The Invisible Counterpoint

It was a bloop in IM from a colleague. “Oh god, I’m so sorry,” it read. “And screw Gawker.” It was an email a moment later, from my boss. “Just ignore it,” it read. “It’s not a big deal; they do this to everyone.” That’s when my heart lunged into my stomach. That was four years ago. That was the first time Gawker wrote about me. The piece itself was relatively mild, on the Gawker spectrum. There were no intimate texts involved, there was no damning sex tape. I had simply been pronounced irksome because “She’s against domestic violence. She’s against harassing children. She’s against elder abuse” — and I apparently expressed this in ways insufficiently nuanced for the writer. I was, in summation, declared “a first class hack.” I’ve been at this a very long time and been called worse by better, so it wasn’t the piece itself that really got to me. It was the picture. It was an image of me, pale and freckled, that had run in Salon seven months before, when I shared that I had jus...

In a blog post that divides the world as he sees it into "Pegs and Holes," Dilbert creator and occasional sock puppet master Scott Adams stirred up quite the online crapstorm earlier this month. Unsurprisingly, a number of critics took him to task for his assertion about "tweeting, raping, cheating," that "the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable…. society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness." Jezebel's Lane Moore took him to task for suggesting "that 'boys' are pretty much designed to be rapists " and Mediaite's Alex Alvarez took on the "misandrist notion that men are base, selfish creatures who cannot control their impulses and, thus, require something else – like women – to act as the gatekeepers of morality." Here at Salon, I called Adams' post, among other thi...

The time has come to admit it -- Jodie Foster is not all that. Foster, beloved child actress turned two-time Academy Award winner, Yale magna cum laude, respected director and person who has lived in the public eye for 40 years without a nip slip, bar brawl or nutty Twitter outburst, seems in many ways the epitome of graceful modern womanhood. She is serious about her work, she is devoted to her children and she was honored Monday as one of Elle magazine's top women in Hollywood. And it was there that she spoke of "an amazing actor, an incredible friend, a loyal friend of mine for 18 years." She described him as "incredibly loved by everyone who ever comes into contact with him or works with him ... truly the most loved man in the film business, so, hopefully that stands for something." She was talking about Mel Gibson. Say what? [. . .] Yet Foster's suspect loyalty to internationally acclaimed, unrepentant creeps doesn't end with "the most...

Leaving wrinkles to the scaly Speaking as someone who is looking forward to the day when we have chips in our head that will allow us to see people as they would prefer to be seen (or not -- we could dialog it), I am not anti-botox. This said, I am someone who strongly suspects that a good portion of people over 50 are going to be spending the next twenty years of their lives doing things like this, writing humorous, what-they-prefer-to-deem-self-effacing-but-will-prove-to-be-largely-self-elevating articles, on their struggles to deal with anti-agism in the work-force -- their struggles with aging -- their kids' neglect, wine and au provence, and of how wonderful it is to finally have a prince back in the white house (did you hear what that nasty person at Salon had to say about Obama?! They've had their fun but isn't it about time they put an end to it -- he's such a nice person, who is really, really, trying, and . . .). We're afraid as a mass you'll not j...