And over here we've got what we can only hope will be the final nationwide appearance of any kind whatsoever of one dangerously prim, heavily shellacked Laura Bush, trotting herself out like some sort of equestrian trophy on Larry King Live to shill for her new book, "Shut Up and Sit Quietly, You're Just a Woman" -er, "Spoken from the Heart."

Verily, it was on the advice of a handful of brave readers that I forced myself to watch the clip in which Laura, looking increasingly extraterrestrial and translucent, responds to a couple of Larry's mildly loaded questions by blinking a few times and then humbly, quietly, rather sheepishly admitting that, yes, she is, in fact, both pro-abortion rights and pro-gay marriage, and apparently has been for just about ever. You read that right.

Well now. Here is where I would like to say that I stood up and screamed. Here's where I sort of expect myself to write that I leaped up in my chair and hurled something heavy at the screen with a full-throated "What the f-- did you just say?!!" and then curse her in a hundred dialects for her pathetic decade of cruel silence and offensive passivity.

I didn't do any of that. All I did was sigh and shake my head in compassionate disgust, as a tremor of deep pain shot through my heart, a visceral cringe in honor of all the suffering, sadness and loss Laura Bush could've have helped alleviate, even just a little, had she brains enough, and balls.

But just so we're clear on some details, oh sweet, pitiable Laura: You had, back in 2000, two young, party-riffic twentysomething daughters, you were, for better or worse, the default role model for women everywhere, you were the emblem for female freedom and feminine empowerment to a hundred nations, and you... did whatnow? Lied outright? Lived in quiet denial? Slaughtered your own core beliefs? Kept your second-class Southern wife mouth shut tight and sat by quietly while the men did the "real" thinking? You sacrificed your own daughters to the sweaty altar of Karl Rove and the fundamentalist anti-choicers? I see.

Oh sweet Laura, it is very likely you are going to hell.

Look, I don't care if Dick Cheney threatened you with razor wire and concrete pumps. I don't care if Karl Rove said he'd suffocate you with his giant clammy hog thighs if you dared to speak up. You did a violent disservice, even outright harm, to women the world over, for nearly a decade. You helped allow virulent homophobia to rage in the nation and in your own husband's tiny soul, when you were in an insanely unique, privileged position to a stand, even a modest one, and help defy a deep hatred and ignorance in this country.

I'm not suggesting you had to become the spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood. I'm not saying you had to become a raging activist, a feminist icon. I know, as a Southern wife, you were trained from fetushood to stand by your man and never, not ever, speak against him or make him look like an idiot. But they say, Laura, that behind every great man is a great woman. George Bush was a small-minded, incompetent puppet. Shall we guess what that makes you?

All right, enough of Laura. Because over here, we have another weird angle on the female empowerment/role model conceit, by way of a swell micro-trend piece from Slate detailing the possible maybe trend of young female sex bloggers possibly maybe choosing to begin pulling back, just a little, from oversharing every detail of their mediocre sex lives -- every orgasm, blowjob, conquest, erotic dream, rape fantasy, or muscle spasm that passes through their transom. Could it be? Is the TMI culture slapping itself awake? Don't bet on it.

It's the tale, primarily, of one Lena Chen, who apparently overshared far too much of her young (very young) and rather childish, raunch-free Harvard sexcapades on her personal blog to the degree that Chen suffered a bit of a twee recoil, a hot little backlash from bloggers and classmates alike, all resulting, Slate says, in Chen learning some sort of harsh lesson, given how she's now to be found all buttoned up and semi-proper, speaking at conferences on virginity and abstinence to people who have never had multiple orgasms using a Hitachi, two hits of Ecstasy and a large riding crop. Chen is now all of 22. Neat.

It's supposed to be a cautionary tale, I think, though where the caution is, it's impossible to say. Don't be a spoiled 19-year-old Harvardite who writes the word "f--" a lot and shows some nipple on your blog? Don't whine about how you're not getting laid because you have midterm exhaustion and you're just too tired? Wait until you're at least 25 and have a had a boyfriend who lasted more than two months until you start blogging about how he won't go down on you? I can't quite tell.

Does it matter? Even the meta-snark hipsterettes over at Jezebel hath declared the hookup/shaming scene to be totally over -- despite, of course, how they reinvent and perpetuate it every fifth posting. So, you know, caveat emptor, perverts.

See, I know my share of sex bloggers. I personally know one of the best in the stratosphere, Violet Blue (former contributor to this very site), who's been doing her thing for years and has cranked out a zillion and five books and has enthusiastically exposed nearly every inch of her smooth, tasty, highly erotic mindset to anyone brave enough to follow along.

I've disagreed with V's stances on many occasions, but I really don't give a damn. Because overall she's fantastic a thousand ways from Sunday morning cunnilingus, effortlessly defies every Lena Chen, and is a fearless champion of good porn, good sex ed, and consensual respectful raunch like the Catholic church can only fantasize about. World could do with a million more like her.

Upshot: There's professional, intelligent, personality-rich sex blogging, and there's, you know, being a horny 19-year-old with free campus Wi-Fi and no real clue as to who you are, what you're doing, or why. Alas, the Slate piece fails to mention Violet at all.

There's a point in all this, somewhere. Oh, right: role models. Women. Sex. Responsibility. Empowerment. Where to find? Where do you seek? Chen was supposedly a role model to overanxious Harvard freshmen girls who've never swallowed. Laura Bush was a role model for terrified Southern housewives stuck with idiot-boy husbands, sad, lost women who, in Laura's case anyway, could have made a real difference, could have been downright historic, had she the slightest bit of nerve and soulful integrity.

All told, there appear to be about a million examples out there of, well, what not to be. Don't be Laura. Don't be Chen. Don't for damn's sake be anything like the half-baked treatises of Caitlin "Loving Our Inner Housewife" Flanagan, whose recent Atlantic piece dissecting teen sex and hookup behavior reeks of patronizing distaste for young sticky things she doesn't understand. I'd suggest being more like my girl Violet, but she's pretty much one of a kind.

Which, come to think of it, might be the best advice of all.

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NEW YORK — Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, has died. She was 92.
Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.
Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.
On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs."
But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.
"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out. ... It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America."
While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy; "Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946.
"Metro's cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.
Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can't reach and therefore can't hurt," she once said.
Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions — one straight and the other gut-wrenching — of "Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.
A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless ... tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her."
When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that among their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Dropping out of school at age 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white.
She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in 1940.
A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.
Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to "pass" in a white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an "Egyptian" makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM.
But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals," Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the studio's efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.
"I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become," Horne once said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."
Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.
That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.
She got involved in various social and political organizations and — along with her friendship with Paul Robeson — got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.
It was also in the mid-'60s that she put out an autobiography, "Lena," with author Richard Schickel.
The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry.
She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him."
Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.
"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."
And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.
"I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."

NEW YORK — Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress who reviled the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialize with them, slowing her rise to Broadway superstardom, has died. She was 92.
Horne died Sunday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.
Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.
"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept," she once said. "I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."
In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.
In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.
On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like "The Lady Is a Tramp" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered."
In her first big Broadway success, as the star of "Jamaica" in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her "one of the incomparable performers of our time." Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her "the best female singer of songs."
But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism.
"I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn't work for places that kept us out. ... It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world," she said in Brian Lanker's book "I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America."
While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy; "Thousands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946.
"Metro's cowardice deprived the musical of one of the great singing actresses," film historian John Kobal wrote.
Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming "a woman the audience can't reach and therefore can't hurt," she once said.
Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist. In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," won a special Tony Award. In it, the 64-year-old singer used two renditions — one straight and the other gut-wrenching — of "Stormy Weather" to give audiences a glimpse of the spiritual odyssey of her five-decade career.
A sometimes savage critic, John Simon, wrote that she was "ageless ... tempered like steel, baked like clay, annealed like glass; life has chiseled, burnished, refined her."
When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: "This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened."
Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 book "The Hornes: An American Family" that among their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Dropping out of school at age 16 to support her ailing mother, Horne joined the chorus line at the Cotton Club, the fabled Harlem night spot where the entertainers were black and the clientele white.
She left the club in 1935 to tour with Noble Sissle's orchestra, billed as Helena Horne, the name she continued using when she joined Charlie Barnet's white orchestra in 1940.
A movie offer from MGM came when she headlined a show at the Little Troc nightclub with the Katherine Dunham dancers in 1942.
Her success led some blacks to accuse Horne of trying to "pass" in a white world with her light complexion. Max Factor even developed an "Egyptian" makeup shade especially for the budding actress while she was at MGM.
But in his book "Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals," Kobal wrote that she refused to go along with the studio's efforts to portray her as an exotic Latin American.
"I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become," Horne once said. "I'm me, and I'm like nobody else."
Horne was only 2 when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.
That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.
She got involved in various social and political organizations and — along with her friendship with Paul Robeson — got her name onto blacklists during the red-hunting McCarthy era.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.
It was also in the mid-'60s that she put out an autobiography, "Lena," with author Richard Schickel.
The next decade brought her first to a low point, then to a fresh burst of artistry.
She had married MGM music director Lennie Hayton, a white man, in Paris in 1947 after her first overseas engagements in France and England. An earlier marriage to Louis J. Jones had ended in divorce in 1944 after producing daughter Gail and a son, Teddy.
In the 2009 biography "Stormy Weather," author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she'd married a white man, she replied: "To get even with him."
Her father, her son and her husband, Hayton, all died in 1970 and 1971, and the grief-stricken singer secluded herself, refusing to perform or even see anyone but her closest friends. One of them, comedian Alan King, took months persuading her to return to the stage, with results that surprised her.
"I looked out and saw a family of brothers and sisters," she said. "It was a long time, but when it came I truly began to live."
And she discovered that time had mellowed her bitterness.
"I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, "because being black made me understand."