"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression toward women or men. Their social responsibility goes beyond the gate or the door. Maybe the answer is for the towns like Williston to heavily tax the companies so that they can afford to police the men the companies employ. If business doesn't see itself more broadly as a player in the overall health of our society, government needs to step in."

That's a reader comment at the NYT article about all the single men working out in the oil fields of North Dakota, which we've been talking about over in this earlier thread. Please go to that thread to talk about the article more generally. I'm opening up this new thread for discussion of the proposition that business should be responsible for the after-work activities of their employers, that the tendency of men to go out after work looking for female companionship calls for the heavy taxation of business, that individuals looking for sexual relationships in their own free time ought to be conceptualized as an issue of collective "health," that overall societal health requires big "players," and that if businesses don't want to see themselves as the players, they leave a gap that government must fill.

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Where the unmarried guys are.

Ladies, they are not on the east coast. Here's a map to guide you, but of course, you won't go there. That's why the imbalance exists. You won't go there.

But you guys, in New York and Massachusetts (and #1, my home state, Delaware), you have rich pickings in the female-heavy disproportion, where you can continue to behave in ways that women will angst over in the pages of the New York Times, which the guys in North Dakota and Alaska and Wyoming probably don't read, but if they did, would they shed a tear for you?

Of course not. They're out in the fracking oil fields being sweaty and manly.... Oh, the sexy married life you could have together!

But the NYT would have you believe the men out there are a bunch of sexist louts.

Christina Knapp and a friend were drinking shots at a bar in a nearby town several weeks ago when a table of about five men called them over and made an offer.

They would pay the women $3,000 to strip naked and serve them beer at their house while they watched mixed martial arts fights on television. Ms. Knapp, 22, declined, but the men kept raising the offer, reaching $7,000.

“I said I make more money doing my job than degrading myself to do that,” said Ms. Knapp, a tattoo artist with dark streaks in her light brown hair, a bird tattoo on her chest and piercings above her lip and left cheekbone.

Stay in New York City, ladies. It's really low class out there in the hinterlands. It's not for you.

Many [women in North Dakota] said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

“So many people look at you like you’re a piece of meat,” said Megan Dye, 28, a nearly lifelong Williston resident. “It’s disgusting. It’s gross.”

All the young, highly sexed single men are out there in North Dakota, but stay away! They're disgusting. It's gross!

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"Madison City Council quietly abandons effort to create code of conduct for members."

The most amusing lines come from  Alder Lauren Cnare: "We could have come up with a set of guidelines that would have helped people behave in situations that are sort of gray" and "I think it's over until something happens again."

The something that happened this time, sending the council into a tizzy about codification, was that one alder allegedly did something sexual to another alder the morning after a long night drinking together.

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"That's how you laughed in the middle of the night."

Said Meade, and I said: "Then Chip Ahoy must have been in my dream."

Because I was just reading his comment: "Melody and Rose broke up the Sweedish contractors and threw change in the tip jar and put on her warm magic apron."

And I laughed not because that is nonsense, but because it's a quite brilliant contribution to a conversation that was pretty far along at that point, including betamax3000's extended interpretation of "The White Album." Beta had said:

Like the White Album perhaps Althouse is telling us there are secret messages to be found, backwards.

"Sweetly up broke voice, her rose melody."

"Upon magic human warm her of little."

"Out tipped change."

It all began with a sentence from "The Great Gatsby," which was about — not a woman laughing — a woman singing. But women laugh all the time in "The Great Gatsby." For example: "She looked at me and laughed pointlessly."

"These 'Gatsby' posts are becoming the new café around here" — "café" posts are open threads  — I say as I drink my coffee and contemplate today's Gatsby sentence, which I'd said will be "I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names, and lunched with them in dark, crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee."

I picked that sentence after searching my Kindle copy of "Gatsby" for "potato" after betamax3000 said:

Yesterday was "gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder," today is "tipped out a little of her warm human magic." Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And that was funny, because — before getting out of bed this morning — I'd been toying with the idea of saying: In that "Melody rose" sentence, Fitzgerald intended us to think of semen when we read about "warm human magic" that tipped out of the vessel that is the woman.
 
And betamax added:

My God: if we get to the sentence involving Daisy, the potato and the gardener I just don't know what is going to happen.

Which is what had me looking for "potato" in "Gatsby," not finding it, and suspecting that betamax was making a canny reference to "Lady Chatterly's Lover." I buy "Lady Chatterly's Lover" in Kindle just so I can search for "potato"! My literary pursuits are a tad — a tot — bizarre. I find:

"No; my heart's as numb as a potato, my penis droops and never lifts its head up, I dare rather cut him clean off than say 'shit!' in front of my mother or my aunt... they are real ladies, mind you; and I'm not really intelligent, I'm only a 'mental-lifer.'"

And:

"I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now."

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"By now, you have likely listened several times to the muffled 911 call placed by the Catholic priest who enjoyed..."

"... slipping into a bondage mask and handcuffs inside a church rectory in Springfield, Illinois.... this time he put the handcuffs on with the keyhole up instead of down...."

Although I find this bloggable, I don't want to listen to the recording. Hmmm. I guess don't enjoy hearing suffering, but I want this to be a lesson to you. Stop wasting the police's time with your handcuff incompetence.

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For comparison purposes.

Are those comediennes funnier than these?

And let's try to think deeply about gender politics. There's something distinctive about the argument — coming from females — that we will withhold sex unless you give us something we want. The argument, even as joke, assumes the audience grasps the notion sex is not intrinsically valuable to women. It's currency to be used to purchase something else.

In contrast to the idea of women exercising power by withholding sex is the idea that men seek political power to get sex. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" is something famously said by a man who looked liked this:



That's Henry Kissinger in his younger days. Think he would have had much political success saying do what I want or I won't have sex with you? No. It was the other way around for him. By acquiring power he became seductive.

Perhaps men have had such success reaching high positions of political power because of their sexual drive. If sexual energy propels their climb to power, it's surprising women ever win elections. Why bother? I mean, really. Why bother? They must really want political power as an end in itself. And... well, there's this:

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"Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season..."

"... suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed."

We're sticking to sentences, here in our "Gatsby" project. I won't pretend not to know that Daisy is the main female character in the book, but for the purposes of this project, I'm disregarding what we know about her and where she might be in the plot line when this sentence appears. I'd like to follow a rule that excludes all extrinsic evidence, but the phrase "this twilight universe" shows why that rule may be too severe. Nevertheless, I'm going to stick with the no-extrinsic-evidence rule, and accept "this twilight universe" as a mystery. Daisy has been up to something in what is now being referred to as "this twilight universe," and there's something poignant about encountering someone — a flower-named woman — in a mysterious place where she has moved before and is beginning to move again.
That Daisy's renewed movement comes with the season makes us think of the plants that come and go seasonally. One third of the way through the sentence, we are thinking about the annual cycle of the seasons as well as the daily cycle of light and dark that contains twilight. A flower that is a woman moves within the inexorable movements of the universe.

This lone female is suddenly joined by numerous men. Though the unnamed men never get definition as individuals, they presumably get one-on-one dates with her, since the numbers match up: half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men. This is the kind of "dating" one associates with a prostitute. The "twilight universe" feels more sinister, and the next thing we see is Daisy in bed: drowsing asleep at dawn. The daily sun cycle has turned from twilight to dawn, the 6 dates have somehow been cranked through and (suddenly) there is our wilted flower on her bed, but there is a string of words — like a string of men — that we must experience before we get to to "bed" (the last word of the sentence (she and we must get to bed)).

The words are the things on the floor beside her bed: "the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids." Orchids! There is Daisy — the flower we associate with freshness and simplicity — and there, next to her, on the way to the bed, are the complicated flowers whose name, literally, means testicles. So the 6 men were unnamed, but there is a name that bespeaks male sexuality. And there are those testicles, dying (as Daisy is drowsing), dying and all tangled up the pretty tatters — beads and chiffon — of what once was a dress.

Note carefully that it is not a dress that is tangled up with the orchids, it is the beads and chiffon, suggesting that the delicate dress has lost all integrity. And yet our Daisy has disentangled herself from the spewings of sex that lie on the floor. And she's not passed out, dead drunk. She's drowsing, in her presumably pretty nakedness.

It's dawn, and she will emerge again, with the cycle of the new day, fresh and daisy-like again. Remember, she was only beginning to move through this twilight universe, and with the new day, the movement will continue, with 6 more men and another dress to move through. She's not caught in this twilight universe. She moves through it. She gets through the men and through the dresses, and sleeps lightly as the detritus dies on the floor.

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