Gwyon.

Back in 2006 I mentioned Gaddis in my list of ten unread books; I don’t know why I picked J.R. rather than The Recognitions, since I owned them both and the latter was published first (by twenty years), but Vanya mentioned it in the first comment and I grouped them together in my 2020 comment linking to a Christopher Beha piece on Gaddis “so I’ll be able to find it when I want it, if and when I ever get around to deciding to tackle J.R. and The Recognitions.” Well, my wife and I finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House (and were sad it was over — I highly recommend it, and we’re eagerly awaiting her next, whenever she chooses to produce it) and were trying to decide what to read next, and for whatever reason I pulled the doorstop paperback of The Recognitions off the shelf and said “Want to try this?” and she agreed, so we started it last night, and after the first few pages we’re enjoying it (and its thousand pages should keep us going almost to the end of the year).

But Gaddis, like a good modernist, is wildly allusive, and though I was able to translate the Goethe epigraph for my wife and explain a couple of references, there were a number of things I wondered about, so this afternoon I turned to the internet and googled “The first turn of the screw pays all debts.” Imagine my surprise and delight when I was taken to A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, which will be my vade mecum throughout the long voyage! For the turn-of-the-screw quote it has:

The first turn of the screw pays all debts: that is, one’s debts on shore can be dismissed with the first turn of the ship’s screw – a sentiment, says Eric Partridge in his Dictionary of Catch Phrases, “so optimistic as to verge upon the mythical.”

But what really boggled my mind was this, on two counts:

Reverend Gwyon: according to de Rougemont, Gwyon was a Celtic divinity whose name “(whence ‘guyon’ meaning ‘guide’ in Old French) means the Führer who has in his custody the secret of initiation into the way of divinization” (LWW 210 n.1). Also relevant are Gawain from the Grail romances (see FRR) and Gwion, a semilegendary bard whose poetry hides “an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery” (WG 55); one of Gwion’s poems is quoted at 467.5. (Asked once how to pronounce Gwyon, Gaddis said he didn’t know; he had never said it aloud. It probably should be pronounced as one syllable, like “Gwynne,” its modern form.)

In the first place, it astonishes me that Gaddis didn’t know the pronunciation of the name of one of his main characters; in fact, I’m not sure I actually believe it. Anyone so aware of the sound of words (as is evident when you read his sentences aloud) surely must have vocalized it on some level. And in the second place, it would never have occurred to me to say it as one syllable; it seemed natural to read it as /ˈgwaɪən/, so that’s what I did. I guess I’ll switch to /gwɪn/ unless someone presents arguments to the contrary. At any rate, what a great resource to help the striving reader through a strenuous text!

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    The Welsh boy’s name Gwion presumably goes back to Gwion Bach ap Gwreang, who was a sort of prototype of the archetypal poet Taliesin, before he was reborn (or something) as Ceridwen’s son:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceridwen

    (see #Legend)
    He may well have started out as a divinity, judging by the general weirdness of the story. He, at any rate, is not pronounced /gwɪn/, and AFAIK his name is nothing to do with gwyn “white.”

    French Guyons are just oblique Guys, of Frankish origin:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido

    This would be the one explained as meaning “guide” in various places. I don’t think any Celtic divinities come into that one. It can’t be of the same origin as the Welsh bod.

    [WG = Graves’ The White Goddess. Not a reliable source …]

  2. David Eddyshaw says

    I suspect that the “semilegendary bard whose poetry hides an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery” may be based on a confusion of the blameless Gwion/Taliesin with this fellow:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwydion

    a confirmed trickster, and incidentally the uncle of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, a.k.a. Lugh of the Long Hand (as we discussed elsewhere.)

    Robert Graves identified him with Woden, because that’s the sort of thing Robert Graves did. I think that The White Goddess may be the source of all this “Celtic divinity” stuff.

    “Gwydion” is not connected with “Gwyn” either, or (needless to say) with “Woden.” I feel a Radio Yerevan joke coming on …

  3. Naturally, I thought of you when I read this passage:

    –Buried over there with a lot of dead Catholics, was Aunt May’s imprecation. Aunt May was his father’s sister, a barren steadfast woman, Calvinistically faithful to the man who had been Reverend Gwyon before him. She saw her duty in any opportunity at true Christian umbrage. For the two families had more to resent than the widower’s seemingly whimsical acceptance of his wife’s death. They refused to forgive his not bringing Camilla’s body home, for deposit in the clean Protestant soil of New England. It was their Cross, and they bore it away toward a bleak exclusive Calvary with admirable Puritan indignance.

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    Aunt May sounds like an exemplary person. Not many of us have the skills needed to take true Christian umbrage these days. Merely objecting to all aspects of Modernity in the American Evangelical way doesn’t cut it: it’s a pale shadow of true Umbrage.

    Our author has (it is superfluous to say) bestowed upon her a surely significant name:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(religion)

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    Graves’ “ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery” does indeed seem to refer to the sixteenth-century Hanes Taliesin, the work of

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elis_Gruffydd

    WP says he was “the first Welsh Protestant to leave a record of his religious views”, so ancient blasphemous religious mysteries would certainly have been his bag. It’s one of those Welsh Protestant things, though we mostly keep it to ourselves.

    The actual shocking story is summarised in the WP article about Ceridwen. You can see at least how Graves would have happily shoehorned it into his White Goddess myth.

    It would be difficult to quote a poem by Gwion himself, what with him being mythological and all. But I dare say that presented no difficulty to Graves.

    [I actually like Graves’ work. But he was also a Very Silly Man. I blame Laura Riding. Again.]

  6. We are as one on the conjoint topic of Graves and Riding (Jackson).

  7. PlasticPaddy says

    @de
    GPC says gwyd/gwydion is from Latin vitium. This leads to two observations: (1) Welsh had to borrow this word from Latin, because in their pristine state of nature the Welsh had no need of it; (2) Gwydion seems more like Loki than Woden.

  8. David Eddyshaw says

    He is indeed much more Loki-like.

    Disappointingly, he seems to be the Guidgen who turns up as the father (rather than merely uncle*) of Lou map Guidgen in the Old Welsh royal genealogies: this would go with WPs claim that the name means “Wood-born.” (Though that would mean that the name should really be Gwyddion; however, you can’t tell the difference in Middle Welsh orthography.)

    It is, however, true that my forebears had no vices before the Romans came. Noble savages, the lot of them. They had a bit of human sacrifice now and again, but there was no harm in it.

    * It’s no great stretch to read this into the story in Math vab Mathonwy itself. It would help to explain why Lleu’s mother, Arianrhod, is so hostile to him, too.

  9. David Marjanović says

    this would go with WPs claim that the name means “Wood-born.”

    So a root cognate of Guy after all ( ~ Old Saxon widu “forest”).

  10. @David Eddyshaw: The story of Lleu’s birth to Arianrhod in the Fourth Branch Mabinogion looks like a doublet, of the kind found so often in the Torah. She unexpectedly gives birth before Math twice.

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    @Brett:

    Dylan and Lleu may have been some sort of pair of divine twins, I suppose. Dylan seems to have started out as a sea god, as so many of us do:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_ail_Don

    So a root cognate of Guy after all

    Possibly so for Gwydion; but not for Gwion, a quite different person*, and the alleged Celtic divinity in the original question, whose name can’t be anything to do with wood – unless, of course, it’s actually borrowed from French. But that seems improbable: I’ve no idea how old the tradition of the miraculous origin of Taliesin actually is, but even assuming that it’s late enough, it would seem odd for some later poet to have put a foreign name into a legend of the remote pre-Christian Brythonic past. Like giving King Arthur a brother called Donald. I’m not sure that it works very well phonologically, either, but I wouldn’t swear to that.

    * OK, it was me who introduced Gwydion, and confused the issue. (But I’ll lay long odds that Graves happily conflates the two of them too.)

  12. Dylan and Lleu may have been some sort of pair of divine twins

    Like Dylan and Zimmerman. And Zimmer is timber, and timber is wood. It all fits together!

  13. Dylan and Lleu

    Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free? [source]

  14. If you put the vowel of Lou into Reed you get rood, and a rood is made of wood. QED

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen are clearly three aspects of one Singer.

    I am uncertain about the position of Thomas (the Rhymer) Waits and Clapton of the Long Hand. They may represent the Dark Twin of the Singer. I believe that Clapton has been regarded as a god in his own right among some of the less cultured peoples.

  16. She unexpectedly gives birth before Math twice.

    That sentence jumped out at me for some reason, and without knowing the context I imagined an unfortunate teenage girl producing two babies before math class (very impressive if it was a single math class).

  17. J.W. Brewer says

    I once saw noted NYC chanteuse Tammy Faye Starlite, in her Nico-impersonatrix mode, explain that she (i.e. Nico) had known all three of Cohen/Dylan/Reed but had only had sex with two of the three. Someone else in the audience shouted out the question of which guy was the outlier, which struck me at the time as a rather vulgar question to ask. Not because it was prying or prurient but because if you didn’t already know the answer maybe you weren’t the optimal audience member for this particular show.

  18. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Like giving King Arthur a brother called Donald.

    There’s the Domnall, or whatever he was, of Dunmail Raise – that’s the Old Welsh North, isn’t it?

    Oh, except apparently he was Dyfnwal, which is proper Welsh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyfnwal_ab_Owain

  19. John Cowan says

    very impressive if it was a single math class

    Twins, perhaps.

    Dyfnwal

    Like Domhnall/Dòmhnall, < dubnos-wallos ‘world-ruler’. Or as RFC 1178, “Name Your Computer” by Don Libes, puts it: “Just because a person is named “Don” doesn’t mean he is the ruler of the world (despite what the “Choosing a Name for your Baby” books say).”

    Or in greater detail:

    A cocky novice once said to Stallman: “I can guess why the editor is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?”. Stallman replied forcefully: “Names are but names, ‘Emack & Bolio’s’ is the name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these men had anything to do with the software.”

    His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but Stallman called to him, “Neither Emack nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either.”

    This is known as the ice-cream koan.

  20. January First-of-May says

    Just because a person is named “Don” doesn’t mean he is the ruler of the world

    Nor Vladimir, though IIRC the etymology is more uncertain in that case.

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    Dyfnwal, which is proper Welsh

    Indeed. I should have gone with “Derek”; or, indeed, “Vladimir.”
    (Though, on reflection, I rather like the idea of Sir Vladimir, brother of Arthur. Gwladfur, perhaps …)

    Neither Emack nor Bolio had anything to do with the ice cream shop, either

    This is, in fact, perfectly true:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emack_%26_Bolio%27s

    Never doubt the word of Richard Stallman.

  22. January First-of-May says

    I should have gone with “Derek”

    “Derek”, incidentally, is a shortened form of “Theodoric”; the Welsh cognate is apparently Tudur, as in the dynasty.

  23. David Eddyshaw says

    I give up. All names are Welsh*. I, of all people, should have known that.

    * Including Myhamed.

  24. PlasticPaddy says

    @jfom
    There is also an Irish personal name Darach derived from the name of the oak tree. Compare also Gaulish Dervacios. Welsh has Derwen, the -ach in Darach is a suffix.

  25. azedarach
    Etymology
    French azédarach, from Spanish acederaque, from Arabic أَزَادَرْخَت‎ (ʾazādarḵat), from Persian آزاددرخت‎ (âzâd-deraxt), from آزاد‎ (âzâd, “noble”) +‎ درخت‎ (deraxt, “tree”).

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/azedarach#Etymology

  26. @David Eddyshaw: reliable as RMS is on the matter of FOSS, he’s also a reliable sexual harasser, so there are good grounds to doubt some of his words

  27. Yuk. Thanks for the heads-up.

  28. John Cowan says

    I give up. All names are Welsh*.

    Not so much, I think. What these cases show is that everyone has a name in the Welsh language.

    there are good grounds to doubt some of [Stallman’s] words

    Again, I don’t think so. Stallman is not as far as I know a hypocrite: if anyone doesn’t know his views on the moral permissibility of “prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia” (from the tweet thread you link), that is certainly not his fault.

    Nor are matters as black and white as Stallman’s adversaries paint them. In my home state the age of consent is 16, but there is a “Romeo and Juliet” exemption as in many other states: if the younger participant is 13 or older and the older participant is not more than 4 years older than that (and absent a family relationship or one of authority), there is no criminal liability. This would have saved my bacon back in the day had the law been after me, but in fact what I got was a stern warning from my mother to Be Careful, both physically and emotionally, with both of us. I did my best, which was not all that good.

  29. PlasticPaddy says

    @jc
    Errors of judgment:
    1. Being a large important man and hitting on small and perhaps less important (it is her perception that matters, not yours) people in an aggressive (it is her.. ) way.
    2. Expecting people to share, excuse or even understand your sense of humour, if it is weird or quirky.
    3. Appearing to excuse someone you do not know personally and who is the subject of ongoing legal investigation / proceedings-let their expensive law team do it.
    Having said that, I am uneasy with social media campaigns substituting for proceedings subject to due process or prejudicing these proceedings.

  30. Yeah, I don’t think we need to prosecute him here, but I for one am glad to know about it.

  31. John Cowan says

    Errors of judgment:

    “I trust that here I am among friends?” —Kato Secondcousin Brutogasi, Keysman

    1. Being a large important man and hitting on small and perhaps less important (it is her perception that matters, not yours) people in an aggressive (it is her.. ) way.

    I disclaim any importance, but I am certainly “a very large man and therefore very peaceable”; as the saying is, “Never frighten a little man, he’ll kill you.” And the lesson you imply here is one I managed to learn more easily than Stallman; he has a worse case of whatever-it-is-he-has than I do. For both of us, though, it is plain that tact and courtesy are procedures that we have had to teach ourselves.

    2. Expecting people to share, excuse or even understand your sense of humour, if it is weird or quirky.

    “25.8069758011 is the (square) root of all evil.”

    “Unless it was by accident that I offended someone, I never apologised.” —Quentin Crisp

    3. Appearing to excuse someone you do not know personally and who is the subject of ongoing legal investigation / proceedings — let their expensive law team do it.

    If I am not mistaken, it was Minsky (who is dead, and therefore has no legal team and can safely be slandered by anyone) that Stallman defended, and then only in the mode of “nothing is proven against him”. Stallman is on record as calling Epstein a serial rapist and saying that he ought to be in prison.

    On rudeness generally:

    The law does not, and doubtless should not, impose a general duty of care to avoid causing mental distress. For the sake of reasonable freedom of action, in our own interest and that of society, we need the privilege of being careless whether we inflict mental distress on our neighbors. It is perhaps less clear that we need the privilege of distressing them intentionally and without excuse. Yet there is, and probably should be, no general principle that mental distress purposely caused is actionable unless justified. Such a principle would raise awkward questions of de minimis and of excuse. “He intentionally hurt my feelings” does not yet sound in tort, though it may in a more civilized time. —Clark v. Associated Retail Credit Men, 105 F.2d 62 (D.C. Cir. 1939)

  32. PlasticPaddy says

    @jc
    Thanks. I did not know the timing. But there are other Epstein associates who are not dead, so an excuse for a dead one carries over in some sense to the living ones.

  33. But there are other Epstein associates who are not dead, so an excuse for a dead one carries over in some sense to the living ones.

    This is not a healthy way of thinking; it leads to the intolerant prosecutorial mentality I deprecate in large sections of the left. If they don’t have enough actual Nazis to fight, they widen the Nazi-adjacent net until it takes in a satisfying number of fish. We are all sinners, and it behooves us to be as tolerant as we can (and obviously this differs for each of us) of the sins of others. Not saying we should tolerate the Epsteins of the world, obviously, but “Epstein is dead, so there’s no point yelling at him, let’s go find people who weren’t sufficiently angry at him while he was alive and yell at them” isn’t a good approach. This is not aimed at you, of course, it’s just that your remark prompted the thought.

  34. It’s also not intended as a defense of Stallman, who is clearly a jerk.

  35. John Emerson says

    There’s really been a sea change regarding what’s permissible in sex over about the last 20 years, centered especially on consent, age of consent, and pedophilia. It’s a rejection of the “anything goes” mood of the 60s, 70s, and maybe 80s, which was itself a more gradual sea change (starting probably in the 20s) from the earlier “within marriage only, man on top” ethos. I’m old enough to remember both transitions.

    A lot of the stuff that is unthinkable today was widely tolerated two or three decades ago, with not too many questions asked about details. Epstein was accepted in decent society even by people who weren’t part of his sex community, but who knew about it.

    I don’t like the ways the age of consent has been fossilized at 18, though, I have no skeletons in my closet, but many of the 16 year olds I have known during various periods have been, or have seemed, eager to consent.

  36. Are you not aware of the argument that consent is meaningless under a certain age and in certain conditions of subordination? Obviously people differ in how quickly they mature, but the law has to pick an age, and 18 is it. Surely you’ll agree that it’s better to have people wait a year or two than to have young women’s lives ruined. And if you don’t think premature sex can ruin people’s lives, you need to read more and/or have more frank discussions with people who had that experience.

  37. John Emerson says

    We’re now in a position of finding out whether a celebrity politician will go to jail for decades or go scot free depending on whether he had sex with a certain person somewhat before or somewhat after her 18th birthday. Because after 18, “anything goes” is still in effect, and he could be as sleazy as he wanted to be. If this doesn’t strike you as bizarre, it does me.

    This is part of the artificial extension of childhood institutionalized in the HS system. I also think that college admission at 16 should be common.

    I am less certain than you are that early sexual experience is necessarily harmful, much less disastrous. (And sexual relationship among consenting adults can also be disastrous.). And as I’ve said. if I had.any skeletons in my closet I wouldn’t say anything at all, because this is another of those minefield topics to be avoided at all costs.

  38. Lars Mathiesen says

    There is (by rough impression) about one case per decade here where a 12 year old girl is discovered to be pregnant by a boy her own age. Presumably they both consented, indicating that the bell curves for consent and fertility stretch that far, but of course it can make the girl’s life much harder than if it didn’t happen. In general, though, teenage pregnancy numbers are still going down even with the age of consent at 15 — I’d like to tell you which proportion of the change is abstinence (as if), prevention or free access to abortion, but there doesn’t seem to be numbers available.

    I support the principle of dismissing consent as meaningless if one party is violent, in a position of authority or psychologically overbearing, but between equal partners (even if badly informed) I think it has to be accepted to exist.

  39. I am less certain than you are that early sexual experience is necessarily harmful, much less disastrous.

    I didn’t say it was necessarily harmful; misquoting is one of the more annoying forms of debate. I said it could be harmful, is demonstrably harmful in many cases, and it’s better to avoid harm at the cost of making horny teenagers wait. And of course horny teenagers are going to have sex, as they always have, and it usually goes OK as long as they use birth control (which has only been widely available in recent decades, and still is unavailable in many places) — what we’re really talking about is cases in which older guys take advantage of the eagerness of horny teenagers to have a bit of fun, after which they go off to seek new fun while the kid is left to deal with the consequences. I have zero sympathy for that kind of guy, and there are lots and lots of them.

  40. Lars Mathiesen says

    To be clear (edit time ran out before I noticed the inaccuracy) it’s the number of teenage mothers that is decreasing, the number of pregnancies before abortion is considered will be higher and was not given in the source.

  41. J.W. Brewer says

    Perhaps it speaks well of hat that this is not a fact about the law of Massachusetts that he happens to know off the top of his head, but over half of the 50 states (including Mass.) still have 16 as the basic age of consent (sometimes with a higher age if the other person involved is an “authority figure” like a schoolteacher), and it’s 17 rather than 18 in many of the rest. And then there are tricky gray areas (as the politician John E. may be referring to is now finding it necessary to understand) such that it may be perfectly legal to have sex-as-such with a 17-year-old, but not okay to pay her and/or transport her across a state line in connection therewith.

    The age of consent is of course a criminal-law concept. That there are certain sorts of sexual behavior that may rightly be considered creepy/exploitative/discreditable but should not be criminalized seems plausible to me, but maybe I’m old-fashioned this way. We already have a situation where only a small percentage of instances of what is technically statutory rape ever get prosecuted and thus ought to be concerned about whether the prosecutors are sensibly focusing on only the most egregious/exploitative violations of the law (which is how you want prosecutorial discretion to work) or are instead focused on those violations where prosecution gets them maximum publicity and/or maximum advantage over their political adversaries (which is IMHO not how you want prosecutorial discretion to work).

    And of course when it comes to attempts to discredit celebrities/politicians etc. via dissemination of allegations on the internet,, there will be a lot of motivated reasoning and the inevitable application of supposed standards under which the condemners’ own political allies could not bear scrutiny.

  42. John Emerson says

    Almost anything could be harmful, and prohibiting things because they could be harmful is not an obvious step. Especially given the intensity of the judgment and the punishment.

    In any case, my original comment especially wanted to point out the enormity of the change in a rather short period. Epstein was last respectable and accepted in polite society when? As late as 2010 I think.

  43. The age of consent is of course a criminal-law concept. That there are certain sorts of sexual behavior that may rightly be considered creepy/exploitative/discreditable but should not be criminalized seems plausible to me, but maybe I’m old-fashioned this way.

    I’m in sympathy with that view, but the law perforce makes crude judgments, and I’m happy in this case with its erring on the side of punishing creeps if that’s what it takes to dampen men’s enthusiasm for this sort of behavior. Again, I’m not talking about teenagers but about men who should know better but think their personal sexual pleasure is the most important thing in the universe. This is not puritanism (sexual pleasure is great, and I wholly support it!), it’s recognizing the harm done in this realm (as in so many) by selfishness. It is close kin to the feeling of greedy people that their personal accumulation of wealth is the most important thing in the universe.

  44. J.W. Brewer says

    One interesting marker of changing age-of-consent mores even among the professionally louche and transgressive:

    When the Rolling Stones first recorded their ode-to-jailbait “Stray Cat Blues” in 1968, the female “you” being addressed is said to be “fifteen years old.” By late 1969 the age had dropped in live performances to the rather more outrageous “thirteen.” After 1971 the song fell out of the band’s regular setlist (there were apparently two mid-Seventies performances I have not tracked down the audio for), but when it was finally revived for live performances in 2002 the girl’s age had been moved up to sixteen. One wonders if there were meetings with lawyers and/or PR advisers about that change.

    I was probably fifteen or sixteen myself when I first became familiar with the song, so the age of the girl didn’t seem “problematic” to me, perhaps because I didn’t give much conscious thought to the fact that Jagger (or the fictional first-person “I” of the song, which may not be the same thing) had been significantly older even in ’68 than I was in ’80-’81.

  45. To put my cards on the table, I agree with the great Samuel Delany (to quote this remarkable FB post answering the question “How did I become a professor?”) that “the political position of women in this country, in the world, is the most important political problem there is.” And as we all know, the personal is political, and sexual oppression is one of the many rivers that feed into the great sea of the oppression of women in general.

  46. J.W. Brewer says

    @hat, but your “strong arm of the law” approach needs some stopping point. Joyce Maynard was 18 when she moved in with the 53-year-old J.D. Salinger, but I daresay most to all of the reasons you would find that situation creepy and exploitative would be equally true if she’d been 21 or even 22 and would not be that much more so if she had been 17.

  47. January First-of-May says

    I don’t like the ways the age of consent has been fossilized at 18, though

    In California and almost nowhere else. (Most of New England has 16, for example.) It’s just that so many big media companies are based out of California that a lot of the internet runs on Californian laws specifically.

    We’re now in a position of finding out whether a celebrity politician will go to jail for decades or go scot free depending on whether he had sex with a certain person somewhat before or somewhat after her 18th birthday.

    There are also occasional situations (forgot which states have laws that can result in that; IIRC not Massachusetts) where two people with a tiny age difference (sometimes as low as a few weeks) have a consensual (and legal) sexual relationship with each other, then one of them reaches age 18 (or 16) but the other does not yet, they have sex (again), it gets discovered, and one or both go to jail.

    And then there are tricky gray areas

    IIRC, in New Hampshire, it’s legal to have sex with someone aged as young as 13 if the other partner is not much older.

  48. @hat, but your “strong arm of the law” approach needs some stopping point. Joyce Maynard was 18 when she moved in with the 53-year-old J.D. Salinger, but I daresay most to all of the reasons you would find that situation creepy and exploitative would be equally true if she’d been 21 or even 22 and would not be that much more so if she had been 17.

    Of course; that’s why I said “the law perforce makes crude judgments.” The law deals with some things, public opinion deals with the rest. I don’t expect the law to solve all problems (I’m an anarchist!), but if it’s going to exist, I’m happy with it being used to punish the most egregious examples of this form of bad behavior.

  49. PlasticPaddy says

    @hat
    For associates read “middle-aged men who allowed Epstein to provide them with introductions to much younger women, some or all of whom were underage and/or subject to coercion.”

  50. Yeah, those guys are scum too. Sorry if I misunderstood your point.

  51. John Emerson says

    18 in California and 10 other states, notably including 2 of the sexiest states, Florida and California. (Is Oregon sexy?)

    https://www.bhwlawfirm.com/legal-age-consent-united-states-map/

  52. Is Oregon sexy?

    It’s just a few letters away from orgasm.

  53. John Emerson says

    An inlaw spent a month in jail for having sex when he was in HS with a HS girl older than he was. It was very sad because they really loved each other all their lives but never could get together again.

  54. Yeah, those are wretched situations, and the law should be kinder (as in many places it is, I believe) to kids of similar ages.

  55. John Cowan says

    the law has to pick an age, and 18 is it

    In a few U.S. jurisdictions, yes: specifically California, Idaho, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin set consent at 18 and have no R & J exemption. Delaware, on the other hand, has an R & J exemption in which, if the younger person is 16 or 17 the older person can be as old as 29, plus a 4-year age gap for 13-15. Similarly, in Virginia, there are two mutual-consent brackets, 13-15 and 16-17.

    Pennsylvania law is particularly strange: the official age is 16, but de facto it is 18, except that 16s and 17s can consent with each other but nobody else: with a younger person it is statutory rape, with an older person it is corruption of a minor.

    There are also marriage exemptions in many states. Full details worldwide at ageofconsent.net.

  56. I’m so glad I didn’t become a lawyer.

  57. John Emerson says

    My belief is that th present high age of consent is a function of sexual liberation and other forms of liberation. It was less an issue in the fairly recent past, and the age of consent was low. (Wiki: “In 1880, the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7”). But in those days it was expected that children would be under the control of the parents, and the age of consent was mostly to regulate arranged marriages.

    Once things went really wild sexually, with much looser parental control of children, a problem became evident. My hypothesis is that the present high age of consent is a way of protecting a version of childhood while leaving sexual freedom untouched.

    Ariel Durant was 15 when she (with the consent of her parents) married Will, who was 28 but (because of his religious background) more or less as innocent as she was.

  58. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Obviously people differ in how quickly they mature, but the law has to pick an age, and 18 is it.

    There are only 3 countries in Europe with an age of consent above 16, and it’s not clear to me that young people across Europe are more damaged than in the US. (Affected in different ways by different issues, no doubt.)

    And while the proportion of people ages 15-17 in the UK having babies is high by European standards, (by the best stats I can find) it’s about twice as high in the US. That must have something to do with views on abortion, of course,

    However, I do feel a bit about the countries who set it at 14 much the way you seem to feel about our 16, so it must be at least partly what you’re used to.

  59. You mistake me. I’m not fixated on 18; I’m just saying the law has to pick an age, and whatever age it picks is the legal age. I don’t care whether it’s 16, 18, or whatever, my point is that the law is a blunt instrument and is bound to toss very different people and situations in the same bucket.

  60. And historically both the law and public opinion have erred on the side of treating young women as sexual objects to be put at the disposal of men as conveniently as possible; if it is coming to err on the side of protecting young women from sexual abuse, sometimes needlessly, that (in my opinion) is a better error to make.

  61. John Emerson says

    I probably should have expressed myself more discreetly. My main point was that there has been an enormous society-wide change of attitude on this question in a very short time, as little as two decades, subsequent to an earlier enormous society wide change of attitude on questions of sex in general, and to considerable degree caused by it. I’ve watched the whole thing with my own eyes. The sexual liberation happened in a hurry something like 1960-1980, and the age of consent thing and concern for underaged happened something like 2000-2020. And 1980-2000 was unrestrained, as I well remember.

  62. David Eddyshaw says

    treating young women as sexual objects to be put at the disposal of men as conveniently as possible

    While I see where you’re coming from, and am sympathetic, does this not entail a view of female sexuality as inherently passive, which is itself problematic?

    Moreover, laws which target unquestionably regrettable things may nevertheless do much more harm than good; whether this so in a particular case is an empirical, not ideological matter. Examples of legislation from impeccable motives leading to unequivocal harm abound (alas.)

    I am happier with your metapoint, which is (I think) that the real issue is about asymmetries of power. Age of consent is not necessarily the right point to pick the battle over, and (especially in the context of marriage practices unfamiliar to Western moderns) it’s often been used as a way to dodge the real issues of oppression of women without seeming to take a stand on culture itself.

    Should we get back to the safe, uncontroversial, topic of Zionism?

  63. J.W. Brewer says

    One could quibble with John E.’s timeline but at a high level of generality I would say what happened was the complete overthrow in Western societies (outside of retrograde pockets of religiosity) of the prior rules of sexual morality (often violated in practice and given only hypocritical lip service, of course) and their informal (and often illiberal) enforcement mechanisms, with their replacement with no principle beyond “anything among consenting adults – for some pretty low minimum-age value of adultness – is okey-dokey.” Which was then followed after a period of trial and error by an increasing number of people realizing what you might have thought would be obvious ex ante, namely that left to their own devices many people (especially but not only young people) will consent to all manner of reckless and imprudent things they may subsequently regret, and certain other people will be more than happy to take advantage of their recklessness and imprudence. It is less clear what to do about this, given where we are, and some of the proffered solutions may be worse than the problem.

    It is the classic problem with a certain sort of naive first-step libertarianism, where the dialogue runs something like this: What should I do? Anything you want to do that doesn’t hurt (for a specific and somewhat limited meaning of “hurt”) anyone else. Ok, but then what should I *want* to do? That’s certainly not the government’s business to tell you. Um, okay, but is there anyone else out there I could talk to who might have some practical suggestions about how I might figure out what I should want to do? Umm …

    That said, “we’ve semi-arbitrarily decided that these are the specific reckless and imprudent things we’re going to try to stop you from doing for your own good, even though our means for doing so are crude, and will predictably cause various side effects which are less than completely salutary” isn’t always going to be a whole lot better.

  64. While I see where you’re coming from, and am sympathetic, does this not entail a view of female sexuality as inherently passive, which is itself problematic?

    I understand that point, of course, and back when wimminz were all sex-positive, let-it-all-hang-out (back in JE’s unrestrained 1980-2000) I used to propound it myself. In recent years I’ve been exposed to more and more stories of girls suffering from early sexualization (this is not just a puritanical myth) and women have been more concerned about that and less about having their sexuality repressed, so I’ve gone in that direction. I’m perfectly happy to let women make these decisions (and in fact would be happy to let them run things in general, men having made such a mess of it).

    Age of consent is not necessarily the right point to pick the battle over, and (especially in the context of marriage practices unfamiliar to Western moderns) it’s often been used as a way to dodge the real issues of oppression of women without seeming to take a stand on culture itself.

    This, on the other hand, I consider a bogus issue. God forbid we should seem to think ill of some historically trodden-on culture because they treat women badly! Screw that; the same arguments could be used to justify foot-binding (which, lest we forget, many women were in favor of). If women take power in the Middle East and, without any input from men, cheerfully decide they like wearing head-to-toe veils, being mutilated at an early age, and getting married to men their parents choose at the age of 12 or whatever, fine, more power to them. Until then, I will continue to consider all that part of worldwide patriarchal oppression and despise it; anyone who wants to call me a colonialist on that account is welcome to.

  65. J.W. Brewer says

    One separate point: far be it from me to rain on hat’s Smash the Patriarchy parade, but one of the most obvious consequences in the U.S. of the increased crackdown on statutory rape (and tweaking of laws for “authority figures”) in the last two decades is the constant stream of news stories about adult female schoolteachers facing criminal charges for allegedly having sex with male high school students (sometimes even 18-year-olds depending on the details of state law).

    I think the salaciousness of the genre probably leads to overrepresentation in media coverage, although it may also be the case (perhaps ironically, but what is a legal/political system but an extended study in irony?) that these cases are easier to prosecute because the “victims” are less stigmatized and thus less disincentivized to keep quiet and stay out of the spotlight.

    To David E’s point, it is, I think, a fairly recent development in Western society for the age-of-consent for statutory-rape purposes to have gotten uncoupled (in many jurisdictions) from the minimum age at which one is free to marry. You really have to be a modern Western liberal to think well duh the latter has nothing in particular to do with the former. Which is not to say that the WEIRD view is wrong, only that it is worth considering how bizarre it would have seemed to many people over a wide range of human societies in different times and places.

  66. J.W. Brewer says

    Shorter version of the Emerson thesis on the recent history of Western sexual morality:

    Vanessa Kensington:
    Mr. Powers, my job is to acclimatize you to the nineties. You know, a lot’s changed since 1967.

    Austin Powers:
    No doubt, love, but as long as people are still having promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at the same time experimenting with mind-expanding drugs in a consequence-free environment, I’ll be sound as a pound!

  67. January First-of-May says

    and in fact would be happy to let them run things in general, men having made such a mess of it

    I’ve read too much about what radical feminist societies are (said to) look like to assent to that. There’s probably a fairly low chance that it would actually be anywhere near this bad, but I’m not sure if I’d have been willing to take the risk.

    (You’re better off in that regard because you’re unlikely to still be alive long enough to suffer from it.)

    and getting married to men their parents choose at the age of 12 or whatever

    But what if they decide to make men get married to women their (probably the women’s) parents choose at a similarly young age? Because from what I’ve read it doesn’t sound at all implausible. Unlikely, perhaps, but not implausible.

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    This, on the other hand, I consider a bogus issue.

    I think you are actually agreeing with what I meant, though evidently I expressed it so Delphically that this was not apparent. This has happened before … must practice my English …

  69. John Emerson says

    I seem to get these anecdotal-example in-laws. No wonder my views are twisted. But one 14 year old in-law-to-be did have sex with his teacher, and his family was proud of him.

    Shit, 2 HS girls about my age married their teachers shortly after graduation, and 2 college classmates.

    I’m starting to feel ethnic and exotic, even though my college was an elite coastal school.

  70. The point is, what were these teachers thinking? They took the risk of making someone’s life miserable. Supposing it turned out OK, it’s not because they were exercising superior judgment, but because they were lucky. Most of the stories I have heard of young people having sex with adults (and I have heard far too many of them, from those involved) were bad to some degree.

    I also know of people having driven at twice the speed limit without anyone getting hurt. The people who get away with it like to think that it’s their skills, not luck, that made things go that way. The law should not be on their side, either.

  71. Jen in Edinburgh says

    “I’m not hankering after the vote, believe me,” said Miss Cornelia scornfully. “I know what it is to clean up after the men. But some of these days, when the men realize they’ve got the world into a mess they can’t get it out of, they’ll be glad to give us the vote, and shoulder their troubles over on us. That’s their scheme.”

    😀

    (L.M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams)

  72. The point is, what were these teachers thinking? They took the risk of making someone’s life miserable. Supposing it turned out OK, it’s not because they were exercising superior judgment, but because they were lucky. Most of the stories I have heard of young people having sex with adults (and I have heard far too many of them, from those involved) were bad to some degree.

    I also know of people having driven at twice the speed limit without anyone getting hurt. The people who get away with it like to think that it’s their skills, not luck, that made things go that way. The law should not be on their side, either.

    Thank you. You made my point better than I did.

  73. David Eddyshaw says

    @Jen:

    The tidying up of the mess doesn’t seem to have happened yet, but I attribute this to the handy Marxist concept of False Consciousness: once women voters realise where their real interests lie …

  74. Jen in Edinburgh says

    Oh, I know – I was just amused to see hat echoing Miss Cornelia so exactly.

    Feminism does often seem to be built around the idea that the ultimate aim of a woman should be to be exactly like a man. I do not have enough faith in male infallibility for this.

  75. John Emerson says

    I’m not really an apologist for pedophilia. It’s just that after spending a few years getting used to the anything-goes sexual ethic, which I didn’t participate in or especially like, I watched an amazingly fast and hard switch to anything goes, but only over 18. And suddenly a lot of cultural icons had to be abandoned. Two total transformations of the sexual ethos in maybe 4 decades. And like I said, I have no skeletons in my closet and no dog in the fight.

  76. I for one didn’t think you were defending anything on your part. I too used to take these kind of stories with head-shaking bemusement, but as I heard more and more accounts from people who were exposed to this kind of behavior, it stopped sounding naughty-funny anymore.

  77. John Emerson says

    And as for the 2 HS students and 2 college students (3 actually) who married teachers: “what were these teachers thinking?” What yhey were thinking was that they wanted to marry this student, which they did, and most of and maybe all of the women / girls got set up in careers. BUT: in none of these cases was the anything-goes ethic (which can be harmful at any age) a factor. (The boy who had sex with his teacher was part of an unspecified ethnic population which most would find in many ways bizarre. (Not one that would come to your mind.)

  78. Lars Mathiesen says

    Now that’s another linguistic change, pedophilia. The clinical definition is still sexual attraction to children with no visible development of secondary sexual characteristics (basically under 10 for overvitaminized kids in the West), but popularly it seems to mean trying to have sex with a minor. (On Tuesday they are 17 and you’re a pedophile, on Wednesday they are 18 and can star in your porno. How is your lizard brain supposed to know the difference?) The lollipop-wielding pedophiles we were warned about as little kids in the sixties were after after us, not the high schoolers.

    As shown by the gamut of ages of consent (and the tendency of fashion houses to pick 14 year old walkway and cover models, at least until they got called on it), it’s not controversial that older minors can be sexually attractive to people of “normal” (i.e., majority) sexuality, though acting on the attraction may be illegal in your jurisdiction as well as immoral, even unethical. Epstein would not get a diagnosis of pedophilic disorder, but he still needed to go to jail.

    Side point: You can discuss the exact ages, but I find it reasonable that the local rules here set consent for having sex in private at 15, and publication of sexual imagery (i.a.) at 18. Maybe California should set the latter to 21, I’m sure lots of 18-20 year olds are doing things on film they will regret later.

    (To JE’s point about the attitude to ages in the bad old 80s, I remember jokes about “As one pedophile said to the other …” being shared around the lunch table. They aged about as well as the cannibal ones. My sister still tells about the janitors complimenting her classmate in 5th grade–age 11-12 here–on her legs and breasts).

  79. J.W. Brewer says

    There’s a separate word ephebophilia which means more or less sexual attraction to post-pubescent teens (with visible secondary etc) who may still be under some relevant legal age of consent. Outside of a clinical setting one often tends to see it used by people pointing out that Accused Sex Criminal so-and-so isn’t actually technically a pedophile because the minor he did sexual things to was 14 going on 15, and there is thus of course a risk that if you use the word you may be taken to be attempting to minimize wrongdoing (presumably a Bad Thing) rather than promoting precision (which we ought to think a Good Thing, except of course when imprecision is your tactic for promoting your agenda in which case you need to denigrate anyone trying to clarify your imprecision).

    Stepping back, of course, the problem is exactly that the word with the most accompanying sting has come to be used more broadly than its earlier core sense because of usage by people who were rhetorically trying to make bad-but-less-grievously-so behavior seem just-as-bad. See also the increasing use of “rape” and “rapist” to describe types of sexual assault (and their perpetrators) technically considered by the law to be separate and (often) less serious crimes.

  80. John Emerson says

    Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, this has turned out to be a topic about which civilized discussion is possible, at least here. My informal list of topics on which civilized discussion is almost never possible includes gun control. abortion, Israel/Palestine, gay marriage, and transsexuality. It depends on social context of course, but in my experience these are the ones most likely to lead to Godwin violations.

  81. John Emerson says

    Back to literature: it would be interesting to trace the readings of Nabokov’s Lolita since publication. My memory is that initial outrage was followed by a sort of sophisticated acceptance, and then I lost track but I think that people started avoiding the book. (Nabokov himself called Humbert a disgusting pervert, and maybe his book deliberately wrong-footed klutzy Americans trying to be sophisticated (e.g. Lolita’s mother) by tricking them into an unhealthy tolerance.

  82. Yes, there’s a strong reaction against the book on the part of some fervent progressives who seem unable to distinguish a novel from an op-ed.

  83. Trond Engen says

    One point to the age of marriage/consent: In both good and evil, there ‘s a difference between “universal” and “local”.

    What is considered good or bad from a “universal” point of view may have the opposite effect on individuals in specific societies. What is abusive in a modern western society, with its insulation of childhood and with vastly different access to resources, knowledge and positions in the complex power structures of a large society, may not be in a small society with a simple economy, where young people contribute as equal partners from an early age. Similarly, or maybe on the other end of the scale, in a repressive patriarchal society, where daughters are kept under lock until marriage, early marriage may be attractive for a young girl as the only way to gain (some) power over her own life. None of which means that early marriage or a low age of consent is good, but it’s the repressive social system that makes it a “local” good that needs to be changed.

  84. John Emerson says

    One reason I harp on this topic is that it’s impossible to get through 19th and early 20th c. European literature without dealing with ephebophilia.

    And stalking.

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    What is abusive in a modern western society, with its insulation of childhood and with vastly different access to resources, knowledge and positions in the complex power structures of a large society, may not be in a small society with a simple economy, where young people contribute as equal partners from an early age.

    In Kusaal, there is no simple word meaning “virgin” (though it is naturally perfectly possible to express the concept); what there is instead is a word meaning “girl who has not yet given birth.”

    Traditional Kusaasi society is certainly no more a feminist utopia than our own, though it functions perfectly well, and women are by no means repressed or kept under lock and key before marriage. (Even the polygamy – hardly a feminist desideratum – among the Kusaasi works in a somewhat less anti-female way than you might have thought, as it is comparatively easy and socially acceptable for a woman to ditch an unsatisfactory husband and attach herself to a better one as an additional wife.)

    I must say though, that the Kusaasi prioritisation of what contitutes life-changing significant events in the life of a woman, as revealed in the language, strikes me as saner than ours.

  86. John Emerson says

    The Puritans had 100 words for “virgin”.

  87. David Eddyshaw says

    Naturally: there are fine distinctions to be drawn among the many different types of virginity.

  88. David Eddyshaw says

    And, of course, among the many different degrees of virginity.

  89. jack morava says

    With some trepidation (cf John Emerson above): it seems to me there is a sparse but nontrivial literature about the sexuality of precocious children written later by the children themselves. It is a not so buried theme in a lot of classical scifi, eg Olaf Stapledon (see eg Odd John, cf Leslie Fiedler’s study); more literarily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Radiguet (and the film by Bellochio) comes to mind, Nabokov’s Ada, Cordwainer Smith, Samuel Delaney, perhaps Henry Kuttner… As they say in Private Eye, I think we should be told…

  90. John Emerson says

    Olive oil is EXTRA virgin.

    The BEST olive oil, that is.

  91. Lars Mathiesen says

    Another word note: pubertas to the Romans meant ‘manhood,’ though when they considered that to start I don’t know; I assume sexual maturity was part of it — a random source says 14 in the late republic. (Girls didn’t become adults, they just got married). And when I was of the relevant age, Danish pubertet was used for that narrow span of years when the changes are really fast. For boys your voice would typically have broken slightly before puberty I think, and it would end well before you were fully grown.

    But now puberty, as defined in WP for instance, seems to cover the whole developmental stage from first emergence of secondary sexual characteristics to adulthood — making the term pubescence for the first part of the process redundant. (I was going to peeve that post-pubescent was a strange term and pubertal might be better, but now I don’t even know. Prepubescence, on the other hand, still seems to be defined as the growth spurt in late childhood leading up to feossc. That looks like old Saxon for fish or something. But I have seen it conflated with prepubertal (~ pubescent proper) and with tween).

  92. I can’t say that I noticed big changes concerning age application in everyday usage for German Pubertät over my lifetime – it always referred to the age when young people underwent the physical changes from child to adult and were difficult. If anything, it seems to refer less often to physical changes nowadays and more often to the “being difficult” part of development.

  93. Lars Mathiesen says

    Yes, the eye-rolling and door-slamming years, which has to do both with hormone spikes and with a feeling of knowing enough to not need parental input, those are the defining features of pubertet here as well. I was talking about the English usage which is now markedly different from that, if Wikipedia reflects common usage at least.

  94. @Lars Mathiesen: The OED has only one relevant sense of puberty,* which covers all the changes to the body that presage the coming of adulthood:

    The period of life during which a young person reaches sexual maturity and becomes capable of reproduction; the sequence of structural and functional changes that occur in the body during this period, including the appearance of secondary sexual characteristics (such as pubic, axillary, and (in the male) facial hair) and the onset of the secretion of sex hormones and the production of ova or sperm,

    which seems exactly correct to me. In boys, the voice change is definitely part of English puberty. That this doesn’t really agree with the Latin meaning (or the meaning in other languages that adopted the Latin term, such as Danish) is no surprise; the OED says the etymology is mixed, partially directly from Latin but also partially from French. The earliest citation is from Wycliffite’s Bible, although with many of the cites—early and late—it is not possible to tell exactly what physical changes the author conceived of as part of puberty

    * There is another (obsolete) sense specific to plants.

  95. Lars Mathiesen says

    RIght. And that is probably from the 189* OED, so it hasn’t changed much in English. I was pretty sure I’d seen pubescence and puberty contrasted in English-language sources, but that may have been an author’s idiosyncracy or my misunderstanding.

  96. @Lars Mathiesen: On pubescence (like puberty, probably a mixture of borrowing from French and directly from Latin into Middle English), the OED has:

    Puberty; the fact or condition of arriving or having arrived at puberty.

    One of the cites is another 1780 dictionary definition:

    the state of arriving at puberty,

    and there are other cites that suggest that pubescence is being taken to mean the beginning (however broadly or narrowly construed) of puberty. On the other hand, the OED also cites Lolita, and Nobokov clearly means the word to cover a more extended period of puberty:

    The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence.

  97. David Eddyshaw says

    I tracked down a copy of The Poems of Taliesin, which is a translation of Ifor Williams’ Canu Taliesin.
    I had hoped that this might have something to say about the antiquity of the legend of the miraculous origin of Taliesin, though the actual purpose of the work is to present the twelve poems held (very plausibly) by Williams to be the work of the real historical sixth-century poet.

    However, these form a relatively small part of the Llyfr Taliesin, much more of which is concerned with the legendary Taliesin and poems attributed to him; and these do at least show that the legend was well established by the thirteenth century.

    There are also quite a few interspersed religious and scriptural poems, regarding which Williams says

    it is practically certain that it [the Book of Taliesin] was written by a monk, and no one would know better than he that his volume contained rather too much pagan sorcery and too little sound Christian doctrine … if our scribe inserted some religious and biblical poems in the midst of the secular and pagan material to salve his conscience for wasting precious time and vellum, he was not the first of his kind to do so.

    Incidentally, the introduction talks about “Taliesin’s floruit” a lot. So there.

    [I also discover that Ceridwen is supposed to have got her esoteric knowledge from studying the works of Virgil. This makes sense if you’re mediaeval.]

  98. SFReader says

    From what I’ve read, Epstein basically run a very large prostitution ring which offered his rich and influential acquiantances sex for favours (or for later use as blackmail material).

    And he recruited literally hundreds of minors into prostitution.

    I pretty sure such behavior was criminal in every decade of American history (or for that matter in every country in the world).

    Don’t really understand how his conviction got tied with the age of consent issue – it really has very little to do with the case.

  99. John Emerson says

    With Gaetz the issue is whether one individual female was 18 by a few months. Much hinges on this, and it’s all age of consent.

    Prostitution is essentially tolerated in much of the US by now, whatever the law.

    Some of the insanity of American politics / culture can be seen in the fact that a delusional QAnon sex scandal dominates American politics right now, while the real, bipartisan. high society Epstein sex scandal is being forgotten.

    And also: Trump could legitimately brag about his role in vaccine development, but his worshippers refuse the vaccine.

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