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Wolff obviously sees the world the same way Dowd does --- the way they all do. Even the Village elder of Village elders, David Broder, is obsessed with the sexual lives of politicians in a way that is more than a little bit odd. (But then, that's the way provincial villages operate, isn't it?)
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A personal anecdote: When I was 15, I had my first experience with real love while in Germany for the summer. As you know, my family lives in a little town in the foothills between Alsace-Lorraine and the Black Forest. The niece of one of my mother's oldest friends had me enthralled, smitten. Needless to say, word of our attraction spread like wildfire though the small town of 1500. To this day (30 years later), people still talk about it and people will still bring the relationship up to me whenever I visit. Suffice it to say it was passionate and we were always looking for places to be ... intimate, away from the watchful eyes of adults. The small town obsession comes from the amount of times, and places, we were caught.
At this point in our lives, hers and mine, our relationship is just a fond memory (I have a wonderful life and love no one more than my wife; she married a great, successful guy and they have 3 beautiful kids - thankfully they take after their mother), but I'm sure, just as I do, she gets reminded every time I'm in town and people always tell her "we always thought you and he would get married". It will probably be that way until our parents' generation is all gone.
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But Wolff doesn't stop with just speculating about the politicans' sex lives. He makes the assumption that voters are as obsessed with politicians' sex lives and speculates that their own sexual "deficiencies" are dictating their presidential preferences:The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.
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Personally, I hope Hillary and Bill worked out whatever problems they had and they're humping like rabbits. Though I think the only ones who care are the 'provincials' like Wolff. Do you care if or who Hil is fucking? I don't, as long as it doesn't embarrass the nation and, after Bush, that bar is set pretty high.
I don't know, but the priorities to me are her statement that she'll start bringing our troops home within 60 days of her election. The fact she promised to rein in the oil companies and end their gouging of the American people. The fact she does have some economic cred (you can't spend 8 years in the White House and not have some of it rub off) and might be able to stop this tailspin the Chimp nosed us into. Her sexuality, or lack thereof, is way down on the list.
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Why Wolff thinks his immature, locker room talk represents anything meaningful is beyond me, but the fact that he writes it in a national magazine, apparently never realizing the multiple levels of insult at a large swathe of American voters is baffling. Perhaps an even greater mystery is why he didn't realize that these allegedly "post sexual" and "older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set" probably make up substantial number of Vanity Fair readers. (However you parse it, it's a pretty mean way to categorize middle aged and older women.)
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And just a personal (male) observation: The 'post-sexual' set Wolff refers to doesn't really exist in my opinion. I believe (I'm no sociologist, just a man who enjoys women in a whole lot more than a sexual way) that female 'post-sexuality' is a creation of the 'establishment'; the male-dominated establishment. When I was 24, I dated a woman who was 20 years older than I and I thought it was an epiphany. I realized that what I was taught (just as women were taught that fulfillment was reached with the white picket fence, two and a half kids, and the executive husband) about what I should want in a woman was mostly wrong.
What people like Wolff don't get is that women, as opposed to their college-age cohorts, want more than the sophomoric pick-up lines and the dinner - movie - fuck cycle of youthful passion. They've been there and done that. They've matured and they want conversation; they want to be appreciated for more than a set of tits or a hot body. They want to be appreciated for who they are as an individual, not as a 'generic woman'; to be discarded when her face isn't as youthful as it was in her 20s or gravity does its work on the parts that were once firm. The turn-on, I've noticed, is when a woman realizes the man she is with wants her for more than just the good parts. Great sex follows (you can keep the 72 virgins, I'll take one woman with experience any day).
When people worry more about others' sex lives than the big issues of the day, I tell them they have to get out of the house more. People like Wolff need to get out among regular folks, and not just the ones they run into in airports. It is his ilk who allowed one President to be impeached over an affair that affected the nation not a whit and another to avoid it after committing war crimes abroad and shredding the Constitution at home. It might behoove them to look more closely at their own houses, and in their own pants, before making an issue of Hillary's (and Michelle Obama's) sexuality; a subject it is painfully obvious they are supremely unqualified to speak about.
Off to work ...
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