Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes a poignant story in The New York Times about Nigel, a gannet, a type of seabird, who fell in love with a decoy bird placed on New Zealand’s Mana Island for the very purpose of attracting many of his kind. But he loved only one. He presented. He preened. He attempted to mate. But the stone-cold beauty remained unmoved. And, in the end, the island caretaker found him dead, which just about broke his heart.
It reminds you of Hans Christian Andersen’s story of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” and the little one-legged tin man whose love for a ballerina seals his doom. (Not a huge fan of Andersen’s downer stories and even less of a fan after learning that some scholars believe Charles Dickens based the creepy Uriah Heep in “David Copperfield” on him.) Anyway, the George Balanchine ballet version makes the soldier’s unrequited love more apparent.
Love is blind. But then, so are politics and selfishness. ...
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Read MoreThe #MeToo movement continues to explode, and we continue to tread gingerly through its landmine-riddled landscape.
The New York Times skewers Alec Baldwin for satirizing P-Grabber in Chief Donald J. Trump while defending filmmakers Woody Allen and James Toback, both accused of sexual abuses. Actress/author Rose McGowan – who’s been fiercely outspoken in her accusations of film producer Harvey Weinstein raping her – cuts off interviewer Christiane Amanpour before she can read a Weinstein response to McGowan’s new book, “Brave.” Museums wonder what their response should be to photographer Chuck Close, who has apologized for sexual harassment.
And yet, a woman friend of mine, a Hillary Clinton supporter whom I consider to be strong on women’s issues, wonders if we’ve gone too far ...
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Read MoreThere were no less than three sexual harassment stories in Tuesday’s New York Times.
A story headlined “300 Strong: Hollywood Women Unite to Fight Harassment” detailed the agenda of the new Time’s Up initiative, which includes a legal defense fund, already backed by $13 million in donations, to protect underprivileged women “from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.” The initiative is also calling for women to turn the Golden Globes’ red carpet Sunday into a bully pulpit as they don basic black to talk about the sexual harassment issue instead of what they’re wearing. ...
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Read MoreIn his acclaimed new book “The Evolution of Beauty” (Doubleday, 428 pages, $30), Richard O. Prum theorizes that evolution is not just about what we need but what we want. And that has profound implications for gender issues, including what I describe on this blog as “the beauty trap.”
The hourglass shape and youthful facial features, such as large eyes, of the female and the particular characteristics of male genitalia (boneless phallus, large scrotum, small testes) are beyond what is necessary for reproduction, Prum writes. Rather, he says, these features are what each desires in the other.
But it is not a level playing field ...
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Read MoreAt Christmastide, I like to share one of my traditions, which is a reading of a selection from John Milton’s “Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” As a classical Christian – I know, an oxymoron – I’m always struck by how the advent of Christianity sounded a death knell for Greco-Roman culture. But then, someone’s sunrise is always someone else’s sunset.
Yet Greco-Roman culture – with its sensual tales of gods and heroes, its dramas on the terrible wonder of the human condition, its emphasis on the body in all its brutal beauty – never died. (It’s a theme of Gore Vidal’s 1964 novel “Julian,” about the post-Christian Roman emperor who attempted to reinstall the Greco-Roman pantheon.) The Greeks would instead resurface in the Renaissance and at the turn of the 19th century. ...
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Read MoreOn Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds.
As I understand it, baker Jack Phillips wasn’t opposed to selling Charlie Craig and David Mullins a cake, just a wedding cake. In other words, he doesn’t mind their living in “sin,” just legitimizing that “sinfulness.”
The couple sued and so we are here. The arguments go something like this: Phillips has a right to make a cake – or not – for whomever. Craig and Mullins have a right to be served by a public business. ...
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Read More“What a week,” Robert Costa, moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week,” sometimes begins his broadcast. But really, he could just say that every week. Another mass shooting. Another celebrity – or 10 – accused of sexual harassment. Puerto Rico still mainly without power. It’s sort of like an evil “Groundhog Day.” ...
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