The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Fame Whore Update: Relationship Expert Fails and Good-Bye, ‘Reasonable’ Man

Posted on | September 9, 2018 | 3 Comments

Julia Baugher, ‘Internet Famous’ on the cover of Wired magazine, 2008.

Friday and Saturday, I worked for hours to research and write my report on “fame whore” Julia Baugher (a/k/a Julia Allison), who was once featured on national magazine covers, who appeared as a frequent guest on Fox News, who had her own Bravo reality-TV series in 2012, who has written for Cosmo, Elle, Huffington Post and other publications.

This Georgetown University alumna, who 10 years ago was the illustrious example of becoming “Internet Famous,” has left more burning bridges behind her than Sherman marching through Georgia. And while my Saturday report hit most of the highlights (and lowlights) of her biography, even 3,000 words did not suffice to encompass every noteworthy debacle in the descending spiral of this erstwhile celebrity who has outlived her 15 minutes of fame. Where to begin with collecting the remaining debris from this shipwrecked life? Well, in February 2014, Miss Baugher spoke on a journalism school panel at the University of Pennsylvania entitled “Feminism/s Presents: Sex in Journalism,” and her biographical blurb in the event program read thus:

Julia Allison, 32, is a nationally recognized journalist, relationship expert, public speaker, former BRAVO star and 2008 WIRED cover girl. She is currently at work writing her first book, Experiments in Happiness, to published Spring 2015 by St. Martin’s Press. A veteran tv commentator and host, Allison has made hundreds of appearances on CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, E!, MSNBC, VH1 and MTV, and has published several hundred articles for publications as diverse as ELLE, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, New York magazine and The New York Post, covering everything from Burning Man to Comic Con to NY Fashion Week to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, as well as interviewing unconventional experts in the realm of happiness and relationships, and examining the impact of technology and social media on culture. She has spoken at conferences around the world as well as universities like MIT, Wharton, Harvard on new media, personal branding, unconventional purpose driven marketing, and hacking happiness. Allison got her start as the (sometimes controversial) dating columnist for Georgetown University when she was an undergraduate. A recovering social media addict with over 300k combined Facebook and Twitter followers, she’s lived in New York, LA, DC and Chicago. Now she lives, loves, and experiments with happiness (and a lot of yoga) in San Francisco.

Among the many items on this list, “former BRAVO star” might catch your attention. Her reality-TV series flamed out like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst after eight episodes. The premise was this: Three “relationship experts” (Miss Baugher, a freelance columnist; Emily Morse, host of a San Francisco radio show called “Sex With Emily”; and New York “executive matchmaker” Amy Laurent) would be shown doing their professional work, and also in their private lives because (ironic twist) all of them were past 30 and didn’t have relationships of their own. No husbands, no steady boyfriends — they were personally failing in the precise area of life at which they were selling themselves as “experts”!

 

Not surprisingly, like everything else in Julia Baugher’s life, the Bravo series Miss Advised ended in disappointment and failure, although she claimed to have gained valuable insights from her experience:

Julia Allison has (finally) experienced a much-needed breakthrough when it comes to love and finding Mr. Right.
“I was completely delusional,” the Miss Advised star admits to TV Guide about her search for a husband. “I thought the problem was I couldn’t find the right guy but … I had created an idea of what marriage should be based on my parents involving the suburbs, monogamy and daily routines I’m not interested in. I was setting up a situation where I’d fail.”
But that’s not the case today. “I realized I can make my own rules and I don’t have to have the relationship my parents had,” explains the Illinois native, who also learned another valuable love lesson recently — turn it down a notch.
“The skillset I have learned to utilize in my career — which is aggressive, masculine, focused, directed — that is not the energy you want to bring on a date,” says the expert on personal branding. “I was interrogating these guys and I always thought that was very charming and it was not charming to watch! There was no romantic energy. I’m starting to believe the things that make you good in a career make you bad in a relationship.”
Add one more newfound belief to the pile. “I’m starting to believe people who have chronic problems need to have a camera crew follow them. It was massively effective.”

 

Did she solve her “chronic problems”? Did the discovery that she could “make my own rules” lead her to happiness without all those “delusional” routines of suburban monogamy? Well, she’s an expert on happiness, too. Remember her book, Experiments in Happiness, which she said would be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015? That didn’t happen.

Experiments in Happiness
How I Learned to Live a Life Filled With Love,
Creativity, Meaning…and a Little Bit of Magic
When Julia Allison — acclaimed journalist, relationship expert, and lady-about-town — set out to discover what was holding her back from happiness, she didn’t just pick up a self-help book: she wanted to write her own. Chronicling her unconventional experiments as a “guinea pig of happiness,” Allison takes readers through her journey with her characteristic charm, humor, and warmth. For anyone feeling unsettled in their hectic urban life, and for devotees of Allison’s trademark style, Experiments in Happiness is a road worth travelling on.

This “road worth travelling on” proved to be a road to nowhere.

Miss Baugher scored her book deal in September 2013, based on an 81-page proposal that included a lot of revelations about herself. Did you know that she used to have a big nose, and had not one, but two nose jobs, the first at age 19? Did you know (well, anyone could easily guess) that she “felt like an outcast, an unpopular misfit” in high school, was bulimic and, during her peak of fame circa 2007, she would “cry myself to sleep, then wake up the next day, aching with emptiness”?

Ah, but her proposal promised the cure for unhappiness, via numerous “experiments,” and it also promised interviews with all kinds of people, from Mark Zuckerberg to Tina Fey to the “Duck Dynasty” family. Her marketing proposal involved selling herself as the Happiness Expert™ with lots of media tie-ins, perhaps including a movie based on the book. Her proposal included “20 reasons this book will be a runaway bestseller” that promised a blog (“URLs . . . already registered”) aimed at “creating a worldwide following of people who are excited to evangelize and take action.” The term for this is: Bipolar, manic phase.

It never happened. Her boyfriend dumped her, she fell into a depression, turned in a manuscript that did not deliver what she’d promised in her original manic-phase proposal and, when re-writes couldn’t fix it, the publisher finally demanded she return the advance money.

The story of that debacle is highlighted by Melayna Lokosky who calls Julia Baugher “the poster child for The Sociopathic Business Model.” Ms. Lovosky is a corporate whistleblower-turned-consultant who specializes in protecting against a type of fraud where would-be entrepreneurs use exaggerated promises to attract venture capital. “Fraud fears facts,” as Ms. Lokosky says, and one way scammers seek to suppress the “negative truth” about themselves is to denigrate as “haters” any truth-teller who tries to hold them accountable. This resembles the tactics of DARVO (Deny, Accuse, Reverse Victim and Offender) in which wrongdoers play the victim by maligning the motives of their accusers.

In the case of Julia Baugher, the people she calls “haters” are the operators and commenters at a blog called RebloggingDonk which has chronicled and mocked everything she’s done for years. All her failures and excuses, every attempt to “re-invent” herself — RebloggingDonk is the dossier, the archival source on Miss Baugher’s spectacular descent from Manhattan socialite to . . . well, what is she anymore?

For two years, she was a fixture on the hippie festival circuit, following around her DJ boyfriend “Rain Phutureprimitive” (a/k/a Chad McNally) but that ended last year when he decided he was into “polyamory” (a/k/a, screwing around, threesomes, orgies, etc.). In June, in a column for the New York Post, Miss Baugher said she had recently “started seeing someone I never would have dated 10 years earlier,” a guy she called “a very reasonable choice.” Guess how that turned out? Read more

Category: Celebrities, Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Sunday: Happy Birthday, Kelsey Chow!

Posted on | September 9, 2018 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I seem to recall that EBL did an extensive post on Kelly Asbille Chow a while back in connection with Yellowstone and Wind River, but since I am fresh out of inspiration this weekend and it’s her birthday, here she is to help kick off another week of Rule 5 linkagery. Is it just me, or is she one of those women who look pretty ordinary most of the time, but in the right pose and setting looks gorgeous?

From her “Teen Wolf” days.

First out of the gate this week (as he is every week) is Ninety Miles From Tyranny with Hot Pick Of The Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #370, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns. Animal Magnetism has Rule Five Airline Prices Friday, as well as the Saturday Gingermageddon.

Speaking of EBL, she’s got Alyssa Milano Tears, Zina Bash, Gabriella Quevedo, National Cheese Pizza Day, Julia Salazar, Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz, Friday Fishing, and sadder-but-maybe-no-wiser former fame whore Julia Baugher.

A View From The Beach has a small but elite group of posts: Going Dutch with Robin Holzken, Friday Morning in the Islands, This Girl Can Really Handle Balls, “Stardust”, Take Me to Your Leader, Light Wallets Prefer Heavy Chests, Well, He Won’t Be Able to Say He Wasn’t Warned and Ariana Grande a Big Hit at Aretha’s Funeral.

American Power returns after a long absence with Rose McGowan, Kara Del Toro, Josephine Skriver, Hot Girls Smoking Weed, Alexis Ren’s Life Update, Alexis Ren Feeling Like A Diva, Josie Canseco, Kelly Brook, and Angie Harmon.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Sarah Wright, his Vintage Babe is Mary Frann, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Calvin Klein. At Dustbury, it’s Nicola Sturgeon and Marguerite Chapman.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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Category: Rule 5

Who’s Crazy on Campus?

Posted on | September 9, 2018 | Comments Off on Who’s Crazy on Campus?

A new study finds that 1-in-4 college students is mentally ill:

The newly-published report out of Brigham and Women’s Hospital shows that a quarter of college students received were diagnosed with a mental health condition in the past year, and a fifth have had suicidal thoughts. . . .
The results showed alarming rates of mental health issues and a significant risk for suicidal thoughts among all students, though minorities, whether racial, sexual, or gender, were especially prone. . . .
In fact, one in four students was diagnosed with a condition, while one in five considered taking his or her own life. Nearly 10 percent admitted to attempting suicide, and nearly 20 percent had committed self-harm of some form. . . .
While sexual minorities were found to have high rates of mental health diagnoses along with reports of self-harm and suicidal thoughts or actions, transgender participants showed high rates over all outcomes. Two-thirds of transgender students admitted to self-harm, while more than a third having attempted suicide. Similarly, more than half of bisexual students admitted to self-harm or suicidal behavior, while more than a quarter attempted suicide.
Asian students showed a greater risk of suicidal behavior, yet lower rates of mental health diagnoses compared to white students. Black students reported lower rates across all outcomes versus white students.

From the summary of the researchers’ findings:

Bisexual students were more likely to report MH [mental health] diagnoses and suicidality, compared to heterosexual and gay/lesbian students . . . Transgender students reported a higher rate of MH diagnoses and suicidality relative to females.

It is interesting that it is not gay men or lesbians who show the higher risk, but rather bisexual and transgender students, and that Asians are more at risk of suicide than whites, while blacks are generally less likely to report any mental health problems.

 

Category: Education

FMJRA 2.0: Powers Of Two

Posted on | September 8, 2018 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Rule 5 Tuesday: Happy Birthday, Mitzi!
Animal Magnetism
Ninety Miles From Tyranny
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive
EBL

Chicago’s Zulu War: ‘The Cops Have Told Us They Aren’t Gonna Touch Them’
357 Magnum
American Digest
The Pirate’s Cove
EBL

Speedway Bomber: 40th Anniversary of Brett Kimberlin’s Notorious Crimes
EBL

Bad Gamblers and Bisexuality
Dark Brightness
A View From The Beach
EBL

FMJRA 2.0: Synthwave & The End of Summer
The Pirate’s Cove
A View From The Beach
EBL

Fake News, Real Hate
EBL

Played for a Chump
EBL

‘Mattress Girl’ Is Now Mattress ‘They’? The Queer Feminism of Emma Sulkowicz
EBL

‘The Truth About Who Kills Women’
357 Magnum
EBL

Trump Derangement Syndrome
A View From The Beach
EBL

In The Mailbox: 09.04.18
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach
Proof Positive

Democrats Planned (and Paid for) Hearing Protests: The Noise of Democracy™
Pushing Rubber Downhill
A View From The Beach
EBL

Crazy People Are Dangerous Update: Deborah Frisch Reported in Custody
EBL

In The Mailbox: 09.05.18
Proof Positive

CNN’s Favorite ‘Republican Strategist’
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

Brazilian Presidential Candidate Stabbed
EBL

In The Mailbox: 09.06.18
357 Magnum
Proof Positive

Soros-Funded Group Paid Protesters Who Disrupted Kavanaugh Hearings
Pushing Rubber Downhill
EBL

What Happened to Oliver Darcy?
Dark Brightness
EBL

Pro-Trump Jewish CUNY Professor Says He’s Targeted by ‘Progressive’ Faculty
EBL

Exit Strategy: Did This Guy ‘Red Pill’ His Way Out of a Doomed Relationship?
EBL

Who’s Up For A Tall, Cold ICE #TeaParty?
EBL

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge
EBL

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 09.07.18
Proof Positive

Top linkers for the week ending August 7:

  1.  EBL (19)
  2.  A View From The Beach (6)
  3.  Proof Positive (5)


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Category: FMJRA Award

The Sad Lesson of a Former ‘Fame Whore’ (Or, Why Slut-Shaming Is a Good Thing)

Posted on | September 8, 2018 | 4 Comments

“I’m beginning to feel like it’s entirely possible I’m ruining my life, and I’ll have absolutely no one to blame but myself and my naiveté.”
— Julia Baugher, 2008

She grew up in the affluent northern suburbs of Chicago. Her father was a Princeton-educated lawyer. Her mother once worked for President Nixon. Julia Baugher had so many advantages — did I mention her parents sent her to Georgetown University? — and she was also beautiful.

With so much going for her, it’s hard to imagine how she could fail, but it was her misfortune to come of age in the late 1990s, when a toxic brand of liberal “pro-sex” feminism was all the rage. Monica Lewinsky was the most famous woman in the world during Julia Baugher’s senior year of high school, and a new TV show debuted on HBO.

I was a rising high school senior when “Sex and the City” debuted in 1998, and I was instantly enthralled. I wanted to be like Carrie and her friends: I wanted to be glamorous and beautiful and dress well and have lots of dates.

She rubbed the lamp. The genie emerged, and granted her wish.

Oops. Be careful what you wish for.

At Georgetown, Miss Baugher became locally famous. Not in a good way.

When she was a junior at Georgetown University in the fall of 2002, Allison decided she had a thing for medical students. They were smart and driven and a little older than she was, all big turn-ons. So she got a job at the medical school library, where she had the opportunity to meet the entire class — and date several of its members. Before long, she was getting invited to med student parties. She was given a nickname — the Medstitute — which she chose to interpret as affectionate.

She also wrote a sex column for the student newspaper, dated a congressman, and somehow got caught in a plagiarism scandal.

After graduating Georgetown in 2004, she moved to New York City, talked her way into writing a sex column ($50 a week) for a giveaway newspaper and, apparently trying to get some distance from her collegiate plagiarism scandal, began using “Julia Allison” as her byline.

A diligent self-promoter, Miss Baugher managed to wangle TV appearances and, as the PUAs say, rode the carousel. Relentlessly, notoriously, infamously. Did I mention she dated a congressman in college? Because in 2006, that congressman ran for Senate, which helped her get noticed (not in a good way) by Gawker. This led to a sort of long-term relationship between Gawker and Miss Baugher, much like the relationship between a boxer and a punching bag.

“Julia was paid by Sea World to somehow convince people to go to Sea World. A short time later, a killer whale ate someone there.”

What had happened, you see, was that the Internet enabled Miss Baugher’s pursuit of fame (not in a good way). She created her own “brand” with a blog, posting photos of herself at Manhattan parties and events with whatever celebrities might be in attendance, and parlayed that into a six-figure gig with the Star supermarket tabloid at age 26.

Julia Baugher featured on the cover of Time Out New York, 2008.

“Easy come, easy go,” as they say, and Julia Baugher was notoriously easy. The young carousel riders never seem to figure out why promiscuity is a bad bet until it’s too late to retrieve their lost fortunes. Youth is a valuable commodity, and racking up a long list of ex-boyfriends (e.g., Men’s Health editor Dave Zinczenko, tech entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick) is not the smart way to invest such an asset. Feminists who rant against “slut-shaming” are like carnival barkers for sexual dysfunction. There is a reason why sluts are shamed, after all, because promiscuous young women are the supply of “free milk” that makes men reluctant to buy cows, as the old adage goes. Why should a tech entrepreneur or a magazine editor in New York City find a nice girl and get married, when every spring brings a new crop of 23-year-old hotties to town, eager to make the same kind of foolish mistakes young Julia Baugher made?

Working in political journalism, you encounter a lot of this type of woman, and one thing you discover in talking to them is that their personal narrative is usually incongruent with their behavior. The 25-year-old party girl, who bounces from one short-term boyfriend to the next, doesn’t think of herself as promiscuous. She may have been with a dozen men in the two or three years since she graduated college, but that doesn’t mean she’s a slut. No, her tawdry six-week fling was a “relationship,” she’ll tell you. She’ll say things like, “We really cared about each other, it just didn’t work out.” And so she bounces along: Six weeks with this guy, three months with that guy, maybe a few one-night-stand hookups with cute strangers when she was between “relationships” (and drunk at a party), and she can’t bring herself to admit that perhaps there’s something wrong with her behavior. Her talk about “love” and “relationships” is a rationalization, as is feminist talk about promiscuity as sexual “empowerment.” She isn’t empowered at all; in fact, she’s negotiating from a position of weakness, wasting her youth and sustaining emotional damage, while telling herself that anyone who criticizes her irresponsible behavior is motivated by envy or misogyny. You’re a “hater” if you advise young women not to screw around haphazardly, or otherwise express disapproval of such behavior.

Their behavior is crazy and self-destructive, but in their minds, it’s all beyond reproach. In this context, dating someone for more than six months is described as a “long-term relationship,” which brings us back to Miss Baugher. In a 2012 column for Elle, she wrote:

A huge mistake, I’ve learned, has been conflating dating with relationships. I was 29 when I looked at my dating spreadsheet and discovered I hadn’t been in a single relationship for more than six months since 2007. That’s five years! Not a stellar track record for anyone, but an especially dismal run for a woman who owns more self-help books than most independent bookstores. . . .

(Hint: Most self-help books aren’t actually helpful.)

For years, I liked collecting new dating stories. I was proud of all the romantic journeys I’d been on — even the ones that ended with me crumpled on the floor sobbing.

(“Romantic journeys” = screwing around.)

But then I had a moment, a single instant when it hit me: I was done. One August day in L.A., halfway through my 28th year, I was in bed with my college boyfriend, reunited after six years, and I realized I had come full circle. I didn’t need to date anymore; I’d seen enough. I was starting to literally repeat myself.

(No regrets, until she’d already ridden the carousel too long — quite typical.)

I remember thinking, Okay, I’m ready for my life partner now. Let’s get this marriage party started! . . .

(Again, typical: This is a carousel rider’s realization, as she nears the big 3-0, that she’s approaching what PUA’s call “the Wall.” The hottie fresh out of college, the New Girl in Town, is often dazzled by her opportunities for “romantic journeys,” but after she passes 25 and approaches 30, she realizes that her market-value has started to decline. She’s ready to get off the carousel, at which point she begins to complain that men are “afraid of commitment,” but they’re not actually afraid of anything. They’re just happy to keep banging hotties fresh out of college. Now let’s return to Miss Baugher’s column.)

After my most recent breakup in May 2011, I started to wonder: maybe it wasn’t the guys who were the problem. After all, the common denominator in my love life is — well, it’s me.

You can read the rest of that. The reason I stopped excerpting with this paragraph is because Miss Baugher’s 2011 breakup was newsworthy.

 

Perhaps you don’t recognize that fellow on the right. His name is Jack. He’s a Navy officer. His father was also a Navy officer. Jack’s grandfather and his great-grandfather were also Navy officers. “Gosh, what could Jack’s last name be?” the eponymous blogger asked, rhetorically.

You see, in October 2010, when Julia Baugher was 29, and checking her “dating spreadsheet,” she was invited to her friend Meghan’s birthday party, which is where she met Meghan’s younger brother, Jack. That day, Miss Baugher gushed on Twitter: “Just when you think you’ve seen everything, you meet someone who blows you away. Wow.”

What followed has been called “stalking” by some of Miss Baugher’s critics, but it was a successful hunt and, within two months (apparently how long it took her to ditch her previous boyfriend) she was publicly recognized as the girlfriend of John Sidney “Jack,” McCain IV, then 25.

Spoiler alert: It ended about six months later — and ended badly, according to a 2012 post by one of her most persistent critics:

Then one day, Julia Allison decided that she was going to move in with Jack. But instead of having a discussion with Jack about co-habitating, she kind of just went over for a visit and never left. Jack thought she was harmless enough and let her loaf about. . . . Long story short, Julia would ply Jack with alcohol to get him to pass out so she could go through his text and email to monitor his communications with other women with whom he had platonic relationships. She would even text or email these women to ward them off, pretending that she was Jack. When Jack discovered that his unemployed roommate was bat shit insane, he broke things off and asked Julia to leave. And she did. . . eventually, a week later under the supervision of Jack’s ice-queen mother Cindy McCain.
Since then, Julia has taken every opportunity to misrepresent her relationship with Jack McCain. She sent out a press release announcing their break-up and her vacancy of the “home they shared in Coronado,” saying that she sacrificed her one opportunity for true love to pursue her career as a person who uses Twitter. And recently on, Bravo’s Miss Advised [her one-season reality TV show], Julia claimed that her relationship with Jack was a storied love affair. She shamelessly lied that they discussed the possibility of marriage and goes on to say that she had to break off the relationship and sacrifice her one opportunity to find a husband to go on a reality show where she endlessly whines about not having a husband. No mention about being escorted to the airport because she refused to vacate his home, mind you. She also claims that she respects the McCain family’s privacy, so much so that she brings up the fact that she dated Jack McCain on national television at every opportunity.

Let me hasten to say I cannot vouch for the accuracy of that account, and Miss Baugher’s lawyer father has been known to threaten legal action against his daughter’s critics, but so far as I know, neither Jack McCain nor Meghan McCain has ever denied that version of events.

If you were writing a novel about a female psychopath, you could scarcely do better than the scene of her getting her boyfriend drunk so she could check his phone and send messages to his other (potential) girlfriends in an effort to sabotage any chance he had of finding someone else.

Jack McCain probably deserves a medal for escaping the psycho’s trap. He subsequently married a fellow Navy officer and they had their first child a couple of years ago, but that’s irrelevant to the point, i.e., how badly Miss Baugher’s plan to “get this marriage party started” failed.

Her disastrous attempt to dismount the carousel was typical of a pattern: The hottie who dated high-status men in her youth assumes she can just as easily marry a high-status man. This is a dangerous delusion. A top-shelf young bachelor — be he a medical student, a congressman or a Navy officer — isn’t necessarily scrupulous in evaluating the character of his female companions. If you’re Harold Ford Jr., 31 years old and in your third term in Congress, and a nice-looking 21-year-old college girl more or less throws herself at you, are you going to turn her down because she seems kind of flaky? No, she’s looking to ride, and you’re happy to be the carousel horse, without any thought of whether she’s “wife material.”

No matter how crazy she may be, a good-looking girl can get plenty of carousel rides, and enjoy a lot of “romantic journeys” that never last more than a few months. By the time she grows tired of riding, however, she’s become accustomed to dating only high-status men, and guys like that are seldom eager to make a flaky bimbo their “life partner.”

And in the case of Julia Baugher, it certainly did not help that she went out of her way to publicize herself as a flaky bimbo. When she said, in that 2008 interiew, that she felt it was “entirely possible I’m ruining my life,” she should have trusted that feeling. It may have already been too late, by then, for her to undo the damage she’d done to her own reputation, or to reform the bad habits she’d developed.

Miss Baugher had a toxic reputation by the time she “lured Jack McCain into her web,” to quote the Gawker headline from December 2010. Anyone who cared for Jack’s future happiness would have warned him to keep her at arm’s length, and no doubt all his friends were happy when Jack’s mother (allegedly) kicked Miss Baugher to the curb.

After getting unceremoniously dumped, Julia Baugher tried to salvage her career by moving to the San Francisco Bay Area and writing about Silicon Valley, then she moved to L.A. for her reality-TV gig on Bravo, which did the Hindenburg-at-Lakehurst after one season. She became increasingly desperate, she confessed in 2013:

I wanted a partner, a teammate. I wanted a last call of the day. I wanted someone to hold me at night, to hug me and kiss me. I wanted someone — besides my mother — to worry about me. I wanted someone to wonder where I was, and if I didn’t come home, I wanted someone to notice. I wanted someone to want my love.
But after 15 years of repeatedly falling in love, only to watch it fall apart, my heart slowly rendered numb by the scar tissue, I had become a cynic.

Wow. Isn’t it terribly sad to see her describe her habitual promiscuity as “repeatedly falling in love”? That’s the story she has been telling herself and others for so long that she may actually believe it by now. And why not? Hasn’t this become our cultural narrative of “love”? If gay dudes hooking up anonymously with any cute twink they meet on Grindr can tell themselves that this is “love,” why can’t Julia Baugher be allowed to describe her own series of haphazard hookups as “love”?

Call someone who’ll listen,
And might give a damn,
Maybe one of your sordid affairs.
But don’t you come ’round here
Handin’ me none of your lies.
Here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.

There is more wisdom in that old honky-tonk song than in all of the self-help books Julia Baugher has read in her lifetime. It’s not like she never had any chances. When she was young, she could have found a good guy, if she’d played her cards right, instead of being a narcissistic sociopath.

We can’t undo the past or retrieve our misspent youth, however, so in her 30s, Miss Baugher found herself consulting “a love coach” and in 2013 claimed to have found “the love of my life”:

We’ve been together 9 months, and it feels completely different than any relationship I’ve ever had. He is the kindest, most honest, most humble and giving human being I’ve ever met. It’s like every movie cliche: He makes me want to be a better woman.

Wrong again, sweetheart. After getting dumped once more, she subsequently took up with a hippie weirdo known as “DJ Rain” or “Rain PhuturePrimitive” (a/k/a Chad McNally) who played at Burning Man and other gigs on the freak festival circuit. That seems to have ended last fall after Chad/“Rain” decided he was into polyamory.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Scarcely 15 years earlier, Miss Baugher had been dating Georgetown medical students and Democrat congressmen. She’d dated magazine editors and tech entrepreneurs and, in 2010, had been the live-in girlfriend of a famous senator’s handsome son. Now she couldn’t even keep a relationship with a hippie DJ!

Julia Baugher at the Burning Man festival.

Finally, this past June, Miss Baugher wrote a column for the New York Post, on the 20th anniversary of the debut of Sex and the City, blaming the show’s influence for her catastrophic career:

I was considered by many to be Carrie Bradshaw 2.0. And I was happy to be given that identity for a while, but it was all a lie. . . .
I also subscribed to Carrie’s ethos when it came to men. There was no such thing as a bad date — only a good date or a good brunch story. In my writing, I gave my boyfriends nicknames (one was “Prom King”) just like Carrie and her friends did. . . .
I cut my ties to New York and moved to San Francisco full-time in 2013. I tried being a tech columnist and writing a personal-growth book called “Experiments in Happiness.” Finally, I decided to go private for a while. I stopped blogging and writing. I rarely post on Instagram.
These days I work as a change activist, mounting summits for world leaders and serving as an adviser to startups and entrepreneurs looking to better the planet. . . .
I do wonder what my life would have looked like if “Sex and the City” had never come across my consciousness. Perhaps I’d be married with children now? . . .
Two months ago, I started seeing someone I never would have dated 10 years earlier. Back then, I wasn’t looking to get married or seek a lifelong partner, and that was a mistake. This man is a very reasonable choice, and I’m at a place in my life where reasonable is very sexy.

If you’re expecting me to unleash a torrent of sarcasm about this latest attempt by Miss Baugher to reinvent herself, you’re wrong. The PUA site Chateau Heartiste already ripped it into tatters with such misogynistic brutality that it would be cruel for me to add anything further.

There is a reason why slut-shaming exists. If sluts are not shamed — if promiscuity is celebrated and glamorized the way Sex and the City did — more young women will waste their youth the way Julia Baugher wasted hers. Who would want their daughter to end up that way, having ruined her reputation and squandered so many chances at happiness, desperately hoping at age 37 to settle for a “reasonable choice”?

Am I being too harsh? Too judgmental? No, I don’t think so. Our decadent culture is long overdue for some harsh judgment. We need more hellfire, damnation and “wrath of God” sermons, and if sinners won’t repent? Honey, here’s a quarter, call someone who cares.



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 09.07.18

Posted on | September 8, 2018 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Cory Booker – I Am Spartacus
Twitchy: New Liberal Fanfic – Kavanaugh Will Win Confirmation But Then Should Be Impeached
Louder With Crowder: Obama Attacks GOP While Decrying “Division & Resentment”
According To Hoyt: Living In Niches
Monster Hunter Nation: Back From DragonCon, also, Target Rich Environment Is Out Now
Vox Popoli: Bounding Into Comics – Negativity & ComicsGate

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: It Turns Out That Men Are The Ones Who Can Have It All, also, Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The Running Shoes Edition
American Power: NFL Season Opener Fumbles, also, Dennis Prager – The Left Is Your Enemy
American Thinker: Democrat Election Scam Just Chose Wyoming’s Next Republican Governor
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Airline Prices Friday
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For September 7
CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday
Da Tech Guy: While Divisive Political Stunts Rock DC…
Don Surber: Obama Is Now The Pussyhat-In-Chief
Dustbury: And A Speedy Cat It Is
First Street Journal:
The Geller Report: Child Marriage, Forced Marriage Reports Spike In Sweden, also, Pro-Sharia Party Leader Claims Belgium Will Be Majority Muslim Within Twelve Years
Hogewash: Congress Vs. The Courts, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day (and Bonus!)
Legal Insurrection: Barack To The Rescue, also, Cory Booker Really Wants You To Know He’s Spartacus
Michelle Malkin:
The PanAm Post: Colombian President Duque Pledges NewWar On Drugs, also, Conservative Candidate For Brazilian Presidency Bolsonaro Stabbed At Rally
Power Line: Democrats’ Hostility To The Constitution Laid Bare, also, Academic Cowardice Reaches A New Low
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Makes The case For Voting Republican
Shot In The Dark: See You On The Dark Side Of The Moon
The Political Hat: Milk – It Does A Nanny State Good
This Ain’t Hell: Vets Want The Wacky Weed, also, Police Raid Home Of Couple Who Raised $400k For Homeless Vet
Victory Girls: Why Are American Taxpayers Subsidizing Chinese Companies?
Volokh Conspiracy: Discipline Of UNM Med Student For “Unduly Inflammatory” Anti-Abortion Post Upheld
Weasel Zippers: U.S. Job Growth Surges – Annual Wage Gain Largest Since 2009, also, San Francisco Taxi Drivers Told To Stop Excreting Outside Airport
Megan McArdle: Nike Bet That Politics Would Sell. Looks Like It Was Wrong.
Mark Steyn: The Lost Frontier


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Category: Linkagery

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | September 7, 2018 | Comments Off on Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

by Smitty

“We left our Safe Space a week ago,” started Randy, striding with his walking stick.
“Yes. The legend said Progress Tower lay toward sunrise. It was true,” replied Jeff.
“HALT! YOUR. PRESENCE. ON. THIS. PUBLIC. LAND. IS. NOT. AUTHORIZED.” a ‘bird’ above their heads made swift, perfect circles and shrieked metalically.
“Is that a LawDrone?” asked Randy.
“I’ve never seen one that small or maneuverable.”
“DISPERSE. YOU. ARE. UNAUTHORIZED.” chided the drone, maneuvering to hover before them at eye level.
Randy swung his stick rapidly. Would have been a homer. The drone traced an arc; crashed; exploded.
The Uprising began.
—
via Darleen

Category: Friday Fiction

Who’s Up For A Tall, Cold ICE #TeaParty?

Posted on | September 7, 2018 | Comments Off on Who’s Up For A Tall, Cold ICE #TeaParty?

by Smitty

Patriots:

It’s time to get out your Tea Party moxy and tell the Left to return its shock troops to the Central American crevice from which they crawled forth.

Via the Corey Stewart campaign site:

We’re rallying to support ICE on Saturday, September 15th, at 6 PM outside ICE headquarters in Fairfax.

The brave men and women who protect us from dangerous criminal illegal aliens are being attacked by the far-left. It’s time we show our support for the members of ICE, who put themselves in harm’s way to keep our communities safe.

These are the SAME headquarters the radical left went to, to attack members of ICE for doing their jobs.

Tim Kaine joined a rally to “abolish ICE” on June 30th in Richmond. Kaine’s liberal stance on ICE is DANGEROUS.

Join us on Saturday, September 15th, at 6 PM at 2675 in Fairfax!

Rally to Support ICE
Fairfax ICE HQ
2675 Prosperity Ave
Fairfax, VA 22031
September 15th, at 6 PM
RSVP Website – RSVP Facebook

In Prince William County, Corey passed the nation’s toughest crackdown on illegal immigration and by doing this, over 8,000 criminal illegal aliens were turned over to ICE for deportation, reducing the crime rate by 48.7% in 2-years!

Once elected Senator, Corey will sponsor a bill to ensure all states & localities work with ICE to deport CRIMINAL illegal aliens. 

If you’re unable to attend, please consider donating $10, $25, $50, or even $100 to help us stay on the road fighting to defeat Tim Kaine. 

For Virginia, 

Team Corey

“We must secure our borders, BUILD THE WALL, end birthright citizenship, defund so-called ‘sanctuary cities’, and ensure not one penny of taxpayer money goes to welfare for those who entered our country illegally.” – Corey

Category: Immigration, Republicans
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