Matt Stoller asks the necessary questions about the latest weird conservative sex scandal.
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Why The Second Wetsuit?
10 Oct 2007 06:32 pm
Comments (35)
When I hear about weird fetishistic stuff like this, I don't reach for a Freudian explanation. I just assume it is the result of not having any other outlet, and self-experimenting until the subject discovers some weird-ass thing turns him on. He just didn't have a willing sex partner who could tell him, "Dude, two wetsuits is weird."
Oh God I'm gonna cum all over my keyboard.
That second wetsuit has got to be a real bitch to pull on.
I don't get it. What the hell do you do with two wetsuits? And why did he need rubber briefs, never mind what was inside them?
That is really bizarre. What kind of a wierdo wears uses 2 wetsuits when 3 are so much more fun...
Why not?
Yes, but what do you think of the Knicks re-signing Alan Houston (!)
Yes, but what do you think of the Knicks re-signing Alan Houston (!)
A second wetsuit probably has more practical value.
I actually read parts of the report - the part that made me feel sad was the 'personal effects' section. I assume that meant that his next of kin had to collect that stuff from the examiner after the autopsy. Made me cringe a bit.
From the post-mortem on TSG, it sounds like one wetsuit was a farmer john (basically overalls, no sleeves) and the other was maybe a diving suit (long sleeves, short legs). When I took scuba lessons, we had to suit up like this for cold water. The farmer john goes on first, the diving top over that, and the two suits only overlap on your torso and upper thighs. You can buy the two suits as a set:
http://www.scuba.com/scuba-gear-101/049181/XS-Scuba-7mm-Pyrostretch-2-Piece-Combo.html
I cannot explain why this would be useful or interesting for autoeroticism, however.
Oh, man, what I wouldn't give to stick Isiah Thomas and James Dolan in a couple (four?) of those suits for what they've done to the Knicks.
I cannot explain why this would be useful or interesting for autoeroticism, however.
It's got to be some kind of bondage kink. I once met a guy who liked to be wrapped up in cellophane wrap . . .
This sort of thing is like weightlifting--not wise to do it without a spotter . . .
For every fetish there are 38,600 websites.
I grew up among the surfer types. This one kid put his wetsuit on backwards the first time he went. He was ruined forever.
I feel for the guy and his family. To have your death become a little cog in the outrage machine between liberal and conservative bloggers is to really be used as a perverse object. But of course, every violation of privacy is justified for the highest cause.
How crappy the public discourse has become. How disgusting, pointless, and slug like. The real offenses happen every day in places like Iraq, are paid for by massive amounts of American money, and are acceded to be a less than spineless, a completely corrupt Democratic party, but hey - let's find some graduate of liberty university that played with himself and died while doing so! What a lot of fun.
What bullshit.
Happily, now that sex toys are illegal in Alabama, no one will discover their dead husband or father asphyxiated in two wetsuits with a dildo up his ass.
Just asphyxiated in two wetsuits, is all. What a relief!
I feel for the guy and his family. To have your death become a little cog in the outrage machine between liberal and conservative bloggers is to really be used as a perverse object.
Jesus gave the man fair warning: Judge not, that ye not be judged.
This is a man who was a leader of a movement to persecute others for their sexual practices.
There is no injustice in using the manner of this hypocrite's death to discredit his movement.
I'm sure rea. There's no injustice in snooping around the Graeme Frost's place, which we must all be dutifully outraged about. There's never any injustice, there is always some reason to continue this prank political merrygoround, where nothing seems to happen, but we can all be smugly happy that we can speculate that people we don't know had dildoes up their asses when they died. They all deserve it, everybody does. You do, I do. But personally, I find it sadly funny to see the same liberals rushing to scold Malkin and then doing the same thing on the first opportunity, which makes me think that there is something very wrong with the people who mold the political discourse in this country. It is like the U.S. has become a perpetual nightmare high school.
roger,
Your off the deep end on false equivilancy here.
What liberals are staking out this guys family's house?
Linking to a news story about the public death of a public figure is a far cry from harrasing the Frost family.
False equivalency my ass. On the one end, I bet you had never heard of this Alabama preacher before. That he was an aid to Fallwell seems to be enough to make him "public." On the other end, the Frost family made a speech for the Democratic reply to Bush. I call that pretty public.
I'm glad the Frosts stood up. I don't expect them to be stalked and attacked at random by the right. But the same holds true for this alabama preacher, and his kids, and his wife.
The only rule here is the rule of the jungle, or the chess board. So no, I'm not off the deep end finding this continual feeding of false indignation to be hypocritical and a convenient distraction from anything really ever happening except one episode of indignation after another, a hopeless game.
Roger apparantly you don't know what the word equivalency means. When liberals start hanging out at this guy's house and digging into his family's finances and calling them demanding they justfy themselves they will be treating them the same way Malkin et al are treating the Frosts.
Again, since you didn't seem to get it the first time, merely linking to articles about this aren't putting any burden on his family, I doubt they are reading Matt's or any other liberal blogs.
Also, there is nothing false about being indignant at people who are actively trying to deny rights to homosexuals. This guy wasn't just some unknown preacher, he worked for Falwell, and was presumably active in pushing Falwell's political agenda.
Give me a break. If I put up naked pics of you on the Internet, it wouldn't be "harming' you if I put them in some area you wouldn't visit, eh?
I think raw story grabbing a police report is, contra you, a pretty big reach into this guy's family's privacy. And you can presume all you want about Fallwell's organization. That's what I mean - you presume the enemy is always fair game, and that your side is never fair game. I definitely think Malkin stalking around the Frost house is disgusting, but I also think the whole 'this isn't equivalent business cause we are just' thing is the typical cry of the morally blind. It has resounded to justify atrocities, minor and major, throughout history. It stinks as an excuse.
Moreover, it is complicit in the prank politics that characterizes this netrooty time, in which indignation at these various minor affairs overwhelms real questions: for instance, why is the netroots party condoning torture, giving a pass to taxing the wealthy owners of private buyout firms that even Ronald Reagan would blush at, and seemingly unable to even consider reigning in the mercenary comnpanies in Iraq? No, instead, I'm supposed to make up jokes about the death of Fallwell's aide, who surely deserved it, even though I don't know what he said and never heard of him before, such a public personality is he.
The outrage politics of right wing talk radio works for the right, actually, because the right is all about a world of fixed enemies and friends. Liberalism takes the more difficult, morally complicated view that you cannot morally imagine the other unless you have some sense of how the other lives - making it difficult to draw targets on people and shoot arrows into them. When the liberals take up the morals of talk radio, they lose their soul and their reason to exist, becoming proxies for fake politics.
Roger:
Didn't they grab a public document that they or anyone else have the right to grab and do what they like with?
By the standard Roger is using, writing news articles about the death of somewhat public figures are equal to stalking a family and sending death threats. When a Republican US attorney from Florida recently was arrested for soliciting sex from a minor, Andrew Sullivan leaked to it once and the story died. Laughing is now somehow immoral when something is silly (like a minister jerking off in a wetsuit) and hypocritical.
thesmokinggun.com reported it and released the documents. They are not a liberal blog, they are owned by Court TV.
Color me skeptical that a guy managed to hogtie himself several times over while wearing two diving suits, a mask, and swim gloves and with a foreign object inserted in himself. Wouldn't that be an awfully difficult maneuver to perform by yourself?
roger,
get over yourself, your equating us all getting a laugh out of the exposure of another hypocrite on the rigth with the attacks on the Frost family
If your don't see the difference the one with moral compass issues is you.
Of course, there is another significant difference between what's going on with the sad death of the preacher and what's going on with the Frosts. Yes, in both cases someone *could* claim "invasion of privacy" or "private lives being used as weapons in a partisan debate" and frame the two cases in such a way that made them equivalent. That misses the biggest difference.
In the case of conservative bloggers and the Frosts, they are pushing false information to attack the Frosts. It isn't that they are going after the family or whether or not they should be fair game, its that the arguments they use are shoddy, deceitful and false. In reality, the Frosts are a good example of why S-CHIP is needed. In the case of the liberal bloggers and the dead preacher, folks are simply linking to a document and making comments like "wow, funny who supports the anti-gay agenda isn't it?" In terms of whether or not something is true, the two cases have *nothing* in common.
And yes, its debatable how much of someone's "private" life remains private when they enter the public arena . . . but come on, saying stuff that isn't true about someone is way different than saying stuff that is true, no matter whether it is public or private information.
Look, what's objectionable about the treatment of the Frost family by Malkin and other right wingnutsis not that the right wingnuts looked at matters of public record regarding the Frosts' finances. That's the price one pays for taking part in public controversy.
What's objectionable about what happened to the Frosts was (1) most of the claims about the family's finances turned out to be willful distortions or flat-out lies, and (2) the rightwingnuts did not limit themselves to googling the Frost family, or searching courthouse documents--they started lurking about the Frost house and confronting their neighbors, co-workers and friends.
If you think these two instances are equivalent, you have a problem telling right from wrong.
Roger: I think raw story grabbing a police report is, contra you, a pretty big reach into this guy's family's privacy
Well, you're wrong. The report doesn't reveal anything at all about his family (except that he's probably married - the corpse was wearing a "yellow metal ring"). I've read the various writeups, and I haven't learned anything about his family. What's his wife's name? No idea. What does she think about this? No idea. Has he got any kids? No idea.
His privacy has been invaded, true, but I think there's a pretty good case for arguing that, just as the dead cannot be libelled, they cannot suffer from an invasion of privacy.
Wouldn't that be an awfully difficult maneuver to perform by yourself?
(1) Practice, practice, practice!
(2) Evidently, he didn't have it quite perfected yet, or we wouldn't know about it.
What apostropher said. How did he do that? Did he have any help?
Whem someone kills himself in a particularly unusual way, I think he has no reasonable explactation of privacy.
For starters, he is bit too stiff to expect anything. But if you do stuff so bizarre, so ghastly and hilarious in the same time, how can you expect people to just shrug it off, say, "rest in piece" and continue with their daily lives with NARY A REMARK TO THEIR FRIENDS OR CO-BLOGGERS?
Mind you, nothing much happens in Iraq right now, the most recent news from DC is that Democrats can be whores to the least deserving beneficiaries of tax loopholes (oh, surprise!), etc.
And we learn! In one blog, I learned why condom around dildo was useful, and here, why two wetsuits are really two pieces of one warm suit.
And we can get money making ideas! Someone should make a self-asphyxiation contraption with electronic controls that would make such an accident almost impossible. Perhaps in the form of an attachment to some Nautilus-like machine. Think of all families that could be spared the grief!
I realized that while it is OK to say "rest in piece", it is not quite OK to write it.
A more serious remark: Russian (which I only somewhat familiar with) has some neat words for person who do certain stuff together. Sotrudnik-s work together (or "share toil"), sputnik-s ytavel together (or "share the road"), sobutylniks drink together (or, "share a bottle"), sovremennin-s are contemorary with each other (or, "share time"), it that vein, soblogger could be a useful word, or "scommenter" or "stroll".
This is "news" because it's weird--and sadly funny. Stop being such relativists for a moment. I realize there are people who have all sorts of odd sex practices. We're supposed to be accepting, I think, but often we're not, because stuff is just plain weird.
Comments closed October 24, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Maybe its like when two coffee filters stick together and you don't notice...
OK, probably not.
Posted by Njorl | October 10, 2007 6:42 PM