The weekly export puzzle:
I tend not to pick really low stakes, vibes-y issues to write about here, but this one was so incredibly menial and silly that the matter loops all the way around to being a breeze to write about. As newspapers are wont to do, sometimes they run articles that don’t really have much justification as a story responding to the news. Instead, they’re hoping to create news by stirring up pre-existing arguments people are ready to revisit, getting the website the clicks and ad revenue they need to fund more important journalism.
Put another way, it’s a slow news day if you run this. Let’s do a line by line breakdown.
“A mother’s call to ban g-string bikinis being paraded at New Plymouth’s popular public pool has divided opinion across the city.”
Instantly, you detect one of the most common elements of super-petty democratic politics: that people feel confident enough to come out and say that, because of their perspective, something should be banned for everybody else. Of course this is part of almost everybody’s politics in some way - we all support bans on plenty of things. Yet to combine the mandate a ban requires (a clear and pressing harm to the public with a justification for such an intervention) with something so insignificant as a style of clothing equals super-petty. To be fair, she says she started the petition more as a poll of other parents, but she clearly, genuinely believes in this.
"Her campaign started after her 8-year-old son was exposed to some g-string wearers while he was at a swimming lesson."
I like that they’re not “swimmers” here, or even “women”, just “g-string wearers”.
“It was pornographic,” Dixon claimed.
No, it’s not. A very easy, and high, bar to judge by here - is somebody trying to sexualise some visual? No? Then it’s not pornographic. Someone swimming in swimwear doesn’t qualify, and if you see most of a woman’s body and think that that’s pornographic, then that’s your unreasonable judgement, because…women look in the mirror every day and clearly aren’t engaged in reviewing something inappropriate.
“I don’t want to be an overprotective mum. Is that the space we’re in with society now? If so, I’ll find ways to prepare my kids for that. But do we have to do that?”
It’s a curious phenomenon that you most often hear “I don’t want to be x” from those who are being a bit too nosy or intrusive in others’ business. Many people who overreach have some sense that they’re pushing it a bit much, they just weigh it up and come down on the side of their push.
Unfortunately what follows is a bit incoherent - it’s hard to tell what the “space we’re in” now is (overly liberal or too quick to resort to sadly necessary restrictions?), what she’s preparing her kids for (accepting women’s bodies? accepting one of the aforementioned societal trends?), or what we have to do (honestly, take a guess at this point). Put another way, the journalist writing this piece probably wasn’t firing on all cylinders given that they didn’t follow up to finesse this down.
“However, others said it was up to the individual to decide if they wore a g-string bikini, because it was a public place and women should be free to wear what they wanted.”
This is obvious and why it’s such a silly ask for any parent to make. A man (or, specifically, one without breasts, because transmasc people who haven’t undergone surgery face constraints from this too) is free to go to the pool, including the lazy suburban walk to get there, in barely any clothing, provided the Speedo covers the appropriate area to govern that “pornographic” line of averting anything that becomes sexually inappropriate for all, including children. You can’t argue that a fair ruleset gives men freedom denied to women.
Yet instead of any campaigners trying to tighten up that unfairness by targeting men “exposing” themselves to children, they target women who aren’t even showing their chests in the first place, whatever separate arguments you want to make about those. The absurdity of the concept of telling men to stop “exposing” themselves ably illustrates the issue. Children are fine around bare-chested men because that’s a norm; we choose to set more restrictive norms for women, then act outraged at them exposing themselves to children. We could instead just…normalise women’s bodies for children. This permanently deals with the exposure issue like we have for men. You can only conclude the issue is one of sexist double standards and internalised misogyny.
“The issue had caused debate across the United States, prompted bans in parts of Australia and recently sparked controversy in Taupō over whether g-strings could be worn at thermal spas.”
You can tell the author is really reaching for justification for running this article when they submit “The issue had caused debate across the United States.”
What doesn’t?!
“It was the frustration after spending a summer at rivers, beaches and the pools, of always seeing girls in g-string bikinis,” Dixon explained.
It’s so weird how when you go to places where people swim, they wear the latest swimwear. I wonder what strange and frankly insidious law of correlation could be causing that to happen. Somebody ring Winston and tell him he’s got a new issue to campaign on.
“I don’t want to seem like an overbearing mum…”
That’s okay, we’ve breached containment on that front already. Just let it all out.
“…but there hasn’t been a space where my boys can enjoy themselves without having to be on alert, avoid places or look away.”
I’m personally somebody who’s always had a strong instinct to avert my eyes, in all contexts, not just at the pool. I’d rather not accidentally stare somebody down with resting bitch face, or see someone I know, fail to recognise them, and come off as a snubby snob. Not to mention the eternal challenge of judging the right moment at which to greet somebody walking towards you. And, of course, particularly in a pool et al context, you don’t want to make people and especially women uncomfortable about feeling unwanted eyes on them. I’m a top quartile look-awayer.
None of this makes doing this anything more than a minor irritant for me, equivalent to messing up a handshake or stumbling over a sentence at checkout. It’d be absurd to suggest that it makes me uncomfortable. It’d be catastrophically embarrassing if I started suggesting legal bans on other people to make my life microscopically easier.
A far more viable option seems like her teaching her children two things. One, women’s bodies are just like men’s: they’re simply biological vehicles that people exist in, by current norms we cover up reproductive organs (and the rest of us in most environments) as our bar of appropriateness, and women deserve freedom and respect. Two, it being totally fine and normal to happen to glance at women in your sightlines =/= stare at women, because women can tell and are made to feel uncomfortable as targets of unwanted harassment.
“We’re never completely comfortable to enjoy ourselves as a family.”
I can tell you with medium-high confidence that the uncomfortable ones here are those who feel this mum staring daggers at them, or walk by and hear this mum’s “come on, really?” comments about their choice of gear. More broadly I think this gets at the fundamental argument behind why progressivism works socially while conservatism doesn’t. Conservative social attitudes not only impinge on women’s freedom in the changing room to choose what they’re most comfortable going out in, but they’re also two-faced, because in practice they rarely ever involve holding men to any kinds of standards.
Instead, some men make people and especially women feel uncomfortable just existing with their bodies in public. That’s an untenable norm because there’s no happy resolution that involves women internalising “oh, being stared at and harassed is okay”. On the other hand, progressivism works because, as has been ably demonstrated in countries like Germany, where you say “fuck it let women wear what they want” everybody gets used to it, and the norm shift permanently ensures a comfortable world for all. Yeah, there’ll be a few unhappy boomers, but as I’ve mentioned before we can’t construct a permanent safe space for their every whim given the sooner we get started on norm change, the sooner future generations accept those norms.
“Parents could put parental controls on devices to prevent children from accessing inappropriate material, or move to another part of the beach to avoid seeing someone dressed inappropriately, she said.
‘But I can’t do that when we’re at the pools.’”
While I’m being quite lighthearted about this, there’s something genuinely quite fucked up in seeing women in swimwear at the pools as comparable to children looking up pornography. Women do not exist as sex objects, they just want to swim at the pool, same as you all. For that matter…it’s a fucking pool, right? How much are you actually looking at other people? 95% of swimming is staring at either the tiles or the ceiling. If you want to feel comfortable around other people and you cbf changing your weird mindset, then just…stop chilling at the poolside and get to exercising.
“Dixon worried the petition would stir up dissent among those who would find her stance on barely-there swimwear overly conservative or old-fashioned.
She wondered if people would feel embarrassed even sharing the petition on their social media page in case they were seen to be judgmental about young women’s bodies and fashion choices.”
This is essentially meaningless windowdressing, because she chose to do it anyway. It’s basically just yet more expression of what I said earlier - people being judgy and intrusive often know they’re doing something a little wrong, but they do it anyway because they choose projecting issues onto others over self-reflection. Normally I’m not that dismissive about criticisms, but come on, really?
“I also wondered if it was women of a certain body size wearing g-strings, or men exposing their bodies, would we be okay about that?”
Yes!!! This is the exact argument I’m making! Yet she just doesn’t follow this line of thinking further! And, in particular, that first concern elaborates on why these arguments are so absurd: because they don’t account at all for the many different kinds of people you encounter. A third of New Zealanders are considered obese and regulating clothing for them will in many cases mean entirely different things in practice. And her plan is…just stand by double standards against women’s bodies where men can expose more than women.
“Dixon received comments of “good on you” through the petition, which had already attracted almost 100 signatures.”
This reminds me of that one BBC post I shat on a while ago where they ran an entire anti-trans piece because like 50 TERFs on Twitter agreed there was an issue.
“There was nothing included in the aquatic centre’s dress code that stipulated a minimum level of coverage for bathers. While swimmers were discouraged from swimming in bras and other undergarments for safety purposes, there was nothing to dictate a level of modesty, apart from adequate coverage of breasts for women.”
This is entirely reasonable from the aquatic centre. I’m sure they have a separate fallback rule about reserving the right to remove people based on inappropriate behaviour. This tracks with the state of our laws: we don’t ban being nude, we ban indecent or obscene acts paired with nudity, which would currently qualify if anybody of any sex walked in with no clothes on at all. Given that legal standards are met, why impose additional restrictions on freedoms? Any pick-and-choose of what’s appropriate is utterly subjective. As indeed is the choice to prevent toplessness based on the current, unnecessary social norms that I’ve been arguing against throughout all of this.
“However, Todd Energy Aquatic Centre operations manager Mike Roberts believed it could be time for a change. G-string bikinis have become increasingly in vogue with younger women. G-string bikinis had become more prevalent with the arrival of European tourists post-Covid, he said. ‘I think you’d find the majority of them are tourists.’”
Again, no elaboration on why this changes anything. I don’t think it does. It’s obviously less of a restriction if it’s temporary for a tourist compared to permanent for somebody who lives in New Zealand, but the restriction is there on women’s bodies all the same. All that’s left to fall back on here is weird cultural arguments about how those odd Europeans are importing their laissez-faire social norms and upsetting New Zealanders, which raises the question of why we shouldn’t simply import those social norms as young women are doing.
“New Plymouth aquatic centre policy aligned to others in Auckland, Hamilton and Dunedin where all swimmers at all times in the water had to wear recognised swimwear. That included clean hemmed shorts, shorter than three-quarter length, burkinis, wetsuits and rash shirts.”
Makes sense. A swimming pool is a place to swim or chillax by the poolside. We don’t have people showing up for wet t-shirt contests, as it were; our basic standards of privacy still prevail. So too have we avoided the bizarre obsession overseas where people - often the same people who complain about how young women today don’t cover up - ban the burkini, creating restrictions on freedoms specifically targeted at Muslim women in the pursuit of some weird social agenda.
“There was nothing written against swimmers wearing speedos or g-strings in terms of minimalist swimwear, Roberts said. ‘But I can certainly put it forward for discussion.’”
In the words of Inigo Skimmer, mhm, mhm!
“In 2019, a swimmer at an Auckland pool was asked to cover up by a lifeguard, who told her other women had complained. Yvette Harvie-Salter was told her bikini was inappropriate to wear at Albany Stadium Pool in 2019. The bikini she was wearing was sold at Glassons. Harvie-Salter said she felt body-shamed and the pool had lost a loyal customer.”
This conclusion right here establishes the harm that arises from this mum’s mentality, even where it doesn’t result in a ban. Many women already struggle with feeling good in their bodies and those who don’t, don’t require a struggle story to justify being happy and comfortable either. Where some people insist on rules and decisions to ensure their comfort, they’ll just make others uncomfortable. Indeed, I’d be horrified to be pulled up by an authority figure and told, one, to go change, and two, that it was because other people had been looking at me and found something distasteful about my body. Grow up, you children. And raise your children right.
If I may offer a final extension on why these petty norms issues can matter, I exist in a weird legal limbo. I’m legally classified as of male sex, yet if I went to a swimming pool topless, there’d surely be complaints made against me that there wouldn’t for actual cis men. (Or, for that matter, anybody who’s had top surgery, though I’m sure some people are mean and weird about scars too.) Yet I’d also face judgement if I went in a bikini.
Creating not only shame but uncertainty about women’s bodies results in simply deterring some people from swimming at all - never mind the next-level exclusion around changing rooms even though they’re such a tiny percentage of your time at the pool. I’d instead simply suggest the norm I saw (briefly, then I glanced away) on an upper South Island beach the other day: a woman had decided to go out there in her birthday suit.
Are we going to be getting to that level at our public pools any time soon? No, of course not. What I’m saying is that, as far as I’m concerned, the less fuss we choose to make getting all worked up about women’s bodies, the sooner we get to everybody being able to get changed, get in the water or somewhere to lie down, exercise and have a good time. Standing in the way of that isn’t finding a solution to discomfort - it’s perpetrating discomfort, not only on other women, but on yourself and your children.
A vice-presidential candidate (henceforth “running mate”) should be selected based on these priorities, ranked top to bottom from most to least important:
Readiness to step up and be president (which does double-time as experience with which to counsel the president).
Suitability as the future presidential candidate for their party.
Capacity to unite the party.
Ability to win votes in a swing state.
However, presidential candidates, and their parties, typically foul this up. They prioritise 3 and 4, which help with the election at hand, over 1 and 2, which help in the years afterwards.
The first problem with this is that running mates don’t actually matter that much electorally. This is for the very obvious reason that the presidential candidate is the only one guaranteed to have a high-profile and important role during the campaign and over the next four years. I accept the statistical argument that running mates help tickets by an average of 2% in the state they hail from, but that’s not much. That matters in such a partisan age with such close results - five states had a margin of victory under 2% in 2020 - but moving just one state a bit is unlikely to strike the decisive winning blow. Since WWII, the only running mate that meets this “swung a state” qualification is Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960 (with Al Gore in ‘96 not far behind and a dark horse case for Edmund Muskie in ‘68, given he had a tiny state to work with).
Yes, you can argue they have a regional influence beyond that, like Johnson across the South in 1960, but such claims always get tenuous. Any narrative can be spun around a veep candidate and, with an already-small sample size for so few elections, tracking who voted based on the running mate is so difficult because practically nobody will think or announce they are voting directly based on the running mate. They merely accentuate the qualities of the presidential candidate, like how Al Gore emphasised how Bill Clinton was a young, moderate Southerner by being a young, moderate Southerner (with a prominently healthy and orthodox relationship with his family).
History is littered with tactical attempts to swing states by picking up ultimately wasted running mates. Since World War II, you can name Earl Warren, Estes Kefauver, Henry Cabot Lodge, Lloyd Bentsen…thankfully, parties have started to shun this instinct, while preserving the more valuable motive of erecting party unity. Yet, in an era of anodyne moderate candidates, these increasingly fulfil a perverse role of satiating the more ideological base, rather than reaching out to swing voters who will decide the election. Democrat Southerner veeps and Republican moderates like George H. W. Bush has given way to Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan and Mike Pence to placate the Tea Partiers and the evangelicals.
Party unity to win an election and stay on the same page in government is important, but there’s something mighty counterintuitive about all of this. Not only are running mates becoming a threat to centre voters, but the base crying out for concessions from their presidential candidate are being placated with token faces rather than meaningful policy and personnel changes. Time and again, vice-presidents have been consigned to the margins of their administration, forced at political gunpoint to constantly prop up their president while receiving nothing in return.
This tendency is rational from a short-term perspective: no president wants a popular vice-president known to be influential in the administration, or that veep becomes a threat. Yet that drive is devastating in the long term. Besides the disservice this does to the party’s supposed goals of representation, undermining the veep only weakens their credibility as a future presidential candidate (as vice presidents so often become) and as somebody who can step into the breach. The charge of “They’ve been in power all of these years and what have they ever done for us?” is a powerful one. This is the choice that has done so much damage to Kamala Harris, who now by virtue of being veep is nevertheless frontrunner to replace Biden, yet suffers from unpopularity and few accomplishments to her name.
Just as parties neglect to think about the very real possibility that a veep picked for one election will be their candidate one or two elections down the road, so too do they too often shun by far the most important duty: picking somebody ready to be President at a moment’s notice. Yes, the odds are low that a vice president will succeed to the Oval Office, but the chance is of such enormous significance that it can’t be dismissed. Harry Truman took over from FDR and defined the Cold War fates of countries from Greece to Korea. Lyndon Johnson stepped up after Kennedy and played a pivotal role in the Vietnam War.
Risk like this makes it understandable that seasoned hands like Alben Barkley and Dick Cheney are picked for VP, and utterly unacceptable that muppets like Spiro Agnew and Sarah Palin should ever get the nod. Age, experience, and competence are crucial for a veep, even if the administration chooses to continue the foolish historical trend of squandering their veep. You cannot bet the future of the world on a President’s invincibility. They are only human and, as we were reminded recently, can be felled any day of the week if their head tilts the wrong way.
All of this to say that J. D. Vance is one of the worst vice presidential choices in modern history. Let’s evaluate him against each of my criteria:
Vance has been a Senator for two years, with zero prior political experience. Being military rank and file means something in an electoral context but near to nothing when it comes to leadership. A bestselling author and a venture capitalist who only just hopped into politics, and whose signature initiative is undermining foreign policy commitments to Ukraine, should not be considered for Vice-President. The obvious comparison here is Sarah Palin, who came at the Presidency with exactly the same level of experience that Vance does now. (An amusing historical footnote is that, frankly, Obama probably wasn’t an acceptable pick for President by my metrics; he was only able to prove himself definitively as competent once he entered the highest office.) Being intelligent shouldn’t give him a pass, especially when he hasn’t even hit forty yet. Speaking of which, Palin was deemed too risky as VP to John McCain, a 72 year old disabled man. Trump is 78 and of dubious health. He is a swing too far in the other direction away from the decrepit Washington fixation of Biden and his ilk, and the Democrats should criticise mercilessly the idea that this guy should be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.
Where Vance shines as a pick is in representing the future of the party. Not that I think he’ll be a great candidate, and he didn’t perform well in the Ohio Senate race, but he’s not terrible in his own right electorally, and he clearly represents Trumpism (or at least cynically claims to). He’s no good for the traditional purpose of reaching out to swing voters and building a big tent, but for Trump’s purposes - a VP who, unlike Mike Pence, will fully aid and abet in election denial, and offer Trump whatever post-presidential pardons and protections he needs - Vance is an ideal stooge. All the other vice-presidential nominees were somebody in politics before coming around to Trumpism. Trump made Vance’s career. He can break all of them, as he did Pence, but not before they betray him. Trump can trust only Vance when he asks whose entire political purpose begins and ends with advancing the interests of Donald Trump.
Speaking of the whole big tent shebang, Vance reaches out to nobody. His acceptance speech was dull, reheated Trumpism. If you want to hear that, then you can just…hear it from Trump. Which new groups does Vance appeal to? Maaaybe he shows he’s hip with young right-wing men and turns them out, I’ll give him that. Yet central to his pitch is winning over the white Midwestern working class. His famous work, Hillbilly Elegy, is about how white Midwestern working class people live shitty lives because they’re lazy bums. Is there an audience for that message amongst white Midwestern working class people? Absolutely, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise! People dealing with shit love to look down on their neighbour dealing with the same shit. Is a California venture capitalist the right messenger to defend that decidedly right-wing socioeconomic message, at the same time as he’s peddling a centre-left tilt? The kitchen is burning down. Compare him to the other shortlisted vice-presidential nominees. Tim Scott is a soft-spoken evangelical who could appeal to suburban voters put off by Trump’s hard edges, and help to sell Trump’s “the Democrats take you for granted” angle with black voters. Doug Burgum sits squarely in that same “common sense positive guy” vein (on a vibes wavelength only, to be clear). Marco Rubio is America’s Simon Bridges in turns of a brighter and warmer reinvention, able to sell the American dream and that Trump’s rhetoric against illegal immigrants is nothing for real Americans to fear. All would be solid running mates and well-suited to take over should anything happen to Trump. Vance, by comparison, is moronic from every angle except the Trumpiest.
In 2020, Trump won Ohio by an 8% margin. Polls show a widening to 10%. Vance does not help.
Vance is a bad vice-presidential nominee, a bad dude, and his choice is a bad sign that means one of two things. Perhaps Trump has been ruled by incredibly short-sighted and senseless considerations - purportedly, it was the influence of his sons Eric and Don Jr. who got Vance over the line, and the lives and futures of Americans should not hang in the palms of nepo babies. Or maybe Trump is making a rational calculation that Vance is by far the most willing Vice-President to subvert democracy and prevent any prosecution of Trump from ending their great national nightmare. Either way, Vance sets off alarm bells. Democrats would be wise to heed them and strike, and if Biden is replaced as the presumptive nominee soon, their first order of business to prove themselves should be taking this plonker down a peg.
The answer is Uruguay! I’ve had one of those emotional-for-no-reason days and, if I can be real with you for a second, chief, that means I cannot be bothered producing a fact file on Uruguay. This is also why I’m passing up on a media recommendation for the day - prompted also by the fact that, for all of House of the Dragon’s many merits, that show’s pacing is dragging on. No pun intended. The Acolyte finale was excellent, though. A really good example of a show struggling until you see where it’s all going, and then everything clicks. ‘Til another day!
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