Of the Republican Rout and Lena Dunham's Vagina

Obama and American voters have one thing in common, at least: They both hate the Democrat party! At least according to this fascinating Washington Post article in which we learn, among other things, that Obama refused to share his donor lists with beleagured Democrat candidates or to release any of those surplus millions from the 2012 election.

Wow. Not only the most incompetent POTUS since Jimmy Carter – worse than George W. Bush in my book – but also a dog in the manger. That’s a serious character flaw!

Anyway, I wouldn’t be too concerned about the Republican rout of Congress if I were Hillary Clinton. Political years are like dog years: Two years is a fucking eternity. The Republican Congress will be a massive clusterfuck; American voters will turn against it and them; and in 2016, the Democrats will win the Presidency and regain control of the House.

Don’t forget: You read it here first!

As for me, I voted straight Third Party in the bigger state elections, but all Democrat in the local elections since I do like the local Dems. My Virtuous and Pure Assemblywoman Didi Barrett appears to have won – by the slimmest of margins; my Virtuous and Pure State Senator Terry Gipson did not. Gipson – first Dem to hold this State Senate district since FDR – is Seraphina’s mentor; and, in fact, we are going after his donor list for the 2015 Breaking Barriers Festival – hope he doesn’t pull an Obummer!

The meta-lesson for me in all of this is that the two-party system is fucked beyond all redemption. Bipartisanism is never a realistic goal – when you have two opinions about something, the human tendency is to polarize around those two opinions; whereas, if you have three, five, or a dozen opinions, there’s an incentive to seek some kind of consensus, to make compromises.

I’m not sure why the American public seems so resolutely opposed to third parties. Probably has something to do with campaign funding. If the Koch Brothers had the balls to funnel $$$ where their true beliefs are (Libertarianism) instead of into the Republican party – just as an example – the US would be a better place.

And I’m not saying that just because Libertarianism coincides most closely with my own political beliefs.

(Real Libertarians hate me, by the way. That’s because I support government intervention in cases of free market failure, and I think the free market fails at least 40% of the time.)

The Koch Brothers don’t have low-hanging balls, though.

In the absence of a massive cash infusion de-marginalizing third parties, there’s really no way to implement them in this country.

There’s only one issue that’s in the No Compromise zone for me – and that’s abortion rights. I could never, ever support a pro-life candidate.

There are any number of issues that are in The-World-Would-Be-a-Better-Place-If-These-Were-So zone, and these include gay marriage and unrestricted immigration. But I have no personal stake in these. One cares most passionately about issues in which one has a personal stake.

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In other news, Lena Dunham’s lady parts are getting a lot of (to me) unwelcome press.

I watch Girls simply because I’m the mother of two twenty-somethings, and I’m trying to keep up with the lingo and the attitudes. I hate all the characters on the show, and I loathe Lena Dunham. I get that she thinks she’s making a political statement: See? I can bleach my hair vamp blonde and wear sexy clothes that make me look like suet pudding in Oscar de la Renta because your attitudes toward beauty are politically oppressive!!!! We’re all beautiful.

But I think she’s just using her fame as a platform to legitimatize her narcissism, because see, we’re not all beautiful. Yes, yes, yes: Standards of beauty change in different eras. When I was modeling, for example, I was not considered beautiful. I was waaaaaay too ethnic-looking. I was a model because I photograph well and had an eating disorder that made it easy for me to weigh 119 pounds at 5’10”.

Now the girl I was back then would be considered beautiful.

But even within those fluctuating beauty ideals, certain ratios and proportions are hardwired into the brain. And Lena Dunham doesn’t have those proportions.

Anyway, believing her own press, that everything she touches turns to gold, Dunham – of course! – penned an autobiography. (I haven’t read it; bel_ebat has.)

Somewhere in that autobiography, she describes an incident in which at the age of seven, she pulled some pebbles out of her younger sister’s vagina, which her younger sister for whatever reason had inserted into herself.

Ho-kay.

Well, I mean, I gotta figure at some point or another, we’ve all had a good long look at our siblings’ genitalia. I know I have!

The question is: Why would anyone write about this?

I can remember reading Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook back in the Jurassic Age and coming across a passage in which Lessing rather graphically describes the act of inserting a tampon into her vagina. I think this may have been the very first tampon insertion described in English language literature.

Anyway, this detail completely threw me out of the book.

I couldn’t figure out why it was there.

My objection wasn't sqeamishness. Pornoy jacking off into a piece of liver made me squeamish, but I understood that the detail was essential to the storyline of Portnoy's Complaint.

This detail added nothing to the story. No new insights into Anna Wulf are gained from watching her insert her tampon.

Every woman above the age of puberty reading the book (and very few below the age of puberty would be reading the book) already knew what it feels like to insert a tampon into her vagina.

Was it there to educate male readers? (See, sometimes the sterile cotton fibers chafe...) To help tampon manufacturers manufacture more comfortable tampons? To show Lessing’s disdain for bourgeois concepts like privacy?

I finally decided it was that last.

And it’s an ideological stance I do not agree with at all.

I had something of the same reaction reading about the vagina passage in Dunham’s autobiography. She has been denounced – completely unjustly, of course – by some right-wing website as a child molester. Which just goes to show you the shrill depths to which all discourse on that particular subject has descended.

But I can’t help thinking, You’re a fuckin’ idiot, Dunham. You believe your own press! You honestly believe you’re a spokesperson for your generation instead of a hook to sell ads and commercials. You think everything about you is a delicious revel that will induct more and more believers into the True Church of Lena the Deliciously Wacky Teller of Harsh Truths. You’re not…

Comeuppance is a beayatch, baybee.

Or in the lingo of Girls: What a Marnie thing to think!