Month: October 2014

Art And Ambiguity

Freddie considers the limits of art criticism in the Internet age, “a vast explosion in the analysis and examination of the art around us”:

These efforts to cast the brute emotional power of art into the conventions of thinking are necessary, natural, and fun. But they can result in, for example, the deep hatred for ambiguity in art, the effort to tease out of every creator what really happened. More, so many takes on art today, straining for political relevance, misunderstand that it is precisely the ability of art to express the indefensible and the disturbing that lends it enduring power.

If you are yet another person online to point out that the lyrics of “Run For Your Life” off of Rubber Soul are disturbing and misogynist, you are yet another to fail to understand that John Lennon didn’t kill anybody. He wrote a song about his impulses to kill — his scary, ugly, unmentionable impulse to kill, driven by the frightening irrationality at the heart of love and desire. He put those impulses into his art because that is where they could be acknowledged without danger. His music was where the unforgivable monster of his feelings could live and do no harm.

Desperately Seeking Moderates, Ctd

In a column from last week, Fareed Zakaria recommends limiting our Syria strategy to containment, emphasizing the unlikelihood that American power can resolve the country’s civil war. He stresses the difficulty of finding reliable partners among the Syrian rebels, a topic the Dish has covered repeatedly. Fareed concludes:

The crucial, underlying reason for the violence in Iraq and Syria is a Sunni revolt against governments in Baghdad and Damascus that they view as hostile, apostate regimes. That revolt, in turn, has been fueled by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, each supporting its own favorite Sunni groups, which has only added to the complexity. On the other side, Iran has supported the Shiite and Alawite regimes, ensuring that this sectarian struggle is also regional. The political solution, presumably, is some kind of power-sharing arrangement in those two capitals. But this is not something that the United States can engineer in Syria. It tried in Iraq, but despite 170,000 troops, tens of billions of dollars and David Petraeus’s skillful leadership, the deals Petraeus brokered started unraveling within months of his departure, well before American troops had left.

Pushing back on Fareed’s claims, Michael Weiss and Faysal Itani make a forceful argument for greater engagement with the Free Syrian Army, pointing out that containment is what the Obama administration is already doing – and it isn’t working. They contest the “longstanding and intellectually disingenuous complaint” that the Syrian opposition has been taken over by al-Qaeda affiliates, leaving few “moderates” for the US to support:

All too often, observers of the Syria conflict employ a shallow, decontextualized approach to appraising fighters on the ground. YouTube video proclamations designed to drum up badly needed funds from Gulf Arab states, to pressure or blackmail the West into offering adequate support, or to triangulate between and amongst competitive rebel interests, are given to be copper-bottom proof of a brigade or battalion’s permanent ideological coloration. In reality, fighters migrate fluidly to and from ideologically divergent camps; we have spoken with rebels who have gone from nationalist to Islamist to outright jihadist alignments, all based on the need for ammunition, food or money. ISIL, for instance, pays its fighters $400 per month; most FSA units pay theirs around $100, according to FSA spokesman Hussam al-Marie. As a matter of simple economy, this disparity could be altered overnight. The perception, too, of who is “winning” versus who is “losing” on the battlefield also drives recruitment efforts, which is why, following ISIL’s seizure of Mosul last June, its numbers skyrocketed.

David Kenner focuses on the Syrian opposition coalition in exile in Turkey, which in theory would take responsibility for governing areas freed from both ISIS and the Assad regime. It’s currently having trouble holding itself together:

While the United States continues to describe the exiled Syrian opposition as a partner in its war against the Islamic State, former U.S. officials are more candid about the limits of its influence. Robert Ford, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Syria, said that his experience as a U.S. diplomat during the Iraq war made him skeptical of the exiled opposition body’s weight on the ground. “They need to get themselves out of Istanbul, and instead get themselves installed in Syria, with or without a no-fly zone,” he said. “And we’ve raised that with them.”

Other former U.S. officials, however, suggest the opposition’s ineffectiveness should have been expected after Syria’s long bout of authoritarianism. “Look, Syria and Syrians were coming out of a 50-plus-year political coma [when the opposition bodies were formed],” said Fred Hof, a former special advisor on Syria at the State Department and currently a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Did we really expect opposition politics to be characterized by trust, openness, loyalty, and selfless teamwork?”

Ministers Jailed For Refusing To Marry Gays?

Todd Starnes contends it’s a real threat:

Two Christian ministers who own an Idaho wedding chapel were told they had to either perform same-sex weddings or face jail time and up to a $1,000 fine, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court. Alliance Defending Freedom is representing Donald and Evelyn Knapp, ordained ministers who own The Hitching Post Wedding Chapel in Coeur d’Alene. “Right now they are at risk of being prosecuted,” their ADF attorney, Jeremy Tedesco, told me. “The threat of enforcement is more than just credible.”

According to the lawsuit, the wedding chapel is registered with the state as a “religious corporation” limited to performing “one-man-one-woman marriages as defined by the Holy Bible.” But the chapel is also registered as a for-profit business – not as a church or place of worship – and city officials said that means the owners must comply with a local nondiscrimination ordinance.

Robert Tracinski is left breathless:

Heretics will be found out and forced to recant. No one ever expects the Secular Inquisition.

Dreher also freaks out. But Walter Olson cautions:

I will note that I have learned through hard experience not to run with stories from ADF (Alliance Defending Freedom) or Todd Starnes without seeking additional corroboration. As a libertarian, I oppose subjecting this family business to any legal compulsion whatsoever, but it’s also important (as in the Dallas pastors case) to get the facts straight before feeding a panic.

James Peron’s understanding of the facts:

What is at issue is that the Hitching Post has been a business, open to the public, with no religious requirements for almost a century, and for most of the time ceremonies were conducted by justices of the peace, until the state abolished that office. The Knapps purchased the business in 1989 and continued to run it as a business, never as a religious institution. They performed non-religious ceremonies and happily allowed ministers of other faiths to perform services whether they were employees or not.

Whether or not it should be the case, anti-discrimination laws–which the ADF loves when it protects fundamentalists–cover private businesses, including this one.

Zack Ford looks at how the business has changed recently:

[T]he Hitching Post is a for-profit business, but with help from ADF, the Knapps have been gearing up for this challenge for some time by redefining their business in more religious terms. In fact, Hitching Post completely reincorporated with an entirely new business certificate just last month, which was authorized by Michael S. Oswald, an ADF attorney. Along with the new business was a new Operating Agreement, dated October 6, 2014, which enshrines all of the religious values offered in the complaint as part of the business. They similarly added a new Employee Policy and Customer Agreement stipulating that the Hitching Post will only perform unions “between one biological male and one biological female.” …

The city’s ordinance does provide an exemption for “religious corporations,” but the Hitching Post is not run by a church. ADF’s complaint does not claim that it is such a corporation, but argues that because the exemption is “broad” and exists for churches and church-run corporations, “the City has no legitimate basis for refusing to extend a religious exemption to the Knapps who are Christian ministers engaged in a religious function.” Nevertheless, the Knapps are still running a for-profit business that is providing a service (weddings) to one group of people and not to others that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation in conflict with the ordinance.

Jeremy Hooper catches The Hitching Post changing their website:

Now that this business needs to make a case for “religious persecution,” they are pretending like they didn’t operate in the way that they totally used to operate. They are pretending like civil ceremonies and ceremonies outside of their own deeply held faith were never on the table so that they can make it seem like they have always been convicted in and committed to one specific kind of religious wedding. They have up and changed the rules that they themselves had laid out (i.e. no church, no faith, no problem) so that they can now make the case that they and their far-right spinmeisters are itching to make (i.e. only church, always church; we’re the victims).

One of several screenshots from Hooper:

Hitching Post

Stephen Miller is uninterested in such details:

LGBT activists of a progressive bent are making much of the fact that the Hitching Post changed its services following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Idaho. To my way of thinking, it makes no difference. People should be free to marry, including same-sex couples, and the government should not be forcing businesses owners, whether they be ministers or not, to perform services for same-sex weddings.

Eugene Volokh argues that the ministers have the law on their side:

Friday, the Knapps moved for a temporary restraining order, arguing that applying the anti-discrimination ordinance to them would be unconstitutional and would also violate Idaho’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I think that has to be right: compelling them to speak words in ceremonies that they think are immoral is an unconstitutional speech compulsion. Given that the Free Speech Clause bars the government from requiring public school students to say the pledge of allegiance, or even from requiring drivers to display a slogan on their license plates (Wooley v. Maynard [1977]), the government can’t require ministers – or other private citizens – to speak the words in a ceremony, on pain of either having to close their business or face fines and jail time. (If the minister is required to conduct a ceremony that contains religious language, that would violate the Establishment Clause as well.)

Burt Likko feels that we “really shouldn’t compel the Knapps to perform a ceremony that is contrary to their religion, even if it is in the context of a public accommodation”:

The level of intimacy involved in actually presiding over that ceremony is very high (as I know from having presided over weddings myself). I’m comfortable with a result that tells a same-sex couple, sorry, you can’t make this particular someone do this very thing, preside over a wedding ceremony, especially not if there are reasonable alternatives readily at hand, as I presume there are in a resort location like Coeur D’Alene.

My problem is that I don’t know where the line gets drawn. … The idea of, “If you’re open to the public, you’re open to the public so you have to serve the public” is a rule that I can get behind morally and intellectually, because a coherent rule can be made out of it. The idea of “If you have a personal religious objection to doing something you don’t have to do it” has moral appeal but I cannot conceive of how a non-arbitrary rule about what things are or aren’t included in a rule resulting from that concept. Maybe the rule just has to be arbitrary — but if that’s the case, then why not compel the Knapps to perform the wedding? Or, why not allow anyone to get away from any rule of any kind on the basis of claiming a religious objection?

Lawyers like it when there are coherent, understandable rules. Which is the principal reason why I don’t like the Knapps’ lawsuit — it makes the rules much blurrier, much less easy to understand.

I agree, and this case looks like a deliberate provocation. It’s relevant, I think, that the Knapps are perfectly willing to perform marriages for non-Christian faiths – which casts some doubt on the sincere religious belief argument. But in cases like these, I still favor maximal religious liberty – even for a public accommodation like this one because requiring individuals to perform a marriage ceremony against their beliefs is just something we don’t do in a liberal society. And look at the context: Idaho now has marriage equality. That’s huge – and our core goal must be to reassure those who disagree with us, that we’re seeking merely civil equality, and nothing else. These people were looking for a fight. Far preferable not to give them one.

Stalker Stories, Ctd

During this relatively slow news week, a reader draws our attention to “the latest thing blowing up (a small corner of) the Internet”:

Kathleen Hale, YA author and fiancée of Simon Rich (Frank Rich’s son) wrote this article about her experience with a nasty review on Goodreads of her non-yet-published book.  She became obsessed with the reviewer, who was also a book blogger.  Hale eventually discovered that the reviewer was operating under a false identity, stolen photos, made-up job, faked vacation photos, etc.  Against all advice, Hale decided to confront the reviewer, to find out why she had it in for her, going so far as to find her real name and address, pay for a background check on her, and go to her house.

What makes the story so interesting is the reaction to it. I don’t know if Hale thought she would get a sympathetic reaction to her confession, but she has instead set off a firestorm.

Her book now has hundreds of 1-star reviews on Goodreads, calling her a crazy stalker and vowing never to read any of her books.  The book bloggers are out in force, determined to destroy her.  No one cares that the reviewer faked her identity, equating what she did to J.K. Rowling using the Robert Galbraith pseudonym. Hale probably went too far, but I have tremendous sympathy for her frustration with having to sit back and silently take the mean-spirited reviews. (Goodreads strongly discourages authors from responding to reviews.)  But I cringed when I read her article, because I knew she was going to make things much much worse for herself.

Along similar lines to Kathleen Hale’s obsession with her bad reviews is this article by Margo Howard, the daughter of Ann Landers, lamenting the reviews of pre-publication copies of her book by members of the Amazon Vine community. Ms. Howard’s article displays a not-entirely-surprising lack of awareness of the real world.  I think her mother would have advised her to keep her mouth shut.

Writing requires thick skin, something that blogging out loud for years certainly gives you. Erin Gloria Ryan sounds off:

I sympathize with Hale’s feeling of helplessness in the face of what felt to her like people unfairly turning on her. And I’m sure most people who have ever written online understand the feeling of wanting to have a face-to-face conversation with a vitriolic critic. It’s that fantasy confrontation, where all of your stored l’esprit de l’escalier flows freely. I’ve even skimmed the Twitter feeds of professional and romantic rivals after a drink too many, an hour too late. I get that urge.

But you do not go to somebody’s house. You do not call somebody’s place of employment. You do not pose as a fact checker and demand personal information. You definitely don’t call a girl with an eating disorder fat while pouring hydrogen peroxide onto her head, and you do not run away laughing like a maniac after the fact. Hale’s thoughts are defensible; her actions are not.

About that, um, peroxide incident:

This weekend, a tipster sent us this piece Hale wrote for Thought Catalog two years ago, wherein she describes a chance run-in with Lori, a troubled girl with an eating disorder who had, years ago, accused Hale’s mother of sexual abuse. … A sympathetic judge let Hale off without punishment [after pouring the peroxide], but that didn’t stop her from doing what she referred to in her Guardian piece as “light stalking;” she says she followed Lori’s movements online. One day, she contacted her via AOL Instant Messenger, and within an hour, a police officer showed up to give her father a firm talking to about how his daughter shouldn’t stalk a girl she once assaulted.

Zooming out, Michelle Dean places Hale’s “nutso behavior” within a literary tradition of sorts:

Off the top of my head, I can think of the following nutty anecdotes […] of authors concerned that someone has been insufficiently admiring of their work:

1. Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead at a party because Whitehead gave him a bad review;

2. Richard Ford (a theme emerges) sending a copy of Alice Hoffman’s book to Alice Hoffmanwith a bullet in it;

3. Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal literally butting heads before their famous fight on the Dick Cavett Show;

4. Robert Frost setting a fire at Archibald MacLeish’s reading because, I guess, he did not care for MacLeish’s poetry;

5. After Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, again on the Dick Cavett show, that, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,'” Hellman proceeded to sue everyone involved for over $2 million; and

6. About eighty different stories about Hemingway fighting with literary rivals.

Previous Dish on stalking here. Update from a reader:

This kind of thing isn’t limited to just authors; this story from a few years back involves a bookstore owner in San Francisco.

Egg-Freezing On The Company Dime, Ctd

A few readers comment on the thread:

Actually, I would agree with McArdle (not something I usually do) about the waning energy of middle-aged parents. My wife had our two lovely daughters (now 4 and 20 months) by the age of 33. And they tire her out as it is. However, being nine years older than wife, these kids can devastate me! My wife and I are both professionals, so we have always traditionally split the household duties 50/50. But she is currently finishing her PhD thesis, which means I’ve taken on the lion’s share of the household work and raising the kids, and I can tell you that my mid-40s body/energy level is just barely up to the task. She left me in charge for a week while she was in Germany for an academic meeting; while I kept everything running well, I was also exhausted and in bed most of those night by 9PM!

Raising kids is something that is really meant for your 20s and early 30s, when your energy is less restricted. If companies really want to support working parents (because I think running a household should be split between the responsible adults), there are a raft of other family-friendly policies that could be looked at.

But another reader praises the egg-freezing policy:

So, I’m 41. I froze my eggs one week ago. I don’t have a partner, I’m still hoping to meet someone I actually want to be with, and I don’t particularly want to be a single parent, but family is hugely important to me and don’t want to regret never having children. I hadn’t really thought much about egg freezing, but then I went to my ob/gyn over the summer, and she recommended that I go see a fertility doctor and see what my options are. So I did.

I thought the doctor was going tell me it was now or never, that it was too late to freeze my eggs. But it turned out my hormone levels looked fine, and he said he thought it was a good option for me.  He also said realistically, I should start thinking about getting pregnant in the next year or two. In other words, he wasn’t advising me to put off childbearing indefinitely, but he was sympathetic to helping me create a solution in the present while I try to solve more complex issues in the coming months and years.

And then it all went down really quickly. Period, tests, shots, retrieval. Voila! 10 frozen eggs. And you know what? It feels really good. It’s possible none of those eggs will be viable when/if I eventually try to use them – there are no guarantees – but it makes me feel like I took some kind of positive action in the face of circumstances I can’t control.

So I say good for Facebook and Google. They are encouraging their employees to think about their fertility now and, quite possibly, helping them preserve their potential for children before they think about it too late, and it’s too late. I just don’t believe that freezing eggs makes a woman who has a career think any differently about her timeline for having a baby. Most women I know who are in healthy relationships, even those who are killing it professionally, end up wanting a family by their mid- to late-30s (assuming they wanted children in the first place). So egg-freezing isn’t about obsessive, type-A women putting off babies indefinitely; it’s about protecting against infertility issues, which can crop up even in one’s thirties, being honest about the challenging realities of finding a partner, and enabling women to be smarter about their relationships (rather than making a mad, desperate scramble for some man! any man! as they see their fertility window closing).

All of which makes me feel that the pushback against egg freezing is all part of the same alarmist hysteria that springs up around anything ever that has let women have say over when and how they have babies. You have too much sex! You have too little sex! You had a baby too young! You had a baby too late! You had a baby as a single mother! You had a baby with a partner but aren’t modeling a healthy relationship and/or got divorced! You didn’t have a baby at all! Witches, burn them all!

There’s no downside to women taking control of their fertility.

Kobani: A Battle In Multiples Wars

Screen Shot 2014-10-21 at 11.41.05 AM

Despite recent gains by Kurdish fighters in and around Kobani, aided by the delivery of small arms and other supplies yesterday, Kiran Nazish reports that the situation in the area remains tenuous:

Firas Kharaba, the leader of a Kurdish group, has been coordinating and managing the return of many wounded fighters from Kobani into Turkey. With the help of spies that, he says, infiltrated ISIS, “we found the power hub. … After the U.S. hit that building, they [ISIS] suffered a full blow.” More than 30 top fighters and commanders were killed, he said. Recently the Islamic State has been bringing in new fighters, but many of them—according to Firas’s sources—are not professionally trained fighters, but mere managers, organizers, and account keepers, with little experience in the battle field.

The main concern for YPG fighters now, is their on-the-ground force. What they need even more than manpower, says Kobani government official Idris Nassan, are “weapons on the ground.”

U.S. intelligence has assisted them, says Nassan, but it is not a substitute for weaponry and ammunition. Despite this weekend’s air drop, “the coalition is not ready to send weapons on the ground,” says Tarek Doglu, a foreign affairs analyst based in Ankara. “No one wants to intervene the matters between Turkey and PKK. That is the basic complexity.”

Dettmer talks to some of the town’s few remaining doctors, who paint a harrowing picture of the humanitarian conditions:

Dr. Kurdo Abdi, gave me a first-hand account of the extraordinary demands that have been placed on the 15 doctors and nurses who remained in Kobani throughout the siege. They have struggled to provide rudimentary care for wounded fighters and civilians while dodging bombs, rockets and bullets. “The main hospital was destroyed ten days ago by rockets,” says Abdi. The ISIS militants bombed the hospital on purpose. “Since then we have been treating people in makeshift clinics in different parts of Kobani, mainly in apartments. We have very little medicines. We got a few re-supplies from some fighters and civilians who smuggled it across the border, but very little. The situation is very bad.”

ISIS’s recent retreat, he adds, has been oversold in the press:

Despite widespread media reports that the Islamic militants have left the town and are now just on the outskirts, that is not accurate. Both doctors say the jihadists have been pushed back on the West of the town but they are still inside parts of the center and that there is street fighting in the east and south.

Yusuf Sayman defends Turkey’s actions, pointing to its massive refugee relief effort, and laments that “refugees running from the war in Syria are stuck in the political war in Turkey”, between the government and Kurdish activists:

While the Turkish government wants to play the good guys by helping the refugees, the opposition — including the HDP, Turkey’s pro-Kurdish party — refuses to allow them to reap the political benefits of this goodwill gesture. Some refugees now stay in camps run by the office of Suruc’s mayor, who is from the HDP, which act as a sort of Kurdish counterpoint to the camps run by AFAD [the Turkish government’s humanitarian relief agency].

Thus, the refugees find themselves on the front line in a propaganda battle. Hazal, a 24-year-old activist from Kobani volunteering as a health worker, speaks negatively about life in the HDP camps: She says their sanitary conditions are very bad, water-borne illnesses are widespread, and there is constant YPG propaganda. People are forced to refer to each other as “heval,” or comrade — a term used by both PKK and YPG fighters. She even recalls a YPG member telling her, “If you visit your relatives staying in the AFAD camp, we will consider you a traitor.”

Intra-Kurdish politics, Hannes Cerny observes, add another dimension of complexity:

[President of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government Massoud] Barzani is playing a long game, as he benefited for years from his status as the main Kurdish leader that the West could do business with. Dialogue now between the U.S. and the PYD/YPG threatens his position; the YPG could even become as indispensable in the war against IS in Syria as Barzani’s peshmerga are in Iraq. Furthermore, if the PYD holds off IS in Kobani and becomes the West’s new Syria partner in the process, it would strengthen the form of local autonomy that the PYD has been exercising in northeastern Syria over the past two years. This political model, an anarchist communalism of Kurdish confederations, poses a direct ideological challenge to the KRG.

(Image: a UN satellite photo shows details of the street fights between Islamic State militants and Kurdish fighters in Kobani. Via Rick Noack.)

What Catholics Really Believe

As we enter a year of debate and discussion about the family in Catholic teaching, it’s obvious, thanks to Pope Francis’ skillful airing of the divides, that there is no consensus on the issues of treating the divorced or single parents or homosexuals, and a majority of bishops in favor of the status quo. But it’s worth noting at the same time what American Catholics actually believe. They are increasingly one of the most socially progressive groups in American society and culture. When I am asked by many outsiders how I can remain in a church that does not welcome me or my kind, I have to respond that I have rarely experienced anything but welcome. My fellow Catholics are almost always obviously comfortable around their gay fellow-parishioners, as are, mercifully, many priests.

Check out this graph, for example, on the question of sodomy – yes, full-fledged sodomy – over the decades in American life:

bialik-datalab-vatican-31

If you wanted a religious vocation that was all about endorsing gay sex (not something I would ever recommend), you should rush to be a Catholic! Carl Bialik’s data-driven analysis even finds the correlation between Catholicism and social liberalism to endure across cultures and countries:

We didn’t have data broken down by religion in individual countries, so instead I examined how attitudes within countries corresponded with the percentage of their population that is Catholic. In general, the higher a share of a country’s residents are Catholic, the higher percentage of residents express tolerance toward divorce and towards gays. The effect isn’t huge, but it’s consistent.

I immediately went to read Rod Dreher to see his head exploding. In fact, he agrees:

I think most conservative Catholics intuit this, which accounts partly for their anxiety over the prospect of Rome’s waffling. They know that they are minorities within their own church, and they grieve over the possibility that the Church itself may undercut their convictions.

Rod’s point is that only this minority can really be counted upon to support the church’s work and so any liberalization in pastoral outreach to the gays or the divorced would be counter-productive. I’m not sure where he gets this idea. The liberal parishes I have attended seem brimming with volunteers and life. And notice that Francis has not argued that the doctrine should change anyway. He is pushing for the pragmatic embrace of those whom the hierarchy regards as “intrinsically disordered” or “living in sin.” He is arguing that Catholics’ general empathy for the outsider and the downtrodden – and forgiving response to sinners – should be reflected in the hierarchy as well. He is arguing for the church to be more what it is already.

As for those conservative Catholics, whose presence in the church is vital and important, one has to ask a simple question. Why are their convictions so weak that they require constant reaffirmation from Rome or the pulpit? Why is it impossible to coexist with others of a more liberal mindset – and not fight to the death over these issues as if they had the same potency and salience of other far more vital aspects of Christianity? Why can they not hang in with the church the way so many more liberal Catholics have during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI?

I think most Catholics’ response to these issues is the Pope’s: who am I to judge? And that response is essentially a Catholic one – and, in my experience, it cuts across the “conservative” and “liberal” positions to a more humane equipoise.

Peen Review, Ctd

NSFW, because Oz:

Readers point to some lesser-known shows and films with major peenage:

I love that this is a current thread! Check out Shortbus by John Cameron Mitchell (director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch) for some serious onscreen peen, and an overall excellent film about the city you love to hate: NYC.

Another adds regarding Shortbus, “How often in a non-porn, ‘art’, ‘indie’ movie do you see this much explicit sexual behavior that is clearly a legitimate part of the storytelling?” Many other readers sound off:

Given all that’s going on in the world, it seems a little weird to email you about boners on TV, but here are two notable instances that stand up – er – stand out:

Adam Scott getting a handy in HBO’s Tell Me You Love Me, and the masturbation scene in the French film Swimming Pool. I’m reluctant to link you to PornHub for clips, but of all the TV and movies I’ve seen, those are the only two times in somewhat mainstream setting that I’ve seen a boner on screen (even though Adam’s was a prosthetic and the one in Swimming Pool was just a semi in a banana hammock).

I wouldn’t include the gratuitous scene at the beginning of Antichrist because, well, awful movie.

Another:

FYI: Under The Skin, released this year and starring Scarlett Johansson, featured quite a few erect members. It was also a pretty great movie.

Another:

Outside of porn, I doubt any movie serves peen-hunting cinema fans more extravagantly than Stranger By the Lake. You’ve got soft peen, hard peen, young peen, old peen, blowjobs, cumshots, ubiquitous fucking, and even entire scenes that span minutes of dialog with peen front and center. It sounds gratuitous, but if you’re gonna make a grim, unnervingly quiet thriller about cruising, danger, and sexual obsession that has any semblance to reality, it’s gotta have plenty of peen.

And another:

I vote for the naked wrestling scene – Alan Bates and Oliver Reed – in Women in Love:

I saw the movie in Wellington, New Zealand, and when the dicks started flopping, one old lady behind whispered to her companion that it was so nice to see a real log fire.

Updates from several more readers:

The movie Angels and Insects has an erect penis at a big reveal (heh) in the film, where Mark Rylance walks in on his wife in bed with … someone she should NOT be sleeping with.  The shot of the erection makes the scene even more … gruesome (I’ll leave it at that).

Another erection:

OK, I have to weigh in, as no reader has picked up the most egregious “mainstream” example I know of: The Brown Bunny with Vincent Gallo and the usually delightful Chloe Sevigny.

Another points to more “peen on the screen”:

Offhand, I’d say the original Bear Cub (Cachorro) has bear ween during the opening credits too explicit for American theaters. But as far as the US: Robin Williams in Fisher King:

rCWHA

Go here for more SFW images of starpower peen, including Ewan McGregor and Kevin, er, Bacon. Another reader:

If the thread continues, we’d be remiss not to include Bob Hoskins’ nude scene from Mrs. Henderson Presents.

A final reader refers to the video in our previous post:

In The Crying Game, at the moment of reveal, it would have been more true to life had that penis been throbbingly erect, not hanging limply.

“Throbbingly erect” is a first for the Dish.