[New York, December 13. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 13: Costumed revelers ride an antique subway train during a 'Vintage Tea Party' hosted by Levy's Unique New York tour group December 13, 2009 in New York City. New York City Transit is running a special subway train with cars in service from the 1930's-1970's every Sunday this month from Manhattan to Queens complete with ceiling fans and wicker seats. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

[New York, December 10. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 10: Police prepare to arrest a woman blocking the front door of the building where Sen. Chuck Schumer's office is located December 10, 2009 in New York City. Around ten protesters advocating for expanded Medicare insurance benefits and unhappy with Sen. Schumer's recent health care stances were arrested by New York police after blocking the entrance to his offices in midtown Manhattan. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

[New York, December 7. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - DECEMBER 07: Clarke Simmons (R) and Aaron Chabin (L), both of New York and both veterans of Pearl Harbor, stand with tourist Olivia Bennett, 7, of York, Pennsylvania after they laid a wreath in the harbor during a ceremony December 7, 2009 on the USS Intrepid in New York City. Olivia's father is a war-history buff and brings his daughter to various military sites around the country, including the USS Intrepid, which is now a museum docked on Manhattan's West Side. Veterans groups around the country hold ceremonies every year in December on the day that President Franklin Roosevelt predicted would 'live in infamy' and prompted America's entry into World War II. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

[New York, November 26. Image via AP]

Mary Linen, of New York, left, stands in line with others as they wait to partake in a free Thanksgiving dinner at a Salvation Army center in the Harlem section of New York, Thursday Nov. 26, 2009. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)

[Venice, CA; November 8. Image via Flynet.]

[New York, November 2. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - NOVEMEBER 2: An armed military personnel guards during an arrival ceremony of the amphibious transport dock ship the soon to be commissioned USS New York on November 2, 2009 in New York City. The New York was built by Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in Avondale, Louisiana, using 7.5 tons of steel salvaged from the wreckage of the World Trade Center site in her bow will be commissioned during a ceremony on November 7. (Photo by Ramin Talaie/Getty Images)

[New York, October 26. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - OCTOBER 26: Ivan Burdos from Puerto Rico sits by her bags while waiting for her husband October 26, 2009 in New York, New York. Burdos and her husband have recently found themselves homeless following a move to New York from Puerto Rico. In a recently released report by the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless it was revealed that the numbers of homeless people using New York City shelters each night has reached an all time high. Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office eight years ago there has been a 45 percent increase in shelter use with over 39,000 homeless people, including 10,000 homeless families, checking in to city shelters every evening. The group also said that 2009 has turned out to be 'the worst on record for New York City homelessness since the Great Depression. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

[New York, October 21. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - OCTOBER 21: A homeless woman sits with her bags on the sidewalk October 21, 2009 in New York City. In a recently released report by the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless it was revealed that the numbers of homeless people using New York City shelters each night has reached an all time high. Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office eight years ago there has been a 45 percent increase in shelter use with over 39,000 homeless people, including 10,000 homeless families, checking in to city shelters every evening. The group also said that 2009 has turned out to be 'the worst on record for New York City homelessness since the Great Depression. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

It's clear that Ferrell's sense of her own awesomeness and importance remains undimmed, even by charges of check forgery, fraud and theft that carry a sentence of up to 12 years (ABC says she'll probably get less). Here are a few Kari-on-Kari tidbits:

— On her story's appeal: "As far as this whole story is concerned, I think that the reason it has been such a big deal is because I am pretty, intelligent and very well spoken. I am charming and funny."
— On her IQ: "I've always been intelligent for my age."
— On how other people just don't get her: "I'm just outspoken and I say funny things that are ridiculous and I assumed that people would be able to understand that they're jokes. Apparently they don't."
— On how other people are fame-whores: "Everybody wants their 15 minutes of fame. They wanted to be in the media. They wanted to be a victim of the quote-unquote Hipster Grifter."
— On how she's smarter than her teachers: "In history I always asked about the war in the Philippines or how Columbus slaughtered millions of people. And that's not what they teach in the public schools in Utah. The teachers had no idea what to do me." [sic]
— On being a high-school high-roller: "They had me at $11.75 an hour. At the time that was amazing because all the people I knew still in high school were working at Little Caesars for five bucks an hour."
— On the media: "[Y]ou guys are crazy. You'll go anywhere."

Given that Ferrell skipped bail in Salt Lake City to come to New York, then boarded a bus to Philadelphia to turn herself in, this seems like a bit of pot-kettle rhetoric. But what makes Ferrell so watchable — other than, of course, her attractiveness, intelligence, and charm — is her heady mix of self-aggrandizement and total lack of self-awareness. She's currently enjoying the reading time jail provides (one fave: Douglas Coupland's All Families Are Psychotic), but when her sentence is through she plans to return to New York. She says, "If there is anywhere that can forgive, it would be New York." Oh, and,

I like guys who dress really, really nicely but have beards. Living in New York was great because you have these Wall Street investment bankers that had these nice-fitted suits and then beards. It was amazing.

So bearded New Yorkers, watch the fuck out. Unless of course, you "want to be a victim of the quote-unquote Hipster Grifter." And really, who wouldn't?

Exclusive: Fake Checks, Sexual Come-Ons and Now Jail — The Hipster Grifter Speaks Out [ABC News]

[New York, July 27. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - JULY 27: Two women try to keep dry during an afternoon thunderstorm on July 27, 2009 in New York, New York. During severe weather yesterday, lightning injured four men, one critically, during a strike in Newark. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

As Levy explains, the late seventies were a time of lesbian separatism in America, a time when it made sense to say, in the words of separatist publication The Furies, that lesbianism was "not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy." But for the Van Dykes it was both — they refused to speak to men except waiters and mechanics, believed the world was suffering from "testosterone poisoning," and tried to stop their vans only on Women's Land, "places owned by women where all women, and only women, were welcome." However, they were far from the "celibate 'political lesbianism'" of such activists as Barbara Lipschutz, who said women should "free the libido from the tyranny of orgasm-seeking. Sometimes hugging is nicer." Ex-Van Dyke Chris Fox says of her time with the group, "people were fucking their brains out."

The Van Dykes embraced sadomasochism — according to Levy, "it was permission to focus on what turned them on, rather than what was politically correct, a way of appropriating the lust and power hunger that feminist doctrine had deemed male." Their practice of S&M angered other feminists, who thought that "lesbians should permit themselves only those sexual interests that reflect superior female ideals" and that "whips and chains or dog collars in public space" would disturb those recovering from domestic or sexual violence. But for the Van Dykes, S&M was an expression of identity as well as desire. The group's de facto leader, Lamar Van Dyke, says,

I felt like I had been in trouble my whole life for being too big, too loud, too demanding, too bossy, too everything that I am. When I discovered this S&M thing, it was actually a place where people loved me for those things. It was very liberating and quite a treat.

Lamar Van Dyke is perhaps the most inspiring figure in Levy's piece. Now living in Seattle, Van Dyke works for an Internet-service provider, where she works and speaks with men. "But," says Levy,

she is still wild, a big pirate of a woman. Regardless of the different people of different genders she has chosen over the years as her comrades, Van Dyke's primary loyalty has always been to her own adventure. A woman in her sixties who has been resolutely doing as she pleases for as long as she can remember is not easy to come by, in movies or in books, or in life.

The political climate may have changed a great deal since the late seventies, but it's a sad sign of our times that a woman who does what she wants still seems like a radical.

Lesbian Nation [The New Yorker - abstract only]

[Illustration by Edward Koren via the New Yorker]