The Last Psychiatrist View RSS

Who Bullies The Bullies? 3 May 2014 1:37 PM (11 years ago)

but they're welcome to buy an iphone

Pacific Standard. Get it? It's like The Atlantic, but it's Pacific. Totally different. So unlike The Atlantic, it will "attack the conventional wisdom from a west coast perspective." That's a quote. "But didn't the editors come from The Atlantic?" Yes. "So what's the diff? Does west coast imply the writers will be better looking?" The women will be, unless they write about gender issues, then they will appear gendered. The men will look wise if they're crushing on social science, or tough and no-nonsense if they're hating on Republicans. Don't worry, pics of the writers will be included to suggest an appeal to authority. "Hold on, is the owner of this magazine Sara Miller McCune? The same woman who is responsible for those atrocious SAGE journals like Psychological Science and Evolutionary Perspectives On Human Development that charge CV padding post-docs a few hundred dollars to publish linkbait like "Ovulating Women Prefer Men With Large Sneakers", that Malcolm Gladwell and media outlets like Pacific Standard then cross promote as valid science?" Yes, but I'm sure it's a coincidence. "This magazine sounds terrible." Duh.

This cover story details #young #vulnerable #feminist writer Amanda Hess's frustration with disinterested male law enforcement when, after writing an article about receiving rape threats from a troll, she received rape threats from a troll. I sympathize, though in my experience what's even more frightening than a guy telling you he's going to rape you is a guy not telling you he's going to rape you.

There's a big push for "women's safety" online, for getting rid of trolls and cyberbullies and cyberstalkers, not coincidentally another one of Randi Zuckerberg's pet causes; and while these are all legitimate worries someone should take a minute and ask why, when mustached men have been stalking women since the days of Whitecastle yet no systemic changes have been effected, the moment women feel threatened from the safety of their LCD screens America opens the nuclear briefcase. No one finds that suspicious?

In fact, regular stalking is barely ever mentioned in media, no matter how many times the guy was laying under her new boyfriend's front porch on Wednesday nights after Organic Chemistry class, what drives the article is "and then he stalked her on Facebook!"

Here's just a sampling of the noxious online commentary directed at other women in recent years. To Alyssa Royse, a sex and relationships blogger, for saying that she hated The Dark Knight: "you are clearly retarded, i hope someone shoots then rapes you." To Kathy Sierra, a technology writer, for blogging about software, coding, and design: "i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob." To Lindy West, a writer at the women's website Jezebel, for critiquing a comedian's rape joke: "I just want to rape her with a traffic cone." To Rebecca Watson, an atheist commentator, for blogging about sexism in the skeptic community: "If I lived in Boston I'd put a bullet in your brain." To Catherine Mayer, a journalist at Time magazine, for no particular reason: "A BOMB HAS BEEN PLACED OUTSIDE YOUR HOME. IT WILL GO OFF AT EXACTLY 10:47 PM ON A TIMER AND TRIGGER DESTROYING EVERYTHING."

As the recipient of not zero decapitation emails I admit it does make you curious about whether or not you can buy an alligator, but while you're arming your windows like a Saw movie you should contemplate the difference between what should be done and why it appears something should be done.

I.

The force for this change isn't coming from safety or ethics. Neither is it activism. If you see any group advocating influentially for change in a media they don't own or control, you can double down and split the 10s, the dealer is holding status and quo. No change is possible on someone else's dime, and if what looks like a supermodel approaches you with a microphone and a camera crew, you should run like she's Johnny Carcosa. On occasion what the activists think they want may happen coincidentally to align with what the system wants, and from that moment on they will be lead to believe they are making a difference, which means they're making money for someone else. "Your writing is so muddled." Sorry. Were you better persuaded by the concise prose of Amanda Hess?

Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don't care much about online stalking, which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either. But never mind, it's not the problem: misogyny is the problem, amplified 1000x by online anonymity. Anonymity makes the internet mean and gives trolls= men too much power. This is the subtle shift: what starts out as "misogyny is bad" becomes "anonymity facilitates misogyny."

Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever, the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn't be enough to get an @ mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. "Cyberbullying is a huge problem!" Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks. Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go.

II.

You may at this point roll your eyes epileptically and retort, "well, who cares 'what the system wants', the fact is anonymity does embolden the lunatics, shouldn't we try to restrict it?" Great question, too bad it's irrelevant. You've taken the bait and put all your energy into accepting the form of the argument. The issue isn't whether we should abolish online anonymity, since this will never happen. For every American senator trying to curb anonymity there's going to be a Scandinavian cyberpirate who will come up with a workaround, and only one of them knows how to code. Besides, there's no power in abolishing anonymity, the power is in giving everyone the pretense of anonymity while secretly retaining the PGP keys to the kingdom.

To understand what's really happening, start from basics: if you're reading it, it's for you. I assume you're not a cyberbully or a stalker. So do you have any power to abolish anonymity?

If Hess has made you wonder, hmm, maybe unrestricted anonymity is bad because it gives trolls too much power, then the system has successfully used her for its true purpose: brand it as bad, to you. She is unwittingly teaching the demo of this article, e.g. women in their 20s with no actual power looking to establish themselves, who are the very people who should embrace anonymity, not to want this: only rapists and too-weak-to-try rapists want to be anonymous. Smart women write clickable articles about their sexuality for nothing, because what good are you if you can't make someone else money? Interesting to observe that the article's single suggested solution to cyberharassment is to reframe a criminal problem into a civil rights issue using a logic so preposterously adolescent that if you laid this on your Dad when you were 16 he'd backhand slap you right out of the glee club: "it discourages women from writing and earning a living online." Earning a living? From who, Gawker? Most of the women writing on the internet are writing for someone else who pays them next to nothing. None of them control the capital, none of them get paid 1/1000 of what they bring in for the media company. You know what they do get? They get to be valued by work, and in gratitude they are going to the front lines to fight for the media company's right to pay them less.

And the indoctrination has worked, the less Asperger's a woman is, the more she'll hate writing anonymously. Don't get angry at me, they did a study, and I think it explains why women don't want to write for The Economist. In the reverse, put a pic in your byline and you improve your female audience; put a pic of a female in your byline and you've maximized ROI, everyone will click on a pic of a chick. This is economic and psychologic universe in which Hess finds herself.

"But you can't use a pen name at places like The New Yorker. You know they pay their top staff writers $100k a year?" Jesus. a) yes you can; b) listen to me: if those swindlers are willing to pay you $100k, then you could probably get $200k yourself, and if you can't get $200k yourself then you aren't worth their $100k either and they will eventually notice. When they pay you that much they're not paying you to write for them, they're paying you not to write for anyone else, that's called controlling the capital.

"So your solution is that she should use pseudonym? Isn't that blaming the victim?" No, not her-- you. You should use a pseudonym. You aren't writing for Gawker, you just use the internet, comment on things, etc. Why should you use your real name? "Why shouldn't I?" I'm sorry, I wasn't precise: why are you being encouraged to use your real name? Again, the question of whether anonymity emboldens trolls is not the force of that article, it isn't about their behavior, it is about yours.

"But merely 'branding anonymity as bad' isn't going to stop the cyberbullying misogynists." You are correct, which is why the spokesperson for this crisis is Amanda Hess. No one is trying to stop cyberbullies, there's no point, they don't shop and no one wants to look at them. Hess has entirely misunderstood what the medium wants. The whole game is to get women-- not the cyberbullies, not criminals, but the consumers-- to voluntarily give up all of their privacy, while paying lip service to privacy at home-- knowing full well women that women will pay money not to have the kind of privacy they have at home. Voluntarily exposing yourself makes you a targetable consumer and targetable consumable. Is it worth it?

III.

All of this is for the benefit of the media, which is why I know with 100% certainty that nothing will change. Because she wrote that article, because some people camped in Zuccotti Park, the energy for activity was discharged. And the media got all the profits.

What Hess didn't realize is that while she was fumbling impotently with the cops, the media company that she worked for could have crushed the troll if it was worth it to them. Did you have this thought? If not, it's not your fault, some people are trained not to have it while others were trained to have it immediately. Which are you? If the founder of Religions For New Atheists Sara Miller McCune herself had received an electronic rape threat from some Fox News stenographer in a Kentucky man cave, you think she's dialing 911? From her apartment? She would have waited until she got to the office, waved her hands like in Minority Report and her lawyers would have midnight Seal Team Sixed him while he was overhand jacking it to interracial porn. Do you know what Hess's employers did for her? No, I'm serious do you know? It can't be nothing, right? That would be Bananastown. It was nothing? Really?

Maybe hypotheticals aren't your bag, ok, here's a true story: "Amy" received a couple of voice messages from a "customer" she met at work who wanted to put something in her vagina. These messages were not violent, in so far as forcing your fantasies of consensual sex into an unwilling girl's ear is considered not violent, but of course they creeped her out. There's one other crucial piece of information needed to understand this story: her harasser probably had large sneakers. I'll give you all a minute to catch up.

Every woman has some version of this story, with one important difference: Amy was a medical student, which meant a lot of money went into her and a lot of money was expected of her. One (1) phone call from the Dean to a phone number that was not 911 and that guy was evaporated. Two cops located him minding his own business, and because he defended himself with the magic words-- and you should write these down, they're gold-- "it's a public street, I have a right to be here"-- he was jailed for eight months for harassment and resisting arrest-- pre-trial. Pre means without. Of course his case was ultimately dismissed. Does that matter? Please observe a) Amy herself didn't have to do anything to effect any of this, she was mostly unaware of the results, the system was on autopilot; b) he was jailed not for what he did but for whom he did it to, had Amy been a 1040EZ at the Footlocker we'd say she was asking for it. "But it isn't fair that her protection money should get her concierge policing while the rest of us have to make due with socialized law enforcement." Was it fair that he did eight months because he couldn't afford bail, is it fair that he didn't know that it wasn't fair? On the other hand, was he a dangerous nut, should he have been punished? Of course. Was he operating from a perspective of institutionalized sexism, patriarchal thinking, misogyny? Sure, #whatevs. Sometimes the structural imbalances go your way, and sometimes they don't, better figure out who makes the scales.

After Hess got the runaround, she spent a lot of time trying to get a protection order, a force slightly less compelling than wind. Why didn't she just call the Mayor? "Hi. I work for the city paper, the one that caters to voting Democrats and men looking for Russian companionship. I'm doing a story about police apathy regarding sexual violence from a first person perspective, by which I mean your perspective. Comment?" That would have solved her problem, but more importantly it would have forced her to think about WHY that solved her problem. What is the difference between a "woman" who is threatened and a "reporter" or "medical student" who is threatened? Why is it more bad to attack a journalist than a woman? Think about that, it has not always been so. The former is an attack on the system, so the system must respond; the latter is an attack on a woman, so -------------------------------------. And so it goes.

But Hess preferred to see misogyny on the internet, so instead we get another trending article about how the problem has a penis. This coincides perfectly with the media's desire to frame it as a gender war because that makes for good clicking. Let's summarize the media's thesis via unwitting Hess: 1. cyberharassment is a women's issue, never mind the men who are harassed. 2. The appropriate way to handle women's issues is not necessarily to solve them but to discuss them in the media. "It's called awareness." We are all aware. Are you aware of how much you made for Pacific Standard at your expense and to no avail?

IV.

Hess is fighting the battles of 50 years ago because she was told to fight them by people who profit from the fight, and as a bonus it gets her out of any self-criticism. Oh, Sheryl Sandberg thinks Silicon Valley can be a boys' club? Was that why she manned up and sold us out to the NSA? Curious that she didn't accuse the NSA of being a boys' club. Perhaps real power transcends gender? More curious/on purpose is that she and the boosters at Wired are more horrified about NSA spying, despite there being an explicit terms of service agreement with them that what it finds without a warrant is inadmissible, but Google monitoring my sexts for their commercial benefit is SAGE approved behavioral economics. Google buying Boston Dynamics is better than DARPA having it, is that the game we're playing now? If I had to put my chips and my children against an 8 year rotation of civil service nincompoops vs. some nerd with an open marriage who spent $15M on a "bachelor pad" so he could score chicks of questionable emotional stability, I'm going with the group my private sector lawyers have an outside chance of pwoning. "But how cool is that guy that he could spend $15M on scoring chicks!" You're looking at it backwards, the only way he could score chicks was by spending $15M, and now that guy owns cybernauts. Power corrupts, but absolute power doesn't exist, so for everything else, there's Mastercard.

What Hess and others fail to see is that this kind of postgraduate sexismology-- Hess's "ability" to see it-- is encouraged because it favors the status quo. It is a tool for maintaining an economic and psychological disavowal favorable to Gen X and older-- men and women. Their collective psychology has caused to be a machine that is calibrated to ensure their life is not disrupted-- at the expense of everyone under 30, you guys waste your life Banning Bossy and make sure you pay back all of your student loans, sorry about the future but the SLEEP/CONSUME machine from They Live has to keep running.

Here's a "class struggle" example: name one Wall Street type who went to jail post 2008, everyone picks Bernie Madoff. Now name one person you know who was harmed by Bernie Madoff. That's weird. Note he didn't cause the crash, his criminal empire was a "victim" of the crash. What got him jailed was stealing from the wrong people-- that the media coded as either "celebrities" or "pension funds". Look carefully at the result: you got a distraction to label as evil so you don't have to feel any guilt about overusing your credit card; the rich guys get (some of) their money back; and the media makes millions of dollars engaging you in a "conversation." "But he was symptomatic of Wall Street excesses." Way to treat the symptoms. Hence the most important result: nothing changed. The whole thing is a defense against change, for the system and for you. Still have that credit card at max?

Radical political action, radical as in "outside the frame" radical, the kind self-aggrandizing #OWS is incapable of, would be to demand Bernie Madoff be released, so that everyone would have to watch him in restaurants and hookers, an unignorable signal to the system and to yourself that things are not right. Not to settle for symbolism and scapegoats. But the media won't let this happen, they thrive on symbolism and scapegoats; and you won't let it happen as long as you can get an iphone.

So the system encourages women like Hess to "critique the patriarchy" or "bring awareness" because it stands no chance of moving the money, let alone the power, and also the media gets a cut. Meanwhile men all over the place are left questioning why their opportunities are just as limited but their answer can't be a glass ceiling. "Maybe it's reverse sexism!" Maybe your media is no different than her media, we'll see what kind of sexism there is when the robots replace all of you. What is both obscene and astonishing in its power is that this distraction is foisted on Millennials by other Millennials, they're fighting for the other team, precisely because the immensely hard work of work can be avoided by hoping the problem is sexism. Hess is frantically fighting against-- whom? Cyberbullies? Frat guys? Stand up comedians? What are the results she expects from this fight? The fight is a symptom of neurosis, frantic energy as a defense against impotence, frantic energy as a defense against change. "Why am I in the top 20% of intelligence but I'm running the register at a store whose products I can't afford?" Because trolls are preventing women from earning a living online? "So it's Reddit's fault!"

V.

There should be no controversy: a guy should never tell a girl he's going to rape her, online or not, kidding or not. I get that he's probably not serious, but there should be no instinct at all to defend such a jerk, and yet----- and yet that is precisely the instinct many people get. Men who have never wanted to threaten anyone read Hess's story and side with the troll. And Hess will agree: it is a massive number of people. So they're all misogynist jerks, too? No other explanation?

Yet a typical such "misogynist" probably has a wife and daughters whom he loves in a more equal way than sexists in the Whig party did. He is aware his daughter is a girl, he wants the best for her, he'd be thrilled if she became President, do you think he doesn't want her to have power/money/influence, more than any man? And of course he wouldn't want his daughter to receive such rape threats, but what's important is that he believes she wouldn't-- she wouldn't deserve them.

There is plenty of existing sexism and [insert lip service here]. I do not deny or minimize it, the point here is to identify the self-imposed kind of oppression, instead of top down it is bottom up: impotence. All of these choices, all of these products, all of that sex, all of that power-- why not me?

The troll and Hess have this feeling of impotence, which Hess easily finds to be the fault of patriarchy, which she uses interchangeably with class, except when that class is Sarah Miller McCune, then it's just patriarchy. The troll thinks the source of his impotence is "militant feminism", which also explains why he's not worrying about his daughter. She's not a woman, she's a person, i.e. like all American parents, he's raising her like a boy: school x 16, sports x 12, violin x 6, and for everything else there's LCDs. I don't know why he thinks his daughter will fare any better through the same machine that is failing his son, but I guess it's worth a shot. Of course, he probably won't be too happy if she becomes a "feminist"; e.g. living with a teenage Zosia Mamet drove David Mamet to the Republican Party. I'm going to go ahead and protect myself by saying that's a joke.

So in order to explain their otherwise irrational feeling of impotence, they pull from any of the media-approved categories of blame, depending on your news network: sexism, racism, feminism. The central importance of the media in soliciting their anger is totally lost on the older "activists" who still believe that the -ism is the primary force. They're enraged that a white Princeton student would dare to write that white privledge doesn't exist; they never wonder why they read it. They are at a loss to explain why the very same trolls who want to "rape" feminist bloggers are even more enraged that women in Saudi Arabia are forced to wear burqas. So do misogynists hate Arab men more than American women? Is there a hate hierarchy? Yet the media is unsurprisingly ambivalent about the burqa, the feminism risks an assertion of cultural priviledge so they'd just as soon not get involved. And to hell with George Bush who made us have to.

There was a time not long ago when the dumbest people in the world were polacks. Do you see any dumb polacks around today? What happened? "Awareness?" Do you think we all just learned "poles are just like us?" You think it was... education? Pole empowerment? Tolerance? The question is not how did we learn to get over that prejudice, but rather what purpose did it serve in the first place, why was it the preferred expression of hate of that time?

VI.

Hess had a chance to wonder about this, but the media's keyword list and her own personal psychology converge to make her prefer to see sexism. Against these force vectors she is powerless. The medium is the message, she just puts her byline at the top. Hess even looked for a "woman problem" at The Economist which I thought was going to be that there weren't enough women there because she cited the statistic that 77% of the writers are men, except that she then lamented that since there are no bylines you couldn't tell which ones were the men and the women, which was also bad. But she had something else in mind:

In many ways, the magazine suffers from the same woman problem that plagues libertarianism more widely. The Economist's central belief in "free trade and free markets" informs its one-size-fits all approach to its readership--the idea that women might actually want to consume news differently than men doesn't fit into this theoretically level global playing field.

Women consume news differently. True? Let's find out:

When I lived with a boyfriend who subscribed to The Economist, I'd pick up the magazine occasionally, scanning the table of contents for the odd piece that appealed to me--a dissection of the racial dynamics of American marriage, for example, or a takedown of U.S. sex offender laws. Typically, though, I'd flip straight to the book reviews, a space I discerned as a little more inclusive than the front of the book. I recently asked that guy whether the contents of the magazine ever struck him as particularly masculine, too. "It's called The Economist," he replied. "It's like Maxim for nerds."

Lord have mercy.

First of all, Maxim is already for nerds, who else would want to look at glamour shots of still dressed women only women have heard of? This month is Sophia Bush and Olympic figure skater Tara Lipinski, yum, time to get your hard on. "Oh I loved her with Johnny Weir covering Sochi!" Can't say Maxim doesn't know its demographic.

this is what women are told men want; this is how women are told how to want

So for him to think Maxim isn't for nerds means he thinks it's for Dude-Bros, i.e. large genitaled males who get to rape all the drunk chicks at the Delta house. Which means he's an easy mark for branding, and which, I am willing to bet $10M, is why he tells his guy friends about Maxim but shows his girlfriend he subscribes to The Economist. Don't worry, Amanda, he only reads the book reviews, too. Stab in the dark, here's a guess at his character sketch: a smart underachiever, proud he's "not some frat jerk", he knows he's supposed to be interested in topics not related to him but finds his concentration isn't up to the task-- so he reassures himself with the trappings/magazines of intelligence. "Would Adderall help me do more work and less porn?" No, but it will help you write a book of porn and you will be terrified at what you learn. His favorite way to consume news is to forgo primary sources in favor of skimming two paragraph dissections written by others who also forwent the primary sources. Unmotivated, unthreatening and unrelevant, publicly not drawing from the system according to his need but privately disavowing a lack of contribution back to the system according to his ability. "But the system is corrupt." $100M says there's a vaporizer nearby.

Second of all: hell yeah, dissections and takedowns, thank you for your consideration.

Third of all: observe that she asked him about The Economist after they had broken up. Her ex was her go-to guy when she had a question about masculinity, and magazines. Does she know any other men? Has she interacted with any men without the polarized glasses of stereotype, prejudice and fear? Is every guy only either a love interest or a Dude-Bro?

Fourth: she misunderstood/completely understood his answer about whether the magazine was particularly masculine: "It's called The Economist." Uh oh. If I ask, "Is Cosmo Magazine particularly feminine?" and you reply, "Duh, stupid, it's called Cosmo, any more feminine and it would have a tailbone tattoo," then you are implying not only that the magazine is feminine, but that I should have been able to infer that because cosmos are feminine. To him, The Economist is masculine is because economics is intrinsically masculine-- and she implicitly accepts this. Now who's the sexist? Whose theoretical daughters have a better chance of learning economics? Of course she'd say any women can learn economics, yay women, but her daughters would be learning a masculine discipline, see also math, which I predict she's bad at. The barrier is in herself, sexism is merely her projection of it.

So while she pretends that it is the male perspective she doesn't like, it is evident that it's the contents themselves that she objects to. They're boring, but that can't be related to intellectual curiosity because she's a thinker. So it has to be the "male perspective". But didn't the same male perspective write the takedowns and dissections? Books, sex, relationships; those are "inclusive to women". What happens when you don't sign up for NATO-- that's masculine. But is it? Really? I agree that most of the articles in The Economist are boring and don't "relate" to my lifestyle as an alcoholic, but I force myself to go through them like social studies homework, and most of the women who do the same are doing it as the same. The articles aren't supposed to be interesting to me, they are supposed to be important and I force myself to be interested.

However, the point isn't that she should read The Economist, the point here is that she saw sexism, which means she didn't notice this:

UNWITTINGLY, perhaps, Vladimir Putin is playing Cupid to America's Mars and Europe's Venus. ... "I have not felt this good about transatlantic relations in a long time," whispers one senior European politician.

WTF, why would anyone whisper this? Is Putin standing right there? The Economist does this all the time, citing unnamed sources while alluding to their power and significance. Of course the easy critique to make, and even this one Hess was not allowed to formulate, is that in this way The Economist conveys the impression that it has personal access to the levers of power, the way Us Weekly recasts publicists as "sources close to Kim Kardashian", shrinking the gap between the magazine and the sources and artificially widening the distance between Kardashian and us. She becomes more important and less accessible-- except through Us Weekly.

But this critique is backwards, it assumes the magazine is trying to trick its audience, this is wrong, the audience is using the magazine to trick itself. The audience wants this distance. It wants heroes, celebrities, people with power-- it wants an upper class-- and it wants them inaccessible. Envy? No, that's advertising, this is the "news." This is what happens when a whole generation's narcissism is threatened with injury-- since everything is possible, why aren't you enjoying everything?-- the personality structure becomes overwhelmingly defensive. "If I were Kim Kardashian, then I would be able to do X!" is NOT envy, flip it over and read the redacted obverse: "Only Kim Kardsahians can do X -- therefore it's not my fault that I can't!"

The Economist demo appears to want this same defense. The real trick of The Economist is that as a magazine of "libertarianism" [sic], its belief in "free trade and free markets" requires as axiomatic that these are not real. The Invisible Hand is actually attached to a benevolent class of gentlemen capitalists who have the money, the connections, and the information to best mold the world. You don't know these people, but fortunately The Economist does. Their motto, inscribed in runes over a blue moongate on Jekyll Island, is, "Be content to bind them by laws of trade. You have always done it. And let this be your reason."

Why would the The Economist's rich and powerful demo want to be ruled? Because they aren't powerful, only rich, all that time getting rich did not translate to any power, only the trappings of power. So they've postulated a fantasy power structure/NBA owners that explains why they can't enjoy their lives as they think they should-- to absolve themselves of the guilt they feel for having money/intellect/opportunities and NOT being able to do anything with it except spend it on the system-wide approved gimmicks: Trading Up, college educations, the National Bank of S&P 500.

And you say, boo hoo for the rich. That's your media approved classism talking. Does $200k/yr have more in common with $50k/yr or $1M/yr? What do your TV commercials tell you? Don't think about where the lines are drawn, think about who draws the lines.

Hess yells about a world of masculine power because she has the power to yell at it. But of course her power is limited only to yelling, she is impotent against a troll who yells at her. But her mistake is in thinking he has the power. No one has it, the system doesn't allow it. Even the mighty Economist demo feels impotent. Are they all delusional? This is the true critique of the system, not simply that one group reliably oppresses another; but that the entire system is based on creating a lack. This lack is not a bottomless hole that nothing could ever fill, but a tiny, strangely shaped divot in your soul into which nothing could ever fit: not money, not sex, not stuff, not relationships. Nothing "takes." Nothing counts. Nothing is ever right. Only novelty works, until it wears off.

This lack of power-- not power to rule the world, but existential power-- what is the purpose of my life? What is this all for? I get that I'm supposed to use my Visa a lot, but is that it? Shouldn't I be able to do more than this? Everything is possible, but nothing is attainable. Nothing tells them what is valuable; worse, everything assures them that nothing could be more valuable. That the media is the primary way the system teaches you how to want should have been obvious to Hess, she works for it, but for that same reason it was invisible to her.

You shouldn't be surprised that the only sane response to this impotence is neurosis, for which of course the system provides a psychiatric treatment that couldn't possibly work. "I need an Ambien, I can't sleep." But where did you hear that you needed to sleep?

VII.

If you're a guy, you probably don't realize the awesome pressure on women to let themselves get looked at: to reveal themselves online, to post a pic, to give everyone your attention, to stop what you're doing and give the other your self, even if they want to yell at you. "Hey lady, I hate you!" And yet that same pressure tells women they are valueless unless they are public. Madness.

The system is illogical, the things you want cannot actually coexist, but you dare not attack the system that promises everything, therefore something else must be blamed. As a basic example, Hess probably wants all the benefits of socialism and all the brand products of capitalism. When she can't have it, obviously the problem is misogyny.

Another example: Donald Sterling.

everyone hates two of these: fat cats, america, virgins

Here's a transcript of an illegal recording not done by the NSA that therefore everyone is ok with, consistent with our new standard of conduct: it is not illegal to make an illegal recording as long as it is given to the media and they profit from it and we can use it to rationalize our lives. Got it. Now I know you think you know what he said, but this time pay attention because he leaked a state secret:

You can sleep with them, you can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on [Instagram] and not to bring them to my games.... Don't put him [Magic Johnson] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me... Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people. Do you have to?...You're supposed to be a delicate white or a delicate Latina girl.

Here's a question: who is THEY who have to call him? Why is a gazillionaire 3 years from God's judgment worried about They? And why would They care what his girlfriend does? The implication is that They are even more racist than he is, which should blow your mind when you consider They are about to pretend to try to take his team away from him and give him $600M.

But the other possibility-- which coexists with the first-- is that They don't exist, not in any coordinated way: They are you, the public, far more dangerously racist than he is because his racism is overt and yours is disavowed. What he is worried about is that you will see a picture of "a delicate white or Latina" girl next to a guy with large sneakers and... film your own conclusions.

Some clueless TV types have deduced that she set him up. Duh. Then they tried to figure out why he hooked up with such a manipulative harpy, and I therefore know with 100% certainty that to them having a hot young girlfriend is an unattainable fantasy. But he didn't have a choice: his superego required it, as a condition of his identity he is obligated to have a mistress, a miss-stress-- a girlfriend who is way more headache than any wife he was "bored" with. Since everything is possible, he is obligated to enjoy-- and if it isn't enjoyable there must be something preventing it, and that obstruction has to be her fault, or They's fault, what it can't be is his fault. He's 80, his sexuality is... on the decline. If he can't enjoy sex someone else has to enjoy it for him, in his place: no, not the black guy, but her-- she is doing the enjoying for him. Being cuckolded-- that's what this is, right?-- is fine, it works for him, as long as he isn't humiliated in public. "It's ok if They see me as a racist because I AM a racist, I accept it as part of my identity, there's no shame in it; but if They think I'm not satisfying her, or worse-- if they think I'm a cuckold-- if they don't see me the way I want to be seen----"

"If only you were the girl I thought you were!" he said, paraphrased. But of course she was the girl you thought she was-- she picked you. When you pick a woman for certain reasons, you are also picking the kind of woman who wants to be picked for those reasons. You may even have succeeded in tricking her that you like her for other reasons, but this is irrelevant: you like the kind of girl who likes the kind of guy who pretends to like women for other reasons....... But in any event, his desires were illogical, they can't actually coexist, so it must be They's fault.

It is heartwarming to think of the backlash against Sterling as a new intolerance of racism, and I'm told his case is important to society because he's famous and rich, but his money doesn't come with any power. So while you are all glowing in self-righteousness because you outed another racist rich guy, consider that you will never hear a recording of the head of Goldman Sachs making racist statements. "Maybe he's more progressive?" Hmm. Or maybe power won't allow it, power won't even allow you to think about it. The more likely explanation-- remember, basketball is a TV show on The Disney Channel the outcome of which couldn't be less relevant to humanity-- is that it is projection, it represents frantic activity as a defense against change. "I'm not a racist-- because THAT's a racist!"

---

1Bbu9uvaNMWmAGj6sPF3edaA4u1wY2DLtZ

The Maintenance Of Certification Exam As Fetish 29 Apr 2014 12:15 PM (11 years ago)

no need to wait for the receipt

(I had reworked an old post for a psychiatry trade journal, which I would happily have linked you to, except that page 2 is behind a login wall. So here is the version I submitted before the editors edited it, slightly longer with more typos. I am posting this because of the new lawsuit against the American Board of Medical Specialties.)

The mission of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology's Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Program is

to advance the clinical practice of psychiatry and neurology by promoting the highest evidence-based guidelines and standards to ensure excellence in all areas of care and practice improvement.

That's what the website says, I have no reason to believe they are not earnest. But far from succeeding, the program does the exact opposite. We have come to a moment of truth in psychiatry, and we are all going to fail. By which I mean pass.

We can start with the 200 question certification exam. The most obvious clue that there was something suspicious going on with the test was that there were no questions about Xanax. How do you measure "excellence in all areas of care and practice" without asking about the most commonly prescribed medication in America, let alone psychiatry? Meanwhile there were several questions about pimozide, a medication which appears to be prescribed exclusively by psychiatrists who want to brag about prescribing it. I was repeatedly assessed on my competence in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, but was not asked to display my knowledge of SSI. You might retort that SSI isn't really psychiatry, but then why is so much of my time spent on it? The only thing I spend more time on is Xanax.

But though the missing Xanax was a clue, the insidious problem with the exam was not the content. To see the bad faith obscured by the questions, put aside the usual college freshman complaints of, "why do we need to know about pimozide?" and ask instead, "what happens if I get the question wrong? What happens if I get them all wrong?" The answer is nothing. There are no consequences for failing this test, at all. First, 99% of the applicants pass, I assume the other 1% forgot to bring two forms of ID. Second, even if you fail, you can take it again and again, as many times as you feel it's worth the $1500. Third: there were a thousand easy ways to cheat, here are three: I could have walked out of the building on an unsupervised "break"; I could have Godfathered an ipad to the back of a toilet; or I could just picked up the phone and called everyone. Who was going to stop me? There is more security at a pregnancy test, which made me wonder if how easy it was to cheat wasn't... on purpose. The retort is that doctors are expected to behave honorably, but the honorable ones were going to pass anyway. Those in danger of failing-- the very people the test should detect-- would be most tempted to cheat. Doesn't the ease of cheating render the test unreliable? If the test is unreliable and 99% pass, why have a test at all? Which reveals the gimmick: the point of the test isn't to measure competence, but to convey the impression that competence was measured. The point of the test is to say that a test was given-- and nothing else.

The question is, to whom are we saying this? It is as if psychiatry was in denial about its ordinary reality and was trying to create a different identity through the test itself. A psychiatry where there are right and wrong answers. Where pimozide and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy happens, a lot. Let me anticipate your retorts: that the questions are carefully constructed for their validity; that the test itself "incentivizes" learning; that not everyone prescribes Xanax; that if I'm such a smartypants, what system would I use? If these are your replies, you have missed my point: a flawed system isn't better than no system at all, it is worse than no system at all, because at least with no system we are forced to be accountable to ourselves for our education. "Not everyone will be so dedicated." Correct, but now those same undedicated people get an official blessing of their ignorance. Who doesn't walk out of even this ridiculously meaningless exam not feeling smart, accomplished, up to date? And who would dare, after passing, to criticize the exam that warmed his ego?

In addition to the test, the Board also requires a nauseating number of CME credits, but these CMEs are an even worse affront to learning. The only thing that CMEs guarantee is that money was spent on buying them, $80 and no questions asked is all it takes, which is even sillier than it sounds since I could go to a number of websites which offer instant and unlimited free CMEs, so long as I skip the long text and just take the post-test, which I can take as many times as I want. I can get 1 CME every 25-50 seconds, depending on my ability to click "b".

The retort is that the system is predicated on a certain level of honor, that physicians shouldn't cheat. Fair enough, but if you're trusting them to be honest in revealing what they learn, why not simply trust that they're going to learn it? Because the point isn't the education. The CME exists to say that there is CME; the CME exists to say there is oversight.

To clarify: the important criticism here is not that the multimillion dollar CME industry is a gigantic money making scam, something on the level of the 15th century sale of indulgences, because to say that would be actually to defend that very system: the money is a diversion, a patsy, what is corrupt about CME isn't the money but, as the default mechanism for continuing education, it subverts its own purpose. It reduces the interest in actual education so that it can pretend that it explicitly monitors it. If you have a minute to spend on your "education," the system pushes you towards CME. "Why not do both?" Why do both, who can do both? There are only 24 hours in a day. In other words, the system doesn't just fail, it forces failure.

Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard, over a hundred students were accused of plagiarism in a government class, and amidst the usual self-aggrandizing criticisms of the college kids as entitled, lazy, or stupid, what no one wondered is why, in an introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren't cheating to get the right answer, there was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor wanted-- because that's the system. Meanwhile, while they were spending their time "cheating", what real learning could be done? None. So--- why bother with an exam at all? Why not just offer the course and give everyone an A anyway? Because the purpose of the test is to say a test was given, to prove to some hypothetically gullible entity that learning occurred-- and to prove it to ourselves. Which is why our reflex was to criticize the kids, not the system: we are products of that system, to criticize the reliability, let alone validity, of that system would be to open ourselves to scrutiny, to deprive us of a core part of our own identity. "Things were a lot more rigorous when I went to college." First of all, they weren't. Second, even if they were, why, when you got to be in charge, did you change the system to this?

Seen this way, these tests, whether Harvard government exams or MOC exams, are nothing more than fetishes: a substitute for something missing which saves us from confronting the full impact of its absence. In less abstract terms, these tests allow us to believe NOT that we learned something, NOT that we know something-- but that there is something to know. Since there is nothing new to learn, therefore there must be a test. The logic of a 10 year MOC exam is to keep us up to date, so it's fair to ask: what in psychiatry has changed in ten years, what are the major advances? Depakote was discovered to be the default maintenance mood stabilizer despite no evidence supporting this, but that fell into disuse at a time oddly coinciding with its patent expiration, which is suspicious but I'm no epidemiologist. Anyway, it wasn't on the test. Anything else? A few new medicines have come out, though none of them appeared on the test either. There's money to be made on the west coast using giant magnets, (fortunately) also not on the test. So? Was the ABPN worried I'd forget how to use MAOIs? I'm never going to use them, I have enough problems monitoring Xanax. The astonishing truth is that despite millions of dollars and hundreds of academic careers psychiatry has made no progress in almost 20 years, let alone ten, a claim no other medical specialty can make, and the truth which cannot be spoken out loud. Hence an exam.

Are you prepared to look inside yourself? When a nurse practitioner asks you what about your board exam is difficult, what will you say? Take a minute, it's important. "Well, it has neurology in it." Note carefully that the psychiatry questions aren't "harder," the appeal here isn't to a higher level of expertise in psychiatry, but an expertise in something else, something "more" than psychiatry, and it is this link that symbolizes our status as "experts." Older psychiatrists will be quick to assert that "clinical judgment" counts for a lot, and I don't disagree, but it's probably not testable, and it most certainly wasn't tested. So what does $1500 buy you? "Existential support." I hope it was worth it.

What makes the MOC not just a bad exam but evidence of a pathology is that though college kids have no idea what they're up against, that the system works against their education, psychiatry is the very discipline that articulated these defense mechanisms. It should know better, it is supposed to know better; which means that we are either unable to see what we are doing or believe that we are somehow exempt from this. But here we are, spending time and money on cosmetics and pageantry to pretend that we are learning, to pretend that we are being measured, all the while slinging random neurochemicals + Xanax based on an a suspect but billable logic in the hope that something sticks and no one notices. Frantic activity as a defense against impotence. There is a term for that, but you can bet your career it won't be on the test. Pass.

Ten Extra Seconds Would Have Saved True Detective's Finale 10 Mar 2014 11:54 AM (11 years ago)

what could it mean?

You just watched a historical TV moment: never before has the audience for a show been smarter than its writer.   I submit as second evidence the season finale for The Bachelor that was on yesterday, for three hours, drawing ten million "people".  Just remember that the next time some dummy from The New Yorker complains that TV has a woman problem. 

The Whitman's Sampler that was True Detective's finale is beyond discussion, literally, because what we now know is that no discussion was necessary.  All the references, all the philosophical subtext, all the weirdness-- turns out it was topping after topping, "does this make you watch?  How about this?"     Remember when the one character who turns out to be irrelevant says, "YOU'RE IN CARCOSA NOW," do you know what that meant?   Nothing.    The writer once read a story that had the word Carcosa in it but since his cat was already named Chuckles he used it in a TV script.  "It's a reference to--"  I know what it's a reference to.  Why is it a reference?  Does it mean anything?  Did "acolyte" or "metapsychotic"? 

We see Errol shifting fluidly between several accents. Here is the show I thought I was watching: is this is a 1 Corinthians 14 "speaking in tongues"? Maybe coupled with the aluminum and ash reference it suggests Errol is Baal and Carcosa is Hell? 

Here is the show I was actually watching: though not mentioned ever in the show ever, he did that because the accident that caused his scars also made it hard for him to talk in his normal voice.

Meditate on that.

The writer googled Chekhov's Gun, laughed mightily and roared, "you're not the boss of me!"  I'm confused, so the killer's ears were green because he painted houses with his ears?  The point isn't that this explanation is stupid, the point is he didn't need to have green ears.

I don't care about "tying up loose ends" or sterile Judeo-Christian undercurrents, I have ABC for that.  I care only about internal consistency.  If you're going to make a show about, for example, zombies that is worth watching, at some point a character must say, "look, the only thing we know with 100% certainty is that every single one of us will eventually but unpredictably become a zombie, so we probably need to devote, oh, I don't know, 100% of our energy to dealing with that certainty."  Once you ask that question you are lead, for example, towards a sci-fi show about forced physical isolation where the only contact we have with each other is digital, but because of the lack of physical contact paranoia sets in, and suddenly every interaction becomes an implied Turing Test.  Would you watch that show?  Because without that question you have four seasons of Denial Lets Us Pretend The Old Rules Still Apply.

A show about applied philosophy in the form of a crime drama sounded intriguing. All of True Detective's existential despair, posed as, "how do you solve a series of murders when humans are a mistake anyway?"  -- well?  It's finally solved incoherently with an appeal to the Old Testament.  Oh, so God exists after all?  That would have been helpful to know up front, because I thought we were in Schopenhauer's "time is a flat circle" universe.  But whirlwinds are cool, too.

So through some kind of faith, Cohle loses both his nihilism and... his interest in pursuing child killers?  "We got ours."  Oh, we're done then.  Time for a sandwhich.

"I don't sleep, I just dream." Turns out that doesn't mean anything either, but if you're 16 feel free to lay it on the artsy girls.  You'll think they'll think you're mysterious.

II.

I'm sure everyone has their own idea of how it should have ended.  But as an exercise how could you take the finale that was aired and fix it using only an additional 10 seconds?  You can't change anything else.

Could you have kept it true to the show's  original promise, such that "pessimist" Cohle is both redeemed AND still true to who he is?  Could you have rendered a closing scene so diabolically duplicitous that, on the one hand, most of the characters are saved/happy, while the world's bleak necessity of a tragic hero (since that's all he was, after all) becomes unescapable?  That we all live semi-peacefully only because of the sacrifice of a few loners in a garden, coming out one by one to allow their own crucifixion?

"Compassion is ethics."  Yes it is. How do you take Nietzsche's nihilism and make it compassionate?  Yet not sappy?  If you accept that the theme of the show is that life has absolutely no meaning and therefore it is up to you to give it meaning, how do you take the mess that is episode 8 and say that?

Could it be done in ten extra seconds? 

At the end they optimistically talk about stars and daughters and life energies, and Marty smiles upon Cohle and Cohle smiles upon the universe, and Marty, having learned the true meaning of Christmas, skips off to go get the car.

Cohle sits alone in the wheelchair, watching him.   The emotion in his face disappears.  His face hardens.  He takes a long drag from the cigarette.

"But I lied for your salvation."

Cut to black.

Credits.

True Detective's Detective 8 Mar 2014 11:59 AM (11 years ago)

taking part in a particular pleasure

[Pastabagel and I have emailed about the show.  Some excerpts of his]:

In Episode 3, the preacher says to Cohle, "Compassion is ethics, detective" when he departs the trailer leaving the reformed pedophile Burt in distress.  Cohle replies "Yes, it is."

But if Time was created so things could become, and if acting out of the interest of others is compassion, then we should assume that Cohle is "becoming", changing into something else.  But what?

Cohle asks in Ep. 5 "Why should I live on in history?"  It's an odd line, especially when in episode 1 he tells Marty that he "lacks the constitution for suicide."  But he also meditates on the cross (as an atheist),  "contemplates that moment in the garden, of allowing your own crucifixion."  But by 2012, Cohle has changed.  He's resigned himself to ending his own life, but only after settling this debt- doing what he owes.  One last act of compassion before giving up the only thing he has.  His life.  And once he's willing to do that, then he can do all the things in his life that require selflessness, courage, etc (i.e. things that require faith).  You have to accept the infinite so you can make the right moves in the finite.

And when he does this, when he resigns himself not to his fate but to his eternity of endlessly repeating, at that moment he will actually have faith, because that's when he proves he believes in the eternal.  Only after doing this last good thing does he believe that he could stand the idea of an eternity of rerunning his life, because he knows at the end, he's fulfilled it.  "Nothing is fulfilled--until the end."

According to Kierkegaard, this resignation to the eternal is crucial.  Kierkegaard was not an atheist but a diehard Christian.  He believed that when a man resigns himself to the eternal, to existing in eternity, and gives up everything that ties him to this world then he becomes a "knight of faith" capable of great Christian acts (like the self-sacrifice that is almost certainly coming in ep. 8).  When Kierkegaard wrote about a Knight of Faith, he contrasted the Knight of Faith to the mere Knight of Infinite, the "God botherer"--a phrase used twice in the show.  What did Kierkegaard say the Knight of Faith looked like?  Like this:

Why, he looks like a tax-collector!" However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through. His tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so. One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite. He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he.

[Here I said that the reference was clear, but that Cohle did not look like this at all, that he appeared much more like the knight of inifinite resignation, the "tragic hero."]

The point is that the writer is taking the concept and running with it.  If we've already spotted Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, then we are firmly entrenched in the existential project, and we should expect to find references from other existentialists also.  And we do.  The preacher in 2002 tells us that God is dead ("only nearness is silence"). Ep 3 Marty asks Cohle the question from Dostoyevsky, "You know what people would do without God, it would be an orgy of murder and debauchery."  Would it?  Existentialists say no.  Do we have Sartre?  Why yes, we do.  There's angst and despair all over the place.  And the angst is brought on by the burden of freedom, not the absence of it.

Think how often Cohle ruminations on suicide echo Camus's formulation of suicide as the fundamental question of philosophy in the Myth of Sisyphus (a guy endlessly pushing a rock up a hill, over and over, repetition, cyclical.)  But Camus answers it in the negative, faced with a meaningless world, you embrace the absurd and revolt, not commit suicide.  And isn't what they are doing now a revolt?  Kidnapping cops, burglarizing the houses of the most powerful figures in the state?  If this group has been kidnapping kids, if they held power for generations in the state, if they are plugged in all all levels, then isn't acting against them so deliberately a revolt against power?

And if they are embracing revolt, if they are not embracing suicide (but are willing to make a sacrifice, is there a difference?) then they have embraced the absurd, and are on their way to the teleological moment ("Teleos de Lorca, Franciscan mystic"--a made-up guy that invokes Francis of Assisi a second time, reminds us of the teleological stakes, and re-invokes mysticism to bridge us from the ethical paradigm of the characters to the Continental philosophy started by Bataille (who was derogatorily called a mystic by Sartre, all in one shot, how is that for economy of storytelling, take that Cormac McCarthy)).

Revolt: "Fuck this world," Cohle says. Remember how he says it?  Not in anger, almost off-handedly, like he's passing on the offer of a free lunch.  No anger, no big explosion.  Just...resignation. But he only gets around to trying to screw it 10 years after he says it.  And in 2012, it's jumper cable time.  No institutional rules.  And no masked perversion of the established rules.  (I'm a cop who's job is to uphold the law, and therefore I'm the one who can break it).  Rather than commit literal suicide, they commit it metaphorically, by giving up and saying goodbye to everything to take on the very institution that defined their identity.

And if it is a revolt, then we invoke all the ideas of consistent with revolution?  Do we push out of the existential angst of the 50's into the revolution of the 60's and beyond?  The "present" in the show is 2012?  Will we get a postmodern postmortem, an aftermath 2 years later set in 2014? And by then, how much more of the landscape will be swallowed by Carcosa, the corrupting refinery towers that loom in the back of every scene in the show?

Who Can Know How Much Randi Zuckerberg Is Worth? 1 Mar 2014 1:07 PM (11 years ago)

cue hatred

Part 1 here

IV.

Off topic: Randi strongly believes Facebook has a legitimate place in the business world, and this makes me think Facebook is finished.  I realize this is a speculative trade to make.  The usual anxiety about Facebook's future is that teenagers aren't interested in it, but the more relevant demo here is adult men, especially the ones in suits.  Facebook runs 60/40 women to men.  In the language of self-aggrandizing social media, that's a tipping point.  5% more estrogen and Facebook will be perceived as a women's site and no guy will want any part of it except for guys you will want no part of.  Hush yourself, you have your sexism backwards:  The instant a woman notices a man flipping through Facebook and one eyebrow goes up, you can head to your car and beat the stadium traffic, the game is as good as over.  That's what happened to Myspace.  It tipping pointed into "unemployed/some high school" and The Ruling Class had to sell it to Ima Holla Achoo for 20x less than they bought it.  Now it looks like Windows Mobile, which is demographically appropriate.

Lose the men and you've lost Big Business, and at some size point a technology needs Big Business to want it, which makes Pinterest more valuable than Instagram and WhatsApp completely worthless.  This is the story of Blackberry.  The conventional wisdom is that people didn't like their emails in monochrome and preferred the sleek and sexy iphones, but you probably remember all the business casual salarymen proudly carrying around two phones like some bourgeois Frenchman with a dignified wife and a touch sensitive mistress, a couple years in a guy's going to get to thinking, "what am I, a Mormon, how did I end up with two wives?"   When Business was henpecked into supporting the iphone, Blackberry went sadly into menopause and defiantly into Africa.  Plausible deniability requires that I do not explain how layered a joke that is. 

V.

I want to believe that Randi Zuckerberg is delusional, that because she is so wealthy and famous she sincerely believes if you take a MacBook Pro to a Panera and start a mommy blog or a particle accelerator, follow your passion, you should be a TEDx speaker in no time, but don't forget it's hard work, money isn't everything, and take time out to unplug!

But this person was at Davos.  Now I'm confused, was the invite Mark + 1?  That's the easy criticism to make, that she's famous only because of her brother, but nepotism only gets you so  far, Mark has a much more intelligent wife who just graduated medical school and no one is interested in her, and when the media has no other choice but to acknowledge her they do this:

I know, I know, it's probably photoshopped.  Still.

So on the one hand the media has no idea what to do with an Asian physician except depict her as a borderline psychopath on Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand they are excited to interview a lunatic  who broadcasts the appearance of excessive action-- frantic activity as a defense against impotence-- that's what the demo wants, and if you've been paying attention you will understand the translation: since the target demo has no idea what to learn from the experience of an Asian woman who despite marrying the Powerball became a physician anyway, you get Davos updates from a woman who plurals adjectives.  This isn't a criticism of her, it's a criticism of you: what do you expect to gain from all the haste, the energy, the "finding ways to be creative?"  Unlocking creativity is the third biggest swindle perpetrated by managment consultants, after open floor plans and managment consulting.  Creativity was never the problem, the problem was always the math. 

Randi probably read her book herself and I don't doubt that it took months to come up with the phrase "dot complicated", after which she needed a vacation, but she doesn't understand why she wrote the words she did, what forces were acting on her, and what these forces wanted from her that she was elevated to celebrity status.  Consequently, her demo doesn't understand either: they think she's an idiot.  This woman went to the World Economic Forum, which you probably think is irrelevant and you'd be right, but grant that they are at least pretending they are relevant; yet they still allowed her in, knowing full well if anyone found out it could completely obliterate their legitimacy.  Why take such a gamble, to what possible benefit?  Look, if Scarlett Johansson is going then at least you can say Scarlett Johansson is coming, I totally get it, but putting Randi Zuckerberg on the brochure should be brand annihilation.  

for the sake of this premise, pretend she came to the 2014 Davos

"I'm pretty sure that's Charlize Theron, not Scarlett Johansson."  And I'm pretty sure they're the same person, and just because now she's Rachel Maddow doesn't mean she's serious.  "But she did actually do serious humanitarian work."  Yes, great, how about that.  Is there a blonder picture we can use for the flier?

It's probably very frustrating for whoever that woman is to try being anything other than whatever she is because no one will see her as anything but that, but this is the nature of the trade off: you spend your life trying to be seen as something, then if you happen to succeed then you will not want to be only that anymore, you are really something else.  But the world and/or your girlfriend won't listen.  This is especially hard if you simply age out of it, you want to move on with new ideas but the jerk in the supermarket wants you to be the person from '99, which means that the jerk in the supermarket still is the person from '99 and can't understand how calendars work.  "You changed!" he hisses with disgust because you fail to normalize his cortical sclerosis.  Sigh.  You can't punch him, there are witnesses.  There are always witnesses, and they will all be from '99.

VI.

You would be forgiven for thinking Randi was at Davos merely because she's rich, but consider that Warren Buffett was not there.  He's a capitalist, not a globalizer, so his brand doesn't synergize, in fact, he is the competition.   "No, he knows Davos is irrelevant!"  So why does he go on CNBC?  Buffett is a CNBC favorite, but what's so remarkable about his appearances is that while he is branded as a sober "buy and hold" investor, he is only ever asked about short term trends: are we at a bottom, what will the Fed do tomorrow, etc.  Why?  You know what he's going to say: "You want to buy good companies when they're undervalued," he'll intone over a cheeseburger, callously unaware that there are only 7 minutes until the close.  --What about Facebook?! Buy at 57?!   "Oh, I don't know anything about those new fangled tech stocks, I liked Wrigley's as a child, I understand the company, it offers durable competitive advantage."  --Oh, Uncle Warren, you're so out of touch!  (But the rest of you understand Facebook, you liked it as a child, doesn't it offer competitive advantage...?)

What does Watch Us With The Sound Down And Feel Like You're Active need him for?  It's not his words, it's him, he's the draw, he is the aspirational image of the demo of 35-54yo hopefuls: "Someday I'll be old, but when I am, I'll have become rich through the market."  So keep trading. 

And here I have to go back over something.  The harder part of the psychology is that the demo doesn't want to become full time traders, either at home all day or on Wall Street-- that part must remain a fantasy--  because then it would be a job and it wouldn't count; it has to be a side gig, then their success wasn't their "work self" but their "real" self;  no one else can claim a sliver of that success-- not the liberals with their "'entrepreneurs' just pretend they don't benefit from public services!" or the wives with their "behind every good man...!" or the echoes of their father yelling,  "you need to apply to Sperry Rand, now there's a company you can put in forty years with!"  It all happened in their head, no one else can share the credit, it is 100% a consequence of their personal value.    Bonus: if they fail, it can be quickly discounted as merely a hobby-- that wasn't, after all, their real self.

The mistake is in thinking this has anything to do with the money.  It's said that most at home traders fail, but this is incorrect: they fail at making money, but they are successful at feeling like a trader.  That is the goal; the money is secondary, which is why they fail at making it.  The buy/hold/reinvest the dividends strategy of Buffet is totally opposite to what's desired, because the strategy does not involve market timing or status updates, it is on autopilot, and there's no "i" in autopilot.  Well, there's one, but it doesn't stand out. 

The trading activity itself-- the frantic activity--  keeps the rest of reality away.  You're not your job-- you're something else.  You're not your family, you're more than that.  Things have the potential of possibly happening someday, and no work will have been necessary to accomplish it.  Just you wait.

But even that's not true.   The hardest part of the psychology is that feeling like a trader isn't the final goal.  Turn CNBC back on, there's Buffett, and oh, look, there's Peter Schiff.  Peter Schiff is another CNBC favorite, and his presence is even more incongruous until you understand it isn't.   Whatever your opinion of his opinions-- debt/inflation/government/armageddon-- his are more political than financial or macroeconomic rather than technical and anyway they are 100% long term opinions.  He may tell you to buy gold for the coming collapse, but you have a few years to open a position.  So why is he there?  "Because he's right!"  No-- why is he on Fast Money? 

Here is the unspoken fantasy that explains the presence of Warren Buffett and Peter Schiff on CNBC:  "Someday I'll be old, but when I am, I'll have become rich through the market.  And then people will want to interview me."

VII.

Swap out the demo, and this is Randi Zuckerberg.  She believes she is worth all her money, she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions.  Anyone who disagrees is a hater.  You're just jealous.  "No, she's a fool!"  Then how come she's so rich?

Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is, which is why her target demo as seen by Davos includes her haters.  The standard criticism of her is that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her brother"--  but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing-- even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid in stock options.  What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them.   She timed the market the way you're supposed to; what she did that makes her hatable, therefore, is that she had inside information.

I don't begrudge anyone the good fortune of right place/right time, take your money and run, but first drop a knee and be humbled before God reflecting soberly on the knowledge that you didn't deserve it.   I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do not let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be lying and you will believe it.  You hold a fetish of value and not actual value.   But even her haters want the money to mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed reality testing and instead creates a new reality,  it uses the truth in order to lie: of course I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value based on his labor.  I'm rich because that's what I'm worth.  "Isn't that specious reasoning?"  Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense.  To her haters Randi is a buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money; Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self worth.  She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else.  So she's disparaged in a specific way: she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother.

VIII.

Not coincidentally, this is the narrative of Davos to the demo that, unlike Randi, will never, ever, ever be rich; but to whom Randi represents a possibility of it:  with globalism comes the possibility of a lifestyle independent of your work product, and, more deeply, that your self-worth will finally be recognized by the world that is happy to pay you just for your individuality.  Why wouldn't it?  Your baby pictures are adorable.

To be clear, it's not a lifestyle that could be independent of your work product-- it has to specifically be independent of your work product, otherwise its based on something other than you and thus wouldn't count.  This is why one cannot profit from "nepotism" and "inside information".  Those are bad.  That they are, in fact, actually bad is besides the point: they are the exemptions which prove you are worth your money.

It's probably unnecessary to point out that this increase in lifestyle is built on the increased work product of whoever will do it for 30 cents an hour, and anyway it is a red herring.  The real attraction for us isn't just the lifestyle, but that it systematizes-- it makes normal-- not ever wondering: how come we have more lifestyle when we didn't do more work?  How did that happen?  In 2008 it was 1933 and six years later it's 1999, what kind of bananastown calendar is this? 

no caption is possible

Confused, I run through my checklist: was there a war?  No.  Did they invent a new technology?  No.  Was cold fusion discovered?  No.  Did the aliens come?  Don't look at me like that, did they come?  Then nothing could possibly explain how we are all worth twice what we were worth in 2009, or even 30% more than we were worth in 2007.  "But stock prices aren't based on our worth."  Then what do they reflect?  Our productivity?  Our innovation?  A bet on our future prospects?  I ask you again: Did the aliens come? 

And hence Globalism-- the brand, not the particulars-- is attractive because it is the physical manifestation of the logic of disavowal we already use for everything else.    "I don't know how it happened, but it makes sense.  After all, I am worth it."  Economics mirrors psychology, as it always must.

So Randi goes to Davos, never once asking why they would want her there?  Convincing her demo of underproducing hyperconsumers that capitalism-- controlling capital-- is pointless and mean, but globalism-- doublespoken as "progress", "human rights", "everything is connected"-- that is a noble cause.  Remember that the "culture" she thinks she speaks for, including those that hate her-- "the startup culture"-- is premised on starting a business in order to sell the business to someone else.   Of course the idea is to get rich-- which sounds like capitalism, if you're retarded, but observe the message that is being taught: that the necessary correlate to getting rich is to give all the capital to someone else.   The power is traded for the fetish of power.  That's not capitalism, it is madness, and apparently Davos and Randi think women especially will heart it.   It'll work for a handful of well publicized people pictured above the caption, "$100 billion!  You could be next!"-- followed immediately by a story about how worthless the business turned out to be, so of course the goal for you is to sell out ASAP;  but the vast majority who have aligned their psychology with this vector will pursue an impossible fantasy at the expense of their labor and their lives.  If you don't believe me, believe Lori Gottlieb.  This logic recommended to her to drop out of Stanford medical school to join Kibu.com, and now she's a relationship expert.  

"But capitalism exploits the worker."  I'll take my chances, because when you get a taste of the money but no access to the capital, you are easily seduced by Globalism-- the brand, not the particulars.  Hence the Hollywood stars, hence Buffett's grandson, hence Randi Zuckerberg, all who act like they belong there.  They do.

Every time you hear the word globalism, you should hear three things: 1. wealth uncoupled from work product.  2. Lifestyle as a reflection of your personal self-worth.  3. You give up control of the capital, and by capital I mean you.    "Do I still get paid?"  Sure, but you have to promise to spend more than what we pay.  "How will that work?"  Don't worry, Visa will explain it all to you.

IX.

It is no coincidence that social media, "everything is connected" (the default is plugged), is a vivid metaphor for globalism, even as so many social media vaginalists think they are against globalism if it is defined as Wall Street.   Propaganda doesn't care about your motivations, so long as you act in the required direction.

When social media is branded to men as a positive, the gimmick is that it magnifies their power,  e.g. "the hive mind."  This brand is reinforced even when it is depicted as bad, e.g. men's increased power to stalk, harass, or bully people.  On the other hand, when social media is branded to women with interests and passions but no math skills it's for "finding support" or "community"; nothing powerful is expected to occur there, it's a place to feel safe, "connect" and "have a conversation."  Those are not accidents, and they have nothing to do with biology, they are the result of market research and 50 years of very, very bad parenting.

Randi Zuckerberg Thinks We Should Untangle Our Wired Lives 25 Jan 2014 6:21 AM (11 years ago)

Randi Zuckerberg is CEO of Zuckerberg Media, which, according to its 10-K, is an iphone.  If you have no idea who she is, and you shouldn't, then the answer to your one and only question is yes.

In her considerable free time she wrote a book about social media. Here's a question: why does a woman who epitomizes the online world need to write a hardback book?  Could it be there's no money in the online unless you actually own the online? I'm guessing that wasn't in the book.  Ok.
  



I understand she gives a lot of interviews too, I'm sure they're TEDy optimistic and unactionable, but she's apparently an expert, shrug, here is her insight from six years of watching people work at Facebook: social media is a bad thing, unless it's used responsibly, then it's a good thing.  Settle in for nuance and shades of grey, all 50 of them.

She thinks it's important to "find a balance" between plugged and unplugged life, a phrase you hear all over the plugged place but has suspiciously avoided scrutiny and is an example of media allowing you to debate the conclusions but forcing you to accept the form of the argument, in this case that a balance is what is desirable. 

I'm definitely not advocating a complete disconnect or complete unplug, that's not realistic... But what I am thinking is that people, we've reached this point where we feel like we just need to be always on. Always answering emails 24/7 connected, and the pendulum needs to swing back a little bit for us to reclaim a bit of our own time...

Someone is lying, time to figure out why.  While she misdirected us with "pendulum" and "thinking" and "little bit" which are words vicious ideologues use to sound nonideological and "realistic", she substituted the plugged/unplugged balance with work/home balance, don't think I didn't see it.  Consequently, when someone/Randi tells you about the negatives of being too plugged in, they almost always blame work emails, as if the things that pay for your dinner are what distract you from dinner.   Really?   If I had to make a sexist yet 100% accurate prediction I'd say that it isn't hers but her husband's work emails that she can't stand at dinner, I'm pretty sure that no husband has ever gotten away with telling his still Anne Taylored wife to put her phone away, "the senior partner will just have to wait, we're about to say grace."   I'll cover myself by saying that, indeed, wives do sometimes answer work emails at dinner, however and importantly if this is occurring you can be sure the wife is extremely, extremely bored with everything that happens after 5pm, and this is compared to everything that happened before 5pm which was also *yawns*.  "Huh," she soundboards as she one thumbs a text to anyone else,  "Obama said that, you don't say, pandering to the flavor profile demo, what are you gonna do."   I'll be first to observe Obama has failed in every imaginable way, but Jesus, if that's your dinner conversation, just Jesus.  One of you should cheat just to force the eye contact. 

Email is a convenient scapegoat not just because "family time should be protected" but because it gets us out of inquiring what went wrong with our home life that we could ever be tempted by work emails, and the avoidance of this inquiry is highly suspicious, i.e. on purpose.  "Honey," she says putting down her Trader Joe's summer salad, "I gotta take this."  Only in America does gotta substitute for wanna so we can avoid the guilt.  #behavioralgenetics.  You may recall industrialization/capitalism/Carousel of Progress's great promise of fewer working hours, and for the most part this has come true, please observe what we have done with our increased leisure time: filled it back up with work.  There was some consternation that evil capitalism had forced Target's employees to work all day on Thanksgiving, "no respect for tradition or family time!"  But how many of them wanted to be home on Thanksgiving?  The customers sure didn't, they were willing to camp out/throw down to get in a store what they coulda got easier/cheaper/faster from their Zuckerberg Medias.  "But the store itself has the responsibility to respect tradition!"  And only in America do we want the system to force us to do the right thing so we can take the credit.  #behavioraleconomics

 

tell HarperCollins that women will like what you tell them to like, just get a boob to promote it

Haters beware, clicking on a link because "I can't believe a stupid person actually wrote such a a stupid article about a stupid thing" is 100% the exact same mental process, and anyway, the system doesn't care about your motivations, so long as you act in the required direction.

Hunger Games Catching Fire: Badass Body Count 30 Nov 2013 3:22 PM (11 years ago)

How Does The Shutdown Relate To Me? 25 Sep 2013 7:08 AM (12 years ago)

Real Men Want To Drink Guinness, But Don't Expect Them To Pay For It 25 Sep 2013 6:22 AM (12 years ago)

the reason the bubbles go down is because of the drag created by the bubbles rising up the center. 
yeah, like a metaphor.

getting the message out

Still Alive 6 Jul 2013 10:36 AM (12 years ago)

WHERE DID YOU GO?

I flatter myself by thinking you are asking this question.  I am writing a book of and about porn.



IS IT ANY GOOD?

Not sure.  I am trying my best.  It's a lot of work, complicated by relentless self-doubt.  The good news is I am drinking more.


ALMOST DONE?

Yes, guy who asks all the right questions.


WILL YOU THEN RETURN TO THE BLOG?

Yes.  The blog is very good practice.


IN THE MEANTIME, DO YOU RECOMMEND ANY OF YOUR OLD POSTS?

No.  Read at your own risk/tolerance, I distance myself from everything older than, say, the last four or five posts.  Everything else is thinking out loud, work in progress.  I could go back and try to revise the old posts, but there's no point.  Life is change, have to keep moving forward.


IF YOU HAD TO PICK ONE OR TWO...?

The Second Story of Echo and Narcissus and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.


WHY A BOOK?

I didn't want to put a porn story on the blog, I felt there should be a buffer.  Wait-- are you asking me why I didn't just shoot a sex tape?  Huh.


SO YOU WROTE AN ACTUAL PORN STORY?

Yes.


HARDCORE PORN?

Yes.


IS IT HETERONORMATIVE?

Sigh.

The book is in two parts. The first part is a straight up porn short story.  There's penis and vagina and lots of cum/ming.  I have deliberately not written the story "well", whatever that means, I am imitating the flow and style of that kind of story. I didn't try to make it sensual or unusual; while it is hard core pornography it is a fairly vanilla story-- boy vs. girl, no vampires, no one dies-- obvious in its language and plot and etc. My goal wasn't to elevate the genre but to photograph it.  I did this so that you could assure yourself that there is nothing meaningful there, no symbolism-- just explicit porn.  And then to business.

The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam 8 May 2013 5:21 AM (12 years ago)

the only way to win is not to play

"Dude, are you doing the Dove ad now?  That was so April 15th...?"  Yes, I realize I missed the meme train, but it's better to be right than part of the debate, especially when there is no debate, this is all a short con inside a 50+ year long con.  Remember House Of Games?  "It's called a confidence game. Why, because you give me your confidence?  No: because I give you mine."

"What's with you and fin-de-Reagan David Mamet?"  It's not my fault Dove cast Joe Mantegna as the sketch artist, and anyway if you want to understand the world today, you have to understand how the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists In The History Of The World was educated.  See also: 9 1/2 Weeks. 

Here's how you run a short con, pay attention:

Everyone likes to know the secrets of the game, and this scene certainly satisfies. Joe Mantagena shows a famous psychiatrist (played, tellingly, by David Mamet's future ex-wife) how a short con is done, how it's improvised, and he makes it look so easy.  Really easy, except for the part where you have to connect with a perfect stranger and make them like you.  Did you find yourself wondering if you had the skills to pull it off?  Better watch it again, sucker.

Quick test for a con: what questions does it not occur to you to ask?  While you were memorizing the language and the pacing of the scam, you didn't ask yourself, why didn't Mantegna take that guy's money at the end?  Why did he let him off the hook?  "He was just doing it as an example." Oh, like when a guy says he'll put in just the tip, "I want to see if it fits"?   It's not like the psychiatrist doesn't know he's a thief-- that's why they were there in the first place.   So he purposely didn't steal the money to make the psychiatrist feel at ease, feel closer to him.  To earn her confidence by first giving her his.  She's the mark.  The aborted short con is part of an unseen long con.

But the genius of the scene is that while you, the viewer, are criticizing the stilted dialogue or the improbability of the success, "dude, that would never work in real life!" if you search your sclerotic heart you will find that you yourself felt good that Mantegna didn't take that guy's money, that he let him go.  It endeared you to Joe, it made you feel more sympathetic to him, like he's an ethical thief, like he's Lawful Neutral.  In other words, he's given you his confidence.... which means that the true mark is you. 

Women are their own worst beauty critics.... At Dove, we are committed to creating a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety... That's why we decided to conduct a compelling social experiment that proves to women something very important: You are more beautiful than you think.

"Oh my God," you might say, "I know it's just an ad, but it's such a positive message."

If some street hustler challenges you to a game of three card monte you don't need to bother to play, just hand him the money, not because you're going to lose but because you owe him for the insight: he selected you.  Whatever he saw in you everyone sees in you, from the dumb blonde at the bar to your elderly father you've dismissed as out of touch, the only person who doesn't see it is you, which is why you fell for it.  Even mirrors fail you.  Hence a sketch.


II.

The gimmick that propels the Dove ad is a comparison between subjectivity and objectivity, though in this case objectivity is defined as however well Mantegna can use a charcoal pencil.  Why not just use a photograph?

Because when it comes to beauty, we all know photographs can be manipulated, especially in ads, especially by Dove.  So the ad frees you from your cynicism and goes with a new standard of beauty, one that, like yoga or genetics, has been around for a long time AND you know very little about it; it hasn't been over-critiqued, you haven't watched it fail over and over, and thus seems pure, fantastical, true.  The artist's sketch.   How can anything this lovingly and precisely created not be the real thing?  And nothing makes a middle aged neurotic happier than 45 minutes alone in a loft with a good looking man who requires no sexual contact and just wants to listen to you talk about yourself, unless he's also sketching you attentively in natural light.  "Can I offer you a Pinot Grigio?"  Slow down, Christian, you're making me woozy.  There is not enough quantitative easing in the universe to prop up this fantasy, but at $3000000000000 you can't say America's not committed to the attempt. 

The mistake in interpreting this ad is in assuming the ad is selling based on the women and their beauty.  If that were true, it would be counterproductive: if they are naturally beautiful, if the problem is actually a psychological one, then they certainly don't need any beauty products.  A beauty ad operates by creating a gap between you and an ideal: by creating an anxiety that can only be mitigated by the product.  But this ad reduces anxiety and avoids cynicism.  Therefore, it is not a beauty products ad.  It is selling something else.  This is why there aren't any products in the ad.

Dove is telling you you don't need to do anything to be beautiful, but it knows full well women must do something to themselves to feel good about themselves, and if they don't need makeup then at least a moisturizing soap. All Dove needs to solidify this is to be recognized as an authority on beauty-- real beauty, not fake, Photoshopped, eyeliner and pushup bras beauty. 

It is the sketch artist who is the most important character in the ad, the ad is selling him.  That's why he doesn't just draw the sketches, he sticks around to chaperone these women to self-awareness.  By the way he is depicted you understand that he knows beauty, inner and outer; he is part father, part lover, expert in what makes a woman valuable.  For you to accept him, he can't be married; but since in real life he is, they only show you the right hand-- the part of him that almost autonomously draws beauty.  He is an authority on appearance, he is the "other omnipotent entity" that decides whether  "you are beautiful." 

The ad lets the women become beautiful without selling them anything.   It lets them win.  It lets them win.  It endears them and you to Dove, it makes you feel more sympathetic to Dove, like it's an ethical beauty products company, like it's Lawful Neutral.   It gave these women its confidence; it gave you, the viewer, its confidence. 

And then-- spoiler alert-- it will screw you and take your money.

III.

That Dove wants you to think of it as the authority on beauty so it can sell you stuff makes sense, there's nothing underhanded about it and hardly worth the exposition.  The question is, why do they think this will work?  What do they know about us that makes them think we want an authority on beauty-- especially in an age where we loudly proclaim that we don't want an authority on beauty, we don't like authorities of any kind, we resist and resent being told what's beautiful (or good or moral or worthwhile) and what's not?

You may feel your brain start trying to piece this together, but you should stop, there's a twist: where did you see this ad?   It wasn't during an episode of The Mentalist on the assumption that you're a 55 year old woman whose husband is "working late."  In fact... it's not even playing anywhere.   You didn't stumble on it, you were sent to it, it was sent to you-- it was selected for you to see.  How did they know?  Because if you're watching it, it's for you.

Here you have an ad that was released into the Matrix, it is not selling a product but its own authority, and it is not targeting a physical demo, age/race/class, it is targeting something else that operates not on demography but virality.  Are you susceptible?  So while you are sure you most certainly don't want an authority on beauty,  the system decided that you, in fact, do very much want an authority on beauty.  The question is, which of you is the rube?

"But I hated the ad!"  Oh, I know, for all the middlebrow acceptable reasons you think you came up with yourself.  Not relevant.  The con artists at Dove didn't select these women to represent you because you are beautiful or ugly, any more than the street hustler selected you for your nice smile.   They were selected because they represent a psychological type that transcends age/race/class, it is characterized by a kind of psychological laziness: on the one hand, they don't want to have to conform to society's impossible standards, but on the other hand they don't want the existential terror of NOT conforming to some kind of standard.  They want an objective bar to be changed to fit them-- they want "some other omnipotent entity" to change it so that it remains both entirely valid yet still true for them, so that others have to accept it, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about look at your GPA: you know, and I know, that if college graded you based on the actual number of correct answers you generated, no curve, then you would have gotten an R.  Somehow that R became an A.  The question is, why bother?  Why not either make grades rigorous and valid so we know exactly what they mean, or else do away with them entirely?  Because in either case society and your head would implode from the existential vacuum.  Instead, everyone has to get As AND the As have to be "valid" so you feel good enough to pay next year's tuition, unfortunately leaving employers with no other choice but to look for other more reliable proxies of learning like race, gender, and physical appearance.  Oh.   Did you assume employers would be more influenced by the fixed grades than their own personal prejudices?   "Wait a second, I graduated 4.0 from State, and the guy you hired had a 3.2 from State-- the only reason you didn't hire me is because I'm a woman!"  Ok, this is going to sound really, really weird:  yeah.  The part that's going to really have you scratching your head is why did either of you need college when the job only requires a 9th grade education?

Which is why those that yelled "Unilever owns Dove and Axe!" like it was an Alex Jones tweet, those who felt tricked/used/violated that Unilever has a sexist side to it, those who thought the ad was hypocritical or  "anti-feminist" are still being duped, detecting hypocrisy is 100% the play of the rube, go ahead and yell indignantly as you continue to be fleeced.  Figuring out the short con is part of the long con, see also House Of Games, for a non-spoiler example if the street hustler is shifting the cards and you think you're able to follow them, then you're still going to lose AND your pocket is being picked.  "Can't bluff someone who isn't paying attention," Mantegna told the shrink helpfully-- he's telling her the scam, no, she didn't listen either.   So let's go to the places where people pay attention, go to the "intelligent" media outlets where all the suckers hang out, and observe the most common criticism about this Dove ad: it has no black women in it.  Never mind it does, that's a very telling criticism: why would you want black women in it?  It's not the Senate, it's an ad, no, don't you hang up on me, why do you want blacks in the ad?  Because it would represent the diversity of beauty?  Because without them, it sends black women the wrong message about society's standards?  Your answer is irrelevant, the important part is that whatever your answer, it is founded on the assumption that ads have the authority to set standards.  Which is why, in your broken brain, the reflex is to complain about the contents of the ad, not assert the insignificance of ads.  The con worked.  Of course it worked: they selected you.

"Well, not authority-- power.  You can't deny their power is massive, but of course I'm not a stupid, I don't think it's legitimate."  I'm sorry, no, you are stupid.  You'll let it have power over you in exchange for the right to brag that you know its not legitimate.

This is the same problem with people who want to ban Photoshopping in magazines or want bigger women to be featured in ads.  You all have the internet, right?  It seems crazy to worry about how beauty is portrayed on TV and ads when there are blonde billions (rated on a scale of one to ten) getting double penetrated literally underneath your gmail window, but that obsessive worry about what's on TV or what's in an ad is completely predicated on the assumption that the ad, the media, has all the power to decide what's desirable.   And therefore, of course, it does.   But the important point is not that you believe this to be true, the point is that you want this to be true.  You want it to be true that advertising sets the standard of beauty because in the insane calculus of your psychology you have a better chance of changing Dove than you have of changing yourself, turns out that's true as well.

Dove, et al sympathize with your powerlessness, so since you can't get anywhere near those  impossible standards, ads give you a chance of making some kind of progress: a little moisturizing soap and a positive message and maybe you get closer to the aspirational images of the women in the ad.  "Those women are aspirational?"  Of course: they're happy, Dad told them they're good.  It feels like improvement, it feels like change, and I hope by now you understand it's only a defense against change.

The obvious retort is that ads are everywhere, you can't ignore them.  But there are rats in the ceiling of your favorite restaurant, and you ignore them no problem, you don't even look up.  That's the real Matrix you make for yourself continuously, in analog, not digital-- overestimate this, disavow that, a constant transduction of reality into a safe hue of green, until by the time you get to bed you're physically exhausted but your brain can't downshift.  "I have insomnia."  Time for a Xanax.  Yes, it's Blue. 

"Everybody gets something out of every transaction," said Joe, explaining why people want to be conned.  That's what ads do for you.  They'll let you complain that they are telling you what to want, as long as you let them tell you how to want. 

"Shouldn't my parents have taught me how to want, instead of yelling at me about what to want?"  You'd think that, let's check in: have you shown this ad to your 14 year old daughter yet?  Oh, you sent it to her on Facebook, that was helpful.  What did you tell her about the ad?  "Well, even though it's an ad and they're trying to sell you Dove soap, there's a positive message in it."  No other ways to deliver positive messages?  "Well, the ad is really well made, and it communicates the message more powerfully than I ever could."  But if the medium is the message, shouldn't you NOT show her this ad?

David Mamet has some excellent insights, but for practice what you preach wisdom you have to defer to a Wachowski sister: stop letting the Matrix tell you who you are.  



IV

Did the way the sketching sessions were conducted remind you of anything?  The women aren't in yoga casual, no one's wearing sneakers-- they got a little dressed up for the appointment.  Observe the way they talk about themselves, trying to find just the right words because, you know, their inner experience is very complicated; and the unfinished, hesitating haste with which they take their handbags and walk out at the end leaving the artist behind.  The loft is certainly an inviting, comfortable setting, warm and safe, but it doesn't belong to them.  They know they are merely visitors in a shared space.  That setting is exactly like therapy.

You may think this is merely my (a psychiatrist's/House Of Games viewer's) biased perception of this, except that a) they're in San Francisco, where the main output is  crematorium roast coffee and cash-only psychiatry, and b):

My father was emotionally very distant-- and so was my mom.  And I didn't get the emotional comfort I needed...

It's been really clear to me over my life that I've made really bad choices, and that's a reflection of my self esteem.  I chose the wrong jobs, the wrong husbands...

I use a toolbox of things I tell myself.... whenever I hear negative thoughts about myself, I remind myself I have to use what's inside me, my authentic self, to feel good about how I am.

This isn't every woman I've ever been stuck next to on the A train who spotted me with a psych journal or a flask, this monologue is in the ad.  Let's find out why: anybody watching this ad in therapy?  Anybody watching this ad ever fantasize about what it would be like being in therapy?  What a coincidence.

This woman is roots deep in therapy, she thinks about herself in the language of "insight oriented therapy," how has this strategy worked out for her?







Yikes, an Oscar Wilde novel.  But the thing to notice here is not that this thinking has failed but that this thinking has BOTH failed AND she thinks it has worked amazingly well for everything else EXCEPT her perception of her physical appearance, her self-esteem; only in that one single area does she "have more work to do on myself."   If you ask her about her capacity for empathy or her social/political beliefs or her "values"-- those aren't evolving, those are evolved, they are unassailable.  "I have a lot of love to give."  How do you know?

I'm not picking on her, any woman who has to raise two kids on her own or with a husband has my unconditional support, but truth hurts, that's how you know it's true. The confidence with which she knows how her perception of self-esteem affects everything in life, "it couldn't be more crucial" is not an insight, it is not wisdom gained from years of therapy: she has been conned, it is society's long con so her pocket can be picked. 

The ad's association to therapy here was probably not planned but it was inevitable, just as Mantegna selecting a psychiatrist and not an engineer or a cook or a stripper as the mark in House Of Games was inevitable.  It is the only system of rules based on self-deception, it  encourages the illusion of "self" separate from behavior.  And as long as psychiatry uncritically elevates identity over behavior, it makes it-- not the patients, it-- an easy mark for con men with their own agenda: SSI, the justice system, gun control, schools, whatever.    "It's called a confidence game.  Why, because you give me your confidence?  No: because I give you mine."  Take a minute, think it through.

Self esteem is sold to you as an inalienable right, not something to be earned; and if you don't have self-esteem it's because fake society made you feel bad about yourself.  But fake society also made you feel good about yourself, it propped you up.  The reason you got an A and not an R and believed it is because you actually believe you are an A kind of guy, Math, English, History, Science, PE, and Lunch notwithstanding.  A, not R.  But if everyone deserves it, it has no value.  Which is why getting  it is unsatisfying. 

Self-esteem is relative, advertising knows this, which is why it operates on comparisons between you and the aspirational people in the ad that seem better because they own the product.  The Dove ad dispenses with the aspirational people and actually compares you to you.  But that's not you, it's aspirational you, "wouldn't it be great if people saw me in an idealized, sketchy kind of way?"   But even as it does this, it pretends self-esteem is innate.

One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it.  You won't.  That's not just okay, that's the point. It's ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die.  And it will have been worth it.

You can't see it, but since this is America, the problem here is debt.  Not credit card debt, though I suspect that's substantial too, but self-esteem debt.  They're borrowing against their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they'll be able to pay it back.  Melinda's 26, at that age some self-esteem debt is reasonable as long as you use it to hustle.  But what happens if you overspend now and can't pay it back by the time you're 40?  Look above.  Time for therapy or a moisturizing soap.  There's not enough quantitative easing in the universe to prop up this fantasy, but you can't say America's not committed to the attempt.



http://twitter.com/thelastpsych


Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World

Don't Hate Her Because She's Successful 22 Mar 2013 5:01 AM (12 years ago)

Today in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever before. But the blunt truth is that men still run the world...

It is time for us to face the fact that our revolution has stalled. A truly equal world would be one where women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half of our homes. The laws of economics and many studies of diversity tell us that if we tapped the entire pool of human resources and talent, our performance would improve.

the first thing you noticed is her great outfit
and the first thing I noticed is she's showing her wedding ring

But women rarely make one big decision to leave the workforce. Instead, they make a lot of small decisions along the way. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she hopes to have a family. A sales rep might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role...

No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up 14 Jan 2013 5:35 AM (12 years ago)

For some reason, one of the most emailed articles from the NYT was an article about whether women should or should not wear make up.  "New York Times? Sounds progressive."  Yes. 

Seven people were asked their opinion in a column called "Room For Debate," liars, there was no debate, all of them said "I guess so", their main contribution was the hedge: "it's a woman's choice."  So while pretending this was some kind of debate with contrasting opinions, all of them had the same opinion, which should automatically signal to you it is the wrong one.

When they say, "it's a woman's choice" what they mean is "it's not a man's choice, it is thoroughly stupid to wear make up just for men, the only acceptable reason is if you do it for yourself, if it makes you feel better about yourself."

Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men.   Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it's both.  "Ugh, women are not objects."  Then why are you painting them?  I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and no, yelling won't change this.  Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?

I am not doubting that in fact you do feel better about yourself, I am saying that that fact is both pathological and totally on purpose.  Since this cognitive trick does help you feel better about yourself, by all means go ahead,  but at what point will you stop pressuring other women to go along with it?  When will you stop "requiring" it, like when you say, "oh, she's so pretty even without makeup" as if the default was makeup?

The fraud women now believe is that it is wrong to look good for men only, as an end in itself; the progressive delusion is that looking good for men is synonymous with submissiveness, so while you're allowed to look good to men, it should always be secondary to looking good for yourself.  This is madness.  You are enhancing your outward appearance, which is great, but then you pretend it's for internal reasons?   

How would you like to live in a world where men had to wear make up?  "Oh, I love make up on a guy, especially eyeliner."  Of course you do, you're having a stroke.  Ask it this way: how would you like to be in a world where men said," oh, I feel so much better about myself when I'm wearing makeup."  You'd run for the nearest totalitarian regime.

The trick to the makeup debate is that it pretends to want to be free of male pressure, yet the pressure to look a certain way is actually much worse from women.  So this result is that a  "patriarchical", controlling force, unacceptable if coming directly from men, is maintained by giving the whip to other women.  No boss man would survive if he said, "ugh, you should put on some makeup, doll yourself up a little bit" but women say this to other women all the time-- especially at work.  "You look really tired," says a woman in MAC Greensmoke to another who isn't.  Just once I wish the reply would be, "I am, your husband kept me up all night."  Not very progressive, but hilarious. 

The evolution from "enhances sexual attractiveness" to "doing it for yourself" is definitely a regressive step, and by regressive I here mean "regressing to age two", but it's the next step which reveals the presence of a neurosis: recruiting science as a justification for behavior: "Study finds makeup makes you appear more competent."  Can't wait to read about that study in a Jonah Lehrer book.  Ugh.  So here's the evolution of feminist theory, take notes: "I want to look better" to "I want to feel better about myself" to "I want people to think I am better."  Madness. 

The further clue that the problem is not gender but... you... is that you find this pseudoscience while you are browsing the internet, i.e. it is your entertainment, your free time; your leisure time is spent justifying a behavior you can't not do.  "But I wasn't looking for those articles, I just stumbled on them."  Exactly.

The reason the makeup debate is insoluble is that it's not yours to solute. The choice to wear makeup is no choice at all, I know you think you came to it on your own but you live in America, you don't make free choices here, freedom is a brand.  Makeup is an $8B/yr industry, that's face makeup alone, no way is it going to allow you to make a choice that doesn't involve a credit card, fine, if you don't like makeup here's a remover for $30, just remember that you're not doing it for men, you're doing it for yourself. 


II.

I had used all the porn on the internet, so I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling as if cold fusion had finally been discovered.  Of course it's a "good thing" that women are Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than that, what does it mean?  That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave enough to hire them?  It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is this important?  I knew I was being scammed because I was being told this was a historic accomplishment by the ABC Network.  The ABC demo is not ever going to be a Senator, I would bet ten bazillion dollars they couldn't even name one of their Senators and a gazillion bazillion dollars they have no real idea what Senators do, so why is this on prime time ABC? 

I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder: when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go?  Why did they leave?  I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?

I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say that those are all stereotypes of women.  Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony.  Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?  Meanwhile all the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd?  "Women aren't as corrupt or money hungry."  Yes, that's been my experience with women as well.

This works in reverse, too, take a field traditionally XX-only, like nursing, and, huh, what do you know-- at the time where nursing is more powerful than it has ever been, there are also more XY in it than ever.  But who made it more powerful?  It wasn't nurses.  And if you're playing that game, ask if the reason "sexy nurses" as a fetish dropped out somewhere around the 90s had nothing to do with females finally getting control over their sexualization but exactly the opposite, men came in and unsexualized the joint.  "I'm not gay."  Easy, Focker, no one was implying anything. 

I know to a woman it must feel good, "yay, I'm a Senator!" and I do not minimize the individual accomplishment of a woman becoming a Senator.  But for everyone else, what is the significance?  One of the Yay-Women senators suggested that the government would benefit from all the makeup because "women's styles tend to be more collaborative," and at the exact same moment she repeated the conventional wisdom's horrendous banality she simultaneously got married to the head of a lobbying firm.  That's progress, I guess.

The problem isn't with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these dummies blindly participate in.  Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the first face I see on Goldman Sachs's website is a black woman?   Is it cosmetic?  She's probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and women, what is the significance?  It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating: "hey.... why did they let so many of us in?"
 
This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.  




III.

In this case, you are seeing a shift of power be repackaged as a gender battle.  And it's quite apparent that power is a generation or so ahead of you, so in 1990 a 40 year old who grew up around successful lawyers then says to his 5 year old, "daughter, you should become a lawyer!" and she probably at one point collaborates to decry the lack of female role models, and then by the time she graduates law school she discovers she's a dime a dozen, power has been withdrawn, one step ahead; and at this rate I fully expect 2013's Aspirational 14% to nudge their 5 year old daughters towards investment banking so they can be part of the big Women In Investment Banking conference of 2033.  Don't bother, it'll be in Newark.

I can't predict the next field of power, I'm happy to hear your projections, the point for now is that while power moves ahead of you and your family, it leaves behind the appearance of a gender (or racial) struggle; and the immediate result of this is that people consider it a societal achievement that they are merely playing, even if what they are doing is ultimately meaningless.  So while women (appropriately) fought for, and got, equal access to college educations-- and now women even outnumber men in colleges-- today we find that college is irrelevant.  Huh.   NB: what women did not fight for, and this is to my point, is the specific power of being taken seriously without a college education. "But how will the world know we're equal?"

The focus here, again, is why did/do women fight so much for what became irrelevant?  Why does this happen all the time?  More specifically, did they pursue it because they thought it had power, or did they pursue it because it had the trappings of power?   I'm not being a jerk, it is a deadly serious question.  If some dentist fires his hygenist because she's too pretty the United States Of America goes to Defcon 1, but if Goldman Sachs doesn't hire enough women some idiot at The Atlantic writes a fluff piece.  "They apparently have a sexist culture there."  You know they rule the world, right? 

I know, I know, women get paid less then men.  Sigh.  There are a million reasons for this, but the most important is the simplest: some people want to get more money from the job, and some other people want the job to offer them more money, and they are not the same people.  Typically the former is men and the latter is women, but the point isn't gender but the mindset: the latter group wants the job to want to pay them more, they don't want to have to have any input in deciding their own reimbursement.  I have this conversation with women a lot, every time it goes exactly like this:


Her: They only offered me $X.
Me: Why didn't you ask for more? 
Her: I don't know... I was just happy to get the job.

And I throw up my hands, nothing I say will convince this senator to try harder for herself.  I have this same conversation with men as well, less frequently but not never, though the conversation is slightly different:

Him: They only offered me $X.
Me: Why didn't you ask for more? 
Him: I don't know... I was just happy to get the job. 
Me: What are you, a girl?


Works every time.




IV.

Everything you need to know about how the system sees you is expressed in its purest way in ads.  So, completely off topic, here's an ad, relax, this has nothing to do with guns:







I had never seen this ad, because the ad was not for me. The ad targets men who need a gun to feel like a real man, the gun validates their masculinity-- or so the ordinary, pseudo-feminist deconstruction would go.    Except that's not what the ad says.  It says, quite clearly, that the highest validator of masculinity isn't the gun, it is the card. 

You've been trained to look at these things in terms of gender, forget it, the pathology of the generation is narcissism, the ad knows about, and works only on, a society eyeballs deep in narcissism, that requires its identity broadcast by branded objects but validated by other people.  Because what this ad says, explicitly, is that owning the gun doesn't make you a man; when you own the gun, some other omnipotent entity will declare you a man. 

I'm not saying that gun owners need to show their guns off, I'm saying this ad assumes that.  There was a time where merely possessing the fetishized object was enough to self-identify ("I'm awesome, I'm having sex with a blonde"; "just having my 9mm inside my jacket makes me feel bad ass"), but this is no longer sufficient, it is no longer powerful enough to penetrate your thick skull, you have to be able to show it to someone else, to watch their eyes light up in recognition for you to know you have convinced them of who you are. 

Is it cosmetic?  Note the logic has evolved from "you'll feel better about yourself" to "other people will see you as more competent."

Forget about the gun/masculinity interaction, it is a red herring; the problem is the cycle of wanting outsiders to tell you who you are, which is why empty celebrity works just as well as accomplished celebrity, which is why you can't tell if Kanye West is downgrading to Kim Kardashian or she is downgrading to him.

But right on cue, the most deluded of women, not just a feminist but a self-proclaimed "feminist evangelist," showed up and completely missed the point, so she changed what was a clear example of the generational pathology of narcissism, and repackaged it as a gender issue:








"We?"  As in, "we at Feministing?"

If you follow that the consumer unconsciously understands that his masculinity is approved from the outside, by other people, then Valenti is the very person that the ad is arguing against: "these bitches think you're not a man.  We at Busmaster tell you differently.  Who are you going to believe?"  Hell, I'lI believe a Sleestak before I listen to Jessica Valenti, really, those are my only two choices? The ad had no effect on me; her tweet makes me want to join a militia.

Note she doesn't really want to discuss it, she assumes it's self-explanatory, as if the very fact that masculinity and guns are related is itself bad, as if the solution was to uncouple the two.  But what would happen next?  The problem, as above, isn't the gun but the need for external validation, which means if you take the gun away something else must replace it, and it won't be what works for her, e.g. exposed brick and that great show Girls.  "It's great!"  It's horrendous. 

V.

To understand exactly why "feminism" or whatever Valenti thinks she has re-invented has not only stalled, but is damaging to all humanity, all you need to do is go to the source.  Totally at random, I went to Huffington Post Women.  Let's see what the feminists are up to, here are the top five articles:

1. The Reason The Academy Passed On Kathryn Bigelow (answer: sexism.)

2. Confessions Of A Mistress (protip: "Here's the wisdom I can offer to mistresses out there: do not get too attached.")

3. Why You Should Be Nervous-- And Yet Not-- About Sunday Night (since the Golden Globes conflict with Girls, just DVR Girls, and anyway Lena Dunham will be at the Globes.)

4. 'Girls' Star Talks Nudity And Season 2 (I refused to even click it)

5. Meet The Woman Who's Only Eating From Starbucks


Look, it's easy to make fun of these articles, my point isn't that sometimes women read nonsense.  The point here is that they are branded as for women, this is what the Huffington Post Women thinks of women, they suspect, apparently rightly, that women will respond better to these articles if they are told they are "For Women."

Here's a quote from #5, the woman who is eating Starbucks for a year:

So how can eating only one company's products impact me, anybody? Well Mr. McDonald's already proved that question years ago with his documentary and Mr. Subway did his take on the loosing weight portion of the food challenges too. But when I watched those guys doing their thing I asked myself "where are the WOMEN challenging themselves in the world?" "Where are the effects being shown on a woman's culture? A woman's family & children? A woman's diet, weight, fashion, checkbook, community and world through challenges?" "Where is HER VOICE on how an international company is directly or indirectly impacting everything from her waistline to her bottom line and every other woman's, man's, child's, societies and planets world with their presence?"

What's crazy about this crazy person is that she's crazy, if she did this in the name of her own psychopathology we could happily ignore her, but she's doing this for women, she's saying it's for women, when what you want to say is, "you know this makes people hate women, right?"  Mr. McDonalds didn't do it for men, or even as a man, he just did it, why do you have to drag the rest of the women into your delusions?

But this is the kind of solidarity popularized by Lori Gottlieb and the rest-- and I am asking, at what expense?  Sites like Jezebel and Feministing are much, much worse than pornography, every article they write sets women back a week, do the math, they do such a disservice to women because they take their narcissism and repackage it as gender issues, and you're locked into it.  What if I don't think gun control is a gender issue?  What if watching Girls makes me want to make a snuff film?  To use your impossible language, "where is my safe space to challenge your privilege?"

My point isn't that women don't have legitimate gripes with the system, or that there isn't sexism still around, my point is that most of what you think is "feminism" is really a work, a gimmick, a marketing scheme.  It is straight up consumerism, repackaged as a gender issue.  Case in point: season 1 and 2 of Girls.

And most importantly of all: if this is what women's solidarity is made of, how much support can they really expect from each other?  Is this solidarity power, or the trappings of power?  "Did you see Girls last night?"  No, I'm sorry, I was being raped.  "Oh, too bad.  It was a good one."


VI.

In Django Unchained, evil slaveowner Leonardo DiCaprio asks a question.  Sorry, back up: why does everyone call him an evil slaveowner?  As far as I can tell, he was a pretty average slaveowner, I'd even say he was "kind", in the sense that all his slaves "like" him, and he rarely "tortures" anyone and by the use of quotes you can see I'm hedging, my point here is how quickly people have to broadcast  their indignancy.  "He's evil."  So what you're saying is you're against slavery?  Thanks for clarifying.

This explains the near-universal anxiety over the movie's frequent use of the word nigger, and someone asked Tarantino if he thought he had used it too much in the movie, and his response was perfect: "too much, in comparison to how much it was used back then?"  Nigger, and the violence, was all anyone was upset about.  Terry Gross, NPR's mental Fleshlight, asked Tarantino her typically insightful and nuanced questions: "do you enjoy violent movies less after what happened at Sandy Hook?"  Sigh.  So there's the Terry Gross checklist for reviewing Django: gun=bad and saying nigger=bad.  Check and check.  You know what no one thought badworthy?  When the white guy asked to have a certain slave sent to his room to try out her ample vagina, and the prim white lady of the house happily escorted her up.  "Go on, do what you're told, girl."

I'd venture that Terry Gross and and the gang at HuffPoWo would rather be whipped than be-- that's rape, right?-- but that scene didn't light up their amygdalas, only hearing "nigger" did.  I find that highly suspicious, or astoundingly obtuse, or both.

Anyway, perfectly ordinary slaveowner DiCaprio asks a rhetorical question, a fundamental question, that has occurred to every 7th grade white boy and about 10% of 7th grade white girls, and the profound question he asked was: "Why don't they just rise up?"

Kneel down, Quentin Tarantino is a genius.  That question should properly come from the mouth of the German dentist: this isn't his country, he doesn't really have an instinctive feel for the system, so it's completely legitimate for a guy who doesn't know the score to ask this question, which is why 7th grade boys ask it; they themselves haven't yet felt the crushing weight of the system, so immediately you should ask, how early have girls been crushed that they don't think to ask this?   But Tarantino puts this question in the mouth of the power, it is spoken by the very lips of that system; because of course the reason they don't rise up is that he-- that system-- taught them not to.  When the system tells you what to do, you have no choice but to obey.

If "the system tells you what to do" doesn't seem very compelling, remember that the movie you are watching is Django UNCHAINED.   Why did Django rise up?  He went from whipped slave to stylish gunman in 15 minutes.  How come Django was so quickly freed not just from physical slavery, but from the 40 years of repeated psychological oppression that still keeps every other slave in self-check?  Did he swallow the Red Pill? How did he suddenly acquire the emotional courage to kill white people? 

"The dentist freed him."  So?  Lots of free blacks in the South, no uprisings.  "He's 'one in ten thousand'?"  Everybody is 1 in 10000, check a chart.  "He got a gun?"  Doesn't help, even today there are gun owners all over America who feel that they aren't free.  No.  You should read this next sentence, get yourself a drink, and consider your own slavery: the system told Django that he was allowed to.   He was given a document that said he was a bounty hunter, and as an agent of the system, he was allowed to kill white people.  That his new job happened to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident, the system decided what he was worth and what he could do with his life.  His powers were on loan, he wasn't even a vassal, he was a tool.  

This is not to minimize the individual accomplishment of a Django becoming a free man.  But for the other slaves, what is the significance?

Of course Tarantino knew that the evil slaveowner's question has a hidden, repressed dark side:  DiCaprio is a third generation slave owner, he doesn't own slaves because he hates blacks, he owns them because that's the system; so powerful is that system that he spends his free time not on coke or hookers but on researching scientific justifications for the slavery-- trying to rationalize what he is doing.   That is not the behavior of a man at peace with himself, regardless of how much he thinks he likes white cake, it is the behavior of a man in conflict, who suspects he is not free; who realizes, somehow, that the fact that his job happens to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident... do you see?   "Why don't they just rise up?" is revealed to be a symptom of the question that has been repressed: "why do the whites own slaves?  Why don't they just... stop?"  And it never occurs to 7th graders to ask this question because they are too young, yet every adult thinks if he lived back then, he would have been the exception.  1 in 10000, I guess.  And here we see how repression always leaves behind a signal of what's been repressed-- how else do you explain the modern need to add the qualifier "evil" to "slaveowner" if not for the deeply buried suspicion that, in fact, you would have been a slaveowner back then?  "But at least I wouldn't be evil."  Keep telling yourself that.  And if some guy in a Tardis showed up and asked, what's up with you and all the slaves, seems like a lot?  You'd say what everybody says, "look wildman, don't ask me, that's just the system.  Can't change it.  Want to rape a black chick?"



IV.

Speaking of no one being upset about rape, here's a story, starts out bad and gets even worse in ways you won't expect: a 16 year old girl is passed out drunk at a party, she is then allegedly raped by a/two high school football players, and carried unconscious to other parties and displayed and/or raped, and apparently because the town has a "football culture" no arrests are made, it's hushed up, the boys are protected, and I think to myself, oh, that's weird, is that town still in 1986?  True story: in 1986, at a mixer at the Delta Gamma sorority house, Lacoste Football Guy gets hard for 16 year old sister of Benetton Girl, and in order to get her jeans off he hits her in the head with a lamp, so in order to keep her jeans on she kicks him in the mouth, and through the blood and fury he's screaming he'll sue her, do you know who my father is?  NB: he went on to become a lawyer and no I am not making that up.

"Ugh, even now, 25 years later, it's still a hypermasculine rape culture."  Ha!  No.  Hypermasculine?  Where are you, the Dominican?  No, what's amazing/obvious is how after 25 years of Diane Sawyer and makeup debates, not one other girl at this party came to the victim's aid; not one girl saw what was happening at the party and simultaneously called 911 and Facetimed the crime; not one girl called all the women she knew and brought the wrath of Athena down on that town.  Nope.  Nothing.   A lot of laughing and giggling though, turns out rape is funny, someone owes Daniel Tosh a huge apology.  "Women's styles tend to be more collaborative."  I can tell, they collaborated to keep their mouth shut.  In 1986 the sorority girls also collaborated to blame the victim for for being so rough with Lacoste Guy:  "How could you do that to him?  His face is like, totally corroded."  Hey, come on, look how he was dressed, he was asking for it.  

"We need more women in power." Wrong preposition, dummy, but anyway you have them.  You have judges and prosecutors and twenty female senators, what has it gotten you?  Your own ground floor women don't protect each other, you know who had to come to this teen's aid?  Anonymous.  Men.
 
Of course I don't know if the boys really did these things or not, ok?  But if the reason the boys were protected was the "football culture," that means people in the town were taught to protect them.  And if the girls did nothing, it means they were taught to do nothing, and the people most responsible for that lesson was other women.

"No, the town was corrupt, they swept these kinds of things under the rug for years."  If you've known for years the town isn't going to help women, if you've known for years it's a "hypermasculine rape culture,"  wouldn't that make women want to stick together more?

It's not like these teen girls were denied an education or had to endure sexual harrassment at work or had to go to Sweden to get abortions, if there was ever a generation that should feel most empowered it would be them, yet they-- not just one of them; all of them-- "knew", somehow, that they could/should do nothing.  Which means that they were taught that from somewhere, and the only place that it could have come was older women.  "The other lesson is: makeup is a choice."  Today I learned nothing.

There's your female empowerment, there's you feminist progress, catastrophically subverted from the top down, like it's in an abusive relationship, satisfied with the house and the car and the 4/7 good days and simply doesn't want to rock the boat so it expends frantic energy on what is ultimately nonsense.   Every stupid parent teaches their girls not to get raped, duh, but have any mothers spent any time indoctrinating their daughters what to do if another woman is being raped?  Have they made it a reflex to defend, to attack?  "Isn't that obvious?"  Ask the town.  "We need to support each other!" sure, as long as it's from the safety of a computer monitor or a 5K, yay women.  Have you explicitly told your daughters that if a woman is passed out drunk and you see a Notre Dame Hat climbing over her couch, it is your responsibility to grab an aerosol can and a lighter and threaten Armageddon, or at the very least yell stop?    "Well, that's kind of dangerous."  Yeah, that's kind of the point, but I grant you that it's safer to giggle and let boys be boys.  Do you want power, or the trappings of power?  Somebody's going to have it, you can't make it vanish.  I wasn't at this particular rape, the town's defense amazingly appears to be she was a slut and she was asking for it, and my point is: so what?  Why didn't the other women stop it anyway?  Why didn't they just rise up?


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Product Review: Panasonic PT AX200U (Hipsters On Food Stamps Part 3) 14 Dec 2012 6:34 AM (12 years ago)

If irony is the ethos of our age -- and it is -- then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.

The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise.

[The hipster] is merely a symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living.

For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s -- members of Generation Y, or Millennials -- particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt.  One need only dwell in public space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has become. Advertising, politics, fashion, television: almost every category of contemporary reality exhibits this will to irony.

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings -- of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 -- now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed......

Obviously, hipsters (male or female) produce a distinct irritation in me, one that until recently I could not explain. They provoke me, I realized, because they are, despite the distance from which I observe them, an amplified version of me.

Funeral 10 Dec 2012 4:26 AM (12 years ago)