When he went off to college, Joseph Whedon “traded his basic name for a more interesting one” and started calling himself Joss. That’s not at all unusual, that you reinvent yourself when you get away from old social circles and find yourself in new ones, but I think, given the allegations and confessions in this article about Joss Whedon, I’m going to have to roll that change back. He’s Joe Whedon, and as he admits, he was “dark and miserable, this hideous little homunculus who managed to annoy everyone”. Gollum tried to call himself Smeagol, but no one is fooled anymore.

The author of the article, Lila Shapiro, lets people just speak, and boy is it damning. She interviews people who worked with Whedon on Buffy, for instance, and discover what an entitled little shit he was, who managed to impress everyone with his big words and flowery language.

A high-level member of the Buffy production team recalled Whedon’s habit of “writing really nasty notes,” but that wasn’t what disturbed her most about working with him. Whedon was rumored to be having affairs with two young actresses on the show. One day, he and one of the actresses came into her office while she was working. She heard a noise behind her. They were rolling around on the floor, making out. “They would bang into my chair,” she said. “How can you concentrate? It was gross.” This happened more than once, she said. “These actions proved he had no respect for me and my work.” She quit the show even though she had no other job lined up.

Then there were the alleged incidents two Buffy actresses wrote about on social media last year. Michelle Trachtenberg, who’d played Buffy’s younger sister, claimed there had been a rule forbidding Whedon from being alone in a room with her on set. Whedon told me he had no idea what she was talking about, and Trachtenberg didn’t want to elaborate. One person who worked closely with her on Buffy told me an informal rule did exist, though it was possible Whedon was not aware of it. During the seventh season, when Trachtenberg was 16, Whedon called her into his office for a closed-door meeting. The person does not know what happened, but recalled Trachtenberg was “shaken” afterward. An adult in Trachtenberg’s circle created the rule in response.

But you can tell Joe chose to do this interview because he wanted to correct the record.

Picking up a cup of tea, Whedon said he could no longer remain silent as people tried to pry his legacy from his hands. But there was a problem. Those people had set out to destroy him and would surely seize on his every utterance in an attempt to finish the job. “I’m terrified,” he said, “of every word that comes out of my mouth.”

That was a prophetic statement. You let your ego run away with you, Joe, you should have just shut up. His denials sound like confessions.

Whedon acknowledged he was not as “civilized” back then. “I was young,” he said. “I yelled, and sometimes you had to yell. This was a very young cast, and it was easy for everything to turn into a cocktail party.” He said he would never intentionally humiliate anyone. “If I am upsetting somebody, it will be a problem for me.” The costume designer who said he’d grabbed her arm? “I don’t believe that,” he said, shaking his head. “I know I would get angry, but I was never physical with people.” Had he made out with an actress on the floor of someone’s office? “That seems false. I don’t understand that story even a little bit.” He removed his glasses and rubbed his face. “I should run to the loo.” When he came back, he said the story didn’t make sense to him because he “lived in terror” of his affairs being discovered.

Wait, wait, wait. The story about making out with actresses couldn’t be true, because sure, yeah, he was having affairs, plural, but he was terrified of anyone finding out? That’s not a very good excuse, you know. It sounds like everyone on the set knew he was screwing around. His wife sure knew, since she divorced him over it.

Then there was that feud with Zack Snyder over the Justice League movie, which Whedon took over mid-filming and revised. I saw the Whedon version, and hated it; I haven’t seen the so-called “Snyder cut”, and won’t, because as bad as the first version was, I don’t think making it longer and putting an Ayn Rand fanboy in charge was going to make it better. It’s a convenient way to blame Joe’s fall from grace on an external force, though.

In our conversations, Whedon was somewhat more circumspect. “I don’t know who started it,” he told me. “I just know in whose name it was done.” Snyder superfans were attacking him online as a bad feminist and a bad husband. “They don’t give a fuck about feminism,” he said. “I was made a target by my ex-wife, and people exploited that cynically.” As he explained this theory, his voice sank into a hoarse whisper. “She put out a letter saying some bad things I’d done and saying some untrue things about me, but I had done the bad things and so people knew I was gettable.”

Snyder superfans tend to be horrible anti-feminist trolls, I agree, but this article makes it clear that Joe is the one who has been exploiting feminism cynically. That Joe Whedon admits to doing “bad things” is not the apology he thinks it is. He was gettable because he’d done those bad things, and that wasn’t Zack Snyder’s, or his ex-wife’s, fault.

Man, that last sentence really needs a “gollum, gollum” at the end of it.

Remember the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, that field station where the boys ran wild and made life miserable for women scientists working there? Nature recently published a bit of a follow-up. It sounds like not much has changed. The Smithsonian is going to form a task force (they haven’t done it yet), and now they’ve finally put locks on all the bedroom doors. I’m not seeing any mention of changes to the culture of hard partying that was rife at the station, nothing but a recognition that people at remote field stations drink a lot.

The dynamics of an island-based research institute where people live, work and socialize together complicates efforts to protect researchers, Tewksbury says. “Strong power imbalances, coupled with close, informal working environments, large age differentials and alcohol all increase the risk of abuses of power and sexual harassment,” he says. “The two main venues where that wicked cocktail is mixed up are field research stations and conferences.”

“It would be a mistake to say [sexual misconduct] is a problem with STRI per se,” Crofoot says. “Assault, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions are a common thing at field stations. There’s a need for institutions to recognize that they can’t continue to ignore these problems.”

You know, these stations are work places. Most such places have rules about getting drunk at work, and age differentials are common. If, at the end of a long day of classes, I brought out a couple of bottles of tequila and started flirting with students, I would be fired so hard, and would lose the respect of my peers, and would probably be hauled away by campus police, not to mention getting kicked in the crotch by some 20 year old student athlete. Why are field stations being given a pass on “Assault, sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions”? This dichotomy in how we treat professionals working in different environments is intolerable. I understand the privilege and responsibility of having a position at a university, why should being employed to work in a field station be any different?

But Crofoot is right. These are problems everywhere. It’s just that when people get away from oversight in a place with a “boys will be boys” attitude, some of them run amuck. Why, here in more civilized parts of academia, everyone knows you’re supposed to sneak around when taking advantage of your underlings.

Like the president of the University of Michigan did.

The University of Michigan Board of Regents has unanimously fired school President Mark Schlissel for cause following an investigation into a relationship with a subordinate, the board announced Saturday evening.

In a letter to Schlissel posted on the school website, the board spelled out its concerns and said his conduct was “particularly egregious considering your knowledge of and involvement in addressing incidents of harassment by University of Michigan personnel, and your declared commitment to work to ‘free’ the University community of sexual harassment or other improper conduct.”

He was exposed by a long history of suggestive emails between himself and the woman employee. He also had a history of talking big about stopping sexual harassment, while also promoting a system of reporting that disadvantaged victims trying to get justice.

Also, email? Does anyone really think the campus email system is a secure way to discuss your criminal activities?

A sexual harassment case brought by a student against a professor at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities — my back yard is 150 miles long) has finally been closed with a settlement.

The Minnesota Department of Human Rights announced Friday a settlement agreement with the University of Minnesota Board of Regents after a Humphrey School professor sexually harassed a graduate student.

The settlement requires the Humphrey School of Public Affairs to take steps to prevent sexual harassment, pay a graduate student $75,000 and allow the student to complete her degree tuition-free, according to the release.

Well, yay. He was an egregious offender.

According to the release, “the professor made sexual comments in front of her, told her about sex he had with other women, and commented on her appearance in front of her classmates.” The professor also told the student he wanted to be her boyfriend and live together in his home.

There are a few problems with the settlement, though. Free tuition is nice, except the student hasn’t attended classes since 2018. One might guess that she’s less than enthusiastic about returning to the scene of the crime, where the university was so slow in responding. It also doesn’t help that after the professor resigned, the dean of the business school sent out a university-wide email praising him as an “accomplished scholar“ who contributed “substantially” to the school’s global policy classes and research agenda.

Also, there’s the little matter of the student getting $75,000, and the professor getting $190,000 as an incentive to resign. Also getting 3 other pending cases against him dismissed. Also getting an agreement that the university would not publicize his firing…oops, resignation. Also, they initially let him back on the faculty, without notifying students of the results of the investigation that found him guilty.

Hey! It looks like the professor, James Ron, is back on the job market, and he used some of his settlement cash to hire someone to build him a cheesy, generic website to advertise has availability.

James Ron is a dynamic, creative, and adaptable senior research professional with deep and broad experience defining research approaches and methods, managing large, diverse global and domestic project teams, developing policy recommendations, and reporting results. James is respected as a published scholar, author and thought leader.

It mentions his employment at the University of Minnesota, but for completely understandable reasons, fails to mention why he left a job that pays $170,000 per year (Huh…I get less than half that, and I don’t harass my students.)

His colleague, Jason Cao, was also found guilty of violating university policy. He’s still working in the Humphrey School of Business, with restrictions on who he can advise.

Lest you think these are just the sins of those over-privileged wankers in the business school, take a look at the UMN biochemistry department, and the seedy reputation of Gianluigi Veglia. There’s a nice short summary at that link.

After enduring years of sexual harassment, two members of biochemist Gianluigi Veglia’s lab filed complaints with the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Investigators corroborated their accounts and recommended that Veglia be fired. University administrators decided to impose lesser sanctions instead. The university kept the decision quiet until a Minneapolis newspaper revealed details. Universities often don’t disclose information about harassment cases, but sexual harassment experts say this practice is harmful. The lack of transparency about the sanctions against Veglia, who continues to work at the university, catalyzed reforms intended to protect against sexual harassment and improve decision-making. But distrust continues among faculty and graduate students.

It wasn’t a secret. Veglia was openly harassing his students.

Veglia also regularly harassed Soller about the fact that she was married. He said, “Why are you missing out on all of these experiences you could be having in grad school because you’re married?” Soller says. “I was also told that I couldn’t be a successful scientist and also wife.”

She also recalls one time when Veglia commented on a lab mate, saying something to the effect of, “I bet she’s a devil in bed.”

Veglia referred to the female graduate students in his lab as “Veglia chicks,” Soller says. “When you’re constantly being referred to as that, and you’re trying to be taken as a serious scientist in the field, it’s degrading.”

Dicke, who joined Veglia’s lab in 2012, says he would frequently tell her that the only reason he hired her was for her looks.

“At one point he told me that I was very beautiful and that I was going to be sexually harassed and that’s why he said inappropriate things to me—because I need to be desensitized to it,” Dicke says. “At some point he told me that I just want to be dominated. He meant that in a sexual way.”

Another time, “he tapped my arm with his elbow and said, ‘Don’t order anything with garlic so we can get close later’ in front of this other professor. The other professor responded by saying that we should order more wine because the ladies need to loosen up,” Dicke says. The other professor was not from the University of Minnesota, Dicke says, though she declined to give C&EN his name.

Don’t worry, though, the faculty had a “vibrant” discussion about him.

“Given its egregious and repetitive nature, Dr. Veglia’s conduct created an intimidating, hostile, and offensive working environment,” one of the reports says. The parts of the reports that included Veglia’s responses to the complaints were redacted.

In a separate letter, the EOAA Office recommended that Veglia be fired, according to several of C&EN’s sources.

“A very vibrant, protracted discussion” ensued to determine Veglia’s fate, according to one administrator, who asked not to be named because the person was not authorized to talk about the proceedings. According to the administrator, the people involved had different opinions about the facts of the case, as well as whether firing was an appropriate punishment for the harassment. Everyone directly involved in the discussion was a man, except for EOAA representatives.

It is reassuring in a way, I suppose, that the university will do their darndest to shield me, and the university, from embarrassment if I should go on a sexual rampage. It is not at all reassuring that I might have to work with assholes, or that my students are vulnerable to this sort of thing. Fortunately, my colleagues here at the Morris campus of the UMN all seem to be decent, good people…but then, how would I know? The university likes to conceal this information from everyone.

Of the 55 sexual misconduct cases substantiated in the university system from 2013 through 2017, more than half ended in the shadows. In 23 of the cases, the responsible employee left the university either through “resignation, lay-off or non-renewal” after the finding but before being disciplined; their names and case files are not publicly released.

In nine other cases, the employees remained at the university but weren’t disciplined. They may have received letters of expectation, been directed to complete training, or received coaching or monitoring, but these consequences are not severe enough to meet the university’s definition of discipline. Their names and case files also remain private.

I’d like this place to hold higher standards.

Here’s how the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was founded.

When the Chagres River was dammed in 1913, water rose to engulf 164 square miles of tropical rainforest, creating Gatun Lake and many small islands peeking above the surface. Naturalists were drawn to Barro Colorado Island, but for decades women were barred from staying overnight. David Fairchild, one of the island’s founding figures, advocated for the prohibition of women, writing in a 1924 letter that the island should remain a place “where real research men can find quiet, keen intellectual stimulation, freedom from any outside distraction.”

Right. I’ve been to places like that, where they want you to think it’s all lofty high-minded serious work, but that’s not what you get when you exclude women. You get a frat house. It’s farting, crude jokes, and lots of drinking, which is excused because everyone is “working hard” during the day…which never made sense to me, because when I’ve been working hard, I want to retire to my room, maybe read a book for a while, and get a good night’s sleep. That’s how you recover from hard work. But then, after you’ve built a culture of masculine privilege for a few decades, you might succumb to pressure to allow women to join in the research, but you’ll do it your own way. The established men get to vet all applicants and decide who they’ll let in, and hell no, they aren’t going to change the culture. Instead, these select women will be expected to join in the hard-drinking frat boy culture, and then they get to add rape and sexual harassment to the party.

I could have predicted it. That’s exactly how the STRI evolved, and wow, is it ugly.

Many researchers who set foot on the island consider the opportunity a dream. But 16 women scientists interviewed for this story described a pattern of sexual misconduct by high-ranking men at the institute, one of whom acknowledged his inappropriate behavior to BuzzFeed News. The women said that struggling to fend off the sexual demands of scientists with the power to determine a young researcher’s career trajectory left them feeling traumatized and isolated.

Seven of the scientists said they have stopped visiting the institute or collaborating with its staff on account of the unprofessional behavior they said they experienced or witnessed there, and two have left academia altogether — a #MeToo brain drain that has cost science an incalculable toll of lost research.

“I was spending more and more time figuring out how to navigate the culture there,” said Nina Wurzburger, an associate professor at the University of Georgia who worked at STRI from 2008 to 2012 but said she no longer pursues major research projects there because of the pervasive discrimination and sexual harassment.

Internal emails and complaints reviewed by BuzzFeed News, as well as interviews with 25 scientists, show that STRI leaders for years issued little more than verbal warnings or social restrictions to employees accused of sexual misconduct while allowing them to continue interacting with newly arrived young researchers. The institute eventually took additional disciplinary action against two of the accused scientists in 2019 and 2020. A third scientist, named in this story, continues to work at STRI.

Two scientists were disciplined out of 1200. I’m not exactly razzle-dazzled by their ‘vigorous’ response.

Here’s what needs to be done: presumably, since they’re able to say there are “leaders” at this organization, they have a chart of the hierarchy. Lop off the top of the chart. All those men get sent back to their home institutions, banned from working at STRI, or put back on the job market. They will no doubt claim to be respected, famous scientists who add prestige to the institution…but that just means they should have no trouble landing positions elsewhere. Appoint a woman to run the show. Put in place a new hiring committee that is at least half women. Rebuild the personnel from new applicants.

Yeah, it sounds draconian, but it’s what needs to be done. The worst solution (but probably the one the Smithsonian will implement) is to keep all the same people in charge, let the culture persist, and send them memos that go “tut-tut”, while continuing to bring in a few women, a handful at a time, to be sacrificial lambs to the frat house meat-grinder. This is a case where they need to burn it to the ground, metaphorically, to clear out the sex pests.

Not literally, of course. Look at the place! It’s beautiful!

Think of all the spiders living on that tropical island…

But then you read about how the assholes mismanaged it (ALL the trigger warnings on that article), and you wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it. It’s not the spiders, it’s the venomous creeps who work inside it.

Scott Yenor is a professor who gave speech at a National Conservatism conference that said the quiet parts out loud. Women don’t belong in engineering or medical careers, we have to have strong manly leadership to convince them to stay home and have babies. Our independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be, don’t you know — the significant word in there might be our. Also, women are at their peak fertility in their late teens and early 20s, and to be a great nation, they must be quickly impregnated. And here I thought Dr Strangelove was satire!

…a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years.

That’s this guy.

Our independent women are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. Without connections to eternity delivered through their family, such women gain their meaning through their seeming participation in the global project. https://t.co/fm97NdmeB1

— Scott Yenor (@scottyenor) November 24, 2021

Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

Fortunately, Yenor is not a professor of engineering, medicine, or law. He’s a professor of political science, a field that seems to have much lower standards. Or at least, lower standards at schools in Idaho.

One of the worst people on the right is Nick Fuentes, a bizarre 23 year old racist and misogynist who inexplicably has a large following. Here he is in a video with a Blaze TV talking head in which he makes an amazing admission.

…I think any man who is observant enough and honestly, we could go back to great geniuses, we could go back to people who have been in relationships, like a perfect example is the pick-up artists. Have you ever noticed that pick-up artists who have the most relationships with women and the most sex what they say is that with women it’s the same bag of tricks to seduce a woman or whatever. And I think that kind of tells you something about the nature of women, you go from woman to woman and it’s the same kind of like little tricks little things you can say, whatever, to kind of hack them, I think that kind of says it all about their nature. So, you know…

Interviewer: What does it say about our nature, Nick?

Well, it says that they are not fully rational. I don’t believe that, like men, they possess a certain full rationality…a male has a real impersonal sense of rationality and reason. I think that a female sense is far more personal, and that derives from the fact that women are made to bear children.

He’s a horrible little man, and that he thinks pick-up artists are examples of great geniuses who have been in “relationships” (I don’t he knows what the word means) tells me a lot about him. But that’s not the unsurprising admission. That would be this response:

Interviewer: have you ever been in a relationship with a woman?

No.

I guess he’s aspiring to be the king of the incels.

Apparently, it’s not trans women, and trans men don’t even exist. This Declaration of Women’s Sex Based Rights is making the rounds — Richard Dawkins proudly signed it, doesn’t that make you want to put your name on it? I like the idea of supporting equal rights for all men and women, and it’s true that women need special legal protection as the targets of current and historical discrimination, but this document seems to be mainly focused on legitimizing discrimination against trans women. It practically seethes with resentment against trans women, and singles them out as the big problem that must be eradicated from society. Cast them out! They don’t deserve to have any of the rights which they want to reserve for true human females, a category that they don’t even bother to define (probably because if they tried, they’d get hung up on the boundary conditions). So women are simply specified by vague “physical and biological characteristics”, which are completely different from “gender identity”, which means their manifesto is primarily a long whine about how the existence of trans women taints the concept of lesbianism.

However, the concept of ‘gender identity’ has enabled men who claim a female ‘gender identity’ to assert, in law, policies, and practice, that they are members of the category of women, which is a category based upon sex.

The CEDAW General Recommendation No. 35 notes that, “General recommendation No. 28 on the core obligations of States parties under article 2 of the Convention as well as general recommendation No. 33 on women’s access to justice confirms that discrimination against women is inextricably linked to other factors that affect their lives. The Committee’s jurisprudence highlights that these may include…being lesbian.” (II, 12).

The concept of ‘gender identity’ is used to challenge individuals’ rights to define their sexual orientation on the basis of sex rather than ‘gender identity’, enabling men who claim a female ‘gender identity’ to seek to be included in the category of lesbian, which is a category based upon sex. This undermines the sex-based rights of lesbians, and is a form of discrimination against women.

Some men who claim a female ‘gender identity’ seek to be included in the legal category of mother. The CEDAW emphasises maternal rights and the “social significance of maternity’’. Maternal rights and services are based on women’s unique capacity to gestate and give birth to children. The inclusion of men who claim a female ‘gender identity’ within the legal category of mother erodes the social significance of maternity, and undermines the maternal rights for which the CEDAW provides.

OK, so how does the existence of trans women compromise the identities of lesbians and mothers? If a person who identifies as a woman is a primary caregiver to a child, what else do you call her but “a mother”? If she happens to be trans, how does that harm a person who identifies as a cis woman and is the primary caregiver to a child, who should also be called “a mother”? If they’re doing everything that a mother does, and if they suffer the same social disempowerment, what is the problem here, and what do you propose that people and the law should call them? I know, they may not have a uterus, and they may not have actually carried an embryo/fetus for 9 months, but are we prepared to deny the “M” word to adoptive mothers, then?

The whole thing is one special effort to carve out an exclusion and to deny one group of people the rights that they ought to share with everyone else. That’s not a good reason to sign this thing. An equal rights declaration ought not to be focused on saying “except these people, we don’t like them and we want to make sure they don’t get these same rights.” Especially when that subgroup has been specifically targeted for hatred and discrimination.

I’m also really curious to know why trans men are not mentioned, and how they handle that concept. Are trans men really women in their minds? How do they cope with their weird sexual essentialism if they accept trans men?

Oh well, one useful feature of their web page is that they list 393 organizations that really hate trans people, which is a useful reference if you want to know who you should never support (although many seem to be just disgruntled people with a website that you’ll never hear of again).

I thought this was going to be a happy story about a small town in Minnesota.

Chris and Kelsey’s younger child was always the extrovert in the family.
Assigned male at birth, they were into more traditionally feminine things — if there was a truck being played with, it was likely being driven by a Disney princess — so the couple took it in stride when their child asked for a Kit Kittredge American Girl doll for a fourth birthday present. Kelsey wondered about the future but Chris just thought it was his child responding to living with a mother and sister while he was deployed overseas with the Navy Reserve.
“So we got this doll and Kit’s eyes just lit up. And Kit was so happy and so excited to get this doll,” Kelsey said.
“About a week later, when dad was in Japan, and I was standing right there in the kitchen, Kit walks up to me and goes, ’Mom, can you call me Kit?’ And my stomach dropped a little bit. Because all of a sudden, maybe things were making a little more sense. Click. And I said, ’Sure. Still my little … boy?” And Kit goes, ’No, your little girl.’ 
“I was like, ’Absolutely, sweetie, you got it.’ And then I ran into the other room with a panic attack and called Daddy in Japan and said, ’What the heck just happened?'” 
Chris Waits said his first thought was that Kit might be going through a phase. Like his wife, he had to learn about trans kids.
Neither parent said they knew much about trans kids, and decided to let Kit be Kit while they figured things out.

See? An accepting family who were concerned about doing what was right for their child. This is going to be a good story, right? I can tell you the parents continued to be supportive and accepting, but as you might predict, small town America is small minded America.

But after one parent posted a long complaint about a whole host of things involving Kelsey, another parent went uglier.  
“She should be locked up for child abuse,” the parent wrote. “Her younger ‘daughter’ is actually a boy.” 
Others jumped in, attacking the Waits as “woke parents” who had pushed their views onto their child.
Kelsey soon found out what was being written.
“This was my most precious secret. The thing I protected most and the thing I was most afraid of ever being used in a political way because for me, this isn’t political. This is my family, this is my child,” she said. “I dropped to the floor, and I cried.” 

Yeah, it just got worse and worse. The family eventually decided to leave the community altogether, because the asshole parents have decided to target a vulnerable child.

So the Waits are moving from the dream house they designed, the one where Kelsey spent hours hand painting murals. They are seeking more privacy, and they believe safety, in a new address that has not been publicized.
“That’s where we’re at right now. There are people that we know, that are not safe for our kids in our neighborhood,” Chris said. ”We can’t trust our kids alone at the bus stop waiting for the bus, not because of the kids necessarily, but because of the parents.” 

Goddamn TERFs. These are people who probably wouldn’t identify as any kind of feminist, though — they’re just hatemongers. And they’re everywhere.

Minnesota had a rather active intellectual life with an international reputation early in the 20th century. It had the bad — Moody Bible College, for instance, which was one of the formative centers of fundamentalist and evangelical Christian thought — but it also had some progressive thinkers, like Charles Malchow, who I’d never heard of before. Malchow was a doctor at Hamline University who was inspired to write an open-minded textbook about human sexuality, and suffered the consequences.

The Sexual Life (dedicated to Malchow’s mother, Marie), appeared in 1904, the same year Maclhow married Lydia Gluek, a daughter of the Minneapolis Gluek Brewing enterprise. The Sexual Life, over 300 pages, described in straightforward language a wide range of sex practices and problems—contraception, youthful experimentation, same-sex attraction, the physiology and psychology of sexual excitement, sexual pleasure, and sexual frustration. The book took particular aim at encouraging equality of knowledge and enjoyment for women and men.

As we’ll see, that is a charitable summary. The book does talk a lot about equality of the sexes, though, and seems to have triggered some knee-jerk reactions in the establishment.

In 1873 Congress had enacted the Comstock Act, which made using the US mail to distribute obscenity (including specifically any information about abortion) a felony. Malchow and Burton knew about the law and inquired of Minneapolis post office officials whether their advertising pamphlet—which described the book in detail—could be sent through the mail. The unhelpful answer merely referred them to the Comstock Act. They took a chance, and mailed 25,000 copies of the pamphlet to doctors, ministers, and lawyers around the country. The book quickly sold 3,000 copies.

In August 1904, just two months after Malchow’s marriage, a Minneapolis federal grand jury indicted Malchow and Burton for violating the Comstock Act. Trial began in October before Judge William Lochren, an Irish immigrant, a Civil War hero (he survived the famous charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg), and Minnesota’s second federal district judge. Lochren disapproved of The Sexual Life and made his views known to the jury, who quickly convicted both men. The First Amendment played no part in Malchow’s defense—it had not occurred to anyone at the time that the Constitution might protect the publication of explicit sexuality. And under the law of the time, Malchow and Burton were guilty of the crime.

Lochren gave both Malchow and Burton eighteen months in prison, later reduced to twelve. While their appeal made its way to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Malchow’s supporters appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt for a pardon. They failed: Roosevelt wrote that he found The Sexual Life “a hideous and loathsome book.” The Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in April 1906; Roosevelt declined the pardon in April; Malchow and Burton reported to Stillwater State Prison in May. They were released in March 1907.

Teddy thought this was a loathsome book? Well then, I must read it. Fortunately, The Sexual Life is freely available on the internet archive. It disappoints. It’s tame stuff for the 21st century, no illustrations, and it hammers away on the importance of traditional sexual and gender roles. Women can be equal to men, as long as their sexual behavior is exactly as would be expected in the pages of a Victorian romance novel — and not the seedy novels you could find under the table at men’s clubs, but the kind a gentlelady could be seen reading in public.

The word “natural” sure does a lot of heavy lifting in the text. It was “encouraging equality of knowledge and enjoyment for women and men”, but only within the narrow bounds of acceptable social behavior. Women were supposed to act one way, men another, and Medicine and Science would discourage any deviation.

It also doesn’t say much at all about same-sex attraction, briefly mentioning only male homosexuality (unthinkable that passive, mild-mannered ladies would consider such a thing), and then only to call it a perversion and dismiss it from further consideration.

Uh, right. I’m certainly not going to praise Malchow as an open-minded, forward-thinking person — the book is a paean to customary gender roles, and is built on conservative assumptions throughout.

He did go to prison for it, though, which was not just. It’s weird to read it now and realize that, for its time, it was a wildly libertine, radical perspective on sexuality. Nowadays, though, I could imagine Ben Shapiro or any of those crimped, narrow minds on the Right praising it as a great prescription for how we all should live now.