Quotulatiousness

September 3, 2023

Online dating apps

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

The modern dating scene is evidently catastrophic for the majority of men:

After all, dating apps digitally castrate 85 percent of men.

On Bumble, sixty percent of women say they’re looking for a six-foot-tall or taller man. Just 30 percent will drop their requirements one inch lower. Just 15 percent of women would consider a man just one inch shorter than the average 5’9 man. Shorter than that? Your chances fall with each descending inch. Understandably, 80 percent of men lie about their height. Why? Dating apps are merciless, Latin American economies. Most women on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble seek the top 20 percent of men, leaving the rest to compete for a small portion of the dating pool. Reader, I’m not bearing a tall grudge from a short height, I’m six-foot-two.

When I was younger, we used to meet people in person. This antiquated exercise was meritocracy in action.

For the genetically ungifted, that is, the ordinary 80 percent of men, this was the great leveller.

No matter how short or aesthetically unblessed, meeting in person gave all a fair hearing. As the great Christopher Hitchens once wrote, there’s a good reason why men employ humour and why women tend to value a man’s mastery of humour.

Dating apps are anti-merit. Essentially, they provoke a biological feudalism that determines your prospects before you escape the womb.

The 5’9 guy with good humour, high intelligence, seasoned wit, and good manners? Nope.

Social media mutates the ideal into the ordinary. Every man is six-foot-plus. Every woman resembles a Reality TV star: big lips, ballooning bum, bouncing boobs.

In this strange, digital landscape, some porn-addled men use dick pics as a greeting. Three-quarters of women have endured such “greetings”.

Dating apps are a primitive world in which some men say “hello” by showing you their rather ugly organs.

Offline, leery weirdoes masturbating vigorously (Is there any other way?) on the night Tube often end up in jail or in the newspaper. Endearingly, the Daily Telegraph still calls this “performing a sexual act” as if on a stage before a ticket-waving audience and a shrivel of critics.

Reader, I’m no reactionary prude — I’m spiritually French — the only people on earth a majority of whom think adultery is an invigorating hobby rather than a grave sin.

The business of life works better without a screen and an algorithm.

Unsurprisingly, presenting oneself as a product on the “dating marketplace” degrades self-esteem, afflicts mental health, and corrodes our sense of reality. I’m no philosopher, but maybe our burgeoning mental health crisis has something to do with our living as if products on a shelf to be thumbed over by complete strangers.

As Rob Henderson reported last year, the world of dating apps is a hellscape for everyone but the tiny minority of men who get a “swipe right” from vast numbers of women:

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

August 25, 2023

Only an extreme right-wing bigot would say that “BDSM is not for four-year-olds”

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

Noted extreme right-wing arch-conservative Brendan O’Neill somehow seems to think that the full panoply of LGBT sexual identities are not appropriate for the pre-school set:

This may not be an accurate portrayal of the book in question, by way of Blazing Cat Fur.

BDSM is not for four-year-olds. Apparently, that’s a controversial statement these days. Only a bigot would want to protect little kids from images of old blokes in fetish gear snogging the faces off each other in public. If you think under-fives should be reading books about hungry caterpillars or tigers coming for tea, not books featuring pictures of ageing men in dog collars and studded leather underwear, you’re a queerphobe and you need to pipe down.

Truly we have reached the seventh circle of woke lunacy. This week it was reported that a mum and dad in Hull in the north of England pulled their four-year-old daughter from a pre-school after she was shown a book called Grandad’s Pride which contains illustrations of “men who are partially naked in leather bondage gear”. The pre-school’s response? According to the mum and dad, it branded them “bigots”. Yes, who else but a hateful phobe would want to stop a toddler from seeing a tattooed, half-naked, grey-bearded homosexual kissing his boyfriend?

Grandad’s Pride is written by Harry Woodgate, an award-winning children’s author who uses they / them pronouns. Of course he does. Or of course they do. Whatever. It tells the story of a girl called Milly, who is playing in her gramps’ attic one day when she happens upon an old Pride flag. She asks what it is and grandad suggests they organise their own Pride march in the village. As you do. Then come the iffy illustrations: old men in fetish gear; a “trans man” (ie, woman) with mastectomy scars under her nipples; an activist in a spiked dog collar waving a placard that says: “Break the cis-tem”. And you thought Where the Wild Things Are was scary.

You don’t have to be a prude to think this is ridiculous bordering on sinister. My view is that consenting adults should do whatever they want. Wear chafing leather trousers, pierce your cock, whip your friends in dim-lit dungeons. It’s not my cup of tea, but knock yourselves out. But it’s not for kids! No four-year-old should be looking at illustrations of a mutilated woman who now identifies as a “man” or of pensioners in leather suspenders. And it doesn’t make you Mary Whitehouse to say so. When you read to little kids, you want them to ask questions like, “Can we have a tiger over for tea?”, not: “Why does that man have stitches on his chest?”

One of the most frustrating things for freedom-lovers like me is that when we raise questions about age-inappropriate woke crap in schools, we get lumped with the religious right or PC fanatics who previously waged war on classic texts like Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (too much talk about menstruation, apparently) and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (too many utterances of the n-word). Nonsense. Of course schoolkids should read Blume and Steinbeck. Teens in particular should be expected to engage with challenging texts, even ones that contain racial epithets or girls eagerly awaiting their first period. Schools should err on the side of being open with literature, though let’s hope they don’t start stocking American Psycho or The 120 Days of Sodom.

August 24, 2023

Speaking of Just-so stories, here’s “a simple story of fetish formation”

Filed under: Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander ventures far from shore in this extended discussion of the notion that fetish research can help us understand more about artificial intelligence:

“Cologne BDSM 07” by CSD2006 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

We try to explain AI alignment by analogy to human alignment. Evolution “created” humans. Its “goal” is for humans to spread their genes by (approximately) having as many children as possible. It couldn’t directly communicate that goal to humans – partly because it’s an abstract concept that can’t talk, and partly because for most of biological history it was working with lemurs and ape-men who couldn’t understand words anyway. Instead, it tried to give us instincts that align us with that goal. The most relevant instinct is sex: most humans want to have sex, an action that potentially results in pregnancy, childbearing, and genes being spread to the next generation. This alignment strategy succeeded well enough that humans populations remain high as of 2023.

We’ve talked before about a major failure: humans can invent contraception. Evolution’s main alignment strategy was totally unprepared for this. It made us interested in a certain type of genital friction, which was a good proxy for its goal in the ancestral environment. But once we became smarter, we got new out-of-training-distribution options available, and one of those was inventing contraception so that we could get the genital friction without the kids. This is a big part of why average-children-per-couple is declining from 8+ in eg pioneer times to ~1.5 in rich countries today, even though modern rich people have more child-rearing resources available than the pioneers.

Another major alignment failure is porn. Giving evolution a little more credit, it didn’t just make people want genital friction – if that had been the sole imperative, we would have died out as soon as someone inventing the dildo/fleshlight. People want genital friction associated with attractive people and certain emotions relating to complex relationships. But now we can take pictures of attractive people and write stories that evoke the complex emotions, while using a dildo/fleshlight/hand to provide the genital friction, and that does substitute for sex pretty well. There’s still debate over whether porn makes people less likely to go out and form real relationships, but it’s at least plausibly another factor in the rich-country fertility decline. At the very least it doesn’t scream “well-thought-out alignment strategy robust to training-vs-deployment differences”.

But these are boring examples. These are like 2015-level alignment concerns, from back when we thought the big problem was AIs seizing control of their reward centers or something. I think we might genuinely be able to avoid problems shaped like these. Unlike evolution, which had to work with lemurs, even weak GPT-level modern AIs are able to understand language and complicated concepts; we can tell them to want children instead of using genital friction as a proxy. 2023 alignment concerns are more about failed generalization – that is, about fetishes.

Evolution’s alignment problem isn’t just that humans have learned to satiate their libido in ways other than procreative sex. It’s that some humans’ libidos are fundamentally confused. For example, some men, instead of wanting to have sex with women, mostly want to spank them, or be whipped by them, or kiss their feet, or dress up in their clothes. None of these things are going to result in babies! You can’t trivially blame this on the shift from training to deployment (ie the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to the modern world) – women had feet in the ancestral environment too. This is a different kind of failure.

Here’s a simple story of fetish formation: evolution gave us genes that somehow unfold into a “sex drive” in the brain. But the genome doesn’t inherently contain concepts like “man”, “woman”, “penis”, or “vagina”. I’m not trying to make a woke point here: the genome is just a bunch of the nucleotides A, T, C, and G in various patterns, but concepts like “man” and “woman” are learned during childhood as patterns of neural connections. We assume that the nucleotides are a program telling the body to do useful things, but that has to be implemented through deterministic pathways of proteins and the brain’s neural connections are too complex to trivially influence that way (see here for more). The genome probably contains some nucleotides that are supposed to refer to the concepts “man” and “woman” once the brain gets them, but there’s are a lot of fallible proteins in between those two levels.

So the simple story of fetish formation is that the genome contains some message written in nucleotides saying “have procreative sex with adults of the opposite sex as you”, some galaxy-brained Rube Goldberg plan for translating that message into neural connections during childhood or adolescence, and sometimes the plan fails. Here are some zero-evidence just-so-story speculations for how various fetishes might form, more to give you an idea what I’m talking about than because I claim to have useful knowledge on this topic:

  • Foot fetish: On the somatosensory cortex, the area representing the feet is right next to the area representing the genitalia. If the genome includes an “address” for the genitalia, plus the instructions “have sexual urges towards this”, then getting the address slightly wrong will land you in the feet.

    • A reasonable next question would be “what’s on the other side of the genitalia, and do people also have fetishes about that one?” The answer is “the somatosensory cortex is a line with the genitalia at the far end, because God is merciful and didn’t want there to be a second thing like foot fetishes.”
    (source for cortex image)

  • Spanking: From the male point of view, penetrative PIV sex involves applying force to the bottom half of a woman, at rhythmic intervals, in a way that causes her very intense emotions and makes her make moan and scream. Spanking is exactly like this, and most kids encounter spanking at a very early age and sex only after they’re much older. If the evolutionary message is something like “find the concept that looks vaguely like this, then be into it”, spanking is the first concept like that most people will find; by the time they learn about actual sex, spanking might be a trapped prior.
  • Sadomasochism: Sex is painful for virgins, can be mildly painful even for some non-virgins, and when it’s pleasurable, it still looks a lot like pain (screams, intense emotions). Imagine you are a little boy/girl who stumbles in on your parents having sex. Your father is impaling the most sensitive part of your mother’s body, and your mother is moaning and squealing. A natural generalization might be “sex is the thing where a man causes a woman pain”.
  • Latex/rubber: Plausibly the evolutionary specification includes details about attractiveness. Attractive people (ie those you should be most interested in having babies with) should be young and healthy (characteristics associated with better pregnancy outcomes, especially in the high-risk ancestral environment). The simplest sign of youth and good health is smooth skin, so the evolutionary message might say something about preferring sex with smooth-skinned people. Latex is a superstimulus for smooth skin, and maybe if you see it at the right time, in the right situation, it can totally overwhelm the rest of the message.
  • Urine/scat: Procreative sex involves a sticky substance that comes out of the genitals, it doesn’t take much misgeneralization to get to other sticky substances that come out of the genitals or nearby regions.
  • Bondage/domination/submission: Okay, I admit I don’t have a good just-so explanation for this one. Maybe it’s more psychological – people who have been told that sex is shameful can only fully appreciate it if they feel like a victim who’s been forced into it (and so carries no guilt). And people who have been told they’re undesirable and nobody could ever really love them can only fully appreciate it if their partner is a victim who has no choice in the matter.
  • Furries: This has to be because of all the cute cartoon animals, right? But why do some people sexually imprint on them? I found this article on worshippers of the 1990s cartoon mouse Gadget helpful here. Gadget obviously has many desirable characteristics — she’s a very cute nerdy woman who sometimes ends up in damsel-in-distress situations. Maybe she is the most sexualized being that some six-year-old boys have encountered. When I watched Rescue Rangers as a six-year old, I could feel my brain trying to figure out whether to have a crush on her before deciding that no, it was too deep in latency stage. I assume most people who get their first crushes on Gadget or some other desirable cartoon character end up with their brains later generalize properly to “I like cute nerdy women in damsel-in-distress situations”, but a small minority misgeneralize to “nope, I’m only attracted to mice now, that’s where I’m going to go with this.”

Combine this with equivalent animal “fetishes” — things like beetles species where the females have red dots on their backs, and the males try to mate with anything that has a red dot — and you get a picture where evolution tries to communicate a lot of contingent features of sex in the hopes that one of them will stick, then tells you to be attracted to whatever is most associated with those features. At least for men, I think the features communicated in the genomic message are simple things like curves and thrusting and genitals and smooth skin, plus something that somehow picks out the concept of “woman” (except in 3% of the male population, where it picks out the concept of “men” instead, plus another 3% where it doesn’t pick out a sex at all).

Real procreative sex usually matches enough of features of the genomic message to be attractive to most people, but if the original triggers were associated with some contingent characteristics, the brain might misinterpret that as part of the target — for example, if it was a cartoon animal, the brain might think the target includes cartoon animals.

Other times, something that isn’t procreative sex matches the genomic message closely enough to be misinterpreted as the center of the target (eg getting whipped); usually procreative sex is somewhere in the target space, but maybe not the exact center, and a few people have such strong fetishes that procreative sex doesn’t register as erotic at all.

The process of forming the category “sexually attractive things” is just a special case of the process of forming categories at all. I discuss the formation of categories like “happiness” and “morality” in The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life. Society feeds us some labeled data about what is good or bad — for example, we might see someone commit murder on TV, and our parents tell us “No! That’s bad! Don’t do that!” (and the other TV characters hate and punish that character). Then we try to extrapolate such incidents to a broader moral system. If we’re philosophers, we might go further and try to formally describe that moral system, eg Kantianism, utilitarianism, divine command theory, natural law, etc. All of these correctly predict the training data (eg “murder is bad”) while having different opinions on out-of-distribution environments. Which one you choose is just a function of some kind of mysterious intellectual preference for how to generalize inherently ungeneralizeable things — what I previously described as “extrapolating a three-dimensional shape from its two-dimensional reinforcement-learning shadow”.

Fetishes are the same way. Here the evolutionary message provides semi-labeled data, giving people weird feelings when they see certain kinds of curvy, smooth-skinned people. Then people try to generalize that into an idea of what’s sexy. Usually their category is centered (in the sense that the category “bird” is centered around “sparrow” and not “ostrich”) around something close to procreative heterosexual sex. Other times they generalize in some very unexpected way, and are only attracted to cartoon mice. I think if we understood the laws of generalization, this would make sense. It would seem like a reasonable mistake that someone using Occam’s Razor and all the rest of the information-theoretic toolkit for generalization could make. But we don’t really understand those laws beyond faint outlines, so instead we’re reduced to YKINMKBYKIOK.

July 5, 2023

The “orgasm gap”, yet another problematic front in the war of the sexes

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

Janice Fiamengo discusses the faked orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally and its role in the ongoing arguments over the “orgasm gap”:

An iconic moment in modern movie history is the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989), when Sally stuns an incredulous Harry with her rendition of a convincing orgasm. Her bravura performance causes shocked silence in the restaurant until one woman, sitting nearby, says admiringly (or enviously), “I’ll have what she’s having.”

The scene and the woman’s amused reaction told of a simple reality with wit and without judgement: some portion of women — perhaps many — are convincing fakers, and even a sexually experienced man will find it hard to be sure.

Many women in the movie audience laughed in recognition, and many men likely scratched their heads, wondering why anyone would need to fake sexual enjoyment. Some men may have remembered times when they faked it too. In the romantic-comedic world of the movie, the scene symbolized one of the differences between the average woman and the average man that only a generous and committed love could bridge.

A few years ago, When Harry Met Sally turned 30 years old, and its anniversary prompted a number of reflection pieces, some turning a harsh feminist lens on the film’s gender politics. In “‘I’ll have what she’s having’: How that scene from When Harry Met Sally changed the way we talk about sex,” Lisa Bonos at The Washington Post found in the fake climax scene a salutary revelation of male sexual arrogance. For Bonos, Harry is a typical macho man, someone who doesn’t care about a woman’s pleasure. The fact that the whole point of his conversation with Sally had been his confidence that he was giving women pleasure simply confirmed his emetic masculinity.

According to Bonos, the fact that some women fake orgasm supposedly reveals that women’s sexual pleasure is “not prioritized” in heterosexual relationships, and Sally’s performance gave sobering evidence of a gendered pleasure gap. It was implicitly the man’s fault that his partner felt the need to lie to him about her sexual satisfaction, and his desire for her to orgasm proved his typically male ego. Bonos’s analysis was an egregious violation of the spirit of the movie but was eminently faithful to the feminist perspective. The politics of grievance had come a long way in three decades.

Right on cue, studies in human psycho-sexuality are now taking up the same theme, alleging a culturally imposed “orgasm gap” between men and women in which men outpace women in the frequency with which they report orgasm during sexual intercourse (86% for men vs. 62% for women, according to one national survey).

Remembering how consistently feminist pundits have expressed outrage at male incels‘ (alleged) sense of “entitlement” to sex, I cannot help but find it ironic how unapologetically researchers assume a female entitlement to orgasm. Apparently, the whole society is to be concerned if women fail to climax every time they have sex, while no one has compassion for young men who face a lifetime of sexlessness. The prime exhibit is “Orgasm Equality: Scientific Findings and Societal Implications“, a paper published in 2020 by three female researchers at the University of Florida. The paper not only surveys the literature on the subject but also makes recommendations for “a world of orgasm equality”.

June 28, 2023

QotD: Freud and modern Feminism

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

I recently came across an article about Sigmund Freud’s theory of female psycho-sexual development, in which Taylor Kubota described penis envy as follows: “Women become envious of penises at a young age, when they realize boys derive more sexual pleasure from their penises than girls do from their own sexual organs. Freud said this penis envy grows over time.” This idea, which I had long disregarded and which didn’t correspond to my own experience (as a child I never saw or thought of boys’ penises; as a young woman I had no sense of lack) makes sense now in light of feminism’s decades-long attack on male sexuality. The attack is based, as feminists’ own words and policies indicate, on a febrile mix of resentment, envy, and projection in which the belief that men enjoy sex more than women (and that the enjoyment hurts women, in the typical zero-sum thinking of feminism) has fueled ever-more frenzied attempts at male neutering.

Serious psychotherapists or students of Freud should probably stop reading right now, as I am not attempting a genuine psychoanalytic analysis of feminism or indeed of penis envy, which has been widely dismissed as sexist or justified as women’s accurate recognition of men’s power. My theory — if it deserves that name — stems from the recognition that anti-sex feminism, involving the continual projection onto men of female sexual anxieties and discontents, has a far more extensive pedigree than most people realize, and that much feminist discussion and activism today take for granted that law and public policy are rightly directed towards “equalizing” not only rights or opportunities but also sexual experience itself, by prioritizing female pleasure and diminishing male.

It’s no revelation that many feminist-influenced women are hyper-alert to male advantage while being willfully blind to male disadvantage. In the arena of sexuality, where male and female most intimately and yet mysteriously interact, the irrational ferocity of feminist grievance-mongering reveals itself tellingly. Unwilling and unable to extend sympathetic understanding to male sexual difference, feminist ideology authorizes an envy-fueled anger that far surpasses legitimate caution.

A word about that legitimate caution. Throughout history, well-functioning societies have recognized the threat to civil order — and to women’s safety in particular — of male lust, and have passed laws and constructed codes of behavior to contain and direct it. Fathers and husbands have always been interested in protecting their womenfolk from sexual violence. Feminists, however, while exalting female sexuality as benign and beautiful, have repeatedly refused to recognize any manifestation of male sexuality as good. A mere glance at prominent feminist claims and policy initiatives highlights their continual misrepresentations.

Janice Fiamengo, “Do Feminists Suffer From Penis Envy?”, The Fiamengo File, 2023-03-26.

June 15, 2023

QotD: Incels

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

Incidentally, I am thoroughly convinced that a majority of self-described incels are men who could find meaningful and fulfilling sexual and romantic success, both short-term and long, but who have developed such a wildly unrealistic idea about what actual human women look like that their standards are laughably high. And it’s easy to make fun of that, but I also think that the conditioning inherent to constantly looking at filtered and photoshopped pictures is powerful.

Freddie deBoer, “Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed”, Freddie deBoer, 2023-03-07.

May 4, 2023

British civil servants apparently need to have training on BDSM theory and practice

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Spiked, Malcolm Clark outlines the proposal to be discussed at a civil service union conference next month:

“Cologne BDSM 07” by CSD2006 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

For years, the LGBT lobby has wreaked havoc across the UK’s civil service. It has helped to turn the machinery of government into a crèche for the kind of people who can’t remember what pronouns they’re using that day. But this may have just been a taster of what’s to come. Kink, it seems, is the new frontier in identity politics. Get ready to meet the “BDSM” lobby.

Next month, at its annual conference, the biggest civil-service union, PCS, will discuss a motion calling on Whitehall to set up a network for staff who are into bondage, domination and sado-masochism (BDSM). I suppose there’s one thing to be said for this daft idea. The more time these jobsworths spend slapping each other around, the less time they’ll have to humiliate and torment members of the taxpaying public.

There are a few obvious problems with this proposed BDSM staff network. For one, its advocates have called for workplace training courses about BDSM. No, I’m not making this up. The suggested courses would explain that “mutual informed consent … is needed before erotic activity is carried out”. This is a statement of the obvious to most of us. Who says entry standards for the civil service are slipping?

You may have assumed that the priority of our civil service should be carrying out the business of government, rather than BDSM advocacy. Perhaps it should be getting on top of the fact that only three per cent of hospital trusts in England hit cancer waiting-time targets in 2022? Or the fact that 360,000 people had to wait more than 10 weeks for their passport last year?

One strange thing about this demand for training courses for kink-meisters is that it flies in the face of other recent staff demands. Across Whitehall, as in private industry, advocacy groups have long insisted that Britain’s workplaces have developed a toxic culture that does not respect sexual boundaries. Reams of new guidelines have been drawn up in response. Many of these guidelines consider asking questions about someone’s sex life to be, in itself, a form of sexual harassment. Yet now we could soon have staff networks based solely around people’s private sex lives. And what would a meeting of sexual fetishists discuss if not their sex lives? The weather?

Even twenty years ago, it was a common witticism to refer to workplace meetings as “beatings”, but this is a long way past a casual joke (that yes, is probably risky to make in most modern workplaces, as someone is bound to find offence).

While looking for an appropriate image to accompany this post, I was quickly reminded why most search engines now offer varying levels of “safe” viewing.

April 24, 2023

Even fighter pilots and gunners have love lives

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, John Sturgis reviews a new book by Luke Turner titled Men at War: Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, which considers the myths and reality of wartime relationships during the Second World War:

Spitfire pilot Ian Gleed shot down five enemy aircraft in just a week in May 1940 — the fastest time in which this had ever been done, making him an official “ace” who would be quickly promoted to Wing Commander.

Gleed had become a poster boy for “the few”, the hero pilots of the Battle of Britain to whom so many would owe so much. He lived up to the popular image with his talk of “a bloody good show” and shooting down “damned Huns”, after which he’d sink a few warm beers and spend some “wizard” free time recuperating with his girlfriend Pam, whom he “loved now more than ever”.

Gleed’s luck finally ran out over Tunisia in April 1943 when his plane was hit by a German fighter and crashed into dunes. Gleed was killed. He was just 26.

It would only emerge decades later that much of the popular image he had cultivated simply wasn’t true. Gleed was gay. Pam was an imaginary character he had invented as a cover to keep his double life as a sexually active homosexual firmly secret.

Gleed’s story is one of many similar vignettes in this alternative history of the Second World War. Its author Luke Turner’s previous book was a memoir about his own grappling with issues around his identity as a bisexual. Here he takes up the question of how this would have played out for him and other sexual non-conformists in 1939–45.

Turner grew up obsessed with the war — everything from Airfix kits and Dad’s Army to Stalingrad and the Berlin bunker — and here he examines what it was to live through that period as a sexually active person of whatever hue. It proves a particularly rich subject matter as sex seems to have been everywhere in war time: everyone was sleeping with everyone else, apparently. It’s a perennial truth that you or I might be hit by a bus tomorrow — but make that bus a bomb, and suddenly this seems to create a sense of urgency which frequently manifests itself sexually, lending daily life what Turner calls “an aphrodisiac quality”. As Quentin Crisp put it when describing the shenanigans in blacked-out, Blitz London: “As soon as the bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed.”

Whilst war may see an explosion of sex of all kinds, the establishment was not always comfortable with this. A Home Office report on public behaviour in London during the Blitz noted, “In several districts cases of blatant immorality in shelters are reported; this upsets other occupants of the shelters.”

One contemporary account suggests, “In wartime a uniform, whether of the Army, Navy or Air Force, to the average girl ranks as a fetish.” This had consequences in the field: Dear John letters from home could be a real problem in this regard. As an Army report in 1942 put it, morale is often damaged by “the suspicion, very frequently justified, of fickleness on behalf of wives and girls”.

Amongst all this sex was, of course, sex with Americans. Turner cites George Formby who captured this mood in the song “Our Fanny’s Gone All Yankee”: “She don’t wait for the dark when she wants to have a lark/In a bus or train she does her hanky panky.”

Then in a dark reversal of this two-nations-colliding-sexually motif, we get the horror of the Red Army’s organised rape of as many as 1.4 milllion German women during the Russian advance on Berlin, whose residents would later refer to the city’s grandiose monument to Soviet war dead as “the tomb of the unknown rapist”.

April 15, 2023

QotD: When the pick-up artist became “coded right”

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

When did pickup artistry become criminal? Relying on online sex gurus for advice on persuading women into bed used to be seen as a fallback for introverted, physically unprepossessing “beta males”. And for this reason, in the 2000s, the discipline was promoted by the mainstream media as a way of instilling confidence in sexually-frustrated nerds. MTV’s The Pickup Artist shamelessly broadcast its tactics, with dating coaches encouraging young men to prey upon reluctant women, hoping to “neg” and “kino escalate” them into “number closes“. Contestants advanced through women of increasing difficulty (picking-up a stripper was regarded as “the ultimate challenge”) with the most-skilled “winning” the show.

Today, the global face of pickup artistry is Andrew Tate: sculpted former kickboxing champion, self-described “misogynist”, and, now, alleged human trafficker. Whatever results from the current allegations, his fall is a defining moment in the cultural history of the now inseparable worlds of the political manosphere and pickup artistry, and provides an opportunity to reflect upon their entangled history.

Pickup artistry burst onto the scene in the 2000s, propelled by the success of Neil Strauss’s best-selling book The Game. More a page-turning potboiler cataloguing the mostly empty lives of pickup artists (PUAs) than a how-to guide (though Strauss wrote one of those too), the methods in the book had been developed through years of research shared on internet forums. The “seduction underground”, as the large online community of people doing this research was called, then became the subject of widespread media attention. Through pickup artistry, the aggressive, formulaic predation of women was normalised as esteem boosting, and men such as those described in Strauss’s The Game could be viewed in a positive light: they had transformed from zero to hero and taken what was rightfully theirs.

The emergence of PUAs generated a swift backlash. The feminist blogs of the mid-to-late 2000s internet, of which publications like Jezebel still survive as living fossils, rushed to pillory them. The attacks weren’t without justification, but the world of PUAs during this period, much like the similarly wild-and-woolly bodybuilding forums, had no obvious political dimension beyond some sort of generic libertarianism. It was only after these initial critiques that it began to be coded as Right-wing by those on the Left. Duly labelled, PUAs and other associated manosphere figures drifted in that direction. MTV’s dating coaches were not part of the political landscape, merely feckless goofballs and low-level conmen capable of entertaining the masses. But their successors would be overtly political actors.

Oliver Bateman, “Why pick-up artists joined the Online Right”, UnHerd, 2023-01-08.

March 30, 2023

QotD: Revealed preference in the teenage hellscape of high school

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

This demonization of masculinity conflicts with the reality that any boy can see with his own two eyes: The cutest girls in school are attracted to the most masculine boys, and masculine not just in terms of physical traits, but also in terms of personality traits — confidence, assertiveness, “swagger”. Here we see a problem with what Rational Male author Rollo Tomassi calls the feminine-primary social order. Every observant man knows that there is a yawning chasm between (a) what women say they value most in a man and (b) the kind of man women actually go for. Listen to what women say, and you’d think they are magnetically attracted to “sensitive” guys. Watch what women actually do, and you can see that women obviously don’t actually care about “sensitivity”. Women want men who are tall and muscular and, ceteris parabus, rich, although no amount of money is going to make a short chubby guy sexy. As for the claim that women go for “sensitive” guys, anyone with two eyes and a brain knows this is nonsense. You don’t see throngs of lovestruck college girls chasing after guys who major in sociology or English literature (unless, of course, these guys are also tall, muscular and rich). No, it’s the jocks and frat boys who get the best action on campus, and if you pay attention to the choices women make, you’ll begin to suspect that their professed preference for “sensitive” men is the exact opposite of truth. That girl who was lecturing you about your need to be more “sensitive” will, with surprising regularity, end up falling head-over-heels for some selfish creep or dimwit brute who can’t even spell the word “sensitivity”.

Robert Stacy McCain, “Conflicting Signals”, The Other McCain, 2019-05-23.

February 18, 2023

QotD: The rise of the “demisexuals”

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

For those not in the know, demisexuality refers to the state of not experiencing sexual attraction or desire without a strong emotional bond. The term originated on a role-playing forum back in the early Noughties, where a teenage girl assigned it to one of her fictional characters. But after it migrated onto Tumblr in 2011, it was adopted in earnest by extremely young and terminally online users who collected identity markers like they were baseball cards. Outside Tumblr, the reaction was largely sceptical; as many a snarky commenter pointed out in the moment, the whole idea of demisexuality also described the normal sexual experience of, if not everyone, then an awful lot of people, most of whom never felt the need or desire to append a label to their sexual preferences. The delighted self-discovery of the teen who wrote the aforementioned letter was only slightly tempered by this concern: “[Some] people are saying it’s people trying to be ‘special snowflakes’ by putting a label on this kind of attraction,” she wrote.

But if the whole thing seemed frankly silly and, okay, snowflakey, it also seemed pretty harmless. Gender and sexuality were just the latest lens through which young people were trying to understand their place in the world; “demisexuality” was to 2013 what being a little goth-curious was for a teen in 1995, more or less — except that with so much of life happening online, this identity was less about how you moved through the world than about finding just the right flag to affix to your social media profile. But unlike shopping at Claire’s Accessories, demisexuality didn’t stay a teenage conceit; a combination of creeping identitarianism in mainstream culture plus a general obsession with What The Youths Are Into eventually made the concept irresistible to adult millennial women.

“IT HAPPENED TO ME: I’m A Demisexual,” read the headline on a 2015 essay on the site XOJane, where the author boldly proclaimed that her inability to feel sexual attraction toward strangers made her “not quite heterosexual”.

The essay was met with a fair amount of ridicule, for all the obvious reasons — “they want to be oppressed so bad” was the unkind but not entirely untrue thrust of the critiques — but there was something about the way it lamented “the many struggles of living in such a sexually charged culture” that spoke to the anxieties of digital natives trying to navigate a post-sexual revolution dating scene. Hookup culture, dating apps, the endless sorting and filtering of potential suitors in a manner that resembled online shopping more than human connection: it’s no surprise that people struggling in this system jumped on a term, a hard-wired identity, that offered an explanation as to why. The young women who adopted a “demisexual” label as a means of opting out were less angry than their closest analogue, the young male incel, but both shared a sense that the system was broken. If male incels were made miserable by the spectre of the sex they wanted but could have, the demisexuals were perhaps equally tormented by the pressure to want, full stop.

Seven years after the XOJane essay, demisexuality remains a contested notion but also a far more visible one, in everything from beer marketing to dating guides, as with this recent dispatch from the dating app Hinge. A hypothetical demisexual dater asks, “What’s the best way to set expectations around waiting to get sexual?”, prompting a supportive but altogether unintelligible response from the app’s resident therapist that is short on actionable information and long on inscrutable axioms like: “Boundaries are bridges, not fences.” (Are they, though?)

Demisexual visibility seems to have less to do with a grassroots shift in human sexuality, and more to do with its corporate profitability. In a world of identity-driven marketing, a massive piece of the pie awaited any advertiser who figured out how to make young, male-attracted women (the group that includes most demisexuals) feel special and seen — and, of course, not quite heterosexual, thus saving them from the curse of being just another basic cishet bitch.

Kat Rosenfield, “Demisexuals are scared of sex”, UnHerd, 2022-11-07.

February 14, 2023

QotD: Outrage

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

Though they bang on about polyamory, I can’t help thinking that outrage is to this generation what sex was to mine. We used to sneer at Mrs Whitehouse when I was young and snigger that if she had more sex she wouldn’t be so cross all the time. It was a childish response, I know. But I can’t help thinking that if the young of today actually practised their kinks more and wailed for validation of them less, they might cheer up a bit.

Julie Burchill, “The pervert community? Oh please”, Spiked!, 2019-05-08

January 6, 2023

QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I’ll be the first to admit that I not only don’t understand the business side of it, but the whole concept leaves me cold. Yes, of course, like any young man from the latter half of the 20th century I’ve seen a few pornos, gone to a few strip clubs, and so forth. Both were bachelor party rites of passage in my day; lord knows what they do now, and maybe that’s part of the OnlyFans sales model — since guys can’t go out to seedy strip clubs or get together as a bachelor party and watch a porno (too much Toxic Male Gaze, #MeToo) they have to do it virtually. And I don’t get that, either. Looking at sex strikes me as pointless — either put me in, coach, or I’m going to find some other, more productive use of my time — and looking but not touching at a strip club seems even dumber.

Given that I am not in the target audience for OnlyFans, then, perhaps all my speculations are hilariously wrong. And obviously there’s a robust market for porn, so it stands to reason that a la carte porn would have, if anything, an even bigger market …

… but do we trust those numbers? Everything in Clown World is fake and gay, and everything to do with the Internet has always been … how shall we put this? Factually dubious. This was true even when the Internet was a Libertarian paradise (for the young guys out there: Back in the build-your-own-modem days, I’m told, the Internet was hardcore Libertarian. By the time I got there, it was still very, very Right. Which stands to reason — you needed patience, discipline, and a little savvy to be online back then, and those are not Leftist qualities). OnlyFans claims a subscriber base of X, with revenues of Y. Do we have any reason to believe those are even within shouting distance of reality?

Money laundering seems like a live option.

My other guess was kompromat. I understand that Chinese Intelligence has all but openly admitted that TikTok is part of a targeted program to spread deviance, and if it has some intel benefit that’s a bonus. I figure OnlyFans had some sort of similar function. We all know that the classic “honey pot” is alive and well — Eric Swalwell and of course Hunter Biden say hi — but why bother running a real agent at somebody when he’s perfectly willing to put all his deviant desires in writing, backed by his credit card number?

I checked out OnlyFans — on Wikipedia; for research — and hey, whaddaya know, they got in on The Current Thing in Ukraine. Given what we know about Vladimir Putin, I’m sure he’s real broken up about that. It probably works pretty well as “open source” domestic intelligence, too — just as your enemies are busy uploading their own blackmail photos, so your domestic deviants are busy outing themselves on the other side of the transaction. Indeed, the only thing that surprises me is that the usual (((retards))) aren’t blaming it on the Mossad …

… actually I’m sure they are, and I do NOT want to know about it, but the point is, the whole thing seems really sketchy. So what are your thoughts? Money laundering scheme? PsyOp? Really obvious intelligence ploy? Or is it exactly what it seems like, desperately horny betas doing their thing?

(Based on what I saw on Facebook etc., I’m almost willing to believe the latter. All a recognizably human female has to do is post a cleavage shot on Facebook and she’ll get a hundred thirsty simps complimenting her. It’s the money thing that gets me, though. Being a simp in the Facebook comments is free).

Severian, “The E-Thot Economy”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-05.

December 15, 2022

“Intense staring” aka the “Toxic Male Gaze” on the London Underground

Filed under: Britain, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jennie Cummings-Knight on a recent publicity campaign to discourage male passengers on the London Underground from “intense staring”:

“London underground” by @Doug88888 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

… there might be reasons that a man stares intensely without sexual intent. For example, he could have autism and not really understand his behaviour might be considered as “staring”. Or he might be short sighted, or daydreaming about his holiday. Moreover, London Transport trains are used by people of all kinds from all over the world, including ordinary people from countries where staring is not seen as threatening e.g. in Spain. Indeed people in the UK are relatively comfortable with eye-contact, though those from outside London might not be aware that in the confined spaces of the London Underground “tube” trains, people tend to be unusually sensitive to eye contact. Although London Transport’s idea may be well intentioned, it doesn’t seem to take these individual and cultural differences into account. Perhaps its main effect will be to make women excessively worried about being stared at, and make men excessively worried about being jailed for accidentally looking at a woman in the “wrong” way.

But there are many layers to this issue. Speaking as a woman, I am always fascinated by the double standards exhibited by women with respect to male behaviour. We are only interested in being looked at by men if we find the said man or men to be attractive to us. This means that we can be potentially offended by the gaze of any man who falls into the following short list:

  • Men we don’t know
  • Men who we don’t find attractive
  • Men who we feel are “punching above their weight” with regard to giving us their attention in this way

At the same time, the curious paradox is that, in spite of our assertions that we don’t need male attention (see the Toy Story 4 Bo Beep character, developed by feminist writers) and that we want to be taken seriously as we pursue our careers, we still take a lot of trouble to look attractive to men. This behaviour can start very young and persist into later adulthood. Teenage girls growing up in the 2000s are still hitching up their skirt waistbands as they come out of school on an afternoon. Teenage girls clubbing at the weekend still dress as provocatively as possible (if the ones I see on late night trains on a regular basis are anything to go by). Why dress in this way if we don’t want to be looked at?

I would suggest that the need to be seen by the male is deeply wired in the subconscious of most women. Sadly, girls as young as 9 years old are worrying about the shape of their intimate private parts. The fact is that women are having more cosmetic procedures than ever before in order to look the most attractive that they can. Men are having more cosmetic procedures too, but not to the same degree. Women who are only attracted to women seem, in my experience, to be less concerned with their physical attractiveness per se and more concerned with dressing in a way that fits in with lesbian group culture.

If we truly believe that we are liberated females, how is it that we are still so obsessed with having the perfect body/and or face? Where does this female need “to be seen” come from? On one level, what they do not realise is that they are looking for “ideal shapes” imagined at least in part, by the porn industry. On another level, if we look at evolutionary history, we see that male and female roles are rooted in survival behaviours appropriate to a hunter/gatherer society, and to the safe nurturing of children. The men were the hunters looking out for prey, and women were tied closer to the homestead because of child rearing. The more inward “yin” role for women, arising from their nurturing role and the physicality of the growth of the baby inside the woman’s body, followed by the nourishment in the early months from her body for the baby, has resulted in women being especially responsive to touch.

Men on the other hand, tend to be more visually aroused, and have an inborn, primeval need to look outwards (the outward thrusting nature of “yang”) which includes looking at the female. In the same way, the need to look around the field when hunting results in looking at whatever is in their peripheral vision. It is simply not possible for a man to stop looking at women unless he goes against this instinctive behaviour and keeps his eyes to the ground. If he does this, he may then also miss other visual cues which give him important information about dangers around and in front of him. 

December 14, 2022

Point – “Society cannot be so radically changed”

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

Counterpoint – Western culture since 1960:

“The Pill” by starbooze is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 .

The discussion of the causes of the problem is clear enough, whereas the discussion of possible solutions leaves much to be desired.

It seems to me rational to say that if the loss of family life was caused by the pill leading to abortion leading to the normalization of fornication, which in turn leads to ten percent of high-status males being sought by sixty percent of females, which in turn incentivizes fornication — because any woman unwilling to play the unpayed whore on the first date will be quickly replaced by one more willing — and if this in turn leads to a anti-child culture where the normal expectations and social support for mothers with children is lost, that therefore the solution is not to have maternal women try harder and made more sacrifices than the grandmothers were asked to make.

The solution is to normalize monogamy, which is impossible as long as contraception is not seen as the grave moral evil it is. Hence the solution, as soon as the culture atmosphere permits it, is to illegalize contraception.

After 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglicans spoke of contraception as permissible. The resolution, which passed 193 to 67 with 47 abstentions, is said to be the first instance where any responsible authority – not simply in Christendom but in any culture – had publicly supported, in any way at all, the use of artificial contraception.

Many other denominations followed suit and caved in on this issue.

The Roman Catholic Church teaches, and maintains, that contraception, in addition to being imprudent and damaging to the woman’s long-interests best interests, is a sin.

This is an ancient teaching which reaches back to the First Century. See, for example, the teaching manual of the Apostles, the Didache reads: “You shall not practice birth control, you shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill what is begotten”. — Many scholars translate this as “practice sorcery” or “use potions” because the Greek word “pharmakon” (from which we get our word for pharmaceutical) sometimes has that meaning. However, it also means to use medicines, potions, or poisons, and the term was also used to refer to contraceptive measure, as it does here.

This is a core Christian teaching, and always has been.

The medical knowledge that chemical contraception, aka “the pill”, meddles with female hormones and induces depression and other mental disorders apparently is an insufficient motivator to reverse this poisonous addiction by the whole society.

Does returning to a society that respects women, follows wisdom, and disapproves of sex desecrated to mere recreation, and forbids our womenfolk to be degraded to harlots, seem impossible? Look around you. The sexual grooming of gradeschoolers and the surgical mutilation of their genitals due to sexual neurosis is a direct result of the sexual revolution, as is the abomination and absurdity of Orwellian gay marriage.

It may not be as impossible to convince the public that the alternative of happy marriages is so much less desirable than the hell of sexual self-mutilation, pornography, and perversion seen around us. It is not as if the Left will be satisfied with castration and mastectomy performed on children, once this is normalized. They will move on to the next thing, and after that, the next.

There is no final level. Hell is bottomless.

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