"Glaser... was still questioning the point of view of a few jokes. She was still going back and forth about the sexual jokes..."

"... counting the number of references to her being horny, feeling there were too many, but now thinking she’s good at them, so it’s the right number. And the 'Wicked' jokes were still fluid. Glaser was adding to things to obsess over. 'Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles?' she wondered. This wasn’t exactly the panic attack she had predicted. But Glaser said she had performed the jokes at clubs so often (91 times before the ceremony) that she could no longer tell if they were funny. How could she? She knew every surprise coming. She likened her relationship with her material to a marriage where she’s not gaga anymore. The jokes have been reliable, sure, but a political one that always kills recently bombed. That rattled her. 'Maybe it bums people out,' she said, sounding confused...."

From "Nikki Glaser Wants to Kill as Host of the Globes. Is She Overthinking It?/ To refine her monologue for Sunday’s show, she relied on two writers’ rooms and 91 test runs. Then came the fickle audiences and a crisis of confidence" (NYT).

Should a standup comedian reveal the inner workings like this? It can't make anything funnier for us, the audience. Eh, but who watches the Golden Globes? I used to, but now, I don't even know how to watch them. And I don't think I've even gone to the movies all year (other than to see that one documentary).

The political joke that always kills recently bombed — hmm. Wonder who that was about?

Do we have too many jokes about pedophiles? Are we suppose to experience that question as funny?

ADDED: I have one other post with the tag "Nikki Glaser," and it may shed some light on what sort of joke she might make about sex criminals. From March 28, 2022:

"This time it’s real. He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like in the old tire ads, and this is the big thing — grown-up."

That's the writing of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Alice Munro, and that's not a flawed fictional character observed by a wise writer. That's Alice Munro expressing her own feelings in a letter, quoted in "What Alice Munro Knew/The Nobel-winning author’s husband was a pedophile who targeted her daughter and other children. Why did she stay silent?"

I didn't expend one of my gift links on that because I didn't think you'd want to delve into why she stayed silent. A more compelling question is: Why would we be able to continue to read her novels?

The article is by Giles Harvey, who writes: "Before the recent news emerged, my own opinion of Munro’s fiction could hardly have been higher. She seemed to have a more direct access to reality than any of her contemporaries, whose work, by comparison, could feel contrived and paper thin.... In the work Munro produced after learning what happened to her daughter, she seems to bear down on her horror and disgust with an implacable resolve...."

"[W]hat often starts as a parent’s effort to jump-start a child’s modeling career, or win favors from clothing brands, can quickly descend..."

"... into a dark underworld dominated by adult men, many of whom openly admit on other platforms to being sexually attracted to children, an investigation by The New York Times found.... Some parents are the driving force behind the sale of photos, exclusive chat sessions and even the girls’ worn leotards and cheer outfits to mostly unknown followers. The most devoted customers spend thousands of dollars nurturing the underage relationships.... 'I really don’t want my child exploited on the internet,' said Kaelyn, a mother in Melbourne, Australia... 'But she’s been doing this so long now.... Her numbers are so big. What do we do? Just stop it and walk away?'"

From "A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men/Seeking social media stardom for their underage daughters, mothers post images of them on Instagram. The accounts draw men sexually attracted to children, and they sometimes pay to see more" (NYT). 

"In January 2022, Dr. Kershnar appeared on a respected philosophy podcast, Brain in a Vat.... The guest presents a thought experiment..."

"... and the hosts spend the rest of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kershnar’s thought experiment was... 'Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl; imagine that she’s a willing participant... A very standard, a very widely held view is there’s something deeply wrong about this. And it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that is, in fact, wrong....'... Dr. Kershnar is a 'Socratic gadfly' who goes around questioning fundamental assumptions, often quite annoyingly, to try to get at a clearer understanding of morality and why something is or is not wrong.... After LibsofTikTok posted clips of Dr. Kershnar’s podcast remarks on X..., the university was immediately deluged with demands for action.... Alumni threatened to stop giving money.... [T]he university received what officials described as threats of violence...."

From "A Professor’s Remarks on Sexual Consent Stir Controversy. Now He’s Banned From Campus. Stephen Kershnar, who teaches philosophy, is suing for the right to return to SUNY at Fredonia. The university defends its ban as necessary for safety" (NYT).

“It’s all in good fun. If you’re taking it like that, then that’s a you problem. Not an us problem."

Said Kelly Autorina, "a longtime parade veteran" and "'huge supporter' of drag," quoted in "NYC Pride Parade revelers sound off on controversial Drag March chant: 'Just adding fuel to the fire'" (NY Post).

The chant was "We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!"

Of course, it was satire. The question is whether it's too cruel — or impolitic — to satirize the fear that drag performers are trying to sexualize children. 

The linked article ends with this quote from Jimmie O’Brien, "a 66-year-old gay man from NYC: "I think humor is the truth that breaks everything. When humor comes out, that’s where inspiration comes from. When it doesn’t come out, it’s repressed. And then it comes out as anger." 

And yet we no longer feel free to openly mock gay people (something that was routine in mainstream speech and entertainment a few decades ago). And it's certainly not a generally understood social norm that the person who says something "in good fun" can brush off anyone who takes offense at their fun. 

But laughing at your opponents is a tactic. "We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!" is very funny in the Drag March context. But when you're in a larger social/political battle, you've got to consider how that will look clipped out. 

Things conflated by Majorie Taylor Greene.

Now, here's an appropriate use of the word "conflate."

I'm reading "How Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘pedophile’ slur made it to ‘60 Minutes’" by Greg Sargent (in WaPo). 

The “pedophile” slur, a companion of the term “groomer,” is regularly applied by Republicans and right-wing media figures to Democrats and others who stand up for transgender rights, including gender-affirming treatment for adolescents. Greene cheerfully flaunted this use of the term on “60 Minutes,” which left [Lesley] Stahl utterly flummoxed: 

"The average child has its image shared on social media 1,300 times before the age of 13...."

"[Bruno Studer, an Alsace MP for Macron’s Renaissance party] said parents seemed oblivious to the fact that 50 per cent of the pictures exchanged on paedophile forums originated from photographs posted by families on social media. 'Certain images, notably photographs of naked babies or young girls in gym outfits, particularly interest paedophile circles,' Studer’s bill says.... The law is aimed at reinforcing minors’ privacy and enabling family court judges to deprive parents of rights over their child’s image, which would be transferred to a third party such as a social worker. The child must be involved in a decision to post their image 'according to his or her age and degree of maturity,' the preamble to the bill says....  Some campaigners say the proposed law does not go far enough. 'It talks a lot about the right to one’s image, but not about the dignity of children'...."

From "French parents who exploit children for online fame face prosecution" (London Times).

"Twitter on Monday night abruptly dissolved its Trust and Safety Council...."

The Washington Post reports, characterizing the move as "the latest sign that Elon Musk is unraveling years of work and institutions created to make the social network safer and more civil."

Twitter first formed the Trust and Safety Council in 2016, as social networks were coming under greater scrutiny for their role in amplifying hate, terrorism, child exploitation and other problematic content online. The council convened a wide range of civil society groups, think tanks — and even some of Silicon Valley’s biggest critics....

Last week, three members of the Trust and Safety Council resigned, warning that the “safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.” Musk responded to replies to their tweet announcing their resignation, writing, “It’s a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!” ....

Midway through the article, the topic switches to something that is in the url for this article — "musk-twitter-harass-yoel-roth/":

Joe Rogan and Whitney Cummings find the pedophilia in Shirley Temple movies.

 

I've blogged about that "Baby Burlesque" before. When Temple died in 2014, listing all my earlier blogging of the great child actress, I wrote: 

April 29, 2009, a controversy over a photographic presentation of teenaged Miley Cyrus looking overly sexualized led me to show you this clip of Shirley Temple as a toddler playing a seductress. It's simply astounding by today's standards....

It was interesting to watch Rogan seeing this craziness for the first time. Whitney Cummings did an excellent job with the running commentary.

"[T]he age of puberty in girls has dropped by about three months per decade since the 1970s...."

"Girls who go through puberty early are at a higher risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and other psychological problems, compared with peers who hit puberty later. Girls who get their periods earlier may also be at a higher risk of developing breast or uterine cancer in adulthood. No one knows what risk factor — or more likely, what combination of factors — is driving the age decline or why there are stark race- and sex-based differences.... 'Obesity can’t explain all of this,' [said pediatric endocrinologist Natalie Shaw]. 'It’s just happened too quickly.'... Sexual abuse in early childhood has been linked to earlier puberty onset. Causal arrows are difficult to draw, however. Stress and trauma could prompt earlier development, or, as Dr. [Marcia] Herman-Giddens hypothesized decades ago, girls who physically develop earlier could be more vulnerable to abuse. Girls whose mothers have a history of mood disorders also seem more likely to reach puberty early, as are girls who do not live with their biological fathers. Lifestyle factors like a lack of physical activity have also been linked to changes in pubertal timing. And during the pandemic, pediatric endocrinologists from across the world noticed that referrals were increasing for earlier puberty in girls.... [S]ome experts argue that the age threshold for alarm should be lowered.... But lowering the age cutoff remains controversial... 'It might be normal in the sense of what the data are showing,' Dr. Herman-Giddens said, 'but I don’t think it’s normal, for lack of a better word, for what nature intended.'"

From "Puberty Starts Earlier Than It Used To. No One Knows Why. Some girls are starting to develop breasts as early as age 6 or 7. Researchers are studying the role of obesity, chemicals and stress" (NYT).

Take note: The phrase "what nature intended" is still in circulation.

"Vulnerable children are wrongly being given gender hormone treatment by the NHS, Sajid Javid believes, as he prepares to launch an urgent inquiry."

"The health secretary thinks the system is 'failing children' and... is understood to have likened political sensitivities over gender dysphoria to the fears of racism in Rotherham over grooming gangs.... Javid is said to be particularly alarmed by her finding that some non-specialist staff felt 'under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach' to transitioning and that other mental health issues were 'overshadowed' when gender was raised.... Referrals have increased 50-fold in the past decade, with far more female-born children now coming forward in a reversal of previous trends.... 'The review has already come across a number of adults that were given these life-changing drugs as children and are now saying, "Why did you do that? Because that wasn’t my problem. I was sexually abused. I was being bullied,"' a health source said.... A senior government source said Javid believes 'far too many public figures have been avoiding [gender issues] for too long' but argued: 'There is a militant lobby that doesn’t want a debate.'... Some around him say the question has been likened to concerns he raised while home secretary about the failure to tackle child exploitation by gangs of predominantly British-Pakistani men in Rotherham. The senior government source said: 'There is the same theme of not being afraid to tackle issues that others might prefer not to talk about.'"

The London Times reports.

"If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed in a very real sense by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators."

Said David Mamet, quoted in "David Mamet slammed over claim that many male teachers are ‘inclined’ to be pedophiles" (NY Post).

“Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so. But they’re abusing them mentally and using sex to do so,” he added. “This has always been the problem with education – teachers are inclined, typically men because men are predators, to pedophilia,” the 74-year-old said....

“People have gone nuts and people are frightened because there’s huge changes in society, that are brought about by the people in power,” Mamet said. “The people in power, as always, are to a large extent, parasites who are feeding off of the decaying flesh."

"'She was seen as too sexy and too lightweight to be serious,' her longtime agent... said... Ms. Babitz was a precocious child of Hollywood, born on May 13, 1943, stopping traffic at 13."

"(A soon-to-be famous actor, spying her on her front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit, cruised her in his convertible before realizing her age and speeding away, she recalled in 'Eve’s Hollywood.').... She clocked the popular girls.... 'When they reach 15.... and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting — like coming into an inheritance and as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and how they spend it and on what.'  Eve’s inheritance was her appetite, her curiosity and her zaftig beauty, like Brigitte Bardot with a shag haircut and hip huggers. She was a hedonist with a notebook. Eve hung out at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood club that nurtured Jackson Browne, the band Buffalo Springfield, for whom she made album covers, and Steve Martin, whom she made over by showing him a book of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs featuring crisply dressed men in white suits on the beach in France at the turn of the century. In 1963, she wrote to Joseph Heller, the author of 'Catch-22,' angling to find a publisher for a nascent novel that never materialized: 'I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.'... Then in 1997, trying to light a cherry-flavored Tiparillo while driving her Volkswagen Beetle, her clothing caught fire, searing most of her body.... Holed up with her cat in her West Hollywood apartment, Ms. Babitz became a recluse — and a pugnacious conservative, converted by the talk radio that became the backbeat to her new life...."

From "Eve Babitz, a Hedonist With a Notebook, Is Dead at 78/A child of Hollywood, she wrote of the sensuous pleasures of Los Angeles, and sampled them enthusiastically" (NYT).

A strange obituary. And I've elided Frank Zappa, Salvador Dalí, and Marcel Duchamp. 

Creepy, really. You'd think "Me Too" had never happened. She died of Huntington's disease, so maybe this obituary was composed years ago. 

The scene on the front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit seems like the scene in the Kubrick movie where Humbert Humbert first lays eyes on Lolita. The Times sounds Humbertish referring to Babitz as "a precocious child." The editors left in "stopping traffic at 13." Maybe that's the tone of Babitz's writing. She wrote "When they reach 15.... and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting" and "I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard." And all this is added up to the role of "hedonist." It's as though the New York Times has devolved into Harvey Weinstein. Ah, but she turned into a conservative — "a pugnacious conservative" — so no holds barred. 

"Whether the director (who is a woman) intends to or not, she has made a film that serves to accustom us to the sexualization of children."

"Cuties is dramatically quite bland; if it weren’t for the controversy, there would be nothing to recommend it. There’s no subtlety in it. If you wanted to make a movie or TV show that appealed to illicit prurience among the audience, you would have to make it with the pretense of condemning the thing you’re exploring in it. If you are the sort of person who finds long scenes of twerking pre-teens to be revolting, then Cuties is going to be hard to get through. If you find it exciting, well, perv, this is the movie for you. I’m not saying that this is what the filmmaker set out to do here, but I am saying that this will be the effect. It will be the effect because the director’s aesthetic failure is a moral failure. And it’s a failure by the Netflix brass too, which tipped its hand with the botched initial marketing. It is plainly only interested in Cuties because it wanted a succès de scandale of a movie about twerking Lolitas. It has no interest at all in condemning a Kardashianized society that produces twerking Lolitas.... I find the traditional Islamic society depicted in Cuties to be unjust towards women, and not one in which I would want to live, or would want by daughter to grow up in. But I would prefer that to the Cuties society of sluttified children, and it’s not even close."

Writes Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. Dreher actually watched the movie. There's a clip of one of the dance scenes embedded at the link. I attempted to watch it, and you can see from my screen shot where I gave up forcing myself:

"The subject of 'Cuties' isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived..."

"... of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective. Left on their own... they’re unable to find or even to seek the line between liberation and exploitation, between independence and imitation. 'Cuties' is about the absence of knowledge and absence of reasonable discourse about sex and sexuality, power and desire, that help young people to avow and confront these drives constructively—or, at least, not too destructively. Lacking those things, Amy latches on to a mode of revolt that is itself a trope of a misogynistic order."

Writes Richard Brody in "'Cuties,' the Extraordinary Netflix Début That Became the Target of a Right-Wing Campaign" (The New Yorker).

But doesn't that describe exactly how a mainstream movie outlet would package pedophilia?! And isn't it specifically titillating to present the children with "the absence of knowledge... about sex and sexuality"?! Brody sounds so disingenuous.

AND: Here's my earlier post about "Cuties."

For those of you who spoke highly of "Little Miss Sunshine" when I was critical of this new Netflix thing "Cuties"...

... in this post of mine yesterday.

I hated "Little Miss Sunshine" when it came out (as I said in January 2007). Here's something I wrote in December '09, reacting to a list of the worst movies of the decade:

"Reed Hastings is the founder and CEO of Netflix. Here is he and his leadership team — the whole lot of them grooming little girls for sexual exploitation."

"These are little girls, and this Netflix show has the acting like strippers as a way of finding their way to liberation. What is wrong with these Netflix people? Do they not have children? Do they think our daughters are only valuable insofar as they can cosplay as sluts who are sexually available to men? What is wrong with you, Netflix?"

From "Cuties" by Rod Dreher (at The American Conservative).

The Titania McGrath take:

Feminism has come a long way...

1918 - Female suffrage

1967 - Foundation of Women’s Liberation Movement

1975 - Equal Pay Act

2020 - 11-year-old girls *finally* allowed to twerk on mainstream TV

✊♀️ pic.twitter.com/QU0MjZ4tj3

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) August 20, 2020

"Mary Kay Letourneau, a one-time teacher who became a tabloid fixture in the late 1990s after she raped a 13-year-old student and later married him, after serving a prison sentence..."

"... died on Monday near Seattle.... Ms. Letourneau was a teacher in the Highline School District, near Seattle, where she taught Mr. Fualaau in the second and sixth grades. She was 34 when she began a sexual relationship with Mr. Fualaau in 1996, when he was 12 or 13. They had their first child in 1997 as she awaited sentencing after pleading guilty to charges of second-degree child rape. After serving three months of a reduced sentence in prison, she defied court orders to stay away from Mr. Fualaau, leading to her return to prison for a seven-year sentence. She gave birth to their second child in 1998, shortly after beginning her second stint in prison.... Upon her release from prison in 2004, Ms. Letourneau was required to have no contact with Mr. Fualaau, then 21. But he fought to have the order removed, and the couple married in 2005.... Mr. Fualaau said in the A&E documentary that 'at the end of the day, it was a real love story.... A lot of things that should have gone through my mind at the time weren’t going through my mind.'"

From the NYT obituary for Mary Kay Letourneau. She was 58 and died of cancer.

She came from a conservative family: "Her father, John Schmitz, was an ultraconservative U.S. representative who ran for president in 1972 as a member of the American Independent Party. One of her brothers, Joseph E. Schmitz, was the inspector general of the Department of Defense, an executive at Blackwater Worldwide and a one-time foreign policy adviser for President Trump. Another brother, John P. Schmitz, was a deputy counsel to President George H. W. Bush."

"Some 800 girls were said to have sought the part. When Ms. Lyon was cast, Mr. Nabokov, employing the word he used in the novel, called her 'the perfect nymphet'..."

"Ms. Lyon accumulated more than two dozen film and television credits from 1959 to 1980, but she was known primarily for one: Mr. Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel ['Lolita'], which was adapted for the screen by Mr. Nabokov himself.... The novel was scandalous when it was first published in English in 1955; the film, made when the restrictive Motion Picture Production Code still governed Hollywood, was less so — in part, some critics thought, because Ms. Lyon, whose character was aged slightly for the movie, seemed too mature. 'She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly haughty teenage air,' Bosley Crowther said in his review in The Times. 'The distinction is fine, we will grant you, but she is definitely not a "nymphet."'"

From "Sue Lyon, Star of ‘Lolita,’ Is Dead at 73/She was 14 when she was cast in the title role of Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film of the Nabokov novel. It remained her best-known credit" (NYT).

Elon Musk — sued for defamation by the man he called "pedo guy" — has won at trial.

CNBC reports.

In his testimony during the defamation trial this week, Musk apologized to [Vernon] Unsworth and said he did not believe the cave explorer was a pedophile....

Musk and his employees developed a device that they billed as a mini-submarine or escape pod, and which they thought could transport the [trapped Thai] kids out of the caves.... After the rescue, Unsworth was asked during a television interview on CNN about the mini-sub and Musk. He said Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts,” and viewed the escape pod as “just a PR stunt.” Lashing back, Musk called the caver a “pedo guy”...

Musk’s lead attorney, Alex Spiro, in closing arguments characterized Musk’s offensive tweets as merely insulting and not statements of fact.

He argued that "pedo guy" was just a slang way to say "creepy old guy."

Spiro also said that Unsworth was telling the court, “I’ve been horribly damaged. Pay me lots of money,” but then failed to prove he had been damaged at all. Referencing the fact that Unsworth had earned a little money for speaking engagements since the cave rescue, he asked, “You wanna award damages? How about one dollar?” And he implored the court not to engage in policing speech.