Today in Supreme Court History: September 4, 1851

9/4/1851: Justice Levi Woodbury dies.

Justice Levi Woodbury

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Certain Named and Unnamed Non-Citizen Children and their Parents v. Texas, 448 U.S. 1327 (decided September 4, 1980): Powell restores District Court injunction against Texas law prohibiting state funds from being used to educate undocumented children; notes the open question of “strict scrutiny” as to plaintiffs’ Equal Protection argument; Texas in opposition points to increased expense of educating the children, and argues they they would suffer minimal harm because the law has already kept them out of school for five years anyway, but Powell says “the balance of harm weighs heavily on the side of the children” (the Court eventually ruled for them sub nom. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 1982)

[SRG2]

Plyler v Doe

Decided 5-4.

[Dilan Esper]

Rightly decided.

Indeed, the education issue shows exactly how irrational hatred against immigrants leads certain people towards mindless, self-destructive cruelty.

You have all these children here. How would it make America better to refuse to educate them? How would it magically deport them?

Anti-immigrant types don't think about these things because they only care about hating these people, not about policy. They like depriving them of educations BECAUSE it is cruel to do so, and they think we should be maximally cruel to people who come here from other countries. They think we should put kids in cages, shoot people crossing the border, put up electric fences, etc. Sadism is their only policy goal here.

In the real world, Plyer saved the country from some bigoted zelaots who would rather destroy America than be nice to an immigrant.

[bernard11]

Correct. Absolutely.

[Mr. Bumble]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12478977/Staggering-figures-workers-lost-jobs.html

[Krayt]

Texas...argues they they would suffer minimal harm because the law has already kept them out of school for five years anyway

"We've been kicking them in the balls every day for five years, anyway, so each additional ball kick at this point is just a tiny increment."

[Dan Schiavetta]

today’s movie review: Swept Away, 1974

In college in the 1970’s you were supposed to like Lina Wertmuller films, dubbed from the Italian. So I sat through the gross and insulting Seven Beauties, which was bad enough . . . and then there was this one.

It is a well made film and there are some good things in it. A Southern Italian man and a Northern Italian woman get stuck together on a deserted island. He is from the poor part of the country, a Communist who sees examples of capitalist hegemony everywhere and is full in with the Marxist analysis of religion as the opiate of the masses. (Going through a deserted hut, he sees a crucifix and says, “Christianity! It’s everywhere! It’s worse than Coca-Cola!”) She is well educated, blond, fashionable, and sees him as her natural servant. There is some entertaining interplay as to the Italian culture wars of that period. And then the tables are turned.

“Oh it’s so romantic!” I heard this from several female friends. Maybe they were in love with Giancarlo Giannini’s eyes (he was a master of comical puzzlement). Maybe it was the beach setting. But he slaps her around and rapes her. She comes to love being dominated so. At one point she asks him, “sodomize me!” and (cue comic Giannini eyes) he doesn’t understand the word until she explains it to her. He tells her it should be called “buttf**king” and goes ahead and does it. This is something that almost always hurts the woman (at least when I’ve tried it) and I’m sure most of the women around me (we were all ages 18 – 20 or so) had never tried it or if they did had only a couple of painful experiences. That didn’t turn them off. “Oh it’s so romantic!”

I hope women that age are wiser these days, but . . . as a friend of mine said, “It’s amazing what women will let you get away with if they’re attracted to you. And it’s amazing what they will bust your balls on if they’re not.” Around that time, at a party, a friend of mine got up in her strapless dress and her (drunk, immature) boyfriend yanked it down to her waist (she was braless). She yanked it back up, and quickly took him to a room and I assume gave him a talking-to. But she didn’t dump him. After a couple of days they were nauseatingly slobbering over each other just like before.

Around that time, also, I misread signals from a woman and gave her an unwanted kiss. I thought she wanted it. I was horrified, insecure teenager that I was. And this was after I had graduated from Unspoken Signals 101, where you learned that if a woman doesn’t want to have sex with you, she says “no” — and if she does want to have sex you with — she says “no”, But there was a hard “no” and a soft “no”. I had the great good fortune of overhearing this rule discussed between my girlfriend and her roommate, late at night when they thought I was asleep. The roommate was having trouble fighting off a guy who didn’t understand the difference.

Then the era of sexual harassment complaints dawned which brought real bullets. Unfortunately we were still in the era of the hard and soft “no”. I was more sophisticated by then but I hate to think of the younger guys who got brought up on charges because 1) the woman did not think he was as cute as Giannini and 2) she decided he had done something traumatic (or because her therapist or her lawyer convinced her of it).

Things are better now. Like I’ve said before, the emerging generation is so much better informed than we were. A few years ago my daughter, who was then in college, talked understandingly about a friend of hers (male) who had “misread the signals” with another friend of hers. It would be a lot better if women took the initiative instead of expecting men to, or at least gave clearer signals. Maybe they do now. But it still beyond my imagining that any woman could submit in the way the Mariangela Melato character did (in a film made by a female director!). Nor could I be the Giannini character. For one thing, I was never that adorable. Secondly, rape is such a huge turnoff. If I really thought I was forcing myself into an unwilling woman my body (all of it) would turn into soft spongy mass of guilt-ridden mush. It certainly is not my idea of “romantic”.

[Magister]

I was not at all surprised to find in the Wikipedia page on Wertmuller "Fellini's influence is evident in much of Wertmuller's work."

There's a whole bunch of foreign films that are revered beyond their worth as art. Maybe the ending of 2001 would have gotten a better reception if Kubrick had been a foreign filmmaker.

[Syd Henderson]

I like several of Fellini's films, but couldn't make it through the revered "Amarcord". I've never seen any of Wertmuller's films.

"Swept Away" was remade by Guy Ritchie starring his then-wife Madonna. The remake has 5% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. When a film does THAT bad on Rotten Tomatoes, I take their word for it.

[Dan Schiavetta]

If 2001 had been made by Fellini, what they would find on the Moon would not be a monolith but a pair of giant boobs. And we can guess the nature of the "space gate" Bowman hurtles through toward the end of the film.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

If it's Italian, that means it's not porn - it's art.

[Dilan Esper]

Around that time, also, I misread signals from a woman and gave her an unwanted kiss. I thought she wanted it. I was horrified, insecure teenager that I was. And this was after I had graduated from Unspoken Signals 101, where you learned that if a woman doesn’t want to have sex with you, she says “no” — and if she does want to have sex you with — she says “no”, But there was a hard “no” and a soft “no”. I had the great good fortune of overhearing this rule discussed between my girlfriend and her roommate, late at night when they thought I was asleep. The roommate was having trouble fighting off a guy who didn’t understand the difference.

Then the era of sexual harassment complaints dawned which brought real bullets. Unfortunately we were still in the era of the hard and soft “no”.

The old way was a form of rape culture that led almost certainly to millions of sexual assaults.

And it's easy to see why. If you tell women they are sluts if they don't say "no" to sex, even if they want it, and tell men "sometimes women say 'no' to sex when they really mean 'yes'", you create a situation where those women who actually are trying to say "no" are having their wills overborne by men who either think their "no's" are "soft" or who are just rapists taking advantage of the situation where some "no's" are "soft".

The current ethic is SOOO much better. You consent to sex by consenting to sex. You refuse sex by refusing sex. And guys aren't allowed to try and press forward on the ground that the woman is saying "no" when she means "yes".

[Dan Schiavetta]

I didn’t know anyone who said that women were “sluts” if they didn’t say “no” to sex. For most of us guys, a women who actually said “yes” was a real find. It got us past the games. As I’ve said before, I spent most of my single years involved with older women because they were not too hung up to say “yes”.

Your cartoon depiction was not reality. Sexual assault happened when men attacked women who were saying a hard “no”. Or (more likely) they didn’t have a chance to say anything at all. As for the soft “no”, it was the prelude to most of the consensual sex that happened.

I met my wife in 1994. She’s Latina, from a more conservative culture. We were walking on the beach. I kissed her and she returned the kiss ravenously. She nearly took my tonsils out. Later I asked her, “If I had asked permission to kiss you, would you have said yes or no?” She thought for a second and said, “No”. That’s just how it was, particularly in her culture. There are 500 million horny women in Latin American but only about 37 of them will say “yes” if asked. From what I hear from my nieces, the new generation of Latinas is more open about desire and that is a good thing.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Then the era of sexual harassment complaints dawned which brought real bullets. Unfortunately we were still in the era of the hard and soft “no”. I was more sophisticated by then but I hate to think of the younger guys who got brought up on charges because 1) the woman did not think he was as cute as Giannini and 2) she decided he had done something traumatic (or because her therapist or her lawyer convinced her of it).

Did Dr. Ed guess your password? Jesus Christ.

[Magister]

I can feel some sympathy for anyone who was promised the world worked in some way only to have it change without notice. But no sympathy here because of the difficulty of separating out the greater number who tried (and are still trying, long after everyone should have gotten the message) to use this as an excuse for being a sexual predator. And I doubt that there was any moment in time where the sexual predators weren't the vast majority.

[Dan Schiavetta]

“And I doubt that there was any moment in time where the sexual predators weren’t the vast majority.”

You and I disagree on that. There were sexual harassers and rapists, and they got away with it a lot more in the old days, for reasons we all know about now, but they were hardly the majority. Also there were guys who considered themselves “Romeos” who slept with a lot of women but women are free agents and it was not a predator situation (there were also women who slept with a lot of men, and of course for a women that was a lot easier to do). Sometimes this (consensual) behavior was a sign of dysfunction, sometimes it was a free and healthy choice (note my recent review of She’s Gotta Have It.

I am telling you how it was as a young straight male in the 1970’s and 1980’s. If things were worse before that (a matter of only historical interest now), or if they were worse after that, I’m not in a position to say.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I see I misunderstood your comment, sorry. You were talking about those men who have been formally accused, and saying the great majority were guilty. I suppose so. Certainly an accusation is heavy stuff. Yet it has been done falsely, as we all know. Whether a sexual assault is more damaging to a female than a publicly-leveled false accusation is to a male (who even if cleared will carry the stigma for years), is a question that depends on the details of the assault and the details of the accusation and its attendant publicity.

I myself was accused of sexual assault a long time ago, in a workplace situation (not publicized). It was the first and only time it ever happened to me and I was traumatized. Being a good Catholic boy I kept asking myself whether it was something I did which was misinterpreted. The only time I was in close contact with her was when we sat together in my office to go over some paperwork. I didn’t touch her, but the accusation was graphic and “invasive”. I found out later that she had made accusations against other men which were fabrications and even accused guys who were standing a few feet behind her in the subway (her friend told me this). I assume this unfortunate behavior was due to an early history of genuine sexual abuse. In the grand scheme of things she was of course more the victim of trauma than I was.

[Magister]

That really sucks. I guess I can have some sympathy for men who sometimes have to worry about the risks of being alone with a woman, but were never taught that growing up like women were.

The claim from misogynists that this happens with great frequency destroying men's lives every time is not symmetric with the claim that this never ever happens, even if they are both technically false. (Just as women, and men, should be clearer with their signals, we should all be clearer about what we're claiming to avoid misunderstandings, less consequential though they may be.)

[Magister]

(Posted this without looking to see if there was a new reply; leaving it as is, though. It's not intended to be harsh and I apologize if it comes off that way.)

Well, I’m thinking of the cases that might, in the most aggressive age of sexual harassment complaint bullets, actually generate a charge. I should probably concede that my “vast majority” would be out of the number of incidents, rather than the number of people involved; serial sexual predators.

From your own experience: the unwanted kiss when you misread the signals. How aggressive were you? Enough to land that kiss despite being an awkward teenager? Did she react by shrinking back or turning away or putting out an arm to block you? Did you bull ahead and force it on her? How did you find out it was unwanted? The sexual predators I’m thinking of did this over and over if they could get away with it – get her drunk enough, corner her, etc. They just got (or get) better at it with practice; that you don’t mention a second embarrassing incident suggests you adjusted appropriately.

I asked a woman who graduated high school in 1970 who had a variety of negative experiences (she relishes being older because she doesn’t get that kind of attention now; “it takes the pressure off”). She described it as sometimes a lose/lose situation to be a woman; say no too aggressively and get called a bitch and possibly attacked, or be courteous and they persist endlessly. The time was more fraught with danger for women than you seem to think.

You should ask some women, I think.

[Dan Schiavetta]

We had been sitting very close together and I angled my head to get her full-on on the lips. It sure seemed to me that she was expecting me to do that. I didn’t put my tongue in. She turned away and said “I think I should go home.” Perhaps (this is a guess) she really did want me to kiss her but once it happened she realized it was further than she wanted to go.

It can be hard to ask people what they think on this topic because too many are stridently trying to make a point (as you can see here). Also perhaps some women find it hard to admit when there is no real downside to being more assertive so as to stop the show (like that girl did) instead of letting things escalate to where stopping is more difficult to explain. I do believe what my wife told me though (as to saying “no” if asked). And overhearing that conversation in the dorm room as to hard and soft “no” was priceless.

Anyway . . . I’m glad I’m “off the market” and happily married and I don’t have to deal with those situations any more.

[Magister]

Maybe she thought she wanted that kiss, and discovered that she did not, or maybe she became afraid of what it might continue to.

Marriage is great, if you can find the right person.

[David Nieporent]

Maybe he had bad breath.

[Dan Schiavetta]

She would have known that already.

[Magister]

Typing Levi Woodbury into Google, it suggests "Levi Woodbury/Former United States Secretary of the Treasury" which seems a very odd choice among the many positions he held.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“the many positions he held”

But enough about capncrisis’ movie reviews.

PS - "Huh-huh, he said Wood-Bury, huh-huh huh."