Suzanne Fields

Meghan Markle, the bride who can’t save the world

It's not easy being a royal bride in Old Blighty. Even keeping up with what to call everybody, and whom to curtsy to, and whom to expect a curtsy from, requires an immersion course in protocol. We can't even call Meghan Markle by her real name.

May 23, 2018

Dazzled, confused and betrayed by too much information

We live in mean times. Spontaneous messages from "unthinking" parts of our brains are magnified on the megaphones of social media, given weight as if they actually meant something.

May 16, 2018

Stormy Daniels sets a new standard for women. No victims need apply

We've entered the porn phase of feminism. You could call it the third stage. The first stage, led by Susan B. Anthony and the Suffragettes, wore white to proclaim their virtue and to show themselves morally superior to men who opposed them. They won the vote in 1920, despite President Woodrow Wilson's frown.

May 9, 2018

Just in time, springtime in Washington

It's hard to remember a season when so many informed, knowledgeable and sophisticated men and women have spent so much time talking about the weather, and longing for change, literally and figuratively. Complaining about the windy days of winter, yearning for the extended days of spring and warmth when that lucky ol' sun finally chases away cloud and murk and moves toward the light. On that, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative, clumsy Romeo and angry feminist, are at last united, if only for a little while.

May 2, 2018

Finally we can let Melania be Melania

This has been the fortnight of the first ladies. Last week the focus was on two former first ladies, one about mourning and fond admiring recollections, and one about yet another book of scathing analytical criticism. Barbara Bush was celebrated for her blunt dignity. Hillary Clinton was recalled for her campaign of blunt excuses for her own failures.

April 25, 2018

The G-men and their emojis

Once upon a time in a previous century I was invited to watch a widely banned movie, "I Am Curious Yellow," in company with a number of FBI agents and officials to see just how naughty it was. I had written about censorship and whether the movie was over the line of decency.

April 18, 2018

Free speech in the time of choler

Polarities are the spice in a dish of politics in search of a recipe. Sometimes the dish becomes a fallen souffle, and once a souffle falls no hostess can serve it with pride.

April 11, 2018

A good man is still hard to find

Women have been complaining since the original Adams family was evicted from the Garden of Eden that "a good man is hard to find." Despite radical feminist mockery of the very idea of "manliness," that men are natural sexual predators, most women, with very few exceptions, still want one.

April 4, 2018

Trying the Golden Rule in Washington

So much turmoil. So much chaos. So much cynicism in Washington and everywhere else. "Divide" is the name of the game. Everyone is in a fighting mode. The most dramatic (and ludicrous) image of the week was the idea of Donald Trump and Joe Biden boasting how they could punch each other out, as if they were heavyweight boxers prepping for the 'thrilla in Manila" or "the rumble in the jungle."

March 28, 2018

Stormy weather over the White House

It's difficult to have a reasonable conversation about sexual mores in the Age of Trump. We could start with the "Access Hollywood" tape, made in 2005 when Donald Trump was the star of a different kind of reality show than the one he's the star of now. His vulgar boasts about how to seduce women did not prevent his election as president.

March 21, 2018

Twitter, truthiness and titillation

When talking politics, online or in person, you don't often hear anything about the "magnificent middle." You'll hear epithets like the "dirtbag left" or the wicked "alt-right," and all of the ugly free associations to commies and fascists, loonies and wackos. Moderation is mush, evenhandedness is stupid, considering two sides of an issue is so 20th century (or maybe 19th). Only one side could possibly be right.

March 14, 2018

Oscar has no penis, and everyone wants Oscar

Oscar has no penis. That was the startling revelation of Jimmy Kimmel in his opening monologue at the Academy Awards. This statue of limitations will be remembered for the attention Oscar got in 2018 for being neutered, which is not to be confused with being transgendered. Who knew?

March 7, 2018

Mourning becomes electronic

"I weep for Adonais -- he is dead! Oh, weep for Adonais!" These opening lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy for the poet John Keats could be a dirge for our times. It's a poem about a young man whose petals were "nipp'd" before the wind blew them away, a poet who died "before the promise of the fruit."

February 28, 2018

Here comes another ‘year of the woman’

Only yesterday the Democrats thought they had the House of Representatives signed and sealed, ready for the second coming of Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate was probably in play, too. But second thoughts can ruin the fun.

February 21, 2018

Uncovering the naked truth

Playboy magazine, now a relic in the legacy of its founder, Hugh Hefner, was not so long ago the sex educator of the young men of America. So pervasive was its influence that someone joked that "a generation of men, having learned about the female body from Playboy's famous centerfolds, are astonished on their wedding nights to discover that their wives don't come with staples in their navels."

February 14, 2018

‘Moral combat’ is a game any number can play

The debate over the #MeToo movement continues. The ladies keep coming out of the confessional with "J'accuse," but some of the players are missing. They're the women who slept their way to starring roles in the movies and powerful positions in politics and the media and didn't talk. We don't know who they are, nor are we likely to learn the details of success on the road to the top, because they played by the old rules of Hollywood and Washington, keeping their dalliances to themselves.

February 7, 2018

No one traps Melania Trump, nobody’s appendage, in the Washington role of ‘wife of’

The president gives the State of the Union, and the first lady offers her state of their union. A president and a first lady, a husband and a wife, a father and a mother, a man and a woman reflect different kinds of power, purpose and propensity.

January 31, 2018

The confusing mishmash of modern morality

The abundant conversations about sexual harassment have become a mishmash of modern morality in America. Talkers mix the accusation toward the evildoer, the man who uses power against innocence to abuse women, with accusations against a man with less calculated motivation but whose weakness of the flesh exploits a confusion of sexual signals.

January 24, 2018

20 years on, Linda Tripp gets the last laughs at the Clintons

What fools (and hypocrites) these mortals be. Two decades have passed since Linda Tripp blew the whistle on sexual hijinks in high places with her tapes of Monica Lewinsky, the young intern, describing to her confidant and colleague the passionate ordeal of a sexual liaison with the president of the United States. She blew the whistle, she says, to protect her friend, but 20 years on she's still a villain for many women who remember those times.

January 17, 2018

Hollywood sexual dander sullies the morality of it all

Whoa. Stop the music. When Ethel Merman belted out "There's no business like show business," as Annie Oakley in "Annie Get Your Gun," a little girl could be forgiven for believing it.

January 10, 2018