By 10pm on the night of 9th June 1983 BBC Television center was humming. In Studio Two, amid a beige version of the set from Alien, David Dimbleby and Robin Day were about to start the election results show, though everybody already knew Thatcher was going to walk it.
I was in the studio next door, which had been transformed into a vast Green Room, tables stacked high with food and booze. Us trainees had been brought in to help organise the guests and manage the hospitality.
And that party was only getting started. As the night wore on and the politicians, academics and journalists came and went, but mostly came and stayed, the whole place, and the labyrinth of corridors, scenery docks and stage lifts surrounding it, began to resemble something between a University May Ball and the last days of Rome.
People were being sick in corridors, being discovered “in flagrante” in lifts or sneaking off into unlocked offices. Some, bearing an uncanny resemblance to their Spitting Image puppets, became far too slurry and unsteady on their feet to go before Dimbleby and co at the appointed time.
Back then, juniors like me were often sent to pick up politicians and other public figures, because if they were not physically guided they’d forget to turn up altogether or go to the wrong place. We’d arrive rather sheepishly outside clubs, parties and private homes — sometimes not the private homes that they were supposed to be living in. We’d gently lead them away from whatever drunken dinner they were at and take them to the studio where more free alcohol was always available. And everyone was smoking.
For politicians and journalists alike, it was an especially louche time. And secrets, by and large, were kept along an arc of tolerated misbehaviour that ran from Westminster through St James’ to Notting Hill and White City. Albertines Wine Bar and Julie’s restaurant both had booths you could dissolve into during lunches that slipped toward early evening, and the “cinq a sept” trade in the local hotels was always healthy.
There was a BBC chauffeur driving company run by a man called Niven, and a late night “Niven Car” was the ultimate perk when the White City and Lime Grove bars finally closed. I’m not the only BBC veteran who’ll remember when a certain public figure left an item of intimate female clothing on the back seat of her “Niven” after an over-enthusiastic snog on her way home. It was duly recovered, popped into a plastic bag and discreetly couriered back to its proper owner.
I’m making it sound more fun than it was. There was a lot of awful behaviour that went unremarked and unpunished, especially the leering, groping and grabbing that my female colleagues had to put up with endlessly, some of which would today rightly be called sexual assault. And, of course, this permissive culture was the ideal environment for celebratory predators, the Jimmy Savilles, Stuart Halls and Cyril Smiths (one of David Dimbleby’s guests that very election night). We all heard the gossip, but nobody made a challenge.
But if I could have any part of that world back it would be this: we didn’t expect, need or want our MPs, ministers or their shadows to be plaster saints.
Phil Craig, “I’m done with po faced politicians”, The Critic, 2022-05-18.
September 9, 2022
QotD: The BBC behind-the-scenes in 1983
September 7, 2022
The “self-domestication” hypothesis in human evolution
A review of The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham in the latest edition of Rob Henderson’s Newsletter:
The “self-domestication hypothesis” is the idea that in the ancestral environment, early human communities collectively killed individuals prone to certain forms of aggression: arrogance, bullying, random violence, and monopolizing food and sexual partners.
Over time, our ancestors eliminated humans — typically males — who were exceedingly aggressive toward members of their own group.
If there was a troublemaker, then other less domineering males conspired to organize and commit collective murder against them.
Women too were involved in such decisions involving capital punishment, but men typically carried out the killing.
Humans tamed one another by taking out particularly aggressive individuals. This led us to become relatively peaceful apes.
But if humans are “self-domesticated”, then why are there so many violent people among us today?
The fact is, humans are not nearly as violent as our nearest evolutionary relatives.
Comparing the level of within-group physical aggression among chimpanzees with human hunter-gatherer communities, chimps are 150 to 550 times more likely than humans to inflict violence against their peers.
We humans are far nicer to members of our own group than chimps are. Thanks to our ancestors and their ability to plan organized murder. And tear overly dominant males to shreds.
Many people are familiar with the findings that bonobos are more peaceful than chimpanzees.
This is true.
Male bonobos are about half as aggressive as male chimpanzees, while female bonobos are more aggressive than female chimpanzees.
Bonobos are “peaceful”, relative to chimps. But bonobos are extremely aggressive compared to humans.
The eminent Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham explores these findings at length in his fascinating 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution.
This is a review and discussion of Wrangham’s book.
August 30, 2022
The plasticity of language, slippery definitions, and the ongoing gender wars
In The Line, Allan Stratton considers some of the reasons for misunderstanding, argument, and anger in the suddenly huge gender wars in western culture:
Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.
From my perspective, much of the controversy stems from academic redefinitions of language and concepts over the past 60 years. As these changes affected a small subculture, mainstream society paid them no mind. But language has consequences.
I’m a gay man in his early seventies, who’s paid close attention to the decades of linguistic manipulations that have turned sense into nonsense. Once, words and concepts had clear understandings that helped to create widespread support for LGBT rights. More recently, they have been conflated and inverted, and threaten to negatively affect the rights of women, the safety of gender-nonconforming children, and the lives of gays, lesbians, and transexuals.
A quick primer on the change in key terms may help to clarify our current mess and suggest a way forward:
Today the trans umbrella is understood to be a single movement within the Alphabet alliance, but in 1960s North America, it referred to three specific groups: self-identified transsexuals, transvestites and transgenders. There was some overlap, but none of the three were specifically attached to the fight for gay rights at all.
Transsexuals gained public prominence thanks to American Christine Jorgensen. After serving in the United States Army, Jorgensen had a sex change operation in Denmark before returning to America in 1953. She never identified as homosexual, but, rather, said she had born in the wrong body. Jorgenson was extraordinarily popular. I urge you to watch these two interviews, one from the ’60s and the other from the ’80s. Her wit, charm, self-assurance and intelligence demonstrate the power of persuasion, especially notable at a time far less tolerant than our own.
Transvestites (a term now considered derogatory) dressed and used the pronouns of the opposite sex, but fully acknowledged the material reality of their biology. Some were gay like the legendary Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Norman, who co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Most, however, were straight men like Virginia Prince, who published Transvestia Magazine, founded the Society for the Second Self, and published the classic How to be Woman Though Male. They distanced themselves from the gay community, fearing the association hurt their image. “True transvestites,” Prince assured, “are exclusively heterosexual … The transvestite values his male organs, enjoys using them and does not desire them removed.”
The term transgender, coined by psychiatrist John Oliven in 1965, was designed to distinguish transsexuals, who wanted to surgically change sex, from transvestites, whose inclinations were limited to gendered feelings and presentation. But its definition soon morphed to ungainly proportions. By the ’90s, trans academic Susan Stryker had re-re-re-defined it as (deep breath) “all identities or practices that cross over, cut across, move between, or otherwise queer socially constructed sex/gender boundaries (including, but not limited to) transsexuality, heterosexual transvestism, gay drag, butch lesbianism, and such non-European identities as the Native American berdache (now 2 Spirit) or the Indian Hijra.”
It’s key to remember that, at this time, trans people typically considered themselves the opposite sex spiritually and socially, but not literally: To repeat, trans women like Virginia Price insisted they were straight male heterosexuals, and would have been outraged at the suggestion that they were lesbians. As a result, women’s rights were never infringed. No one insisted that “sexual attraction” and “biologically sexed bodies” be defined out of existence. Nor were “tomboys” and “sissies” expected to seek gender clinics or consider puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery.
Under those circumstances, trans people gradually gained public support for human and civil rights protections. It’s easy to empathize with the distress of feeling trapped in the wrong body, and the horror of wanting to claw one’s way out. And how can a live-and-let-live world justify discrimination against people for simply wanting to imagine and present themselves as they wish? Progress, though imperfect and incomplete, was real.
But, as we have seen practically every day in the last few years, for true Progressives, mere “progress” isn’t enough and there are no waypoints on the road to Utopia…
August 25, 2022
Louise Perry – “It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism”
Guest-posting at Bari Weiss’s Substack, Louise Perry explains what drove her to write her new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century:
I used to believe the liberal narrative on the sexual revolution. As a younger woman, I held the same opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West. I conformed to the beliefs of my class.
Of course freedom is the goal, I thought. What women need is the freedom to behave as men have always behaved, enjoying all the pleasures of casual sex, porn, BDSM, and indeed any other sexual delight that the human mind can dream up. As long as everyone is consenting, what’s the problem?
I no longer believe any of this.
[…]
The problem is the differences aren’t trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era.
The research is clear. Men are (on average) far more interested than women are in casual sex, buying sex, watching porn, and experimenting with unusual fetishes. It’s not that women never enjoy such things. But, on average, they enjoy them much less than men do.
Remove the progressive goggles, and the history of the last 60 years looks different. The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It is also a story about the triumph of the playboy.
It would have been impossible to imagine a self-described feminist offering advice like this to other young women even a few years ago:
This is the advice I would offer my own daughter:
• Distrust any person or ideology that pressures you to ignore your moral intuition.
• Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives.
• Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard.
• A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behavior. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with.
• Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims.
• The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women between the ages of 13 and 25. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: It’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.
• Get drunk or high in private and with female friends, rather than in public or in mixed company.
• Don’t use dating apps. They offer a large pool of options, but at a severe cost. It is far better to meet a partner through mutual friends, since they can vet histories and punish bad behavior. Dating apps can’t.
• Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up.
• Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children — not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether he’s worthy of your trust.
• Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.
None of this advice is groundbreaking. It’s all informed by peer-reviewed research, but it shouldn’t have to be, since this is what pretty much most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to listen.
August 19, 2022
“This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married”
Elizabeth Nickson was a feminist entrepreneur (although I’m sure she would not have used that word to describe herself) in her early 20s, earning money to support herself by pushing feminist ideology through theatrical performance and running consciousness raising sessions. It was, as she says, “fashionable”. She now realizes that the changes to sexual belief and behaviour led directly to the modern “hook-up” culture young people now have to navigate to find relationships:
A new book, the Case Against Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, written by Louise Perry, a young writer for the New Statesman is published at the end of this month. Perry volunteers in rape centers, and works for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.
This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married.
Dramatically well-argued and sourced, Perry goes through every “innovation” in the sexual space and demonstrates without flinching, that all of it, all of it, privileges a particular subset of male, the sociosexual male – the kind that preferences quantity over quality – and not only that the worst kind of sociosexual male. The kind who like choking women, the rapists, abusers, serial womanizers, the pedophiles, the pimps, and the traffickers.
Decades later, says Perry, the mothers and grandmothers of 2nd and 3rd stage feminism have created hook-up culture as the near exclusive method of finding a mate. She details the unassailable fact that women, by their very nature, by their evolutionary history, and their specific biology are victimized in every move of hook-up culture, which ruthlessly uses their femininity, their gentleness, kindness, and agreeableness against them. It coarsens men, inflames their worst natures and has turned the netherworld of the sexual marketplace into a vicious free-for-all, a Darwinian thrash-hunt of the most vulnerable.
Everyone is hurt by it. Without exception.
I live in a place socially advanced, jokingly known as the end of the hippie trail. It is prosperous because it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. But, because it is environmentally advanced, our population is aging. The young and busy cannot start businesses or families here, because the environmental regulation is so strict, they cannot afford it. The human wreckage of the sexual revolution, therefore, is on full display. The streets and markets are littered with broken older men and women, long divorced or separated, the women especially living on crumbs, alone and destined to die alone, many without family. Hey, but their 20s and 30s were free. They got to have sex with dozens, if not hundreds of gorgeous men or women. And they used all the drugs.
If you look hard enough, you will see the same people drifting along the margins of every city and town. Break sexual norms, you break the family, and then you break the culture. What is left is pitiable.
Perry makes the point that I have tried to make hundreds of times in the past 20 years. So many of the political aims of upper-middle-class work for them, but for no one else. They are luxury beliefs. Upper-middle-class mothers do not send their gorgeous teens away to college now without very stern warnings about what might happen to them. Without a full delineating of the horrors that attend hooking up. But the less advantaged, those who swallow the propaganda of the culture do not.
August 5, 2022
QotD: The Peacock’s feathers
The “peacock principle” provides the answer to one of the abiding mysteries of nature: Males will evolve into any sort of weirdness to attract females. Since psychology recapitulates phylogeny, I have personally experienced the peacock principle. In my callow youth, I grew my hair to enormous length and strutted around in ridiculously colored garments. My bewildered parents thought I had become gay, but the explanation was the exact opposite of that. Long hair and gaudy clothes were my peacock feathers.
Martin Gurri, “Get the Kids Out of the Room — We’re Going To Talk About Sex”, Discourse, 2022-04-25.
August 2, 2022
“Is this ok? And this?” – The pitfalls of the “affirmative consent” model
Blake Smith recounts how the affirmative consent model — so beloved of the always-online contingent of GenZ — attempts to codify and regulate the sexual dance:
“Is it okay if I touch you?” Half an hour after I’d started chatting with this guy on Grindr he was in my bedroom, beginning a series of questions meant to lead from touching to any number of other acts. I suppose he expected, or hoped for, an enthusiastic “yes!”, signalling what the orientation-day workshops on college campuses call “affirmative consent”. But it didn’t occur to me to answer with the eagerness of a child agreeing to dessert. Instead I tried, with a soft laugh and what I hoped was a seductive “ok”, to seem as if I needed my reticence knocked out of me.
What I got were more questions. “Is this ok? And this?” Soon I began to wonder: “Is it ok?” I’d thought it was when I’d told him to come over. But it’s one thing to want someone in an unspecified way, quite another to start itemising what it is you actually want from them. With my own desire in doubt, I started to feel the very thing this line of interrogation had been meant to avoid. Instead of making consent as simple as saying “yes”, these questions had plunged me into a deeply unsexy uncertainty.
In reading me his sexual questionnaire, my partner was showing me that he’d internalised the ethic of “consent”, which over the past decade has emerged as the dominant liberal framework for distinguishing between moral and immoral sex. At the core of this ethic is explicitness. The purpose is to make sex — and all of its constituent acts — something one can and should directly say “yes” or “no” to, a contract negotiated between individuals.
This model of consent has been roundly criticised for deflating erotic tension, leading to sometimes-cringeworthy campaigns to insist that “consent is sexy” (“If asking for consent ruins sex you’re what? A rapist who sucks at talking dirty?’, reads one viral Tumblr post). But the deeper problem with this model is that it produces, or rather reveals, exactly what it is meant to avoid, which is the ineradicable ambivalence at the heart of sex. In other words, while we can and should maintain a distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts, there is an important sense in which we are never able to say “yes” to sex. Indeed, enjoying sex seems to involve a certain suspension of our usual relationship to ourselves, one in which we are overtaken not so much by the other person as by sex itself.
The original sexual relation — prior to the one we have with any particular person — is our relation to sex itself. This relation is not consensual but something we experience as a given. We are born, we mature, and at some point in this process we discover that we our prisoners of our sexuality. Sex, after all, makes us uncomfortable. It can conjure feelings of disgust and embarrassment. It can be a distraction, an excruciating deprivation, even a source of catastrophic humiliation. We notice how attractive the “wrong” person is — a boyfriend’s brother, an ex, a colleague, a student — and feel violated by our own urges. Sex with a partner works, when and to the extent that it does, in part by letting us suspend our inhibitions and want things without having to admit to ourselves that we want them.
July 27, 2022
QotD: Sex and the young Zoomer
Apparently, many in the zoomer generation find sex scary. I get that. When I was 13 and contemplated the mechanics of the thing, I pretty much became reconciled to a life of despondent celibacy. But at what point was our culture handed over to clueless 13-year-old kids? The zoomers mate later, less and with fewer reproductive consequences than their parents and grandparents. They get triggered by 50 Shades of Grey and suffer a permanent headache from climate change. I mean, can anyone conjure up a romantic vision of Greta Thunberg?
There’s also the idea that sex is fluid — that one can be born into a biological “gender” then pick among dozens of other flavors, like scoops at the gelato store. But weren’t we told, not so long ago, that being gay was a matter of genetic destiny? Evidently, everyone else is free to choose. You can be transgender, of course, and cisgender, which I think is what I am. But there are 70 more buckets to pick from, such as abimegender, aerogender, cassgender — even cloudgender, which means one’s gender “cannot be comprehended or understood due to depersonalization and derealization disorder”.
If you believe there are 72 sexes, you’re overthinking. You’re also likely to be online 22 hours a day and paddling toward a digitally reinforced narcissism. “You may say you’re cassgender. Fine. Big deal. But I am cloudgender and can’t be fully comprehended or understood!” That’s the stuff of social media. It feels like millions are listening to your magnificently baroque sexual identity, even if you’re only talking to yourself.
Martin Gurri, “Get the Kids Out of the Room — We’re Going To Talk About Sex”, Discourse, 2022-04-25.
July 22, 2022
Sexual liberation to sexual revolution to … today’s sexual desert
Chris Bray thinks that the sexual revolution “missed a turn, somewhere out in the desert”:
The discussion of what we didn’t mean to do is becoming an interesting one:
After decades of sexual liberation — Mattachine, Stonewall, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, Second Wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, and whatever else I’m missing in there (and I’m not sure Roe belongs on the list, but maybe) — we somehow arrive at a moment in which we merge a sexualized display of childhood and a relentless media-driven commodification of sexuality with the very clear reality that nobody’s having any sex:
One of the most comprehensive sex studies to date — the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior — found evidence of declines in all types of partnered sexual activity in the U.S. Over the course of the study from 2009 to 2018, those surveyed reported declines in penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation …
Over the last 22 years, Herbenick has co-authored several studies about our sexual activity. Her most recent research finds that all of us, regardless of age, are having less sex, with the most dramatic decline among teenagers.
At the start of the study in 2009, 79% of those ages 14 to 17, revealed they were not having sex. By 2018, that number rose to 89%.
Liberation stabbed pleasure in the heart; we emptied sex. Hypersexualization turns out to be desexualization. The unrelenting joylessness and death odor of contemporary sexual culture emerges from seventy years of growing openness and freedom. How?
There’s no way to fully cover a question of that scope in a single post — but I refer, as a start, to the earlier posts I wrote about the sexualization of childhood and the way Jim Jones used sex as a weapon. Breaking barriers and repressive anchors broke connections and reference points: Yes, some people were trapped in oppressive societal norms, and it’s not at all my view that all the sexual liberation in our past wasn’t really liberating. But we broke marriage to set people free, and whoops. Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family.
July 19, 2022
How dating apps have changed the dating world
Rob Henderson on the changes dating sites have accelerated in the dating community:
“In the United States, 35 percent of Tinder users are college students ages 18 to 24 … ‘I’ve heard a joke on campus that goes something like this: ‘First base is hooking up, second base is talking, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dating’.“ (source).
I am just old enough to remember what the dating scene was like before the rise of Tinder and other dating/hook-up apps. It has changed a lot.
2012 was another world in many ways.
The situation has changed for everyone on the dating market. Even those who don’t use these apps. This is because even for the people who don’t use the apps, they still live in an environment where others use them. Over time, those who don’t use apps must adapt to the preferences and behavior of those who use them. Not the other way around.
One example of how the scene has changed. I have a friend from college. A good-looking guy. He showed me how many women he has matched with: More than 21,000. Twenty-one thousand. Tinder actually identified him as a valuable user early on, and gave him free perks and upgrades. They lifted his radius restrictions. This allowed him to match with even more women. I have another friend. Doesn’t have the best pictures on his profile. But not a bad looking guy. Over roughly the same period of time as my other friend, he has matched with seven 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.
One way dating apps might be changing the dating scene. People used to have to go out to meet people. And it was costly to lose a relationship partner, in part because of the process involved in meeting someone new. Today, people know that a new partner is a few swipes away. Partners might be more replaceable. If things start deteriorating with their current partner, some can pull out a goldmine in their pocket.
There may be some sexual stratification going on as well. My two friends are examples of the above finding that being slightly more attractive as a man leads to far more matches.
June 22, 2022
Puberty, “white guilt”, and social contagion helps drive huge numbers of teen girls to think they are transgender
Until a few years ago — a blink of the eye in social terms — most individuals who wanted to transition to the other gender were born male. That is no longer the situation in North America, as vast numbers of young teens have been hammered with accusations of “privilege” for being white, while already undergoing the stresses and social disruption of puberty, seem to be deciding in groups that they must have been “assigned the wrong gender” at birth. In City Journal, Leor Sapir tells some of their stories:
Patricia (a pseudonym) is the mother of a teenage girl who in recent years has come to identify as transgender. She lives in California, considers herself progressive, votes Democrat, and leads a group for parents of children with rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) — that is, youth who suddenly experience distress with their bodies and believe that undergoing medical “transition” will make them whole again. When I spoke to her recently, she recounted how her daughter’s at-first-lesbian and then trans identity emerged in response to feelings of shame about being white.
I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege”, how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color”. Plagued by guilt, the children — almost all of them girls — rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Patricia, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.
The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context. They do not appreciate its ahistorical, anti-intellectual, and anti-humanist foundations, nor are they aware of the incentives leading teachers and administrators to foist it on them. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.
The wages of whiteness for teenagers are, however, only half of the story. Decades of gay rights activism have taught us that being gay or lesbian is not something one chooses. The mainstream narrative of transgenderism — promoted aggressively in the context of civil rights policymaking — holds that even being transgender is something people have little control over. Gender identity, experts have argued in Title IX lawsuits, is innate, immutable, and “primarily dictated by messages from the brain”. Thus, membership in the “LGBTQ+ community” would seem to be nonvoluntary. One is either “born that way” or not.
[…]
Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. As Kate Julian has written in The Atlantic, America is going through a “sex recession”. Whereas in 1991, most teenagers would have had at least one sexual encounter by the time they graduated high school, by 2017 most had had none. The vacuum left by the hollowing out of courting and relationships has been filled, so it would seem, by a new, inward form of “sexuality” in which the sexual side of our nature is purely a private experience. The 1960s sexual-liberation movement has somehow bred asexual atomism.
June 16, 2022
Among GenZ adults, LGBT identification tracks far higher than LGBT behaviour
In conversation on social media the other day, I speculated that in years gone by, some possibly significant proportion of self-identified lesbians would probably identify as asexuals today. Coming of age long before more relaxed modern attitudes toward non-heterosexual relationships, women who were not attracted to men would probably assume that this lack of attraction meant they must be lesbians. Similarly, Eric Kaufmann discusses a recent survey that shows some interesting divergence among GenZ adults between their declared sexual orientation and their actual behaviour:
A granular look at survey data on same-sex behaviour and LGBT identity shows that identification is increasingly diverging from behaviour. More importantly, those who adopt an LGBT identity but display conventionally heterosexual behaviour are a growing and distinct group, who lean strongly to the left politically and experience considerably greater mental health problems than the rest of the population.
By contrast, those who engage in same-sex behaviour are more politically moderate and psychologically stable. These facts sit awkwardly with the progressive view that the rise in LGBT identity, like left-handedness, is explained by people increasingly feeling that they can come out of the closet because society is more liberal. My analysis of these data raise another interesting question: Has some of the increase in anxiety and depression among young people, like the LGBT identity surge, arisen from a culture that values divergence and boundary-transgression over conformity to traditional norms and roles?
[…]
But has the LGBT share of young people really tripled in a decade? It has not. First, a growing share of LGBT identifiers engage in purely heterosexual behaviour. Figure 1, drawn from the General Social Survey (GSS), shows that, in 2008, about five percent of Americans under the age of 30 identified as LGBT and a similar number had a same-sex partnership in that year. By 2021, the proportion identifying as LGBT had increased 11 points to 16.3 percent but the share reporting same-sex relations had only risen four points, to 8.6 percent. LGBT identity had become twice as prevalent as LGBT behaviour. We must also bear in mind that 20 percent of young people now report no sex in the previous year, which means the four-point rise in same-sex partnering since 2008 is actually closer to a three-point rise: not nothing, but hardly a sexual revolution.
The trend towards greater LGBT identification has been particularly pronounced for young women, among whom there are three bisexuals for every lesbian in the 2018–21 period. Among young men, on the other hand, gays outnumber bisexuals and the LGBT total is only half as large as it is for women. Other large major surveys conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and by Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) find a similar pattern.
Furthermore, the GSS data show that bisexual women are the fastest-growing category, accounting for a disproportionate share of the post-2010 rise. A closer look at trends among female bisexuals in figure 2 shows that an increasing share of them display conventional sexual behaviour. In 2008–10, just 13 percent of female bisexuals said they only had male partners during the past five years. By 2018 this was up to 53 percent, rising to 57 percent in 2021. Most young female bisexuals today are arguably LGBT in name only.
June 10, 2022
The common male delusion that they “age like fine wine”, unlike women who “hit the wall”
Ed West considers the brutal truth that while beauty may indeed be fleeting, ugliness is life-long:
George Clooney at the White House, 12 September, 2016.
Official White House photo by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons.
The male psyche is filled with delusions, forming a sort of psychological protection against real life. Just as men tend to overestimate how competent they are at any given task, they are programmed to wildly overestimate their value in the mating market. The brutal truth of dating apps has shown that around 80% of men are basically unattractive and, in many societies, a significant chunk would fail to find a mate at all, forced to set out on a longship in the hope of winning glory and a girlfriend. We don’t contemplate this, because reality would be just too much to take for most of us.
Among the many delusions males have is the idea that, unlike women, they don’t become less attractive with age; in the minds of many men, female attractiveness peaks early and, while most men don’t improve with age, looks are less important for us so female preference doesn’t really change.
That explains the popularity of a certain genre of feature piece, usually in the Daily Mail, in which women in their 30s lament that there aren’t any available men left, and they can’t get a date despite being beautiful and wealthy and having their own career. Many quite embittered men take pleasure in these pieces, gleeful that the shoe is now on the other foot, and that the women who spurned them have hit “The Wall”.
The Wall is the name given to the drop in female attractiveness that comes with age, the decline beginning quite early, around 20 or 21, as judged by searches on dating sites and the number of approaches a woman receives. There are even cruder measurements, such as the average hourly earnings of strippers, lap dancers or prostitutes, and which again show a decline from the early 20s which becomes steep after 30. If you think that’s a depressing measurement, there are even bleaker ones highlighted by Louise Perry in her new book, on rape victims, which show a very similar pattern.
These are all quite horrible measurements, but then science is an empty moral void and the data only has deeper meaning if you choose to give it any. It doesn’t measure attractiveness as most of us feel it; people become more interesting as they get older, and as men mature their interests change, too. What’s strange about our species is that men’s prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain concerned with judgement — doesn’t fully mature until around 25. As women enter their peak for male attention, their male contemporaries have not even finished maturing yet, and are at the pinnacle of stupid behaviour (as measured by things like car accidents).
Some men take pleasure in female contemporaries hitting the Wall, because while those contemporaries became very desirable in their late teens, they struggled to find a date, and so convinced themselves that they were playing a long game. But it just isn’t true — men hit the Wall, too, and it’s not even that much later.
Many men seem blissfully unaware that, while the dating game may seem brutal and unfair in adolescence, it’s going to remain brutal and unfair later, just in different ways. They’re not going to mature into a debonair George Clooney-type who has the women gushing over his overgrown ear hair. They’re just going to become increasingly repulsive as they age.
May 17, 2022
Mary Whitehouse, “The avenging angel of Middle England”
At First Things, Jonathon Van Maren considers the legacy of Mary Whitehouse, the often mocked champion of public decency and crusader against pornography and blasphemy in the media from the mid-60s onwards:
I was surprised to find few public domain images of Mary Whitehouse available, so here is a selection of thumbnails (hopefully this won’t violate any copyright restrictions)
We have reached the point where our post-Christian elites, having safely enshrined the sexual revolution in law, can afford the luxury of occasionally admitting that their opponents were right. Exhibit A is the new BBC documentary Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story, which details the life of Great Britain’s most infamous morality campaigner. Beginning with a crusade to keep smut and blasphemy off TV in 1964, Whitehouse rallied hundreds of thousands of women (and ordinary Britons) to her campaigns against “the permissive society”, culminating in her war against the porn industry. Alas, she lost most of her battles — but her warnings proved prophetic.
Mary Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1910. She first started organizing in the 1960s because she — and millions of other mothers — did not like what her children were seeing on TV. A committed traditional Christian, she watched with dismay as the country she loved began to change around her. The metropolitan elites she faced off with thought she was “a provincial Birmingham housewife”. They didn’t underestimate her for long. She hosted her first mass meeting in 1964, and her organizing skills soon highlighted the subterranean power of Britain’s women. Whitehouse tapped into the gardening associations, the mothers’ unions, and other grassroots community organizations filled with folks who cared deeply about their children and the moral fabric of their nation. She brought them together, and when she spoke, it was with the voices of legions of little people. Her nickname summed it up: “The avenging angel of Middle England”.
Whitehouse’s first major campaign was to “Clean Up TV”, and her parliamentary petition to that end garnered around 500,000 signatures. In 1971, Whitehouse began organizing against sex ed in schools, triggered by an “educational” video she saw that was filled with pornographic scenes. Whitehouse was accused of hysteria — but Banned! features a pornographer admitting that, by using sex ed, “we gradually pushed back the barriers”, much as Whitehouse warned they would. Now that they’ve won, they can admit they were lying.
Whitehouse and others appalled by attempts to corrupt their children were accused of being “horrified by sex”. In reality, they were horrified by the version of sex presented by sex educators — in much the same way an art lover would be appalled to see vandals approaching a great masterpiece with cans of spray-paint and lewd laughter. Progressives never understood this, and consequently Whitehouse has been almost entirely defined by what she fought against rather than what she fought for.
Whitehouse’s lobbying resulted in several pieces of legislation, including the 1981 Indecent Displays Act, which sought to restrain sex shops and the display of porn, as well as the 1984 Video Recordings Act, intended to limit the sale of extreme video content. Unfortunately, these acts were rendered moot by the internet. But her greatest achievement was the 1978 Protection of Children Act, which criminalized child pornography. It seems remarkable that such a law did not already exist, but in the ’70s the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was operating openly in Britain; it was supported by some British elites who believed that sex with children was the natural next step in sexual liberation.
May 10, 2022
How did Jim Jones persuade hundreds of people to commit suicide at his command?
Chris Bray has more disturbing details drawn from Tim Reiterman’s history/biography of Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, Raven:
Reverend Jim Jones in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Kearny & Jackson Streets during a rally to save the hotel.
San Francisco Chronicle photo by Nancy Wong, 1977 via Wikimedia Commons.
He broke families, he taught fear, he isolated people, he shamed and demeaned people to break their spirit, he made people dependent, he ran obedience tests with deliberate sadism to see who would take it. That’s it. Those are the tools. Again, all of this comes from Tim Reiterman’s book Raven, which I encourage you to read.
When Jonestown shows up in news stories, Peoples Temple is usually described as a 1970s-era Bay Area cult that moved to Guyana. But that’s not where Jim Jones started the church — he began in Indianapolis in the 1950s. In a moment when there were mostly black churches and white churches, Jones insisted on building a racially integrated congregation. Then he warned them, with increasing urgency, that the church would be attacked by white supremacists who were outraged by their social progress; a flood of menacing phone calls and threatening letters backed up the point. One night, as members of the church visited Jones at home, he stepped into his bedroom alone — just as a brick crashed through the window. The visitors rushed into the bedroom, where Jones told them that the white supremacists had just attacked his house. (Miraculously, the brick and the broken glass had landed outside the window.)
Over the years, the threats built to a crescendo — look, another terrifying letter! — and Jones warned his congregation that the white supremacist threat was moving toward its culmination. At the same time, he began to receive visions about the other great threat hanging over the world: nuclear war. It’s coming, he told them, over and over again, sometimes even naming likely dates for the attack.
Finally, under the increasingly terrifying dual threat of death from local attack or death from Soviet missiles, either of which could happen at any moment, Jones sent an advance party across the country to find a place where his people could survive — and then, with a secure haven located, he led his congregation to safety in a remote area of Northern California. Good thing they made it out, right?
For a congregation of Midwesterners, the journey to California meant a departure from parents, siblings, and adult children; for many, it meant a departure from their birthplace and every social connection they had made outside the church. It put them in the woods a couple thousand miles from their families, in isolation together in a new place.
Then, with church members living in church-built homes on a church-owned property, Jones helped them to see that selfishness was cruel and atavistic. People who loved, who were spiritual, shared together. So what kind of self-involved monster kept a husband or a wife trapped in a limiting one-on-one relationship? Liberating the members of his church, he helped them to start having sex with other church members outside of their marriages. In some instances, particularly close couples with especially stable relationships — like the church attorney Tim Stoen and his wife, Grace — forced Jones to issue direct orders telling them who else they would be having sex with. And yes, it did liberate them from the confinement of their close marriage, quickly and decisively.
Jones also helped by having sex with everybody, teaching them how to become free. One night, Jones had a heart attack — another maneuver he used all the time — in the presence of a church member named Larry Layton; as Layton rushed to help, Jones explained that he needed to fuck Layton’s wife, and had already started, and had brought her to orgasm “no fewer than sixteen or seventeen times” during their first encounter. But no worries, because Jones also assigned another church member, Karen Tow, to have sex with Layton to assuage his pain. After the divorce, Layton and Tow got married — but Tow let Layton know that she still preferred to have sex with Jones. See how liberating this is?
