WP: Blog Interrupted (Jessica Cutler: new morality?)

[DeepModem Mom]

Blog Interrupted
When Jessica Cutler put her dirty secrets on the Web, she lost her job, signed a book deal, posed for Playboy -- and raised a ton of questions about where America is headed

By April Witt
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page W12


....(Jessica Cutler's) blog...was the online diary she had been posting anonymously to amuse herself and her closest girlfriends. In it, she detailed the peccadilloes of the men she said were her six current sexual partners, including a married Bush administration official who met her in hotel rooms and gave her envelopes of cash; a senator's staff member who helped hire her, then later bedded her; and another man who liked to spank and be spanked....(After her blog appeared on Wonkette), Jessica's unapologetically snarky chronicle of her busy sex life, her audacious refusal to keep the pawing patriarchy's dirty secrets, her contempt for honest but unglamorous public service, her cynical wit and sexy looks would combine with the power of the Web to launch her into low-orbit celebrity....

***

"She's a sign," says Daniel Yankelovich, the pollster and analyst who has been studying American values for 50 years. He means a sign of our times, as is Jessica's frumpy 21-year-old contemporary, Pfc. Lynndie England, whose gleeful mugging for the cameras as she mocked naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib unsettled the national conscience. Both women have left many people questioning: How did we get here?...

***

Feminist author Naomi Wolf...says modern sexual conduct offers a window into what's been gained and lost in the nation's values revolution. The sexual revolution, now stripped of much of its feminist political ideology, has left legions of young women free but confused. "I think the tipping point came three or four years ago with the first generation to grow up with the Internet," Wolf says. "They were daughters of feminists. The feminist message of autonomy got filtered through a pornographized culture. The message they heard was just go for it sexually....

***

"The country is taken aback by moral relativism in all of its forms," Yankelovich says. "To me, the best way of thinking about it is that people are now free to say: 'I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't break the law.' An earlier generation, my own generation growing up in the United States, would say, 'What has the law got to do with it?' The usual model for societies is that they have a very thin layer of law and a very thick layer of social morality. What this expressive individualism has done, as an unintended consequence, is weaken that layer of social morality to the point where it's almost disappeared."...


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54736-2004Aug10.html

[Nimrod]

1. Can't say I agree with this much...

There's too much here for me to tackle. I'll just say that some of my best friends are sluts, and I think they'd take a wee bit of offense to being called "confused".

[DeepModem Mom]

2. This article is a doozy -- long and controversial, but interesting! n/t

[Nimrod]

3. Not registered to read the whole article

But judging from these snippits, it looks pretty familiar. Sort of a paraphrase of "Since guys are nothing but penises with legs it's the women who must be held accountable". I could be wrong, but that's the meaning I've inferred here.

I read an interview with Nina Hartley once that I really liked. She said "Who's being more offensive, the person who's wanking off to a picture of my boobs or the one who's saying 'Look at that poor woman, she has no soul'"?

[DeepModem Mom]

5. Very little is said about men in the article, which focuses on women...

but that might indicate that you have a point about its theme. Here's the rest of Naomi Wolf's statement, however:

"What is gained is (young women) totally reject the double standard and believe they are entitled to sexual exploration and sexual satisfaction," Wolf says. "The downside is we've raised a generation of young women -- and men -- who don't understand sexual ethics like: Don't sleep with a married man; don't sleep with a married woman; don't embarrass people with whom you had a consensual sexual relationship. They don't see sex as sacred or even very important anymore. That's been lost. Sex has been commodified and drained of its deeper meaning."

[liveoaktx]

4. Thin layer of law vs thick layer of social morality reversed-that's Bush

Bush and the Law -G8

Troublesome how he has skirted this issue of whether it was an ETHICAL or MORAL issue not to torture people by pinning it strictly on the law, as the article says "I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't break the law" but of course he was asking his attorneys how he could do this underhanded scheme by finding loopholes in the law that allowed him to act above the law.

[NashVegas]

6. Great Exposé on Hypocrisy

The tittering hordes vilified Jessica even as they pursued her, denouncing her online, around office coolers and in commentaries from the left and right. Jessica thinks she knows why. In a culture increasingly nervous about its own values, numbly sinking into the sofa at night to watch trash reality TV shows and wondering if our own 14-year-old sons and daughters are casually "hooking up," it's satisfying to have a bona fide blog slut to flog.

[DeepModem Mom]

7. As the writer, Ms. Witt, says: "our blog slut." From article --

"In other words, we can denounce Jessica Cutler and call her a blog slut if it makes us feel any better. But she is, for better or worse, our blog slut."

[Blue_Tires]

8. i'll be glad when her 15 mins are up

so she knows how to sleep around and shoot her mouth off about it...bfd. what?? are we actually supposed to be proud of her or something??

[acmavm]

9. Proud of her, no. Apparently though, her lack of integrity, ethics, or

morals aren't her fault. It's an 'everybody does it' or 'whatever it takes to get ahead' kind of thing.

What makes me curious is what differentiates her from the run-of-the-mill street corner hooker? I.Q.? Upbringing? Color of her skin? The men she slept with?

Just curious.

edit: spelling