Quotulatiousness

September 26, 2013

Selling things by amping up the “numminess” factor

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:01

I think Ace is making a good point here … modern culture is being retuned to a younger, less adult-oriented default:

A moccachino, topped with lots of nummy whipped cream, is not a sophisticated taste. We emerge from the womb craving the sweetness of sugar, after all.

Again, it’s one thing to indulge in a treat. But it’s another thing to decide to simply revert to one’s childhood self.

Now when he was on this rant, I thought he was full of shit and just being annoyed because Being Annoyed is how Adam Carolla makes his rent.

He also, I’m sure, went off on his typical rant about adult men watching Super Hero Movies, which does in fact hurt my butt. And I’m sure he connected that to the New Nummy.

[…]

We are indeed becoming a more childlike people. We are more and more shirking the expected obligations of adulthood, such as marriage and procreation, and even more basically, we’re rejecting the obligation of adults to actually think, in terms of numbers, and of best outcomes, and so forth.

The national mode of thinking is now Nummy. “We” — and by we I mean Americans, not “we” meaning us here right now — increasingly think in terms of cute, and easy, and glib, and dumb, and fun.

[…]

Why, Yes, actually. Because having all of your trivial cultural preferences flattered by impersonal corporations at every turn is itself Very Nummy Indeed. All little girls want to be told that they’re the Best and Prettiest Little Girl there is, and all little boys want to be told they will play for the Yankees when they Get Big.

To have one’s head patted and cheeks pinched by Admiring Grown Ups at all possible times is the Nummiest Nummy Thing there is.

[…]

Now I have to caveat this: Prior to Tweener Girls becoming the default National Tastemakers, our national culture was determined by the tastes of 19 year old boys, per the Zanuck Postulate.*

So this isn’t just a sexist thing. It’s about losing at least those seven years of maturation, too.

We are drowning in nostalgia and crushing debt and we can’t see the latter because we’ve checked out into our Happy Place to chase the former.

I can’t blame the White House or BuzzFeed for these trends. They’re pushers, but they didn’t create the sad addiction. This stuff works in America.

But why? Why does it work?

When did we all check out of adulthood to revert to tweenerhood? And when did we stop thinking that might be a little indulgent and shameful?

June 15, 2013

Ontario’s abusive relationship with sex ed

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:31

In Maclean’s, Emma Teitel talks about the failure of Ontario’s sex-ed classes to keep up with the times:

In the fifth grade, my friends and I had a special afternoon tradition. When school let out at 3:30, we would walk to Katherine’s house (a pseudonym), raid her fridge, go upstairs to her bedroom, lock the door and watch Internet pornography. Where were Katherine’s parents? They were at work. But it wouldn’t have mattered. When they were around, we just turned off the sound, or read erotic literature on a website called Kristen Archives. This is how we gained the indispensable knowledge that some women like to be ravished by farmhands, and others, by farm animals. The year was 1999. We had not yet sat through our first sex-ed class, but when we did, almost two years later, it was spectacularly disappointing. We had seen it all, and now we were shading in a diagram of the vas deferens.

Since our special after-school tradition came to an end over a decade ago, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Formspring, Instagram and Twitter have emerged. But against all logic, nothing has changed in the sex-ed business. Our century is literally on the cusp of puberty, and yet despite these enormous social and technological changes, we remain largely incapable of giving kids the resources they need to deal with their own puberty. I’m talking here, specifically, about the province of Ontario. As you read this, kids from Sarnia to Kingston — kids who, on average, have viewed Internet porn by age 11 — are probably shading in the exact same vas deferens diagram I did. There’s nothing wrong with the vas deferens — or so I’m told — but surely there is more to sexual education in the 21st century than anatomy and colouring. Ontario currently boasts the most out-of-date sex-ed curriculum in Canada. It was last revised in 1998, which means sex ed was out of date when I took it.

[. . .]

Kids shouldn’t watch porn, but they do. We can’t un-invent the Internet. And we can’t reverse puberty. Case in point: In 2001, one of the most determined voyeurs in our special after-school group skipped sex ed at the request of her religious father — for whom an hour of vas deferens shading was just too much to bear. He told her to go to the library instead, which was fine with her. Who, after all, could resist an afternoon with the Kristen Archives?

May 20, 2013

18-year-old charged with two felonies due to relationship with 15-year-old

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:08

An 18-year-old Floridian is facing two felony charges of “lewd and lascivious battery on a child 12 to 16” due to a relationship with a 15-year-old girl:

“These people never came to us as parents, never tried to speak to us… and tell us they had a problem with the girls dating,” Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother, Kelley Hunt-Smith, wrote in an statement posted to Facebook. “…They were out to destroy my daughter. [They] feel like my daughter ‘made’ their daughter gay.”

According to Hunt-Smith, police arrived at the family’s home Feb. 16 and put her daughter in handcuffs. Local news website TCPalm.com listed Kaitlyn Hunt’s arrest for “lewd and lascivious battery” on Feb. 18, and the girl’s mug shot is still easily accessible on the Internet.

But the trouble didn’t stop there. The other girl’s parents repeatedly tried to have Kaitlyn, a senior, expelled from school. Despite the Sebastian River High School administration’s denial of their request, and a judge’s order allowing Kaitlyn to remain in school (so long as the girls had no contact), the 15-year-old’s parents successfully petitioned the school board to have Hunt removed from school weeks prior to graduation.

On the one hand, it’s outrageous that Hunt has been charged, but it’s oddly re-assuring that even though it’s a lesbian relationship, it’s being dealt with exactly the same way that a comparable heterosexual relationship would be: treated as a sex crime. And yes, in either case it’s absurd that teenagers are being classed as sexual predators for relationships that would have been considered quite ordinary a decade ago.

April 23, 2013

The myth of radicalization

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

In sp!ked, Frank Furedi examines the recent phenomenon of “nice guys” turning into terrorists:

… homegrown terrorism is viewed as a problem of ‘radicalisation’, where young people are seen as having effectively been warped by some imam or ideology promoter. So within days of the Boston bombers being identified, a local mosque was blamed for radicalising Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Others have looked for alternative sources of radicalisation, such as jihadist courses on YouTube or extremist Islamist websites. The theory of radicalisation is based on the premise that the lure of jihad politicises otherwise disgruntled individuals and transforms them into hardened militants.

Yet it is not clear what exactly constitutes the lure of jihad. Young people who are attracted to jihadist websites rarely adopt a new worldview. In fact, their perspective is very similar to numerous non-Muslim Westerners who visit nihilistic websites and become fascinated by destructive themes and image. Those who visit jihadist sites are choosing a fad rather than a coherent ideological outlook. In this regard, it is worth noting that some radicals arrested for terrorist activities in Europe are neither religious zealots nor political idealists. A study of ‘The Mujahideen Network’, a Swedish internet forum, discovered that its members’ knowledge of Islam was ‘virtually non-existent’ and their ‘fascination with jihad seems to be dictated by their rebellious nature rather than a deep ideological conviction’ (5). In other words, these people seem to have been driven by their estrangement from society rather than being pulled by a vibrant and dynamic alternative.

[. . .]

In fact, there are formidable cultural forces that denigrate the West’s historical achievements and its traditional belief in progress and enlightenment. Some commentators argue that the West, finding it difficult to believe in itself, faces a moral crisis. In such circumstances, is it any wonder that many young people feel deeply estranged from the Western way of life? Fortunately, only a handful opt for the nihilistic course of action taken by the Boston bombers. But the real problem is not to be found in the impressionable minds of youths but in the failure of society to inspire these young people with positive and forward-looking ideals.

Young people are not being seduced by mystical jihadist ideologies; they are being driven away by a society that fails to lead or enthuse or move them. There will, of course, always be a handful of confused and disturbed individuals who opt for acts of violent destruction. But as long as their community believes in itself, the damage they cause will be contained. The experience of the post-9/11 world shows that winning the arguments for an open society is the most effective answer to the threat of terror.

March 4, 2013

Florida student punished for taking part in incident with a firearm

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

His participation in the incident was to wrestle the loaded revolver out of the hands of the football player who was threatening to shoot another player:

A 16-year-old Cypress Lake High School student, who wrestled a loaded revolver away from a teen threatening to shoot, is being punished.

The student grappled the gun away from the 15-year-old suspect on the bus ride home Tuesday after witnesses say he aimed the weapon point blank at another student and threatened to shoot him.

The student, who Fox 4 has agreed not to identify and distort his voice because he fears for his safety, says there’s “no doubt” he saved a life by disarming the gunman. And for that he was suspended for three days.

[. . .]

The teen we spoke to and authorities both confirm the Revolver was loaded. According to the arrest report the suspect, who Fox 4 is not naming because he is a minor, was “pointing the gun directly” at another student and “threatening to shoot him.”

That’s when the student we spoke with says he and others tackled the teen and wrestled away the gun. The next day the school slapped him with a three day suspension.

“It’s dumb,” he said. “How they going to suspend me for doing the right thing?”

According to the referral, he was suspended for being part of an “incident” where a weapon was present and given an “emergency suspension.”

“If they wouldn’t’ve did what they had to do on that bus,” the teen’s mother said, “I think there would have been a lot of fatalities.”

H/T to Charles Oliver for the link.

January 10, 2013

Narcissism on the rise (again) among college students

Filed under: Education, Media, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:04

I know you won’t believe this, but college students have an inflated sense of self-worth that has been further enabled by those new-fangled social media tools.

A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.

Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
This data is not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities — the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.

On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.”

While the specifics of today’s worries differ, I’m reminded of this classic, attributed to Socrates (but not authenticated):

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

December 7, 2012

US student vocabulary tests show disappointing results

Filed under: Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

At the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero reports on recent tests of vocabulary that show US students are not as well-informed as expected:

U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation’s reading education.

Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.

The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn’t know that “permeates” means to “spread all the way through,” and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn’t know that “puzzled” means confused — words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.

Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of “created,” “spread” and “underestimate.” At eighth grade, most students knew “grimace,” “icons” and “edible.”

The new vocabulary test was embedded in the biennial national reading exam, known as the NAEP. Last year’s scores were in line with those posted in 2009, the first time vocabulary scores were broken out, but the latest results are the first to be made public. Experts noted that the results mirror the performance on the national reading test, which has yielded fairly static scores for a decade.

October 23, 2012

The law, sexting, and shady website operations

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:41

Tim Worstall discusses the weird and disturbing online world of sexting teens, parasitical porn websites and the insanity of our current laws on the topic:

… the legal problems go much further than just young people losing control of images of themselves.

For we’re in the middle of a social hysteria over child pornography and paedophilia. And as is usual in such hysterias reactions desperately overshoot. For example, in my native UK it is entirely legal for a 16 year old girl to have sex with whichever consenting also 16 years or above human she wishes. Any thing from removing her top for her lover’s delectation through to any perversion you might care to think about. However, if said lover, with her full permission, takes a photograph of her without her bikini top on this is child pornography. Yes, even if they’ve been lovers for nearly two legal years a topless photograph of her at 17 and 364 days old is child porn. And it is here that the real legal problems start.

[. . .]

It gets worse, too. The general assumption in the law these days is that a picture on a computer is production of child pornography, not possession of it. The reasoning is that, before you looked at the picture there was one copy, on the server. Now, as you look at the picture, there are two. One on the server, the other in your browser (or cache, whatever). Thus there are now two pictures, you have made one of them therefore you are producing child pornography. And it’s not all that much of a surprise to find that the penalties for the production as opposed to the possession of such are markedly stronger.

October 18, 2012

Treating one particular religion as special

Filed under: Britain, Education, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:08

James Delingpole discusses his niece’s exposure to religious education at her school, and discovers that one religion is exalted above the others:

My brilliant niece Freya was talking to my brother the other day about the religious education curriculum at her predominately white, middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city. She happened to mention ‘Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him.’ ‘Eh?’ said my brother. ‘It’s what we’re taught at school. After we mention “Mohammed” we have to say “Peace be upon him”.’
[. . .]

Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him? I suppose it would make sense for a non-Muslim to use that phrase were he, say, trying to persuade his Islamist terrorist captors in Mali perhaps or the Yemen not to cut his head off. But since when did it become necessary for white, notionally C-of-E-ish English kids in a middle-class school in a pretty cathedral town?

I mean it’s bad enough — as I’ve argued — to teach kids to think that their country’s religious traditions no longer really matter. But what is surely unforgivable is simultaneously to teach those same kids that there is one particular religion which matters so much that even when you don’t subscribe to it you must still treat it with the reverence, fear and awe of those who do.

Why? You can imagine the fuss if at every mention of the name Jesus Christ all children of whatever creed were forced to raise their arms in the air and add ‘Our Lord and Saviour, He is risen, Alleluia’. We ought to be equally appalled, I would suggest, at what children at Freya’s school are being forced to do with regards to the prophet of a rival religion.

October 16, 2012

Asking for help against bullying may be impossible

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Matt Gurney in the National Post pointing out that the instinctive response of many to bullying just isn’t a viable alternative for many or even most victims of bullying:

The federal NDP has reverted to type, calling for a national strategy to combat bullying. School boards and educators will no doubt develop strategies and zero-tolerance procedures. Counsellors will want to chat about mediating the disputes. Well-intended suggestions, all. But they all suffer from the same fundamental weakness — they can only spring into action once the victim further victimizes themselves. For many, the solution is as bad as the problem.

I’m referring, of course, to the mere act of asking for help. Bullying is an intensely degrading assault. It strips power and dignity away from the victim. Sometimes it’s crushing and sudden, other times it’s gradual, with the victim’s mental defences whittled away piece by piece. The end result, as we all know, can be a victim utterly convinced that everyone is staring at them, laughing at them, enjoying the defenceless, pathetic state they’ve been reduced to. The bullies themselves feed off the crushing of their victims, but the keen attention of the mob is what makes it so humiliating for those targeted. It’s not just a humiliation. It’s a very, very public one.

And it is in that moment of maximum vulnerability and humiliation that the students are supposed to further compound their embarrassment and signal their total defeat by appealing for help from a teacher or counsellor? Or even a parent?

[. . .]

If there is a way forward on bullying — I’m not sure there is, as much as we’d all like one — it will have to recognize the inherent advantage bullies possess. Their victims don’t want help. They might desperately need it, but asking for it is, for most, a step too far, an added injury they simply cannot contemplate. The only effective means of deterring a bully may lie with the observing mob becoming enforcers of an anti-bullying code. And as that seems unlikely, outrage notwithstanding, this is probably a problem we’re stuck with.

October 15, 2012

Jonathan Kay on bullying

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

In his National Post column, he responds to a fellow journalist’s column on the topic of bullying:

The appetite to bully cannot be treated as a social sickness, or the product of maladaptive psychological development — which is how it is universally depicted in the media, and in government-funded public-service announcements. Bullying is in our genes. And any effort to fight it must reflect that fact.

The reason that bullying has become part of human evolutionary psychology is that it works — for both males and females — as a strategy to increase one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex, one’s perceived social status, and the cohesiveness of one’s social alliances.

In movies, bullies are shown to be wounded individuals whose bullying is a perverse symptom of the pain that’s been inflicted on them by abusive parents inhabiting poor and broken homes, or by more dominant figures in their social pecking order. There is no evidentiary basis for this stereotype. In fact, research cited by Anthony Volk, Joseph Camilleri, Andrew Dane and Zopito Marini in a 2012 Aggressive Behavior journal article indicate that bullying-induced social dominance is correlated with reduced stress and improved physical health. Amazingly, “bullying is also positively linked with other positive mental traits such as … cognitive empathy, leadership, social competence, and self-efficacy.”

[. . .]

The strategy works: Studies show that boys who bully other boys, on average, gain status with girls, who perceive the boys as more dominant. And girls who bully, on average, receive more positive attention from boys.

As the aforementioned authors report, “Dominance has been found to be positively associated with both bullying and peer nominations of dating popularity among adolescents. Bullying is also positively correlated with peer nominations of power, social prominence, student and teacher ratings of perceived popularity and peer leadership” — all of which translate to social capital, which in turn means social or mating opportunities with the opposite sex.

An earlier post on this topic is here.

October 14, 2012

“I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

James Joyner on the phenomenon of internet privacy — and the growing reality that it’s pretty much an illusion.

In the first instance, a bad person is likely to have his real life — including his ability to make a living — upended by the conscious act of a reporter. In the second, two young people who did nothing more than join a school club had their biggest secret exposed by a well-meaning person who made the mistake of trusting Facebook, a data mining company that makes billions by getting people to give them their personal information.

[. . .]

I’ve been active online now since the mid-1990s and have, by virtue of this blog, been a very minor online public figure for almost a decade. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my professional career is one that encourages writing and publishing, I’ve done virtually all of my online activity under my real life name. As such, I’ve long been aware that my family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and prospective employers might read everything that I put out there. That’s the safest way to operate online, in that it avoids the sort of disruptive surprises that Brutsch, Duncan, and McCormick received. But it also means, inevitably, that there’s a subtle filter that makes me more cautious than I might otherwise be. That’s likely both good and bad in my own case.

But I continue to worry about what it means for a younger generation, for whom Facebook and other social networks are part and parcel of their everyday existence from their teenage years forward. By the time the Internet was a public phenomenon, I was a grown man with a PhD. I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name.

I have generally used my real name — or at least not tried to actively conceal my real identity — in most of my online activities. Some of this has been because there wasn’t a pressing reason to remain anonymous, but as in the writer’s case, it was a strong suspicion from the start that it would be difficult to maintain that degree of privacy over the long term (information wanting to be free, and all that).

October 2, 2012

The Baby Boomers are turning into the New Victorians

Filed under: Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:20

As usual, Gregg Easterbrook manages to squeeze in lots of non-football items into his weekly NFL column:

The entertaining aspect of the fizzled Newt Gingrich presidential campaign was that Gingrich still blames the 1960s for everything. The 1960s were half a century ago. In the year 2012, blaming the 1960s makes about as much sense as someone during the 1960s blaming events on the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet.

Since Gingrich put the 1960s into play, note that during that decade the mainstream media advocated what was then called “free love,” and looked down with scorn upon those who backed traditional views of marriage and lovemaking. Yet today when people engage in free love, graying Boomers who run the MSM get all squeamish.

Here, The New York Times treats as shocking that an unmarried yoga instructor had “a penchant for women” and liked “partying and fun.” Man likes women — arrest him! The unmarried instructor faces “accusations of sexual impropriety,” which means “yoga’s enlightened façade” is tainted by “scandal.” And the scandal is what? That unmarried adults are having consensual sex. This “penchant” must be stopped — it can lead to fun.

Worse, yoga can “promote sexual arousal” by causing “emotional closeness” that leads to “increased blood flow” which makes “pelvic regions more sensitive,” resulting in “debauchery.” Who wrote this, Queen Victoria?

All news organizations, including ESPN, sometimes publish ill-thought-through articles. What’s compelling about this one is the sociological change reflected. When they were young, the Baby Boomers who now run big news organizations extolled free love and mocked the older generation’s conventional expectations about sexuality. Now that the Boomers have aged and are not getting any themselves, they evince shock that younger people are fooling around.

September 13, 2012

Falkvinge: Child porn laws are insane

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:13

People are generally sensible, but even sensible people can demand bad laws get passed by their governments. Child porn laws in the United States are an example of not merely bad laws, but insane laws. Rick Falkvinge follows up an earlier article:

A common protest to my article was that prosecution of people who record evidence of child abuse, or of teenagers doing things voluntarily, “would absolutely never happen”. The arguments went along these lines:

    It would be absolutely insane for the law to say this, and since the law can’t possibly be that insane, you must be wrong. Therefore, you’re an evil person for writing this opinion.

The problem is that I agree with these people: it would be absolutely insane for the law to say the examples I gave, and that the law says exactly that, so the law is indeed that insane. I understand the disbelief, so I’ll be returning to that shortly and list how it has already happened. But first, let’s take a look at what happens when you document evidence of a couple of types of very serious crimes:

  • If you film a police abuse situation to get evidence and show it to the world so the power abusers can get caught, you’re a hero to the level that your film can cause riots.
  • If you document a genocide in enough detail that your evidence can bring perpetrators to justice, you’re a worldwide hero.
  • If you film wartime killings, people will risk their lives — and sometimes die — to bring your evidence and documentation to news studios.
  • If you risk being beaten up by covertly filming a street battery and assault, you’re welcomed with open arms by the police when you hand over the evidence you produced. (I personally did this, for the record.)
  • If you film something as serious as a presidential assassination, people will watch the film over and over and over again and your name will go down in history for centuries.
  • If you film a rapist of a minor to get evidence in order to bring the sick, twisted bastard to justice, you’re the bad guy and will get a worse sentence than the rapist you attempt to bring to justice and jail.

[. . .]

As I described in my last post, these laws were constructed by Christian-fundamentalist pressure groups with the intent of criminalizing normal teenage behavior, and the side effect of protecting child molesters from prosecution, under the pretext of protecting children. I find that completely unacceptable. Outrageous, actually.

September 7, 2012

Gender-identity: how (many) adolescents cope with the “what am I” problem

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

This is from a discussion that took place on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list the other day (list info here) that explored some interesting notions. I emailed Ms. Bujold to ask her permission to use a quote from one of her posts, and she asked me to provide a bit more context as she wasn’t sure the portion I’d asked to use was sufficiently informative. The topic of discussion was the anima/animus mental model of what is “right” about the opposite sex many (most? all?) young people use to determine what it is to be male or female. A subtopic of that was the use or misuse of that mental model to judge potential dates/mates and the problems that that might entail.

It seems to tie in with my own notions of gender-identity formation in adolescence being principally accomplished by heatedly deleting everything seen to be associated with the opposite gender, and maturity being the slower process of regaining or recovering same to once again become a complete human being.

[. . .]

I might direct your attention to the large preponderance of “alpha males” as romance novel heroes. Very much the embodiment of those very assertive or practical qualities that adolescent women delete (or repress, if you prefer) in themselves, much to their later sorrow when they have to cope with real life, alas.

Your typical bad-boy alpha-jerk high-achieving rich hero is pretty much a grocery list of survival qualities discouraged in women, in fact.

Granted, women need to be socialized as sharers to a high degree, or their infants would never survive un-murdered. It’s a near thing as-is. (Says the experienced mom.)

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