Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

"Be my tool tonight; if you are satisfied it will not be because I have any obligation to do so—know instead that it served me to pleasure you.”

On the Right Wing Date:

Every time I read these sorts of things I howl thinking back on all that tiresome eye-rolling sanctimony about “elitism” and “snobbery” that the right often toss at the left.

I remember talking with an attractive woman at a cocktail party years ago (well before I met my wonderful wife) and things were going well till I mentioned I liked Ayn Rand.  She was shocked and said something like “I thought you were smart.”

I took it in good humor (and while I did not back down) and did not get confrontational about it.  Unfortunately, I also did not close the deal (let alone get her phone number). 

If she had actually read Ayn Rand and the Fountainhead, she might have gotten to the part where Dominique Francon imagines her body as the city, with Howard Rourke the architect...doing wonderful things to her.  Her loss.

Joe,

Perhaps she had started to read the Fountainhead and was troubled by Roarke’s raping Dominique Francon the first time they have sex. One of those weird little things that sometimes bothers women when idealized.

And I say this as someone who read all of Rand’s fiction output and about half her published nonfiction—when I was 15. It’s very nice when one is a socially inept teenager to believe that one is part of this elite that Rand describes, who do not do things to follow the crowd and never pretend or exaggerate anything. But most people eventually realize that it often helps in a job interview, or in other encounters with strangers, to bump up one’s actual level of enthusiasm.

Hah!

Rand’s writing is one of those things that, like Def Leppard (if you grew up in the 1980’s) you’d now be embarrassed to admit that as a teenager you thought it was cool.

Wouldn’t a Randian pickup line be, like, three hours long?