Sherry Chandler

Back in the days of the Clinton presidency, Richard Mellon Scaife was one of his fiercest enemies. It may have been he and the money he put into discrediting Clinton that provoked Hillary to make her comment about the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” But according to the NYTimes:

Christopher Ruddy, who once worked full-time for Mr. Scaife investigating the Clintons and now runs a conservative online publication he co-owns with Mr. Scaife, said, “Both of us have had a rethinking.”

“Clinton wasn’t such a bad president,” Mr. Ruddy said. “In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today.”

I have to agree with Kevin Drum on this one:

…you have to be a pretty bad president to make Richard Mellon Scaife start pining away for the good old days of Bill Clinton. If there was any lingering doubt about whether George Bush is the worst president ever, or perhaps only the second or third worst, we should probably take this as a cosmic confirmation that the votes are in.

As to Hillary’s run for the presidency, the article allows as how these old attack dogs aren’t hunting.

As for the conservative response to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, Mr. Ruddy said, “The level of intensity and anger toward Hillary is not getting to the level that it was toward Bill Clinton when he was president.” He added, “She has moderated and developed a separate image.”

As a voter, I’m not sure whether I find that reassuring.

On the day before Valentine’s, Powells.com posted a review of I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love my Low Libido, in which the author, Joan Sewell is reported to say:

If I had a choice between reading a good book and having sex, the book wins. I notice I put in the adjective “good” — and that leaves me wondering if I’m not trying to put a better face on things.

Because I get behind in my reading, I just now got to this review, originally from The Atlantic Monthly. But it’s still February so maybe it’s still kosher to share this. I can’t say about the book, but Sandra Tsing Loh’s review is amusingly contra:

Maybe …female sexuality really is a culturally subversive little beastie. Not only do many women enjoy it best alone, but of their fantasies, perhaps the less said the better (in terms of humanity’s social progress). For women, though, the bizarre and the irregular might just be “normal.” And if so, as Sewell suggests, widespread pressure — from both the left and the right — for women to have a “normal,” at-least-two-times-a-week sex life may ultimately be geared to serve not women’s natural tendencies but men’s. Who sets the pace anyway? As Sewell notes, about the husband/wife divide:

No one is trying to lower men’s sex drives. I don’t hear, “Doctor, my sex drive is too high. Please, do something about it. I feel guilty and ashamed that I don’t want less sex. It’s killing my marriage.”

No one suggests, continues Sewell, that men take estrogen supplements to mellow out so they better complement the moods of women. Although that could have measurable benefits. After all, elevated testosterone levels in males have been linked to such social ills as murder and rape. And I have to admit, the urge to slap my own husband and vomit in a ditch comes not from sex but from what I feel is his kamikaze driving. When he’s at the wheel (i.e., always), I white-knuckle it, I close my eyes, I can barely restrain a scream. (Many wives feel this way. As a girlfriend said recently about her husband, “If any woman drove as ragefully as Ron, she’d be hospitalized!”)

In the end, both the book and the review seem to take a rather common sense approach to a subject that has made a lot of therapists rich:

sex — like life itself — involves a fair amount of tedium.

You should read the whole thing. For myself, I was pleased to learn that I’m not the only woman a little turned off by all the cultural pressure to perform. It’s not that I’d rather eat chocolate — at least not all the time — though I’m not so sure about the good book… It’s just that I’m congenitally contrary and don’t like to do things I “should” like to do. Maybe that’s why this was my favorite paragraph of all:

You know? If it were really about sensual female pleasure, everyone would stop waving the dildos already and let us eat. Sewell herself would “rather eat chocolate.” But even here a Puritan ethic crashes the would-be sybaritic fun. Yes, by all means, eat chocolate — not more than half an ounce, or approximately three-quarters of a teaspoon if you do not own a food scale, per week. And dark chocolate only — it wards off hypertension, is full of antioxidants. As for sex, just think of it as another cardiovascular workout, a self-improvement regimen not unlike aerobics (”sweating to the oldies,” we call it, at my age). That’s right. Sex — your sexologist/cardiologist commands it. Two to three times a week. Hop on that sex treadmill. Get your heart rate up, to at least 160 beats per minute. And drink plenty of water (avoid alcohol at all costs). It’s good for ya!