Nothing like slut-shaming a young woman in the name of wisdom. This female Boomer prefers to support a bright and articulate voice now lost to Congress. Try judging the men who wrongfully invaded Ms. Hill's privacy instead.
6
Just somebody tell me, why you guys start hyperventilating if you get a glimpse of a boob (nipples OMG) or a bare backside, when - at the same time - you are utterly unfazed by blood and gore. During our ten years as liveaboard bluewater cruisers, we made lots of American friends. But even the most laid back Southern Californians were surprisingly prudish (no quick changing into your swimwear without first hiding in the bushes, if the Americans were present..). Pictures of people without clothes should be an absolut nonevent, if two or more consenting adults want to sit around in the buff - so what ? Pictures of people, who are drunk or stoned, making an idiot of themselves, no that leaves a negativ impression in the back of my mind. But nude pictures .. why can’t everybody just get over it !
2
I can't help but wonder if this was only about Hill hiring a lover for a staff position would everyone still say she should have resigned?
And if this were a man who hired a lover for a staffer position would we expect him to resign? No, we would ignore it just as we ignore Duncan Hunter's same actions.
Someone brought up Al Frankin. I feel he he never should have lost his job for what he did.
Someone else said people who are married or in a relationship should not be legally allowed to work together. That's just plain silly because family businesses should not be a crime.
39
As a fossilized boomer, I am dismayed by the sneering, contemptuous arrogance of the young woke. They have had the safest, most coddled, most comfortable lives in human history, so free of hardship or challenge that hearing any fact or idea ever so slightly at odds with their rigid virtue-signalling orthodoxy sends them into tantrums about safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions. They rage at the racists, sexists, xenophobes, and homophobes so naive as to still believe that a diversity of ideas is necessary to a democratic society, and can be expressed civilly and respectfully. There is little difference between the virtuous woke and the talk radio right.
146
I'm rather surprised that so many young people really do think of this as a generational thing, which is Ms. Dowd's point and how it plays out. The rules of politics are really nasty right now in case people haven't noticed. Republicans really deal in nasty dirty tricks. It's a major player in their playbooks. And let's blame the prudes out there who just think it is inappropriate for a public figure to be so sexually liberated. I do think having sex with a subordinate is wrong. It's not enough to demand that women have a similar benefit of the doubt that men have always claimed as their right. It's just wrong. Finally, my phone photos are an open book. There's nothing hiding or lurking there. If you feel the need to have nude photos of yourself to comfort you in your old age, or to remind yourself of a time when you had a hot lover, please get safe deposit box. And don't give the key to anyone else.
42
"Youngs who can’t even imagine that they will one day run for office may already have racy shots somewhere out there."
Do they imagine they will ever apply for a job?
67
OK! Boomer!
24
I think she’s behaved like an idiot—and she’s over thirty, not a teener by the way—but as others pointed out, it’s very hard to justify the hue and cry given the mile-long camel caravan it takes to lug Donald Trump’s baggage around behind him, not to mention the latest wifey’s fairly-icky modelling career.
Oh, well. I guess we’ll all just have to start greeting right-wing honking about Jesus and morality the way we greet their blatting about deficits and debt.
With derision.
42
Both Katie Hill AND Al Franken should have fought back and NOT resigned! In comparison to trump and numerous other republican hypocrites their transgressions Hill and Franken’s are not that big of a deal.
Compare them to when newt Gingrich (republican family values champion) was having long term affair(s) and dumped his wife while she was in the hospital fighting her cancer. His present wife is the one he was having extramarital sex with. Now Gingrich is a major defender of trump. Republicans are the double standard champs of all time.
Biggest hypocrites of all are evangelicals who continue supporting trump, monumental LIAR (13,000+ told) and one who has broken most of the Ten Commandments many times (lying, coveting, adultery, etc.,).
Our democracy hangs in the balance and may be doomed IF we are not successful in VOTING OUT republican CONtrol of the senate AND White House while retaining democratic control in the house. THINK about that. VOTE for the Democrats. ANY one (regardless of their flaws) IS much BETTER than 4 more years of treasonous trump.
78
Who or what made her resign? Cowardice, perchance?
9
Ok boomer
You really relish in this stupid scandal
You’ve been such a Clinton hound for your entire career
For those of us watching the past president in Clinton get away with a subordinate affair- should have been kicked out of office
And a current president who is a rapist and unfit to be near women
This is your generation
You equate this Katie Hill thing as millennial pay back?
No way. I’m neither boomer nor millennial and just sit back and watch the stupid battle
Boomers are becoming irrelevant and can’t deal with it.
5 years from now there will be no such thing as “revenge porn” because it won’t matter and women will take that stupid weapon from the insecure men by saying - come and see it you losers. You missed out and ain’t getting any in your mom’s basement as you troll in your underwear.
Sorry Boomer-
18
A 27-year-old male snot-nosed urban elite is a proto-typical Millennial, not Gen Z.
That's why we'll see more productive, sentient humans from Gen Z, suich as Greta Thunbergs in the news and, hopefully, fewer undereducated whining selfie sex pix addicts, Barbie/Kardashian lookalikes with fish lips, porn addicts, incels + Bernie Bros.
19
"Youngs who can’t even imagine that they will one day run for office may already have racy shots somewhere out there...He (Shawn) said that iPhones and social media have so reshaped culture that older people would have to accept the new and sometimes naked reality." Boomer to Millennial, grow up, wise up and pull that smart phone out of your butt.
27
We feel offended by a dismissive "millennials" or "ok, Boomer" and recognize the sweeping generalization as inaccurate. So how do we respond?
We get our panties in a twist and retaliate with like sweeping generalization. We perpetuate the same imbecilic condescension we condemned in others. Yeah, that will show "them"
Fact is you need a coalition to solve problems, but maybe we find playground name-calling and outrage more satisfying than coalition building. God knows such a self-congratulatory practice is a powerful weapon, but it is one we hand over gift-wrapped to authoritarians.
Yeah! Go team __________! We're the best!
7
This may not happen, but I hope Katie runs again. Let her voters (and maybe even her lover) decide if what she did was worth the loss. As a voter from NJ, I never heard of Ms. Hill before, but she gave a great farewell speech that spoke volumes. I'm sorry her time in Congress was cut short.
21
On the question of why Donald Trump remains in The White House:
The Women of America want him there. Many (across all generations) voted for him and continue to support him.
If the Women of America had a convention (after the 2 parties had their nominating conventions) and decided who the Women of America were going to vote for, that candidate wins. Period.
Please spare me the talk about lack of equality. Women are the majority - act like it!
EVERY picture of our government's leaders shows mostly middle-aged men and men who have been Senior Citizens for quite some. Women are the clear minority.
That's because this is the way the Women of America want it.
15
@Flic B
Married/heterosexual, white, undereducated, underempliyed *Catholic and evangelical* women voted for Trump.
All other females, not so much.
53
The other thing that hasn't changed is that we are almost never talking about nude photos of males - I was reminded of this yesterday as I heard a young woman in an NPR interview discussing the "obligation" of her female peers to provide photographic evidence of their physical attributes to prove themselves worthy of a relationship.
10
I don't care if Hill had a three-way relationship with a Massey-Ferguson tractor and a harvester. However, if the combine had worked for her as an aide, then the situation becomes a classic imbalance of power in the work place and the brakes should have been applied.
26
What I don't get is the embracing of a life without privacy. Or the idea that such a picture, once it exits, won't take on a life of its own. My species likes to live in protected spaces without the big eye of the world looking in whenever it wants, 24/7. So when someone gets caught with a nude, I have about zero empathy, unless they are too young to have seriously comprehended the creepiness overall. As for politics, it's what Dowd says, age-old and often dirty. So keep your clothes on and don't sleep around. How hard is that, really? Hill doesn't get a pass because she's younger or "fluid"; it's plain old common sense or what my great-grandmother would call common decency. Hill is not a victim of much more than poor judgement.
47
I have been reluctant to wade into this issue, but, I have to say that women who hold high political office have a special obligation to keep their clothes on. I realize that this comment will draw outrage. The world is not fair. Former Congresswoman Hill committed Freshman mistakes: she is young and attractive, and, like many before her, fell victim to the very seductive world that is Washington, D.C. When you are the first announced bisexual member of Congress, you have to realize that the denizens of D.C. will be scrutinizing you, and that the political opposition might see a likely target. Those of us who have experienced the political life in D.C. know how brutal it can be, and we know that it will never change.
22
These insignificant “scandals” and the current whinging between left and right, old and young, male and female, are the products of a willfully ill informed society. The post-modernist culture wars have left any semblance of shared morality, or shared sacrifice for the greater good, in tatters. It will go on like this until some major national catastrophe, equal to the disastrous level of WW II forces the population to become interdependent again and then maybe we can get back to what really matters. 9/11 did it but it only lasted about six months. WW II did it for 30 years. It goes even further back than Shakespeare. The Greeks believed that through suffering comes wisdom. And by suffering they meant more than public humiliation.
13
"Ok, boomer." That's quite the snarky comeback. I wonder who gave millennials their sense of entitlement?
15
@Michael Tyndall
Facebook. Instagram. Snapchat. Tinder.
17
She probably should not have resigned, given the absurd double standard that now exists. But the true error here is not the racy photos: it's the bad judgment of engaging in inappropriate behavior with people who work for you. Don't do it.
14
Here’s a thought. Live a clean life. Be as good as your word. Don’t lie. Vote like your future depends on it. Be kind. Don’t let anyone take compromising pictures of you. Seems like a pretty attainable standard to require of elected officials. And yes, everyone else.
36
The night has a thousand eyes. Just a bit fewer than the population of Ziebach County, SD.
I still blink twice when I realize what I know of the unwanted details of people I barely know. And then swallowing the perfectly frightening price of admission...that it is a two way street.
7
It is fitting that a woman is the first member of Congress to be forced to leave because her sexual behavior violates a new rule of conduct adopted by the House of Representative. Women today have turned their backs on the free love principles of the 1960s. Women are more puritanical today than they have been in decades. It is odd that there are plenty ways to avoid pregnancy and, as a result sex is far less significant than it once was. Here we have a woman having sex with one of her female staffers and she complains that the standards of conduct that apply are based on the hatred of women. The rules of course are just part of the snares that were intended to punish male behavior and give women more power. I hope their are a lot of pictures out there and women pay a price for the puritanical world they created for themselves. Maybe they will eventually see the light and get rid of these silly rules and treat sex as an act that doesn't mean much of anything!
6
OK Millennial. What are you going to do about the problems that you are faced with? Most of us Boomers are going to be dead in 25 years. Are you still going to be complaining us then, or are you going to act to correct the problems? Part of the problem is that many of you have refused to engage yourselves with the political system because of your cynicism. Us Boomers were/are not perfect; nobody is. Just like in any generation, some of us are good and some of us are bad. Most of us just forge ahead and try to make the best life for ourselves and our children and grandchildren.
13
@Art
The oldest millennials are already 50, with 30 years of baggage and plenty of blame for current problems.
7
Art, I think the young people are trying to fix the problems confronting them. and they are finding that the boomers (however unfair broad strokes like this are) are not good faith interlocutors.
Case in point is your claim that young people are cynical and disengaged. This is clearly wrong on its face. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it were. This kind of condescending dismissal is exactly why young folks have adopted this “ok boomer “ phrase. They smell your low regard for their troubles, and your rose-colored high regard for your generation’s self-proclaimed pragmatism.
The fact is that the world has changed. Ethics, standards, and the common sense of the past won’t help us solve new problems. It’s just nostalgia. Boomers who actually are thoughtful and pragmatic will change rather than treating young adults like they’re just bratty teenagers.
7
I’m sorry, but this just isn’t a case of millennials not getting it. I fall into the same age range as Congresswoman Hill and I somehow managed to get through life so far without doing anything that would embarrass me out of office (though she broke clear ethics rules regardless of her ex-husband’s motives). I’m not special nor do I believe I should be rewarded for there not being any nude photos of me out there. I’m just not dumb, that’s all.
15
For God's sake, Katie Hill is from a liberal California district. They would have collectively said "Yeah, and?" and had no problem with her staying in office__and she knows it. The fact that she left anyway makes me think there's more to this story.
12
@mivogo
Yeh, her ex husband's a loser jerk, confirming Hill was right to dump him at the side of the matrimonial road.
6
I'm not offended by Hill's nude photos. However, I'm waiting for an explanation for the Iron Cross tatoo on her lower abdomen. That should concern everyone.
5
@Potlemac
That tat is a bit odd. Maybe she's Prussian.
1
Common sense, it seems, has disappeared.
8
Hill will come back stronger than ever! She has what it takes.
2
Okay, there are about 1400 versions of this response in these comments, but...
Remember "never trust anyone over 30?"
1
I'm definitely a 'boomer' and this seems a pretty much so-what non-issue. So what the woman had some nude pix on her social media account. Who cares. What has that to do with bringing good governance to her constituents and our country? Nuthin'. She got sacrificed to some phony PC culture and the fringe uber-right that will do anything destructive to anyone. And, BTW, ditch 'social media'--and the phone. You'll be safer and feel better.
5
Wise advice to the Petri Dish Generation.
3
I generally love your columns, but this may be your most curmudgeonly opinion since the self-inflicted bad cannabis trip review! (I’m a proud and tolerant Boomer).
2
There are 3.5 billion women in the world. Probably about 100 million or more of them would be interested in a bi-sexual or three-way relationship, and the only one she can think of fooling around with is her subordinate whose salary is paid for by the US taxpayer?
8
Dear Ms. Dowd,
It is precisely because of the eternal verities of the human condition that we ought to be able to culturally walk and chew gum. Are we doomed to materially progress beyond belief and never become morally sophisticated enough to deal with a simple naked human body?
Good grief.
Cordially,
S.A. Traina
8
@S.A. Traina Unfortunately, the naked bodies in question aren't "simple". They belong to an elected official and a person who works for that official.
3
Nude photos of people we at least think we love: isn't this what disposable cameras are for??
2
@lisa delille bolton
That is what Polaroid cameras are for. Or Fuji Instax cameras if you want to be more modern about it.
Hey young people: Try voting.
14
Think things change ? They just go around faster.
“Say it with flowers, say it with mink, but never, ever say it in ink !”
A boy friend told me he lived by that rhyme more than 50 years ago.
And there’s always “ don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time “
Write it, photo it ..,think for 24 hours before “mailing/posting” it.
6
HA!
"The Shiny tools of modernity will
always fall prey to the ancient flaws of humanity."
And that just about sums it up doesn't it? And not just when looking at the young.
Our current mecca, the shining valley of Silicon with its myriad denizens is the perfect example of the delusion. All of them evincing the bright eyed look of the cult enraptured. They, and they alone, are somehow going to change the world! And by GOD they will do no evil while engaged in such lofty pilgrimages. They all trip up in their Zuckerbergian fashion due to not acknowledging this most basic aspect of human nature.
We are bi-polar. Wherever there is light, darkness soon enough encroaches. And if you do not stand guard over the former, presuming all will just logically be okay, then the latter will will overwhelm it. Always.
The wise understand this. So those, both young and old, acting as if all is "la la la" good either fail to acknowledge it or, as I will profess from my deeply cynical nature, they know full well what they are doing and what they're up to is nothing more than a money/power grab of their own. In truth they stand for the dark, not the light, side of our nature.
Either way this is a part of the human condition. You'd do well in your life to never overlook how it can impact you. Never, EVER, leave any back doors open because that nature can prance right up and bite you on your backside in less than one cyber second.
John~
American Net'Zen
2
Maybe we "olds" need to get over it, but the "youngs" should read some Shakespeare.
4
Too bad Katie Hill didn't pull a Bill Clinton, and just persevere. Of course, I'm not inside her head and can't evaluate the impact of this stuff on her spirit. Her relationship with a female campaign staffer didn't violate Congressional rules, and as I recall she denied the relationship with a male staffer while in Congress. Her husband's transgression seems way worse. Can't imagine any excuse for him, if he released the embarrassing pics. Fire him from his unemployment?
Also, to point to the elephant in the room, the power dynamic is way different for a male boss having sex with a female subordinate, and for a female boss having sex with a male subordinate. Reminds me of the glee of racists in calling out an African-American for "reverse racism." He/she may in fact not like white folks, but American history and society's power dynamic work the other way. Likewise for a female pursuing a male. Of course, I'm ignorant of the specifics here, so if those point to the Congresswoman getting her "just desserts," pardon me. If I'm right, pardon her.
4
@Russ What element, Russ? Exactly how does the "power dynamic" differ as a result of the gender of the offender?
6
@Russ
"Also, to point to the elephant in the room, the power dynamic is way different for a male boss having sex with a female subordinate, and for a female boss having sex with a male subordinate."
Sorry, you don't get away with making a statement like that with no justification. It isn't true just because you said it. If women want to be treated equally, it starts by dropping the double-standard of "It's okay if a woman does it, but not a man". Women don't get a free pass just because men did in the past.
12
@Bob Oops, I meant to say "What ELEPHANT, Russ?"
Perhaps there needs to be a new 12-step program called, say, #LookAtMeTooPlease! to help folks deal with the need to be in the flow, be in the know. In the meantime, Markie Z and other gurus of "sharing" appreciate all the info we give for their business "partners" to scrape. What an excellent arrangement.
3
I am so sick and tired of the acceptance of ageism by a cohort that seems to find all other stereotypes morally repugnant. What are you thinking, millennials? Or maybe you are not actually "thinking", just going along with whatever "meme" makes you feel superior (a similar motive drove sexism and racism).
And I'm sick of the idiotic conflation of generation and social class when the issue is economic inequality. Do you really imagine Boomers are all 1 percenters? Do you really think the great post-WWII economy and its all-too-temporary blessings were somehow caused by those of us who were toddlers back in the 1950s?
9
After years of similar stories, it is clear that Republicans dislike sex. What wonderful news that is. Now if you Democrats would stop stubbornly supporting Abortion after having been instigated by Republicans, we can have more Democrats because as it is now, your thinning the ranks. We need new generations of Democrats who care about everything. And if you think I'm inferring a sinister Republican motive....that's right! Now they are working on eliminating health care and food programs for us. Do you understand? All you Hill's on the Hill, shape up and start fighting for us.
1
The new reality is that the old reality is still alive and well. That anyone has to be told that sharing nude photos of yourself will come back to haunt you makes me wonder about your judgment in other areas. The fact that you would sleep with a subordinate shows me that you don't think the rules apply to you and that you believed your own hubris. Her farewell speech just confirmed that she was a whiner. If you want to play in the big boys and girls arena, Stop Whining and take responsibility. She must have gotten a lot of participation trophies as a kid cuz life is just so unfair to her. NEXT!
6
Two choices: 1) Don't record yourself doing acts you don't want others to know about. 2) Accept that a nude picture is just your body without clothing and nothing to be ashamed of.
4
"OK Boomer" could have been invented for Dowd specifically.
5
"OK Boomer" is the new insult. Wonderfully crafted to be a cute retort with no response expected.
Yeah, right.
"Hey, Millenial! How's your Russian? If it wasn't for boomers like me, you'd be speaking in Russian today."
Pat Shediack
Chief Master Sergeant, USAF (Retired)
&
Proud Baby Boomer
9
@Pat
Because if too many Boomers’ support of Putin-puppet Trump, we might be ‘speaking Russian’ in the not-too-distant future.
1
"The more things change, the more they stay the same."
5
I would like to suggest that the Gen Zs and millennials who are feeling oh so troubled by things being — can you believe it? — unfair, that they read Frank Bruni’s op ed today. Here is the link.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/opinion/sunday/what-i-learned-when-i-stabbed-myself-52-times.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
I don't think she should have resigned. I don't think she did anything wrong. I hope her x-husband goes to jail because that is where this loser belongs.
6
learned something new here--droit du seigneur; very useful term!
Thanks for making me look up what droit du seigneur meant.
I don’t want to be represented by someone who is stupid enough to send naked pictures of themselves to others, nor by someone who makes fun of a sleeping female soldier. Who can trust their judgement?
We deserve better and should not lower our standards based on the Republican Party which started digging when they hit rock bottom.
8
Money in bonuses for sexual play with staffers is just unethical. Can you imagine if Bill Clinton had given Monique a cushy desk job for easy access? Oh yeah, he did.
I can hardly believe Pelosi and the DNC defended him. Maybe a nude photo instead of a blue dress would have made all the difference.
2
why do Democrats always resign and Republicans just thumb their nose and go back to their dirty business?
13
Firstly, why are sex scandals a thing? I never understood that. I also don't understand why everyone -- both conservative and progressive -- wants to outlaw and shame other people's sex lives. Having seen the culture wars from the 1990s to the present, I think nearly every attempt to outlaw certain forms of human sexuality is almost certainly an attempt to control others and an expression of bigotry. Surely homosexual relationships are okay and most heterosexual sex including drunken hook-ups are not rape. Stay out of other people's sex lives! What is so bloody hard about that?! Also, nearly every sex scandal is just a political move from the other side to oust an opponent, and likely is an attempt to fire a competent politician. This is so dumb.
Seriously, I have no clue what Katie Hill did wrong. She had sex. Sex is awesome. High five! Now continue with your job.
Sex is only unethical because Me Too said it was. Me Too is dumb.
As for social media and naughty pics on the internet, it's largely a problem because Americans are scared of sex. Also, social media is addictive. By design. No one has the level of self control to stop posting stupid nonsense on the internet. The problem isn't people posting naughty pics. The problem is largely the existence of social media and the ability to post pics in the first place.
Outlaw and destroy social media. And stay out of other people's sex lives. Gee, why is this so hard?
(I know, that's what she said.)
3
The idea is not that revenge will go away. Sure revenge will always be here there will always be people who try to gain traction by sharing nude photos of their exes in order to shame them. But as a society we can choose for this to not be a source of shame and that is the millennial and gen z argument. We don’t think we will suddenly go to a world where everyone is kind and good and does not seek revenge, but it is not inherent in humanity to think a naked woman is automatically disqualified from having power.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (debatably according to historians) road into battle bare-breasted in order to inspire the troops going to fight in a crusade and you know what it worked. You know what they did not do scream that Eleanor needed to be ousted as Queen because she exposed her breasts.
Also for what it is worth I have no doubt Shakespeare would have sent nudes.
2
The only thing in Hill's case that is "actionable" is that she had sex with a staff member. Of course the photos provide proof of this, but they shouldn't be the focus of the debate. Yes, the husband is a creep, etc. but the bottom line is she had sex with a young employee. If the other person in the pictures had been just a friend or even a stranger I doubt Hill would be resigning.
The real line is "OK, Stupid" and it applies to all ages.
8
Many assert that this matter was caused by - singularly, or in combinate - revenge porn, homophobia and/or bisexualphobia, mysterious, below-the-radar adversaries, and the patriarchy (again, with the patriarchy) and often deploys whataboutism.
Everyone ignores what really brought Ms. Hill down - an affair with a young campaign staffer and bringing her into a throuple. A female staffer who signed on to long-shot campaign and likely idolized Ms. Hill, personally and politically. A staffer who was apparently unceremoniously dumped along with the husband not long after the swearing-in. The House rules do not cover affairs with campaign staffers, but they probably should. The staffer herself could have disclosed the affair in a book or press release and the result would have been the same. Ms. Hill will eventually return to a position of prominence in the public or private sector - notwithstanding this mess, she is still a smart, tenacious and committed young woman. In the meantime let's not call her a victim when she is really a predator.
6
I don’t think Katie should have resigned either; but I think she’s doing it because by doing so her chances of having to pay alimony to her soon to be ex-husband go down. However, it may be a miscalculation as judges often ascribe a salary to litigants based on their potential. Katie may not get out of this one unfortunately. She should have just stayed and taken the alimony on the chin. Hopefully she runs again in 2020. The idiot Papdapolous is running for the seat in 2020.... sigh...
You endorsed Trump. That's evil and brutal in my eyes. What she did was consensual sex. You have no right to criticize her. It's hypocrisy.
7
If you’re going to try adopting the moral high ground and shame a columnist, my advice is, try shaming them for something they actually did.
4
It’s about judgment isn’t it? Hers was pretty poor. I’m not terribly clear on why she resigned either. That shows poor judgment as well. Ok Millenials it’s time to learn that sometimes you make very stupid mistakes and look like a fool. However, thst doesn’t mean you just quit your job and crawl home.
2
Bisexual? This woman is promiscuous and corrupt. She was sleeping with someone who worked for her, not exactly a level playing field. And when she was found out due to her loser husband, she began blaming other people. I'm confused about why she resigned, however. She seems the perfect politician-in-training for Washington these days.
7
It’s not the sex anymore but the mixture of money with sex that caught Hill on her slippery slope!
2
I suppose the lesson has always remained the same: if you want to run for office, don't have photos of you taken standing naked, wasted in a shower stall holding a bong and with your Iron Cross tattoo showing.
4
Haven't seen the pics... no interest... but let me guess... she looks like basically 50 % of the world’s population.... any adults left on the planet.. ? Or are we still stuck in ages past where religion co-opted government for control?
2
I'm Gen X at 50. I don't understand why Hill resigned. Did anyone call her for her resignation? I don't care that she had sex with people. I do think the ex is a jerk for what he did and he should be shamed.
But why end her career?
3
Bongs, tattoos and open marriages are not for the fainthearted. You need to be varsity level in life skills and self-awareness first.
Hill indeed should have resigned, and not just for practicing poor bong and marital hygiene, as well as thuddingly questionable taste in unimaginative tattoos.
Ms. Hill's actions were unprofessional and unbecoming a Congressperson, male or female. You just can't date a staffer and you certainly should not involve one in a failing marriage. This speaks to a lack of ethics and, like the bong, the threesome and the tattoo, a severe lack of judgment.
I appreciated her goodbye speech, which I heard before reading the details of the scandal. After learning the details, I have to admit that I lost confidence in her ability to conduct her duties, and would not have re-elected her if I lived in the district.
5
I can see how she put her ex in a such a hopeless place that he was willing to destroy her.
1
As a member of the "Silent Generation" who met his wife, a Boomer, at a Vietnam protest rally and now has two millennial sons, I pass on this advice from them to you, "Millennials feel entitled!" My oldest son, 36 has repudiated his millennial-ness with the hard work and thrift that makes me think he's a closet Calvinist rather than the son of a non-congregational Jew and Lutheran. So, Katie Hill may have the same moral blinders as that Boomer paragon of virtue, The Don [aka Twitter-finger Trump]. Whether she should have resigned is a matter of debate when you consider the likes of Mr. "Total Exoneration!"Trump and Brett Kavanuagh, especially if she really believes it's all about "revenge porn." But, perhaps it's a hopeful sign of recognition that the #MeToo rules, as you note, now apply to #YouToo women like Katie Hill. That said, I still miss Al Franken, and have to ask why is there so much "naked reality" out there in cyberspace and should we treat it as "Yes, I really did inhale!"? After all, all we have to fear is the "naked truth"?
Melania's naked pictures are all over the net.
9
@zula She got into the country on an Exceptional Genius Vista, go figure! Trump was instrumental in that, no doubt.
I don't see any talent.
1
I don’t fault Ms. Hill for her sexual activities. She’s not a kid, and her private life is her own.
Still, she is not a kid, so I fault her for being really stupid. This isn’t news. We’ve been reading and hearing about the sexting and outing and shaming and abusing for at least four or five years now.
Grow up, Katie. Rescind your resignation, apologize to your constituents, and get back to work.
2
@Bluebeliever41
Her exit speech makes clear that she didn't resign willingly. She resigned because the ethics committee would have made it worse for her if she didn't.
1
A thought on your OK Boomer opening and thought that at 27 Shawn is NOT a child, and where is the blame on GenX?
1
People enjoy sexual activity. It can be normal to have sex with others who enjoy sex.
3
This column is the feature equivalent of a war zone story, except instead of interviewing the cab driver Dowd is interviewing a millennial. One millennial. The congresswoman shouldn’t have messed with her staffer(s). That’s the real mistake here. But I hope she sets some kind of standard for prosecuting revenge porn. That sure would help out a lot of millennials.
1
Shawn is disrespectful of your experience, authority and position. He should be fired.
@chris
Ms. Dowd is obviously secure enough that she doesn't have to demand complete obedience and deference of her young staff. He should be happy he doesn't work for you.
2
A Trump free column! No Russians, Ukrainians, Turkish tyrants Guillianiesque double talkers et. al.
Now we know what life will be like when he's impeached, and his droit du tweet is taken away.
4
Pure victim blaming. For shame.
3
If you don't watch it, someone will take pictures of you with porn "actresses" and Playboy "models".
1
It appears to me that a lot of folks here missed the part where Ms. Hill had a sexual relationship with a staffer in violation of institutional rules. Yes her ex is a nasty little toad. Yes the right wing blogosphere makes even him look good. But is she expecting someone to say "these are the rules, but they don't apply to you"?
5
Who are our leaders? They are all the worst people. So as long as the moron rage against "old people" and not against endemic corruption and lack of justice...nothing ever changes. They will all become the machine, they just don't know it yet.
Also: "social media rots the intellect"...discuss.
3
She should have been smart enough to have paid The Enquirer to "catch and kill" the pictures before they were published.
2
the real shame was hooking up with a loser....I could see putting up the pic(s), as most of us are not immune to online stupidity, but she could have been more discerning re "that guy."
1
@will segen
It's his fault she hooked up with a couple of her subordinates?
3
I thought Katie Hill had an affair with someone who wasn't a subordinate of hers? Or did I get that wrong? Doesn't that change the picture?
2
People have short memories. Al Franken was forced out by a picture of of him on a comedy tour. Remember Larry Craig, the apparently closeted Republican Senator forced out when he tapped his foot in a public restroom and was arrested for the offense. This is not about sexism. Katie Hill had an affair with a staffer against House rules. She advertised on a sex site and has a (now visible) tattoo of a Nazi era Iron Cross below her bikini line. The images included using a bong prior to legal pot in CA.
3
I can hear my mother's voice now. "Just because everybody else is doing it, doesn't make it right. " How can the best educated generation be so dumb? The baby boomers did some outrageous things but we were smart enough to try to keep them secret. Don't go into politics if you've got nude pics.
1
Random thoughts:
1 - I wish she hadn't resigned. A Republican wouldn't have, and I doubt that her constituents forced her into it.
2 - I am grateful beyond words that smartphones and their accompanying technology were not around when I was in adolescence and young adulthood.
3. Anyone who takes and/or sends nude photos of themselves is being really, really stupid.
Look to the leader in all of this, the Senator from NY, KG. If it's good enough for Franken, then...where is her big fat self-righteous ugly stick and mouth now? Do I think she should have resigned because of the multiple partners? No, but she violated the House Rules, and she overtly lied about it, aka Clinton - something Al didn't do and yet, according to KG ,he had to, he must go. And yet, all this doesn't seem to apply to the President. His corruption and deceit will be the end of him, not sexual practices or adultery that is supposed to go against his Christian believes and fundamentalists who by the very act of supporting this President, screams hypocrisy to the very definition. If you are going to have sex in its various forms, don't lie about it. Just don't lie and deliberately break the law and lie about that either.
1
Having sex is like, nothing. Prove me wrong.
2
This was vintage Dowd at her finest. And truer words never spoken.
At least we now know the new average attention span is around 15 tik toks.
1
There's a reason I love reading Maureen Dowd and today's column is a good example why.
I see "OK, Boomer" being offered up in the coming years with a very different posture and tone.
Head down, back stooped, voice small. There will be a wearied acceptance from the Millenial generation that Shakespeare was right. The "truths about humanity never change."
When enough Millenials:
Don't get the job
Don't get into law/grad/med school
Don't get into religious service...or armed service...
...they will begin to realize that photos of their naked selves, dirty bong water, and snow going up their nose, have very negative repurcussions.
"OK Boomer, I get it now. The arc of morality and decorum doesn't bend just because I said it should."
Sincerely,
The Mother of Four Millenials
3
Doesn’t her sniveling, blame-filled kiss-off belie everything women have striven for in the past decades, to be fully equal in all ways, including the expectation of proper comportment? I don’t see a male counterpart standing in the Well of the House making a speech such as this, pointing a finger at a miscreant ex [your poor choice, Ms. Hill], and blaming everyone and everything — except herself — for her own willful violation of ethical behavior. Perhaps it’s time to put down the bong and to grow up.
4
Hello Ms. Katie Hill.
Judge Roy Moore sends his regards....
Of course, Judge Moore, being an older man, he never took any pictures.....and it seems likely he didnt do any of things he was so lewdly accused of doing.
But you, Ms. Hill, provided irrefutable evidence of your own deeds...
I would agree that nothing you did was illegal or reprehensible.....but it is very, very embarrassing to get caught, literally, with your pants down!
By the way, Ms. Hill, dont you realize how the DNC gerrymandered your Congressional District so you could get an easy win in the first place?
1
Thanks, Maureen Dowd! Back in the boomer 70’s, when most boomers were experimenting with sex (boomers: please don’t say you weren’t, we won’t believe you) and Donald Trump was cowering under the covers nursing his bone spurs, the last thing to be included in a tryst was a camera. The only exceptions were professional porn film makers.
In this, and perhaps in this only, you should emulate your elders.
1
"OK, millennials?" Touche, Maureen. This article is a perfect rejoinder to that impertinent "OK boomer" highlighting yet again the pernicious nature of identity politics. What your puerile colleague is exhibiting is a new form of racism; you have no more control over your age, ie. your boomer status - any more than any person has control over the colour of their skin. Please pass on this boomer's commiserations to your millennial co-worker, and give him my good wishes so hopefully he comes to realise he needs to reverse his intellectual regression so he can evolve sufficiently to deal with those very real ancient flaws of humanity.
2
A second reading:
I’d have never imagined hearing:
“OK Boomer.”
A “dryly dismissive phrase leveled at me [ Maureen Dowd] quite a bit lately from Shawn McCreesh, the 27-year-old in my office.”
A dismissive phrase to Ms. Dowd in her own office?
It seems taken out from a Gore Vidal movie script.
Advice from an unrepentant Boomer : Never, Ever take or allow someone to take Nude Photos Of YOU. “ Love “ or even lust, is rarely forever, but the Photos will be. Imagine your Family trying to unsee them, or your co-workers frantically searching the Internet. This is almost Trumpian level Stupid.
Seriously.
1
This is just one example of blowback from #MeToo. While predation of any kind is wrong, consenting parties ought to be left alone where the heart and libido are concerned.
You wanted a nanny state? Here it is.
3
The advice given to young politicians by long time Boston pol Martin Lomansey, "never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink" (upgraded by Eliot Engel to include "never email"), is lost on exhibitionists and selfie addicts regardless of age...how old is Carlos Danger? Self-exposure of this type is the tech equivalent of chain smoking, compulsive and automatic.
I don't care about the sexual predilections of these individuals. However, to make oneself vulnerable when privacy is extinct merely shows monumentally bad judgment which is far more offensive to one's sensibilities than showing genitalia.
1
Two of life's unanswerable questions:
1. Why do people take naked photos of themselves and send them to other people?
2. Why doesn't Joe Biden get better-fitting dentures?
2
The hypocrisy of the "woke" is laughable. If a young congressman was stupid enough to have done and recorded the things Katie Hill did he would have resigned too. Al Franken resigned for much less.
11
Well written, objective, not the usual male bashing one sided tripe the NY Times usually prints ie Neo feminism.
Putting what you say more concisely, there are always all types of predators, losers, bad people, whatever you want to call them, male and female, black and white, young and old out there looking to use people.
There are an equal number of people who fall prey to them and enable and co depend on them.
Your last two paragraphs is a road map on how to protect yourself.
3
Another thing that happens when you are over 30: you start asking, "What could go wrong here?"
As someone who worked in tech for too long, I have seen many things that were supposed to usher in utopia go horribly wrong.
However, I do wish Katie Hill had stayed in Congress (like a man, I guess) and started writing legislation to make revenge porn a federal crime.
1
I agree with you Maureen. Don't post naked photos of yourself on the internet. - unless you're in showbiz, where such publicly seen photos can perhaps help your career.
4
Ok, Maureen Dowd. Old or new, why are rules not applicable to the Man in the White House? Period.
2
Not all Gen Z's are morons. Neither my 19 year-old daughter nor my 17 year-old son is on social media.
I have taught them two things:
1. Never communicate anything to anyone about anything unless you trust the person completely.
2. Never trust anybody.
I also told them not to get tattoos because some day they'll look at their saggy flesh and want to vomit.
This wisdom comes from, you guessed it, a boomer!
2
@vbering
Never trust anybody? I'm sure your kids aren't morons, but they will live a sad, lonely life unless they reject your "wisdom".
1
Maureen has on her kid gloves to gently massage the former Democrat Congresswoman and current misanthrope, Ms. Katie Hill. Making every excuse from my generation to sleazy ex-husbands and lovers, Ms. Dowd cleverly or perhaps purposely misses the point. This isn’t about misogyny or even women. This is about rules, not gender. Katie Hill’s fall from grace does bare witness to her generation, that being to blame shift and take no responsibility. However, her sleaziness is not due to nude photos or location of tattoos, it is her blaming others and lying about it. Her blowup and pelvic thrust on the way out the House door mimics her lowlife persona, not for her sexual predilections, but for her flat-out dishonesty and zero integrity. This is the new Democrat. Hear her roar while traipsing proudly around in another stained white dress.
4
I’m sorry- where is the glaring naked truth of our first lady in this article?
Also where is the relationship between the birth of porn culture - exposed to most boys by age 11- and girls learn how to be that sexy woman and flaunting narcissist our culture loves. Since I was a teen in the 80s, models at the magazine stand, young feminists today wear their sexuality like their one source of power then claim they are objectified.
You want to stop being objectified - stop doing it to yourself. Rebel.
Everyone should watch the Duece- hands down the only series on TV dealing w what women go thru since birth- being judged for our looks. We internalize it: I know this and still can’t stop.
Let’s stop. We are not here to serve the world with our bodies until we have aged and join the unseen masses of women over 40, who may have intelligence. I made money off of my body when young. It’s what we do, if we can, it’s valued the most.
Can we confront each other on this, as women, and how we do it to each other, without blaming ourselves for the culture that created it?
I am tired of supermodels / I’m so bored with this. Tell me what you think. I don’t want your selfie. I cant think of anything more trite.
2
Okay, Millennial. It's your turn soon. Prepared?
It's the Millenials that dont "get it".
The Sheep never look up until the butcher tilts their heads up to complete the process with a razor sharp tool.
The razor sharp tool in the Millenial's case ... is the pervasive electronic media and the gadgetry that goes along with it.
Sex has been around for a very , very long time. And humans seem to have learned to make it enjoyable.......without taking pictures of themselves while they're doing it.
Millenials dont seem to "get" this part of human behavior.
So enthralled with the act of taking pictures of food, what street corner they stood on earlier this morning, what their desk at work looks like, who they talked to five minutes ago, and...of course......what they do in the bedroom.
Big Brother is Watching.
2
OK Boomer, huh, huh. And what can you say to that--the equivalent of a Beavis and Butthead phrase? Nothing really. You can only turn away, in embarrassment.
1
I don't understand why Americans are so afraid of nudity.I used to vacation on the island of Sylt off the coast of Germany and Denmark. Everybody is naked. Back home I went to the sauna 3 times a week, sweating and showering with 70 or so naked men and women, no pictures were taken. I don't think anybody should send sexually suggestive pictures to others, that is just trashy (and stupid).
That girl should have stood her ground.
3
I am glad that she is gone simply because she demonstrated that she is not very intelligent. And she is a whiner to boot.
3
@Dan O
Jeez, how did us geezers, gaffers, and boomers of all sexes even survive? Mo still hasn't apologized for helping elect Trump with her constant anti-Hilary ranting, but she is totally right here. Like my mama always asked, 'just because all the other kids are doing it, does you that mean you're be an idiot, too?." Not just "so mid-century modern," it's oh so "since we climbed out of the trees" true. Except, of course, for Trump's evangelical base, who never did climb out of the trees but sort of evolved into humans anyway. So, super woke millennials, here's the question: are those the folks you're chill with?
Why do people let themselves be photographed doing stupid stuff? Women always get hurt more than men by these things unless they're Madonna!
1
Her mistake was having a relationship with a staffer, against the new rules. I think she may have survived the photos. Even gotten some sympathy because it was revenge porn released by her ex-husband to her opponent.
3
Parents should start talking to their kids as soon as they (the kids) have their first phone about this. Not so much the morality of it but how it might affect their future in ways they cannot begin to understand when they are now so young.
It's very sad that revenge porn brought down a young, talented politico. She will not be the last. Or maybe our society will evolve so that nudies no longer de-rail a career. But I think that is a ways off. And maybe never because people love to shame. Read The Scarlet Letter. Nothing's changed except technology.
3
The next time that Shawn hits you with "OK Boomer" you could reply with "Bless your little heart!"
1
OK Maureen. Love it!
If you are foolish enough to participate in this type of photography, you will face problems because of your actions.
2
I saw this story on TV. What a sad sack as scorned husband was like a worm with lips.
1
It seems as though the greater shame lies with those who look at the pictures than with the woman who seems to have mistakenly trusted people. OK, Boomer - who has not done something regrettable and stupid sexually? I recall hearing about panty raids, and I watched drunken frat boys streaking though campus. We survived and moved on. Katie Hill may have been right to resign, but some idiot publishing dirty pictures of her hardly qualifies as an impeachable offense. Would her constituents care in another year? If so, they could vote her out.
2
Everything I have read on this story the focus is on Ms. Hill, her exploits, and the congressional invesitgation. I have yet to read a story about an investigation of the people that published or threatened to publish her pictures. Where is the investigation on the revenge porn aspect to this episode?
1
I don't get it. Back in the day, most of us knew you didn't have nude photos taken because it was a stupid thing to do. And that was when a single polaroid could be passed around by an ex.
What's wrong with the kiddies these days, that don't understand that life comes back to bite you for your indiscretions? Pictures on the Internet are there to stay. Want a decent job? Better not be in any soft-core porn. Videos of racist rants? Ditto.
Have we raised a generation of narcissistic fools?
1
I am not a millennial , but i think what Miss Hill should have done is NOT TO RESIGN ... But with courage she should have face her tormentors. Finished her term in office. Run again . Telling everyone that consensual sexual relationships between adult are no ones business ..!!! revenge porn is only effective if you are afraid of them ..
2
Katie Hill is not a victim; she is a predator. Many of these"millenials" have no common sense with regard to boundaries and they will continue to suffer because of their stupidity. In the case of Ms. Hill stupidity, lack of commonsense and just plain rottenness all apply.
4
Shawn’s friends almost drive off the road when they’re pranked, but Maureen’s met with Ok Boomer because she rightly points out that it’s stupid to have nude pics on his devices. He’s so savage.
1
"It turned out that one of the people responsible for publishing Hill’s photos and texts is a Republican operative who worked for her opponents."
As bad as it is for Katie Hill, Nancy Pelosi has set America on the road to Impeach-a-geddon. Of course there were dozens of ne're do wells involved in the behind the scenes, to bring down President Trump. They have fabricated stories, that any murder/mystery/spyologist writer couldn't dream of.
The latest version starts off with a "whistle blower", that can't whistle. Nope, he pieces together enough hear say to fertilize the new and improved story. 5 weeks later, we don't need the whistle blower, because the real rats are lining up to tell the "real" story. Everybody wants a payday.
In retrospect, this makes Katie Hill and her sordid adventures look positively "high school". Face it, if you have naked pictures, that include generous exposure you and a bong and some sort of tattoo, that would best have been covered by some Walmart underwear, you aren't ready nor worthy of impeaching anyone else' behavior.
2
Ok kids. Take Polaroids and keep them in your sock drawer.
1
I rarely agree with you but I do today. Please don’t let it go to your head.
She had sex with a staffer.
End of story.
3
sex isn't new - there have been scandals and old boys caught in canals with strippers and presidents snapping thongs since Ms Dowd was a young writer decades ago
1
Older people who just don’t get it? Ha!
Anyone who doesn’t agree with the millennials every woke half-baked thought is labeled the enemy. It’s because millennials can’t defend their ridiculous positions, that’s why they cancel people. Easier to shun other opinions than to meaningfully engage in discussion about them.
I just wish they were smarter, one can’t really argue with stupid.
3
All true Maureen, but lies and misinformation have been leveraged to spread around the world in an instant, and proliferate a lot faster than with a Xerox, mimeograph, printing press., or even on the evening news Just ask the next Russian bot you encounter.
How about just not freaking out if we discover that adults are sexual (in non-abusive ways)?
1
Maureen you are so Right on. Today It's like "Everyone Does it"
People need to understand, It's a New world with the press of a click Millions will see your Stuff, Never to be returned or destroyed. In my day Hill's Ex would meet a fate that he would come to regret his actions.
With so many millennials spending the large part of their lives in a cyber-land of social-media texting, sexting and exchanging whatever to other millennials “that are now recoverable later in life” (???) and who, as a collective, are “operating under new rules now and that they apply to both sexes,” then they must have uploaded their brains to “God knows where,” somewhere in cyber-land, and not between their ears !!!
With so many millennials spending the large part of their lives in a cyber-land of social-media staring at their phones while walking on sidewalks and/or crossing streets, I am surprised that there are not more millennials in hospitals from accidents !!!
OK, millennials. It’s time to end the generational war and blame game, look up, talk with people, get connected with reality, grow up and do something with your lives !!! and vote “en masse” for change in the 2020 election !!!
A “Boomer,” still learning lots of new stuff.
6
Katie Hill, if a male R, would've been a top story on the NYT.
Instead a female D from California relegated her to the "in other news section"
Your readers are smarter than you think
5
Ok, what congressperson thinks a throuple (threesome?) with staffers is a good idea?? If that is your thing, go to a bar. Why mix work with pleasure? All generations should understand THAT.
4
If the governor of Virginia can stay in office in pire of his black face past, why does she have to resign? And at a time when we discover everyday some new criminal activity of the occupant of the White House.
1
We need to give more respect for the future generations. Our time is gone, it’s not about me or your.. It's their time. America idiotic and puritan society is like a weapon. Let go...their privacy have nothing to do with you, she or he...How stupid we became?
1
If she was a republican representative, she would have simply lifted her chin high and defied both public perception, Congressional investigation, and everyone involved in the scandal and move onward.
But.. because she is a woman and a Democrat.. she has to fall on her sword it seems. A sad state of affairs driven more by Democrats looking down on anyone who is not "pure enough" in some way.... /looking at people like Kristen Gillbrand... who I'm sure are not as rosy and holly as they would like us all to believe. I can't wait for some of Kristen's skeletons to get pulled out of her closet.... becasue what comes around goes around... just ask Amy Klobuchar.
Personally, it is none of my business what people do in their private lives, nor do I care. What matters is how they legislate and vote when placed in office by the public.
And of course it was all leaked to the press by some republican operative.. that is what they do. They rail when it is done to a repbulican candidate.. but they relish it when it happens to a Democrat. Hypocrits of the highest order.
So if a male member of Congress had a photo leaked and he was naked with another man doing a bong hit (a bong? Really?) there would be no implosion? Not sure there’s a double standard here.
2
The Intergenerational War is a distraction from the class war. It's a productive distraction for the folks who brought us neoliberal capitalism because it makes many people think that "old people" or "young people" have screwed-up the world when the culprit is an economic system that is making life harder for younger folks to have the same opportunity for future prosperity as their parents enjoyed. So while Maureen Dowd and Shawn McCreesh are slinging barbs at each other someone else is picking our pockets. It's an old game, and ruling class folks (of all ages) can now take advantage of generation-bashing in addition to white supremacy, xenophobia, and gender hierarchy to keep the rest of us fighting each other rather than fighting them and their system of exploitation that's driving the extinction of millions of species and condemning billions of people to shorter, sicker, more brutish lives. While the rich must be amused that some young people think selling a new clothing line on the internet is striking a blow against The Man they must also appreciate that Ms. Dowd is spending her time being patronizing instead of advising younger folks to overthrow the system that makes her wealthy.
5
i feel this opinion piece misses the point, almost entirely. The Left is it’s own hamster wheel of moral superiority.
It’s not the pictures, stupid.
It’s how you react to them.
I’ve seen much more defense of Melanie’s air brushed, oiled up nude pictures from the get go than I have seen defense of Hill’s stolen nude photos.
There is simply no reason to not defend this woman... other than playing the game of ‘being better”.
We do that a lot.
We always lose.
Is it because she’s bisexual?
Or naked?
We always lose the sacrificial moral lamb argument because no one on the Melanie soft core porn team gives a rat’s butt about her breasts.
Or about rapists, sexual predators, peeps who throw children in cages, drunk drivers, dudes who ignore sexual abuse of young men, or the lovelies targeting Jews, minorities and the LGBT community.
Those are moral choices.
We fret and complain that they always win, and why doesn’t anyone do something?
Oddly, it seems to start with the pictures.
Al Franken was vaporized because of a picture.
Fake grabbing breasts when he was a professional comedian.
Without that, I highly doubt he would have been raptured.
See hair smelling for a reference......
Kathy Griffin for a fake head picture.
And now a very influential lawmaker.
So, shame on us.
The pearl clutching has a steep price.
1
She's gonna dedicate her life to Slut Shaming?
Really? Slut Shaming?
Aren't there some really important problems out there to address like Poverty, Medical Care, Education, or Medical Research, Voter Suppression to name just a few?
And all self-serving Ms. Hill can think of doing with her life is to dedicate it, and all her energies, to Slut Shaming? Good riddance to yet another selfish self-serving politician!
2
This is all a lot ridiculous, and a little bit sad.
If you have nudies, odds are high you will see them someplace you wish they weren't. And even if you don't distribute them yourself, is there anyone, anywhere who hasn't either snooped or been snooped? That iPhone is a digital copying machine, and paper/toner costs zero for one, or for 1 million. Or 1 billion.
Maybe we should all be nudie outed - one giant database, well indexed, available to all. Let everyone see that (surprise) we all have a butt. Some are more esthetically pleasing than others, but we all have 'em.
Maybe we should all also admit that (spoiler alert) sex is really fun. And we're a little bit off center in our own unique enjoyment of personal pleasure. Every single one of us. It's just not that remarkable, if we're honest about it. Or noteworthy. Because - there is no single center.
I'm at a loss on workplace sex. I don't think it's a problem with a simple solution, because if you put human beings together for a quarter to half of their waking hours, there will be frigging. Probably a lot, if we're honest.
A big fraction of it will involve two people in different places on the org chart. Some will be pure desire. But some will be at least a little transactional both ways. It's not fair. But it will happen, no matter what. Because, for many, power is aphrodisiac - both ways.
3
"OK Boomer"?.... sigh.....
I am 71 years old and, admittedly, I live in culture isolation. I don't follow movie stars, sports, nor most current trends. My iPhone is way out of date. But I do try to understand all of the "others": young people, women, Republicans, everyone who isn't me, actually. I reckon I partially succeed. One thing I've learned is to tolerate their being different from me and to not dismiss them. So when I read the above phrase, OK boomer, I cringed. Please don't say that. And I promise to not say, "young man."
7
Hill missed an opportunity to own her behavior, dismiss it as inconsequential, make light of it, and continue on. Works for Trump. The Franken sacrifice was wasted, and so is this one.
5
@Bob Egerton
We should be better than Trump, and insist on better from our members if Congress Otherwise, we’re no better.
Having sex with a campaign staffer of one gender and a congressional staffer of another gender is WAAAY worse than what Franken did.
1
This morning I heard a young woman interviewed on NPR. The program host asked her about the Katie Hill situation and the young woman said that the old people who control things did not understand how normal it was for young women to post nude photos of themselves online. She said that the problem was not the posting, but the face that nude men online were treated differently differently than the young women. I nearly wrecked the car. Am I such a dinosaur that I think that posting nude photos of myself online is not appropriate - that it is 'normal". Yikes.
7
or don't have sex with a staffer, captured on video or not
14
Or, put another way: Millennials—don’t be stupid.
8
Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday”: “don’t do anything you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the NYTimes.”
8
Being taught don't write anything in a letter you might not someone else to see because at some point the relationship may evolve into being vulnerable to vindictiveness was good advice for any age.
4
Good luck trying to get thru to Millennials. They know everything...their Google searches tell them so.
Never was there a generation using more information but not very well informed at the same time. "Millens" think that looking up a factoid, makes them smarter. (sure, in the moment) That having access to the circumference of the moon, means they understand what that is and how it was determined. Looking things up, where they don't understand (let alone know of) enough of the surrounding context, does not make someone smarter, or better informed. Access to information is not a metric of a person's intelligence. If it did, the neighbors to a library would be the smartest in town!
Regretfully Millen's are victims of their Boomer Parents questionable Parental behaviors/skills. Boomers tried too hard to be their children's friends over being their Parents. Spent too much energy on telling their kids they were super-special and that everything they did, no matter how inane, was worthy of praise. And of course gave them, and the culture, the participation award and reward mentality.
Then they handed them devices that not only immediately distracted them, but provided them a means to create an Alternative life. To have an online Avatar, all before they became truly attuned to what it was to be a flesh and blood human. Where the online Me, was more important then the offline flesh/blood/bone Me.
Boomers, like Boomer Trump, ruined whatever they touched, and never fixed a thing.
7
@Boregard I think your timeline is off re: the use of devices. I'm a Boomer (70) and the pervasive use of online devices to entertain children happened well after most of our children were grown. That started happening more with Gen X kids.
Although the Hill issue may very well be the result of the “Me Too” movement working as it was meant to, this story also illustrates the ridiculous preoccupation our outdated culture has with sexual mores. We are not that far advanced from Puritan days, or for that matter not all that much different from other cultures, such as Wahhabism in how we consider anything other than traditional marital sex as something to hide and be ashamed of. Just look at how we treat victims of sexual assault. We grant them anonymity thereby reinforcing the notion that they are damaged goods who should be ashamed of their circumstances. For all our technological and military prowess we remain an immature culture.
3
They didn't have to put that video clip out in the cloud. I would have voted for her anyway.
When the people who designed our system of government, they first had to decide what the nature of human beings is. Too bad the people who invented social media didnt start there.
2
@Carol I disagree. They were very aware of "the nature of human beings" and sought to exploit that for money and power.
Katie Hill should have conceded not to run for re-election but should have stayed in Washington and everytime she was criticized responded with the Access Hollywood tape.
4
Let's be clear: the photos didn't do her in.
They were proof of a sexual relationship by an employer with an employee they could fire at will.
That violates Congressional ethics and any basic sense right and wrong...regardless of gender. Or age.
9
“Congressional ethics” is an oxymoron.
She violated a condescending rule made by the morality police.
She did nothing wrong.
Case in point; I've been divulging some very solid leads about the Kennedy killings in the past year. The recently released movie titled "The Hitman" is reported to discuss the kennedy killing and In a very smart move by your paper, an article stated that the Theaters were angry because the movie is being put on national streaming Netflix sooner rather than later and that was a red flag. I believe it's meant to enable traceability to know who in the nation had watched the film through typical IP logging. Yes, the Kennedy's were murdered, and not by aberrations of society but by concerted efforts.
It is beyond me why would ANYBODY want to take pornographic pictures of themselves and think that somehow they are fine, cute, sexy, whatever...and post them by sending them to whomever or have them available where they can be used by creepy people.
I don’t think I want policies which affect all of us impacted by a person who think the way or acts the way Katie Hill does. No matter what her political beliefs are.
Me too indeed is for everyone, including the SELF. Exploitation is real even when you exploit yourself for whatever reason. PRIVACY is in my opinion just that, PRIVATE, and what you do in private should remain that way, unless it is illegal or harmful to others.
If you are not super careful you may live to regret it, especially when you are in public office. That is just REALITY in this cyber age where everything you do, say, post can be used against you.
Live and learn, Katie, in other words GROW UP!
5
Oh, please.
1
People who are offended by Hill are the ones who should grow up.
And mind their own business.
1
Shakespeare's plays are so . . . like . . . really old, aren't they?
10
@redweather
You're a funny guy!
A word to anyone if you put yourself online in some format be it pictures or emails or Facebook or tweets.....it is there forever. You can’t wash it off, you can’t throw it away, you can’t delete it, you can’t burn it in the fireplace. Done forever.
2
I hear the defensiveness about “ok boomer.” As a millennial, we’ve been reading about how awful we were since...we can remember. In other words, I think the barb is meant as payback, which is a very Shakespearean theme.
4
Interesting that the husband is referred to as unemployed.
2
@Ally H
And a "loser".
2
@Ally H
Yes. If the genders were reversed, the “homemaker spouse” who was “left penniless” would be seen as an object of sympathy.
4
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me - signed, a youngish Boomer
2
Very funny and poignant, Maureen. My 4-letter word answer to "OK Boomer": V-O-T-E.
5
One good thing about the boomers: We don't all have nude pictures of ourselves on the Internet. I'd almost guarantee it!
5
No, not OK. Blaming the victim is never okay. The onus shouldn't be on the victims to protect themselves, it should be on the vengeful exes and envious allies not to abuse women. What you're asking is for women to live their lives in constant fear that someone they trust will eventually betray them in an extremely public way. Millennial women are sick of living in fear. We've decided to live our lives the way we want, and demand more of those who would abuse us. Is that okay with you, boomer?
3
I was born in 1943 and was part of the 1960s that exposed the hypocrisy of government, marched against the Vietnam War, created the Second Wave of Femimism, and passed the Civil Rights Act.
Don’t you dare use “Boomer” as an expletive.
What have YOU done?
3
@Jerry Engelbach
We elected the first black president. We drive action on climate change. We fight for (and win) rights for LGBTQ people. We march to protest police brutality, gun violence, and misogyny. And we do it all with more than a trillion dollars of student loan debt.
2
Wow, the first Maureen Dowd piece in a long time that I actually enjoyed reading and agreeing with.
Of course it is a bit ironic that she was one of those people who driven by one of those "primary color" emotions relentlessly attacked Hillary Clinton and contributed to the election of one of the most morally repulsing presidents ever.
1
Clearly the modus opererandi of Democrats who become ensnared, usually by the “dirty tricks wing” of the political opposition (nothing new here), in mildly violating the strictures of the broad “blunt instrument” rules of conduct that they themselves helped to put in place is to do this walk of shame followed by a resignation and parting cry complaint that the President has done much much worse. Sure...and so did JFK. I’m thinking of Al Franken and now Katie Hill both of whom have resigned without even a semblance of a fight. Oh...sure...”for the good of the party”. Give me a break. Bill Clinton would never have done that! Even a lightweight like Brett Kavanaugh had enough backbone to fight it out. Why
? Because, right or wrong, his party gave him permission and supported him. And what about a guy like Elliot Spitzer who, were it not for our sanctimonious standards would, at this moment be mopping the floor with Trump’s blow-dry combover. Instead, Democrats are now quaking in their shoes fretting that they can’t field a candidate that can beat the worst president in US history.
And BTW...isn’t time to re-examine that oft-used and oft-abused term “power”. So in an act of revenge, Hill’s loser husband was able to harpoon the political career of “powerful woman” Hill with barely a whimper...primarily because she had more to lose...not on account of gender. So who has the power when you’re “topping from the bottom”?
I'm sorry, but I could only skim this, as I have more or less vowed to stop reading pieces that frame things in terms of silly and made up generational terms -- especially the most meaninglessly pretentious one yet, "millennials" -- since they are marketing terms unrelated to any real grouping of shared characteristics. That is, the use of the terms assumes that everyone is in na box and so has characteristics of everyone else in the same box. As to the substance of the article: yes, it is stupid to feel you have to immortalize every event in a photo on a platform that assures it will be there to haunt you at some later point in your life. But that is also seen, in a verbal (sort of) form in the gibbering of our Imbecile in Chief on Twitter, who (for those paying attention) has said things in the past that are the exact opposite of positions he purports to hold now. But that's not quite the same thing, I suppose.
Possible comebacks to "OK, Boomer":
"OK, Moppet." "OK, Bantling." "OK, Whiffet." "OK, Younker." "OK, Gremmie." "OK, Grommet." "OK, Munchkin." "OK, Rug Rat." "OK, Ankle-Biter."
Let's see now . . how can I monetize these? A song, maybe?
1
I wonder if Hill would have been forced out if her relationship with the staffer had become known, but there were no embarrassing photos?
Hi Maureen: There are several lessons I learned from your timely Op-ED---1. If you're angry, don't take it out on another human being and look at yourself. 2. Take full responsibility for what you do and 3. Be compassionate and non-judgmental to others and yourself. 4. We need data-protection legislation and enforcement in this country. 5. Fire the Gen Z'er in your office: he doesn't get it that we are all in this together snd you don't need a negative person in your midst.
3
Simple: keep your clothes on, or keep your smartphone out of your bedroom. Really.
4
Feminism said women should aspire to be like men (basically. don't @ me).
A man would stay and fight.
But you all know that.
Nothing changes, despite the hack Left's best efforts.
Ms is a myth. And not in a good way.
@conovox
A man, if he’d had sexual relationships with a campaign staffer of one gender and a congressional staffer of another gender, would be loudly decried—and perhaps rightly so—as a monstrous, voracious sexual predator. There would be calls for him to go to jail.
There is indeed a double standard.
2
You know, you don't have to be a Boomer or Millennial, or even have a cell phone with a camera, to fall into a mess. How many politicians have recently found themselves apologizing for Polaroid snapshots of themselves in Blackface? Nakedness need not be your downfall.
2
If all those youngsters who "OK Boomer" me get out and vote, we'll be rid of the Orange Menace. Prove to me that you'll break the cycle of "We don't vote but we complain a lot". Signed, A Pragmatic Boomer.
5
So go back to using snail mail. Even that is photographed, and BTW, did you notice most of the so called "Security" envelopes are using nonrepro blue ink on the inside? I know graphic arts. Nonrepro blue ink doesn't show up on photo reproductions so be sure to get security envelopes lined inside with black ink.
1
Excellent far reaching public service essay. Thank you. I'll feel better if the young people heed the warnings.
1
As a pediatrician, my "word to the youngs" advice is simple: Don't post on social media anything that you don't want your parents to see. That way it takes into consideration the varied ideas of what is acceptable and usually keeps most people out of trouble in later years.
5
Well, Vicki, we aren’t children.
Adults should more important things to do than moralizing over nude pictures and other people’s consenting relationships.
1
She used terrible judgment in getting involved with a subordinate staffer on her campaign and in allowing it all to be photographed. I can't help but wonder how this might reflect on her judgment in other areas as well. And yes, I know the examples abound of poor judgment by male politicians who got away or are getting away with it (B. Clinton, Trump, etc.)
4
Yes, there has always been drama. Socialite Eliza Jumel probably killed her husband and later married Aaron Burr in hopes of restoring her social status. Woman have had to claw at whatever they could to get to some kind of top spot. It doesn't always pan out.
This "incident" is not just a generational issue. It *is* a political issue. At least since the Middle Ages politics has been moving albiet slowly towards a consent basis of power at all levels. Currently we must find a way to control non-consensual abuse of power particularly those forms that have irreversible consequences in the loss of human life and the destruction of natural systems. We have the power to do our part: vote the current abusers out of office.
A culture of us and them benefits power - condescension is a one of the tools.
Sharing knowledge across generations and cultures has given us tech advances. Nothing new that young does not "get" old and vice versa - do remember that we are on the same team.
1
"Don't leave yourself vulnerable by giving people the ammunition," Dowd says.
OK Boomer!
It was your generation that designed the technological architecture to mine private information without also adapting our laws and social norms to accommodate this historically impossible feat. Furthermore, it is currently your generation that is overseeing the transfer of that informational booty from the shadows of a legal gray area into every conceivable avenue of accountability. Every everything about our lives has become a kernel of leverage that can be used against us by anyone, at any time so long as they have either the financial resources or technical know-how. Thanks for the dystopian nightmare, Boomer!
4
Yes, those millennials just don't get it, do they? The world wasn't remade yesterday by Silicon Valley and it won't be remade tomorrow or the day after: "the primary colors of emotions carry through the centuries."
Maybe a little Shakespeare would also help on the other score on which millennials have a most peculiar and near universal mental block: the trope of irony does not bring meaning to a screeching halt, serving its player as some kind of magical political-moral-ethical Get Out of Jail Free card. "I was being ironic." No, sorry, it doesn't work that way.
For some time now, my rule has been "Never trust anyone under 50."
4
OK Boomer. Well done! Katie Hill knew the new rules, probably signed a document somwhere confirming that she was bound by them. An apology just might have saved her but instead she played the crusading victim, going to war for her own purposes. She does not belong in Congress or any position of authority. Yes men in Congrss are guilty of the same thing. Let's get them out of Congress too
6
As an side; "Okay Boomer" is not okay.
Having recently been in the position of looking for employment I am appalled at the pervasive and unabashed age discrimination in the workplace today. Making light of it in the name of office collegiality is not helpful.
I do not often agree with Ms. Dowd but she has earned her position and the respect that comes with it. Mr. McCreesh should be reminded of that. Perhaps by the Director of Human Resources. What one person perceives as banter another sees as harassment. Me Too applies to more than gender issues.
4
@BC
America is a nation that worships youth and dismisses the experience gained with age as outdated and close-minded - the opposite of most other nations around the world.
4
Our society is replete with double standards. Women’s sexuality versus men’s. White versus people of color in criminal justice. Those with wealth versus the lower classes in just about every sphere. Apparently, culpability for Republican presidents versus Democratic ones. And Millennials versus Boomers in worldview.
Mostly these double standards skew along lines of race, class, and gender. Probably much as it ever was. But halting progress, with some setbacks, is being made.
Only the age divide is different. It appears to have been inflicted on one generation by their elders. Boomers bought car seats and bike helmets by the boatload. They gave every child a participation trophy. Those that could paid for private schools and college test prep. They helicoptered as offspring went off to college. And they reopened their homes when grads had difficulty launching.
But Boomers also collectively put Reagan and two Bush’s in office. Twice they bought the myth that tax cuts pay for themselves. Boomers also failed to respond adequately to climate change despite decades of warnings. Equally bad, Boomers essentially sat by as the vast majority of new wealth was transferred to those in the top 10% of households.
Intergenerational warfare is not the answer. There are lessons to be learned, not the least of which is the importance of political engagement in every cycle. Structural changes then become possible. And with time I also expect oversharing will subside.
5
Millennials and other young women need to pay attention to the double standard that exists for women. The OK Boomer generation made many things better for young women today but that double standard isn't going anywhere just yet.
4
@Jacquie .... Yes. Nailed it. No matter how we’ve progressed (and these young-uns have us to thank, whether they admit it or not), this is a double standard in this country. Probably always will.
3
What the millennials and Gen-Zs and whatever the name might be would like us to believe is that younger people today are somehow fundamentally different, they’re so digital by birth that the standards should be different. A nude picture here and there should be perfectly acceptable these days, among other things.
In reality, the difference is that we’re dealing with generations that are exponentially more spoiled and irresponsible, and believe that, just like in their education, standards should be changed if they’re difficult to meet.
Witness recent leaks of classified data: these days, if a young person that took an oath finds something that they disagree with, they feel entitled to just steal information and disseminate it.
3
She should have stayed in office and let the voters decide. She would be better positioned to fight back and fight back she should.
9
Pretty much Boomers gave Millenials the phones and dubbed them Millenials, setting up a generational marketplace that's booming back like a boomerang. But lest we forget: not all people of a generation are alike...
2
What is ironic, and I just remembered it, was the publishing of those photos of Melania Trump prior to the 2016 election. I know she was not the candidate and that Republican hypocrisy is boundless, but it seems true that they are able to rationalize things to their political advantage. Still, I must believe a day of reckoning will happen and we will see them pay for that at the polls or the courts, or both.
1
The advice of a Boomer comes to mind, perfect for Ms. Hill as she makes new career plans:
"You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometime,
You might find,
You get what you need..."
How prescient.
3
"He said that iPhones and social media have so reshaped culture that older people would have to accept the new and sometimes naked reality."
Yes, it appears young Americans are determined to accede fully to their own domination by totalitarian forces. Just be glad you're old.
4
Remember the unpublished list of settled sexual harassment cases that have been paid by Congress? I’m still waiting to see the names of those Congressional ‘leaders.’
As my husband told our sons, ‘don’t put anything on the web that may come back to haunt you.’ And, while Ms. Hill or her sexual partner may not have taken those photos for public consumption, common sense should have prevailed.
I’m sorry that one of our new shining stars has been caught in this quagmire of double standards, but it just goes to show, it still exists.
2
Simple good advise. I'm not famous enough to be victimized. No pics and watch what you say. The whole world is watching.
Ah... For the old days, making a picture using a film camera and making your own prints privately.
You had total control you could show them or even destroy them.
The same with thoughts you might commit to paper with pen.
Wouldn't it be great if some of our gadgets did not connect to the internet?
2
Katie Hill was unknown to me until her resignation from Congress. Now, she appears to be known to me as just another person who earned herself 15 minutes of world fame. Regrettable, but that is all.
2
The issue here isn't nude photos, it is violation of ethics rules by having an affair with an employee she supervised. Cause for termination in any modern American corporation. Her point that Daffy Donald has gotten away with worse is also true and reflects the moral bankruptcy of the GOP.
7
There is no evidence that this was an abuse of power.
Many supervisors and subordinates have had consenting relationships and marriages.
As for ethics, are you kidding me? It’s the government.
Ok Boomer. About time you took us seriously. We achieve a lot more by connectivity. Just watch the exceptional septuagenarian at work. His twitching fingers on twitter are so successful creating chaos and breakdown of our democracy.
1
Yes it bewildering why some get banished for so called sexual misbehavior? and our President has multiple situations with many abused women testifying and he is OK.
Personally I think she should of "toughed it out"and made the committee act. If she lost the next election then OK but why quit?
4
"that older people would have to accept the new and sometimes naked reality" Heads up to the young ones: boomers invented the internet and the cognitive revolution that changed the definition of property from what is privately owned to software that is publicly owned opensource; free open source software, the software that built Google, Amazon, and Facebook, that allowed, as one example, The Huffington Post the ability to be competitive to the New York Times, without the money outlay involved in print newspapers. This is what Boomers did, OH! YOU! incredibly naive young ones. It is the young ones, but of course not them alone, that got Trump elected because Clinton was too close to Wall Street.
1
I am a baby boomer and am sickened by the misogynistic double standard that continues to dominate our society.
I agree with Maureen Dowd that humanity will never change and you don’t want to leave yourself vulnerable by giving people ammunition. And, while I really don’t understand the concept of posting personal photos/information online, I really hope that once Katie Hill gets rid of her loser husband and gets her life back in order, she’ll run for office again. She was great asset to Congress and will be missed.
3
Barney Frank was my Congressman; Ted Kennedy my Senator and Bill Clinton my President. They legislated and governed while scandal ragged around them. It's an ugly political weapon.
Katie Hill and Al Franken should still be in office doing their best for the American people. Lead with your heart; own up if you're culpable and throw yourself into your work like the above historic figures who put their constituents first.
6
Most Americans believe that they can do whatever they wish because the constitution gives them permission....no matter if what they do is moral or immoral, decent or indecent, or right or wrong. With this kind of total freedom the future will have no need of prisons, law enforcement agencies, nor law books. Why? Because if the law allows you to do what you want, then there is no wrong you can do.
Blessed are those who do not see yet believe. To those who believe in His name: who are born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
Sex scandals have been part of Washington life since the inception, and have always been used by a politician's enemies to bring them down. This has absolutely zero to do with her being a woman. If you want to get in the ring, you have expect to be punched. Don't expect special treatment because you're a woman.
If there's a double-standard, it's that women will defend Katie Hill, and will proclaim her a victim and try to absolve her of any responsibility, but won't care at all when a similar thing happens to a man.
7
Great column. Bad guys will always exist. We should not allow ourselves to get intimidated by them. Women deserve the best. If we need to die for women like you, we would happily die. Boomer is a compliment. Period.
As a Boomer, when I was the age of a Millenial, it was "Don't trust anyone over 30." Same thing as "OK Boomer".
Just sit back & enjoy the comedy watching the Millenials discover life's realities which are not always on a screen.
As a Boomer, I certainly do not envy their lifestyle - they can't get through a day without a screen in front if them.
3
Yep. And if you do take nudes for someone special, like a mate, make sure you can brag if they are released by hackers “YEP. Aren’t they fine art!”
Degrading is pornographic. Magnificent is sacred and erotic. Keep it erotic and, if hacked, grin and brag.
And boomers, let US not forget our mothers who stepped up and riveted, who coded the computers and broke the enemies’ codes, flew our bombers across the bitter cold Atlantic so that a trained pilot would not die if mechanical failure or headwinds brought that bomber down, who flew into enemy lines as operatives, . .
This ‘boomer’ has always been tremendously proud and impressed by my grandfathers and father and uncles who all fought so many years and my second cousin who flew those bombers and married one of the first three Jedberg pilots who flew and supplied our OSS. Few of my generation ever served in combat as many years as so many of our boomer generation.
2
Given the conduct of the President, it was a bit illogical for Hill to resign. Trump maintains his parties support while the evidence of corruption and sexual misdoing surround him. She should have let the voters decide her political fate.
2
There is nothing more boring than generational wars. Yawn.
4
Without pictures of ourselves, we may all disappear. The horror.
3
You can’t expect teenagers to make rational decisions. They never have, and they never will, so blaming them for their mistakes is pretty well useless. The difference is that now, your dumb teenage decisions can haunt you forever, and I don’t think people who were adults before they had the internet understand that. It’s hard to make them understand, and “OK Boomer” is a pretty enticing shorthand for a world they don’t really understand.
3
But if you think about it... it is an odd rule. A rule that says who you can have sexual relationships with.
@David Martin It's about unequal power relationships, where there very well may be serious negative consequences for turning down a sexual relationship.
As a married woman, did she not have an an improper relationship with young woman and then hired her as a staff member? Are those lies or truth?
Wish I could tell the difference.
Nude pics, who cares. The other stuff....
2
Dear Tim Cook - Where's my OK Boomer emoji?!?!?!?
Now back to rebalancing my $600K 401K at age 56.
1
As the linked NPR article point out, “Over a six-month period in 2017 and 2018, nine lawmakers — eight men and one woman — were forced out of office, either by resignation or by early retirement, over varying degrees of allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior or tolerance of such behavior.”
The new House rule prohibiting lawmakers from having sexual relations with anyone who works in their congressional office or on any committees on which they serve is an outgrowth of the “Me Too Movement.” Katie Hill violated the rule, which applies to women as well as men.
Hill’s ex-husband actions are reprehensible, but women also blackmail politicians. Maureen Dowd appears to have forgotten she labeled Trump our “first porn president” after porn star Stormy Daniels allege she and Trump had consensual sex.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/trump-the-porn-president.html
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/24/773025596/first-lawmaker-to-trigger-new-metoo-era-conduct-rules-is-a-female-freshman
Considering the ridiculous Schiff’s pursuit of fictional nude photos in Russian hands nothing surprises me about Washington and their pack of spying eyes.
1
@Charlie Were you equally amused when an American comedian pranked Wisconsin governor Scott Walker by pretending to be one of the Koch brothers?
Figure being granted space here in the NY Times, Ms. Hill's story could somehow rise to the level of a Shakespearian tragedy. It barely gained the status of seedy and falls short of greater downfalls--Wilbur Mills? Ted Kennedy?
1
It’s all yours millennial. Remember you break it you own it. Mommy and Daddy won’t always be there to make everything ok.
4
Agree!
The Republican threw Katie under the bus, just like Senator Gillibrand threw Al Franken under the bus.
1
Congresswoman Hill, may our culture redirect its focus from our collective finger wagging at you to the four waving back at us. Because no matter what we might "see," we don't need to contemplate the things that are part of someone else's life that are none of our business to contemplate nor our place to form judgment. We're all going to have to learn the most "civilized" skill of looking away when that thing I'm seeing is none of my business. The only thing rightfully my business is your violation of our relatively new, bright line rule: Bosses may not have sex with their employees. Maybe there are points on this rule that need refining, or not. But that rule is the only one that really should matter to anyone who's not immediately involved. The fact that this essay and most of these comments focus on anything else speaks volumes about US. And I suppose that's OUR shame...exposed online forever. We all have some growing up to do.
1
Good advice. Well said, Ms Dowd.
Why do millenials, Gen-X,Y, or Z-ers think that what they do, say or post is of such interest to anyone? Because they've invented sex? Because they're just so fascinating?
I suppose it's normal to gaze at your navel, but just don't ask me to look at yours.
And if they're so hip to technology, why the shock and surprise when pixels bite back?
(Yes - I'm a boomer. Now answer the questions).
5
Best Dowd column in ages. Really well said. Yeah, I'm old.
2
Once again, the hypocrisy of the left is shocking.
Dowd describes Hill’s husband as an unemployed loser for choosing to be the one that stays home with the kids, enabling his wife to pursue her career.
If a Republican described women who choose to stay at home to raise the kids as “unemployed losers”, I suspect your faux outrage would show.
5
Politician allows pictures to be taken of her naked with a staffer. What could possibly go wrong?
2
How about we get over the naked human body and not be scandalized by naked pictures?
1
People should learn: dont allow nude pix. It's not just abt women,...remember Anthony Weiner. Great article by Dowd.
1
"... it featured revenge porn, a throuple, sexual fluidity and dirty bong water."
And the story is not done. I predict a lawsuit and a book deal.
1
What bothers me is not the substance of the issues being discussed, but how one side smugly dismisses the other. Boomers are not entitled to comment on The Youngs, men cannot comment on women, whites cannot comment on African-Americans, religious people cannot comment on secular individuals, etc. And vice versa in most cases. The list is long. Minds are closed, real discourse becomes impossible.
8
I can remember when academic liberals were up in arms about “The Closing of The American Mind” by Allan Bloom in the late 80’s. Turns out he was right.
Thank you for this very important effort to protect Americans Constitutional right to privacy and to be secure in their person, places and papers. But now why do we have to fear our government? I think we should start turning that paradigm to having them fear us by demanding repeals of any self serving laws that have made us fear them. We can start by repealing the patriot act, the freedom act, the "War on Drugs", the "War on Crime" that put three million people in prison, the Death penalty that terrorizes our citizens under the false pretense of being a "Deterrent", and the wars that make seasoned killers who come home only to join the police "Forces" where they are crazily killing innocent people in what is clearly an attempt at sparking rebellion as an excuse to have martial law. We need all you social media fans to do a Blackout of your activities to deny the government their unconstitutional surveillance techniques some of which I could die for for telling you, so take my word for it, blind the government.
There is a point at which you can be soooo sensitive to any criticism that you block your own path to wisdom. It seems to me that the younger generation today is overly defensive to any suggestion that they made a mistake and could do better. As I tell my sons, mistakes can be expected when you're young, and your job is to see them, own them, and do better going forward.
3
Sage grandfather once said “trust no one except your dog”.
6
So Millenials are too trusting? That is their real problem?
And here I thought it was mindless categorization.
If Dowd has the numbers that most Americans born in the same decade as the recently resigned congreemen have video of their sexual shennagins floating around do tell.
Until then I will chalk this up to a another boomer in position to judge thoughtlessly patronizing.
And the headline is far worse.
Modernity? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism_in_the_Catholic_Church
Sectarian nonsense.
I find myself saying, more and more often, "I'd be really angry about this, except I was at least that stupid at that age." The other thing I must say, "Man! Am I glad we didn't have cellphone cameras back in the day."
4
As a member of the "Silent Generation" who met his wife at a Vietnam protest rally and now has two millennial sons, I pass on this advice from them to you, "Millennials feel entitled!" My oldest son, 36 (nee 1983) has repudiated his millennial-ness with the hard work and thrift that makes me think he's a closet Calvinist rather than the son of a non-congregation Jew and Lutheran. So, Katie Hill may lack the same moral blinders as that other paragon of virtue, The Don (aka The Donald). Whether she should have resigned is a matter of debate when you consider the likes of The Don and Brett Kavanuagh, especially if she really believes it's all about "revenge porn." But, perhaps it's a hopeful sign of recognition that in the #MeToo the rules, as you note, now apply to #YouToo as with women like Katie Hill. That said, I still miss Al Franken, and have to ask why is there so "naked reality" out there in cyberspace?
2
“Me too” rules have nothing to do with it.
Hill was not guilty of sexual abuse.
There were no nudes of Monica Lweniksy and she was still shamed and vilified to kingdom come. Its not the nude pictures that are the problem but the cruel desire to humiliate others.
4
It's not blaming the victim so say: don't put stupid pictures on your phone/internet.
What's the purpose of doing that?
There's something rotten in Denmark, indeed!
2
In Greece, when I visited, there were billboards of women breastfeeding. In Nepal, women who dress modestly, as culture dictates, will breastfeed easily in public, no one stares or is disgusted.
In Nicaragua and Costa Rica the same. It’s our culture that represses the naturalness of nudity with the unnaturalness of the posed selfie aesthetically dictated by a marketed modality. Be real people not facades.
1
@Lulu,
Ditto here in Mexico.
Monstrous, voracious Member of Congress sexual predator forces campaign and congressional staffers of different genders into sexual relationships, then leaves homemaker spouse penniless.
Oh, wait...those would be the headlines for a male Member of Congress.
4
It's a shame that this woman felt that she had to resign over this. Nude photos, OMG! Really?
Our prudish society had not come very far in the last 50 or 60 years.
2
They forced her out for nontraditional relationships and smoking weed while the 'conservative' crew is ruining the environment, selling weapons to barbarians, and enabling the most corrupt inept president in our history turn our country into a Banana Republic?
3
Katie Hill should not have resigned. I understand that she probably wanted the humiliation to end, but I wish she had stayed. The fact that two reputable new websites published her naked photo is a disgrace.
2
This OK Boomer would die before photographing any naked part of my body on my phone. Luckily all those photos are on yellowing Polaroids tucked away my sock drawer.
1
And, Maureen, you just don't get it. OK Boomer (and I'm 73).
1
At 76 years old, my advice to Ms. Hill is that if you play with fire, you should expect to get burned. She's no loss to het district as she seems more interested in her sex life that your every day problems.
2
Who said journalists aren’t writers?
“...the primary colors of emotion carry through the centuries.”
“From passenger pigeon to pixel.”
Bottom line here is, as Harry Truman put it, if you cannot stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Democrats need to learn to stop doing stupid things; and after admitting that is impossible, they being human, to stand up and tell the rest of the world to “get over it” - wait, didn’t someone who works for Emperor Trump just do that? Not a good example to follow, but the alternative is to surrender to the hypocrites masquerading as fine, morally perfect Republican citizens.
Ah a little taste of the ugliness the dems dish out every day spills out over one of their own. Quelle dommage.. Perhaps the millennials will learn that sometimes you just have to conform your behavior to the norm or sink into the swamp.
Millennial query: If there’s no photo, did the event happen?
4
It seems elementary. Wake up, Shawn.
(I am far too old for "generations".)
When Katie Hill's husband leaked those photos, he committed an incredibly cruel against her. Maureen Dowd, you're choosing to use your platform wagging your finger at her for making choices ypu admit essentially everyone her age has made. Young people take nudes and share them with people they trust. Here are some analogous situations to ponder: Would you blame a woman if she trusts a man enough to marry him, then is blindsided by him saying demeaning things to her? What if he suddenly hit her? What if, in 1996, a woman trusted a man enough to have sex with him and take some Polaroids in the process, believing both would stay between them?
The fact that technology has made it easier to hurt women in this way is not as a mandate against women using technology. It's a reason to figure out new standards for everyone using that technology, like revenge porn laws aimed at situations precisely like these. Forget the tech. Forget the generational rhetoric. Hill's relationship with a staffer is bad news, but don't blame her or other women for it when the men in their lives betray their trust.
2
@Anton
Don't blame her for having affairs with her staff? A man made her do it? Really?
That "bad news" is sexual harassment. At least that's what it would be called if a man had done it. And he wouldn't get to blame his wife.
1
@J.C.,
Where did you pick up the lie about sexual harrassment?
She did not sexually harrass anyone.
She simply violated a stupid, authoritarian rule with another adult.
Have not seen the photos of Katie Hill, apparently she has nothing to be ashamed of. On the other hand, I do not want to see pictures of naked conservative women. Just looking at pictures i see of them is enough to make on wonder what kind of alien life form they are trying to imitate.
If you think aging blobs are attractive, then go ahead, but be forewarned, they most likely will make you sick.
Different points of view; by that I mean a progression of inclusion of different perspectives, actually do fit together like a puzzle.
We accept Darwin's principals of evolution, which he brought to a spiritual level; or we err by taking the pieces that support a narrow self serving set of beliefs and shove the rest. I think Ms Hill should have stayed in office.
Somehow Ms. Dowd rubs me the wrong way. I always feel she is hired to write divisive 2016 style refusal of democratic principals; because the democratic "establishment" has taken on the deliberate deceptive role of us against them, and incrementalism that is a half hearted lure. They charm us with attractive people like Obama and Bill Clinton, but it's banal and ultimately cheap if they sell us out. like Hollywood and bad art, it has to have some rot. Unfortunately "they" are backed by moneyed interests that do not want any thing to get in their way and the courage of democracy gets in their way.
This is the genius of our constitution that was carefully written precisely to eliminate the abuse of power.
Equal rights and feminism do indeed flush out any residual selfish power and control psychopathy. Who are the fools here? that's why these people degrade and shame and abuse the vulnerable -young people, people of color, inspiring people; girls and women, and older people;
So Ms. Dowd chimes in like a junk yard dog defending the garbage dump of the status quo.
1
@Julie
Very well written and nail on head.
Why on earth did she resign??? She might have been censured, ok, but why resign and once again get everything the Republicans sought in fomenting this story? The Trump way, the Roy Cohn way and the Republican way is never give in, ever... and so Trump, Jim Jordan and tens of others are still haunting our days while Al Franken, Katie Hill, like good little democrats give in at the first sign of smoke (Al Gore anyone?).
6
OK Maureen, the point is that most people have at some point in their youth done something a little crazy (like smoking a bong naked) - that is what has NOT changed - but what HAS is that their are phones with cameras everywhere and a well developed habit of documenting one’s less edgy endeavors, and also the possibility of being photographed without your knowledge.
Maureen's best in quite a while. Bravo.
1
In reference to the empathy of “ Representative Matt Gaetz, the 37-year-old Florida Republican and Trump lap dog..”
A mug shot for DUI’s you try to bury ain’t the same as a nude photo used by an ex for shaming.
"Youngs who can’t even imagine that they will one day run for office may already have racy shots somewhere out there."
Right. So now the Millennial generation working in the msm had better get on tout suite with spinning down the need to expect any sort of sexual ethics from their future politicians. Get ready America for Presidents with harems of first, second, third and fourth or more spouses - of any gender, of course. And if you happen to be a white Republican candidate in a traditional monogamous marriage with someone of your own race, unless you utterly denigrate your privileged life a la Beto O'Rourke, then you will be pilloried as being a dangerous racist and sexist monster.
The whole thing disgusts this early baby boomer. Her excuse that the pictures were taken "without my knowledge" makes me wonder if she know who took them. I say, grow up. You blew it and ruined things, so move on.
2
Ms. Hill was in elementary school when Bill Clinton had his White House affairs. That was the example she had growing up, and for her generation it was the norm. He kept his position. Why would she think she couldn't keep her's as well? It was only sex. Right?
@Ben,
That’s right. It was only sex.
But to read some of the comments here, you’d think we wrre living among the Puritan moral police.
The GOP’s second biggest coup was publishing the purloined photos. Their biggest coup was getting Ms. Hill to give the exit speech they wrote for her.
1
This piece misses a key point. She had sex with her subordinates, campaign and house staff. Nothing to do with tech or generation. Just wrong. Ask Bill Clinton.
5
@Daniel Salazar
It's no accident that this key information was left out of Ms. Dowd's piece. It's the part that she can't blame a man for.
Think back may years age...that kid on the diving board saying, “Look Ma...look Ma....look Ma...,”
That’s who we now are. Except now it’s not about jumping into the pool for approval from Ma.
It’s now about, “Look where I am...see what I’m eating...see what I’m wearing...see how good I look...see where I live...see what I’m driving...etc.”
@Bruce Stasiuk "If there's no pictures, it didn't happen".
She should have stayed and fought it out. If she asked the Squad they would have fought for her. Nancy pushed her out, you may be sure of that. She denies having an affair with a current staffer. I believe her. She said yes she did have an affair with a campaign staffer but that was before her election. And it is none of our business. Being forced out by good old Nancy means that porn revenge can now be used on everyone in office. I am glad she spoke of Trump and the many accusations against him. I am in my 70s but all these self righteous people tsk tsking here make me throw up. She really did not do anything wrong except marry a terrible man. Not a reason to get kicked out of congress. I hope she becomes and independent and runs for office again.
2
The Revolution always devours its own children. WOKE generation beware.
1
I wish she had not resigned. It felt a little bit like Al Franken. If I'm not mistaken she was having a tryst with her husband and a campaign staffer before she was elected, and it was all consensual. Yes, the millennials are more liberated than Xers or Boomers, but this is the world they live in. I wish she had owned it and stayed in Congress. We needed her and a lot of people pounded the pavement and knocked on doors to get her there. And yet somehow George Papadopolous feels less shame and is priming to take her place. Pity.
1
Why, then, 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so
Thank you Maureen! As my Mom (a member of the “Greatest Generation” ) used to say “Always wear clean underwear - you never know if you’ll have an accident and someone you don’t know will see it.”
They used to call it common sense. Sadly now everybody pulls their pants down online and still expects respect.
To which I say “Get over yourselves GXZ”
2
The proper riposte to "OK Boomer" is....
......."Wait a few years...you'll see"
4
Ah the millennials! Yes. The millennials.
I turned seventy in August. I have two children--one thirty two, the other twenty nine.
I do not have a smart phone. I DO have a cell phone--which provokes immediate laughter whenever I pull it out and show it off. I tell people it was found among the relics of some long-dead Egyptian pharaoh in some crumbling pyramid.
This simply to get a cheap laugh.
Well, I am sorry about Ms. Fiona Hill. BUT--
--I will never understand (till my dying day--Lord knows when THAT'LL be)--why anyone would wish to take a nude photo of himself and have it hanging around in his smart phone.
And wow! What a prank! I could easily imagine any number of coronaries following on the heels of such a message.
What is "bong water"?
No no--never mind. I don't need to know.
Thanks for the piece, Ms. Dowd. It was--
--enlightening.
I wish Ms. Hill the best.
Good luck, Ms. Hill.
No one is truly concerned (rightfully so) about a sexually fluid member of Congress that has nudes in her story and smokes a bong, although the state of one’s bong water is an big metaphor of one’s personal life.
Hopefully we are truly concerned with a member of Congress sexually harassing a fellow human who is also their staff member—again rightfully so.
1
177 Republicans Voted to Impeach Nixon
30 Democrats Voted to Impeach Clinton
0 Republicans Voted to Impeach Trump
Given This Trend--
Mens Club is alive and well
1
Between "OK Boomer" and "cancel culture", I can't imagine that the Russian trolls are having a field day retweeting our culture war. Let's all chill out!
1
@Crocus Hill
Tay Tay say " You Need to Calm Down "
I am one of those "Ok-Boomers" Dowd writes of her office colleague to her, but I continually am amazed at just how naive the Katie Hill's of the planet are that must think by becoming a politician one no longer has any enemies, and that politics is not a dirty game of gotcha in the digital age. How stupid or ill informed, or, again, incredibly naive, Katie Hill and her ilk are. Grow up kid. Having just vilified her, I then will say, why did you cave, and resign? If your gender wants to be treated on an equal footing with the likes of Trump, even your fellow House member, Duncan Hunter (R-Ca., indicted with his wife on 60 counts of wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations and conspiracy) and oh so many other Members of the Congress over the years, then stand up and be counted. Don't repeat the mistake of All Farnken, the Minnesota D who similarly resigned for acts that did not reach the levels of Trump, Clinton, and their minions. Your closing speech of being the victim of gutter politics exemplifies that maybe, just maybe, you would have been better off at listening to a "ok-boomer" than flicking the middle finger at our generation.
Good grief.
If Modo noting "dirty bong water" isn't a sign of the apocalypse, I'm not sure what is.
This comment thread is a master class in how disconnected the older generation is
OK boomer
Sounds like Matt Gaetz has some pictures out there.
Dowd is on the money here. And I hope 27-year old "Shawn" saying "OK Boomer" doesn't mean he can't appreciate working with (for?) someone of her caliber. He might learn something.
She voted to impeach-yet self destructed. She who lives by the sword....
I fall into the category of a "Boomer" but I think I must be in some sub-category of the tribe. Although I was brought up to believe the need to flash your privates was creepy, illegal and a psychological impairment, I salute the freeing up of the sexual mores that restricted anything outside of the normal religious ideas of sexuality. I was never comfortable with the bullies in school, the harrasers at work and the bigots in my family, so I am glad these things have come out in the open to the betterment of the victims. I celebrate gay rights, equal rights and human rights, phrases that weren't coined when I was born. With each new medical, technological and cultural advance came a downside but progress always seemed to demand it's pound of flesh. In this case, Ms.Hills career was stymied by the very behavior that brought about the #me too movement. My race, gender and age should make me a Trump supporter but, there again, I find myself more comfortable in the millennial camp than my own. I wish there were a way I could let people know that I'm an OK boomer.
OK Boomer.
You go Millie.
"Talking about my g g g ,generation;
hope I die before I get old..."
1
why can't she withdraw her offered retirement (in view of various discussions) & leave it to others to force her out if they so choose & can?
Interesting, but unsurprising, quote by Gaetz. Perhaps he’s hedging? Duh. Why is everyone so afraid to come forward with stuff that is well known about this guy?
Nice one, Maureen- especially that last line.
I don’t care about Katie’s sexual predilections (but for the possibility that she may be a potential victim of extortion) but I am curious about the circumstance in which a compromising photo was made available to public scrutiny and licentiousness.
Who took the photo(s)? Did Ms. Hill know it was taken and did she consent? If, as a member of Congress (or, if before she became a member, an ambitious politician), how stupid could she have been? If she was unaware of the photo(s) being taken, that’s a different story. Trump wasn’t dumb enough to know his Access Hollywood unexpurgated bragging was taped.
I don’t understand why she resigned. A consensual affair with a staff member or campaign worker might have garnered her a reprimand, is not a capital crime. I don’t care about her nude photos and neither would most Californians. Clearly, her ex-husband is a massive jerk.
Why did she quit?
1
@RMC,
Read some of the viscious comments here by a supposed enlightened Times readership, and you’ll how few phony liberals support her.
She should have just stayed on the job, apologized to her constituents, and moved on. Her behavior was not unusual, just dumb to record it,
It is not remotely "AMAZING" that a woman was ensnared. The only people who are every held accountable are women.
No one in Congress or the Senate is holding our liar, destructive conman president accountable. They are just talking...Lot's of sound bites...
I still don't see why she resigned. So what if nude photos of her were seen? That damage is done. When Ocasio-Cortez's dancing video was released, she simply said, "So what?" and everyone soon forgot about it. Something else must be lurking in this story.
1
The #MeToo movement is about inappropriate advances and even sexual assault that are born of power imbalance. That is the message which must come out of the movement; those relationships are inappropriate. [quid pro quo?]
Ms. Hill groomed her staff member to partake in some creepy lust-fueled triangle. If the staffer said "no," would she have fallen out of favor with the then bright-futured Hill? This is a textbook #Metoo situation, and must be referred to as such.
265
@Anderson I agree. It's not about the photos, it's not about the bong, it's not about being bisexual or having an open marriage. It's about the grooming. The staff member was 21, which is adult but fully 50% younger than the 31 year old candidate, who got this young woman to participate in the 3-way that either the husband, or Hill, or both of them wanted. The connection took place in the workplace, and Hill was the more powerful person.
54
@Anderson
If a male congress member had sex with a campaign staffer of one gender and a congressional staffer of another gender, the headlines in Dowd’s column would be about a
“monstrous sexual predator,”
and rightly so.
33
@Anderson Unbelievable how clear you've pointed out the nonsense of the #metoo ethos. If you could you prove that your career was disrupted negatively by rejecting someone's advances, sure sue away but otherwise it seems like rejecting gay marriage by saying some consensual relationships are totally wrong because fundamentally what is pious is decided by the know it alls.
7
Do "most young people have at least one picture on their phones that they don’t want to get out"? I don't know anything about Ms. Dowd's friend, but I would venture from my experience that in fact there are a majority of the younger generations out there who have a good enough sense of personal morality, and respect for themselves and others that won't have such pictures. Let's not sell them short.
A story in the Times says Katie Hill's case is complicated. To me it seems overblown in that her resignation, while honorable, seems unwarranted at this point. But mayhap I just haven't caught up with all the details.
She is accused of having had a relationship with a member of her congressional staff, which would be against House rules. But she denies it, and AFAIK no proof has surfaced -- which leaves it a he said/she said matter between her and her estranged husband.
Then there is a consensual relationship with a woman on her campaign staff. That is not against House rules, nor is adultery illegal in California -- and anyway her husband had apparently been involved also.
So again, I may have missed something, but I see no great wrongdoing here.
1
Eventually this will become normalized. Give it another 20 years. I’ll be in my mid 70s and won’t be doing it then either but the ubiquity and passage of time plus new technologies will combine to make this all moot. The decision makers for the most part will all have grown up with a phone in hand and I think they will have found far more insidious things to crucify others over.
In my early 60s, watching tech evolve, it was always , always in the forefront of my brain that anything I did on line, or put online, was probably always accessible. You'd think the younger set would understand that more-so. Then again, maybe many dont, or have the sense to think about consequences down the road.
1
Sure, everyone needs to be careful except Trump. Perhaps the most selfish and evil man to ever hold public office gets a pass because of tax cuts and the electoral college. Insane.
1
Maureen: as a 60 yo I do agree with you and I want to give you a fist bump wherein we simultaneously say, “OK Boomer!”. There with we coopt the new meme. Once this response spreads among boomers the term will extinguish having been adopted by the geezer class.
2
well done Maureen! one of your better columns in this drab and depressing Fall of Brexits & tweets & more tweets and...
I have a better idea. Instead of telling young people to not take nude pictures of themselves on the off chance that one day they might decide to run for office, why not get used to the idea that EVERYONE will have nude pictures of themselves floating around somewhere, accept the fact, and stop penalizing decent people for daring to have sex lives?
This is an absolutely reasonable expectation. We now live in a world where politicians drink, do weed, have sex before marriage, have abortions, divorce, and even openly announce that they are homosexual. Each and every one of these things were once instant career-ending disasters, and now each and every one of them rightly has no impact.
That must be the expectation going into the future. One day, Katie Hill will be seen as a martyr to this last, stupid taboo.
1
We do have sex lives and nudity. Nudity doesn’t have to be sexualized.
There is a huge difference. One is used for marketing and money making - or between lovers- intimately. Now you can’t go on a dating site without giving some shot of your decapitated body.
It’s more inhuman than the 200 thousand years plus humans wore very little clothing.
Also - people in other cultures , in warm climates, do not wear clothing as we do. It’s European. But be sure the mass produced clothes are everywhere now.
Panamas Kuna culture as example wore nothing but painted designs on their bodies, the Europeans came and said nudity was bad, so they made clothing with designs and now tourists buy the MULAS. No one even knowing the history.
Maybe we can get away from prescribed sexuality - maybe we should stop looking at advertisements and porn to tell us how to be naked.
How could Ms. Dowd write this column and not mention Duncan Hunter, another CA congressmen, still in office, who is under indictment for using $250,000 in campaign funds to support his affairs with FIVE women - and is blaming the scandal on his wife's bad bookkeeping?!?
Talk about a double standard!
3
I hope that Katie Hill sues Red State and the Daily Mail into oblivion, and that her ex goes to jail.
I don’t know whether or not she did have an affair with a congressional staffer—she says not—if she did, rules are rules.
But revenge porn is illegal. And immoral.
4
You don’t want intimate photos to embarrass you down the line?
Don’t take intimate photos.
This is not rocket science...
1
"And [millennials] don’t leave yourself vulnerable by giving people the ammunition — or the nudes — to strip you of your dreams..."
... And your humanity. As Ms. Dowd declares, there are horrible, vicious, gratuitously vindictive people out there with no nobler mission in their lives than to harm other people.
If you doubt this, look no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
1
0 Republicans voted to Impeach
By this Standard
She should stay
Why are women always the first to be held accountable???
I still live by my mother's mantra: "Fools' names, like their faces, always seen in pubic places". It has worked well for me, so far.
1
so... now why did she quit?
Lemme get this straight, you should pardon the expression...you’re moving up to the bigs in the age of DON THE TRUMP and you dunno whether or not you should be shtupping your staff in, well, assorted ways?
That right there is disqualifying. You don’t want to play, your shouldn’t of brought the ball.
Good grief.
Oh dear not another social media catch phrase (or clap back for the striving hipster). Okay Boomer is supposed to be a real zinger? Meanwhile the crowd looks around for group confirmation and conformity. It seems very trivial although exciting to divide groups up by age, media savvy, virtue signalling competitions, virtual social media opportunities for hand holding and singing kumbaya with people you don't know let alone have any affection for. Let's face it, most teens, Millennials, Gen Xers, or other terms for young demographics ultimately have more loyalty & bonding to their immediate family & small circle of friends than some invisible group that is supposed to be tied together based simply on their age bracket.
Katie Hill's pressure to resign from office was simply because she broke the new Congressional ethics rule by choosing to have sexual relations with her DC staffer. These rules were enacted by Democrats as part of the Me Too Movement to enforce stricter enforcement & provide clear guidelines of what is considered appropriate behavior. Surely she & her devotees can be angry about revenge porn although without her poor decision she would most likely still be holding on to her seat.
Lastly, as far as sending compromising photos of one's body parts, I am sure there are many Boomers who have let their id overrule their brain including Anthony Weiner who ultimately paid a price. Although again his misdeed was sharing his member pic with a minor which is unlawful.
1
I am a proud Boomer. Born in 1952. You know what, Millenials et al? I think you’re just jealous. The tuition at my Ivy League School in the early 1970’s was $2,650 per year! I knew I could use my degree right out of college and was never going to have to say,”You want fries with that?”
It was not impossible to buy a decent house. I could live a generous life and still save. I could take vacations.
So, be jealous. Your “OK Boomer!” doesn’t bother me. It only reminds me that I was just lucky. By the luck of the draw, I was born at a great time. And by the luck of the draw, you weren’t. I’m sorry about your struggle. Your sarcasm only reminds me that I was born in a fantastic era, that I’m eternally grateful for.
@Jet Phillips
I don't think you should take pride in the fact that your generation is the one that has created the mess that young people are living in now. And your gloating about how good you have it and "too bad, so sad" to young ones makes you deserving of mockery and contempt.
1
@J.C.
that could/can be said about the attitudes of the young from the 50's / 60's till now .
prior , the toughness of society and life left little time for such thought...
Ok out there, please note that “young” is an adjective and NOT a noun. Thus there cannot be “youngs” - what the heck happened to plain old talk?
Why is it that being nude is acceptable but taking nude photos is not? The point of this article is not “don’t have relations with people that work for you.” It’s “make sure naked photos of you don’t exist so that no one can use them against you.” I was very disappointed to see this kind of victim-blaming rhetoric in the Times. Bad actors should be blamed for bad behavior. Furthermore, if someone plans to betray you, they will. It is not up to the victim to prevent the crime.
At what point do we stop shaming people (let’s be real, mostly women) for being sexual? If someone releases private photos of you, it’s not on you for being in them. Maybe instead of implying that young people are so distracted by shiny tech that they can no longer think rationally, the author could come to terms with the idea that nude photos are not inherently scandalous.
Take all the nude photos you like. But seriously, don’t have sex with your staff.
“ Hill was a blast of fresh air on the Hill. And it is amazing that, after two centuries of men treating the political landscape here as a droit du seigneur playground, that the one ensnared in an ethics investigation about the new rules enacted last year on sexual harassment — barring lawmakers from having sexual relationships with staffers — is a woman.”
Oh my god. Why is that “amazing”? Are you crazy? That’s what always happens: The ones who enact the “holier-than-thou” rules end up getting caught. Look at the Impeachment Republicans of the ‘90’s who Impeached Bill Clinton. Several had to resign because they were guilty of the same thing they were accusing Bill Clinton of: Bob Livingston, Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde —— they all had mistresses. And they were exposed as the hypocrites they were. Same exact thing today. There is no difference.
Nobody would care if there was a picture of Bernie dancing naked at a Grateful Dead concert. Probably nobody would be curious enough to do a google search and try to find it. I agree with many of the other comments, it's about sex with a employee/subordinate/intern (you should have resigned, Bill), not the pictures.
After the celebrity nudes leak a few years ago I took the position that if you don’t want not safe for work (NSFW) pictures to end up online then don’t take them. Then I found myself taking NSFW pictures of myself (for myself and sometimes for my husband) and my position has changed. Obviously I’m careful with whom I share those pics, but I feel it’s reasonable for me to trust my husband. If our relationship deteriorated down the road and he decided to release those pics, he should be punished, not me (granted I would be punished regardless in loss of reputation etc with those pics being public).
We need much stronger laws against revenge porn and people who leak unauthorized photos should be punished appropriately. And instead of blaming the woman for taking the pics, we should blame and abhor the leaker for leaking them (and we should negatively judge those people and publications who continue to disseminate them).
I'm older than a boomer. And I was filmed in a sex scene in a movie. They cut the scene because they needed me to play a different character who was murdered. I was so frustrated that the sex scene was cut out. I tried to get hold of it but by the time I asked for it it it was lost somewhere in film heaven.
Why in the world is Maureen piling on here. Better doing that in an in an orgy than in a media frenzy.
1
Hubris is perennial, not just Millennial.
Katie Hill tried to recast her fall as things that would rally the troops: revenge porn, double standards for the sexes, another hit against representing her demographic in Congress.
But it was good, old fashioned hubris. She made decisions that were based on a firm belief that she was above those around her and beyond reproach. It had nothing to do with a naïve Millennial love affair with smartphones and their cameras. She actually broke the ethics rules.
She was not a victim. She was an author.
3
Maureen has absolutely proven that she is part of the Boomer generation that just doesn't get it.
Times have changed.
Things have changed.
America is not like it was when you grew up.
The world is not like it was when you grew up.
Stop blaming the victim, and accept the fact that you are living in the past.
America is not better than it was back then, it's much, much worse. No matter what you think, it's not our fault, it's the fault of your entire generation. How could it be our fault that America is broken, when we weren't alive to break it?
"You broke it, you bought it!"
1
I'm a Boomer. Blaming a victim because they participated in an activity that led to the crime, in this case revenge porn, isn't a lot different than asking a rape victim why she was wearing the wrong clothes. The degree of harm is different, but you get the idea..............
1
My question in answer is
And what’s your number?
The only way that this could have been more entertaining is if Hill magically morphed into Gillibrand and when she delivered her 'fiery exit speech' - she looked up to find only Al Franken doing a slow-clap.
OK Boomer indeed.
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These days one never know who is out with smartphones in their hand starting from teens to seniors.
About four months ago I had a stupid fall and broke my humerus bone, I could not even get up until three men had to pull me up .
Later I wondered did anyone out there snapped a picture to post in their whatever sites ?
1
OK Milennial.
I'm a boomer, born in 1952, the last year of the Truman administration.This is how I/we grew up:
Nuclear war a daily threat
Constant (and pointless) bomb drills in school
Childhood "Nuclear War Syndrome"
The Cuban Missile crisis
The Polio Virus. Measles. Chicken Pox.
Legal segregation.
Bull Connor, fire hoses, dogs.
Freedom Rides.
Cities burning in "race riots."
Assassinations: JFK, MLK, RFK.
The Draft.
The War, the War, the Vietnam War.
My Lai Massacre.
Richard Nixon
Kent State and Jackson State
OK, Millenials?
Just a sampling of the Boomer world you scorn.
It's difficult to understand just what, exactly, you appear to be so contemptuous about.
Until you all face a draft, an illegal war -- and have to fight it -- or try to stop it -- or both, I tend to dismiss your contempt for my generation because we don't live or die by your dangerous infatuation with technology.
Until you ride a bus deep into Mississippi and get attacked by the Klan -- until you get shot dead just because you happened to walk across your college campus -- until you're afraid to swim, or panic if you get a temperature after swimming -- until you jump out of a helo and start wading through a jungle -- be careful how you judge those who came before you.
As JFK said in a speech: "We all inhabit the same small planet. We all breathe the same air. And we are all mortal."
Katie Hill shouldn't have resigned.
Millennials, stand up for the technology you worship, even if it betrays you.
1
@history lesson
have you had
phone battery die ?
Uber fail to show ?
Amazon arrive in 3 days ?
GrubHub show up cold ?
Netflix refuse you using friend's password ?
have some empathy
“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.” —
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
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Real mob bosses like Donald Trump make a religion out of not documenting anything. The man has never sent one email in his life!!!!
Maybe Jeffrey Epstein has documented his sexual misbehavior, but you can't rely on AG Bill Barr to bury it all.
Unmatched wisdom.
When you are a genuine human being and not a mob boss, you are much more vulnerable.
Maureen,
You close with, "OK, Millenials?"
They never made it to the end of the piece.
After years of similar stories, it is clear that Republicans dislike sex. What wonderful news that is. Now if you Democrats would stop stubbornly supporting Abortion after having been instigated by Republicans, we can have more Democrats because as it is now, your thinning the ranks. We need new generations of Democrats who care about everything. And if you think I'm inferring a sinister Republican motive....that's right! Now they are working on eliminating health care and food programs for us. Do you understand? All you Hill's on the Hill, shape up and start fighting for us.
Surprisingly enough, there are people I know and respect who are noticeably younger than me, who have an absolutely minimal number of photographs of themselves out there on the internet. And I'm willing to bet, nothing embarrasing!
I am fully digital and have been for a rather long time, despite or maybe because of my advanced middle age. I keep my FBook profile boring and have never sexted anyone, for reasons that seem blatantly obvious to me but which are somehow lost on (some of) the youth of today.
Once upon a time, last century, it was understood by cleverer folk that one ought to use a POLAROID camera for certain kinds of photographs! Taking them to the one hour photo in the mall was a bad idea, likely to invite all sorts of trouble. SOME people understood this, others did not.
I used to work in a one hour photo back then, and I assure you that the staff of young adults at almost any one hour photo in the nation definitely noticed (and made extra copies of!) those naughty photos y'all should have taken with a Polaroid! And if you were a real perv, you'd likely get the cops called on you. (probably faster than FBook will do it today)
I wonder if, had Katie Hill and her ex been taking their photos in the 90's, they would have had the sense to use a Polaroid?
It’s not about the pictures or the President. It’s about being so personally irresponsible that you can no longer be trusted to lead.
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What was she thinking?
I'm a "boomer" and the fact that in this day and age, a woman with a healthy libido is STILL being shamed out of a job with "revenge porn" by an obviously vengeful and bratty ex is beyond regressive. This whole thing stinks to high heaven. And don't forget that if this was a male colleague, the slap on the back "atta boys" would still be happening in the halls of our selectively moral Congress. I'm profoundly disappointed that women just can't be treated equally, STILL.
1
@Kia
This IS equal treatment, just not the kind you want. Get used to it.
I don’t think it was the naked pictures that did her in. She broke the rules by having an affair with a staffer. That is not allowed whether you have clothes on or not. That being said, this penchant the younger generation has for photographing themselves in compromising positions in the internet age is beyond stupid - especially if you hold a public job. It’s dumb even if you hold a private job. Employers today even look at someone’s Facebook and Twitter posts when considering whether to hire. Maybe that’s not fair. Well, life’s not fair. It’s competitive. Get over it. And show some common sense.
1
Why are digital natives digital naifs?
Vanity, thine name is Millennial.
by the way, Matt Gaetz Republican Congressperson from Florida, who you quoted, doesn't need a smart phone to remind us of who he is. I believe there is more than one mug shot on line for viewing for his multiple arrests for drunk driving!
1
Look up the poem addressing Father William and tell that young man that agism is unacceptable. And stop asking him to comment or educate you about millennials. Unless you buy him dinner or otherwise pay for your lessons. Read the article about Korean Nunchi.
Its a meme, not a declaration of war.
Generational politics are generally stupid, and a poor substitute for a serious class analysis of who friends and enemies are, but so is getting mad at young people for expressing frustration with their often clueless elders.
The generation that coined the phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" doesn't get to lecture anyone about inter-generational civility.
If you are a boomer taking offense at "Ok, boomer" you have too much time on your hands and no sense of proportion.
Please...it’s not the sexual fluidity and dirty bong water.
It’s the scandalous subjugation of hired staff for one’s sexual conduct that demands punitive action.
+ 10 points for "Whether the messages are being carried by pigeons or pixels..."
I'm still peeved about all the anti-Hillary columns, but this one was pretty solid, top to bottom.
Why is this a story (here and elsewhere) about social media and Hill's photos? Ok, I get it - they're a salacious hook for the media and a facet of the imbroglio where Hill can justly claim to be the victim - but is anyone claiming the photos are why she's stepping down? She had (possibly multiple) sexual relationships with subordinates. To the extent that there's a generational angle to the story, it's the heartening one that this kind of behavior is no longer winked at. Would I prefer it was an old white male Republican who were leaving office in disgrace? Absolutely. But being on "my team" is not an ethical blank check. She is absolutely the victim of a double standard, but is her argument truly "but Donald Trump is worse?" That way madness lies.
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I thought discretion was the better part of valor.
Oh, silly Gen X me.
2
Here’s an idea: You don’t want your nude photos exposed by lovers or former lovers?
DON’T TAKE NUDE PHOTOS OF YOURSELF.
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Ms. Dowd does indeed miss the point. If the professional advice is not to take nude photos of yourself, the ship has already sailed for millennnials. You mean don't take more nude photos of yourself? Don't take nude photos of yourself on a networked device? Don't share nude photos of yourself with anyone?
This seems like common sense. However, you need to understand. We're talking about a generation that didn't really understand just how insecure a "secure" flickr account could be. The early and mid 2000s were the wild wild west in terms digital literacy. The transition from digital cameras to iphones happened seemingly overnight. I don't think anyone fully evaluated the gravity of that change.
I do however believe in the commonality of human nature across time. Don't act so high and mighty. Every generation has an adolescent desire to document their sexuality and their sexual exploits. The nude portrait is as old as photography. Older actually. Nude paintings abound. Sharing nude images is actually prehistoric. The Moche "sex pot" comes to mind.
The only reason there aren't more naked photographs of Boomers floating around is because Boomers had to send film out to develop when they were teenagers. That all changed with the advent of the Polaroid camera. Iphones are the same phenomenon on steroids. Boomers are no better than millennials. Get over yourself and get over lurid pictures. You were technologically lucky, not more self-controlled. Ok, Boomer.
You fail to note that the exit speech was reminiscent of the age old whine of a young brat: Why does Johnny (Trump) not get punished for it?
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It's such a wast of breath having a generational conversation. Everything is of the time. Jefferson had sex with slaves. Who's the greatest basketball player of all time, LeBron or Jordan. There is no difinitive answer, just opinions.
What the media isn't reporting is that Ms Hill's former girlfriend is also furious with her. She calls the relationship "toxic" and there are hints in the texts that she might have been abused.
Dowd is also choosing to ignore the real problem with Ms Hill's relationships, which is that she is having sex with her employees. When she gives her employee/lover a $5000 bonus, is that for good job performance or good bedroom performance? If she uses political funds to pay for sexual services, isn't that breaking the law? The whole situation is an ethical mess.
However, the real reason that Nancy Pelosi fired her was stupidity. She knew her husband had these pictures, and she still went out and cheated on him. Then she gave him a hard time in the divorce. She betrayed him and eventually he took revenge. That is a very old story and she should have seen it coming. I think Ms Hill is a nymphomaniac, an alcoholic and a drug addict who is in the process of self destruction. Pelosi did the right thing in cutting her loose.
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George Papadopoulos of Mueller Report infamy is running for Hill’s seat and no, that’s not a coincidence at all.
You know what I took from this situation? That Matt Gaetz definitely has pictures he doesn’t want anybody to see. If they want to play dirty, maybe it’s time to play dirty back.
Democrats have been losing since 2010 and only won in 2018 because Trump was so bad.
If you continue to cower as masochists after being ridiculed by the Sadistic sly Republicans, you will continue to lose.
Life is tough and you have to be tougher, not exceedingly compliant and nice. You are our fighters, so fight.
Politics is a "Televised" spectator sport, and you look like losers. So fight for us instead of preening yourselves.
maureen seems to imply that if only the nude pictures had not been discovered Hill's behavior would have been acceptable
Again and again, the NYTimes and its columnists offer the generational war drumbeat. Et tu, Maureen?
Trusting your "smart" phone is just dumb. And there is no shortage of people who are dumb in that way: silent-generation, boomers, x-ers, and millenials.
There are lots of divisions in our society. Class. Race. Gender. Wisdom-in-handling-digital-devices. Generation is the least of it. Stop with the generational war already!
The norms around nudity and sex are falling faster than the trees in a logging camp. If only the political hypocrisy would abate. Compare West Wing from not so long ago to Game of Thrones. This year Katie Hill photos are click bait. Next year ho-hum.
Well, now we know it's not only the emperor who has no clothes. In his case there's always the coverup whether it be hiding the evidence in a secret server (not located in Ukraine, by the way) or just run-of-the-mill "bribery" which, for those who haven't read the Constitution lately, is considered a "high crime" (Art. I, Sec. 4). But, the more entitled and naive female millennials are now confronting the very "naked truth" that what's appropriate for #MeToo is appropriate for #YouToo. As smart as Katie Hill is, she like our wannabe emperor felt above the law and is now paying the price for her revealed "naked truth." Let's hope Republicans will also get the message and send the emperor off to his new, tax-free residence in Mar-a-Lago in his "perfect" call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealing the very perfect naked truth of his "bribery."
1
Was Al Franken a millennial too?
1
Well, Maureen, you are decidedly a "boomer," if at the end of your column explaining the ins and outs of our present-day society...which of course the boomers have brought about because of their incessant need to corporatize every living thing, you insist that manners still apply, no matter what. So Katie Hill is pilloried once again for her past, not for her present or her future as a progressive congresswoman for the state of California ( you know, the state you can check out of, but you can never leave...) It is sad to see you get on your high horse at this point in our evolution of women coming into their own.... I encourage Katie Hill to stay in congress and join the squad!
Isn't it bad enough that America has been divided in two by our G.O.P. Boomer president, who is a misogynistic, nationalistic, demagogic, kakistrophic and demented Florida man? Do we also have be further chopped up and subdivided into intergenerational war between the sparkly Millennials and the Boomers, with Gen X in left field? The ghastly world of social media is too much with us, Maureen Dowd. Rep. Katie Hill of Smartphone Instagram fame is just a Gen Y fall-guy/girl who fell prey to the horrible eternal truth about human nature.
Almost 60 tears ago, in a school yard in Germany, where I grew up, some teenage boy was showing off black white photos of his nude girlfriend. He'd promised her that nobody but he would ever see them. I thought then that she must have been really stupid to let herself be photographed that way. I can see that nothing much has changed except the technology.
Let's see, Trump, a boomer, and the most dangerous, democracy destroying American leader ever, was hugely assisted into office by a Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, a millennial. In his recent appearance in Washington, he basically gave them finger, and said "too bad, freedom of speech lets me broadcast lies, help Trump, AND Russia." Facebook then announced it would using the Breitbart News Network as a source.
Zuck is totally on board with Trump 2020. Big money, selective blindness and callousness to the very core. But keep those self's flyin' and who needs to vote? OK, millennials?
1
Tribalism has always been present, now more than ever. The generations need to group together to remove the Trumps, McConnells, Barrs from power. That is more important than ageism.
1
Just heard on NPR a partial reason but not an absolution for the behavior of taking nude pics (and more). Paraphrased, but you can hear it for yourself.- 'Older people might not understand...... how prevalent this is ...... I've been on social media since I was twelve......' Well, I've had film and video equipment since 1962 (also age 12) and now have several video cameras, a smart phone, an iPad, computers (all with cameras) most of which this technology was developed by people that could be her dad or even grandfather and yet I have never had the impulse to take a nude of me or anyone else. I must be using this stuff wrong. P.S.- I truly don't care that Katie Hill took or had taken these pics. Lots of people do zany things in their personal life that do not bare on their job performance. And .... did Ms Hill break some rules or the law? There is a big difference.
Being a child of the 60's, I can remember clearly how we were going to change the world with the underlying assumption we would set new norms. Sex, drugs and rock and roll would allow a new openness and acceptance.
Fortunately, it was a paper driven world. Our narcissism and naivete were protected by a lack of instant photographic evidence, immediately published on public forums. The worst issue was who had the negatives.
And I am fully confidant had we had today's technology, we would have been as foolish.
And my generation became our parents. After we rid ourselves of Nixon, mortgages and other real-life issues turned millions of flower children toward Reaganomics.
So perhaps the problem is that brains newly arrived at adulthood are not fully developed. As very young adults, decisions may be impaired by radiant hope drowning out cautionary judgment. The state of adulthood comes through a process whereby the nutured child learns limits over two decades. But the biggest test is the sudden freedom from restraints that leaving the parental nest offers around one's late teens. Peer influence has already taken the place of the parents' and the battle is now between peer approval and inner wisdom.
I believe nothing will change this. Perhaps we do need to do as we did with the Clinton imbroglio and resolve to leave private lives outside consideration if not predatory, but consent based. After all, one of the impeachers was found later looking for boys in a public restroom.
After reading many comments the lesson is clear - there are recording devices out there, don’t live your life. Big Brother is not the government - he is us.
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Yes, human nature is the constant. That about says it all. And so is the experience of, God willing, going from 19 years old to, say, 72 years old. It's all going to look very different to you, "youngs". And there will be a new generation and you will be baffled by their values, and you will know you are right, and yet nothing you say will penetrate.
Newsflash: there is nothing new under the sun.
But back to human nature. In the essay a few days ago about Obama's "boomer" attitudes, there was a negative reference to youngs who held "regressive views." (Meaning, views the author doesn't agree with). Shades of Mao's Cultural Revolution. I was waiting for the author to call for true believers to "struggle against" those who held regressive views.
Just read "Animal Farm." It's a book boomers used to read. You'll get the idea. Right now you're walking on four legs and proud, but let's see where that goes....
Still, having an affair with a staffer seems like an unethical abuse of power to me.
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We Boomers were “hip and what’s happening now”...until we weren’t.
This is the fate of all future generations.
Don’t be sad. Just understand it’s part of life.
When we "boomers" (I detest that silly word) were at the age of today's Millenials (detest that one, too, as I do all facile labels), we were sure we knew everything. The Millenials now think they know everything, but refuse to acknowledge that their elders have learned anything at all from having lived longer. The M's know technology, but they don't know life, and life will, to their indignant astonishment, slap them down in due time. Okay, Millenials, you'll get yours, and we'll be chuckling as you thrash about and fulminate. Have a nice day!
Human cruelty isn't going to disappear (though social factors can moderate it, just as, right now, they seem to be making it worse). But...human attitudes to nudity and sex can change. Ms. Hill's photos shouldn't have been made public but, once they were, the right attitude, after condemning those who maliciously released them, should have been "So what?" They added nothing to the matter of Ms. Hill having sex with a subordinate, which was the only issue that should have raised questions about her standing.
Fake morality from trump makes me see this much more clearly; how come we beat up Katie Hill and not Kevin McCarthy? My only question is did she do her job, was she learning to be a good congressperson. That's all that should matter, was she earning her pay check.
This story is about a powerful politician who had a sexual relationship with a campaign worker and then apparently a congressional employee, both of whom she supervised. This behavior not only violates the House of Representatives rules, but also would get most of fired from our jobs if we had sex with an employee we supervised. Nothing to do with "the youngs", whatever that means, and not a new concept.
Poor judgment, that's what Katie Hill showed. You want to be a horn dog in your private life? Fine. But she continued it after stepping into public life, and did so with a young campaign staffer no less.
If she couldn't understand how problematic or creepy that might be, perhaps she doesn't have the good sense to be a member of Congress. And frankly, I don't believe her that she didn't know any of the photos were being taken.
1
Ok, thanks grandma. (Btw, 71 here).
I grew up in a calmer time. But doing something stupid was going to get around the gossip lines sooner or later.
In this media world, the social circles are so much bigger that the ripples are transformed into enormous waves.
It's dangerous out there.
So true Maureen. Honestly what do people think they're doing with these photos? And I won't even ask what happened to modesty...
1
This is the case of bad judgement. Who among us haven't done something we should not have?
The difference is Ms. Hill got caught and she did the right thing. She resigned. However this does not prevent her from still doing good in the world. Your life isn't over until you are no longer here.
Let's save our outrage for the truly despicable in the Trump Administration and those in Congress who aid and abet him.
They are the ones who should be resigning. They are the ones bringing true danger and shame to this country.
I hope Miss Dowd writes more about McConnell and call him out for the danger he is to this country, not waste time warning Millennials.
1
Tsk tsk, she says. But sexual morality is what people say it is. It isn’t inherent. What if we get to the point that it’s fine to be seen in our naked, private moments? Not shameful? Wouldn’t that be liberating? Is that where the youngs are taking us?
“OK Boomer” has a resonating slogan from the sixties. How many boomers can remember “Don’t trust anyone over 30”?
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@MJM As a former hippie (I'm 70), I always thought that was a lame saying (like "flower power").
👏🏾 from this (older) millennial.
Human nature just won’t change.
1
Being from the “don’t trust anyone over thirty” generation, now in my middle sixties, I get the desire to think your generation is the one that will change the world. Each generation is self righteous and, maybe, moves the needle of change a little closer to something better for all. The song, “Father/Son” by Cat Stevens comes to mind. We used to think, righteously of course, that the old man in that story was the enemy. Now, well, we are the “olds” of that story and realize that the “young” of today are just repeating the old, dare I say privileged, yawn of each generation.
Hill was RIGHT to resign. As should any elected official with posted nude photos of a tryst of whatever sexual orientation floating about. I don't care what age you are, if you document your intimate life on social media, there are consequences to that, even if you've been undone by other's nefarious motives. Until Facebook's, et al, outrageous corporate behavior is reined in, this is what you get. Is that so hard to understand?
A masterwork of realism, this column -- realism and pragmatism, two things that self-absorbed millennials know nothing about. I dread the day when one of them becomes president.
Wait, you’re saying that people get naked and have sex? If true, that would certainly be shocking. Personally, I don’t believe it, but you say there’s photographic proof? What is the world coming to? Will all of these young people who were conceived the one and only time their parents ever had sex, while obviously staying as fully clothed as possible, ever learn anything?
Look, if Ms. Hill had an amorous relationship with a staffer then her resignation is appropriate but this embarrassment over “scandalous” naked photos just betrays our Puritanical roots. Explain to me exactly why photos of consensual acts of something we all do should be embarrassing? The person who leaked private photos should be embarrassed, the other person should not be embarrassed and it is fundamentally hypocritical of us to make them feel embarrassed. Sorry, but nothing there to see, pun intended.
Millenials and Gen Z need to do us all a favor and please with all due respect, just get over yourselves!
They suffer immensely from digital compression and it is their own fault.
They don't have to document every waking moment of their life.
Relax, read a book (e-book or on your phone, we don't care), disconnect, go for a run or a bike ride with the bold practice of w/o your phone, do something as risky as a crossword puzzle with a pencil, go to a public place and don't look at your phone and just look at people or your palm print for an hour, etc.
We don't care.
The incessant need to make everyone aware of your life is so bloody boring.
Be less dependent on a digital appendage.
When you come up for air. We don't need to hear or see what your
"experience" was like.
Live a little and try other "analog" behaviors and platforms.
You might find that you won't be so needy and perhaps a lot happier.
Let's face it, vinyl is way better than Mp3 will ever be, right?
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Society (all living generations) can’t seem handle (or, in some cases even care about) solving real problems, hunger, war, health care, refugees, mass transit, fire, climate change, education, you name it. So instead focus on revealing human foibles captured on a cell phone; after all it’s more fun to leer at pictures of a naked congresswoman than those of women and children trapped in a Syrian refugee camp.
Ms Hill had to resign because she had a relationship with a staffer.
Seriously, who cares that she’s naked? She looked fine, so she can’t even complain that it wasn’t a flattering shot. I make a prediction that in the next 10 years, all of our representatives will be naked on the internet. Let’s pray that they are all so photogenic.
But have a relationship with a staffer, say goodbye. At least if you are a Democrat. Perhaps Democrats (especially the woke, holier than thou type) should reconsider their views on sex.
On the bright side, it looks like our neo-puritan sexual mores seem to apply to women, as well as men. Though when women get caught in their net, there is an awful lot more whining about unfairness and misogyny.
BTW Boomer, a dad at home with two kids is not a “loser.” He’s a stay at home dad, who made his wife’s short career possible by minding the kids.
Show some respect for a hard job, and don’t denigrate fathers who are the primary caregivers right after you complain that men don’t pull their weight at home.
Seriously, the double standards of Boomer “feminism” can be mind-blowing.
What if "she" was "he"?
This is what is important.
This how the womens movement finds and holds solid ground: by requiring all people adhere to the same code of conduct - even if it's one our own. No double standards.
Her sexuality is hers.
Revenge Porn is vile and repulsive and it's criminal.
No one gets a pass because of their gender. We all know if "she" was a "he" the conversation would be entirely different. When we hold ourselves to a different standard we lose credibility.
the predicate of this article is that the lurid human retribution with nudies and sexts will be as eternal as iago's machinations with jealousy or lady macbeth's with daggers.
the justified millennial riposte seems to be, "dude, get over yourself."
but the subtext here, the "intergenerational war" that pivots on a dismissive cliché ("OK, Boomer") is merely laughable.
this septuagenarian was young once, too, but the anthem of my generation ("Don't trust anyone over thirty") had an expiry date that demanded we take action -- like, now.
today we get "OK Boomer" from the self entitled who are old enough to have teenage children but are apparently waiting for all the Boomers to die so they can passively appropriate our positions.
because, you know, millennials are known for their work ethic.
i seriously doubt that three millennials will be killed and buried in an embankment for fighting climate change, the way three of my generation were killed and buried advocating for civil rights.
this was the point of president obama's rebuke: it's easy to preach cancel culture from your surfing sofa. it's harder to get on the streets and demand change with your bodies.
because, you know, millennials are known for their activism.
compare the millennials of hong kong with the millennials of NYC, and you can see how far our domestic breeding of herd animals has progressed.
for this herd, getting over nude selfies is a cultural watershed. and what an achievement that is.
Hill is 32. Kelly is 31.
This is intelligent consensual relationship.
An in-house Congressional Rule has no place here.
How about if 52 and 42, or 62 and 52? Is this “Taking advantage” or “happenstance and daily interaction.”
OH, the sinners among us...Are whom?
Get rid of the foolish rule.
@Neil I'm not sure how you can be sure that the relationship is/was truly consensual if one party could lose their job if they don't "consent".
If we realized how much the Robber Barons in Silicon Valley are exploiting a "natural resource"(individual private information).....TAX FREE.......we might want to consider adapting our Tax Code to the 21st Century.
If the Internet were TAXED effectively........a lot of the peculiar nasty abuses would be curtailed.
It would become too expensive to waste your time taking foolish pictures. Terrorists would be forced to use other means to attempt to recruit, plot, blow up, etc.......
Robber Barons would have less control over our society....Robber Barons would also end up paying TAXES which they currently disingenuously claim they would be happy to do!!
I think the whole thing is just outrageously FUNNY, FUNNY, FUNNY!
An old country aphorism was, "Fools names and fools faces mostly appear in public faces".
Of course in this "WOKE" era, more than faces appear in public places. Ha ha ha ha ha
So glad I am old. I will be dead before the end of this nation/culture/wokeness.
1
In the utmost serious statement, everyone should know that after Foreigners attacked America on 9/11/2001, the government passed the "Patriot" (?) act that turned the intense and extreme surveillance apparatus on American citizens, and by the way, don't believe the phone companies didn't keep "Metadata" or call logs before then. I used to get my logs in the early eightees and the cops always had access to such data. So now the Shadow government backed by the military watches us as suspects by the hundreds of millions. I highly recommend to young people that you seriously curtail your giddy greetings all over the web and on your phones. Yes, you are all being monitored as the government has become so paranoid, their focus is now on their own people. And then the Congressional cohorts passed another surveillance bill called the "Freedom (?) act". Of course it's all an act and we are the audience being watched instead of us watching them.
Nudity and sex are not scandalous, so long as everyone involved is at least 18 and freely consenting. European countries have such a healthier attitude about this.
I look forward to the day when a US politician, faced with calls to resign over nude photos or some such thing, calls a press conference, takes off all their clothes, simply stands there and says "take all the photos you want and when you're done I'm going to get back to work on what really matters for our country."
There are plenty of Boomers with nude pics on their phones. OK?
1
@Phil Rubin
NOT OK !!!
Best column in a long time. Nailed it.
The exit speech was more obnoxious and foolish than the any of the underlying behavior. Of the two modern approaches to such a a problem she picked the wrong one. The right one, perfected by everyone's favorite officeholder, is: Yeah, I did all that. So what? Sue me.
There was another 22 year old intern, Monica Lewinsky, who was abused by older member of government.
A Sexual Predator can be either male or female. Still wrong to take advantage of a subordinate.
1
I agree she should have resigned, but with one correction...
The letter to Pelosi should have been dated “day after Trump resigns”.
Words come back to haunt and shame too, Boomer Dowd. Reference Secretary Clinton.
She should have got divorced a long time ago. It's still a man's world.
I'm in Reddit a lot and here's what I'm accused of for being a Bomber, in no particular order (I was born in 57, the peak year of the Boomer generation). I was able to afford college through part time jobs (laughable--oh, and by the way, 5 of my 6 siblings and my mom were in college at the time so there was no aid from the one bread winner of the house, my dad), I was part of the skinny generation cuz we all took drugs (no, it was cuz we had no money to eat out, there were few fast food joints, we didn't sit inside playing video games, a Coke was 10 oz's, the list goes on), we left the earth less inhabitable (every generation up to the latest can share blame here, including millennials), we old white guys gave the US Trump (I voted Hillary, meanwhile young people in Wisconsin didn't show up in the same numbers as for Obama cuz they were throwing a hissy fit cuz Bernie didn't win). The list goes on. Hey millennials, shut up and vote against Trump. Please.
You can’t delete the lessons of the past, and if you think you can you’ve got a lot to learn from it.
About the second "OK Boomer", Shawn would have been gainfully unemployed if he worked for me. It's saying "Gee you're too old, too out of touch to get it, old timer."
1
This article reminded me that nude pics of the Republican 1st Lady wearing nothing but stilettos can easily be found on the internet.
OK GenX-ers. John Kennedy was 43 when he ran for President and won. Where is your candidate to beat Trump? OK Millennials. Who among you has mastered the twitter-verse to the same degree as that guy in the White House. (and as the Times notes in this issue, for ill and to the division of the country...) How is it that this boomer from the dark side has out-social-media'd the generations that live life through their smartphones?
In what crazy universe, millennial or not, would you send nude pictures of yourself? Save the phone for pets, good meals, or travels. Once you take those photos and send them, they are NEVER private. All those young people who are the phone fixers and mavens should know that. Unless you leave the phone OUT of lovemaking, you will always be another candidate to be a Katie Hill.
"What I learned from studying Shakespeare is that the primary colors of emotions carry through the centuries."
Ms. Dowd has added well to the almost-exhaustive trove of commentary on Shakespeare.
1
How about ”OK Silent...”
That’s the generation that has basically given us Trump.
1
Is "naked reality" supposed to describe the immutability of human nature or is it just a Millenial/Boomer pun?
We have the choice to civilize the beast, in this age we have weaponised it at our own peril!
1
Boomers be all like “hand over your tax returns” while millennials will be like “hand over your social media”. That’s the difference.
Kudos for engaging with "Ok Mo!"
No one cares about the nude photos of Katie Hill. The problem she has is that she entered into an intimate relationship with a staffer, which is verboten for members of Congress.
2
Where are the breathless, outraged headlines about a predator who took advantage of a campaign staffer of one gender and, apparently, a congressional staffer of another gender? A homemaker spouse was cast aside, penniless. Monstrous!
It all depends on who is writing the headlines.
1
One of Murphy's Laws states that if anything can go wrong, it will.
You will have something to regret in the future. It's all part of maturing over decades.
Generations have different cultural standards. Thirty-five years ago, every youngish boomer running for office or appointed to the bench had to answer the question of whether he or she had ever--(insert the gasps and horror of the aged here!)--used drugs, like so many fellow baby boomers. Thus came the tortured explanation of so many former potheads that they'd "experimented" with marijuana as well as Bill Clinton's far more tortured "but I didn't inhale" comment. Careers died if evidence of weed lurked in the background. What is the Katie Hill nude photo saga but a new generation's cultural norm, turned against her? I hate to agree with Matt Gaetz, but older Americans need to get over stuff like this that just does not matter.
157
@Amelia Well, I have always been a feminist, which doesn't mean I hate men. I generally don't like or dislike many people because I don't know but a few people. What is a feminist if she likes men? She supports the same exacting human rights, that are usually only allotted to white males, for those rights to be afforded to everyone. Even so, if that ever happens women will still be on the short end of the stick because she is the only one who is able to carry an embryo to full term and that comes with a cost to her body,sexual, and psychological health that nobody else but that woman must bear. .. So I have always supported safe sex between consenting adults. I have always supported safe and adequate birth control. That Katie Hill stayed in bed and couldn't get out until she rose to give the speech that she was leaving because the photos were leaked tells me that she is not a strong enough person to be running for office where we expect adults to act like adults and not like Trump.
17
@Amelia Well, she had a sexual relationship with a subordinate. The pics were evidence of that.
She's trying to spin it to make herself look good (and play the victim card) by focusing on the pics, but to do that is to downplay her own behavior.
The left ought not act as if it believes that sexual relationships with subordinates are bad unless one of their own does it, in which case it's okay.
33
@Amelia I disagree and I’m not “older”.
If (strength of) character doesn’t matter anymore, what does?
Being represented by people who don’t or didn’t give in to their worst impulses seems pretty basic to me.
If you want to represent millions of people, you need to be a role model.
29
The one thing that Katie Hill seems to have in common with our current incumbent president is that she parades her victimhood for all to see. It's all about her as victim, not about her taking responsibility for her own conduct. There is always some one else to blame for one's misdeeds. One hopes that this Millennial Generation will be less self-absorbed than its older Boomer Generation. We don't need any more Clinton or Trump candidates.
2
It is long past time that boomers can and should tell the younger generation what to do. It is time for them to pass the torch to a new generation, the generation that is in its prime, raising families, who are trying to build, not just hanging onto what they have.
Pass it over. Gracefully. Then you can give us all the advice you want.
Wonderful Op-ED for it reminds us of the universality of human behaviors and emotions since the inception of humanity. Emotional reactivity in response to sex and aggression has been represented in all forms of expressions: from ancient mythology, to literature , to art , to cyber space. I am a boomer who works with millennials. I perceive that significant numbers of millennials have a very different concept of privacy of their own personal inner and outer space. Sometimes they have very little concept of privacy. Anecdotally I tested this theory years ago when the first Facebook breech of privacy and legal inquiry took place. Hundred per cent of my sample did not care. Their response was equivalent to Shawn McC’s reply: “OK Boomer”, while brow raising. Reasons for decreased concern and value to privacy would be a good subject for scientific inquiry. Whether the generational lack of boundaries is in part motivated by the helicopter parenting style with which many millennials are raised, whether cyber communication have engendered greater cognitive conceit, whether the subject of intimacy is transmitted as a less valuable human concern, whether religious dogmas have been less or more impactful. Ultimately is this counter intuitive crossing of privacy boundaries a response of millennials to the very frightening physical and psychological world in which they have been raised?
1
Millennials and Gen Zers don't seem to fully appreciate the implications of their habit of uploading their entire lives onto various platforms. What will they be thinking in 10 or 20 years when they get fired from a job (or precluded from getting one) based on something they posted when they were teenagers? Colleges are already revoking admissions when nefarious Facebook posts are discovered. By the time they come to appreciate the value of privacy, and the need to be employed, it will be too late.
7
Half of Millennials who were generally born between 1980 and 1996 NEVER grew up with smart phones. Smartphone use as 0f 2008 was about 10% of phones. They became more common around 2012. Even the youngest millennials were probably 16 before they got their first smartphones. So, no, they were not using smartphones when they were 10-16 year olds.....
4
Yeah, I’m not even the youngest of millennials (‘90) and I didn’t have a smartphone until I was 20. I got my first flip phone when I was 16.
I can only speak for Gen X but it’s not like taping ourselves in the act with VHS/DVD/... camera and taking nude pictures for lovers with Polaroid or early digital cameras was a thing, and that we were only saved by the fact that these pictures perished.
Morals have changed.
The new generation has to accept that with freedom and convenience comes responsibility.
5
When we are born, we are each born into our own times. As a boomer, that means I came of age during the political upheavals of the late 1960s and the era of free love. We both shaped and were shaped by the societal norms of the period.
Millennials now have their own period--one marked by political upheaval and their own era of free love, in their case characterized by a certain innocence (or is it lack of caring?) about privacy in an Internet era. They can both shape it and be shaped by it.
But in any era, behavior has its consequences (sometimes immediate, sometimes longer in coming). Best not to blame others for our own lack of sound judgment, because sooner or later, the bell will toll for thee.
4
Technology amplifies we virtues or vices. Technology does not change human nature. We have been careful in not giving technology to those not ready to wild it, a real gun to a child, nuclear weapons to unstable governments. This would be a danger to themselves and the rest of the world. Social media should have been a compliment to social engagement and not a substitute for it. Giving this technology to our children is one social experiment whose outcome we are about to find out. Using social media will not make anyone a better or a worse person. You already are who you are and social media just expose it to the world.
2
Hill was certainly correct in her assessment of the double standard. And, wrong to do what she did. And what of her ex, and the political operative from the Republican party? Their ethics are deeply problematic: posting intimate photographs without permission in order to exact revenge and gain a political end hardly qualify as defensible. All one can say to them is 'what goes 'round comes 'round'. They are now exposed for who and what they are as well. They should not expect smooth sailing either.
1
When millennials and Gen Z vote as much as us Boomers, then I'll pay attention. We accomplished much but not enough. But over 63% of us voted in 2018 while only 36% of 18-24 gen voted. That was an impressive 20% improvement from for the Youngs from 2016, but not impressive overall.
As for Katie Hill, I do not understand why she resigned. I also don't understand why Al Franken resigned while two Republicans under indictment ran successfully for reelection in 2018. Seems we have a higher standard for ethical lapses than for outright corruption.
11
@Jim And this attitude is why Trump will win a second term. Young people won’t vote for a pro-choice Republican masquerading as a Democrat, nor should they.
Agree!
"And don't leave yourself vulnerable by giving people the ammunition-or the nudes-to strip you of your dreams." Just ask the Baby Boomer born in the last years of the boom, 1963, Miss America 1984, who gave up her crown when nude pictures her cycled into public view, Vanessa Williams. I hope Katie Hill can recover from all this adverse turmoil- divorce and job loss- and change her life around like Vanessa Williams did. Today Vanessa has four children who are "thriving", was nominated for numerous acting and recording awards, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Chapman University, and said "she has more life to live." Her life demonstrated that while glaring and humiliating mistakes are part of our biography, our successes and positive contributions to life can be more definitive of our lives no matter what generation we are.
5
Katie Hill could choose to resolve her divorce, scrub her digital library of that which can come back at her and re-run for the seat she vacated. I am sorry her district and the House of Reps lost a talented congressperson but she did a wrong that women, and men to a lesser known extent, have been fighting against for far too long. No holds barred digital life, with its riches of documented celebrations and losses, is a treasure trove of all kinds of secrets to be exploited. Rather than "ok boomer" on this one I say "ok gen Z and millennials"
1
This is so tragic and hard to fully understand. It is as if Katie Hill was not the woman she was portrayed to be. Strong. Different. Daring. Mature. She did not have a conventional life. Did she go home and talk to the people that elected her? Was the pressure that bad? Why not wait to the investigation results? Countless people said that senator Al Franken’s resignation was after all a travesty. “Franken had experienced one of the most abrupt downfalls in recent political memory,” a New Yorker article stated. Kirsten Gillibrand leaving the presidential race did not cause sorrow because of her righteous role in that downfall. “An eye for an eye” “Poetic justice” People said. ¿But Katie Hill?
¿Another Democrat?
2
@MavilaO She slept with a subordinate, some she had economic power over. It It has been "Jim Hill" instead of "Katie Hill" who has sex with a subordinate, would you be excusing his behavior and claiming that he was a victim? Of course not. Then why does a predatory woman get a pass?
1
Thanks Jeff.
@DF Spot on. TMI from all quarters.
1
She should have stayed.
2
@SC
all she had to do ...
As far as I can tell, most Generation Z journalists, pundits, commentators and influencers have never actually, you know, read a book or met a copy editor. But hey, if they’re content to mechanically swap the same memes and pat, formulaic phrases (“OK, boomer”) instead of thinking and engaging in dialogue, hey, that’s OK.
2
Complete justification for 'OK Boomer' can certainly be found in this comment section.
Does anyone else reading these comments notice how much they sound like cranky old people complaining?
All that is missing is, "Get off my lawn".
4
Cranky people are sometimes right.
1
How about a little modesty--and yes, shame--in the evil Internet exhibitionist age?
2
Everything we need to know we learned in Kindergarten; you dress modestly around the opposite sex, you share your crayons, but not your nude photos.
So she blames Trump but he but didn't share his nude photo's, all his accusers put out their photo's trying to get money from him.
The rumor was because there was so many more photo's of her about to come out she bailed first and fast.
All I can say is like Beto, Katie we hardly knew you.
Now if we could only find those rumored pictures of a certain writer from her younger days...!
2
Three thoughts on this.
First, anybody with a brain does not indulge in the mindless narcissism of nude or sexual selfies.
Second, this is not a gender issue. Can you imagine the media and social reaction if nude photos of Matt Gaetz combing the hair of a male aid were published?
Third, the republican party sinks to a new low with its operatives.
8
Hill was the most overrated of all the freshman Dems from 2018. For brains and political talent, much less savvy, Hill was not in the class with the equally, and more typically, OK Boomer Millennial star, AOC, who is obviously going to be president some day, if some white supremacist doesn't shoot her. Once she's old enough to run, and the Millennials have thoroughly displaced the ever more rapidly dying Boomer at the center of American politics--in a decade or so--AOC's a cinch to go to the White House. There was no way Hill was ever going anywhere higher than her district. No comparison between what she did and what the infinitely smarter and more talented and principled Al Franken did. She got what she deserved. He didn't. Anyway, her 15 minutes are now over forever.
2
Well said boomer, "girl up".
1
Why did she just up and quit? Was it to put herself into the shoes of Al Franken? It should have been.
The most revealing line in this account is at the end, where the Trump lapdog expresses his sympathy for Hill. What he's saying is that your sleaze is as bad as mine, so, as Hill says, you should get over it. From what I see, and aside from her wanting a Safe Space, this is about a millennial who parades her own self-indulgence as normal... then quits.
Note to young whippersnappers: it's generally not a good idea to be photographed in the nude....unless Annie Leibovitz or Joyce Tenneson is doing a feature on you.
Get off your iPhones, register and vote in record numbers if you want to make America a better country.
19
Let me suggest that “ Representative Matt Gaetz, the 37-year-old Florida Republican and Trump lap dog” has empathy because he equates his DUI mug shot that constantly surfaces in social media with Ms. Hill’s being smut shamed by her unemployed husband.
Not quite the same.
6
Nothing new here except the elected officials have strict rules about relationships with the staff. Remember Eric Massa from New York? He also had to resign in 2010 due to improper personal behavior with staffers.
https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/new-york-congressman-resigns-amid-harassment-charge/
5
Jeff Bezos learned this too — and not only is he an OK Boomer, he’s the richest man in the world— the ultimate Boomer.
Thanks to Bezos, millennials get to grocery shop in their pajamas without leaving their rented $2000 a month studio. Tapping into the laziness and vanity of millennials is creating digital billionaires while the masses are forever stuck as digital proletariat.
But Hills is probably not the first case of same sex workplace predation, nor the last. Glad the law was gender neutral.
Still, the newly elected Congresswomen in 2018 have been rather outspoken for their newcomer status — Omar and AOC being other examples. Joe Wilson-like.
Funny how power swells the skull, and other anatomy.
1
If Matt Gaetz is defending Katie Hill, then he's probably worried about his phone pix and Instagram account.
3
The only thing that can explain Matt Gaetz's anomalous sobriety on this subject is that somewhere out there he's got some pictures floating around, and they can't be made public soon enough to suit me!
Hill broke the rules. Everything else is just commentary.
11
“It turned out that one of the people responsible for publishing Hill’s photos and texts is a Republican operative who worked for her opponents.”
In the same sense that George Stephanopoulos is a former Democrat operative who worked for the opponents of some the same people he now makes news decisions about as ABC News anchor.
1
Oh, so true, Ms. Dowd. Life can be hard. My thoughts are, she will be OK.
Thanks Boomer you sound Woke!!!
1
Katie Hill should have stuck it out. That she resigned is her biggest mistake.
Maureen Dowd calling Linda Tripp sleazy is ironic to say the least. Without Linda Tripp, Maureen would never have won her Pulitzer for her articles about the Clinton/Lewinsky story.
I enjoy Dowd's writing. But given her role in the Clinton/Lewinsky story and then her contributions towards making the current presidency possible with her non-stop attacks on HRC and her soft-serve pieces on Trump early on before the 2016 election, Maureen might be the wrong person to take on the shortcomings of woke-culture and the double standards regarding the expectations placed on male and female politicians.
9
"Ok Boomer." This phrase is an example of the condescension leveled at older people. It's as if we're the enemy and must accept the utter deterioration of our society, it's morals and history.
The "Youngs" as you call them, want us to accept an abbreviated and pixelated new reality and give them a knowing smile and wave. Utter rubbish.
A smart phone, nude pictures and churlish revenge porn exposing private sexual behavior, will never and can never constitute acceptable norms for our society.
The real news here is that younger adults can no longer tell right from wrong and diminish themselves on a daily basis by giving in to their need for approval and "likes."
If this is the new reality of the digital age, I choose to honor the lessons my parents taught me and the valuable lessons I learned in school.
I value myself more than the "Youngs."
4
Ms O’Dowd is too smart and too good of a writer to have missed the point of this melodrama, so methinks she missed it on purpose. The Rep had an affair with a young female employee (which violates both the legal rule and the moral power imbalance rule) and, on top of that looks pretty scuzzy given that act, the guy she was married to and the apparent loose rules of that marriage, and the allegation of an affair with a younger male employed by Congress. So this rule did not unfairly bite her and her defenses are sheer nonsense. Good riddance to her.
10
I was at a nude beach & a couple asked me to take their picture. Asked them if it should be shoulders & higher. The woman said, "No. It's OK. We're never running for office!"
People have always understood that if you might go into public life, you need to be extremely prudent about how you are photographed.
4
Waiting for the day when our culture doesn't clutch its pearls seeing nude photos.
6
@Rick: This story isn't about the pics. It is about a boss having sex with someone who's paycheck and future job references depend on whether that subordinate has sex with the boss. It is coercion at the least and borders on rape.
1
Two relevant memories: 1) back in 1961, as a high school sophomore, a B&W photo circulated of senior girls at a party, half naked or at least in their underwear, feigning (or not) same-sex hookups, and 2) GW Bush telling an interviewer that the one instruction he'd like to give his daughters is not to make the same mistakes he made. Oh my, young people have been doing naked forever. Now their shots are on their phones, but I see no difference, and I send no blame their way. I teach university biology seminars, and my courses are frequently filled with young women. Let them make the same "mistakes" we made. Treat their youthful sexual zeal with respect. Ms Hill should not have resigned, correct. She did nothing "wrong". Stop, please, with the finger wagging, the condemnation of adolescent and young adult play, for that's what it is. Sexual exploration, enjoyment, fun. Go for it! Ms Hill, I, for one, applaud you! No one got hurt until scolds got a hold of Ms Hill's private life. The only theme common to these comments is moralizing. Parents, you have always been the problem young people have to escape. Technology now allows for private sexuality to be made public. Nothing more. Yikes!
1
I really don't care what consenting adults do or how many of them do it. I do care that our president has boasted about sexually assaulting women. We have our priorities more than a little misplaced.
5
@Frank Having sex at the boss's request is never voluntary. The underlying message is no sex equals no job and bad references.
1
@Jeff I cannot assume that all boss/employee sex is initiated by the bosses. I also cannot assume that any boss/employee sex is coercive. Such a determination requires more than simple statutory definition.
I actually care that our president is a sexual predator and that he gets away with it is wrong. And I actually care that a Congressional Representative (Hill) was having sex with a subordinate. I care about both. Really.
Too soon old, too late smart...
2
The Millennials have no sense of privacy. They neither extend it nor expect it.
As a famous dead white male, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote,
"One does not dress in private as for a ball."
Ben was quite a rake, and would have been in trouble if selfies were around in the 18th century.
He never ran for public office, but his puss is on the $100 bill. Not bad.
3
Dear millennials, or Xer's or Zer's or whatever the current titles are:
In life, you will find that a little modesty goes a long way on your journey. It is absolutely unnecessary to take nudies of yourself and friends and even worse, post them online. It's worse than unnecessary to photo or video sex acts, and posting those online is down right idiotic.
Anything posted online, anything that resides in a server somewhere, can be revealed to all. There is no such thing as privacy online. If the file has been sent to the internet, it's open season on you.
This is self posting thing is all about selfaggrandizment. Everyone wants to be a big shot. Fame is just a few clicks away.
That's what the social networking companies want you to believe. Post away they say. Have fun with your smartphones. Afterall, they cost a fortune so you might as well use them to get your money's worth. So walk down the street with those white things hanging out of your ears and your face buried in a 4 inch screen. Disconnect from the real world and thrive is the digital world. And these companies will sell your every click to anyone that can pay.
Real fame is hard work. It takes years of struggle and effort. Life is so much more than clicks. Put your phones down and join us fuddy duddies. Don't just click your way through life.
5
@Bruce Rozenblit
Agreed -
Stumbled across a similar thought process on the most recent Disturbed Album - Song title "in another time"
"In a another time,
When we weren't so blind,
When the world was more than what we see online,
When we actually lived instead of watching life,
in another time
in another time"
I'm from that time. Yes I do take pictures on vacation at times, but often I consciously turn the device off, stow it in my backpack, and fully soak in each moment, and store it in the most personal of storage devices - My own mind.
3
You suggest women take and post photos out of ego or vanity. Perhaps you mistake why women allow these photos to be taken or recognize how often they are taken without permission or posted without permission. Male power and privilege are very much alive and well in the internet.
We are parents of a millennial son. So I have some understanding of the behavior patterns of this specific generation. However, in my humble opinion, people from ALL generations should use their JUDGEMENT or COMMONSENSE in terms of whether or not to take naked selfies for sharing with the others or to pose for naked pictures for others. It doesn’t have anything to do with being digitally savvy or not. It’s just a reflection of one’s degree of naïveté or it might also be construed as a gesture of reckless rebellion against the social norms of the older generation. It might also be a form of cyber exhibitionism.
I totally abhor the practice of “Revenge Porn” but at the same time, we should also be careful so that we don’t get caught “Flagrante Delicto” so to speak. It’s matter of “Risk Management” for one’s personal Brand.
I feel sorry for Katie Hill. I think she shouldn’t have resigned and fought to keep her Congressional seat. Ah well - I’m positive that she will learn from this unfortunate incident and will move on to bigger and better things.
Mazel Tov!
2
"This is an issue where a lot of Millennials, I think, sympathize with Katie Hill ..."
Yeah...Shawn is a fool, or a liar.
Of course he works for Old Mo, so it could be he's just another self-regarding master manipulator.
But if his Millenials had the heart or the wit to sympathize with anyone they would have rallied to keep her in office and cast out the miscreants who created this mess by exploiting her personal data.
Of course, they didn't. Because, even if they do sympathize they do it The American Way: all alone, in their heads, in front of their screens, in mute dis-ease.
Heaven forbid they should get up, get dressed, go vote.
Or stop Tweeting awesome views of their privates and write and actual letter of protest.
Millennials should wise up and realize Maureen and her ilk gave us an administration that destroyed the comfortable fiction of a shared national community, split it irrevocably into factions economic, political, gender-based, and they will have to fight for every crumb of comfort and security.
Noble fallers-on-swords like Katie and Al Franken are a sign of weakness on the Left, unwilling to weather the certain pain of continuing to advocate even from a position of flawed experience, of guilt.
Its why Mo's administration of choice, and its woebegone party, are preternaturally powerful: they have no shame, imagine no reason they shouldn't wield power and control the lives of everyone around them.
2
Just more proof that common sense is uncommon when some people need to be told to not send naked photos unless they don’t mind being confronted with them at some point in the future. Stupid acts can lead to really painful results.
6
Maybe smartphones should be called “stupid phones” because people do stupid things with them.
Boomers didn’t have smartphones, of course. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. The stupid things we did were only preserved in school yearbooks, newspaper clippings, or FBI files.
Of course, ex.-Rep. Katie Hill’s story is cautionary. Yes, dipping the pen in the company ink is as wrong for Millennials as it has been for Boomers. Yes, Republican operatives will leave no smartphone unhacked in search of dirt. And, no, people don’t vote for you because they want to hear about your personal woes.
But I must admit, I laughed at Ms. Hill’s unemployed ex-husband whining about being stranded without a car at their residence and having to ask his father for money to pay the divorce lawyer. New Rules - if you can’t afford the divorce lawyer, then don’t get married?
5
The colossal hypocrisy of the Republicans who worked for the man Ms. Hill defeated in the polls is disgusting. It demonstrates how low the GOP will go to win.
Sure, ideally, Ms. Hill would not have put nude photos out into cyberspace, but it doesn't approach the degenerate sexual behavior of the Republican-in-Chief, and should not have forced her out of office.
Why do progressives keep giving in to the nasty and vicious tactics of the Republican party? They will always find a lowdown way to attack any Democrat who makes it, and we should not let them get away with it without a squeak.
3
@Elizabeth Bennett: When are you going to be honest. The issue is not the nude photos but that the boss had sex with a subordinates who's job and perhaps professional life depended on not rejecting the boss's sexual demands. Tell me how you would have reacted it the boss was a man and the employee was a woman? The word "rape" come to mind.
1
There are pictures of our First Lady totally naked and all parts exposed. I wonder if it's not more the salaciousness of it all, more than the nudity per se (which, frankly, is quite old hat). In any case, I have no problem with nudity of elected officials -- always good to be reminded that they put on their pants (women and men) one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.
2
The Right wallows in this double standard. They stay, Dems leave. Perfect.
5
I find this licentious behavior disgusting for both sexes. And I question their stability and judgment in the political arena.
Boomers deserve any and all criticism leveled at us, certainly a lot worse than "OK Boomer." We are the most self-indulgent, self-satisfied, destructive generation in a long time, perhaps ever. Our legacy is a ruined economy, a ruined political system, infrastructure rated as D-minus, punishing debt, a million species going extinct, and, worst of all, an uninhabitable planet. We Boomers should simply shut up and hang our heads in shame.
PK - age 58, born 1961
2
I'm sure this has been discussed, but I haven't seen it in the pieces I have read on this whole affair...
Katie Hill laments the double standard applied to her versus Donald Trump. And while there is a societal double standard applied to men and women embroiled in sexual scandals, the only difference between Katie Hill and the president (lower case intentional) in this instance is that she chose to resign while he refused. That is a double standard enforced on progressives, by progressives.
As far as I know, no one had the power to force her to resign. She could have stayed in office and faced the consequences of her actions, which more likely than not would have ultimately been nothing more than censure and stripping of her committee assignments.
Re-electability is a different question, but that is in the future. Like Al Franken, Ms. Hill should/could have taken the route chosen by this president. The greatest double standard here is the repeated self-immolation of Democrats while Republicans facing similar circumstances shrug it off and stay in power. Being the more "virtuous" of the parties is getting us nowhere.
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Unfortunately, the young women of the Millenials and Generation Z will have to learn the hard way that a double standard still exists for women and that society hasn't evolved all that much.
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@Morgan Yeah, my Millennial daughter thought that hers was the Post-Sexism Generation until she fell prey to it, herself.
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@Morgan
Really? Imagine the same story with reversed genders.
If a male member of Congress had had sexual relationships with a campaign staffer of one gender and a congressional staffer of another gender, and left a homemaker spouse ( that’s how it would be spun) penniless, what would those headlines have been like? Predator! Monstrous! Lock him up!
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@Morgan
Look at the bright side; you don't have to put up with pay inequality at a job or the glass ceiling above keeping you from management, instead you can manage a husband who buys you cars, a home, pays all your expenses, and like many other wives, when you get bored with him, you can divorce him and get all-I-money and live easily, or if you stay married, you know the good lovin' means that salmon of a man is gonna' die long before you so you can drive a new car you paid for with his pension and life insurance as you flitz around in your convertible with the neighbors playing Bridge or Bingo. I mean c'mon, the way it was is the way it is. You know I'm teasing you right?
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I am a Boomer. My wife and most of my friends, ditto. I don't like us much either.
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I don’t care if she smokes pot. I don’t care if she likes women, or three-ways with her hubby and another woman. I don’t care that there are naked pictures of her available on the web.
I do care that she slept with a subordinate. That has nothing to do with revenge porn, Trump or the clear double standard in society. She knew or should have known the rules, and the power dynamic she was manipulating. She deserved to be punished. That she resigned is for her to reconcile.
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@Kevin Saavedra The problem here is that while you are absolutely right in your assessment, we only know this because of dirt-digging research from opposition political operatives.
Anytime you see a politician being brought down by negative politics, dirt-digging, negative advertising, you have to ask: do we want to live in a world where this is a winning strategy?
Because if we accept this, then we're going to end up with the most bland politicians rather than the best ones. Or on the other hand, we'll end up with leaders who have so much dirt that even more doesn't hurt, as per one current example.
Every real person by the age of 25 has probably many things they said or did that would look bad on the front page of the NY Times. Different voters will react to different things. As long as these things do not impact the person's ability to be a politician, I believe we need to ignore them.
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When men sleep with a subordinate it is called abuse of power and sexual harassment. Why should it be different for a woman in power. I agree with your post.
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@Kevin Saavedra after two centuries of men treating the political landscape here as a droit du seigneur playground, that the one ensnared in an ethics investigation about the new rules enacted last year on sexual harassment — barring lawmakers from having sexual relationships with staffers — is a woman.
You don't apply the same standard to the generations of playboy politicians who were admired for their ability to make their secretaries swoon and fall into bed. Whatever.
trump supporters are very concerned about the behavior of women and Democrats. VERY concerned about morality. The irony of their own hypocrisy, defending trump, escapes them completely.
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I don't care about the picture(s). However, there was also a relationship with a subordinate that figures strongly in her resignation, as it should. Let's keep in mind the whole story. We can't keep making excuses for women if we want to hold men accountable for those same actions. Take the picture out of the story...THAT'S the real story.
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Many years ago I read a fascinating story. A zoo somewhere in Europe, the old-fashioned kind with cages, had a problem with the primate captives - they were bored and depressed.
A zoo keeper had the inspiration to roll a big screen TV in front of the cages, because apes like to watch TV. But who would changes the channels for them to keep the entertainment fresh?
They just handed the control to the gorillas, and in no time they figured out how to use it like pros. They could change channels, adjust the sound, locate nature documentaries, everything!
They were 'living in technology' - just like generation Z.
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That Katie Hill resigned only shows how badly the Democratic Party (of which I am a member) understands politics. There is no way she would've lost re-election. We're playing by Robert's Rules, and the Republicans are in a knife fight.
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True, but the Democrats are the ones who just made new ethics rules banning Congressfolk from sleeping with their aides.
I agree, they should undo those #metoo blunders and become the pro-sex party again.
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@Dominic, no thank you. Competing to see who will go lower results in America's failure.
It's always the right time to do the right thing, as MLK, Jr (and Jesus) said. If a politician in my party lies, cheats or betrays their oath, they should go.
For republicans these da;ys, if one of their politicians lies, cheats or betrays their oath, they circle the wagons and call Democrats names.
Never advocate for allowing the rule of law to slide, especially with such excuses as 'this is a knife fight'. One party at least, needs to follow the constitution!!
I'd rather set a good example for the kids I know, for honesty and American law, than tell them I'm gonna jump down into the dogpit to join the bloody cruelty.
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Maureen, you've given us just another of a plethora of columns printed by the NY Times that seems to believe that there are only two generations: Boomers and Millennials (plus the first two years of Gen Z). Once again, Gen X is completely overlooked and invisible. Maybe it's because we've been forced to be self-sufficient, having graduated in the years after the 1987 stock market crash and when the employer-employee loyalty bonds were first broken.
Older adults and younger adults shouldn't overlook this valuable generation.
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Interesting, isn't it, that we Gen Xers are not the perceived enemy of Gens Y and Z?
The Boomers are working hard to divest all of us of a working society and government. I think the pinnacle of that generation's success is that they elected Cheetolini to oversee the final leveling of a once vibrant and wealthy nation. Let's see what they choose to force on the rest of us in the next election. Wanna bet it'll be more of the same?
Why shouldn't we resent y'all and dismiss your generational "wisdom"? This Gen Xer has watched the circus since y'all chose Ronnie Reagan. It's been the same puritanical, boring, money-grubbing show since the 80s.
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@Beanie I have two millennial daughters. Both have worked hard in school and at small jobs, graduating from universities with law and engineering degrees. Both bought their own apartments at 25, have solid jobs and will start their own families soon. All this, despite the Boomers.
Stop blaming generations and do something.
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The main reason you should not resent all Baby Boomers is because many of us are quite progressive and did not vote for Trump. Many of us have worked hard, paid our taxes, supported non profits and institutions of change, are not rich, do accept that climate change is real, know that we are moving more and more towards an oligarchy, and understand that judging a diverse group of millions of people simply by what year they were born is in and of itself a form of prejudice.
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"There will always be vengeful exes and envious allies and ruthless opponents and double-crossing friends. Whether the messages are being carried by pigeons or pixels,... Don't let our shiny new tools blind you to the fact that some horrible truths about humanity never change."
Love this. So well said and illuminating.
I will need to pay more attention to Shakespeare!
Thanks Maureen!
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I feel really bad for this young woman. I'm a school counselor and I know a lot of kids are sending inappropriate photos to one another. I think that technology and cell phones in particular are similar to chainsaws. They're great tools but they can hurt you very quickly. We Boomers are wandering around semi lost in this technological landscape, the Millennials and TikTok generation have been given the tool without any guidelines. I hope and believe that as the Tiktok people have kids, they'll be able to provide the guidelines needed for the proper and safe use of this tool that can cut you badly if misused.
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As a millennial and a democrat, I have no sympathy for Hill. She created this scandal and responded to it as any typical power broker (regardless of gender): deny, blame others, resign.
At least she had the decency to resign, don’t pull from the Republican’s playbook and suggest otherwise.
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Most millennials see God in nature, it's creative,emotional and alive ,some tremble seeing God retreating as the earth slowly passes away.
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I love that she added a comma to the retort, "Ok, Millennials?" (The missing comma bothers me so much in the original "Ok Boomers" message, but hey, I'm in Generation X. I guess I don't get it either.)
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When I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the 1970s, a classmate showed me some nude Polaroids -- the selfies of the day -- that she and other classmates had taken of themselves and invited me to join them.
My response was: You want to be a lawyer some day, right ,and So and So a judge and So and So a doctor and a biochemist, right?
Why yes, she said.
So why take photos that will only come back to haunt you? I asked. Thanks, I said in ending the conversation, but I have homework to do.
The problem with millennials is not just that they don't think ahead. (Throughout history, young people have lived in the moment, presuming the past to be dead and the future to take care of itself. They've never understood that time is not only a construct but a continuum in which the past flows into the present and future.)
Young people, however, don't even live in the moment anymore. Thanks to the digital age, millennials are always busy recording the moment, instead of truly living in it, often in ways that jeopardize their futures.
These young people don't realize that there is no such thing as privacy, no such thing as secrecy as long as two people are party to an act. My advice to them is always the same: If you'd be embarrassed to see something in print later, if it could cost you a marriage or a career, then don't say or do it now. -- thegamesmenplay.com
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I second the commenters who believe she should have remained in Congress until the next election. Giving up her seat as she did without a fight is a weak look not just for herself, but all Democrats.
Fight for your hard-earned seat in our government!
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No matter your age or gender or your origins, people like Hill fail to recognize that with "rank" come responsibility. Whether you are a boomer or just any young adult, please recognize that should you seek to occupy and position of leadership, that it is a privilege to do so. It ain't about you.
There are many people in Congress who understand this rule. Most of them are women. That should be enough to quiet the angry and immature among us. Of any age.
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"OK Millennial"? Eh. The next gen will have to come up with something else in 30 years when Millennials take their turn and "don't get it".
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From group to individual venture capitalist, blackmail and larceny have become the newest booming money maker and no one is better at this than the current president and those that prop him up.
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The old saying, from well before the digital age still rings true; don't say or do anything you wouldn't want your mother to see in the newspaper.
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Of course people are imperfect and Katie Hill's behavior is as old as time. It was predatory, manipulative and abusive then and now.
The difference is consequences throughout the ages. Usually they would fall adversely on women and be ignored for men. Dowd is old enough to remember how 'liberal lion' Ted Kennedy behaved in Washington and really everywhere and was excused for his gender, wealth and politics.
The issue this time is that had this now been the behavior of a man; white and Republican particularly, Katie Hill would be the first at the barricades to demand his resignation.
The behavior is not new. Katie Hill continually called out men in politics to be held accountable.
Why is it wrong to require her to live her own politics and beliefs? Why is Katie Hill exempt from the consequences she so readily calls for for others?
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I thought she was a positive force for the progressives and when interviewed in the media she was very intelligent. It’s too bad that she made a bad decision that brought her down . I agree that she has to be held accountable. She knew the House Ethic Rules and she still played with fire. Any Dem that supports or excuses this behavior— and I am not referring to the nude pictures—-I am referring to the relationship with subordinate— any Dem that excuses that is a hypocrite. If a male politician —-especially a Republican-did the same people would be sounding the alarms.
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A Boomer here, OK? I made a personal choice never to run for public office after things I did and things that happened to me between age 19 and 25. I was very 'woke' in those days.
OK, Millennials and Gen-X er's, You didn't invent the i-Phone. Steve Jobs, a Boomer, did, The WWWeb was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a Boomer. You didn't invent environmental awareness, the civil rights and anti-war campaigns, the efforts to control gun access, Funk, or even Hip Hop. Grandmaster Flash and friends are in their 60's.
My parents worked to pass the Clean Water Act, abortion Rights, and the ERA, and they were Republicans! Go figure. We all walk in our parents' footsteps. Teach your parents well, but Teach! Don't just dis them. This is not about just you or me, it is about everybody, our whole world. Teach and Act. Join the world's Long March. Your time is Now. OK?
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Dividing people into generations may be Big Stupid Fun, but it fatally ignores that economic systems and classes are the key to understanding society. Just the same, the focus on individual politicians obscures how systems and classes motivate political behavior across the board.
I have infinitely more in common with a working class "millennial" than with a rich person of my own age.
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As a general rule, men bounce back after sex scandals. To wit: Mark Sanford is currently running for President as it if were the most normal thing in the world (and that is one among hundreds of examples). I hope Ms. Hill will be back with her head held high.
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