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STATE OF THE ART SEPT. 14, 2016

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Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author, with Thomas E. Mann, of “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.”

TORONTO (Reuters) - About 1,500 Americans floating down a river that separates the United States from Canada had to be rescued from the water when strong rains and winds sent them illegally into Canadian territory, the country's coast guard said on Monday.

The Americans were taking part in the annual Port Huron Float Down on Sunday in the St. Clair River, which runs between the U.S. state of Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario.

The winds blew the flotilla of inflatable rafts and inner tubes off course and toward the Canadian shore. Some rafts deflated, spurring a rescue effort by the Canadian Coast Guard as well as federal and provincial police, coast guard spokeswoman Carol Launderville said in an email.

Most "floaters" had to be rescued from the water, with many towed to shore, according to the coast guard.

"They were terrified of entering another country without documentation. No one carries their passport or any ID, and a lot were drinking alcohol," Peter Garapick, superintendent of search and rescue for the coast guard, told CBC television.

Some tried to swim back to the United States.

"We had to pull a lot of people out of the water and say 'no,'" Garapick said.

The Americans were gathered at Sarnia, Ontario, and bussed back to the United States by the city's public transit.

Sarnia police did not say whether anyone was charged in the incident and there were only minor injuries reported.

Launderville said the event has no official organizer and poses "significant and unusual hazards" due to the river's fast-moving current and participants' lack of life jackets.

A Facebook page for the event, which dates back more than 30 years in the city of Port Huron, west of the border from Sarnia, made a post Sunday night thanking Canadian authorities.

"You've shown us true kindness and what it means to be amazing neighbors!" the post read.

The Facebook page appears to be operated by a group named Port Huron Float Down, which says on its website it is not an organizer. The page's operators did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Ethan Lou in Toronto; Editing by Andrew Hay)

by Nancy Jo Sales

Knopf, 404 pp., $26.95

Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

by Peggy Orenstein

Harper, 301 pp., $26.99

By some measures, girls appear to be faring rather well in twenty-first-century America. Teenage pregnancy rates have been in steady decline since the 1990s. Girls have higher graduation rates than their male counterparts at all educational levels. The popular culture abounds with inspirational images and anthems of girls “leaning in” and “running the world.” But according to two new, rather bleak books, these official signs of progress have given us an unduly rosy impression of the modern girl’s lot.

In American Girls, a study based on interviews with more than two hundred girls, Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales argues that the most significant influence on young women’s lives is the coarse, sexist, and “hypersexualized” culture of social media. American girls may appear to be “among the most privileged and successful girls in the world,” she writes, but thanks to the many hours they spend each day in an online culture that treats them—and teaches them to treat themselves—as sexual objects, they are no more, and perhaps rather less, “empowered” in their personal lives than their mothers were thirty years ago.

All young female social media users, Sales contends, are assailed “on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis” by misogynist jokes, pornographic images, and demeaning comments that “are offensive and potentially damaging to their well-being and sense of self-esteem.” In addition to this steady stream of low-level sexual harassment, many girls are subject to more aggressive forms of sexual teasing and coercion: having their attractiveness crudely assessed on “hot or not” websites, receiving unsolicited “dick pics” on their phones, being pestered or blackmailed for nude photos. (A group of thirteen-year-olds in Florida explain to Sales that girls who acquiesce to demands for “nudes” run the risk of having their photos posted on amateur porn sites, or “slut pages,” while those who demur are usually punished in some other way—by being branded “prudes,” or by having sexual rumors spread about them.)

The unsparing gaze that social media train on girls’ sexuality—the supreme value that they place on being sexually appealing—engenders a widespread female anxiety about physical appearance that is highly conducive to “self-objectification,” Sales claims. All of her interview subjects agree that on sites like Instagram and Facebook, female popularity (as quantified by the number of “likes” a girl’s photos receive) depends on being deemed “hot.” “You have to have a perfect body and big butt,” a fifteen-year-old from the Bronx observes grimly. “For a girl, you have to be that certain way to get the boys’ attention.” Girls who spend long enough in this competitive beauty pageant atmosphere don’t need to be coerced into serving themselves up as masturbatory fantasies, Sales argues. Taking their cues from celebrities like Kim Kardashian—whose vast following on Instagram Sales identifies as a marker of social media’s decadent values—they post “tit pics,” “butt pics,” and a variety of other soft-porn selfies as a means of guaranteeing maximum male attention and approbation. “I guarantee you,” a seventeen-year-old from New Jersey tells Sales,

every girl wishes she could get three hundred likes on her pictures. Because that means you’re the girl everybody wants to fuck. And everybody wants to be the girl everybody wants to fuck. Every girl who isn’t that girl secretly hates herself…. It’s empowering to be hot…. Being hot gets you everything.

The “empowering” nature of hotness is a theme that crops up frequently in Sales’s book. A number of the girls she meets vehemently reject the notion that they are oppressed or objectified on social media. On the contrary, they tell her, they are proud to be sexy “hos” and their highly sexualized self-presentation is a freely chosen expression of their “body confidence.” Naturally, Sales is not much persuaded by these claims. The fact that being “the girl everybody wants to fuck” can now be characterized as a bold, feminist aspiration is one measure, she suggests, of how successfully old-fashioned sexual exploitation has been sold to today’s teenage girls as their own “sex-positive” choice.

Peggy Orenstein, the author of Girls and Sex, is equally skeptical about the emancipatory possibilities of hotness. “Whereas earlier generations of media-literate, feminist-identified women saw their objectification as something to protest,” she writes, “today’s often see it as a personal choice, something that can be taken on intentionally as an expression rather than an imposition of sexuality.” Her investigation into the sex lives of teenage girls finds plenty of evidence to suggest that the confidence and power conferred by “a commercialized, one-dimensional, infinitely replicated, and, frankly, unimaginative vision of sexiness” is largely illusory. This generation of girls, she argues, has been trained by a “porn-saturated, image-centered, commercialized” culture “to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality.” As a result, they are eager to be desired, but largely clueless about what their own desires might be, or how to satisfy them; they go to elaborate lengths to attract male sexual interest, but regard sex itself as a social ritual, a chore, a way of propitiating men, rather than as a source of pleasure.

Orenstein, it is worth noting, is not concerned about the quantity of sex that young women are having. (There is, she points out, no evidence to suggest that rates of sexual intercourse among young people have risen in recent decades.^*) Her interest lies rather in the quality of young women’s sexual experiences. “The body as product…is not the same as the body as subject,” she observes sternly.

Nor is learning to be sexually desirable the same as exploring your own desire: your wants, your needs, your capacity for joy, for passion, for intimacy, for ecstasy…. The culture is littered with female body parts, with clothes and posturing that purportedly express sexual confidence. But who cares how “proud” you are of your body’s appearance if you don’t enjoy its responses?

Orenstein interviewed more than seventy young women for her book, each of them chosen to represent those who had “benefited most from women’s economic and political progress.” All were at college or college-bound, and almost all struck her as “bright, assertive, ambitious” students. Yet their sexual histories, she reports, were characterized less by joy, ecstasy, or even minimal satisfaction than by discomfort, intimidation, and a chronic lack of “self-efficacy.” Half of them had suffered “something along the spectrum of coercion to rape.” And much of what they described about even their consensual experiences was “painful to hear.” Although many of them led active sex lives and professed to find sex “awesome,” few had ever achieved orgasm with a partner. (Most of them had faked it.) And while the majority of them regarded providing oral sex as a mandatory feature of the most fleeting sexual encounter, they rarely received, or expected to receive, oral sex in return. (Several rejected the idea of cunnilingus as embarrassing and worried that their vaginas were “ugly, rank, unappealing.”)

Some of the misery of teenage girls’ sexual experiences is attributable, Orenstein contends, to the “hookup culture” in which sex, “rather than being a product of intimacy…has become its precursor, or sometimes its replacement.” (Rates of female orgasm are much lower for casual encounters, she notes, than for sex that takes place within committed relationships.) Another contributing factor, she suggests, is the part that pornography now plays in determining normative standards of teenage sexual behavior. As one example of this, she points to the fact that most of her interview subjects had been dutifully shaving or waxing their “bikini areas” since the age of fourteen. (Rather like Ruskin, whose ideas about the naked female form are said to have been gleaned from classical statuary, modern porn-reared boys expect female genitalia to be hairless.)

She also notes that, in the years since the Internet made hardcore porn widely accessible to teenage boys, anal sex has become a more or less standard feature of the heterosexual repertoire. (In 1992, only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four had tried anal sex; today, the figure has risen to 40 percent.) Despite the fact that most girls report finding anal penetration unpleasant or actively painful, they often, Orenstein claims, feel compelled to be good sports and submit to it anyway. (According to one study she cites, girls are four times as likely as boys to consent to sex they don’t want.) Among the girls she interviewed, the most common reasons given for doing so were a fear of being considered “uptight” and a desire to avoid “awkwardness.”

History has taught us to be wary of middle-aged people complaining about the mores of the young. The parents of every era tend to be appalled by the sexual manners of their children (regardless of how hectic and disorderly their own sex lives once were, or still are). There were some in the 1950s who were pretty sure that the decadent new practice of “going steady” augured moral disaster. Both Sales and Orenstein have undoubtedly grim and arresting information to impart about the lives of American girls. And neither of them can be dismissed as a sexual puritan. (They are not troubled about teenagers leading active sex lives, they assure us, only about the severely limited forms in which female sexuality is currently allowed to express itself; they are not even against casual sex per se, just eager to ensure that there should be, as Orenstein puts it, “reciprocity, respect, and agency regardless of the context of a sexual encounter.”) Even so, neither of their books entirely avoids the exaggerations, the simplifications, the whiff of manufactured crisis that we have come to associate with this genre.

Both writers make rather invidious comparisons between the frenzied, romance-free social lives of today’s young women and their own halcyon youths. Sales recalls walking back from school with her ninth-grade boyfriend to do homework together at her house. “The point of being together was not to have sex, necessarily. It was to become intimate,” she writes. Orenstein observes that her college experience was not about binge-drinking and hook-ups, but “late-night talks with friends, exposure to alternative music and film, finding my passions, falling in love.”

To use these sun-dappled recollections of life before the iPhone as a way of pointing up the misery of girls’ present conditions is a little misleading. To be sure, certain kinds of sexism have been amplified—or perhaps transmitted more efficiently—in the Internet era, and girls are now under pressure to present themselves as pliable sexual creatures at a much earlier age than they have been in the past. But even in the far-off 1970s and 1980s, young women experienced their share of exploitation, abuse, and unsatisfactory sex. Witness the feminist writer Ellen Willis drily reporting on the state of the sexual revolution in 1973:

For men, the most obvious drawback of traditional morality was the sexual scarcity—actual and psychic—created by the enforced abstinence of women…. Sex was an illicit commodity, and whether or not a sexual transaction involved money, its price almost always included hypocrisy; the “respectable” man who consorted with prostitutes and collected pornography, the adolescent boy who seduced “nice girls” with phony declarations of love (or tried desperately to seduce them)….

Men have typically defined sexual liberation as freedom from these black-market conditions: the liberated woman is free to be available; the liberated man is free to reject false gentility and euphemistic romanticism and express his erotic fantasies frankly and openly…. Understandably, women are not thrilled with this conception of sexual freedom.

If the good old days were never as good as both writers are wont to imply, the dark days of our present era are not quite as unremittingly desperate either. Notwithstanding the vicious influence of pornography, social media, and Miley Cyrus, contemporary girls still manage to have high school boyfriends; some of them even get around to watching alternative films at college. Fifteen-year-olds may go online to learn how to perform fellatio, but they also post fearsome rebukes to boorish boys on Facebook and have lengthy debates on Twitter about whether or not Kim Kardashian is really a good “role model.” Girls use editing apps to whiten their teeth in their selfies and fret about the size of their “booties,” but they also celebrate the sororal power of “girl squads” and attend Nicki Minaj concerts to hear the rapper sermonize on why a woman should never be financially dependent on a man.

Sales portrays social media as an irresistible and ubiquitous force in the lives of young women. All of the girls in her book, regardless of their socioeconomic background or individual circumstances, are presented as being equally in thrall to their phones and computers. Some are queen bees, most are drones, but all are trapped in the social media hive. None of them appears to have a single cultural resource or pursuit outside of its ambit. (The one exception is a young woman who doesn’t own a smartphone—but that’s because she’s homeless and itinerant.) Is this an accurate representation of social media’s utter dominion, one wonders, or a reflection of Sales’s rather narrow line of questioning? (If you gathered up two hundred young women and asked them exclusively about their pets, you could probably write a shocking exposé of the outsized role that domestic animals play in the lives of American girls.)

Orenstein offers a rather more nuanced and measured account of the way girls live now, but she too has a tendency to underestimate the heterogeneity of teenage culture and the multiplicity of ways in which girls engage with it. At the start of her book she notes that the meanings of cultural phenomena are complex. Selfies are neither simply “empowering” nor simply “oppressive,” and wearing a short skirt is neither just “an assertion of sexuality” nor just “an exploitation of it.” Better, she suggests, to think of these issues in terms of “both/and.” Yet more often than not, she ignores this advice and opts for the reductive language of “might seem, but is actually.” Thus, Beyoncé may appear to be an inspiring, powerful figure, but she is actually “spinning commodified sexuality as a choice.” Girls may think they’re powerful when they look hot, but in fact, “‘hot’ refracts sexuality through a dehumanized prism regardless of who is ‘in control.’”

Orenstein is most convincing when she addresses the passivity, the “concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure,” that characterize her interview subjects’ approach to sex. Young women’s propensity to give male satisfaction priority over their own is not a new development, but Orenstein is surely right to be indignant about how little has changed in this regard over the last fifty years. Her belief that new, stricter definitions of consent on college campuses are a step toward establishing “healthy, consensual, mutual encounters between young people” is perhaps unduly optimistic. Setting aside the question of whether it is useful or fair to apply the bright line of “yes means yes” to sexual situations that tend, by her own admission, to be blurry and complicated, the new college codes assume a female confidence, a willingness to challenge the primacy of men’s sexual wishes, that many of Orenstein’s subjects have specifically demonstrated they lack. Making young men more vigilant about obtaining consent and discouraging their tendency “to see girls’ limits as a challenge to overcome” is no doubt essential, but if young women are still inclined to say “yes” when they mean “no”—are more willing to endure unwanted sex than to risk being considered prudish—the new standards of consent would seem to be of limited value.

Far more interesting and persuasive are Orenstein’s recommendations for revising the American approach to sex education. In place of the failed “abstinence-only” programs (that have used up $1.7 billion in government funding over the last thirty-five years) she proposes offering classes that frankly address all aspects of teenage sexuality, including female pleasure. (Even the most comprehensive sex education classes currently on offer in high schools fail to mention the existence of the clitoris, she notes.) In addition to candid discussions of “masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and orgasm,” this new sex education curriculum would offer guidance on how to make decisions and to “self-advocate” in sexual encounters.

The idea of encouraging girls to speak up for themselves—of promoting their ability to ask for what they want and to refuse what they don’t—seems an eminently sensible one. “Assertiveness training” for women has gone out of fashion in recent years. Indeed much of the recent discourse about girls and sex has tended to reinforce rather than to challenge the idea of female vulnerability and victimhood. It would be a salutary thing to have some old-school feminist pugnacity injected back into the culture.

An Omaha dad who mistakenly ate some marijuana brownies didn’t enjoy the experience.

Omaha police officers were called to a house near 90th and Maple Streets about 9:45 p.m. Tuesday to investigate an accidental overdose. They learned that a 53-year-old man had been unloading groceries and found some brownies in the back seat of a car that his adult children had used earlier in the day.

The man ate four of the brownies.

[Read more: Hansen: Pot Dad, back from accidental trip, talks about being 'really, really high' and his cat's true nature]

The man’s wife told police that as she and her husband were watching TV, he noted that he was getting “bad anxiety.” She tried to call their children to ask them what was in the brownies but couldn’t reach them. (The woman told officers that she would rather not provide her children’s names because she thought they could get in trouble. An Omaha police spokesman said the investigation into the matter has concluded.)

While police were at the house, one of the couple’s children arrived and told officers the brownies belonged to his siblings. He told them he was “pretty sure it was just marijuana in the brownies,” according to a police report.

Paramedics called to the scene who checked the man found his vital signs to be normal. But they noted that he was displaying odd behavior — crawling around on the floor, randomly using profanities and calling the family cat a "bitch."

The man told paramedics he felt like “he’s trippin’.” He declined their offer to be taken to the hospital.

The paramedics helped the man to his bedroom and he got into bed. The man and his wife were told to call 911 again if his situation worsened.

Contact the writer: 402-444-1272, kevin.cole@owh.com

1. “I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work.”

2. “Why are you so obsessed with me?”

3. “It’s almost like… does he watch television?”

4. “He put on glasses so people will think he’s smart. And it just doesn’t work! You know people can see through the glasses.”

5. “I, like, invented her, you know what I mean?”

6. “My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”

7. “The beauty of me is that I’m very rich.”

8. “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.”

9. “Get in, loser.”

10. “Her ass is too fat.”

Donald Trump: 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10
Regina George: 2, 5, 9

Donald Trump rolled out a new presidential campaign logo on Friday and, well, the internet thinks it looks a little, errrrr, phallic. 

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee announced his running mate on Friday: Indiana Governor Mike Pence. So naturally, Trump needed to incorporate his new bud into his campaign logo, and this was the best that they came up with.

SEE ALSO: The internet tells Trump his rumored VP choice sucks

I am pleased to announce that I have chosen Governor Mike Pence as my Vice Presidential running mate. News conference tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2016

From campaign email, here’s the Trump-Pence 2016 logo... pic.twitter.com/elp0qYMM9n

— Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) July 15, 2016

Someone had the brilliant idea to take the T in Trump and P for Pence and mash them into one sexy letter. Yes, Trump's T is penetrating Pence's P. 

They added a bit of American flair with a red, white and blue color scheme.

Naturally, the internet took note of Trump's sexy patriotic letters and decided to poke fun. 

Breaking the mattress of America. pic.twitter.com/M4Cq62YS2c

— Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) July 15, 2016

What is the T doing to that P? https://t.co/tDvYm2QJYi

— John Dingell (@JohnDingell) July 15, 2016

or something@JuddLegum pic.twitter.com/0AJJDFqiSp

— darth™ (@darth) July 15, 2016

I’m sorry, but the most offensive part of the Trumppence logo is hands down that damn exclamation point pic.twitter.com/LjP7mxjb9e

— Dustin Drankoski (@DownSmileyFace) July 15, 2016

Cornholio approves of the #TrumpPence logo. pic.twitter.com/V4Dtny7zPN

— Some donkus (@rabid_child) July 15, 2016

#trumppence logo is literally donald fucking pence #tooreal pic.twitter.com/zovyUekfxV

— Matthew Blake (@MatthewBlake) July 15, 2016

Ppl keep saying the #TrumpPence logo is like the T fucking the P but it could also be the T pooping into a toilet pic.twitter.com/o5Og9PjiFV

— the food curmudgeon (@FoodCurmudgeon) July 15, 2016

Let's not read any symbolism into the new Trump-Pence logo people! pic.twitter.com/Zgb85wsAPX

— David Bach (@DBachYSOM) July 15, 2016

TP used to stand for 'toilet paper'. It now stands for a different kind of asswipe. #TrumpPence pic.twitter.com/6SH1BjmYDl

— Chris (@bizona17) July 15, 2016

#politics Shocking! The new #Trump #Pence logo is here and it's NSFW! #NeverTrump @colbertlateshow pic.twitter.com/0F6VE8QN1a

— Lee Valentine Smith (@leevsmith) July 15, 2016

I really hope Hillary Clinton picks Sherrod Brown for VP so we can get this logo to rival Trump's. pic.twitter.com/fIDksMp0XH

— Annie Colbert (@anniecolbert) July 15, 2016

If you put the Hillary logo next to the Trump logo, it looks like they're double-teaming Pence pic.twitter.com/gnlTzEZskM

— (((Political Math))) (@politicalmath) July 15, 2016

When you turn the Trump/Pence logo upside down, it literally looks like a handjob pic.twitter.com/4OLMD5H0sc

— Erin Gloria Ryan (@morninggloria) July 15, 2016

Trump/Pence logo: F'ing America again pic.twitter.com/SBZJe4tE7s

— Joe Jurney (@JoeJurney) July 15, 2016

Even Trump supporters decided the logo made them uncomfortable.

Love Trump but the "T" f*cking the"P" is off-putting. Logo needs work #Trump2016 #Pence #TrumpPence 🐯
pic.twitter.com/XujQCa3X0X

— Dirty Litterbox (@pdblaker) July 15, 2016

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