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
February 14, 2023
QotD: Outrage
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January 6, 2023
QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”
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.
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December 15, 2022
“Intense staring” aka the “Toxic Male Gaze” on the London Underground
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 
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… 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.
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December 14, 2022
Point – “Society cannot be so radically changed”
Counterpoint – Western culture since 1960:
“The Pill” by starbooze is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 
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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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November 29, 2022
QotD: People have always lied about sex, but GenZ’ers lie even more than you’d expect
By the end of my last tour of duty, most college kids were dour puritans. I know, I know, but hear me out. This is the thing people keep forgetting about the Internet: People lie. I know we all know that consciously, but we seem hardwired to believe confessions. In the same way that we might not consciously watch TV — might go some distance out of our way to avoid it — but find ourselves staring mindlessly at the blinking screen when we’re in a bar or a waiting room or something. It seems to be hardwired. So when these folks start writing about all the bizarre sexual shit they’re into, we just … believe them. Sight unseen.
But y’all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. I want to state, unequivocally and for the record, that my entire knowledge of undergrads’ sex lives is secondhand. I have zero personal experience in this area. But it’s a close secondhand. For one thing, there’s not much to do in College Town that doesn’t involve undergrads, so I ended up drinking at a lot of the same bars, and in vino veritas. Second, kids these days have no filter. None whatsoever. Finally, social media — my last tour was at a SPLAC, where they strongly encouraged the faculty to be “friends” with the student body on their campus social media apps.
And yeah, they SAY a lot of things … but I highly, highly doubt they actually DO much of anything at all.
For one thing, those “student” bars were lucky I and a few other semi-normal profs were still in our “drink away the pain” phase, because otherwise they would’ve gone out of business. Friday and Saturday nights during football season were still pretty lively, but the rest of the week the “downtown” bars had all the crackling energy of singles’ night down at the mortuary.
Kids just don’t socialize much IRL, and when they do, they don’t hook up. In my not-inconsiderable experience, college drinking these days is like college anything — a grim, pinch-faced, assembly-line business. They intend to get blackout hammered, and they get after it like Heroes of Socialist Labor. Pausing for a quickie in the bathroom would mean skipping a turn in the drinking game — and they all play drinking games; it’s bizarre — so no thanks.
And y’all, those are the outgoing ones. The ones who still have some slight urge to see and be seen out in physical space. The rest of ’em never leave their rooms except at gunpoint, and when you force them to, their eyes never leave their phones.
That’s why I’d bet many crisp stacks of Crispus Attucks that all the “kink” in their social media profiles — even their personal ads — are just for show. They’re not listing all that stuff in order to find someone to have sex with. They’re using it as an excuse not to have sex with anybody, because “having sex with” entails personal interaction and they’re terrified of that. If they ever perfect those VR sex helmets like they had in Demolition Man, watch out, but as of now the whole idea is to seem weird and daring and liberated and kinky, but with no possibility of a follow-up. Oh, you’re into aardvarks and dental tools too? Um … yay? Oh, wait, you dress up as O. a. erikssoni, and I’m only into O. a. leptodon. Sorry!
Severian, “Saturday Miscellania”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-13.
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November 22, 2022
QotD: The obligatory orgy scene
It seems that all opera productions these days need an orgy scene, just as doctoral theses in the Soviet Union used to need at least one quotation from Lenin. There was a time when an orgy would have been censored, but now it is obligatory — no opera without one. There was a brief orgy scene in the last Flying Dutchman that I saw, and it was a bit of a relief when they got it over with because I knew that it must be coming and tension mounted until it did. It was a bit like childhood diseases in the old days: The sooner you had them, the quicker you got over them.
The problem with orgies is that once you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all, and these days they are staged literally rather than suggestively, as if the aging audience has to be reminded of what sex actually is. Moreover, they are staged like a tableau of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the fin de siècle compendium of what used to be called, in those far-off judgmental days, perversions. The implicit, however, is more powerful than the explicit, or it used to be. The explicit, in fact, is the enemy of the voluptuous.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Adding Injury to Insult”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-01-20
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November 17, 2022
The Pornstars of World War Two – Pin-Ups – On the Homefront 017
World War Two
Published 16 Nov 2022How do you motivate men to leave home and go fight in a foreign land? Send them packing with Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, and Irene Manning, of course! It helps if you include an Esquire magazine and girlie cartoons from the infamous Alberto Vargas.
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November 7, 2022
“We are the descendants of good team players”
Rob Henderson considers the Male-Warrior hypothesis:
The male-warrior hypothesis has two components:
- Within a same-sex human peer group, conflict between individuals is equally prevalent for both sexes, with overt physical conflict more common among males
- Males are more likely to reduce conflict within their group if they find themselves competing against an outgroup
The idea is that, compared with all-female groups, all-male groups will (on average) display an equal or greater amount of aggression and hostility toward one another. But when they are up against another group in a competitive situation, cooperation increases within male groups and remains the same among female groups.
Rivalries with other human groups in the ancestral environment in competition for resources and reproductive partners shaped human psychology to make distinctions between us and them. Mathematical modeling of human evolution suggests that human cooperation is a consequence of competition.
Humans who did not make this distinction — those who were unwilling to support their group to prevail against other groups — did not survive. We are the descendants of good team players.
It used to be accepted as a given that males were more aggressive toward one another than females. This is because researchers often used measures of overt aggression. For instance, researchers would observe kids at a playground and record the number of physical altercations that occurred and compare how they differed by sex. Unsurprisingly, boys push each other around and get into fights more than girls.
But when researchers expanded their definition of aggression to include verbal aggression and indirect aggression (rumor spreading, gossiping, ostracism, and friendship termination) they found that girls score higher on indirect aggression and no sex differences in verbal aggression.
The most common reasons people give for their most recent act of aggression are threats to social status and reputational concerns.
Intergroup conflict has been a fixture throughout human history. Anthropological and archaeological accounts indicate conflict, competition, antagonism, and aggression both within and between groups. But violence is at its most intense between groups.
A cross-cultural study of 31 hunter-gatherer societies found that 64 percent engaged in warfare once every 2 years.
Men are the primary participants in such conflicts. Human males across societies are responsible for 90 percent of the murders and make up about 80 percent of the victims.
The evolution of coalitional aggression has produced different psychological mechanisms in men and women.
Just as with direct versus indirect aggression, though, homicide might be easier to observe and track with men. When a man beats another man to death, it is clear what has happened. Female murder might be less visible and less traceable.
Here’s an example.
There’s a superb book called Yanoama: The Story of Helena Valero. It’s a biography of a Spanish girl abducted by the Kohorochiwetari, an indigenous Amazonian tribe. She recounts the frequent conflicts between different communities in the Amazon. After decades of living in various indigenous Amazonian communities, Valero manages to leave and describes her experiences to an Italian biologist, who published the book in 1965.
In the book, Helena Valero describes arriving in a new tribe. Some other girls were suspicious of her. One girl gives Valero a folded packet of leaves containing a foul-smelling substance. She tells Valero that it’s a snack, but that if she doesn’t like it she can give it to someone else. Valero finds the smell repulsive and sets it aside. Later, a small child picks up the leaf packet, takes a bite, and falls deathly ill. The child tells everyone that he got the leaf packet from Valero. The entire community accuses Valero of trying to poison the child, and banishes her from the tribe, with some firing arrows at her as she runs deep into the forest.
The girl who gave Valero the poisonous leaf packet formed a win-win strategy in her quest to eliminate her rival:
- Valero eats the leaf packet and dies
- Or she gives it to someone else who dies and she is blamed for it, followed by being ostracized or killed by the community
This is some high-level indirect aggression. Few men would ever think that far ahead (supervillains in movies notwithstanding). For most men, upon seeing a newcomer they view as a potential rival, they would just physically challenge him. Or kill him in his sleep or something, and that would be that.
Point is, this girl would have been responsible for Valero’s demise had she died. But no one would have known. If a man in the tribe, enraged at the death of the small child, had killed Valero, then he would be recorded as her killer. Or if Valero had been mauled by a jaguar while fleeing, then her death wouldn’t have been considered a murder.
Interestingly, the book implies that Valero was viewed as relatively attractive by the men, which likely means the girl who attempted to poison her was also relatively attractive (because she viewed her as a rival). Studies demonstrate that among adolescent girls, greater attractiveness is associated with greater use of aggressive tactics (both direct and indirect) against their rivals.
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October 25, 2022
QotD: How con-men and charlatans use the Forer Effect
- You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
- You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
- You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
- While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
- Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
- Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
- At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
- You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
- You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.
- You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
- At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
- Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
- Security is one of your major goals in life.
… most people will agree that the statements accurately describe them. In fact, most people will feel like they’re unusually accurate descriptions, which is how astrologers get you.
What statements show a Forer effect? Wikipedia just says they should be vague and somewhat positive. Can we do better?
A lot of Forer statements above are about the contrast between internal experience and outward behavior — for example “disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside”. All of this is implicitly comparative — since there’s no objective measure for how disciplined you should be, “disciplined” implicitly means “more disciplined than other people”. Take this into account, and you can rephrase many of these statements as “Although everyone else is really X, you are Y pretending to be X”.
Now the trick is obvious. You can access your internal experience, and you know what kind of things you’re pretending. But you can only access everyone else’s external presentation, which (absent specific evidence otherwise) you mostly believe. So whenever everyone is Y pretending to be X, it will feel like “although everyone else is really X, I am Y pretending to be X”.
Consider the fifth statement above: “Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you”. Everyone has to go through their own sexual adjustment. But usually they hide it from everyone else except maybe some unlucky early sexual partners. Sexual adjustment is terrible, and so without any opportunity to calibrate, most people assume it can’t possibly be quite that bad for other people. So if an astrologer reads a star-chart and predicts “I bet you had an unusually tough sexual adjustment”, most people will agree the astrologer is right.
Scott Alexander, “Forer Statements as Updates And Affirmations”, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-07-27.
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October 24, 2022
The rise of “Queer Theory”
In City Journal, Christopher F. Rufo provides the background that has lead to the widespread phenomenon of “Drag Queen Story Hour”:
Start with queer theory, the academic discipline born in 1984 with the publication of Gayle S. Rubin’s essay “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”. Beginning in the late 1970s, Rubin, a lesbian writer and activist, had immersed herself in the subcultures of leather, bondage, orgies, fisting, and sado-masochism in San Francisco, migrating through an ephemeral network of BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism) clubs, literary societies, and New Age spiritualist gatherings. In “Thinking Sex”, Rubin sought to reconcile her experiences in the sexual underworld with the broader forces of American society. Following the work of the French theorist Michel Foucault, Rubin sought to expose the power dynamics that shaped and repressed human sexual experience.
“Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value,” Rubin wrote. “Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. … Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries.”
Rubin’s project — and, by extension, that of queer theory — was to interrogate, deconstruct, and subvert this sexual hierarchy and usher in a world beyond limits, much like the one she had experienced in San Francisco. The key mechanism for achieving this turn was the thesis of social construction. “The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist alternative to” the view that sex is a natural and pre-political phenomenon, Rubin wrote. “Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms.” In other words, traditional conceptions of sex, regarding it as a natural behavior that reflects an unchanging order, are pure mythology, designed to rationalize and justify systems of oppression. For Rubin and later queer theorists, sex and gender were infinitely malleable. There was nothing permanent about human sexuality, which was, after all, “political”. Through a revolution of values, they believed, the sexual hierarchy could be torn down and rebuilt in their image.
There was some reason to believe that Rubin might be right. The sexual revolution had been conquering territory for two decades: the birth-control pill, the liberalization of laws surrounding marriage and abortion, the intellectual movements of feminism and sex liberation, the culture that had emerged around Playboy magazine. By 1984, as Rubin acknowledged, stable homosexual couples had achieved a certain amount of respectability in society. But Rubin, the queer theorists, and the fetishists of the BDSM subculture wanted more. They believed that they were on the cusp of fundamentally transforming sexual norms. “There [are] historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized,” Rubin wrote. “In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.” And, following the practice of any good negotiator, they laid out their theory of the case and their maximum demands. As Rubin explained: “A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.” Once the ground is softened and the conventions are demystified, the sexual revolutionaries could do the work of rehabilitating the figures at the bottom of the hierarchy — “transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers”.
Where does this process end? At its logical conclusion: the abolition of restrictions on the behavior at the bottom end of the moral spectrum — pedophilia. Though she uses euphemisms such as “boylovers” and “men who love underaged youth”, Rubin makes her case clearly and emphatically. In long passages throughout “Thinking Sex”, Rubin denounces fears of child sex abuse as “erotic hysteria”, rails against anti–child pornography laws, and argues for legalizing and normalizing the behavior of “those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries”. These men are not deviants, but victims, in Rubin’s telling. “Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation,” she explains. “Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch hunt.” Rubin wrote fondly of those primitive hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea in which “boy-love” was practiced freely.
Such positions are hardly idiosyncratic within the discipline of queer theory. The father figure of the ideology, Foucault, whom Rubin relies upon for her philosophical grounding, was a notorious sadomasochist who once joined scores of other prominent intellectuals to sign a petition to legalize adult–child sexual relationships in France. Like Rubin, Foucault haunted the underground sex scene in the Western capitals and reveled in transgressive sexuality. “It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” Foucault once told an interviewer on the question of sex between adults and minors. “And to assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.”
Rubin’s American compatriots made the same argument even more explicitly. Longtime Rubin collaborator Pat Califia, who would later become a transgender man, claimed that American society had turned pedophiles into “the new communists, the new niggers, the new witches”. For Califia, age-of-consent laws, religious sexual mores, and families who police the sexuality of their children represented a thousand-pound bulwark against sexual freedom. “You can’t liberate children and adolescents without disrupting the entire hierarchy of adult power and coercion and challenging the hegemony of antisex fundamentalist religious values,” she lamented. All of it — the family, the law, the religion, the culture — was a vector of oppression, and all of it had to go.
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October 19, 2022
Jonathan Kay reviews 18 Months by Shannon Thrace
At Quillette, a review of a new book on the breakdown of a once-happy marriage when one partner decides that mere transvestism isn’t enough any more and becomes transgendered:
The trans community is diverse, especially when it comes to attitudes toward sex. As writer Angus Fox noted in a seven-part Quillette series, When Sons Become Daughters, some biologically male trans-identified teenagers live a sexless existence; and are drawn to puberty blockers and androgynous aesthetics precisely because they seem to offer safe harbour from male sexual development. In the case of middle-aged men who abruptly adopt a trans identity later in life, on the other hand, it can be the opposite: the presentation is often hyper-sexualized.
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October 16, 2022
The concept of “childhood” changes over time
Chris Bray on the steady changes in how adult societies have viewed their children from the “better whipped than damned” views of the Puritans to the “childhood is sexy” views of today’s avante-garde opinion pushers:
Childhood is mercury.
Puritans thought that children were born in a state of profound corruption, marked by Original Sin. Infants cry and toddlers mope and disobey because they’re fallen, and haven’t had the time and the training to grow into any higher character. The devil is in them, literally. And so the first task of the Puritan parent was “will-breaking”, the act of crushing the natural depravity of the selfish and amoral infant. A child was “better whipped than damned”, in need of the firm and steady repression of his natural depravity. Proper parenting was cold and distant; parents were to instruct.
By the back half of the 19th century, children were sweet creatures, born in a state of natural innocence, until the depravity of society destroyed their gentle character. (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”) Meanwhile, the decline of family-centered industry changed the household. The historical father, present all day on the family farm and guiding his children with patriarchal modeling and moral instruction, left for work at the factory or the office, and mom occupied “the women’s sphere“, the nurturing home.
Depraved infants, stern and firm parents; innocent children, nurturing mothers. Those two conceptions of childhood and the family can be found less than a hundred years apart at their edges. There are some other pieces to layer into that story, and see also the last thing I wrote here about the history of childhood. But the briefest version of an explanation is that the changing idea of what it meant to be a child was a reflection of growing affluence and security: Calvinist religious dissenters living hard and unstable lives viewed childhood darkly, while the apotheosis of Romantic childhood appeared in the homes of the emerging Victorian management class.
So childhood is mercury: It moves and morphs with societal changes, becoming a different thing in different cultures and economies. It tells you what the temperature is.
In the febrile cultural implosion of 2022, childhood is sexy, and legislators work hard to make sure 12 year-olds can manage their STDs without the interference of their stupid clingy parents.
Or click on this link to see a fun story about a teacher in Alabama who has a sideline as a drag queen, reading a story to young children about a dog who digs up a bone and then cleverly telling the children, “Everybody loves a big bone.” Wink wink! I mean, really, what could be sexier or more fun than talking to very young children about thick adult erections, amirite?
Update: Corrected link.
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October 14, 2022
The commercial failure of Bros
With the movie failing to find much of an audience, the director and lead actor blame homophobia, because that’s far easier than accepting that rom-com movies are quaint, out-of-date, and stale in the modern hookup culture:
In the case of movies, one might respond to Stoller and Eichner by saying that entertainers are supposed to provide products that the viewing public wishes to see. It might surprise the team behind the didactic Bros that many of us watch movies to be entertained, not to be preached at, seeing them as brief, trivial moments of escape from the drudge of daily life, not an opportunity to (as the Victorians would have said) “improve” ourselves. But even though it has proved an abject commercial failure, the movie is nonetheless instructive in how our culture is changing. And both its production values and its failure are likely signs not of the LGBTQ movement’s influence stalling, but of its remarkable success.
[…]
Romance depends upon sex being costly. It was the difficulty of obtaining sex, the need for that delicate, complicated, and unpredictable interpersonal dance between two people, that was the very essence of what it was to be romantic. In a world where sex is not simply casual but remarkably cheap, the notion of romance is dead. Romance requires a particular kind of culture in order to make sense. A world of hookups, one-night stands, and all-pervasive pornography is not one that gives people the cultural grammar and syntax to understand it. That the movie apparently contains scenes of sex and nudity is hardly exceptional today. But that’s the point: A world where sex and nudity are displayed on the screen is not a world where romance has any place. Just as explicit rap lyrics reflect a world antithetical to that in which Frank Sinatra sang “Fly me to the moon”, so the endless tedium of explicit sex on celluloid is not that of Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire in Funny Face. Romance depends upon social codes of restraint and modesty, and upon the idea that sex is not something casual but something special, even sacred.
The same point can be made with reference to what we might call romantic tragedy. Take Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The story simply could not be set in modern America because Anna, married to the tedious Karenin but falling in love with the dashing Vronsky, would simply file for divorce and move out of Karenin’s house and into that of her lover. The tragic romance is rooted in the impossibility of Anna’s situation, given the way sex is seen through the powerful moral lens of nineteenth-century Russian society. The genre of romantic tragedy depends upon a specific moral framework. So does the genre of romantic comedy. But the sexual revolution has obliterated that moral framework.
To return to Bros, it is frankly as ridiculous to make a rom-com in the twenty-first century as it is to hire a cast and crew on the basis of modern categories of identity rather than professional competence. And, while the Bros team might regard its box office failure as discouraging, it might just as easily be evidence of the triumph of the LGBTQ movement in wider society as it is of a residual resistance to the same. Please don’t blame homophobia for your commercial failure. Romance is dead. And you helped to kill it.
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October 11, 2022
Looking for a full definition of “Two-Spirit” is a fruitless task
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay tries to find a satisfactory definition of the term “Two-Spirit” but despite his best efforts comes up empty:
On August 28th, Justin Trudeau’s government announced “Canada’s first federal 2SLGBTQI+ action plan: Building Our Future With Pride“, which was described as “a whole-of-government approach to achieve a future where everyone in Canada is truly free to be who they are and love who they love”. One aim of the $100-million plan, the government explained, is to convince Canadians to adopt the term “2SLGBTQI+” in place of “LGBT” — on the basis that 2SLGBTQI+ “is more inclusive and places the experiences of Indigenous 2SLGBTQI+ communities at the foreground as the first 2SLGBTQI+ peoples in North America”.
The two characters given pride of place, “2S”, signify “Two-Spirit”, a term that’s been a form of self-identification among Indigenous North Americans since the 1990s. But the descriptor doesn’t appear to be in wide everyday use outside Canada. And so non-Canadian readers will sometimes ask me to explain its meaning — at which point, I have to admit that I can’t. And I’m hardly alone: While most Canadians know that the “Two-Spirit” category is connected to Indigenous identity in some way, there’s an unspoken rule against requesting more specific information.
Last week, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), the province’s elementary-school teachers union, published what the authors present as a primer on Two-Spirit identity, a document written in close consultation with 2S-identified Indigenous people. Since the report’s target audience consists of workaday teachers who educate young students, I imagined that Niizh Manidoowag: Two-Spirit might finally provide me with a straightforward explanation of what the 2S identifier actually means.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. In fact, one of the main themes of the 32-page document is that the task of defining the Two-Spirit concept is (quite literally) beyond the powers of Western language and epistemology. And in any case, the category is almost completely open-ended: The act of proclaiming oneself Two-Spirited could be a statement about one’s gender, or sexual orientation, or both, or neither. Or 2S can be a statement about one’s politics, spirituality, or simply one’s desire to present as “anti-colonial”.
According to the ETFO report, there are only two non-negotiable elements of a Two-Spirited individual—both of which are spelled out multiple times in the document, and in bold letters. Neither rule is concerned with sex or gender, but rather with race and political orientation: To be Two-Spirited requires (1) that you are Indigenous; and (2) that you are engaged in a “decolonizing act of resistance”:
There is no one way to prescribe usage of the term [Two-Spirit] … There is no one way to define the term Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit people and their roles predate colonial impositions, expectations, and assumptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Where colonial worldviews often frame concepts as linear, compartmentalized, categorical, and hierarchical, Indigenous worldviews tend to be understood as non-linear, reciprocal, (w)holistic, relational, and independent of Eurocentric perspectives and framings. As such, identifying as two-spirit is a decolonizing act of resistance in and of itself.
The term Two-Spirit was first popularized in 1990, at an inter-tribal Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian summit in Winnipeg, and is derived from the Ojibwa words Niizh Manidoowag. By one account, delegates were looking for a term that would “distance Native/First Nations people from non-Natives, as well as from the words ‘berdache‘ [a European term suggesting deviancy] and ‘gay'”. But lore has it that the true originator is a Fisher River First Nation woman named Myra Laramee, who experienced a vision of the world as seen “through the lens of having both feminine and masculine spirit”.
On the surface, that sounds like what today might be called “non-binary”. But that analogy fails on a fundamental level. The idea of gender identity relates to the (perceived) nature of oneself. Two-Spirit people, on the other hand, are described in the ETFO report as possessing a savant-like power (or “lens”) that channels truths about the nature of the external world.
The Two Spirit concept is also entirely distinct from run-of-the-mill gender dysphoria. In everyday progressive gender parlance, it is typically insisted that trans women are just like other women. Two-Spirited people, by contrast, are presented as an entirely unique specimen whose arrival within traditional Indigenous societies was “celebrated” — “highly valued” “gifts” who “possess the best of both gendered identities”.
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October 3, 2022
“Still, what about the boys?”
Janice Fiamengo on the far-from-impartial emphasis of concern on young people being pushed toward radical “solutions” to gender dysphoria:
Last year, conservative educational institution Prager U published “Why Girls Become Boys“, a short video by journalist Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in 2020. Shrier’s focus is evident from the titles: girls. Previously, Shrier had been profiled in an interview with Candace Owens when she was still working on the book. Though the interview is now three years old, its canvassing of teen transitioning — in a discussion that moves from concern about girls being “seduced” into trans, to anger at society’s failure to protect girls from boys who transition — provides a fairly accurate representation, I believe, of conservative positioning on this subject. Girls who transition are seen as victims; while boys who transition are seen (if they are seen at all) as predators.
This double emphasis is clear in the interview. Shrier and Owens describe the collusion of media influencers, the public school system, woke punditry, and medical authorities to encourage girls (but not boys, it seems) to consider their gender identity “fluid”. Feelings of discomfort are too readily interpreted as signs of a trans identity. Girls can be made to believe themselves trans very quickly, sometimes simply from viewing one or more internet videos; and schools are not required to tell parents if their daughter begins identifying as male. From age fifteen, girls can find gender clinics willing to prescribe testosterone without their parents’ consent; a girl can have her breasts amputated as early as age sixteen. The lifetime of dependency on hormones (their consequences unknown), the risky surgeries, and the tragic missed opportunities — of motherhood in particular, but even of having breasts — were emphasized by both pundits.
It’s almost impossible to imagine these two women discussing the tragedy of losing a penis, of being denied the opportunity to become a father, of being denied the joy of male sexuality.
From this point, the conversation moved seamlessly into discussing the victimhood of girls forced to share their private spaces — and of course their sporting competitions — with biological males (often called “men” as in “Men are invading girls’ sports”). These males are not discussed as vulnerable innocents duped into taking body-altering hormones or undergoing dangerous surgeries. No imaginative effort was spent on why these boys want to live as trans female. The underlying assumption seemed to be that boys’ transition, far from being an attempt to relieve real distress, is an act of appropriation of female experience. The boys were depicted as aggressors who invade girls’ locker-rooms and deny girls opportunities (or, even worse, masquerade as trans in order to prey on girls sexually). Are there boys made uncomfortable in their change rooms or other private spaces by the presence of biological girls? The question seems never to have occurred to Shrier and Owens.
Shrier and Owens agree in decrying feminism for failing to protect girls and for failing (allegedly) to affirm femininity and girlhood. “Girls aren’t being told how wonderful it is to be a girl!” Their own feminist — or at least female-centered — assumptions are clearly evident in their conviction that the trans phenomenon is about multiple harms to females, harms which must always take precedence over the legitimate needs and experiences of males. And in fact, contrary to what Shrier and Owens seem to believe, there are many feminists who vehemently denounce biological male incursions into female bodies and spaces; many of them, such as Meghan Murphy, Julie Bindel, and Sheila Jeffreys, to name only a few, advocate from an avowedly anti-male perspective.
Shrier might respond that the overwhelming majority of adolescents who believe themselves to be trans are female (as she states in her Prager U video). This may be true (a recent Psychology Today article puts the number at greater than 80% female) but does not mitigate my objection. Teen suicide is about 80% male (more on this later), but it is hard to imagine concerned pundits ignoring the troubles of girls. Many discussions of teen suicide, in fact, make much of the fact that girls attempt suicide more often than boys, downplaying the fact that boys carry out their suicides in such distinctively high numbers. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to a focus on girls’ difficulties in adolescence — except when it improperly ignores and even maligns boys.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the vast majority of young people seeking “gender-affirming” therapy were males hoping to become trans-females. In the last few years, that proportion has flipped completely.
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