Thank you. Maybe he figured if he buried the dippiest of dipshit ideas in that comma orgy, no one would notice how nanners it was.

“Your job doesn’t stop until you’re voted out, or until your term expires,” Obama said of the Senate,

This is a great point. A 20-something should know that it’s illegal and inappropriate to give alcohol to and have sex with a 15 year old. Yes it turned out ok in this case but others may look back years later and feel victimized. It should always be on the adult to make the right decision.

“I think I echo your sense of confusion around what it really means to say that “the times were different,” and how that is both simultaneously an explanation and a failure of an explanation.”

I don’t think the law is about why or whether you wanted to have sex with him. The law is about why or whether an adult wants to have sex with a teenager. It’s totally understandable that teenagers glamorize and desire older men - everything about that time in our lives says hurry, grow up! As teenagers, we are naive…

I unfortunately think that little has changed... I wasn’t alive in the 70s so I can’t speak to that, but I remember still getting attention from men my dad’s age and older starting from around age 11 or 12 in the early/mid 2000s... I was tall and well-endowed, sure, but I was clearly and obviously a child. It didn’t…

Her word should count for quite a bit when discussing her own situation, much less so when discussing policy or societal norms.

I question whether an arguement of law can be applied here. It was legal for people to marry under age girls at one point and force them to have sex. Even though it was legal they are still rapists. In some states it wasn’t (still isn’t?) considered rape if you were married. they are still rapists. He wasn’t tried so…

i mostly see a “it was the times!!” excuse. which makes me feel bad for all victims of sexual assault before, what? 1985? like theirs doesnt count

I think part of what makes these conversations so difficult is that we can’t ever hold them in a truly safe space. We can’t have a real conversation about the grey areas in sexuality without some creep jumping in to be like, “Exactly, it’s complicated, that’s why I’m not a rapist.” We feel pressure to be like “CONSENT…

I was 13-14 in the mid-70s, and I got a lot of attention from grown men. I was thrilled by it. Boys my age either ignored me, barked at me, or called me names. Adult men talked to me like I was a person, admired me, complemented me. At the time, it was bliss, and I felt it made me special. And thanks mainly to a lack…

I appreciate your willingness to write a story that reflects deep ambivalence. I think there isn’t enough of that anymore (everything is always strident and polarized) but you did a great job sitting with the murkiness of what this all means about Bowie’s legacy.

“...you can understand how Lori Maddox could have possibly developed not just a sincere desire to fuck adult men but the channels to do it basically in public; why an entire scene encouraged her, photographed her, gave her drugs that made all of it feel better, loved her for it, celebrated her for it, for years. You…

Taylor Swift winning album of the year is some serious bullshit. Kendrick Lamar and Alabama Shakes were far more deserving. I guess we couldn’t go one awards season without having America’s favorite little white princess playing the underdog victim card. GAAAH I can’t stand her.

“I felt like I was being herded into a concentration camp or something.”

I will cop to enjoying South Park.

Can you elaborate on what exactly is “South Park” politics? If I’m a fan of South Park, do people assume I vote a certain way?

South Park can be fine in doses, but as a former fan (like most people back in my high school days, when the show first started airing, I thought it was this amazing, transgressive thing), I got really, really turned off at how so much of the point came to be to emptily poke at any sort of genuine, real-world social…

He [Donald Trump] gets South Park—its cheap spite, its self-congratulation, the fantasy that privileged scorn for political correctness is subversive, rather than the exact opposite—better than the Pauls ever did...

Ever since I was aware of “libertarian” as a political ideology, my friends have had the phrase, “South Park Libertarian.” It’s a very fitting description of the worst people.