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‘Toast’ing Gov. Christie – and the male sex

February 27, 2015

Well, it’s official: My Chief Pretend Boyfriend, Gov. Krispy Kreme, er, Chris Christie has been proclaimed “toast” by The New York Times’ puckish Gail Collins. And by “toast” I don’t believe she means the kind spread with delicious Bonne Maman damson plum preserves.

No, I think she means the kind whose burnt offerings can never make it palatable. And all because he said he fixed New Jersey’s pension system and apparently didn’t. You know, it’s one thing to fail grandly, epically, sexily, like Coriolanus. But to fail in a manner that requires a boring Excel spreadsheet – ah, the cruel irony. I’m willing to bet that my little CPB is not even very good at math – another thing we have in common along with our love of the Jersey Shore, Springsteen and ice cream cones. While I contemplate whether or not it’s time to end my pretend relationship and promote WPB (Weekend Pretend Boyfriend) Rafael Nadal to CPB status, thereby elevating PB in training, Colin Kaepernick, to WPB, I want to note that there’s a new book that would make hay of the rise and sort of fall of my luv guv.

“Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy” by Dr. Melvin Konner (W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95, 404 pages) suggests that blustery males like Christie are basically, well, troglodytes who will have no place in the new evolutionary world order of consensus-building that dovetails with women’s strengths.

Konner does a good job of rounding up the usual cultural and historical suspects to paint a depressing portrait of man’s inhumanity to woman. Reading the litany of abuses made me at once angry and self-congratulatory: As an unmarried woman, I may not have what my married sisters have, but at least I have myself.

Where Konner is particularly on-the-money is in his discussion of the one thing that colors the male-female dynamic: Men rape; women do not. Men’s atavistic, animalistic propensity to violence, to sexual violence, makes it difficult for women to trust – and build relationships with – them. But he also implies that the male violence may be selected out in the evolutionary scheme of things.

I think Konner is more optimistic than I am. For one, it’s hard to imagine male brutality going out of style. Witness the popularity of war, terrorism and the NFL – all of which are promulgated b men, young and old, who seem to have a lot of rage and too much time on my hands.

But the members of my sex aren’t completely innocent in all this. Some of us have long since swallowed the male Kool-Aid. We find men charming, funny, entertaining, beautiful even. We’re happy to let them do the heavy lifting – as long as we can direct that lifting, even obliquely. We are ambivalent toward power, because we understand that its price is the many interests we have, including our children. We even support the male power dynamic. Among the posters who are welcoming back Adrian Peterson – the Minnesota Vikings star who’s been reinstated by the NFL after being suspended for taking a switch to his 4-year-old – were women who said there are different paths to discipline, that we shouldn’t judge, blah, blah, blah. ...

Fed, Davis Cup and ‘Just Say No’

February 25, 2015

Well, Feddy Bear has spoken and it’s ‘no’ to the Davis Cup this year.

Is it me, or does Roger Federer have a way of sounding self-centered even when he’s probably just trying to be logical?

"It wasn't a difficult decision," he was quoted as saying in Bleacher Report. "I have played for so long, and I think by winning it, I can finally do whatever I please, to be quite honest."

He also called the Davis Cup “a big burden” that lays on the guilt.

Reaction was predictable: “It’s ‘Me first’ again for Roger,” Mary Haw posted on the Bleacher Report report.

To be fair, Fed Ex does have a 50-17 record in Davis Cup. And he’s going to have to play it again to qualify for the Rio Olympics in 2016. Then, too, you have to pace yourself, particularly as you age. Sometimes you just have to say ‘no’ if you’re going to be fresh for tourneys, which are the main focus of a tennis player’s career.

That means ‘no’ to the guilt as well. In my novel “Water Music” and the upcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – both part of The Games Men Play series – the tennis players/swimmers and football players respectively are sometimes weighed down by the expectations of family and country. Tennis player Alí Iskandar – whose father is fond of quoting the biblical “To him to whom much has been given, much will be required” – wonders if there’s a statute of limitations on gratitude. Sometimes you have to put yourself first – something Feddy has no trouble doing.

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‘Shipping’ news

February 23, 2015

Still checking out the newly redesigned New York Times Magazine – so far, so good. But I was excited to see a page on “shipping” in the column Search Results by Jenna Wortham. And no, it wasn’t a column about Fed Ex.

Shipping is about relationshipping, or a romance between characters who are not otherwise romantically linked, such as Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Dr. John Watson on PBS’ “Sherlock.” (Drawings of them from the Tumblr website are featured on the Search Results page.)

Shipping, then, is the umbrella term for things like slash – gay pairings of characters who were not originally gay – and slash in turn includes male/male romance, which is where I come in. Though the characters in my series “The Games Men Play” – the swimmers and tennis players in “Water Music” and the football players in the forthcoming “The Penalty for Holding” – are entirely fictional, I won’t pretend that I wasn’t influenced by male/male romances I read on the Internet that either used real people (called RPF or real person fiction) or well-known fictional characters. ...

QBs vs. haters in digital duels

February 20, 2015

The latest tempest in a teapot comes courtesy of Washington Redskins’ quarterback Robert Griffin III and his San Francisco 49ers’ counterpart Colin Kaepernick, who recently took on critical fans via Instagram and Twitter respectively.

In RG’s case, he was jamming to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” on Instagram when a fan called him out for not acting like a quarterback.

Colin meanwhile tweeted a litany of “recovery day” activities – 1,000 abs, arm workout, 10 minutes straight on the jump rope, a two-hour study session. To which fan Stephen Batten replied, “ab workout won’t help find open receiver.” Which in turn led to a verbal pummeling from Colin that ended with “get better at life.”

My first reaction was, Why bother? Why bother to respond? In a 35-year career as a journalist, I’ve been praised and vilified, even threatened. Rarely have I responded, preferring instead to follow the dictum of my favorite British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli: “Never complain, never explain.”

And yet, I can understand. The fluidity and anonymity of the Internet are such that people respond with immediate, unfiltered vehemence. You’re punched, you counterpunch.

I think, however, this is about more than the culture of hatred bred by the web. It’s about our expectations of the quarterback, perhaps the most traditionally masculine occupation in the United States – expectations that weigh heavily on the gay, biracial quarterback at the heart of my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding.” ...

A-Rod, Ray Rice and the game of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’

February 18, 2015

Cue Connie Francis. In this “the winter of our discontent” – the season of 90-inch snowfalls, Southern ice, broken water pipes and equally shattered hearts – the lament of the woman with the catch in her voice and a torch-song life to match would seem most appropriate.

Really, it’s as if we’re all stuck in “Dr. Zhivago” – without Omar Sharif.

In this “region of ice” – thank you, Joyce Carol Oates – everyone is sorry. Ray Rice is sorry for cold-cocking his then wife-to-be, Janay Palmer, issuing an apology almost a year to the date of his Valentine’s Day (image) Massacre. (Could the holiday of hearts have been the inspiration?)

Hot on Ra-Ri’s Achilles heels comes A-Rod and his handwritten apology for steroid abuse and – the thing that always does you in more than the transgression itself – lying about it.

And speaking of lying, opprobrium and ridicule continue to snow down on disgraced anchorman Brian Williams for aggrandizing his role in the Iraq War – although Jerry Seinfeld’s line on the SNL 40th anniversary show about Williams being part of the original “Saturday Night Live” cast was one of the subtler digs. The irony is that the talk show-minded Williams probably counted as friends many of the people now making fun at his expense. Ouch.

Let’s just say Williams should be glad that he’s not A-Rod. The disdain heaped on him by The New York Times’ columnist Tyler Kepner is typical of the way in which the once and apparently future New York Yankee is now viewed. There are two schools of thought on this. One says that justice is justice and compassion, like patience, has its limits, particularly as said limited patience is often accompanied by the sneaking suspicion that the contrite are not all that contrite but actually seeking something less noble than the epic redemption found in Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” say like a return to the Yanks or the NFL. (It reminds you of the moment in “Gone With the Wind” in which Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O’Hara that she’s like the thief who isn’t sorry for what he’s done but is awfully sorry he got caught.) ...

SI’s swimsuit issue and the power of (the male) sex

February 15, 2015

Picked up my first-ever copy of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, which I bought for one reason and one reason alone – an image of a man.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I have to write about Greenwich actress Kelly Rohrbach, one of the featured “rookie” models, in my guise as editor of WAG magazine. But mainly I bought the Swimsuit issue for the two-page Levi’s spread featuring San Francisco 49ers ‘quarterback Colin Kaepernick, his teammate Vernon Davis and model Samantha Hoopes. (The Niners play in Levi’s Stadium.)

The ad campaign is about the most wholesome thing in the mag, which veers now and again into Playboy territory. The cover in particular has the media once again wringing their hands over whether or not SI went too far with a depiction of Hannah Davis in an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, not-yellow-polka-dot bikini, the bottom of which she has pulled down to the top of her pubic region. This is a popular new trend in posing models – having them hook their thumb or thumbs in one or both sides of the pants or skirt to hint at the treasures and pleasures beneath. Colin does it on the cover of the fall/winter issue of VMan magazine. And a young woman holding a basketball does it in the Feb. 15 edition of T, The New York Times Style Magazine. ...

The road warrior

February 14, 2015

What a terrible week for journalists. The Brian Williams debacle. Jon Stewart’s departure from “The Daily Show. “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon’s death in a car crash. Media columnist David Carr’s fatal collapse in The New York Times newsroom.

What I want to touch on here is Simon’s death, for at a moment when Williams is being castigated for exaggerating his war correspondent cred, Simon was the real deal. Vietnam. The Yom Kippur War. Tiananmen Square. The Persian Gulf War, in which he and four members of his TV crew were held in Iraq, an experience Simon wrote about in his book “Forty Days.” How ironic that a man who survived a dangerous professional life abroad should die on the streets of New York, the city in which he was born and raised, although maybe it’s not so ironic when you consider the livery driver’s rap sheet.

But this is a sports/culture blog, and so what I’d like to leave you with is another side of Simon, who profiled Novak Djokovic for “60 Minutes” on March 27, 2012. ...