Quotulatiousness

July 21, 2025

“Normal”? Dude, that’s extremist right-wing hate speech!

Filed under: Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Bone Writer on the huge increase in young people “identifying” as something other than what unreconstructed cavemen used to call “normal”:

Walk through any high school, scroll through TikTok, or attend a freshman orientation, and you’ll see the new hierarchy of modern identity:

  • Straight white male? Bottom rung.
  • Bisexual nonbinary neurodivergent? Stunning and brave.
  • Confused, anxious, fluid? You’re seen. You’re valid.
  • Rooted, stable, and clear? YOU must be dangerous.

It’s not just a cultural shift anymore. It’s a cultural mutation. A slow but total dislocation from reality.

We are no longer celebrating the diversity of life. We are celebrating the diversity of escape routes from it.

Identity as a Compass? No … It’s Identity as Camouflage

There was a time when “identity” meant something integrated, a clear expression of who you are, shaped by your values, your upbringing, your nature.

Now, identity is:

  • A product
  • A protest
  • A mask

It’s often less about expressing truth and more about shielding from judgment.

And nowhere is that clearer than in the explosion of LGBT+ self-identification, especially among the young.

The Numbers Don’t Lie but No One Wants to Look at Them

In 2012, Gallup found ~3.5% of Americans identified as LGBT.

By 2021? Over 20% of Gen Z now identify somewhere on the spectrum.

Among Gen Z women, bisexual identity has grown by over 400%.

Do you really believe this is all “just visibility”? Do you really think the human genome changed this much in 10 years?

Of course not.

What changed was the culture. And culture now rewards deviation and punishes normativity.

Reported by Axios in 2021

July 20, 2025

Generational differences about … ugh … talking on the telephone

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a late boomer — and unlike most of my cohort — I’ve always hated talking on the telephone to someone. I’m sure part of it is my innate shyness and social awkwardness: if I can’t see how the other person reacts to my verbal blundering, how can I correct myself in time to salvage something from the call? As a result, I’m rather more sympathetic to younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers who have a common generational aversion to telephone calls:

“Candle-stick phone with courtesy pay box” by CodeName47km is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

I’ve been working to wean myself off the phone. I try to use it only when it feels necessary: we require an answer now, things are too complex to lay out in an email, or I want to be sure what I’m saying is received as I intend it. Sometimes these calls are spontaneous. Increasingly, I schedule them, or ask permission first.

I’ve done this because it’s how business communications work today, and I don’t like to remind people that I’m getting on. I also do it in deference to my colleagues, all of whom are much younger than me. They prefer email, texts, or the group chat.

The landline decision was forced by our acquisition of Fitzhenry & Whiteside, which has had the same telephone number for decades. F&W has many more authors than does Sutherland House, and a good number of them are over sixty. We’re trying to make the transition to new ownership seamless. We didn’t want people calling up to hear “this number is no longer in service”. So the newly installed phone sits on a stand beside the desk I share with Shalomi. I call it Shalomi’s phone and make her answer it when she’s around. Mostly it goes to voicemail and tells people how to contact us by email.

Accustomed as I’ve become to phone-free work, I was taken aback this week when I asked one of our interns to call a printer — we needed a quick quote — and she responded, “I don’t do telephones”. She looked at me bewildered. I responded in kind.

My mind was racing to figure out if I’d mishandled the matter. I’d just read that story in the New York Times about the “Gen Z stare”, the blank look given by a young person (usually in a service job) where a verbal response would be common. It is often interpreted as a freeze on the part of the starer, an inability or reluctance to engage, perhaps rooted in anxiety, perhaps a remnant of the pandemic’s social dislocations, although some insist the starer is telling their interlocutor “you’re in my space and you ought to back off”.

I heard from a number of people about that article this week, and while the Times had not mentioned phone usage and etiquette, my conversations did. Apparently there are a lot of young people who don’t know how to answer their phones. They see a call pop up on their screen and they stare at it, waiting for it to go away. Or they press answer and listen without saying anything. Some, I’m told, answer even scheduled calls from people they know with silence.

I’ve heard parents say they didn’t expect they’d have to teach their children to answer a phone. A university lecturer explained that journalism professors now demonstrate use of a telephone before instructing students on how to conduct an interview over it. Apparently, the same goes for rookie salespeople.

Poking around online, I found a BBC article reporting that a quarter of people aged eighteen to thirty-four never answer their phones, more than half of them interpret any unexpected call as bad news. CBS reports 90 per cent of Gen-Z are anxious about phone calls.

In fairness, a lot of adults are similarly leery of their phones. They don’t want to engage with spam dialers or scammers — they answer and listen for the brief pause that betrays a call centre. Some let every unrecognized call go to voicemail. The savvier ones have figured out that your iPhone, properly configured, will send calls from people not in your contacts directly to voicemail.

Back to our intern. Eventually, I recovered myself. This wasn’t an instance of Gen-Z awkwardness or anxiety around real-time conversations. She is bright, confident, and as socially adept as anyone in the office. I asked if she had a phone. She did. I asked if she used it for calls. She said only to speak to her mom, who pays for her phone. Perfectly reasonable. And it was her personal phone, not a company phone, so she was under no obligation to use it at work. So we suggested she make the call on the company phone, which she cheerfully did.

We spoke later about generational differences with regard to communications technology. She likes the control one has over email communication as compared to the unpredictable nature of phone calls. I told her about life when no one had phones, yet we could all somehow manage to show up at the same place and the same hour. I can hardly believe I lived in such times. Hearing this must have hit her like I was once hit by the reporter Ray Stannard Baker’s account of how he used to walk up to the White House, knock on the front door, and ask to speak with the president.

QotD: Above all else, helicopter parents hate … helicopter parenting

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s a very weird, but oft-observed, phenomenon that the biggest opponents of “helicopter parenting” are … helicopter parents. You can go into a Starbucks and announce to the gaggle of Karens: “Kids these days are so soft; their parents never let them get hurt or make any mistakes, and so they never learn anything!” all you’ll get complete, enthusiastic agreement. Meanwhile, they’ve got their Jayden and Kayden and Brayden and Khaleesi coated in bubble wrap, wearing three masks and taking hand-sanitizer baths every half hour.

If the kid gets anything less than an A-triple-plus in Zoom School, Karen is immediately on the horn to the teacher … and since all schools these days, even the rare physical ones, are all wired up with “classroom management software”, they can bombard their kids’ teachers with emails and text messages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Helmets, knee pads … kids these days wear more safety gear than a mountain climber just to ride their bikes, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them kitted out like hockey goalies if recess ever becomes a thing again. Can the day be far off when every kid is trailed by xzheyr own personal injury lawyer, and parents are forced to sign waivers to let their kids use the bathroom?

Everyone knows how bad this is for childhood development, but if I told some kid with a scraped knee to rub some dirt on it, you’ll be fine, I’d probably get hauled up on child endangerment charges.

How can kids advance past age twelve, mentally and emotionally, if they’re never allowed to get hurt? To fail? To suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions?

I’m no developmental psychologist, but it seems obvious that such learning is time-limited. If you haven’t learned that X brings pain — and WHY — by the time you hit twelve years old, then on some fundamental level you’re never going to learn it.

Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.

July 14, 2025

The “War of the Sexes” is over … men now expected to surrender and go back to doing what women want

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The more I read about the state of male-female interactions on the dating scene (such as it is), the more grateful I am that I’m decades out of that killing ground. Male survivors have clearly decided that the risks are far greater than the potential relationship rewards and individually withdrawn in large enough numbers that the “dating scene” is a shadow of what it once was in the pre-swipe-left era. Janice Fiamengo responds to a “men, come back!” plea from Rachel Drucker in the New York Times:

The question of where men have gone, in the title of Rachel Drucker’s New York Times op/ed, is surely disingenuous. Drucker thinks she knows: men have disappeared into social media posting, digital lurking, uncommitted sexting, and porn. Allegedly afraid of emotional intimacy, they are no longer “showing up” for women. Drucker addresses men directly, diagnosing their feelings: “You’ve retreated — not into malice, but into something softer and harder all at once: Avoidance. Exhaustion. Disrepair.”

Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Drucker’s article is part social lament, part personal ad, and like many statements by modern women about men, it is notable for its presumption. Drucker seems to think she can call off the sex war simply by saying she’s had enough. Men were never supposed to stop being available to women. Drucker mourns a lost time when men “asked questions and waited for the answers”, when they “listened — really listened — when a woman spoke”. It doesn’t seem to occur that men have been listening and have heard women’s messages, loud and clear.

Drucker goes so far as to express nostalgia for a time of male sexual pursuit, when having a woman on one’s arm was a way for a man to prove himself and impress other men. “It wasn’t always healthy”, she says in one of her many massive understatements (ignoring the barrage of condemnation leveled against such men) “but it meant that men had to show up and put in some effort”.

Drucker produces no evidence of men’s lack of effort, and it is not clear that her personal anecdotes — all culled, it seems, from her monied Chicago milieu — are representative. I know many men, including young men, who are still willing to pursue romantic relationships with women; many put in a lot of time and thought. But it does ring true that at least some portion of men are far more wary than in previous eras, unwilling to risk the potential hell of divorce or of a false accusation in a culture that believes women and belittles men.

Some men have simply come to the conclusion that modern women aren’t, in general, all that likable — neither marriage material nor viable candidates for motherhood.

As far as female pronouncements about men go, Drucker’s piece is not the worst. It does not hector or accuse (at least, not much), and Drucker expresses some genuine liking for men. But it’s not clear how much that is worth when she is so oblivious to men’s points of view and unaware that at least some of the onus for re-engaging men must fall on women. Drucker’s blind spots and unearned certainty turn her wistful dirge into a tone-deaf commentary on contemporary sexual politics.

The article begins with a restaurant, where Drucker notes the absence of men. There are women together, doing what women do, but almost no coupled men. And in her own life, Drucker notes, there has been retreat. It isn’t just her, she’s sure: it’s a collective act in which men are removing themselves from women’s lives, no longer “trying to connect”.

Drucker is part of the problem, though she doesn’t seem to recognize it. She admits that she “spent over a decade” working for Playboy and more hardcore sites to get men addicted to digital pornography. Part of her job was “to understand exactly what it took to get a man to pay for content he could easily find for free”. She does not seem to regret this work or recognize its damage; on the contrary, she exults that it helped her understand men’s deepest selves.

Her characterization is simplistic and contemptuous: “We knew what worked”, she boasts. “It wasn’t intimacy. It wasn’t mutuality. It was access to stimulation — clean, fast and frictionless. In that world, there’s no need for conversation. No effort. No curiosity. No reciprocity.”

If this is what men fundamentally are to Drucker — sex bots without emotion or desire for reciprocity — why is she so disappointed that they are no longer around?

July 2, 2025

QotD: The bane of socialism — boredom

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… even the Yankee Leviathan at the very height of its powers couldn’t have made Socialism work long term, for as the Bolshies discovered, there’s more to life than just shit, shoes, and bread. The old proverb says “A man with an empty belly has one problem; the man with a full belly has a thousand”, and like most old proverbs it’s 100% true. It’s no surprise our modern cat ladies — of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to-now genders — don’t realize this, as you can overfeed a housecat into total somnolence, but anyone who has ever had so much as a dog knows what happens when all its immediate physical needs are satisfied: it grows bored.

Most “bad” dogs aren’t actually bad. They’re not misbehaving because they’re willful, or mean, or whatever. They’re just bored out of their fucking skulls, because the kind of bugman who gets a dog these days has no idea that you actually have to play with it, and pet it, and interact with it, in much the same way you have to interact with a young human. Given a dog’s limited intellect, the only thing it can think of to do to alleviate its boredom is chew on things, or dig in the yard, or piss on the rug, or, if all else fails, chew its own fur off.

Being slightly more complex critters, humans have more options, but bore a human enough — overfill his material needs, so that he’s stuffed to somnolence, but take his sense of purpose away — and you’ll see the exact same dog behaviors. Why do you think they shove all that metal shit in their faces? And no, I am absolutely not joking. Why all the huge, gaudy, gross tattoos? The constant changes of hair color and style?

Have you ever asked them?

Again, I’m 100% not joking. I know most of y’all avoid SJWs like the plague, and that’s a smart move, can’t blame you for it, but if you do, you’ll just have to trust me: I was in academia for a long time, so I was around not just SJWs, but bleeding-edge lunatic SJWs, and I asked them about it. One must be discreet about this, of course — hey, I’m thinking of getting a roll of toilet paper tattooed on my bicep, to remind me that We’re In This Together, what do you think? — but it’s fairly easy to do. And every time, they’d spin me some elaborate tale of how deep and meaningful it all is.

No, really. By some mental process I can’t begin to reproduce, getting Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s face tattooed on your calf is, to them, striking a blow at ambient civilization. That is the literal truth of their motivation. It’s the same reason the dog digs in the backyard, or pisses on the rug, or chews its own fur off: That’s the only agency it has, the only purpose it can find.

Severian, “Purpose”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-06.

June 28, 2025

Punctuation microaggression

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We appear to have an entire generation — Gen Z — suffering undue trauma from, checks notes, aggressive and distressing punctuation marks:

“American typewriter keyboard layout” by Любослов Езыкин is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

What is more delicious than casting sweeping judgements over entire generations? Contrary to prevailing wisdom, studying and mocking the mores and manners of Generation Z is not only morally just but entirely natural. Not to mention good fun.

At the end of this paragraph, re-read this string of sentences. Study the punctuation. You’ll notice that each sentence ends with a satisfying symbol. What Americans call a period and what Britishers call a full stop signifies the end of the sentence — that the sentence contains a complete thought. How lovely.

That unassuming little dot was good enough for Shakespeare, Hemingway, Ibsen, Miller — every writer who mastered the well-mannered violence of the English Language. They understood, too, the writerly compulsion to kneel before that impossible mistress. Submission sets the writer free.

Submission, however, is not in vogue. Submission implies hierarchy, which implies standards — forbidden notions to anyone under 45.

Generation Z. The Zoomers. Those with the misfortune to have spawned here on Earth between 1997 and 2012. This swarm of digital natives has never known a world without the internet. Or, it appears, one with grammatical standards.

According to linguists, Zoomers view the full stop as Bill Clinton views a well-adjusted woman: with intrinsic horror. For Zoomers, the full stop is the mark of unbridled aggression. Zoomers refuse full stops — period.

In The Telegraph, one-linguist-cum-exorcist said that Zoomers find the full stop deeply troubling. That little dot before these seven words provokes a generational panic attack: “Full stops signify an angry or abrupt tone of voice”.

Another expert chimed in. Dr Lauren Fonteyn tweeted, “If you send a text message without a full stop, it’s already obvious that you’ve concluded the message. So, if you add that additional marker for completion, they will read something into it, and it tends to be a falling intonation or negative tone.”

To renew my sense of horror, I probed further. In a 2015 study at New York’s Binghamton University, undergraduates perceived text messages ending with a full stop as “less sincere” than the same message without one.

Language, like the fish, rots from the head. Researchers also found that exclamation marks, those hyperactive symbols of faux cheer, achieved the opposite of full stops. Those employing an exclamation mark appeared “more sincere and engaged”.

June 22, 2025

QotD: “Autism stolen valor”

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Autism stolen valor”. What a concept.

The very concept that anyone would ever claim to be autistic as a status move would have seemed incomprehensibly bizarre to me when I was growing up.

I get it, though. In the intervening decades, somehow a lot of people have developed the notion that anybody above the middle range of IQ must be autistic-spectrum.

It’s not true. I’ve met enough autists, brights and super-brights to know differently. I’ve read a fair bit of the literature on psychometrics and MBD syndromes. And I’ve been a guest for faculty tea at the Institute for Advanced Study, which is very illuminating if you’re even a little bit observant about people.

Here’s what I think I know:

Many autists are seriously damaged and non-functional, to the point where they need to be institutionalized or have semi-institutional special care. Few people outside the mental-health profession know this. The “autists” we encounter in daily life are a selected high-functioning group.

HFAs (high functioning autists) have one advantage over average-IQ neurotypicals: they can really concentrate on things that aren’t social-status games or sexual maneuvers.

Average-IQ neurotypicals can only just barely manage that, so it’s difficult for them to compete with HFAs in fields where you have to be able to concentrate for long periods in order to do decent work.

Like, say, writing software. The upper reaches of software engineering are stiff with HFAs. This has become well known.

This doesn’t mean your typical HFA is actually brighter than a median average-IQ neurotypical. In fact, if you put a whole bunch of HFAs through a psychometric battery you’ll find their average IQ is lower than for neurotypicals, not higher.

HFA is actually a drag on general intelligence that HFAs overcome by being obsessive — grinding really hard on intelligent-people stuff.

The result is that HFAs as a population excel over average-IQ neurotypicals, compete fairly evenly with bright neurotypicals, but top out lower than super-bright neurotypicals do.

This is hard to notice because there are so few super-brights that many people never meet one at all. Very few people have observed enough super-brights to make valid generalizations about them. And of the few people who have a large enough observational sample, still fewer are themselves bright enough to comprehend what they see.

But I have been to faculty tea at the IAS. (I had been an invited speaker that day.)

Most of my friends and peers are people in the tippy-top end of the HFA cohort. Top 1% software engineers and people like that. So at the IAS, people-watching a bunch of Nobel laureates and people bright enough to work with Nobel laureates day-to-day, my jaw dropped open.

Because compared to who I usually hang out with, these people are mostly *normal*. Neurotypical. As near as I can tell, the people in the crowd showing HFA tells are the slow ones.

Imagine if you can being so natively intelligent that even though your brain is constantly trying to distract you into playing monkey socio-sexual status games, you can still think rings around 99.9% of the people in the world.

That’s what actual super-brights are like. They’re not brain-damaged. They’re not obsessive or compulsive or neurotic. They don’t have sensory disabilities. And they leave high-functioning autists in their dust.

Because I know this, I find the concept of people faking being autists amusing. They think they’re positioning themselves as the superior, smartest people. They are hilariously wrong.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-27.

June 16, 2025

QotD: Evading the censor

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This “vibe shift”, as Gen Z calls it, reminds me of my then three-year-old nephew’s weekly blasphemy tour of the local supermarket. Back then, corralled into carting the little critter around town, I’d fasten little Jack into a pushchair and head off. He’d say little to nothing between the front door and the edges of the high street.

As we crept closer, mischief would smear across his lips. He’d bide his time. “Now, Jack,” I’d plead. “Remember what your mother said …”

We’d land in the supermarket. Jack would survey the crowds. At the top of his lungs, he’d bellow: “Boobies! Boo-BEES! Ha-ha-ha-ha! Fat — FAT boobies!” With a visceral joy on his face, he’d fold over and repeat the lung-puncturing cycle, laughing himself into a pram-splayed stupor.

For the first time, Jack indulged the timeless power inherent in saying a few forbidden words and basking in the illicit result. Freud, for all of his faults, called this joy “evading the censor”. Of course, Jack hadn’t read much Freud by then. All he knew was that saying what he was forbidden to say was, in fact, uproariously funny.

No doubt, modern scolds would pen a 5,000-word buzzword soup condemning Jack’s internalised misogyny, his unconscious patriarchal programming or some such modern voodoo. They’d miss the point: saying what one is forbidden to say is — and always will be — funny.

Christopher Gage, “No Laughing Matter”, Oxford Sour, 2025-03-14.

June 14, 2025

QotD: University students or NPCs?

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I first started teaching, for instance, I had to constantly remind myself that my charges were just teenagers. At most they were 21, 22 tops, which is basically the same thing. So much of the crap they pulled, then, was just typical teenager stuff. All they really needed to straighten themselves out was two good head knocks and a swift kick in the ass, which life would soon provide. I did exactly the same sort of dumb stuff back in my own undergrad days – maybe not as bad, but it was a difference of degree, not kind. They’d be ok in a few years.

A few semesters on, and that no longer applied. Sure, sure, they were still teenagers, and still pulled typical teenager capers … but a new set of behaviors crept in. I can’t describe them exactly, in detail, but the overall impression was: here’s someone doing a pretty good impersonation of a teenager. Most every kid goes through the faux-sophisticate stage, usually somewhere around age 12, and this kinda looked like that — young kids pretending to be a lot older — but it also looked a lot like the opposite end of the spectrum. Not quite “hello, fellow teens!” — not yet — but there was something like that going on, too. It was weird, but I figured it was mostly in my head — I’ve always been a grouchy old man, but now I was actually chronologically old enough to let my freak flag fly, so I assumed that’s what I was doing. They’re not changing, I am …

Fast forward a few more semesters, and nope, it’s definitely them. The kids at the tail end of my career still looked like bargain basement Rich Littles, doing impersonations of teenagers, but their act was terrible. Remember a few years back, when Facebook or Twitter or whoever tried to make an AI chat bot, and it immediately turned super racist? Not that these kids were racists — they were the furthest thing from that — but they all seemed to have a small stock of crowdsourced responses. And that’s ALL they had, so no matter what the situation, they’d shoehorn it in to one of their canned affects, because that’s all they had.

By the very end, interacting with them was like playing one of those old text-adventure games from the very dawn of the personal computer, like Zork. They’d respond to commands, but only the right commands, in the exact word order. No deviations allowed, and of course their responses were equally programmed.

Severian, “Terminators”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-04.

June 13, 2025

The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:

The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.

If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.

But that’s not true anymore.

In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.

It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.

It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.

Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:

  • Do NOT try to close.
  • Do NOT try to sell.
  • Do NOT try to persuade.
  • Don’t even listen.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.

Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.

You will pay just to get rid of the ad.

In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.

That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.

And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.

[…]

We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.

But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.

They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.

June 10, 2025

The limits of female empathy

Filed under: Books, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo discusses the 2006 book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man by journalist Norah Vincent. Intended as a kind of exposé of male privilege, her investigations turned into something rather different than she originally intended:

    Many men are lonely. Many don’t like the work they do. Many are unhappily married. They struggle with an at-times overwhelming sex drive. Their encounters with women, romantic or otherwise, often involve rejection and contradictory tests of their masculinity. They are the objects of blame and bigotry in their societies, yet are expected to remain stoic and put women’s needs first.

It’s a strange world in which the above observations — by a woman — are seen as outstanding insights, but it’s the one we’re in.

In 2006, American journalist Norah Vincent published Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man, an under-cover adventure in which the author, a mannish lesbian with big feet, spent close to 18 months periodically disguised as a man named Ned, notching up about 150 episodes in drag.

With breasts flattened, fake stubble on her chin, and a stuffed jock strap in her pants, having hired a tutor to teach her how to pitch her voice low and move like a man, she set out to “infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets” (p. 18). She joined a bowling league, went on dates, did sales calls, spent some weeks at a monastery, and attended a Robert Bly-influenced men’s wilderness retreat.

Expecting to learn something about male power, she found instead “the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it” (p. 254). The planned exposé became a feminist mea culpa.

The book got a lot of attention when it was published, and many men expressed gratitude and appreciation for the empathy and insight in Vincent’s work.

Reading the many accolades, I felt sadness, tenderness, and amazement. Wasn’t this a bit much? Was it really so remarkable that a woman could develop sympathy for the opposite sex?

Most men are so unaccustomed to any empathy from a woman, even when it’s mixed with patronizing descriptions and questionable conclusions, that they respond as if to heroism. The woman who cares, even within circumscribed limits, is catapulted into the company of the saints.

Imagine the reaction if a man had masqueraded as a woman for a year or more, and then pretended to understand women (even sympathetically) using a shop-worn ideological framework? Imagine a white person putting on blackface in order to become an expert, even a well-intentioned one, on the need for black self-improvement? There would be howls of outrage and indignant rebuttals, especially by members of the impersonated group.

Not in Vincent’s case. So rare is a woman’s attempt to understand male experiences that she doesn’t need to be consistently sympathetic or accurate.

Even when someone goes beyond temporary male drag, there is a palpable surprise that mens’ lives are not a well-watered garden of male privilege:

Today, of course, there is still always a reason to look away from men’s pain. Feminist-inclined men and women routinely “bathe in male tears“. They claim that discussing men’s issues is misogynistic, and ask “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” No wonder it seems that the only time men can be heard is when women speak for them.

Notably, women who “transition” to male through hormone treatments and surgery are often shocked by the indifference and unkindness they encounter in public, where men are not eager to help and women expect deference. Zander Keig wrote as a trans man in “Crossing the Divide” of a pronounced sense of aloneness: “No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being”.

June 9, 2025

Parenting style choice – “small people who do not yet know very much or … pets who can talk”

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I always felt that my son was a person, and did my best to treat him that way while still being his father. I think that was the correct choice, although clearly a lot of other parents choose the other option for their children:

“Happy family cyanotype 2” by simpleinsomnia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

There are two views of children — that they are small people who do not yet know very much or that they are pets who can talk. I prefer the former. One implication is that children and parents are, in a fundamental sense, peers. Obviously they are not equal in what they know or what they can do or how strong they are. But they are not different sorts of people in a way that goes beyond that. Children should usually believe their parents about things the parents know much more about but parents should believe children when that asymmetry is reversed, as it sometimes is. The mere fact that one is parent and the other child does not determine which is right and which wrong when they disagree; that is determined, as between adults, by which has better arguments, more evidence.

One implication of treating children as people not pets is that you have to keep promises to them, as to other people. Another is that if you assert something to them you have the same obligation you would have if you said it to an adult to defend it or, if you find you cannot, admit that you can’t.

I once heard an elderly man tell a child who disagreed with him on something that he should never contradict his elders. The statement struck me as not merely wrong but blasphemous. The elder was probably correct on what they disagreed about but the appropriate response is to demonstrate that, at worst decline to argue it, not to imply either that truth is determined by seniority or that it is discourteous to point out errors to a status superior. I am reasonably sure that neither of my parents ever told me to believe something just because they said so or refused to entertain arguments against their views. The son of my first marriage, who spent summers with me and my wife when he was growing up, told a friend that his project for that summer was to get my wife to say “because I told you so.” I doubt that he succeeded.

Treating your children as your peers is easier if you sometimes interact with them in contexts where they demonstrably are at least your equal. I was the first member of our family to play World of Warcraft, so when my wife and our children, then eleven and fourteen, joined the game I was more skilled, had a higher level character, more in-game resources. They improved over time and there was a long period, during which we sometimes played separately, sometimes as a family team, were all on about the same level. By the time I eventually quit the game some years later we all had top level characters and all three of them had become more skilled at the game than I was.

Going back to my childhood, the nearest equivalent that occurs to me is ping-pong. We had a table in the basement on which my father and I played. We equalized the contest with a sliding handicap, a number of points I started each game with. Every time he won the handicap went up, every time I won it went down. Over a period of years, as I got better, the handicap went down, eventually to zero, I think occasionally below zero. The family also played bridge together, there being conveniently four of us.

I spent a lot of time arguing with my father on a wide range of subjects. Someone who met us skiing on Colorado when I was in high school told a friend of mine that we spent all our time arguing and I won half the arguments. I don’t think the latter was true, but if my father won a majority of the arguments he won them fair.

May 21, 2025

QotD: The sandpaper people

Filed under: Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unless you’re an engineer, then, friction works best as a metaphor for human interaction. Creativity, for instance. Lots of very creative folks have tried to describe the creative process. Stephen King (I think) came up with the notion of grit in an oyster — something gets under your shell and irritates you until something beautiful forms around it. I like that, but being a social guy I prefer the notion of friction. You spend your days rubbing against people (not like a Japanese businessman on a crowded train, you sickos); sometimes that friction sparks something. Maybe it’s friendship, romance, whatever; or maybe it’s a story, poetry, music. Whatever the spark catches on fire depends on the interests, training, and talent of whatever pile of tinder it lands on.

On the other hand, most people aren’t artistes, so a well-ordered society is a well-lubricated society (“ah so!” yells our Japanese businessman, and look, y’all, much like my poor old high school physics teacher, we’re just going to have to ignore the obvious sexual connotations for the sake of the lesson). “Better a false ‘good morning!’ than a sincere ‘go to hell!'”, the old proverb runs, and that’s because the false “good morning!” is social lubricant; it keeps the friction of living packed cheek-to-jowl with a bunch of strangers down to a manageable level.

That’s what that mystifyingly old-timey word “manners” really means. What the frustrated artistes of the 20th century decried as stultifying conformity is actually lubricant. You don’t do that whole bourgeois thing, maaaannn, because you like being a sheep; you do it because that’s what keeps your world from catching on fire. Replace enough false good mornings with sincere go to hells, and pretty soon you’ve got Chicago, Philadelphia, Bodymore Murderland …

Alas, modern prosperity enables the sandpaper people. If normal people oil themselves up with manners before they go out into the world, these freaks wrap themselves in sandpaper. The really gritty stuff, too, the real paint-strippers you load onto big belt sanders. The kind of assholes who make up elaborate pronouns for themselves and get theatrically mad on social media when normal people can’t figure out what the hell they’re talking about, for instance.

And in an at least Alanis-level irony, the sandpaper people do some of their most abrasive work by pretending, high school physics-style, that obviously frictive situations are frictionless. […]

And so it goes … except physics is a real thing that exists. Our high school teacher instructed us to ignore things like wind resistance in order to teach us the basics. We all knew there was a lot more than F=MA to answering even so basic a question as whether or not Mickey Mantle’s line drive cleared the fence. Not only do the sandpaper people not know that, they wouldn’t care if they did, because equations be rayciss. Alas for them — and us — friction is real. Ever seen a car engine catch fire? Too much friction for the lubricant to handle, and the lubricant becomes a fire accelerant.

Severian, “The Sandpaper People”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-03.

May 17, 2025

Learning racism in Japan

Filed under: Cancon, Japan — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carter recounts how his views and opinions on racism changed while living for an extended period in Japan:

“Tokyo street scene” by snapsbycw is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

We started the conversation talking about the Shiloh Hendrix affair, but ultimately got onto the subject of the Land of the Rising Sun. As it turns out, Alexandru and I have both spent quite some time living in Japan, an experience which contributed to both of us becoming incorrigible racists. This is a very common occurrence: almost anyone who spends a significant amount of time living in a very different country will start to draw conclusions about the differences between human groups. Your levels of epistemic closure need to be extraordinarily high to avoid this.

When I first moved to Japan I was, in most ways, an unreconstructed liberal. I took the axiomatic precept of the Boomer Truth Regime – that stereotypes are both incorrect and evil, because all people are basically the same – more or less for granted. This was very easy for me to do: I’d grown up in a remote, homogeneously Anglo part of rural Canada, and while I’d had some degree of exposure to different ethne at university, this was during a period in which Canada was making a real effort to filter immigrants for quality, and most of the non-white, second-generation immigrants I interacted with were heavily westernized. I wasn’t unaware of cultural differences, but I generally assumed that it went no deeper than that, and that inside every human being there was a liberal Anglo struggling to break free.

Japan of course is a completely alien culture. Among the many profound differences with the contemporary West is that the Japanese are, famously, intensely and unashamedly racist, or “xenophobic” as it is usually framed. I was initially taken aback by how frank the Japanese could be about this, for instance by asking questions about me that were clearly in rooted in their stereotypical understanding of what young North American white boys were generally like. But there were two things about this experience that quickly made me stop and think. First, these questions were almost never hostile, but rather came from a place of genuine curiosity: they were simply trying to get to know me, which they would do by starting with a default mental picture and then testing to see if and how I conformed or departed from that picture so that they could update their model accordingly. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always hateful! Second, a great many of their stereotypical assumptions about me were uncomfortably accurate. Yet I had been assured my entire life, by every TV show, movie, and teacher, that stereotypes were always wrong!

It didn’t take me long to get over this cognitive dissonance, which I resolved by the simple expedient of concluding that I’d been lied to by my culture, which is something that even then I’d realized happens a lot. This then gave me internal permission to observe the Japanese themselves, to notice the myriad differences in character and behaviour as compared to my own people, and to connect these individual level differences to their emergent societal consequences.

Learning racism in Japan is a humbling experience for a Westerner. I’ve travelled to a lot of different countries, and everywhere else I’ve either felt like my own people were basically on the same civilizational level (Europe), or at a noticeably higher level (South America). Japan is the only place I’ve ever been where I felt like an unlettered, uncouth, savage, stinky barbarian primitive one step removed from the cave – where it was obvious that my own people could learn quite a bit about how to comport themselves in a civilized fashion. Then again, at the same time, this taught me to value that very barbarism: it’s quite possible, as the Greek understood when regarding the Mede, to be overcivilized.

I could go on about this subject for hours, but I’ve got things I need to do today – like go to the gym and get some work done on other projects I’ve been engrossed in – and I wanted to get this out fast. In any case, I did go on about this subject for hours, with Alexandru and Phisto, so if you’d like to hear more about Japan you’ll just have to click through and listen.

May 16, 2025

For some reason, men who sleep around don’t want to marry women who sleep around

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Young women who approach casual sex the way that young men do (or used to, anyway) are shocked to find that men don’t want to settle down in a long term relationship with a woman with a similar “bodycount”:

A young woman at a club with unrealistically disinterested young men.
Image generated by Grok.

First of all, men are very different than women, but guys are also fairly simple creatures.

Here are the fundamentals, ladies …

If a man sees you as a potential match, is attracted to you, you feed him, seem to want to take care of him, you’re a good mom (if you have kids), have good sex with him, are nice to him, he enjoys talking to you and you genuinely seem to think he’s great, he will think he’s the luckiest guy on earth. The great thing about all of this is that it’s mostly under your control. Yes, you might have to dress up and have some open conversations about what the two of you like in bed, but it’s a doable list. Being 6’4′ or making $500,000 per year to get some woman’s attention may be outside of a man’s control, but if a man considers a woman relationship material, she is probably capable of locking him in if she wants to do it.

Of course, like everything else in life, there is some nuance involved here.

For one thing, good sex is a key part of a good relationship, BUT unlike a lot of women, men are also generally very comfortable with the idea of having sex OUTSIDE OF RELATIONSHIPS. A lot of men can enjoy sex with women they just met, women they know they’ll never see again, or even women THEY DON’T EVEN LIKE AS HUMAN BEINGS. Men just have a biological drive toward sex, the same way, for example, a lot of dogs have a biological drive toward prey. The second my dog sees a cat; she wants to chase it. If she catches up to the cat, she doesn’t even know what to do, but she does know she wants it to run so she can have the fun of running after it. It’s an innate drive for her and most men have that same kind of innate drive around sex, even though most of us never have the opportunity to fully express it.

[…]

For example, all other things being equal, just about every man would prefer a virgin to a woman with say 50 previous partners. Why? Well, in a man’s book, being promiscuous is a huge negative in a woman you’re interested in long term for reasons great and small, fair and unfair.

Like what?

Well, first and foremost, the traditional concern is that if she’s sleeping around, how do you know your child is yours? The last thing any man wants to do is get cucked and end up spending his life raising a child some other man impregnated his wife with right under his nose. Along similar lines, the more a woman has slept around, the more likely it is that she may cheat. After all, unless you’re the absolute peak of the pyramid for men, having sex requires a lot of effort and work. For women? Not so much. She’ll have easy opportunities every day of the week, probably multiple times per day, and if she feels comfortable sleeping around, can you trust her?

How easy is it? Well, once, I remember talking to a female friend of mine who had moved to another city, was lonely, and she complained to me that she “Just needed to get laid.” I laughed at her over the phone and told her something like, “All you have to do is dress up, go to a hotel bar, look for any attractive single man, sit next to him, and talk to him for 5 minutes, then ask him to take you up to his room. You’ll be having sex 5 minutes after. It’s that easy” – and it is, for women.

We can go on. Promiscuous women are statistically less likely to stay married. You also have to think they probably aren’t going to be as satisfied in bed if they’re comparing you to a large number of men. You know, “Well, Brett had that amazing 8 pack, Jimmy was really hung, Paul could go forever, and Todd did that really cool thing with his tongue, so how good is this compared to those guys?” Furthermore, it’s natural for men to want large numbers of female partners, but not so much for women, which usually means women who sleep around have issues. How many mentally healthy, happy women are racking up truly large numbers of guys? Not many.

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