No Longer A Virgin
By 
I’ve been wondering if there were favorable pieces written upon the death of Henry Kissinger, but didn’t really want to know. So I didn’t ask on social media.
Tonight I learned about one, by Graham Allison. Which reminded me of an interaction I had with Allison, almost two decades back.
I can’t date it exactly, but it was most likely in 2007, when the intelligence community released its evaluation that Iran had been working on nuclear weapons but stopped in 2003. Allison wrote an op-ed about it in the Washington Post. The headline was something like “Iran Is No Longer A Virgin” and the piece continued in that vein.
Well.
My post is long lost in the detritus of the internet, and I’ve tried a number of times and failed to find the Allison op-ed. But my memory of it is still vivid.
Wrist to forehead! Bring the fainting couch!
I began. It was fun to write.
Almost simultaneously, another blogger, who went by the handle of Progressive Military, published his own post.
That’s not what she told me in the backseat of the car.
Allison was flanked by two fully gendered readings of his poorly chosen metaphor.
He sicced one of his graduate students on us to harass our comment sections for a while. It was very funny.
Recently that graduate student found me to harass on Twitter. I blocked him of course.
Some things never die.
Update (12/4/2023): I believe this is the op-ed by Allison that I reacted to. My memory of it was somewhat faulty, but he clearly wants the virginity metaphor to frame his contentions.