Who do women sleep with?

Wikipedia reports Tristane Banon is the god-daughter of Strauss-Kahn's second wife. Sheesh. Curiouser and curiouser, but then, her mother, Anne Mansouret, is only a minor  contender for the Socialist nod to run for the French presidency, and politics makes strange bedfellows. (Wiki Commons photo of Banon in 2001)

My late stepfather was a wise man. He often told other men, when they were wondering whether to agree with their wives/SOs on household matters, "Give in. You will eventually." I liked that.

What I liked even better was Ed's contention that, "Men sleep with whomever they can; women sleep with whomever they want."

He was not speaking of forcible rape, with bruises and contusions both inside and out. He was speaking of the usual run of male/female relations. And he was right. A man will try it out as often as possible with a desirable woman on the off chance she will say yes. All a woman has to do, in essence, is say yes or no. A man may persist; a woman may persist. Must persist, in fact, if she expects to control her own destiny. Except in the case of forcible rape, the woman wins. Always.

If the woman says no, she has made the decision. No problem.

If the woman says yes, she has made the decision. No problem. Well, almost no problem. What if, later on, the woman is mad at herself for accommodating a particular man? Might she not then blame him for imposing his will upon her, as a coward's way to refuse to recognize her own culpability for failing to be discerning? I have in mind various cases of celebrity men taking advantage of offers by hotel maids and the like and the maids later regretting their loose behavior and falsely accusing the men of rape.

If the woman says maybe--recall, the "tease" has been with us as long as men and women figured out what to do with each other in the privacy of their caves--then there's a problem. The modern knee-jerk feminist will say that the man SHOULD have known she really meant no despite the flirting and provocative clothing.

Knee-jerk feminism
The modern knee-jerk feminist will say that women don't act like teases anymore. (Really? Consider what all the skanky clothing on females from 8 to 80 signifies. It advertises the goods, leaving the price thereof open to male interpretation. Men might well be excused for thinking little clothing means a little price for the goods barely contained therein.)

And now comes the case of Tristane Banon, 22 years old when she claims--eight years later--that Dominique Strauss-Kahn attempted sexual contact with her when she interviewed him, alone, in an apartment. She didn't complain to the police then; her mama, Anne Mansouret, told her not to and she obeyed. Mansouret was a Socialist Party functionary at the time, and Strauss-Kahn was a more important Socialist. As he still is. Only now, apparently, Mansouret would like him out of the way so she can run for the French presidency.

What to do, what to do? Ah. Remember the heavy flirting business the kid raised all those years ago? Trot that out and see if it flies. After all, Strauss-Kahn is on the ropes--right?--because of some sexual exploits in New York.

Except that the New York woman doth protest too much. She protesteth so much--attempting to convince people with brains and five senses that a 60+ man could force a 30-something woman to clean his magic wand--that finally someone got a whiff of something smelly.

Ripe for the plucking
I think the Banon thing is just a bit too ripe, too. Eight years too ripe, if indeed it would ever have borne fruit at all. Let's see: sweet young thing goes to apartment to interview powerful older man. She complains to her mother that he attempted--what?--with her. Eight years later, she doubtless recalls every detail perfectly; anyone would. (OK. Tongue firmly in cheek.)

Eight years after the fact, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Banon has decided to press forward with bringing a case in French courts contending that, "Dominique Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her during a book interview" and so she is filing a complaint "in order to clear her own name of suspicion that she had fabricated the accusation."

If the shoe fits....Tristane, darling, no one had ever heard of Strauss-Kahn putting the moves on you back then. So you really didn't have any name to clear, until YOU brought it up. And why would you need to clear your name, if Strauss-Kahn is supposed to be the culprit?

Indeed, no one had ever heard of Tristane Banon before she decided to recall, in stunning detail after eight years, a pseudo-attack on her by a man more than twice her age at the time. What is it with these young women? Did they spend too much time in front of the TV, so much that doddering old fools can pin them to the carpet and fondle at will because they are too weak to fend them off? I mean, how embarrassing. If I were 22 years old and couldn't find some way to shift a geezer older than my father--if indeed I had stupidly allowed a ludicrous flirtation to get to that point--I think I'd just pack it in.

Serial whiners
Or maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the ethical basis of all womanhood has descended to the level of the serial whiner or paid shill. Maybe the filing of completely insane charges against Julian Assange by the two CIA hired guns in Sweden has set a new low precedent for trumped-up innuendo. Even MSNBC once referred to Assange as an unlikely babe magnet. No kidding.

On the other hand, fame and fortune seem to be the major draw for women involved in trafficking in sexual innuendo these days. Nothing to do with pecs, abs, great hair or a large salami at all.

Banon said she had waited eight years before filing her complaint because "it's very difficult for any woman in this situation ... and it's even more difficult when you know in advance that it's doomed to failure," according to the Atlanta paper, cited above.


Strauss-Kahn will likely be free sooner than later
Let us pray. Let us pray that all this female-perpetrated sleaze is doomed to failure. The latest word from New York is that all charges against Strauss-Kahn will be dropped no later than July 18. Then he's free to head home to France, and see his name bandied about once again for something sex-related.

With an EU passport, though, he need not actually go back to France, even if the US shows him the door. Any EU country will have to take him. And that, in essence, may be what Mansouret is after. If Strauss-Kahn is parked elsewhere, for reasonable fear of having to go through the New York exercise all over again in France, the way is clear or Mansouret to climb over whatever bodies are in her way, including that of her own daughter, apparently a serial shill for her mother's ambition.

I can't make this stuff up; it's not fiction; just read the news and read between the lines.

Aside from wondering where politicians draw the line regarding stretching the truth for their own purposes, I have also concluded three other things out of all of this. They are that:

• America has exported its insane Puritan viewpoints of sexuality to once-reasonable France, and locals there are now acting as nuts as the entire US population, almost, did when Bill Clinton engaged in a extra-marital adult relationship and was pilloried for it by the paid-in-full efforts of Linda Tripp.
• America has exported its penchant for turnip-minded female politicians to France. That's probably OK; the French like root vegetables. They also like organ meats...but I won't go there.
• Women have forgotten who has the upper hand in ALL sexual matters except forcible rape: Women.

To repeat: Men sleep with whomever they can; women sleep with whomever they want. Teach it to your daughters, and keep it in mind when these anti-feminist greedsters crawl out of their holes and try to pervert men's ordinary conduct into something more. 

Dinner with Frank Lloyd Wright

Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house now on the National Register of Historic Places. (Wiki Commons)

One of the things missing in England is Frank Lloyd Wright. There is an installation of a room he designed, an office, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but I’ll need a lot more reasons for a London trip than viewing a single room, even if it was by Frank Lloyd Wright. London, contrary to popular belief, is not close to every other place in England. First, there are the miles and miles of two-lane roads with little motorway involvement. Second, Cornwall is about 200 miles from London. Plus one has to pay 12 pounds a day to the government to take one’s car into the city itself…But I digress.

I have always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs because they are so perfect not only architecturally, but in their underlying ethos. Wright’s Usonian house idea always intrigued me; these were marvelous houses meant for the middle class, and not the filthy rich. There are only about sixty of them standing today, but one was in the Baltimore neighborhood where I lived for six years. You can see it here.

There were also, nearby, the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses, modern cubes with oddly attached roofs and stacks of glass bricks here and there on the façade, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. (I use the term façade with my tongue firmly in my cheek; to Baltimoreans, the word is fakade. I swear.) I didn’t name them Frank Lloyd Wrong houses. My late good friend the Rev. Jeffrey Proctor called them that after he moved to Baltimore; he, too, was fond of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had a lovely sense of humor.

However, this is about neither the Frank Lloyd Wright house in my larger  environment all that time, nor the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses I had to drive to get to Starbucks.

It is about elitism, and how bone-deep it seemingly is in the American moneyed class. The Old Money class, that is.

It was probably more than 30 years ago that I first became friends with a couple who lived in a swell house on Manhattan’s East Side. It was filled with museum-quality furniture and paintings. After I moved away from NYC, when I was their weekend guest, I awoke to a Courbet hung above the dresser in the room I was assigned. It certainly was fun, too, to be served the de rigueur East Side watercress soup followed by a chicken wing and a mushroom cap at the elegant dinner parties the couple hosted, parties where one might easily meet Nepalese princes and princesses, among other people born to the ermine. (At West Side parties, one actually got fed real, life-sustaining food, although those soirees lacked the monkey-suited serving guys one would encounter on the East Side.)

Still, I quite enjoyed going on the New York Garden Club tours each spring as a guest of my friend’s mother. I got to see Zubin Mehta’s house and garden one year. On those days, we always had lunch at the Summerhouse, a very preppy spot on the upper East Side.

Once, my friend and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be, as she ALWAYS put it, “culture vultures.”  I was keen to see the new installation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francis W. Little House II Living Room.  “I can’t stand that stuff,” my friend intoned. “If you want to see it, I’ll just go and wait for you outside.”

I did want to see it, and I did see it. No accounting for taste, I thought, and thought nothing of it.

But now, on reflection, and coupled with a later incident, I have decided her distaste was not aesthetic, at least not totally, but cultural/class-based as well.

The other incident?  While disagreeing with my political views, my friend’s husband told me I was childish and used the term “you people” to denigrate my opinion. I ended the friendship over that, and not before time, I think.  

I suspect I was the house oddity for the couple, the unaccountably well-raised member of the middle-class, decently educated, slightly traveled, and with a knowledge of which fork to use. But I didn’t fit intrinsically into their world, just as Frank Lloyd Wright, with his ideas of a decent bit of ground and some lovely furnishings for all, didn’t fit. (NOTE: Wright wasn’t a universal egalitarian. His ideas descended only down through the middle-class, but that was better than most architects of his day, who thought only about the wealthy and their needs).

Regarding its Wright room, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the house from which it came “is composed of a group of low pavilions interspersed with gardens and terraces, which, in plan, radiate from a central symbolic hearth.” Wright took into account the architectural/cultural lexicon of a few thousand years, making the ancient concept of the cultural heart/hearth move onward through the Roman vernacular of rooms for specific uses, to the thoroughly modern concept that a home should be an organic whole.

That is not so, of course, in the homes of America’s upper classes. They are not now, and never were, organic wholes. There would have to be separations so that servants would not forget their place, so that mere tradesmen should be forced to use a rear entrance, while invited gentry used the front. (Visiting the house of George Bernard Shaw last weekend, I learned that he refused to use the servant bells in his house; he both believed and lived his socialist ideals, in direct contravention of British upper crust mores, which the American upper crust was aping.)

Upper crust houses have not historically featured flowing spaces, meant to put residents and guests at ease as in a Wright house. Rather, the upper crust manse will feature defined and delimited areas, entry to which denotes one’s position in the hierarchy of the family or in society at large. Admission to the kitchen meant one was a servant; houseguests, of course, could also enter to get a glass of milk before bed and so on, being temporary “family.”

Usonian houses did have separate dining rooms, or at the very least, dining areas. And the kitchen itself conformed to the upper class ideal; it was place where the work of cooking and cleaning up was done, and was not appropriate for guests. Not because kitchen work is inferior and should be reserved only for servants, but because dinner guests are to be pampered and honored in return for the conversation and liveliness the contribute to the occasion. Although he was an egalitarian, Wright drew the line at imposing a host’s tasks on guests--a line I do retain in common with my ex-friend--and kept the kitchen where it belongs, as a separate room.

Unlike my friend, I could easily live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, should I ever be fortunate enough for the gods of civilization to bestow one upon me. And everyone, from the man cleaning the gutters to Prince Charles, would be invited in the front door and given some refreshment on the good china.* Indeed, it has never once occurred to me to treat tradesmen/women any differently than I would treat Prince Charles. As my mother used often to say, they all put their knickers on one leg at a time. (Actually, she said, “What, they pee perfume?”  We got the message.)

Her message was that it doesn’t matter who you are, but what you are matters very much. Who you are is denoted by whether you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,  a mansion on Manhattan’s East Side, a Frank Lloyd Wrong house, my house, or a tent. Or your car, these days. One’s estate is not what one is; it merely represents one’s current state of finance, something that changes over time for everyone. Everyone. Even my fine friends had to sell some paintings to afford schools for their kids, darn fine schools, but still….And in the end, when they couldn’t afford the inheritance taxes on that fine East Side pile of bricks, they had to rent it out and move to the hinterlands.

But you know what? They are doubtless still referring to those they perceive to be of lesser estate as “you people.” The great unwashed. Yup. The rest of us.  I’m one of “you people,” and proud of it.

But I still wouldn’t mind if the gods of bricks and mortar dropped a bona fide Frank Lloyd Wright house in my back garden.

* Ludicrous thought, as is “good silver.” If you and your family aren’t good enough for the good china, who is? Reverse snobbery…against yourself. If you don’t regularly use the silver, you’ll have to polish it by the time you get it out of the drawer. Far better to regularly use your “stuff” I think.

A thank you note to Father Andrew M. Greeley

Carraroe, Ireland, home of Andrew Greeley's fictional character, Nuala Ann McGrail (Wiki Commons)

A couple of years ago, Father Andrew M. Greeley, getting out of a cab in Chicago, got some of his clothing caught and was dragged. He suffered a fractured skull which, since he was over 80 at the time, was hardly likely to be a good thing. It finished his book-writing career, but not his career as a priest. He still writes weekly homilies, which appear on his website.

I am not a Roman Catholic. I am a sometimes-kinda-sorta Episcopalian (Church of England) with Druid tendencies and New Thought understanding of how it all works; in addition, I operate via existential behaviors. So it is odd that Father Andrew M. Greeley is, for me, the revealer of infinite wisdom, as he has been since I read a column he wrote about Star Wars, long ago and far away―to be precise, in my apartment in a New York City high rise, 17^th floor. The column, syndicated at the time, appeared in the New York Post, a rag I rarely read. At that moment, at the zenith of my unbelief in much of anything, Greeley captured me heart and soul with his insightful comments on that iconic movie, which was eliciting outrage from a great many clerics at the time. It has been a good, long time that I have been an avid fan of the writing of Father Andrew M. Greeley.

It is with the utmost sadness and distress that I admitted to myself this morning that the creator of stories I have loved so well for so long shall not, though he yet lives, offer me any more spirit-lifting, mind-engaging parables of the modern age and its relation to the numinous. His website has said so for months, but I refused to understand. Selfishly, I wanted more.  Except for his accident two years ago, we’d have had another mystery novel from his pen by now, and I’d have eaten it whole, relished every word, every nuance of his lovable characters developed over the past 30 years or more.

No more Nuala Ann McGrail

I realized, finally, that there will be no more Nuala Ann McGrail mysteries, populated by the world-famous but self-effacing (while being altogether fierce) singer from Carraroe, County Galway and her husband and several children, one of them fey like Nuala Ann, and the wonderful wolfhounds, going now into the second and third generations from the original pair of savior dogs.

No more Mike Casey the Cop showing up in the Nuala books and in the luminous works about the tiny fresh-faced bishop in a Chicago Cubs jacket, the Rt. Rev. John Blackwood Ryan (“Call me Blackie”) and his just-retired boss, Sean Cardinal Cronin, who also starred in an early series by Greeley about the problems inherent in celibacy, and in human relationships in general. 

No more one-offs, like the ultimate entry in modern mainstream fiction, Lord of the Dance.

And so, finally, I grieve, and feel compelled to acknowledge the gift while Greeley yet lives.

Moving house

I grieve, in the middle of my angst about finally getting to move into the house we bought in October, finally financed in December after we had danced to the unfortunate tune of an incompetent mortgage broker for six weeks, and which has been delayed by acts of God―snow and the vagaries of lawyers and builders―since then. It looks now as if my original extended estimate―Feb. 10―will be about right. We shall thus be denied a trip to London on the 9^th to meet with Simon’s boss, the lovely man who made it possible for him to move and work here while the company remains in the U.S. We shall endure an extra week in the interim rented house, where light bulbs burning out cause major power shorts (the owners need to have that looked at!) and frighten the dog into hour-long shaking fits. The event doesn’t do much for me, either.

Father Greeley’s homily concluded with the phrase “we should never let the important interfere with the essential.”

Indeed. And so I suddenly got happier, as I began to ruminate on the fact that the to-do list often overwhelms the must-attend list. The house? It’s a to-do list thing.

The scourge of the to-do list

The to-do list, I realized (as so many others have before me, and will after) that the to-do list is how we become human doings rather than human beings. It is how parents become so convinced that their children have to do well that they forget to allow them to be well, to help them to be well.

It is how marriages become hollow, targeted only on acquiring houses, boats, cars, and trips, and not on cherishing the other person and the relationship itself.

It is how careers become things such as those execrable excuses for meaningful work carried out, and finally exposed, on Wall Street..the faux work of the tycoons and tycoon wannabes; their 'work' did not express stewardship for the world and its people. Not at all, at all.

Working the do-do list is how actors become idols rather than artists, how artists become caricatures instead of the bearers of cultural understanding.

The to-do list is how cultures become the sham found in most nations these days. Not just western ones; it’s too easy to point fingers at America.. Islam is just as much at fault for putting the to-do list first:

Item One; Make westerners accept Islam, regardless.

Item Two: Repel all incursions into Islam of thought from other cultures.

Etc.

Consider how different the world would look if it followed a must-attend list rather than checking off its to-do list. Would there have ever been a 9/11? Probably not. Regardless of who did it (and I am mainly persuaded it was an inside job), it wouldn’t have been carried out because the event fails, in every possible way, to attend to the welfare of anyone. It cannot actually even attend to the welfare of whoever did it and thought to profit from it in some way. There can be no profit in destruction. If there could, then the eternal quest would be not for order, but for chaos.

Appearances abound; truth, not so much

There may be a temporary appearance of profit in harmful deeds, from 9/11 to the BP blowout in the Gulf to trashing a co-worker whose job one covets…but appearances are allied with the to-do list. “What a success he is!” we may say. “Look at all he has done.” We do not say, “Look at all that he is.” Or even “Look at all he isn’t.” We don’t look at all at human beings; we simply look at human doings, and judge accordingly. Thankfully, even this semi-atheist is familiar with the phrase “Justice is mine, saith the Lord.”

And so it is. No human can mete out ultimate justice. The universe will do it in its own time, I say. (Others would say God does it.)

Meanwhile, our task―as human beings―is to attend to those things we must do: 

• Care for others, not just about them.
• Do valuable work, whether or not for a paycheck.
• Balance our to-do list (it is, after all, necessary to vacuum the hallway sooner or later) with listening to the music of the universe, and gleaning what it can say about contributing what we can.

The judgment of the universe will be, I think, that Andrew M. Greeley is a brilliant teacher, whether he teaches through novels or homilies, through abundant life energy or in the less active moments of his current life.

And for that, and countless hours enjoying the universes he has created and mulling the spiritual food he offers so entertainingly, I thank him.

***

Dear Father Greeley,

I realize you have worked both lists for decades, and it is time for your must-attend list to be mainly about your own relationship to the numinous. And I thank you for all you have done for me for so long. But you must know: When I’ve finished my daily to-do list from here on, knowing I will lack a fresh Blackie Ryan or Nuala Ann book to please me, I will grieve. But I will also continue to thank you, and to commend your work to anyone I feel needs both a laugh and some spiritual instruction. You are a true mensch. I adore you. I wish you well.

Love,

Laura

Gods of New York: Ed Koch, Moonstruck and yellow snow of a different kind

Cher's neighborhood in Moonstruck...and mine for a year or so in the 1980s.

New York City is where my heart lives.

It’s true.

I was born there, lived there for many years of my youth and again, even longer, as an adult.

I loathe the NY mayors one is supposed to loathe, chief among those Abraham Beame and David Dinkins. I love those one is supposed to love, chief among those Edward I. Koch, but also including Rudy Giuliani.

I know. Giuliani has recently been tarred with a lot of brushes, and possibly his feet are more certainly of clay than many others’ feet. Still, after he became mayor, the city became liveable once again. So, for that―no matter what else emerges that tarnishes his glow among New York’s mayoral glitterati―I will continue to love him.

But my true hero is Ed Koch. Koch served for 12 years, virtually all of the time I lived in NYC consecutively, having moved back to the city during the preceding Abe Beame administration (I shudder to think) and remaining until the minus-4 temperatures and tornadic winds blowing through Manhattan’s canyons one Christmas Eve convinced me to seek sub-tropical temperatures in Florida. But then, we’re all entitled to the occasional mistake.

Anyway, Ed Koch―bless his little soot-and-Nedicks heart―used to stand at the subway steps at 86^th Street and Lexington Avenue when I first moved to the Yorkville neighborhood, saying good morning to people scurrying down that hole in the ground in the darkness of the Nixon ban on daylight savings time.

I was using the subway to get from Yorkville to my first real publishing job, as an editor for Prentice Hall business newsletters. Unaccountably, the offices were in Midtown, on Fifth Avenue at 54^th Street, almost across from St. Thomas (Episcopal) Church, which shortly became my lunchtime refuge as I realized the managing editor I worked for was N-U-T-S. I lasted a mere six months in that asylum before quitting to freelance, an enterprise that could only be undertaken because my husband had a job reverse commuting to the Stamford, CT. daily newspaper.  This meant that one or the other of us spent a minimum of one hour a day cruising the streets near our apartment to find parking for the car. We couldn’t afford a garage, and needless to say, on-street, legal parking spaces in NYC are always at a premium.

I wish I had had some more seasoning as a writer back then. If I had, I might have written a novel like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, a fictional account of parking in Manhattan by Calvin Trillin.

Or maybe I’d have written it later, when I was living in Carroll Gardens, the area of Brooklyn made semi-famous in the Cher vehicle, Moonstruck. The year I lived there, in a converted munitions factory at 505 Court Street that had the grandest 3-BR apartments with views of NY harbor you can imagine, it snowed almost as much as the blizzard of 2010. It took weeks and weeks for all the snow to melt and all the cars to be freed from their ice sculptures.

One car, very close to the corner on one of the blocks where we took the dogs to poop, had a 3-inch stack of parking tickets on it, as it hadn’t moved since right before the snow, and alternate-side parking was in effect.

When the snow did finally melt, the car began to drip. Not water; the snow was GONE.

It was dripping bodily fluids from the “missing wife” of a minor mafioso and her boyfriend found in the trunk with one bullet each in their brains.

As I said, it was the neighborhood made famous in Moonstruck.

As for me, I was glad we had found cheap, safe, permanent parking under the el a few weeks before the snowstorm so we hadn't had to do the New York parking mambo. Indeed, since we had joined the parking aristocracy, it was a wonder we even noted the stack of tickets on someone else's car. No longer our worry!

It was lucky, too, that my dogs were both Type A and very goal-oriented, basically only interested in smelling other dogs’ peepee, and not any other sort of light yellow liquids they noticed on the street. But I’ve always wondered whether we might have brought some human genetic material into the apartment on our shoes, or on eight furry paws. We always crossed right about there….

But it doesn’t bear thinking about. Not when I have all of NYC left to worship, and might travel down this holy path again soon.