So I got a private message on Facebook earlier today, from someone who's friends with a friend of mine and recognized my real name.

The message said

How many people in the world can say that they saw two beautiful women crack an egg into your underwear, then coat you with honey and feathers at a gathering called [the name of the gathering]?

I won't tell [our mutual friend], I promise. I was part of the [group from the place he's from].

I'm actually not particularly worried.

• First because it was honey and feathers and not tar and feathers. :-)
• Second because I'm pretty sure our mutual friend, who's not of our generation, would be more amused than aghast.
• Third because I can honestly say it was for a good cause (a fundraiser.)
• And finally because it happened in 1974 or 1975 so I could always use a "youthful folly" excuse. Even though I probably wouldn't.

But it does serve as a nice reminder that just because the internet makes digging up the past easier it doesn't mean the internet was ever required to dig up the past.

If anything the sheer volume of past digging-up on the internet today serves to inoculate us by demonstrating that, in fact, "scandalous" sexual behavior might not be universal but it's certainly common enough that there's actually nothing very scandalous about it.

That said, I'm glad there weren't digital cameras back then. :-)

Back then I was already six foot three but only weighed 125 pounds. Plus I had terrible acne! Both of which are fine in retrospect even though I felt self-conscious about it at the time.

What's worrying, though, is that while I think they might have dressed me in a nice pair of women's bikini underwear first they might instead have dressed me in whitie-tightie boxers and I don't think I could handle that kind of shame. :-)

UpdateIf there had been photos I'd have had to title this post "Lefty Loosie in Whitie Tighties."

In an (appropriate, all things considered) bit of meta-meta reflections on the media’s treatment of former Wall St. prosecuting Eliot Spitzer, Digby of Hullabaloo says of ongoing twit-vs-substance questions about his presumably-former employment of expensive sex workers…

...it’s disgusting that Spitzer “has to” answer questions about his sex life at this point. They didn’t file any charges, he’s resigned from office and I don’t htink think the public really gives a damn. Certainly, they could acknowledge the scandal and then move on rather than insisting on grilling him about the details. It is gratuitous and embarrassing to everyone watching as well as the man himself. But it is typical juvenile media behavior, replete with the usual nauseating spectacle of middle aged men giggling over some other man’s sexual foibles. Ugh.

Eliot Spitzer is an expert on the financial crisis and he shouldn’t have to subject himself to the media’s puerile curiosity in order to share that expertise with the public. In a sane world, he would be working in an official capacity to straighten out this mess, but because he had unsanctioned sex he is now relegated to the sidelines —- mostly because the press can’t seem to stop acting like a bunch of Jonas Brothers fangirls whenever a story makes them feel funny down there.

She said it here.

Incidentally one needn’t be anti-prostitution to feel white-lipped fury about Spitzer’s peccadilloes. Whatever one feels about hiring sex workers I don’t see how it would be possible to respect anyone who a) zealously prosecuted in public precisely the kind of sex workers he b) zealously employed privately.

So. Having neutralized the knee-squeezy question we can turn to Digby’s point that, sexual peccadilloes/hypocrisy notwithstanding, Spitzer is unquestionably qualified to be a big, fat, capable, and most importantly feared stick to match any carrots offered to Wall Street titans as incentive for them helping us out of the financial mess they’ve gotten us into.

It also raises a (hypothetical but illuminating) question… sort of a reverse of the Appeal to Celebrity fallacy: would you be willing to see economic collapse if the only person who could prevent the collapse had frequented sex-workers? (Or, if you prefer, had prosecuted sex-workers and/or maybe just frequented and prosecuted them?)

In a piece subtitled “Why does it take a cliché to draw attention to the problem of fathers’ rights?” Dahlia Lithwick of Slate makes the vivid point that our fondness for the stereotype of the dramatically aggrieved ex-husband seeking greater custody of his children interferes with reforms of divorce and custody proceedings that really ought to be, and maybe need to be, taken up.

I recognize the allure for some men of the man-pushed-till-he-snaps narrative. My husband rents those movies, too. But for every Clark Rockefeller and Darren Mack, there are dozens of nonviolent fathers who believe that the mere fact of their divorce should not result in an arrangement in which they pay for the right to see their kids on alternating Sundays. If the family-court system is ever going to improve, we need to hear their stories, not these endless tales of kidnappings and murder. Much of what’s wrong with family law today lies in warmed-over stereotypes of men as fundamentally unsuited to caring for children. Lionizing Clark Rockefeller or other violent, lawless fathers will not promote fathers’ rights or fix the family-court system. It merely perpetuates the same outdated ideas about fatherhood and fathers that have tainted the family-law system for too long.

The rest of the article is pretty cool. You’ll find it here.

That seems about right. Of course I’m a father and I have a hard time with poorly examined stereotypes so of course I’d encourage that sort of destigmatization, where the Alex Baldwins, and Clark Rockerfellers become non-poster-boy icons of divorced fatherhood in favor of, you know, the more representative, um, majority.

But the general point seems pretty important for so-called “sex bloggers,” who — I’m pretty confident an assessment of court records would show — differ from non-bloggers only to the extent that they publish rather than don’t publish their experiences and opinions.

And yet thanks to current case law, in need of reexamination or not, bloggers in general and “sex bloggers” in particular are extraordinarily at risk of what I’d like to (arrogantly) deem the Figleaf Principle: twitting about sex obstructs discussion of substantive issues.

This can play two ways, by the way. First, upon discovery a judge officiating a custody hearing may be much more inclined to act on a motion that includes salacious allegations of sex clubs or bisexuality than on one that includes allegations of more substantive issues such as means of support or management of substance dependencies. And second, alarm over salacious allegations may distract supporters from what may be more seriously substantive ones.

Both concerns, I might add, are justified. An “otherwise” blameless divorced mom who supplements her income by anonymously reviewing sex toys in the privacy of her own home should not be at risk of losing custody. A couple involved in BDSM should not be able to wave their floggers or rope burns at each other in court. And a judge should not be swayed by the “scandalous” nature of a custodial parent’s sexuality, especially if said sexuality in no way infringes on his or her parenting. But on the other hand we shouldn’t let acceptance of a good party organizer enable his or her drinking problem. Nor should we let our admiration for this or that leather master enable his or her tendency to abuse the owl-shit out of acolytes.

Ok, so while making dinner (made-from-scratch tuna-style casserole with chicken, rice, red bell peppers, mushroom, onions, and a cheddar cream sauce**) this memory came up unbidden about a column David Broder, so-called dean of the mainstream media, wrote sometime after the 1988 Democratic National convention. It was about political affairs and their consequences and… and… I’m idly curious whether the particular affair Broder alluded to might explain… well… a ton of stuff that’s still reverberating now.

See. What Broder said then was that right after the convention a very intelligent, charismatic, and ambitious young politician approached him and asked if he though news of a maybe-sort-of-like-Gary-Hart, long-ago affair would be enough to kill his aspirations for higher office. Broder opined that he’d told the politician that in his, well, opinion that if the dalliance was truely in the past, and that the politician was truely remorseful, then no, it surely wouldn’t be a problem.

And, coming from Broder — for some reason hugely influential in the social life of D.C. journalism — that was something like a guarantee it wouldn’t be an issue.

Fast forward four years to the (Bill) Clinton. For various reasons the press was never all that crazy about Bill, and even less so about Hillary — reasons that… sorry… just didn’t make that much sense from most outsider’s perspective… reasons that just seemed to go beyond the usual kind of partisanship.

And then along came revelations about Bill’s liason with Monica Lewinski and it just seemed like the press went dead south on him, again way beyond what either partisanship or even public opinion called for. (Certainly not public opinion — he remained pretty steadily popular, and even won reelection through all that.)

But anyway, as I popped the oven door open to slip in the casserole, and as convection from inside riffled my eyebrows and forehead, the thought popped into my head “Broder was pissed because he’d told Clinton it would be ok as long as he didn’t have another affair!”

So. I dunno. The mainstream press has tended to waive off so many sex scandals over the years with a resignation here, and no resignation there, and but sort of “no hard feelings.” And until the Spitzer resignation I would have said it was more because for whatever the mainstream media just goes easier on Republicans (maybe because it didn’t seem like news to them, maybe because their bosses tell them to keep a lid on it.) But all things considered I think they went kind of easy on Spitzer as well, with him going far harder on himself than anything we knew about in public. (After all Senator Vitters is still sitting pretty in his diaper-fetish seat.)

So no, I think with Broder and, by extension, the rest of “the village”, took Clinton’s infidelity not as a social transgression but as a personal affront: failing to respect a senior MSM pundit’s gracious waiver of “youthful indiscretion.”

Anyway, even back in the 1980s I figured the politician Broder must have had in mind was Clinton because, still as Governor of Arkansas, he’d delivered a (very long-winded) keynote address (or was it the nominating speech?) at the ’88 Democratic convention. And sure enough just four years later he was the one being sworn into office.

Anybody else remember that column? Anybody else have even a slightly firmer grasp on the chain of events? I’m not making anything even like a conspiracy theory out of this — just wondering if the fairly straight-forward connection I drew has any foundation or plausibility at all. Ring any bells?

[** Anyone else still doing recipe Tuesdays? —fl]