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Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Timothy Noah

Irrational Exuberance

Posted Tuesday, July 14, 1998, at 7:17 PM ET

Dear Marjorie,

Past drug or alcohol addiction does not disqualify you from opining on the capital gains rate. But if the drug (one of them, anyway) happens to be cocaine, it's worth asking whether Kudlow's "irrational exuberance" about the benefits of tax cuts (the phrase, yanked deplorably out of context, is Alan Greenspan's) is in any way linked to the irrational exuberance that comes from ingesting that particular illicit drug. (I tried cocaine once in the early 1980s and concluded that nothing that made me feel so confident and boisterous could possibly be good for me.) If conservatives can blame the Pill and Woodstock for the teen-pregnancy rate, why can't liberals blame cocaine, the Official Drug of the 1980s, for the deficit?

Given your irritation about my comments concerning polygamy in Nigeria, I'm not about to wade into a discussion about breast implants coming back into vogue. I mean, really, can I win? If I say I like big breasts I'm in one kind of trouble. If I say I think women who get implants are insane I'm in another kind of trouble. (But we women do it for you men, you son-of-a-bitch!) So I ain't playing.

But as an olive branch I offer up a stupendously shocking example of Misogyny In Our Time in today's New York Times. You probably missed Neil Strauss's "Critic's Notebook" in the arts section (you rarely linger there) about Super Jockey, a TV show in Japan that has come up with a novel way to sell commercial time. Rather than pay for commercials, the sponsors offer up female employees in bikinis who get dunked in scalding water. "The longer the woman can stay in the water, the longer she is allowed to deliver a commercial. Most women last three or four seconds in the heat, after which they rub ice all over themselves or jump up and down in pain as the camera focuses on their reddened breasts and legs. Once they have cooled off, they can advertise whatever product they want for exactly the amount of time they were able to stay in the water." Strauss says that the women on the show "look as if they are being cooked in the water, since during each show men stand behind the tank, ladling hot water over the women's breasts as if they were chickens in a pot. Making this sadomasochistic entertainment even more disturbing is the habit Japanese women have of smiling and laughing when they are embarrassed or humiliated."

Does the National Organization for Women have a branch in Tokyo? Where do I send a check?

Genuinely Shocked,

Tim

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849505152535455565758596061626364656667686970717273747576
from: Timothy Noah

Irrational Exuberance

Posted Tuesday, July 14, 1998, at 7:17 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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