting to protect her children, Smith counts, in the world of the ACLU, as a bigot. One understands why she had to resign her position at the ACLU.

And yet, a solution to the problem has just come into sight. It was recently enacted by the New York City Council. In a grandiose display of New York Values, the City Council just decriminalized public urination. It’s no longer a crime to pee on the street in the Big Apple.

What could be more gender neutral than the streets of New York?

Is France Burning?

Americans are so thoroughly mesmerized by happenings in their own neighborhood that they have not paid much attention to what is happening in France.

Such is not my case. Aside from the fact that I lived in France for several years, I will be traveling there next month. Thus, the fact that the nation is being besieged by radical leftist forces has captured my attention.

I and many others have had occasion to praise the French president before. We know that his handling of the terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre in November was far better than what we have seen coming out of Washington.

The French president was strong and resolute. He placed the blame where it belonged. He did not whine about Islamophobia. He sent his military to attack ISIS in Syria. Had he received any support from the Obama administration he would have invoked the NATO charter and declared the attack an act of war.

All told, the French Socialist shamed the American president. One point for him. Also worth noting is the fact that France’s large and unwieldy Muslim community offered the great majority of its votes to Hollande in the election that made him president of France. Defying your own constituents is an act of political courage.

Though Hollande rode into office on a “social justice” platform, one that seems to have echoed the advanced political economic theories of Thomas Piketty, he quickly discovered that the policies he first put in place were ineffective. In truth, municipal and legislative elections made clear that the nation disapproved. So, Hollande named a more market friendly prime minister and announced new economic policies that were more oriented toward the free markets. The new policies aim at eliminating the famed 35 hour work week and making it easier for employers to fire workers… thus making it less risky to hire them.

For a socialist to see the light and to defy some of his most zealous supporters was an act of political courage.

Now, as the economic policies are becoming law, the Hollande government is facing a violent insurrection, led by French labor unions, in particular by what is called the CGT. France has two major labor organizations, the CGT and the CFDT. The more radical CGT was, until the 1990s associated with the French Communist Party. The CFDT, with the Socialist Party.

The CGT has been showing its displeasure by trying to shut down the nation. Hollande has stood his ground. The Wall Street Journal editorialized today that the reforms were nearly Thatcherite. That is, they are a step in the right direction.

It noted that Hollande had not run on a Thatcherite platform and thus lacks the mandate for change that she had.

The Wall Street Journal reported on the events yesterday:

The standoff between President François Hollande and unions deepened Tuesday as unions launched a new round of strikes and the French leader vowed to press on with a contentious labor bill that has fueled the unrest.

“The bill will be enforced, and the French people will judge,” Mr. Hollande said in an interview published Tuesday in daily newspaper Sud Ouest.

Mr. Hollande’s plans to overhaul rigid labor rules by giving companies greater margin to negotiate directly with their employees on pay and working conditions have riled union leaders, who say the measures circumvent their power to negotiate contracts across entire sectors. CGT, France’s largest union, has struck back with weeks of walkouts and blockades—backed by protest marches that are at times violent.

And, the CGT has tried to shut down the transportation system:

Three of the four biggest railway worker unions said they plan to join the labor action Tuesday evening, bringing to a halt about 40% of the country’s high-speed TGV trains and 60% of the slower intercity trains, according to state railway operator SNCF.

“Railway workers have every reason to mobilize to demand working conditions fit for the 21st century,” the railway branch of CGT said Tuesday.

The move by rail workers raises the stakes in a standoff that began in March with violent street protests and escalated into CGT-backed strikes that are trying to cripple the nation’s infrastructure. For the second straight week, blockades and strikes continued at oil terminals and refineries, leaving about 20% of gas stations with fuel shortages.

Adding to pressure on the government, air-traffic controllers announced a three-day strike starting Friday to demand more hirings. Their strike isn’t directly related to the labor-law changes, but it will create additional chaos for would-be travelers.

If anything is going to stop the insurrection, it is …an upcoming major soccer tournament. As long as it looks like theatre, it’s OK. Once it starts interfering with soccer and vacation, it becomes far less appealing.

The Journal continues:

Union leaders, however, are also under pressure. If the railway strikes and other blockages continue much longer, unions risk alienating swaths of the French public who want to see the popular tournament—as well as their holiday travel plans—go off without a hitch.

So far, CGT has struggled to mobilize wide support for its protests. Recent polls show the French public divided over the labor bill, while an Odoxa survey on May 26-27 found that 67% of 1,018 people surveyed had a negative opinion of CGT leader Philippe Martinez.

Pierre Gattaz, head of the Medef employers union that lobbies on behalf of France’s largest companies, said France “must do everything not to yield to blackmail, violence, intimidation and terror.”

All in all, it’s a good sign that a Socialist president can take the requisite political action to turn his nation away from economic stagnation and toward capitalism.

The Journal editorialized:

It’s a sign of the depth of France’s economic distress that even a government of the left recognizes the need for reform, and that it is pressing ahead despite the vehement opposition of its traditional political base. If a Socialist president can succeed in doing this in France, there might be hope for the rest of sclerotic Europe.

As I said, this takes great political courage. It takes courage to stop pandering to one’s constituents and to stop making promises that cannot be kept. One imagines that the next step will be reforming the French social security system and cutting down the generous pensions that are offered to government workers who retire young.

These big government programs are enormously popular with American liberals and socialists, but they have just about bankrupted France and have produced chronic economic stagnation.