I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another two weeks before it gets its day in the sun, though. A comment I made during a recent speaking gig, which was duly recorded and posted to the internet, sparked quite a little tempest in a couple of minor online teapots. I don’t follow social media, but I have friends who do, and several of them happened to tell me about certain saliva-flecked rants responding to the comment.
If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it would hardly be fair for me to object if others decide to return the favor. Nor do I have any intention of taking back the comment that has some people on the far left spluttering through yet another predictable tantrum just now—in fact, quite the contrary. Less biased readers, however, may reasonably want to know the thinking behind my suggestion that a certain recent protest against the Trump administration reveals a great deal more about the psyche of many of the women involved than they likely want to bare to the world.
This is why we’re going to take a break from the current discussions on this blog and talk about Operation Dildo Blitz.
Operation Dildo Blitz? Why, yes. That was the official name of a protest this April in which crowds of protesters flung an assortment of artificial penises at various buildings associated with things they don’t like about the Trump administration. As protests go, you have to admit, this one wasn’t exactly a stroke of genius. A good protest should impress the government officials it seeks to influence, and the passersby it hopes to recruit to the cause, with the importance of the grievances the protest is about and the seriousness of the people who want the government to redress those grievances.
Flinging rubber sex toys at government facilities doesn’t further either of these goals. For that matter, I can’t imagine any way in which officials looking out through windows at this eccentric spectacle were inconvenienced at all, or any way that the passersby who witnessed it were even slightly impressed. Bewildered and amused? Sure, but that isn’t exactly helpful to the cause.
It’s also worth noting that this isn’t anything like the only way that the protests against the Trump administration have taken on a sexualized tone. Consider the way that the most common profane English word for sexual intercourse gets used so relentlessly in these protests. It’s gotten to the point that it’s almost surprising to hear Trump’s name from protesters without that overfamiliar monosyllable tacked to the front of it, and plenty of graffiti, signs, and the like follow suit. Our culture’s habitual use of that word is strange enough as it is—the next time you hear it used, imagine that it was replaced by the phrase “enjoy passionate sex with” and see what that does to the meaning—but that’s even more true than usual in this case.
When people behave in weirdly counterproductive ways, it’s often useful to stop and try to figure out what’s behind their actions. As depth psychologists have been pointing out for a very long time, it’s precisely when behavior doesn’t make obvious sense that it offers a window on what’s going on below the surface of the individual or collective psyche. Gregory Bateson, whose brilliant essays on the etiology of mental illness have been shamefully neglected by today’s pharmaceutical-obsessed psychologists, pointed out that even the most seemingly bizarre utterances of schizophrenics make perfect rational sense if you realize that they’re attempts to discuss things that their families of origin insist must never be mentioned. Elaborate personal symbolisms that other family members can’t or won’t interpret correctly allow the schizophrenic to say the unsayable in a roundabout manner.
Treat Operation Dildo Blitz as a dream or a neurotic fantasy, in turn, and it isn’t at all hard to catch its inner meaning. To begin with, in today’s America, nearly the only context in which a woman hands a straight man one of her sex toys is when she’s asking him to use it on her. Yet the symbolism goes deeper than this. In the sort of magical thinking that pervades the deep places of our minds and survives in folk custom, to cast something at someone is to communicate the properties of the thing cast onto the person on the receiving end of the act. We still throw rice at newlyweds because rice grains, being seeds, are symbols of fertility. This applies just as well in the present case. The Trump administration is not exactly lacking in over-the-top machismo, and so it raises interesting questions about why people protesting it would want to pelt symbols of the regime with emblems of virility.
There’s still another level to all this. Dildos, vibrators, and other sex toys have become the hallmark of the independent, assertive, self-sufficient feminist woman in today’s America. Go visit sex shops that cater to women, read online or print media aimed at an urban middle class female audience, or check the collective consciousness of the liberal end of American female culture in any other way that comes to mind, and you’ll find these objects portrayed relentlessly in such terms. What does it mean when hundreds of women from that demographic are throwing their sex toys at government buildings, as though offering up these emblems of their sexual autonomy as sacrifices on the altar of Donald Trump?
It means that a process long under way has taken another step, and thereby hangs a tale.
One of the reliable constants of human sexual behavior is that dominance and submission are wired deep into the sexual side of the psyche. These don’t necessarily take the heavily scripted form you find in the BDSM scene these days, not least because outside that scene, most people like to take on both roles in a fluid interplay of assertive and receptive behavior. Even the most macho guy, for example, will be delighted if now and again a woman with whom he’s in a sexual relationship shoves him back onto the bed and pounces like a hungry tigress. One of the issues that makes sexual life challenging in today’s America is that people in the urban professional middle class by and large don’t have that freedom any more.
To understand why, we’re going to have to talk a little about rape. I certainly don’t dismiss the seriousness of that issue; my late wife Sara was a rape survivor, and early on in our relationship I spent a lot of time helping her deal with the aftereffects of some very traumatic experiences. It’s also true, and appalling, that women who are subjected to violent rape have a dismally poor likelihood of getting any legal redress for those ghastly experiences. Many US police departments effectively roundfile reports of rape, and the likelihood of a conviction even for rapists caught in the act is very low.
Every rule has its exception, and that’s as true in this wretched state of affairs as in any other. Within the urban middle class and the universities that feed into it, accusations of rape take on an enormous force, as if to make up for the criminal justice system’s failings. Women in those classes who suffer violent rape still generally can’t get successful prosecutions, but a man’s career can be destroyed by the claim that he is a rapist, even if all the evidence indicates that he’s innocent of the charge. “Believe all women” retains its power in that setting, if in no other, and men are well aware of this. That’s why so many men in that class have simply stopped dating altogether, and go out of their way to avoid being alone with a woman even for the duration of an elevator ride. It’s simply not worth the perceived risk.
Those men who still nerve themselves up to date women from liberal urban middle class backgrounds very often practice the dating equivalent of defensive driving, going out of their way to avoid anything even remotely assertive unless it’s carefully negotiated beforehand. It’s reached the point, in fact, that many young men on university campuses will not have sex with a woman unless she’s willing to let him videorecord her in advance, saying that she consents to have sex with him, and detailing exactly those acts she’s willing to do.
Thus women of that class rarely have the freedom to enjoy any of the more receptive and submissive sexual roles; they have to be the initiators, the dominant partners, the boundary-setters and enforcers, all the time. This is very much of a piece with the entire panoply of identities and behaviors that have been manufactured by the media and used to market products and services to women of that class. They’re supposed to be independent, self-sufficient, assertive, and self-actualizing all the time, never relaxing into a more receptive role even for a little while—and especially not in relationships with men. This kind of rigid behavioral pattern is difficult for anyone to sustain, especially in the teeth of natural human urges, and it likely plays a significant role in the sky-high rates of diagnosed emotional problems and psychiatric prescriptions among women of the class we’re discussing. It’s the same syndrome that drove so many men of the same class to heart attacks and nervous breakdowns in the middle years of the 20th century.
Inevitably, any such imbalance drives the return of the repressed, and we’ve already had some whopping demonstrations of that in recent years. The astonishing commercial success of E.L. James’s novel Fifty Shades of Grey a few years back is a case in point. It’s not actually a novel about dominance and submission; instead, it’s a novel of fantasies about dominance and submission. I’ve been told that people in the BDSM scene despise it, partly because it’s so shoddily written, but also because its portrayal of BDSM is absurdly distorted. Nonetheless its sales, mostly to urban middle class women, were astoundingly high. That shows clearly enough what was moving through the crawlspaces of our collective sexual consciousness at that time.
Romance fiction is another sensitive thermometer of the same type. I’ve commented here before that romance novels used to embrace a very wide range of possible relationships between men and women. Twentieth-century romance writers such as Georgette Heyer rarely used the same pattern twice, dancing around all the variations of assertive and receptive behavior two people in love can explore. That’s changed in recent decades. The great majority of today’s romance novels feature a powerful, dominant bad boy, whose cruelly handsome face, rippling muscles, and boldly assertive acts in and out of bed reduce the heroine to quivering jelly. Once again, it’s not hard to see which way the wind is blowing.
That leads us, of course, to bad boy syndrome in the world of actual dating. Yes, I know that quite a few women of the same urban middle class demographic we’re discussing respond with outrage if you mention that a great many women in that demographic say they prefer sensitive, gentle men, but won’t actually date them, preferring to go home with bad boys from the local singles bar. Nonetheless, this is quite true, and you can prove it for yourself by the simple expedient of going to the singles bar of your choice next Friday night, buying a drink, sitting back in a corner, and watching the antics of the other people present. For quite a significant number of women these days, there’s a wide gap between the men they think they ought to want and the men they actually want, and it goes in the same direction we’ve already discussed.
The irony reaches a white-hot intensity in the subculture of MAGA dating. (That’s the least impolite phrase I’ve yet encountered for this curious habit.) It’s been a source of wry amusement to me for many years that so few people realize that nothing is ever really private on the internet, and will blurt out the most embarrassingly personal details on online forums that anyone with a decent search engine and a talent for search strings can find with a few dozen keystrokes. There’s a whole subculture of liberal women who go out of their way to date men who support Trump, and talk about it with other women who share the same kink.
The common thread in those examples I’ve read is the same one we’ve been following all along in this post. These women are attracted to MAGA men because the latter are assertive and dominant—that is to say, stereotypically masculine. They slip off to places where they can meet such men in much the same spirit that Southern men who don’t want to admit that they’re gay drive across the county line to find a gay bar and, in the euphonious phrase I’ve heard Southern women use, “get shot by the bun gun.”
It’s probably necessary to pause here and head off a misunderstanding that gets deployed far too often in discussions like these. No, I’m not saying that all women, or all women in the liberal urban middle classes, secretly want to be dominated and therefore should be relegated to the kitchen, or any such drivel. I’m saying that most women, like most men, naturally move back and forth from assertive to receptive roles in emotional and sexual relationships. Are there exceptions? Sure. There are people of both sexes who are only comfortable in one or the other set of roles, but they’re in the minority. Most of us enjoy the dance.
The problem, again, is that sexual culture in today’s America demands that women in the liberal urban middle class demographic behave according to the stereotype of the liberated, assertive, self-sufficient feminist, even when staying stuck in that role leaves them feeling emotionally and sexually unfulfilled. It backs up that demand by threatening men of the same class with career-ending consequences if they take on an assertive role with women, even if they have every reason to think it’s consensual at the time. That, in turn, gives male dominance and female submission the thrill of the forbidden, and leads to a whole series of attempts to satiate that forbidden desire, either via surrogate forms such as fiction or in the kind of shamefaced, hole-and-corner way that the violation of sexual norms generally involves.
It also leads, in turn, to weird forms of acting out the forbidden in a symbolic way. That’s why in Victorian England, when men of the respectable classes were expected to be masterful, self-controlled, and always dominant over women, the single most common kink among men—“the English vice,” as it was called everywhere else in Europe—was being flogged by women. While there were noble exceptions, the identity of most English men of the respectable classes was so deeply entangled in the caricature of masculinity pushed on them by their culture that they couldn’t even conceive of trying to loosen up and enjoy the normal give and take of active and receptive interactions between members of a couple.
Instead, they engaged in the same sort of symbolic gesture on display in Operation Dildo Blitz, where hundreds of women flung emblems of virility in the notional direction of America’s number one bad boy. That, in turn, was what lay behind my comment that a remarkable number of liberal women these days act as though they desperately wish that Donald Trump would bend them over his knee, yank down their panties, and spank their bare bottoms until they reach orgasm. I don’t happen to know how many of them actually fantasize about this, though the popularity of MAGA dating suggests that it may not be a small number. Yet something of this sort is clearly present in the subconscious minds of a great many women who publicly insist they loathe Donald Trump with every fiber of their being.
One final point probably needs making. I don’t have a solution to suggest for the tangled mess of dysfunctional behaviors and stifled desires I’ve sketched out in this little essay. I don’t think there is one. Over the last century and a half, the Western world has passed through a dramatic transformation in sex relationships, in which the subordination of women that’s been standard in more or less every other society all through recorded history has largely if not entirely broken down. So vast a change will necessarily have impacts that unfold over a timescale of many generations, and some of those impacts aren’t going to be any fun to resolve.
It would be helpful if men and women alike could be honest with themselves when their desires and their ideologies come into conflict. It would be even more helpful if they could be honest with their lovers. Still, honesty has never been our species’ strong suit, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon. We’ll just have to keep trudging along, dealing with things as best we can, and trying to find ways to make relationships a little less difficult in the years ahead.
Just a quick heads up — I’m going to be moderating comments on this post very firmly. Among other things, I expect to see a lot of people trying to divert the discussion away from the points I’ve tried to make and toward various hot button issues. Please stay on topic and be respectful to your fellow commenters!
I thought that “Operation Dildo Blitz” was you gently mocking this inane stunt. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it was the official title of it!
It also made me realize why the myth that Germans have no sense of humor is so persistent: we do, but as this example demonstrates, it’s really hard to tell apart deadpan humor from a complete lack of a sense of humor… I doubt that whoever came up with Operation Dildo Blitz had the slightest idea how deeply funny that name is.
@JMG and the commetariat. So, this topic was well covered in the first quarter or so of “Industrial Society and Its Future,” where Kaczynski (please don’t make me go through that stupid ritual of saying, “Although I agree with many of the author’s points, I don’t agree with his actions.”) points out that modern leftism is less an ideology and more a psychological type of unsatisfied people who feel helpless in their lives. And one thing that a lot of people feel helpless in their lives is actually finding some kind of romantic partner. Or hell, just a friend. Try and get someone to commit to an activity not online these days and see how hard it is.
A note on a previous idea you have discussed is leonocracy. While I realize that many of you, wisely, don’t do online videos, this one was pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQoahSUs7RE
It’s about the downfall of the Boy Scouts of America. What finally killed it were liability lawsuits against the Scouts for abuse against boys. According to the video, plenty of false claims have been filed, few verified victims have actually received any compensation, and many of those a pittance just to reach some settlement. Best part is, the lawyers filing the claims have already eaten up about 10% of the settlement fund! Everyone seems to get their cut…
I have several observations. Sparing the backstory, I was recently surprised to discover that a significant percentage of gay literary pornography, perhaps more than half, is written by women using male pen names and an equally large percentage of readers are also women, perhaps more than half. Even in the gay porn movie industry women make up a surprising percentage of viewers. I could be mistaken, but the only explanation that I can imagine is that it gives them permission to engage in sexual fantasy unburden by the ridiculous levels of social politics, censorship, and guilt that burdens heterosexual interaction.
In the face of all the antics of Trump’s first term, from the ridiculous to Crimes Against Humanity perpetrated against undocumented immigrants, there was only one thing that prompted any substantive reaction beyond pearl clutching. In one of the largest protest marches in American history, 100K women took to the streets of DC incensed by Trump’s grotesque misogyny and the fact that he edged out the first woman president.
The only way that “**** Trump” makes any sense at all is if, by “****”, they mean sexual violation of the type committed by invading forces in wartime, generally considered to be among the most heinous crimes of war. It would be baffling and repulsive, except that I suppose “****” has lost its meaning beyond an existential expression of hate and animosity. Although, as a friend responded when I called him out on a blatantly slanderous Trump meme, “Who cares? It’s about Trump.”
Truthfully, I have decided that being old and not being in the game anymore is turning out to be one of the best parts of my life. Plato called it and I agree:
“How does love suit with age, Sophocles,—are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.”
So here’s to you young ‘uns. Good luck figuring out what the current zeitgeist consists of, I will sip some whiskey and watch the show.
JMG,
This situation of hostility between men and women in the workplace I think will have a certain outcome in the relatively near future. I think we will see workplaces taking on gender segregation out of necessity. Certain kinds of public and private organizations will become all male and others will become all female. The prospects of these two groups may be equal but the ability to work together in the same space may separation a necessity.
The all female HR team that terrorizes the nearly all male software team is becoming more common in public perception. In my wife’s previous workplace the woman HR leader was told bluntly by the workers in a remote operations unit ( all blue collar union men) that they did not trust her or her team and did not want anything to do with them and any HR issues should be taken up with the shop steward. My wife was able to keep peace between these two groups but her replacement is weak and lets the HR ladies run wild in persecuting the blue collar men for the slightest breech of protocol.
The same can be true in reverse. My son works for a big video game company that a decade ago had an all male leadership of USC frat bro gamers ( he had not arrive yet). As you know much of the gamer subculture has a less than healthy relationship to male-female relations. The result was a huge scandal and giant turnover in leadership.
As you have pointed out, I don’t any of this getting resolved soon and the current attempt to make it work with extreme work rules and me too political correctness is destroying the effectiveness of organizations that we all depend on. My guess is separate but equal will start happening by default.
Hi JMG,
I have a nephew who is in his early twenties and he has been single and not dating for a couple of years now. He finds young women are always diagnosing him as racist, sexist or some other sort of ist. He is 3/4s Mexican and darkly handsome so I am not sure about the racist bit.
He recently said he is considering trying to find a girlfriend. He said, “You cannot do without it completely.” That was news to me because at his age I need sex at least twice a day just to be civil. My husband and I think all this sexual oddity in young people must be related to the amount of microplastics and other synthetic chemicals they are contaminated with.
Maxine
The first example that comes to mind is Jane Fonda with Ted Turner.
Interpersonal dynamics is a major focus for me, a blend of academic curiosity and personal fascination. I take the iconic phrase from the movie “Being There”: I like to watch.
In high school, our vice principal was academically credentialed in non-verbal communication. He would guest lecture in our Psychology (almost college level 101) about it, and would often start with a “demonstration” of how body language could be an accurate view of people. It informs my use of Tarot cards with people. I sense (Unsubstantiated Personal Gnosis there) an energy on the non-verbal level.
My view of our society is that it is trapped in the distractions which politicians and capitalists use in their quests for personal profit (power and/or wealth). It’s very common to see a beautiful woman with a prominent bosom with a caption touting “better” loans or insurance, or some other clickbait.
To JMG’s main points: women are both the most vulnerable and most attractive targets of politicians and capitalists. Of no particular order or weight: the stereotype of women acting on impulse if given the right stimuli; the canard that women are inferior to men emotionally, intellectually, even spiritually; and the (IMO) most frustrating thing to feminists is that too many women seem to live up to both of the latter.
We are not governed by sex and politics, in my perhaps pompous opinion. We are governed by sex and violence, by the manipulation of our desires and fears. The greatest distraction I’ve seen in my lifetime is that perpetrated by Trump. He is an icon of sexual perversion (a term I might be using loosely) and transparent corruption. He obfuscates when he is not telling outright lies. His rhetoric is barely coherent, but he is very good at getting people to fill in his blanks in ways that profit him.
I’m the son and brother of second-wave feminists. One of the points I’ve tried to make to the women in my life is that their personal appearance is dictated by sexual signals, make-up (especially lipstick), clothing, high heels. I want them to explain to me why they are committed to following those dictates. I married a woman who used minimal make-up, who declined to change her last name to mine, who was my partner in raising three children who do not subscribe to our society’s biases and requirements. Our lives together are about over, but I can easily focus on our accomplishments (despite the mistake we made, which any parents can make).
“If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it would hardly be fair for me to object if others decide to return the favor. Nor do I have any intention of taking back the comment that has some people on the far left spluttering through yet another predictable tantrum just now—in fact, quite the contrary.”
Perhaps I’m thinking about a different comment of yours that was denounced, but I don’t think that the denouncing was restricted to the far left; I saw plenty of denouncing of it coming from the right as well.
Very entertaining and spot on as regards the general message! We humans are animals and our reptile sub-brain will reptile, whatever fancy and wholly artificial veneer we throw up over it.
A couple points that occurred to me as I read it:
-I think the F word is primarily an attack/aggression word. The fact that one of the things it is, is a transitive verb with a sexual meaning, is in service to the main point of the word, since that meaning is “inflict penetrative sex on”, not “enjoy passionate sex with”.
-I don’t think the upending of the hardwired relationship between the sexes in the western world will take many generations to resolve. I think western women will continue to import real men as long as they care to come here, and since the Middle East is something like 20 times overpopulated if you remove petroleum from the picture, I don’t anticipate a shortage of candidates any time soon. I’m just hoping, since I’m an unconvincing imitation of a woman, that we don’t get actual sharia law here, or some equally abhorrent regime, before I die on my own. It’s a real worry. This organism may carry on for as much as a further 35 years. It is, unfortunately, a spectacularly healthy example, except the brain of course. But anyway, I think “a few decades” is about the most time the correcting of the relations between the sexes in the west will take, not many generations. It’s just that western men won’t be part of the solution as we sadly resort ever more to each other during this last gasp of our once vast influence.
Final note about myself since it amuses me: If I’d been born 100, or 200, years ago, I probably would still have been exactly the same type of weirdo, but I would have kept it to myself. If I’d been part of a culture that had and was able to keep my respect, all this “trans” and “gay” stuff would have been firmly in the realm of never-expressed fantasy. It almost was anyway.
Greetings JMg, great post.
America has great cultural strengths, for instance in the realms of money and power, and I can say with confidence that sexual connections between men and women is not one of them, for exemple from the point of view of countries like Japan, Mexico, France. I am speaking from first hand experiences.
Yet, american culture is good at raising uncomfortable questions and moving forward, so those culture could still learn something – and help – based on the question you wrote about.
I suspect that the issue described above is the reason why so many progressive Western women are drawn to lesbian relationships: in such a relationship, one of the partners can assume the male role without facing social rejection.
Until I read your post just now, I’d never heard of Operation Dildo Blitz. For which I am grateful!
That said, I just had a remarkable conversation with a fellow writer about another, much higher up the food chain romance writer we’ll call SJ and what SJ revealed to my friend at last weekend’s Fairy Fest.
This covers money AND, more importantly, how the romance market might be shifting.
SJ has been writing romance for years. She’s always been spicy, starting out in Ellora’s Cave. She’s got 69 titles and counting. She’s mostly indie now but she’s published plenty of trad. She was a NYC bestselling author. Last year, her sales dropped from 100K to 40K, without doing anything different. My friend and I agree that this must be gross, not net.
What is SJ’s response? She’s 61 and has been writing for decades. We think she’s caught in a trap. She doesn’t want to follow the trends into the most God-awful, vicious, degrading pornography (don’t look for it, I beg of you) because she doesn’t want to write like that but at the same time, her normal stuff with “normal” spicy (which is now bland) scenes, say 3 to 6 per book is no longer selling.
It’s almost as though the normal female reader is becoming repulsed by the extremes and is retreating back to … well, normality. Like the romances published back in the 40s and 50s and 60s. Adults all knew what they were reading but they didn’t need it spelled out.
This is one data point and only one but I do know that for the hardcore pornography readers, they MUST keep pushing deeper and deeper into utter degradation to get the same thrill and the writers must do the same to keep up their sales.
SJ’s other response is to do events. Every weekend, she’s at some event, large or small. That’s where her money is coming from now. Not online or in bookshops. Sometimes she does extremely well (Booklovers Con) and other times, like at Fairy Fest, she’ll sell five books which might cover the cost of her table but not the books, transportation, or her time.
Perhaps the extremes are shifting back to the middle!
Hello JMG,
Thank you for your lucid commentary. Yes, looks like people in the middle class are denied the possibility “to take on both roles in a fluid interplay of assertive and receptive behavior” by the current culture. Curiously, at the same time, we are supposed to be extra-vigilant to the fluidity of a 5-year-old when he is not sure whether he is a boy-dinosaur or a girl-dinosaur and assign him a gender only tentatively until he is old enough to decide for himself. Why?
You’re definitely on the right track, JMG. I wonder, too, if the western liberal (“politically correct”) woman’s pandering to rigid (“erect”?) muslim men in their midst embodies a similar dynamic.
@ Bruce T #4
What you’re describing is MM. Or MMM. Or MMMM in which the beta male can actually get pregnant! It’s magical, I know.
As a longtime romance writer and member of the community, I’ve met MM writers for years. Most of them (not all!) are indeed women writing gay male porn for other women. Not lesbian porn. Gay men, including shapeshifting men are the stars. Reverse harems where one woman lives with several alpha males often feature gay porn and thus you get MFM and FMM and MMF. More M’S can be added. Where the F is tells you the accepted genital arrangements.
Andrew Grey, a gay man, writes MM and I’d guess more than half his fan base in person is female. He also writes more romantic stuff rather than the BDSM.
Are you familiar with the Japanese manga of Boys’ Love and Yaoi and Shonen-ai? It’s the same stuff and it goes back a long way in time.
I read the first two paragraphs and knew I was going to want a cup of tea for the rest.
I somehow missed “operation dildo blitz” in the news. Perhaps my absurdity detector overloaded and refused to pass it to the higher cortex.
I think your take is correct, they sent a strong “take me take me” signal instead. Weren’t the young women throwing panties at stage for Elvis and the Beatles?
If you search on YouTube for “body harness using rope” you find some interesting fashion statements besides the expected climbing and safety applications. Signaling seems to be getting a little more overt which is a good thing. You don’t have to be autistic to find women’s signaling system to be completely opaque.
Pitting cherries complete, good laugh complete, on to the next task.
I recently read Fantasia of the Unconscious by DH Lawrence and he touches on some themes that are relevant to this, in his characteristically idiosyncratic and iconoclastic way. I hesitate to recommend books to you since I think you’re sort to always have a mountainous reading list ahead of you at all times, but I do think you’d find that work interesting if you haven’t already read it. I disagree with Mr Lawrence on much of what he says there, but he’s consistently evocative and interesting.
Takes me diectly back to the detailed discussions hereon, of the ‘gender polarity’ of different bodies (etheric, astral, etc) and potential identity ‘mixups’. Always wondering how this might influence seemingly unusual sexual behavior. On the lighter side… did they compete to see who could toss their objects the farthest? Letting out any inner ‘toxic’ aggression and all that? Maybe someone could host a “Fling the Phallus” contest at the next Midsummer? Makes one wonder if… “To **** or not to ****” is really the question?
I hope this comment is not too off-topic, but I am curious about he idea that “…to cast something at someone is to communicate the properties of the thing cast onto the person on the receiving end of the act”. For some reason the image my mind conjured while reading this was the famous photo of Bill Gates sporting the remains of a pie that someone smashed in his face. This particular type of “casting” has a solid history in the tradition of slapstick comedy, but is it possible the thrower was also inadvertently communicating the property of sweet deliciousness onto Gates*?
Bringing this question around to the topic at hand, it seems to me the dildo-throwers were attempting humor. I say “attempting” because the joke clearly didn’t stick the landing, perhaps because dildo-throwing doesn’t have the same cultural cachet as pie-throwing and therefore it came across as dumb and random rather than silly and hilarious. What they succeeded at was probably to increase at least the metaphorical virility of their enemy, if only because the protesters just made themselves look inept in comparison.
*I am aware that pies also have a more salacious symbolism but I don’t know where that would fit into the matrix of intent, material, and audience understanding.
“Our culture’s habitual use of that word is strange enough as it is—the next time you hear it used, imagine that it was replaced by the phrase “enjoy passionate sex with” and see what that does to the meaning—but that’s even more true than usual in this case.”
I’m literal-minded enough that this always happens when I hear that word. The unbidden mental image I get when people say “Jesus (_) Christ” is rather blasphemous, and I always have to remind myself that they don’t mean it literally.
—
Speaking of current trends in romance fiction, as a (SFW) webcomic artist, I am right up alongside the deluge of tropes that are Romantasy and Omegaverse stories. Romantasy tends to be just 50 Shades-adjacent, but with demons or werewolves or whatever. I did find myself obliged to de-list my fantasy-adventure-romance from the fantasy romance genre for not being as ‘forward’ as the romantasy stories.
Omegaverse, on the other hand – I’ll spare the details, but essentially it amounts to a m/m relationship where one partner is very dominant, and the POV character is a “m” who is biologically hardwired to be the receptive partner, often including reproduction and all that entails. Much of the time, there are no “f” characters in the setting at all. Who are they kidding with that?
What really surprises me is that I see brazen requests for artists to illustrate these stories (usually asking for hundreds of pages worth of illustrations for free) several times a week. A male erotica writer looking for such …illustrations… would not be so public.
Hi Bruce,
I think the reason women like watching and reading gay porn is quite simple. Hetero women find men attractive and watching them have sex is a turn on. Kind of the same way men like to watch female porn actors have sex with each other.
Maxine
I’m reminded of something you wrote a while back about formal and informal forms of power tending to divide along gendered lines (the preachers vs the church ladies). It seems that the formal structures of power ignore or write off sexual crimes and the informal ones persecute them with no evidence, and everyone loses. Where’s Vivien le Fay when we need her…
I am shocked at times at how a camp of people that loves the concept of gender-fluidity can remain so sexually rigid. Here’s to hopefully finding a partner among the moderate defectors…
Bruce #4, astounding amounts of “gay” content, of wildly varying quality, are produced by women for the very reason you mentioned.
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
A very explicit title for your today new post, John! Well, It’s possible to be a serious thinker, and to have sense of humor, too. A deeper comment, coming soon…(I hope it).
“Kind of the same way men like to watch female porn actors have sex with each other.”
Really? It’s never appealed to me. That scene in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” between Naomi Watts and the other woman: When I saw where that was headed, I thought “Oh, I hope they don’t” but they did. Maybe David Lynch, weird guy that he was, liked it.
Athaia, ha! I didn’t even think about how that would come across in German. Now I’m imagining the young priest in Die Zauberflöte warning Papageno that the gods will punish him durch Dildos und Blitz!
Watchflinger, here as elsewhere Kaczynski made the mistake of reducing complex things to a single factor. All political movements, liberalism very much among them, are at least three things: a set of policies unfolding from a political philosophy; a set of crass material benefits its followers want to get for themselves and other members of their class, race, gender, or other group; and a set of psychological states, which — human beings being what they are — are always at least somewhat dysfunctional. You have to include all three to have anything close to a clear insight. I’ve talked about the psychology here, but the policies and the crass material goals are also inseparable from what I’m exploring — I’ve just focused on them in other posts.
Bruce, good heavens, yes. For that matter, a huge number of romances are written by men using female pen names. I’ve considered it as a potential side gig, and even selected a pen name.
Degringolade, maybe I was just ridiculously lucky the first time around, but I enjoyed being married and would like to do it again. Still, whatever floats your boat!
Clay, oddly enough, the post that got bumped to make room for dildos addresses that, in a slightly indirect manner. The short form is that HR departments may not be long for this world.
Maxine, well, when I was in my late teens and very early twenties I went without girlfriends for long periods, being socially inept in the usual autistic way, and somehow managed to survive. For that matter, the last two years plus I’ve also been celibate, for other reasons. Sex drives vary, and your nephew may simply be less highly sexed than you.
Howard, a good example.
Franklin, Trump’s good at the game, but he’s far from the best player, not least because he’s so brash about it. Subtlety is an important source of power in what is, after all, very much a form of magic. As for makeup, etc., one of the many things I loved about my late wife is that she couldn’t stand makeup and the rest of the fakery that women are taught to use. She was simply herself, and I could be myself with her.
Anon, if you saw criticism of my comment about Operation Dildo Blitz coming from the far right, I want to know more about it. How entrancing!
Cynthia, I rather like “reptiles gonna reptile” as a catchphrase. Young American men are certainly catching on to all this, so I don’t think we’ll have to import assertive men; still, we’ll see. As for your options a couple of centuries ago, good heavens — haven’t you heard of the Chevalier d’Eon? Even in the late 18th century there were options.
Tony, oh, no question about that. America inherited its sexual habits from England, for heaven’s sake, and it’s always been a bit of a surprise to me that the English manage to reproduce at all.
Executed, that may well be an important part of it.
Teresa, I’ve been hearing rumbles here and there about a significant resurgence in “clean” romances; there are apparently small to midsized publishing houses turning ’em out at a rapid pace and making good money from them. So you may be on to something.
Inna, of course. That’s another symbolic way they express their craving for the fluidity their ideology won’t let them embrace in their own lives.
Yule, very much so. I’ve been predicting for some time that a significant number of women on the far left are going to end up converting to conservative Islam — it’s the natural endpoint of a whole series of trends on the extreme leftward end of things.
Siliconguy, yep. No doubt by this time next year they’ll be throwing their panties at Trump, while of course insisting all the while that they hate him and are protesting him.
Alex, I’ve read it! I don’t really enjoy Lawrence’s fiction but his two works on psychology are well worth close study.
Rdlange, oh, it was better still. They played dildo cornhole.
Which itself makes me chuckle, because where I grew up “cornhole” had a very different meaning!
Stephanie, my guess is that the pie-throwing thing has its origins in the sexual symbolism. The pie-thrower is equating the target with female genitalia. If it was intended to pass on sweet deliciousness to Gates, well, I’m sorry to say the spell was an epic fail.
Sirustalcelion, good heavens. I thought I was the only person who drew theological conclusions from that very odd turn of phrase! As for Romantasy et al., maybe I’m just odd, but I’ve never seen the point in all this bizarrerie. Sex is delightful enough just the way it is…
Andy, that’s a valid point! Yes, it’s precisely the divide between formal and informal power that’s at issue here. As for the worship of gender fluidity, the fascinating thing is that they don’t actually support that. They support the right to choose one of two rigidly defined gender roles irrespective of your biological sex. Actual fluidity — the capacity to embody elements of both (as we all actually do) — is something the woke don’t tolerate at all, as shown by the nasty treatment dealt out to drag queens who don’t self-define as trans.
Will Americans ever not be weird about sex? Will they ever stop twisting themselves into pretzels trying to reason out and understand even the most mundane things about it? Your point about most people preferring to fluidly switch between assertive and receptive roles just seems like common sense to me, and yet I’m aware it contradicts literally everything I’ve ever been told by this culture about the way sex is supposed to work. It just flits from one extreme to another: “No sex ever!” “All sex all the time!” “Men should always be dominant!” “No, women should always be dominant!!”
And that’s just one subtopic, Americans will take literally any aspect of sexual relationships you care to name and try to fit the square peg into the round hole, over and over again.
Is this another form of cognitive collapse? Is the American cultural model of sex just broken?
I saw a comment on Twitter a few months ago that I’ve been mulling over ever since. It was something to the effect of, “American politics finally makes sense if you realize that the Right is full of closet gays and the Left is full of closet straights.” Operation Dildo Blitz (?? What were they thinking?) was the work of the closet straights.
The closet gays on the Right have probably been obvious to everyone since the days of William F. Buckley. And probably earlier– I’m also remembering Maxim Gorky’s comment that if you “exterminate all homosexuals, fascism will vanish.”
People are what they are, and, as you said above, honesty is not exactly our species’ strong suit. The reason I bring up the Right though isn’t to point out that the Republican Party is full of closet cases, though I’m fairly certain that’s true. The issues on the Left are painfully obvious and have been so for a decade for everyone whose salary doesn’t depend on not noticing them. I myself have been a self-identified right-winger for more than a decade, since the prototype of Woke first reared its head in the last years of the Obama administration, and have probably wasted thousands of hours consuming rightwing material in the form of books, blogs, podcasts, news programs and Twitter comments. For a very long time it was easy to ignore the small ways in which my own views differed from those of the big-name conservative voices, such as Tucker Carlson. With the fizzling out of the biopolitical tyranny of the Woke-Covid regime, those differences have become very obvious and very troubling.
Many people have pointed out here that Tucker Carlson has been regularly hosting guests who are trying to stir up public hysteria against occultists and freemasons. (And maybe Jews, or at least, anyone who says that scary word, “Kaballah.”) Carlson is the leading voice in the rightwing opposition to Trump, and probably the most popular figure on the American Right right now.
Carlson’s latest guest was a very popular priest with the Eastern Orthodox Convert movement. He taught Tucker all about how, before Noah’s Flood, the pagan gods bred with human beings to produce Nephilim, the giants of old. All pagan gods, as it happens, which includes all divine beings not officially recognized as such by Antioch, Moscow, or the other Orthodox centers of power, are demons, and all their worshipers are demoniacs. The ancient Greek philosophers were demoniacs themselves– as he put it, “Socrates said he had a daimon, that is, a demon, which whispered wisdom in his ear.” (Ah, the terrible voice of the demons, whispering such blasphemies as “It is better to suffer than to do evil” and “In this world the good and the evil are always mixed, so we should make haste to fly to that world in which there is good alone.”)
In a group chat that I’ve participated in some years, one of the members, another Orthodox convert, shared a link to the video along with his enthusiastic praise. When I pointed out the priest’s intensely bigoted comments and the danger to which they point for people like me, my Orthodox interlocutor lost his temper and did an *exact* impression of a leftwing social justice warrior from 10 years ago. The shrieking tantrum, the cries of victimhood, the distortions of everything I had to say and total inability to listen– it was all there. Certainly it did nothing to allay my fears of a coming persecution; instead it made it clear to me that people that I might once have trusted or seen as political allies will be leading the way.
I’m very concerned about the direction that the populist Right is taking. In this situation, it would be really, really helpful if we had a Left wing movement that was at all serious and capable of any action that didn’t involve sex toys or pussy hats, shilling for the pharmaceutical industry, or calling everyone racists. As when Trump noticed that white working class and rural voters had no one to represent them and thus amounted to a massive untapped market of votes, the market for a different sort of Left is almost certainly here, now that the Right has gone septic. Lacking that, however, I’m afraid that our political future will be analogous to Eastern Europe in the 1940s, caught between tyrannies with no good options.
“Most of us enjoy the dance.”
** Raises glass to the dance **
🙂
“Anon, if you saw criticism of my comment about Operation Dildo Blitz coming from the far right, I want to know more about it. How entrancing!”
Okay, it was a different comment. The comment I had in mind was you commenting that the Trump administration is going against government-expenditure fraud, and there were a bunch of right wing people on Twitter that were saying that no actually the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about fraud based upon recent events and John Michael Greer seems to be stuck in the past.
I was watching your discussion on the King in Orange on the Dangerous Minds podcast and was inspired to expand a little bit on my recent comment on the open post on egregores and national group souls.
I’m not going to quote it, but in your reply you said that, besides spiritual powers, human groups and movements can also “hijack” an egregore. In the podcast you were talking about the “meme wars” of the 2016 election of Trump. I just wanted to say it seems to be the case that the “meme lords” managed to hack into and hijack the national egregore and something or some things (Kek, the Changer, what have you) responded. The meme wars, while still somewhat active, have long since cooled down as it seems like they accomplished what they set out to accomplish, but the Changer is apparently still very much active in American politics. Meanwhile the ones who refuse to change are left on the sidelines, screaming incoherent obscenities while drooling and waving their dildos, as the rest of the world passes them by.
David M.
It’s rather interesting, in that one doesn’t see so-called Maga-Men projecting say .. those hitch dangling rubber cajonies at, well, anything or anybody. They’re just affixed the rear end to their vanity truck. Now, imagine if you will, that they had the temerity of wanting to hurl those ball thingies back at their supposed high enemies to testosterone, would anything um, stick .. come together?? Another thing, I believe that the Romans .. as depicted in the ruins of an excavated villa in Pompeii, proves out the opposite of such hostilities. *The House of Vettii had a entry wall painting of the god Priapus – associated with wealth and fertility … and, as one looks back further towards the peristyle garden, therein lies a statue of the very same. There are no images or statuary of ‘nobles’, e.i. Caesars.. Military officium.. etc. I (polecat) think that the two brothers above, former slaves who attained weath buy their own means .. and holding no political office, received all comers!
*Attributed from a Great Courses lecture re. Pompeii, by Prof. Steven Tuck
Fascinating! I read this pretty differently, with the folkway in question resembling more the pelting of the criminal with rotten fruit or stones than the throwing of nuptial rice. I assumed that the use of dildos was a semi-covert admission of a desire for the target to be humiliated or dominated via sexual violence, similarly to the “F— Trump” slogan. And that this is because the dildo-flingers semi-consciously believe that the best way to humiliate a macho man is to treat him like a woman (or, I suppose, a gay man).
In this case, the thing being repressed would not be the desire to be dominated, but the wish that they could dominate in unapproved ways, as well as the secret fear/belief that being f—-d actually does demonstrate one’s inferiority. They wish they had the equipment to dominate those they hate, are terrified that the equipment they do have leaves them doomed to perpetual subjection in the absence of the state and social power they are losing their grip on, and even more deeply fear that such subjection is actually justified.
Having rejected all uniquely female forms of power and capability and having fully internalized male ideas of power and hierarchy, they are left to live as deficient men, and thus cannot quite convince themselves deep down that they are actually the equals of real men. Symbolically, they try to prop up their self-concept by enacting sexual domination of the feared and resented enemy, the man at the top of the hierarchy in which they cannot compete, but only end up depriving themselves of the symbol of power (which was never intrinsically theirs to begin with) by flinging it away. They dramatize the powerlessness and humiliation that they fear by putting on a silly and baffling display, ensuring that they achieve nothing and will not be taken seriously.
I think this is supported by the emergence of dildos as a celebrated symbol of female sexual autonomy, which you mentioned in your post. If you wanted a real symbol of autonomy, why would you choose a representation of the male penis instead of, say, your own capable fingers? Symbolically, it equates women’s autonomy with gaining a knockoff penis, but isn’t actually a symbol of *female* autonomy at all.
I also agree with your point about the bizarre cultural use of the four-letter world you mention, but I think that “dominate via sexual intercourse” is a more realistic translation than “enjoy passionate sex with.” It has always struck me as odd that such language is considered a mark of “liberation” in women, when it is actually a statement that whatever you don’t like should be sexually violated.
Really interesting post; I’m going to read through it again and noodle on it for a while.
Am I the only one who read “and so it raises interesting questions about why people protesting it would want to pelt symbols of the regime with emblems of virility.” as if the phrase had ended with the word VIRGINITY?
Leaving aside the issue of how to produce appropriate emblems of such concept, I think that would make for a much more effective protest (as measured by the stated goals of the ones participating in it). Not a perfect antithesis for virility, – IMHO that would be impotence, – but another quality that may complement, mellow and reorient the angry machismo displayed by the White House as or late. What do you think?
Wow, lots of fun stuff this week! Lots of reading to catch up on here too. Couple things…
Watchfinger: I clicked on that thinking, “No way is that going to be the very same Elephants in Rooms video I just watched yesterday” and it is! That’s cool! I really like Mr. LaCorte and his channel.
JMG: I’m glad you like that phrase. I hope you’re right about young dudes catching on. As to what (non profane but controversial word removed) options might have existed for me in the past, I’m sure that being a history buff you have that right. Just because the options existed though, doesn’t mean that I would have exercised them. Even today, there are perfectly acceptable (to others) options my reptile would have me exercise that I. Will. Not. No need for details I’m sure you’re quite incurious about. What I mean to say is that at a point in the past, when our religion was strong and inspiring AND the age of reason hadn’t petered out, I would have cared about participating and never have taken on a socially dubious presentation just to alleviate gender dysphoria. It’s not about it being “soooooooo repressive” back then or whatever. I don’t share Miniver Cheevy’s enthusiasm for swords, but I find my birth to be as inconvenient and badly timed as his.
I’m 31 and I’ve been celibate for almost a year, with several long stints before that. My attraction to women is completely different now. If I see an attractive lady on a screen, the locus of attraction is in my head. If I see a real life women I’m attracted to, I feel it in the solar plexus or chest. The “boys” don’t feel much attraction anymore and I don’t know if that’s a good thing.
I should add that the solar plexus/chest attraction seems to be more mature and is doing some kind of intuitive processing to decide if I could imagine myself with that person long term, and the head attraction is more reserved for culturally stereotypical attractive women (which I have a hard time seeing myself with).
JMG, excellent though a bit surprising post. The imagery of “it’s raining dildos out here” is hilarious.
As a late Boomer, I noticed the change in women from my younger days when most were trad wives to the current scene of pink-blue-haired-tattooed-to-the-max crazies. It seems to me the conflict seen today regarding gender “comfort” is at least partly caused by .gov’s war on the family.
I was not aware of the forbidden fruit of the liberal ladies seeking out the MAGA men on the down low. Please excuse me – I need to go shopping for a new hat.
Oops. I thought “Chevalier d’Eon” would turn out to be some sort of 18th century FetLife. My bad. Doesn’t really change what I said though.
JMG,
You may be interested in hearing an anecdote about Trump’s visit to Israel at the end of the current iteration of the Israel – Gaza ongoing conflict. Apparently, at least some Israeli women started spontaneously fantasizing about Trump around the time he was in the country giving his speech in the Israeli parliament.
This information comes from one of my female roommates, who told me both she and her girlfriends found themselves overwhelmed with such feelings. As you can probably guess, ordinarily she does not like Trump at all.
“crowds of protesters flung an assortment of artificial penises at various buildings associated with things they don’t like about the Trump administration.”
I think this kind of feminist or post-feminist bizarre protest maybe could please one of our current woke propagandist here, the ideologue…err…philosopher Paul B. Preciado (formerly known as Beatriz Preciado).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_B._Preciado
She…err..he studied with Derrida, and he’s our main supporter of queer theory here (post-feminism). I’ve remembered one of his “genial” phrases, when he wrote/said something like this: “Dildo isn’t imitating penis, is the penis which imitates dildo”. Of course, unless you’re a hardcore wokester, you can’t take seriously such an occurrence…
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“Dildos, vibrators, and other sex toys have become the hallmark of the independent, assertive, self-sufficient feminist woman in today’s America.”
In addition to Mr. Preciado (in)famous phrase, which I’ve written before, it’s interesting to check how this non binary trans activist, when he was a cis woman, spent a time in the USA, I suppose learning the proto-woke feminist dogma, so…yes, dildos are the king for (post)feminists.
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“a man’s career can be destroyed by the claim that he is a rapist, even if all the evidence indicates that he’s innocent of the charge. “Believe all women” retains its power in that setting,”
You’ve opened a can of worms with this painful but true phrase. Victimism against those men is a dangerous weapon by (fake) victims. “Believe all the women”, indeed, is throwed against pressumption of innocence, maybe and old fashioned right for every human being…men included. In Spain, woke left likes more to shout “Yo sí te creo, hermana”, which seems apparently a more innocent slogan; but the agenda is the same: to demonize men when they’re accused of rape, blocking their pressumption of innocence (woman good, man bad).
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“a remarkable number of liberal women these days act as though they desperately wish that Donald Trump would bend them over his knee,(…)”
Well, that could be also a case of “gerontophilia” toward an evidently old politician, methink. On the other hand, I bet some European liberal woke woman maybe have the same fondness for Putin, another example of old “alpha male” in the “bad boy” sense. Indeed, he’s been compared with Hitler, in a puerile way, here in the EU. And he’s also a Conservative, though in the Russian style.
I had forgotten about operation dildo blitz. I think I had found it so bizarre when i saw it that my brain decided to just forget it ever happened. I think Jessica is correct, I think it was more an intent to humiliate their target.
I find the world of sex and dating to be bizarre and off putting. I always say i am happily single, and even though I know I am not the norm, still can’t entirely understand why abstinence is so hard for people. I am almost 40 and have never dated or desire to date. It all seems to just bring trouble.
Untitled-1, we’re in the early stages of a long and complicated transition from the cultural forms we got from America’s European roots to a new set of forms that don’t exist yet. That flight to the extremes is part of that — a frantic and inevitably unsuccessful attempt to break out of rigid binaries by jumping from one pole to the other. Eventually it’ll shatter, and then there’ll be a period of desperate flailing in the void before some new and more balanced pattern emerges. That’s probably a couple of centuries off, though.
Steve, the term “woke Right” is getting some airtime these days, and it’s justified. The same frantic quest for purity through the demonization of scapegoats that’s made the woke Left so intolerable is becoming prevalent again on the Right as well, and Carlson’s one of the most prominent purveyors of it. I don’t know if either side is prepared to throw its wokesters into the trash at this point, but yeah, it’s not exactly comforting to watch the woke Right sinking into the same kind of mental dysfunction many of its members once criticized. Still, it’s predictable enough. What you hate, you imitate…
Scotlyn, (clink)!
Anon, that’s too bad. I was looking forward to seeing something original. Instead, it’s the usual complaint of the extreme end of any faction, insisting that the leadership has given up completely when it just hasn’t gone as far or as fast as the extremists wish.
David, that seems plausible to me.
Polecat, Romans liked to have images of Priapus in their gardens, on the principle that an image of rampant fertility would inspire the plants to spring up just as enthusiastically!
Jennifer, fascinating. I’ll simply note in passing that that’s the kind of analysis that these days, only a woman could get away with suggesting…
CR, that’s valid — a little more blushing, maidenly modesty would do wonders for the current administration. Still, I’m not at all sure how you’d symbolize that.
Cynthia, I’m not sure anybody’s actually born at the right time.
Luke, that’s quite common with maturity. Over time, if you don’t remain stuck in an unnaturally juvenile state, the focus of your life moves up the spinal column, not merely chakra by chakra but actually vertebra by vertebra — each of the 33 vertebrae is linked with an energy center that has distinct effects — and so the centers that exchange energy shift as well.
Drhooves, always a possibility! Enjoy your new hat and your liberal girlfriend on the down low.
Cynthia, nope! S/he — the Chevalier switched genders constantly, and could play either role with perfect grace — was a courtier, spy, diplomat, adventurer, brilliant conversationalist, and swordsman/woman who had an international reputation in 18th century Europe. Here’s a portrait in male mode:
Here’s one in female mode:
A fascinating person, certainly.
Circle, that doesn’t surprise me for a moment. When he dies, I expect to see a lot of women who claimed to loathe him while he was alive make a cult figure of him.
Seeking, people vary in the intensity of their sex drives. As I recall, you’ve taken monastic vows — you probably came into this life with that intention, and have the appropriate sex drive (as little as possible) for that purpose.
“Steve, the term “woke Right” is getting some airtime these days, and it’s justified. The same frantic quest for purity through the demonization of scapegoats that’s made the woke Left so intolerable is becoming prevalent again on the Right as well, and Carlson’s one of the most prominent purveyors of it. I don’t know if either side is prepared to throw its wokesters into the trash at this point, but yeah, it’s not exactly comforting to watch the woke Right sinking into the same kind of mental dysfunction many of its members once criticized. Still, it’s predictable enough. What you hate, you imitate…”
It’s everywhere on the right wing these days. On one side you have the “woke Right”, and on another side you have the Zionists, whose behaviors in denouncing everybody that doesn’t support Israel is very similar to the woke right denouncing everybody that doesn’t oppose Israel.
Clay Dennis said, “Certain kinds of public and private organizations will become all male and others will become all female.”
Remember when the YMCA was the Young MEN’S Christian Association and the YWCA was the Young WOMEN’S Christian Association?
I am glad to have been born in such a way that makes it easier for me to help all beings. 🙏
Watchflinger # 3:
“Kaczynski (please don’t make me go through that stupid ritual of saying, “Although I agree with many of the author’s points, I don’t agree with his actions.”) points out that modern leftism is less an ideology and more a psychological type of unsatisfied people who feel helpless in their lives.”
I’m not a fan of his views (even if he had been a Gandhian pacifist!), but I know some of his writings. Mr. K. nailed it in his criticism against leftism as a more efficient firewall to protect the system than right wing Conservatives. He discovered one of the little dirty secrets of modern leftism, to explain (in part) its apparent madness and its stupid “modus operandi”. So Kaczynski was despised and then ignored by far left (unless a few anarchists, at least here), not because he was a violent eco-terrorist, but for depicting their deep sad and guilty motives to behave like they’ve usually done during last decades…It’s interesting to see how they react when you tell them what wrote Mr. K. about modern leftism or another topic like ecology or the future of mankind. They usually accuse him of being a right wing guy disguised like an anarchist, or even depict him as a fascist…Maybe fear to be unmasked?
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Cynthia C. # 11:
“I think the F word is primarily an attack/aggression word. ”
I think our most popular unpolite profanity word here to depict sexual action (it begins with “J” pronounced in the hard spanish way) maybe is also an attack/aggression word. Indeed, it’s used in a real sense, but also in a metaphorical sense (“to bother” or “harm” someone). Mexicans have also another word with these dual meanings, which begins with “C”.
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Teresa # 17:
“Are you familiar with the Japanese manga of Boys’ Love and Yaoi and Shonen-ai?”
Yes, there isn’t shortage of a thriving otaku Japan-ophile minority within young people here since some years ago, so “gay” manga is also known in my country, though I don’t like very much to read it.
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JMG # 27:
“Kaczynski made the mistake of reducing complex things to a single factor.”
I agree, but even a stopped clock allows you to know the right time two times a day. And Mr. K. upsetted a lot of leftists in spite of his reductionist view, because he was right in it…
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(To be continued)
Hi John,
As a young man I was shy and sensitive and was spurned by many young women who wanted the macho bad boy.
However it was my experience that young women who also were shy and sensitive were the ones who took a liking to me including the woman I eventually married. So nice guys don’t always finish last.
Rather explains A-LOT, including why I don’t date or even bother to have male friends; pretty much everyone I know is crazy and miserable.
Re: Maxine on diagnosing -isms in male companions: Yep. I’m mixed ancestry and one of the easy ways to end a relationship (or a conversation) is to refuse to be diagnosed. Oddly, the desired fantasy bad-boy is not activated in response to this refusal.
And my mother wonders why I never, as she says, “settle.”
Steve T. # 29:
“The ancient Greek philosophers were demoniacs themselves– as he put it, “Socrates said he had a daimon, that is, a demon, which whispered wisdom in his ear.””
OMG! If the very serious thinker N. Berdyaev (a Russian Orthodox religious philosopher I’ve read recently), returned to life today and he’d heard that phrase, maybe he would die again due to his sadness and anger. He loved to depict ancient Greks philosophy as a forerunner for Christianism, to some extent, and he accepted some Greek philosophy in early Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippona (Plato)…
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Finally, I think John explanation for woke (post)feminists “dildomania” in the USA seems quite right, but I can point a non exclusive hypothesis on my own. Maybe those activists were imagining as a guilty fantasy they would be able to reach Trump bedroom and rape him (cough) with their surrogates penises. It isn’t a very absurd idea. Rape against straight men is even nowadays a taboo, because the heterosexual men manhood “falls” near to zero if/when that awful act happens to them, or even it’s imagined against them. It’s interesting ancient Romans (and maybe Greeks?) thought passive gay men were like women, under straight men manhood level. Some homophobical straigth men here (yes, it’s sad but they still exist here) think active gay men are less “gay” than passive gay men (who are depicted in a stereotyped way as affeminated). Of course, it’s only an hypothesis made by a straight man…If Trump can be raped by feminist women with dildos, at least in their neurotical fantasies, his supposed great virility would be defeated. It’s also a very bizarre idea, methinks.
JMG,
To be fair, I’m not sure that even a woman can get away with suggesting it! I’ve probably ruled myself out of running for so much as local dog catcher by publishing that under my real name, and it’s a good thing I’m self-employed! I would also note, lest I be misunderstood, that I believe the women depicted in my analysis are misguided by their distorted ideology and their materialism, and that a world of genuine power, meaning, and authority is available to them if they can grasp it or learn to value it rightly. Unfortunately our society doesn’t make that easy.
@Cynthia Christie, #36. I’ve been battling a YouTube addiction for many years, but Ken LaCorte’s videos may have to get a pass. I’ve always found them quality and balanced even if that is an overused word. Oh, and last week I asked if you needed a bass player and you responded something to the effect that you didn’t know what I was getting at and that you weren’t interested in a collaboration. I’m not neurodivergent, but I do have
“engineer brain” so I understand trying to analyze an off the cuff remark. I wasn’t actually proposing that we do any music collaboration together, I was just acknowledging that I saw you playing on youtube, thought you were pretty good and telling you that I had a similar interest in music. This should be thought of as an invitation to conversation over music and not a proposal for collaboration.
I want to add two ideas to the conversation. 1. The sexual revolution didn’t happen, and it went too far. 2. Courtesans were big business in Victorian England. we have digital courtesans I suppose, but no desire to have actual courtesans in our society. What does that say about our times?
As tumultuous and confusing as it was, I am grateful to have reached adulthood at a time when it was acceptable for both sexes to experiment with both assertive and passive roles in their interpersonal relationships. (Right now I am betting that most people who read this are assuming that I am talking about the decade that they grew up in).
Recently I read a statement that I think sums up nicely what odd happening in America. It was, of all things, a book about the American judicial system. It noted a trend in civil rights cases reviewed by the US Supreme Court. From the 1930’s through the 1970’s Supreme Court decisions tended to come down on the side of protecting and thereby increasing civil rights. For those who remember, one of these decisions was Roe V Wade. From the 1980’s through the 2020’s the Supreme Court has reversed direction and come down with a series of decisions curtailing civil rights. Including ultimately reversing Roe V Wade. 50 years of increasing civil rights turned into 50 years of decreasing civil rights. I wonder if this trend goes a ways toward explaining the current mood of the country.
Our minds are hereditarily configured for the life like hunter-gaterers taking part of a horde . In an horde didn’t exist marriage, and for each women was a survivance goal to atract the alfa-male, the leader of the horde. So ,the atraction of many women for bad-boys could be an inheritance of the atraction for the alfa-male.
> When people behave in weirdly counterproductive ways, it’s often useful to stop and try to figure out what’s behind their actions.
#11:
> -I think the F word is primarily an attack/aggression word. The fact that one of the things it is, is a transitive verb with a sexual meaning, is in service to the main point of the word, since that meaning is “inflict penetrative sex on”, not “enjoy passionate sex with”.
Yeah. JMG, you somehow skipped going into any detail about the the superficial meaning of the protest. That’s centrally important context! The relative plausibility or implausibility to be found among the space of exoterically-consistent hypothesized motivations contributing to someone’s behavior is almost exactly what determines how much discrepantness is left over to give plausibility to esoteric hypothesized motivations, such as the one you are proposing.
And the core of the space of exoteric mechanisms seems quite simple to state here. The left feels violated by the actions of the administration (and its allied political movement) undertaken with the intention to humiliate them, as well as vicariously violated by the actions meant to humiliate groups that they empathetically (and/or power-legitimation-seekingly) identify with. (In some cases, the felt violation comes closer to being arguably literal, such as one or two outcomes involving the Supreme Court.) So the protestors’ conscious understanding of the purpose of their actions was to project that violation symbolically back upon the administration and its associated political movement.
The administration, of course, in turn, was driven to power substantially by a groundswell of rage at past prolonged unrepentant self-righteous humiliation of “the right”, including the previously-center and center-left part of the non-protected-category working class that has become included in what “the right” came to mean as part of the Great Realignment. As Tucker Carlson wrote: “Trump’s election wasn’t about Trump. It was a throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class. It was a gesture of contempt, a howl of rage, the end result of decades of selfish and unwise decisions made by selfish and unwise leaders. Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do.” And there we find another invocation of the same kind of symbolism of violation, just this time with the motivation in the other direction — Carlson even adds the adjective “throbbing”, in case the middle finger wasn’t enough.
(And of course the cycle reaches on further back, through Reagan, through the Days of Rage, and so on, but the dynamics have gotten worse recently. As Rod Dreher writes, “Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups”. (That trend has a notable persistent driver, but that’s off topic for the moment.) For complex reasons, a group-oriented meta-politics is intrinsically more prone to getting consumed by runaway spirals of vindictive retaliatory humiliation and not seeing how the other party could have been acting in good faith from meaningful principles that genuinely sometimes forfend real consequences.)
I think maybe a lot of people who are calling you a clueless boomer or whatever are in significant part deriving motivation from observing that your proposed counter-explanation for the Dildo Blitz doesn’t even touch on these themes at all. In a signaling equilibrium resulting from people acting from a position of unexamined neurotypical privilege steamrolling over everyone else and centering their own way of thinking about moral(ity-adjacent) principles, if you don’t at least allude to grasping a (para-)important point like that, such as to distinguish yourself from being someone from a plausible low-status alternate category of person you could have been who just didn’t get certain (para-)important (para-)moral themes, such that people in that equilibrium would want to avoid looking like a person in that category (e.g. a “clueless Boomer”, which is not quite a protected category, or a “just-an-autistic-STEMlord-techbro-except-he-didn’t-even-manage-to-fall-in-with-his-people” Aspie, even though that sort of is a protected category), then that failure is taken as presumptive evidence that you just don’t get those themes.
And, after all, your centering the alternate meaning of “enjoy passionate sex with” and totally eliding the seemingly-obvious meaning of “inflict penetrative sex on”, even though that second one contains a lot more of the anger that is blatantly present in the examined case, is consistent with a hypothesis that you are unconsciously-purposefully selectively noticing some connotations and not noticing others. I know someone on the autism spectrum who does something like that in contentious situations: at other times, he can follow an explanation of how someone else might reasonably construe his wording as purposefully chosen to connote something, but in contentious situations where the connoted position might turn out to entail some implication he wouldn’t have wanted it to, that ability somehow shuts down. (A mutual friend speculated that he picked up that habit while he was growing up, to unconsciously try to make a wall against pervasive manipulative social maneuvering and motivated misinterpretation from family members.)
@JMG
So you expect things to remain dysfunctional for the foreseeable future? Well, I suppose there’s little to be done about it but to take in the spectacle, and keep a comfortable distance from the hive mind 🙂 Such are the times we live in.
@Jennifer Kobernik #34
It’s fascinating to me the ways in which left-wing symbolism these days so consistently has the opposite effect of what was intended. I find it easy to believe the intent of the protesters was to humiliate Donald Trump by flinging dildos at him, and am also completely unsurprised that the symbolism of that act instead communicated to people outside of those circles that the protesters would like to be humiliated by him (or in many cases, it communicated nothing at all except perhaps a vague sense of secondhand embarrassment). I have to wonder whether it ever occurred to anyone planning that protest whether they might be sending mixed messages with what they were doing?
I can already guess at the answer to that, of course. They work so hard to reinforce their specific way of looking at the world that they’ve lost the ability to understand people outside of it, which leads to absurdities like this. It’s a shame, really.
Very interesting JMG.
Data point from a middle aged dad – my teenage son, and most of his friends and the sons of many of my friends (aged teens to mid twenties) are simply not very interested in girls/women. Not intimidated or scared..and they certainly have all the normal physical urges, but mostly they’re relatively apathetic – the whole vibe is “not worth the hassle”. It’s all on a spectrum of course – some are more interested, some are less, etc, but on the whole – they think about girls, talk about girls, relationships, dating, sex, the works – FAR less than previous generations did. Porn plays a part in that of course, but IMHO a much bigger reason is what you describe – the “juice isn’t worth the squeeze” to quote someone on Twitter. And there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between interest levels and levels of porn viewing or relative attractiveness of the young men.
You see it in the data too – levels of dating, frequency of sexual encounters, even frequency of simply meeting friends in person and socialising – all dropping off a cliff in Western countries (again, many reasons for this including smartphones and social media and COVID lockdowns). Also seen some data suggesting young men and young women are becoming increasingly more polarised politically – young men moving further right as young women move further progressive etc.
I have less data about the female side, but from what I can tell, the girls have not lost interest or become apathetic in the same way – but they HAVE become delusional in their expectations of what they can realistically expect to get in a boyfriend or husband without any rational self-examination of what they bring to the table (even if they ARE goodlooking – are they really at the level of a Hollywood star, if they expect to date the same kind of men a Hollywood star dates? Or are they just the prettiest girl in their small town, whose picture on social media was once “liked” by a famous athlete on another continent, who now believes she can compete with the Hollywood actress who that athlete actually dates?).
The female side IS largely driven by social media and benchmarking themselves against the most famous/best in the world as opposed to their actual town and actual social circles. It also doesn’t help that the general social acceptance of casual sex in the last few decades has meant it is actually not that unusual for (say) a moderately attractive girl to have casual sex or a night stand with a man who would normally be way out of her league (due to his wealth or fame or whatever). Now that man is never going to marry her or even have a relationship with her – she was just convenient at 2am in the nightclub he was at, where she managed to get in after waiting 2 hours in line because she heard famous people go there – and there is absolutely nothing wrong with casual sex if two people want to scratch a mutual itch – but in most cases, what happens is that the girl (even if she doesn’t expect a relationship with that particular guy) has now reset her expectations way higher and won’t enter into a relationship with the men who actually would seriously date her, even if they are objectively successful themselves (say, a prosperous doctor or lawyer) – how could that guy compare to the multimillion dollar professional athlete? And don’t even get me started on how the women getting older (especially hitting age 30) affects this dynamic or this comment will be even longer.
Also to add – in my youth, I was heavily involved with the “pick up artist” or “Game” community – basically young men, usually with limited social skills (not always), practicing and exchanging tips and learning how to get better with women. It changed my life for the better and I went from being absolutely useless with girls in high school and college to legendary amounts of sex and experience in a way that my 19 year old self would have found unbelievable (before settling down and marrying and kids etc). And an infinite number of stories to share with my son when he’s a few years older.
What I find interesting is that the more sensible end of the community broadly preaches what you are saying here (I am excluding the lunatic fringe of scammers and genuine misogynists of the Andrew Tate variety, although even he is sometimes right in the “even a stopped clock is right twice a day” sense). The advice and coaching is/was (I am somewhat out of date) is basically to improve yourself as a man and focus on your social skills as a skill and practice them, and learn to become more confident with women and particularly to be more assertive and take the initiative more and lead them because they enjoy it and it is like a dance with a leader and follower that both parties enjoy (along with a dollop of applied psychology and sales techniques – stuff like “make sure your online dating pictures show you with other women, because women [really all people] respond to social proof and want what other people want”).
Anyway, one of the very best seducers I knew, and also one of the deepest thinkers, went one step beyond and essentially articulated what you’ve said here in different language two decades ago. His core thesis (or part of it) was that ultimately everyone wants the emotions they lack, and in modern Western society, women largely are bereft of dominance (which is why most pick up artist advice revolved around how to be assertive etc) which is why it works really well but ultimately the goal was to figure out what was emotionally lacking and feed that need and women would do anything for you and chase you and essentially be you slave. OFTEN (in the modern West), that is dominance and assertiveness – but actually it doesn’t have to be – if you’re dating a divorcee whose ex husband was extremely dominant for example you actually want to give her exactly the opposite emotions. This is a couple of levels deeper in analysis than “typical” pick up theory, which itself is way deeper and more empirical than what passes for mainstream thought and advice in our society..
This guy was astonishing – overweight, average clothes, unshaven, no money (exceptionally intelligent and socially and emotionally aware but you can’t know that when you meet him), would go into a nightclub and have the most beautiful women there competing for him and essentially take his pick. They would finance his lifestyle, give him money, drive him to sleep with other women..basically anything. Just to be around him and please him.
Anyway, I’ll stop know. This is a fascinating discussion.
JMG: Yes, quite a fascinating person indeed! I see some things never change though, choker to conceal the Adam’s apple, probably as much of a giveaway in that time as it is now. I’ve never bothered with that myself.
Yes, in my experience teaching in a middle to upper middle class school, girls were attracted to “bad boys” as early as 4th-5th grade…In this case, bad boys being only somewhat unconventional and rebellious…When I mentioned that to a longtime guidance counselor…he confirmed it….I have also read that convicted criminals sire more children than conventional men….I would guess that it’s hardwired in women’s brains, for evolutionary reasons…..
Anon, yeah, there’s that. As I mentioned last week, I wish people would give that one unimportant country a rest and get bent out of shape about Laos or Malawi instead. 😉
Chuaquin, how many people on the left even remember what Kaczynski wrote?
Peter, well, that was my experience also, so I won’t argue.
Rhydlyd, I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe I’m just lucky, then, to know people who are neither crazy nor miserable.
Jennifer, so noted! Of course you’re right about worlds of genuine power and meaning right there next to us all, but I don’t know that any society has made it easy to get there.
Pointwithinacircle, hmm! Yes, that’s doubtless an important part of it.
Anselmo, the notion of hunter-gatherers living in a promiscuous horde was scrapped by anthropologists most of a century on the basis of fieldwork among actual hunter-gatherers. It still hovers in the imagination of the Western world, though; not sure why.
Anon, all through my writing career I’ve been contending with what I like to call the tyranny of the supposedly obvious — the notion that whatever claim comes first to the mind of the average person must be correct, which gets pushed on me so reliably by people like you. In this case, as in so many others, I don’t think the obvious explanation explains the territory, especially in the light of other factors such as “bad boy syndrome” and MAGA dating. If this means people want to insist that I’m a clueless boomer, why, let them; my predictions still turn out to be correct far more often than those of writers who depend on the conventional wisdom.
Untitled-1, I’d be delighted to be proved wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
Cynthia, yep. S/he knew how to play the game — and what’s more, wanted to play it.
Chuaquin: I dated a Mexican woman between 2010 and 2015. I am familiar with both those words. The “C” one seemed to be for anything from mere linguistic spice to a mildly annoying problem, whereas the “J” was for something that was very bad indeed. There was a bit of overlap at the very high end of “C”, but “J” was definitely more serious.
I’m not sure if that’s usual for Mexicans or not. My erstwhile girlfriend and her kin were more “Spanish” than most, her family having been aristocrats before Zapata put an end to that for them.
Watchfinger: Thank you very much for explaining that to me and for the kind remark about my playing! You made my day!
Ooh boy, JMG, you’re “cruising for a bruising” on this one (not from me, though; I’m cool with what you say)! Cue to the rage of those who are easily triggered and either hardly read your post or, having reading it are so agitated that they can’t mentally process what you are saying. Thanks for speaking the truth. This should be lively. Have fun moderating!
@Anselmo
@JMG
It seems like Hobbes’ state of nature before the State was created to limit freedoms so society could function. That’s a rather silly idea crafted to support Enlightenment political ideologies, in my opinion.
A small, insignificant, nuclear-armed nation at center stage in the Armageddon dreams of about half the world? I’m not buying it.
Untitled,
I suspect that it has to do with the Left’s orientation toward critiquing and “problematizing” everything that was once (or still is amongst the deplorables) viewed as a symbol or representation of goodness, authority, virtue, triumph, etc. Their flipped moral orientation toward these symbols and inability to imagine that other people still find them good, moving, aesthetically pleasing, or powerful puts them at constant odds with the “normal” symbolic meaning of the thing.
JMG pointed out long ago that rfective protests aganist Republican administrations should be led by Republican voters threatening to withhold their votes from certain Republican politicians in the next election. Since they know Dildo Blitzers will not vote red in the midterms regardless of whether they yield to the protestors’ demands, they have no incentive to change their policies. They care about what the donor class, swing voters, and less-tribalistic supporters think, not solid red and blue voters.
If I have another hypothesis for why the right wing has become like the left wing: the right wing has a lot of former left wing people who changed their political positions and tribal affiliations, but never got rid of their scolding habits from their left wing days.
@Jennifer Kobernik #66
Very true. The left in many ways defines itself as a “counterculture”. However true that ends up being in practice, that attitude leads to a lot of deliberate “flipping” of the common meaning of symbols in the minds of people who subscribe to that ideology. Not only that, the original meanings and attitudes become taboo. Not only do you denounce these symbols to others, you do not even allow yourself to think of them in the original way, as a way of proving your own virtuousness, which only further reinforces the echo chamber effect.
An interesting aspect of this is that most of this repression is, of course, on the conscious level, and we find that unconsciously, some of the original meaning can’t help but creep back up in their behavior, as you pointed out where the feminist conception of female domination is essentially just an appropriated version of male domination, which unfortunately reinforces sexist ideas about feminine inferiority. I hope it changes, but the tides don’t seem to be pushing that way just yet.
I was accused of being a “Maga d*ck” by a rather angry generation x female online, whom I vaguely knew, when I politely asked her if she had a problem with a growing number of female urban liberal university educated colleagues insisting that only those with a university education should be allowed to vote. My polite comment produced such extreme rage it had to have touched a nerve somewhere collective, which I suspect that woman had no idea about.
“Anon, yeah, there’s that. As I mentioned last week, I wish people would give that one unimportant country a rest and get bent out of shape about Laos or Malawi instead. 😉”
There’s also the fact that Trump’s no different to the rest of the American political class on that issue in 2024 and also right now. Any plausible alternative to Trump, across the political spectrum, is likely going to take very similar actions as Trump did in the Middle East and America will likely end up in a very similar situation as today. It’s going to take a while before attitudes change in the American political class.
JMG,
Thinking about it more, I do think your reading of the situation provides a better explanation for bad boy syndrome and the MAGA dating thing than mine does (assuming those things are actually common enough to matter). I have to take those phenomena on faith, however, as I haven’t observed them much in real life, although the bad boy thing is certainly very common in women’s literature. I really only see women from chaotic or violent homes seeking out bad boys in real life, and I see as much of it in the other direction from men from similar homes (hot but excessively crazy girlfriends, basically).
Almost all the PMC progressive women I actually know seem to seek out progressive men and then browbeat them into becoming even more progressive in even innocuous aspects of life (no longer being allowed to enjoy their sword and sorcery novels or military sci-fi, for instance). That sort of relationship seems to track straightforwardly with my framework; they need their boyfriends/husbands to constantly affirm their worldview because they’re horribly afraid it might not be true.
I suppose the best explanation within my framework for the bad boy phenomenon would be domesticating the fear of inferiority or subjugation by compartmentalizing, ritualizing, and eroticizing it. There’s also a certain moth-to-flame attraction for many people in the things they fearfully obsess over. If you constantly contemplate male domination while charging it with fearful emotion, you end up imitating it, either as wishful perpetrator or as self-sacrificial victim, or both.
Hi John Michael,
I’d not heard of this protest previously. It seems even more vacuous and ineffective than the usual (other than an advertisement for the participants desires), and you’d have to suggest that Freud would have a field day analysing the repressed symbolism. 🙂 Mass hysteria, anyone?
The curious mind wonders whether the ladies in question were supporting local manufacturing with their purchases? Hey, even blow molding plastic folks have to earn a living. If not, then the absurdist perspective may be that the whole thing was cooked up by the land of stuff folks to increase demand for product. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work at a factory making such toys? There’s – dare I say it – enough meat in the subject for a book.
If I may point out the obvious thing here? Women invading male spaces, have been known to act like err, dicks. And the converse is equally true, males invading women’s spaces, have been known to act like, err, dicks. There’s a theme there, but it’s escaping me. A bit of respect and good grace on all sides, would go a long way. It’s not too much to ask for is it?
Dude, people are single, because they’ve made the decision to be that way. The old timers used to say that there is a lid for every pot. Sorry for that, dad talks are a personal speciality.
The thing you’ve left me wondering is, will this week be a record number of comments?
Cheers
Chris
What a fun topic. Let the fan fiction presses roll! Oh wait, they’ve already done so… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54848636-not-my-president-but-my-lover
On a more serious note, I really appreciate the plain-spoken statement ‘most women, like most men, naturally move back and forth from assertive to receptive roles in emotional and sexual relationships.’ That’s basically what flirting is! It’s a dance between two people, each by turns taking assertive steps forward and receptive steps backward. Neither move is exclusively masculine or feminine. When you’re both consenting and attuned to each other’s movements, it’s sexy; when one or the other isn’t, it’s awkward at best, and cause for outrage at worst.
I was talking with a friend the other day about the current dating scene, and the conversation ended with his summary statement, ‘Yeah, white women scare me’. We are both straight white males, and we’d been talking about our more pleasant experiences dating immigrant women. Though communicating across cultural differences carries its own challenges, we agreed that there is something very refreshing about interacting with women who are not confused about what it means to be a woman.
Now, ‘what it means to be a woman’ can vary considerably depending on the individual and the culture, but my point is that in our experience young, white, North American women are simply confused, and their confusion is frustrating to them, and their frustration often ends up being taken out on the men they’re close to. The always-assertive-and-independent role that feminism assigns them is unsatisfying, just as it was to North American men in mid-century (another great point you brought up). Equally maddening is the always-sexy-and-available role that the more crass and pervasive end of pop culture (including advertising) pushes them toward. This I think is the explanation for why so many Gen Z girls and women are choosing to identify as ‘they/them’- they’ve just had it with the whole mess and don’t even want to be identified with the female sex.
So I think Jennifer Kobernik #34 and Anonymous #56 are correct in their reading of the protest. It might well have the desirous undertones you’ve analyzed in your post, but the surface meaning is at least as important: its purpose was to give the participants a burst of self-empowerment by symbolically inflicting ‘sex as penetrating degradation’ on their great enemy. Not that this speaks well of their sense of self-worth. In Jennifer’s words: “Having rejected all uniquely female forms of power and capability and having fully internalized male ideas of power and hierarchy, they are left to live as deficient men, and thus cannot quite convince themselves deep down that they are actually the equals of real men.”
Dangerous waters, indeed! It’s been nice swimming with you all.
Liberal women need to understand they don’t have to have the sex lives of characters from Sex and the City (that is, the sex lives of the stereotypical gay male before AIDS). Most women don’t want numerous, emotionless encounters with strangers. But hookup culture has convinced them they do, and should, want this kind of sex, and that they’re “demisexuals” or “asexual” if not. I wish more people knew about the etheric and astral bodies and the polarities associated with them.
@Anselmbo #55: Were you there to observe the hunter-gatherers? Or can you point to a recent group embodying that lifestyle? Khoi-San, Yamomame, Inuit, any Australian or Andamanian group? There was enormous variety between non-state societies in the recent past, and there is every reason to believe it was at least as enormous in the distant past. It’s just that I can’t right now remember any group that lived according to your description.
There are multiple men waving dildos in the photos of the “blitz” that you posted. Are they subconsciously begging to be spanked by the President as well?
To me it appears that the protestors are trying to embarass ICE by festooning the fence with plastic phalluses. And yes the F-word originally had a sexual connotation but when someone yells “F*** YOU” at me in traffic I never mistake it for a come on. In certain contexts that word is understood as pure aggression. It is literally called “the F-bomb.”
Sure, de riguer Progressive sexual liberation may play a role it this – the protestors assume that ICE agents are repressed and thus vulnerable to embarassment by vulgar display – but perhaps you are overthinking this.
Pyrrus @ 60: “I have also read that convicted criminals sire more children than conventional men…”
That is ominously dysgenic. I can think of a case near me. A man in his mid-thirties was gunned down at a late night party at a motorcycle club. He’d been in prison. Now out, he’d left his pregnant GF alone in her/their apartment to attend the party. According to his relatives, he was turning his life around, and had gotten trained as a fork-lift driver… he was “always a peacemaker”… “caught in a crossfire,” also according to his relatives. In the crossfire he caught four bullets, but apparently nobody else nearby was injured. The article went on to say that he had fathered 17 children and had two more on the way when he was killed. I saw his photo: quite a hunk.
I plead guilty to being a “conventional man.”
@Pointwithinacircle #54: Your comment about the pendulum swing in judicial decisions over the last century reminds me of a remark by Dion Fortune in ‘The Mystical Qabalah’ about the way nations oscillate between 40-or-so-year periods influenced by Geburah and the planet Mars, on the one hand, and by Chesed and the planet Jupiter, on the other.
I’ve long thought that you can track this trend in American politics by glancing at the public portraits of presidents: from the 30s to the 70s, stern and serious was the more common look for a national leader. Then, friendly and fatherly became the norm. The current administration represents another turn of the tide, with a scowling old man for its figurehead. (His smile is nearly always a smirk of triumph, so it doesn’t count).
It’s interesting that the hypothetical Mars phase was characterized by increases in civil rights, while the now-ending Jupiter phase by curtailments in rights. That seems to align well with Geburah’s penchant for separating and atomizing (ie. the individual over the collective) and Chesed’s tendency for expansion and assimilation (ie. the collective over the individual). It also raises the possibility that Uranus and Neptune would be more appropriate planetary markers for these chapters in the life of nations, since they are more strongly linked with individuality and collectivity, respectively.
And if this cycle I’ve sketched is in fact a cycle, then it would seem we’re due for another period of stern, warlike presidents and judiciaries that exalt the rights of individuals.
I had to look up this operation dildo thing on YouTube to know what you are talking about. Honestly it sounds like a Monty Python skit. There are multiple posts so I guess this was an actual thing. I don’t know how any guy seeing this managed not to fall over with laughter. I guess they’re trying to get the pudgy orange round one to man up?
Poor dears wanted to inflict penetrative acts on the Big Bad Wolf. Unfortunately for them, they didn’t have the proper equipment to do so. What is a girl to do? Go shopping, of course! So they did and got some toys. I think one day it’s gonna be a funny story. Why is everybody so serious about it?
Fluidity and ambiguity are very much alive and well here in California. Unfortunately, they are not channeled through the subtle dance of the hunter/huntress and the hunted. They just went sideways. Such words as wife/husband and girlfriend/boyfriend are very… er…er.. declasse. Any mid-level corporate manager knows better than to say, “My wife and I…”. The right way is “My partner and I…” Gynecologists manage to put their entire websites without ever using the word “women”. It’s “those assigned female gender at birth”. And of course, “a nursing mother” is offensive (To whom? Never met a single one in real life). It’s “a nursing person.” As the industrial age declines, these things will right themselves out, and our descendants will consider their existence to be myths, just like the landing on the Moon. 😉
@Pyrrhu #60
Perhaps it is simply the case that convicted criminals sire more children because they have poor impulse control and a disregard for consequences.
And perhaps instead of being hardwired towards them women just make mistakes.
The Sea Priestess. does a good job demonstrating and explaining relationships with give and take between masculine and feminine. I’ve had some experience with that – going from completely astrally negative, to able to being dynamic when I wanted to, and another repeat cycle of the same. A constant ebb and flow of One Life would be something I look for in a future relationship. I can’t imagine there would be any point to me having a relationship without it.
Ron, I’ve already fielded some incoherent rage-trolling, including one shrill bit of blind fury from somebody who hasn’t pestered this blog in years. It’s all highly amusing — the usual ad hominem spitslinging, as one would expect. Still, unless it picks up considerably, this isn’t even going to land in the top 100 of my troll magnet posts.
Patrick, the primal-horde notion was certainly used to support Enlightenment ideologies, but I don’t believe it was invented then. It’s an interesting question, though.
Phutatorius, it’s precisely the mismatch between those gaudy apocalyptic fantasies and the reality of just one more angry little ethnoreligious state in the Middle East that I’m trying to poke fun at by such comments.
Patrick, exactly. I note that press releases in the leftward media are all insisting that Operation Dildo Blitz was a great success. Exactly what that success consists of doesn’t seem to be addressed anywhere.
Anon, interesting. I haven’t seen much sign of former leftists joining the right — can you point me to something along these lines so I can expand my analysls?
Peter, nah, it’s very straightforward. A great many college-educated liberal middle class women think they ought to run the world — after all, they know better than everyone else, right? You challenged that fantasy of privilege.
Anon, as long as the Jewish community in the US remains a large and relatively well-disciplined voting bloc, and there isn’t a Muslim voting bloc of equal size and discipline to outweigh it, American politicians are going to keep on supporting Israel. If you have a government chosen by elections, any sufficiently large and effective pressure group is going to get the lion’s share of what it wants as long as it doesn’t face organized opposition; that’s just the way elections work.
Jennifer, interesting. Yes, I could see that analysis making sense of it, too.
Chris, the thought that the whole thing might have been cooked up by some marketing genius in Kwangtung, looking for a way to increase sex toy sales, is delectable; I’m almost sorry to say I’d need to see some evidence. So far, btw, comments are running pretty much the usual volume.
Dylan, okay, that was worth a click.
The subtitle, “Who Could #Resist?”, is especially delightful.
Vala, that’s an excellent point. I’m beginning to wonder whether the central mistake of 20th century feminism was that it embraced the entire toxic mess that was upper middle class male culture circa 1960 — corporate careers, constant alpha behavior, compulsive sexuality, emotional starvation, and the rest of it — as its model of what empowerment is like.
Nonara, if the men are typical of the male leftists I know, they’re there to impress the women in their lives with how progressive they are. It’s quite possible I’m overthinking all this, of course, but I’ve noticed that a lot of people tend to reflexively underthink such things, and a little probing of the possibilities seems useful just now.
Dylan (if I may) good heavens — I’d forgotten that. It’s obviously been too long since I last read the MQ. It’s a valid point — and in that case, I’ll take the stern faces and increased rights for individuals!
Moonwolf8, it does, doesn’t it? And like most of the best Monty Python skits, it’s the totally deadpan way in which the performers parade around in an increasingly absurd situation — there is no cannibalism in the British Navy! — that makes the whole thing so funny.
Inna, when somebody says “nursing person” I reflexively think of an RN. 😉
Luke, that was certainly my experience in marriage, and in dates prior to that. It’s all about the tidal ebb and flow of energies. All Fortune’s occult fiction has much to teach about that.
Something you allude to that I’d like to make more explicit: the measures that have been put in place ostensibly to punish bad actors do no such thing. In fact it’s been noticed that a lot of the punishments doled out in the last decade are basically voluntary: the less you cooperate, the less they can do to you; but if you try to justify yourself or, worse, make teary-eyed apologies, you’re done for. The result is that the costs have fallen almost entirely on the most socially-awkward, the most risk-averse, and the most scrupulous.
One thing that I think will help going forward is that men and women in the working class don’t seem share the middle class’s neuroses around sex. As downward mobility drags a lot of the current middle class kicking and screaming down into the working class, maybe their (our) sex lives will improve…
Mr. Greer, I’m glad to hear that the Romans had that mindset: this of course is assuming you’re not slyly pulling my leg .. well, even if you were, I’d run with it.. ‘;] Imagine the ruckus that would ensue .. were I to place such a visage on a stand, in my community garden plot (hint: most of the ladies who toil there would .. well .. have me ‘affixed’ to a garden stake, bound with twine , rope, or whatever .. with a crown of loops of barbied-wire, just for good measure! (they are, with few exceptions, at various levels .. part of the local gynotocracy, after all..) But, who knows, maybe they’d be beating a line to my devious, um, plot! God knows what the garden manager would make of it. Perhaps I should attach a few dildos(green of course!) on top of the trellis .. 1.) to keep the plaster angel .. and the accompaning plastic protector tyranosaurs’s .. who are perched above, company .. and 2.) to assuage said garden gyros, that I mean no harm.
I was reading this post. My GF walked by and exclaimed, “What ARE you reading?!”
It took me about a half an hour to figure out how to explain the core theme in one sentence. It was a good morning’s meditation.
Oh, and per the discussion, above, it’s my estimation that HR are atheist ‘church ladies’.
Slithy, that’s an excellent point. I noticed back in the RaceFail 2009 woke witch hunt in science fiction that anybody who pushed back hard against the bullying got left mostly alone; it was the ones who tried to be “good people” and placate them who got doxxed, harrassed, and in some cases driven to attempt suicide. Interestingly, it was almost always white women of very liberal views who got targeted, and brash male authors who pushed back hard got labeled “Do Not Engage” and suffered no harm at all to their careers — yet another way that bad boys benefit from the current state of things.
Polecat, why not get a bunch of dildos, put them around your plot, and tell everyone that it’s a protest against the Trump administration? Nobody will question that at all. 😉
Renaissance, that strikes me as a very sensible analogy.
“I haven’t seen much sign of former leftists joining the right — can you point me to something along these lines so I can expand my analysls?”
There was a phenomenon called the “post-left” that consisted of former leftists and operated between 2020 and 2025; most of the post-left eventually ended up merging with the populist right:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-death-of-the-post-left/
“Anon, as long as the Jewish community in the US remains a large and relatively well-disciplined voting bloc, and there isn’t a Muslim voting bloc of equal size and discipline to outweigh it, American politicians are going to keep on supporting Israel.”
Well, you don’t need a Muslim voting bloc to get American politicians to stop supporting Israel. You just need the Jewish community to start turning away from Israel, like what younger Jewish Americans seem to be doing right now:
https://www.thejewishnews.com/news/israel/as-young-jews-move-away-from-israel-jewish-leaders-are-reluctant-to-change-their-approach/article_aaf45389-4484-4385-822e-2bc1c97ef414.html
OMG, I hadn’t heard of this, and it’s even stupider than the pink pussy hats. Nice drop kick, JMG. The thing is, when you drop kick a hornet’s nest, the hornets do all come out, but they come out dizzy 😀
You stated in #27 that you’ve “considered [romance novel writing] as a potential side gig, and even selected a pen name.” It would be very interesting, and instructive, if you were to write books in the style of the earlier ones Sara loved– Do they fly off the shelves or do they gather dust?
You and Jennifer Kobernick together have described the profoundly septic mental illness of the society that the PMC constructed for us in the early 1950’s. JMG #84: “I’m beginning to wonder whether the central mistake of 20th century feminism was that it embraced the entire toxic mess that was upper middle class male culture circa 1960 — corporate careers, constant alpha behavior, compulsive sexuality, emotional starvation, and the rest of it — as its model of what empowerment is like.” And Jennifer K #34: “”…the secret fear/belief that being f—-d actually does demonstrate one’s inferiority. They wish they had the equipment to dominate those they hate, are terrified that the equipment they do have leaves them doomed to perpetual subjection… and even more deeply fear that such subjection is actually justified.”
Bingo!!
And thank you both for this realization.
There has been no liberation. Many of us are still caught in the Matrix of the PMC Thermonuclear Family world view.
I knew this culture was corrupt when I was six years old.
Unfortunately the cultural H-bombs have left their scars.
JMG,
When I was young, the single most responsive thing that I would say to a woman I wanted was, I would wait for the conversation to get around to something she wanted and how should she get it and I would say, “When I see something I want it, I take it,” while directly looking at her. The typical response from the girl was, “That’s so hot.”
Which tells you everything about why so many would be so unconsciously or subconsciously attracted to a guy like Trump.
Male-female sexuality.
No-one else in the world knows this story. Only I can tell it.
Let me tell you a story ’bout a girl named ‘Red’ …
That would be me.
I used to be quite a tease around age 20. It was single in the early 1970s.
I grew up in a college town. I knew all about the male dorms and fraternities,— let’s say, “intimately,” if you get my drift. I was a dorm-crawler/groupie.
On my way to work as a nurse’s aide, I was walking on the sidewalk along the outside edge of the college campus. The college was surrounded by high metal 19th-century fencing with gates for cars and walkers. I knew that the inroads of the campus dead-ended about halfway through; none were thru-ways. I was walking in the direction from home to work, so it might have been morning. It must have been late spring to early summer because I was carrying no sweater or coat.
I heard a convertible (car with no top) full of fraternity boys a block away whoopin’ and hollerin,’ cat-calls and all. I head them coming a mile away, and they were coming my direction (this sounds more like an evening thing). Anyway, I was quite frisky in those days. *** I could NOT let this opportunity pass me by.*** I saw the convertible had traffic behind them where they could not stop or turn without getting rear-ended. They were forced to keep heading straight. Then they passed by, ever so slowly. Slower than slow.
I pulled up my nurse’s aide uniform’s blouse and bra, and gave them a g-o-o-d l-o-n-g flash of my ample ‘C’ (‘D’) bosom, non-chalant — as if I did this every day. Some days my bosom seemed more like a ‘D’ depending the time of month. I didn’t care who else saw. The convertible, if they wanted to return, would have to go all the way around the campus, and that would take five minutes. I suppose if they had thought to jump out of the car right then, but they didn’t think of it — frat boys are not too smart. When their car was out of sight, I ran through the nearest gate of the campus and hid in the ample bushes near the tall continuous metal fencing, peaking out, and waited. —Ample bosom in the ample bushes.— Sure enuf, they came ’round again. I was nowhere in sight. I had disappeared. They eventually left, and I left. What groans of disappointment they emitted. I loved every minute of it.
What is the moral of the story, “Girls, if you have ample bosom, use it. All you gotta do is flash dem (them) boys.” Give them some nipple. Males can’t stop themselves. Males age 20 are slaves to the cucumber🥒between their legs.
And if you want to continue an encunter such as this, feel free to continue; the situation is already set up. Fifty years later, I am thinking, “Why didn’t I fulfill the encunter and join them in the car?” Now THAT party would have been fun.
At age 73, memories is all I have🎻.
My philosophy is, “Girls, you are only young once (teens and twenties), so use your youth while you have it.” Youth goes away fairly fast. Don’t squander your late teens and twenties by NOT doing idiotic-“foolish” things. Use your flesh up to age 30 doing things you will think fondly of at age 73.”
I haven’t even told Jethro this story.
Words of wisdom… eh❓
💨👙🤌🏼🎻💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Phutatorius 65
> small, insignificant, nuclear-armed nation at center stage in the Armageddon
Is that the little pip-squeak of a country that starts with an “I” and ends in “L” (which is unmentionable)?
💨🫵🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I think a lot of this sexual dysphoria, dysfunction and just plain wierdness is rooted in the popular idea that there are no limits on humanity. Born a man? You can be a woman with the right drugs and surgery. And vice versa. You can download your consciousness into a mainframe and never have to die. Deny your drives, deny your Jungian shadow, and it will all just go away. Yeah, sure it will ;-).
I have at times generated rage with spit flecks by gently suggesting that we all live within limitations.
I WAS tempted to interpret the essay as your covert appeal to find a dating pool of eligible, single Calvinist ladies! Sure, they may force you memorize Bible verses from Deuteronomy, join the Stewardship Committee and make a large pledge to the new Building Fund– But you know things will get funky fast while you listen to the Backward Masking of Rock of Ages…. Hmmm. I think I just developed the plot of a new novel– “The Druid and the Organist — A LOVE Predestinated — Would they meet as Equals at the Equinox?”
Outside the Whipple building, oh I wish I could be there
When the flying dicks of protest were sailing through the air,
When dildos adorned fences and went bouncing in the street,
When federals feared penises might force them to retreat.
JMG # 61:
“How many people on the left even remember what Kaczynski wrote?”
Of course, near to zero. Left is under the dictatorship of actual fashions (though it pretends it’s antisystem), like another tendences and ideologies in the West. So they forget soon everything. In the case of Mr. K., they despised fastly his criticism against nasty leftist psychology, because they wanted to do it, too (he wrote unpleasant truths about leftism, ahem).
————————————————————————————————————
Cynthia C. # 62:
“The “C” one seemed to be for anything from mere linguistic spice to a mildly annoying problem, whereas the “J” was for something that was very bad indeed.”
So it seems, at least for some Mexicans, the “C” word is a mild prophanity; it seems here we’ve got another mild prophanity for sexual businesses, which begins with “F”, and the “J” word is user often with more “bad humor” in Spain (ahem).
———————————————————————–
JMG # 84:
“I note that press releases in the leftward media are all insisting that Operation Dildo Blitz was a great success.”
Oops! Too much propagadistic charge in “news” often leads into involuntary comedy, methink…
Dylan #79 – that 40 year thing looks quite interesting from a New Zealand perspective. In the early 80s the PM was Robert Muldoon, who is remembered for being a domineering personality and for having a dedicated following known as “Rob’s mob”, and who is commonly seen as jack-booted in retrospect. Forty years on you get Jacinda Ardern – again a domineering personality with a dedicated following, and … enough said. (Muldoon also left the government in a difficult situation fiscally, like Ardern’s government – the 70s energy crisis vs the Covid fiasco.) The next PM after Muldoon though was David Lange, a quick-witted and amusing lawyer who on the face of it has nothing in common with the current rather bland PM Chris Luxton (who actually looks a bit like Muldoon). But Lange was largely a figurehead for what was really a transitional government trying to unite various conflicting forces, which basically summarises the current coalition government and Luxton’s role. So maybe the following two governments will see a relatively extended return to emphasising stability, competence, and less forced social change (like the Jim Bolger, Helen Clark, and John Key governments from 1990-2016 – it is interesting seeing how the level of charisma of the elected PM rose gradually over that time from Bolger to Key, then Jacinda).
After reading some comments about JMG view about “bad boys” attractive for a lot of women, I’ve thought in the music phenomenon named the “Regueton” across Hispanic countries and Spain alike. In the short form, it’s a very popular musical style for youth today, it began in Puerto Rico during `90s. IMHO, it’s usually a poorly performed music, its singers are more often men than women, and they sing using too much autotune (maybe they ‘ve got bad voices?). Lyrics often depicts sexual adventures, near always from a straight man view, and according feminists, they humiliate women desire and affectivity. Maybe they’re right when you hear the worst Regueton singers; but it’s interesting they’re popular within young men and women alike. I think some girls who like that “music” are fond of these supposed bad boys. At least, regueton singers like to depict themselves like bad boys, though sometimes I think they pretend it to be richer and famous…
Here, a link to a Spanish regueton singer who isn’t one of the worst of them, methink. An old legendary song according “reguetoneros”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y28YZu0wEk
I’ve chosen this song because he speaks about sex with a woman, in a mild polite way, if you understand at least some of his Spanish lyrics…Ironically, his real surname “Quevedo”, is the same as one of our greatest ancient poets.
I wonder if the persistent wearing of face-diapers among certain liberal women is a reflection of this repressed desire to be dominated. They claim that the purpose of face-diapers is to stop the latest boogieman virus, whatever that is, but anyone with half a brain knows that such masks are useless against such viruses. However, they seem to work quite well as substitutes for the sort of gags used in BDSM. I even recall seeing in 2020-2021 people wearing face-diapers with BDSM style metal spikes and chains. It’s like they now have an excuse to indulge their sexual fantasies in public, but under the guise of health.
What *were* these protesters thinking their effect would be? (I don’t want to Google it, for obvious reasons). If it was to protest against Trump the (alleged) sex-offender, it’s a bit like those climate change protesters who try to make us care about the planet by destroying priceless artworks. Baffling, if you want to be taken seriously. And as a “survivor” of a childhood sexual assault myself, I find the form of this protest actually quite revolting. I think any other “survivors” might feel the same, so I think most of those ladies have never been through it themselves.
On an unrelated note, here is a lovely romance some of the commentariat may like:
https://writersmosaic.org.uk/reviews/my-favourite-cake/
It’s in Iranian film about two lonely elderly people in Tehran. Very much the “return of the repressed”, acting in ways that women and men aren’t supposed to in that country. UK-based readers can watch it on BBC iPlayer (not sure about other countries).
Makes me wonder if the left isn’t infiltrated by somone who actually tries to boost Trump’s approval rate through this magical means. Just a sticker would “I did that” at a petrol station would have been maximum effect, as it was with Biden, plus is proven to work.
There is an interesting 2025 essay by a feminist. At the age of 63 she looks back on her life and regrets nearly all of it. Apparently she spent most of her years belittling men with typical passive-agressive hostility. It did not work out well for her – at least she is honest.
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/regret-belittling-men-63-ended-up-alone-3569366
@ Anselmo #55
“Our minds are hereditarily configured for the life like hunter-gaterers taking part of a horde . In an horde didn’t exist marriage, and for each women was a survivance goal to atract the alfa-male, the leader of the horde.”
I must say, I’ve always loved the “just so” stories that have become such an integral part of what one might call the “evo devo” mythic corpus.
Thank you for a sterling example of the type. 🙂
” I’m beginning to wonder whether the central mistake of 20th century feminism was that it embraced the entire toxic mess that was upper middle class male culture circa 1960 — corporate careers, constant alpha behavior, compulsive sexuality, emotional starvation, and the rest of it — as its model of what empowerment is like.”
Yes… this makes sense.
Also, this thought gives a sideways tribute to your other saying about knowing only one story. If you only have one story about how power works, and you want to exercise the power that you feel deprived of, then you have to find a way to cram yourself into that one story, even if it turns out to be a Procrustean Bed.
John Michael Greer #61
Your comentary matches with the observations of Cabeza de Vaca about the life of the indians of Florida and Texas.
https://share.google/aimode/YoCsWcOTNkN7ST8TK
@ Inna #81
“Any mid-level corporate manager knows better than to say, ‘My wife and I…’. The right way is ‘My partner and I…'”
Back in the day, when the right way for his serially married Californian colleagues to introduce their spouses as “my second wife” or “my third husband”, my middle class, left wing, uncle, who before he retired had occupied an endowed “chair” at a Californian university of distinction, liked to nettle said colleagues by introducing my aunt as “my first wife.” 😉 And, happily, they are now married, and still “firsts” to each other, more than 60 years.
This really only affects a very specific urban class of people doesn’t it? I noted at a recent wedding that there was a certain urban type who were very standoffish with men, while the local rural gals were completely normal.
Thanks, JMG for this piece. The fascination with the male appendage for many of these people speaks volumes. I saw it myself at a feminist lecture in college where the speaker spent an undue amount of attention on the microphone and making phallic comments.
A lot of the protests, it seems to me, stem from Vico’s Barbarism of Reflection. Any time spent listening to feminist agitators will show the insulated world they live in. For example, the performance art aspect of protest, which makes no sense to anybody watching, is prevalent in the universities. For some reason, dance, movement and gutteral utterances are a ritual to bring out something within these protesters. Some say it is the emergence of Hecate, Dark Moon Lilith, anti-patriarchal rage or a host of other reasons. Dildos might make sense to these protesters in their insulated, internet-forum world, but not to anyone else.
But I can say with certainty that the protesters are all in agreement that their performance is necessary and vital; while those watching from the sidelines just scratch their chins, with just as many women chuckling as men.
““Believe all women” retains its power in that setting, if in no other, and men are well aware of this. That’s why so many men in that class have simply stopped dating altogether, and go out of their way to avoid being alone with a woman even for the duration of an elevator ride. It’s simply not worth the perceived risk.”
This is only one of the reasons so many men have stopped dating. Believe me, there are other reasons. I’d list a couple but would rather hear what you and the commentariat think.
I suspect that this post may eclipse The King In Orange as your most reviled and attacked piece of writing.
My compliments. May it bring you many new readers.
This reminds me so much of a comic strip that was popular about 40+ years ago:
https://www.google.com/imgres?q=bloom%20county%20america%27s%20lil%20dumplins&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Fmedia%2FETqtpJ6WoAI5Iy1.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2Fbisforboogie%2Fstatus%2F1241495630809370624&docid=U4c42W4zPUE5LM&tbnid=nr-HQ11agl_H-M&w=1020&h=684&hcb=2&itg=1
In re: “Over the last century and a half, the Western world has passed through a dramatic transformation in sex relationships, in which the subordination of women that’s been standard in more or less every other society all through recorded history has largely if not entirely broken down.”
Many people have pointed out that Faustian civilization is a WEIRD outlier among civilizations. WEIRD is an acronym for: “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.” We are the only civilization that I know of, which has ever asserted that consciousness is an accidental by-product of random chemical processes, or that religion is some kind of mental disorder, or that biological sex is somehow arbitrary.
Carl Jung, in his Epilogue To “Essays On Contemporary Events” stated:
“It is after all only a tiny fraction of humanity, .. who, because they lack all contact with nature, have hit upon the idea that religion is a peculiar kind of mental disturbance of undiscoverable purport. Viewed from a safe distance, say from central Africa or Tibet, it would certainly look as if this fraction had projected its own unconscious mental derangements upon peoples still possessed of healthy instincts.”
Since the mid 17th Century, the main contributions of Faustian civilization have been technological. In all other respects (including family life and sexual relations), I think that we have either regressed or have simply run off the rails entirely. Most of the rest of the world thinks that the West is either demonic or simply insane. Jung (again) agreed when he wrote:
“A Pueblo chieftain once confided to me that he thought all Americans (the only white men he knew) were crazy, and the reasons he gave for this view sounded exactly like a description of
people who were possessed. Well, perhaps we are. … Just when people were congratulating themselves on having abolished all spooks, it turned out that instead of haunting the attic or old ruins the spooks were flitting about in the heads of apparently normal Europeans. Tyrannical, obsessive, intoxicating ideas and delusions were abroad everywhere, and people began to believe the most absurd things, just as the possessed do.”
My assessment, exactly.
For those that are willing to endure video, I present my flying dildo opus from 20+ years ago.
https://www.imdb.com/video/vi514654745/?ref_=nm_vids_vi_1
Operation Dildo Blitz could be the sequel, complete with a Flight of Valkyries interlude! If only.
Regarding our most common American vulgarity, I always think about the English and their contempt for the prolific breeding habits of the Irish; no Fornication Under Catholic law prohibited. Always makes me laugh.
There were two other trends (one short lived, one that’s somewhat hanging on) over the last ten years that seem similar:
1. Slut walks. Originally created as a protest against a Canadian policeman who advised women to a) be aware of their surroundings; and b) be aware of how they were dressed in situations that might be dangerous/attract unwanted attention. This is course led to accusations of slut shaming and condemnations of the male gaze, and the slut walk was born. Over time, however, it became less about safety or prevention of assault, and more “I will sexualize myself however I want and you can’t comment or notice,” and eventually moved to “I demand that you notice and approve of me sexualizing myself, but only when and if I want you to.” Also, while lauded by the press, journalists (primarily female) tended to publish photographs of, well, the least attractive marchers. Female intersex competition is rough. (As an aside, the Spanish translation for these events was much funnier: March of the Whores.)
2. The whole Handmaid’s Tale cosplay at political events. While shrieking about the return of extreme patriarchy, women dressed up as characters prized for attraction and fertility, that were subservient to rich and powerful men/couples, and forced to submit to their demands and desires. As Willford Riley said when an article about the elaborateness of these costumes was cited on Twitter: WE KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!
Jennifer, I think you’ve nailed (oops!) what’s really going on here. “They wish they had the equipment to dominate those they hate, are terrified that the equipment they do have leaves them doomed to perpetual subjection in the absence of the state and social power they are losing their grip on”. Exactly.
The ICE Officers they hate are terrorising and sometimes killing with their guns (which are of course phallic symbols) and this is the protesters ineffectual beta way of ‘getting even’ on ICE and by extension, Trump.
“Having rejected all uniquely female forms of power and capability and having fully internalized male ideas of power and hierarchy, they are left to live as deficient men [reminds me of “the female eunuch”, to quote Germaine Greer], and thus cannot quite convince themselves deep down that they are actually the equals of real men.” Quite, they will never match the power and testosterone of ICE agents, and that includes the beta male protesters too.
The influence of porn is a factor here too, looming large in the imaginations of these protestors and when you said, ‘deficient men’ I couldn’t help but think of those unfortunate females who think that getting their forearm skin surgically attached to their groin makes them men. These so-called ‘trans-men’ are of course mascots for these liberal lefties (same with the so-called ‘trans-women’). I noticed some of the ICE agents were laughing at them – these protestors were about as threatening as a wet paper bag.
JMG, while you have clearly found some liberal women who are secretly hooking up with Maga men online, I would say they are a very small minority of leftist women. I am in a liberal lefty group online and these women are very dismissive of any man who is MAGA who they view as dangerous Neanderthals. Also I did read a couple of romances back in the day and I noticed the ‘bad boy’ hero was always a whitewashed ‘bad boy’. He was never running a meth lab, beating up women and going in and out of prison, for example.
I wanted to add a couple of points that I left out of yesterday’s post (it was already getting long).
First point: if Western women can’t get the masculinity they crave within their immediate circle, they are almost driven to look elsewhere for it. JMG’s post mentions one alternative (MAGA men), but it’s not the only one. Another popular option is immigrant men, especially those who are not white (particularly in Europe – it’s instructive sometimes to look at how and why French or German women descibe why they are dating immigrants).
Another one – much older men who still are traditionally masculine. A friend of mine around 60 is married (and has kids with) a woman over 30 years younger than him. He is very stereotypically masculine, works a manual job etc. He’s only been with his wife a few years, but he said even before that, well into his mid 50s, with an adult son from a previous marriage etc, he was getting lots of interest from women in their 20s and 30s.
Even in my personal experience, almost 50. I am in decent physical shape but I am not particularly good looking or famous or rich, and I consistently get looks and interest and smiles from much younger women when out and about even with my family (most of the time it’s pretty deniable stuff, although sometimes very direct, but I have enough experience to read the signs).
Another avenue, much rarer, but the same dynamic. In small numbers (but fairly regularly) you see news articles about high school teachers having affairs with their students. The typical pattern is a 25-30 year old teacher with a 16-18 year old student (this would actually be legal in many European countries but not in the States). When it is a female teacher with a male student, you will usually find the student is a typical bad boy and/or masculine type, and the teacher is often (if married) with a typically non-masculine liberal man – it’s the same dynamic – they crave the masculinity and will try to get it where they can find it.
Speaking of “bad boys” btw. Most people misunderstand what women (particularly young women) find attractive about them. It’s not being “bad” as such (meaning breaking the law or being unpleasant to people or a criminal or whatever). It’s primarily things like confidence, having a strong set of values and principles and boundaries which he maintains at all costs, resistant to social and peer pressure, exciting, not boring, self-driven, dominant, and basically having a strong identity and purpose, can’t be pushed around, gets things done, has options with other women, isn’t needy or dependent on them etc. Barring the very tiny minority of women who respond to actual bad treatment, in the vast majority of cases, the above are the core characteristics of being attractive – it is simply more likely that the part-time bartender/unemployed guitarist/motorcycle rider/part-time drug dealer in the leather jacket with multiple girlfriends has those qualities than the really sweet Bob from Accounting in his cardigan. But it is the underlying qualities that are attractive, not the actions – which is why Bob from Accounting cannot simply take up the guitar and put on a leather jacket and become attractive to women (and vice versa – why the first man will continue to be attractive even if he takes the job in Accounting).
A great deal of attention was paid in the old school pick up artist community to helping young men develop along this path and build their own self-confidence, identity, authenticity and boundaries and become the best version of themselves.
To quote a fantasy novel I read recently, “There are a million different [magical] Paths in this world, but they all come down to two words – “Improve Yourself””…
Bridge,
I have come to the conclusion that the fixation by progressive PMC women on pushing the insane trans agenda* is in large part a way to obscure and delegitimize sexual differences which threaten their self-concept.
*I have heard from several “old school” trans people who transitioned before it became a major social flashpoint that they think the reckless push by non-trans progressives, most loudly women, for increasingly unpalatable policy and ideology in the names of trans rights is going to result in horrible backlash and that they wish those women would shut up.
I’m a little late to the party on this, but I think a factor on the seeming incomprehensibility of Operation Dildo Blitz is the very different reactions men and women have to unsolicited pictures of male genitalia.
Men draw pictures of penises on everything. They always have – some of our earliest paleolithic art is dicks. Archeologists try to dress it up as fertility rituals, but the truth is that men just draw dicks on things.
Women do not. If a woman is on a dating app and recieves an unsolicited dick pic, it makes her feel threatened and humiliated. If the hallway of a men’s dormitory was filled with a forest of rubber dildos, they would shrug it off as a mildly amusing prank. If the hallway of a women’s dormitory was filled with the same dildos, someone would call campus security over sexual harrassment.
When these women threw dildos at goverment buildings, there probably was some weird Freudian psychosexual ideation going on, but there *also* was a profound inability of these women to see beyond their own feminine perspective of an unasked for penis being something threatening or humiliating.
Anon, thanks for the link. As for changes in the voting behavior of young Jewish Americans, let’s see what happens when they get a little older. I’ve seen headlines like that on and off again for quite a few decades, and it’s remarkable how the dissidents always keep coming back into line.
Cicada, classic romances of the kind Sara liked are steady sellers — every single one of Georgette Heyer’s romances is still in print, for example, and the earliest of them were published more than a century ago. (Heyer fans are doubtless already aware that this year is the centenary of These Old Shades, one of her all-time favorites.) Yes, if I go ahead with the project I’ll use Heyer and Jane Austen as models, but with a twist — many people aren’t aware of this, but the Regency was one of the golden ages of British occultism, with important figures such as Francis Barrett, Thomas Taylor, and Iolo Morganwg active in England during the years that Austen’s and Heyer’s heroines were finding true love. My romances (or rather those of my notional alter ego) will combine classic, squeaky-clean Regency romance plots with genuine occultism. It should be fun.
Dennis, I bet!
Northwind, ha! Well, I’m glad you had a good time at it, anyway.
Emmanuel, dead on target. Have you ever seen the way that a spoiled child will act out in an attempt to make the parent set limits? I think a lot of what’s going on in today’s America consists of a nation full of spoiled children all acting out in the most over-the-top ways they can think of, in the vain hope that Daddy or someone will show his love for them by spanking them and sending them to bed without supper. As for your romance, well, I’ll pass on Calvinists, but I could probably make things work with a Lutheran lady. Maybe she’ll be from Pennsylvania and have hexenmeisters in her family tree. 😉
Martin, ha! That’s hilarious, not least because I reflexively hear it to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Chuaquin, interesting. Not being part of the Hispanic world, I hadn’t heard of this, but it certainly fits the pattern I’m discussing.
Samwise, that may be part of it. My suspicion all along, though, is that it’s mostly a great way for women of a certain age to hide sagging skin.
Ms Sidaway, thanks for the link. Yeah, I really have no idea what they thought they were thinking.
Archivist, one of the weirdest things about so many of these anti-Trump protests is that they almost seem intended to fail. I noticed that first with the soi-disant “Magic Resistance,” which consistently went out of its way to ignore all the principles of magic that might have made it a success, but it’s more general than that. I’m still far from sure what to make of it.
Cynic, thank you for this! It’s exactly what I was talking about — she focused her life on always being the dominant, assertive, powerful one and trying to push men into a subservient role, and that messed over her relationships and her life. As she notes, she’s not saying she should have gone to the other extreme — just that she’d have been happier if she’d allowed herself to meet men somewhere in the middle.
Scotlyn, a good point.
PumpkinScone, very much so — that’s why I specified urban liberal middle class women. What makes this a broader issue is simply that people in that category have a great deal of influence over society as a whole just now.
Jon, the funny thing is that maybe it is the emergence of the Dark Moon Lilith. That doesn’t exist, but some astrologers insist on treating it as real — that is to say, it occupies the same odd ontological category as the power exerted by protests of this type!
Karalan, oh, I know. I’ve lurked on some of those forums too (and also on forums where women complain bitterly about the fact that men won’t date them any more).
Charlie, so far, at least, nearly all the reviling and attacking seems to be going on somewhere else, which is fine by me. The really odd thing is that in every example of reviling and attacking this post where I could determine the sex of the reviler and attacker, it was a man, not a woman. Odd.
Old Steve, good heavens. That’s eerily prophetic, isn’t it?
Michael, the same thing’s true, in one way or another, of every other mature civilization. They all drift from the standard human baseline, each in its own eccentric ways.
JeffBKLYN, thank you for this. (Ahem.)
Gollios, two good points. I’ve long thought the women doing the Handmaid’s Tale cosplay, aside from portraying themselves as fertile and submissive, are practicing for the burqas they’re going to wear after they complete their current trajectory and convert to Islam.
Bridge, never, but never, confuse what women will say when they’re in public with a group of other women, on the one hand, with what they’ll do in private, on the other. It’s well known, for example, that a lot of women who claim to be vegans or otherwise on strict diets will stop on the commute home from work at drive-in hamburger dives so they can wolf down a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate shake with nobody the wiser. (I have friends who’ve worked flipping burgers who testify to this. The best place to watch it is a fast-food place just off the freeway between a big city and its upscale suburbs.) MAGA dating is similar; do some online searches and see what you find.
SNSMan, it’s fine advice.
Calliope, fair enough! I’d be interested in hearing the take of other women on this.
Michael Martin #117: Chemistry is a newer area of inquiry, but Democritus, Epicurus and their followers affirmed that everything, including the human mind, was a consequence of atoms bumping into each other. While Epicurus did not deny the existence of Gods, he considered them to also be made of atoms AFAIK. While I can’t give you the names, I know there are ancient Chinese and Indian philosophers who had materialist opinions.
It is possible that Faustian civilization stands out in that such opinions have spread out from a small group of leisured philosophers into the main population.
#14 Theresa and JMG
I have an interesting observation regarding JMG’s comment on ‘clean’ romances novels. Here in Watertown NY, there used to be an indie bookstore that had a large selection of Amish Romance novels. It’s a particular sub-genre of Christian Romance novels, which deliberately avoid anything ‘spicy’. I seriously doubt if these books were written for an Amish audience. Rather, I strongly suspect that they are intended for an ‘English’ readership that might be fantasizing about a return to simpler times.
Emmanuel Goldstein 95
> download your consciousness into a mainframe and never have to die.
Reminds me of a “Moody Blues” (rock group) song of the mid- to late-1960s:
“In the Beginning”
[First Man:] I think, I think I am, therefore I am, I think.
[Establishment:] Of course you are, my bright little star,
I’ve miles
And miles
Of files
Pretty files of your forefather’s fruit
and now to suit our
great computer,
You’re magnetic ink.
[First Man:] I’m more than that, I know I am, at least, I think I must be.
[Inner Man:] There you go man, keep as cool as you can.
Face piles
And piles
Of trials
With smiles.
It riles them to believe
that you perceive
the web they weave.
And keep on thinking free.
These lyrics go along with a song, and what a great song it is. At age 17, these lyrics walloped me in the head, and I was never the same.
💨🤯👩🏼💻💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
that… actually makes a lot of sense. And may also explain why middle class, college-educated, political views are so, for the lack of a better word, hysterical in the West nowadays. It’s just sexual repression messing up everything, it’s just everybody wanting to scream LETS F*** RIGHT NOW!!!11 but lacking the words to express themselves, fearing the thoughts they are thinking and worrying about the social consequences.
It also touches a strange phonemenon in the younger generation: the youth is having less sex. Everybody wants to have sex but the complete breakdown of social norms in our society is making that very difficult for inner party drones. What a mess.
This is the week I found out I am even weirder than I thought I was. I never heard of the dildo episode before JMG reported on it. I refuse to call it a protest. A few points that may be of interest:
Renaissance Man & JMG @ 87 & 88: Please don’t call the dildo hurlers (DHes) church ladies. Church ladies are the women who staff food pantries and soup kitchens, and volunteer at thrift stores. Annoying and somewhat snobbish they may at times be, but they are doing good work. The DHes, in my estimation, based solely on what I have read here, strike me as being not only clueless but selfish as well. (any MAGA men wishing to respond, I think many of your cohorts are also selfish individuals). In fact, I find myself wondering if this event was staged in order to discredit real protests. The kind which have serious intention and don’t rely on staged stunts.
Cynic @ 103, like I said above, I must be even weirder than I thought. I don’t regret singlehood at all. I had hoped my late husband and I would grow old together, but I have had no wish to replace him. I can go where I like and do as I please to the extent slender means allow. I can keep expensive utilities turned off, ignore fashion, stay up to 3 am reading a good book and keep the radio tuned to classical music. I don’t have the in laws doing you’re just a culture vulture wannabe at me, and I don’t have to financially support them. I was able to send one child through college and another through a nursing program BECAUSE I had no extended family obligations and no replacement hubby with expensive habits.
BTW, frat boys on a rampage are to be avoided. They can get a young woman just as pregnant as any other kind of guy, and Mommy and Daddy can deploy an army of lawyers to say it wasn’t them, and you consented even if you just thought you were having a good time.
Gollios @ 115, IDK about Canada, but in the USA, there are some men who regard modest attire on women of child bearing age as a provocation. Who does she think she is, acting like she doesn’t even have a …? I’ll show her, etc. etc.
Samwise @ 100, about the “face diapers”, in case you happen to be a fellow American, I propose a deal. We ladies stop insisting on the masks, and you men stop insisting that we continue to cripple ourselves with high heeled shoes. As you put it, “anyone with half a brain knows that” spiky heeled shoes with narrow toe space are both unsafe–try running away from danger in them–and contribute to many kinds of ill health.
Jon G 109
> Hecate, Dark Moon Lilith
Aka The Cailleach. No, Hecate wouldn’t be caught dead having anything to do with Operation Fake Pecker Toss. What she would do, however, is: think of the worst storm you were ever in,— THAT was Hecate’ doing; she was there, directing the action.
No one needles/angers Hecate because that “someone” will not survive.
💨⚡️🌪️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
In one of your recent interviews you talked about how the signature of the Changer, which had been so noticeable about Donald Trump, appears now to have moved along to another vessel, leaving our beloved Trumpster somewhat less amusing and somewhat more brittle and hollowed out. That left me wondering what might cause the Changer to decide to switch avatars and what might then end up befalling the sidelined avatar. As long as the chosen vehicle remains open and willing to be a channel for the Changer’s energies, the Changer would probably go on flowing through him. Should the chosen vehicle begin fighting and resisting the Changer’s influence, well, being the Changer, I’d expect it to both promptly change vehicles and then to treat the one fighting and resisting it in its signature way: by leaving him stuck forever in his futile pose, fighting and resisting the change he once was.
Unfortunately, that sounds spot on for how Donald Trump has changed (or stopped changing) over the past year. Almost every change he once promised he has begun backtracking on. All the corruption he went on about changing, he has instead embraced, complete with mind-boggling insider trading and market manipulation. Trump’s failure in last year’s 12-day war, along with all his bluster and bravado about winning, are now replaying on a perpetual loop. The shockingly brazen change to the reigning diplomatic status quo that he pulled off by kidnapping President Maduro ended up so fascinating Trump that he can’t stop dreaming of repeating it in Iran or Cuba or Russia or anywhere. “Donald Trump, you dreamed of killing the Changer by decapitation strikes using arial superiority. From now on you will be known as the Headless Airman, flying blind in endless repetition of your failed dream.” Ouch!
I also wonder where the Changer has temporarily alighted to now. North America and Europe are probably far out of the running, as our societies are like sepulchral cults to fixed and changeless status arrangements. Perhaps someone in Iran or Russia or China is now walking with the Changer through the land. Or, maybe more likely, someone in some disregarded country nestled between them has become the Changer’s new avatar. Wouldn’t we all be surprised if some unknown Kasakhstani ended up turning the dying world order on its ear and billowing up the winds of change in her inescapable wake?
More specific to this post, you wrote, “Treat Operation Dildo Blitz as a dream or a neurotic fantasy, in turn, and it isn’t at all hard to catch its inner meaning.” Too true, but which inner meaning will we manage to catch hold of out of the imaginal dream vocabulary we’re left to decode? Your interpretation of suppressed libidinal yearning is brilliant… and deeply entertaining! One slight tweak on your dream interpretation would be that their long-standing yearning is no longer for what the Donald has on offer, but for what he once had on offer when the Changer was working through him. Thus, their dildoing antics would fall into the category of regretful fantasizing known as cargo cults. If only the Donald could still deliver the furtively fetishized power they had grown addicted to and so loved to hate. Or hated to love? Or no, they were supposed to love his hate, right? Or ride his big throbbing hate to a state of addicted carnal love? Or hate what they so deviantly couldn’t stop themselves from slavishly, boot-lickingly loving? There is definitely a dance to all their passive and active commingling with the object of their endlessly denied lusting.
Hidden behind those rictusly frozen lustful fantasies is the horrible absence of the divine energies once promised by the object of their verboten fantasizing. These dildo-wielding warriors were attempting to hurl emblems of potency and virility at their obsessively reviled (and thus deeply cherished) figurehead, who they never in their wildest projection fantasies ever dreamed might actually lose his totemic power over them. Their own fantasy of the irresistible, world-altering power of Donald Trump is all that a lot of the TDS-afflicted have left to cling to, as so many of the immutable niches they had so reassuringly backed themselves into are mutating away before their eyes. Pelting a dildo at their preferred abuser makes perfect sense given how it masquerades as a symbol of feminist independence while actually being an ersatz stand-in for missing virility. I can’t imagine much metaphysical change will result from this naive attempt to co-opt an ancient ritual, since a masquerade of potency camouflaging missing virility is exactly what they fantasize about somehow restoring to his former power. You don’t do that by flinging even more ersatz limpness at him.
JMG,
I have noticed that in the case of extremely progressive women that they have substituted their woke political agenda for any traditional values of integrity, loyalty, and such. If you spend all your time demonizing anything and everything from the historical past these good traits also get thrown in the trashcan.
Often the more progressive the woman the more likely they are to stab others in the back, lie to benefit themselves and do whatever gets them ahead.
Many people in Oregon have noticed this with our ultra progressive Lesbian Governor. On the surface many on the left assume an automatic goodness for someone from a once downtrodden group. But in office they notice that she seems to do anything possible to stay in power without any kind of center. Even many corrupt politicians from the past ( including the mafia) had a core set of values they preserved while doing what they wanted to get ahead.
I am embarrassed to say that this protest…thing…happened in my city. Yes, media and social media coverage was all intensely (self) congratulatory, declaring it some sort of weird victory (for example, https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qyn55d/operation_dildo_blitz_was_a_great_success/ ). It certainly succeeded in giving me a headache from all the eyerolling! I also got a strong hit of deja-vu; anyone remember the naked yogini from the Seattle protests in 2020? She also pretended she was making some kind of profound political statement, instead of just ensuring an audience of millions for her tedious exhibitionism fetish.
Concerning the definitions of f**k and the intent of this happening, we’ve seen over and over in the last 5 years that leftists will arbitrarily decide what something means while remaining oblivious to any alternative interpretations, such as the use of the Tower card in the Magical Resistance curses, or the slogan “love trumps hate,” both of which our host discussed previously. Sure, the protestors’ *overt* intent is to insult and humiliate (or so they hope) the government, but subtext is so much more interesting and revealing than pretext, don’t you think?
There is a lot of “old think” on the Left. A lot
They people doing the dildo blitz thing assume that Republicans, the group with the highest fertility rate are al a bunch of prudes obsessed with process, chastity and dignity like they were in the 80’s or like former VP Pence seems to be
Sure some are but a lot of that party are fine with sex use adult material, some the Log Cabin Republicans are gay , transgendered (Caitlin Jenner) etc. The Republican Party has changed. The Democrats haven’t
‘Ladran, Sancho, luego cabalgamos’ is a very common quote in Spain, I just wanted to quote it to you. In the process I discovered it’s thanks to Rubén Dario it becames know, it comes from Goethe, “Kläffer”, Und seines Bellens lauter SchallBeweist nur, daß wir reiten.
Are they barking?, Then we are riding.
Greetings
Agnes
Jennifer, I agree again. The AWFLs (Affluent White Female Liberal) are the kind that bring their children to ‘drag story time’ so that transvestites can dance suggestively in front of them after they got the story (usually about a “transkid”) out of the way. The AWFLs are often desperate to join the LBGTQIA+ party and they tend to be big supporters of transgender ideology. I think that the influence of Pride (which is now a whole month!) played a part in Operation Dildo Blitz as these events often feature dildos. In fact I have just seen this on X – a mom throwing hoops on dildos – just another fun day out with the kids at Pride.
https://x.com/IfindRetards/status/2061777270331888063
Also, the AWFLs often believe there is no such thing as biology and your biological sex is whatever you feel it is on any given day. It’s safe to say they are unmoored from reality which is why they think their dildo protest was a great success. Incidentally, businesses donated the dildos.
“Operation Dildo Blitz was a raging success. The dildos were brought by @fearandloathingclosertotheedge Some were purchased from @smittenkittenmn and 500 were donated by @likeakitten_llc”
The comments on here – https://www.instagram.com/p/DUd8txOjmDM/ – are funny, this got 70 likes, “The Left is ALWAYS more creative than the Right!!!” Okkkaaayyy!
@Jennifer Kobernik #52
“I believe the women depicted in my analysis are misguided by their distorted ideology and their materialism, and that a world of genuine power, meaning, and authority is available to them if they can grasp it or learn to value it rightly. Unfortunately our society doesn’t make that easy.”
Apologies, but this did actually pique my interest. Do you happen to have any suggested reading or other resources you could recommend for someone interested in exploring a healthier version of feminine power? Suggestions from others are welcome as well.
“Bridge, never, but never, confuse what women will say when they’re in public with a group of other women, on the one hand, with what they’ll do in private, on the other. It’s well known, for example, that a lot of women who claim to be vegans or otherwise on strict diets will stop on the commute home from work at drive-in hamburger dives so they can wolf down a bacon cheeseburger and a chocolate shake with nobody the wiser. (I have friends who’ve worked flipping burgers who testify to this. The best place to watch it is a fast-food place just off the freeway between a big city and its upscale suburbs.) MAGA dating is similar; do some online searches and see what you find.”
You also have the phenomenon of outwardly woke non-white minority women, who are spouting CRT slogans about how white people are to blame for everything, dating white men.
“…as long as the Jewish community in the US remains a large and relatively well-disciplined voting bloc, and there isn’t a Muslim voting bloc of equal size and discipline to outweigh it, American politicians are going to keep on supporting Israel.”
I wonder if you are failing to give sufficient credit or attention to the voting behaviour of the American Christian Zionist voting bloc, which is:
a. larger than the Jewish voting bloc by an order of magnitude (at around 30% vs around 3%), and
b. being less visible, suffers no downside by being rendered worldwide as the “human shield” for Israeli state policy.
Aldarion#7
Certainly ,we only can supose how was the life of the paleolitic peoples and the observations about the details of the life of primitive tribes who remain this state is very usefull . But this people lives in the last stage of Paleolitic ( 1,7 millions of years) called the Magdaleniens Period (7000 years).
Emmanuel # 95:
“I think a lot of this sexual dysphoria, dysfunction and just plain wierdness is rooted in the popular idea that there are no limits on humanity. Born a man? You can be a woman with the right drugs and surgery. And vice versa. You can download your consciousness into a mainframe and never have to die.”
Although I’m not a 100% fan of Spengler, that German man wrote about those tendences (no limits) with a very interesting name: the Faustian man/civilization. A lot of people never have forgiven him because he depicted modern Western silly and arrogant attitudes and behaviors since his times…
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Gollios # 115:
“As an aside, the Spanish translation for these events was much funnier: March of the Whores.”
As an Spaniard being myself, and beyond my mediocre English level, I understand perfectly the meaning of that expression. Oops!. I can also ask myself and you wether real prostitutes would be pleased or angry with that comparison…
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Jennifer K. # 118:
“I have heard from several “old school” trans people who transitioned before it became a major social flashpoint that they think the reckless push by non-trans progressives, most loudly women, for increasingly unpalatable policy and ideology in the names of trans rights is going to result in horrible backlash and that they wish those women would shut up.”
It’s a probable backlash thanks to current woke madness in a near future…I think trans people. like gay men, migrants or another favorite “sacred cows” for the “Left”, are indeed cannon fodder for the current cultural wars against the right wing people. So, if/when wokesters are going to be defeated in elections and social online tendences by the anti-woke far right (in Trumpian or Milei style, for example), the “hangover” is going to be painful for them. It’s a pity, because I don’t have any personal bias against these minorities, but against their manipulation by wokesters (who usually are white and western people, cough).
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JMg # 120:
“Chuaquin, interesting. Not being part of the Hispanic world, I hadn’t heard of this, but it certainly fits the pattern I’m discussing.”
Yes, they’re bad boys, or maybe they pretend to be bad boys…that last idea is what I tend to believe now. I want to say I like Quevedo’s music, at least he tries to sing and his music seems better than another reggetoneros, though I’m not a young man anymore, ha ha…It’s interesting to point their musical style reached Spain a time after it was popular in Center and South America. I can explain it partly due to the recent massive Hispanics migration, but on the other hand I suspect it’s a youth reaction against woke dogma since 2018 here (4th feminist wave ans full woke offensive, at least here).
Well, I can see sometimes in his songs, Mr. Quevedo remembers God…I won’t say wether he’s a believer or pretends to be it (like being a “bad” boy), but I bet these apparently religious references don’t please absolutely wokesters…Of course, Quevedo doesn’t represent every “reguetonero”, but he’s one of the most famous here.
According some South American people I’ve met, in its first times, reggeton singers loved to present themselves as near criminals, in a loosely similar way as gansta rap…So their lyrics were about imaginary (otr not) criminal actions, more than sex adventures. However, maybe due to censorship and self-censorship, reggeton which reached Spain finally centered in the sexual thing.
I’ve read some comments by JMG and several commentarists about the active/pasive role in romance and directly sexual relations. I can tell you that, according my personal experience with some women I’ve met, I can define myself as a passive straight man. It’s ironical some men are very eager to “hunt” a women, and some “feminist” men love to say they (women) hunt us. Well, I can say I’m not a women hunter, nor an “alpha male”. Indeed, women are attracted by me, not due to my body nor my special personality, but due to my “lack of special attractive”. When I hear some man speaking about books for learning to flirt, or he tell me tips to date women, I can’t avoid to smile at him…
In addition to this, I’m a shy man with some mental problems: an unlikely candidate to make women become crazy for me, but…I guess maybe women see me as a man with a strong female side, I don’t know…
Some women think I’m a weak man, but when I show them I’m slightly smarter than average men, they seem scared and upset. It’s a common misunderstanding within some women today (espcially the feminist ones, but not only them), to believe every men are stupid penises without a brain, so when they met a clever man, they can’t react in a reasonable way…
I’ve wrote about my “mysterious” power to attract women without doing anything special by myself before this comment (and post). I’ll repeat it’s a blessing and a curse alike for me, because until recent times, I haven’t been able to choose well my female mates…sometimes with very unpleasant consequences for me. So don’t envy me, straight men within the commentariat.
JMG # about the critics of your article being mostly men – I could see that.
If you were a left leaning politically correct male who bought into how men are supposed to be sensitive, subservient and so on, I could see how finding out that most pc women do not want your type as a sex partner, to be a very threatening truth to have to swallow… though maybe swallow isn’t the best word choice here.
@ Anthony from Watertown #122
From my observations of the women who buy those books at book events, you are absolutely correct. They’re NOT written for the Plain People. They’re for women who want something heartwarming, romantic, a hearkening to simpler times, and so forth.
Interestingly, I’ve met a few authoresses who write Sweet Amish Romance AND pornography. Those authoresses keep their pennames VERY separate since what one audience likes, the other despises.
JMG
I wonder if orthodox Christianity’s hostile relationship with the concept of the divine feminine plays any role with what’s going on with gender relations? The Holy Spirit was originally Sophia, the Mother of the trinity and most of her veneration/worship was pushed onto the Virgin Mary in a distinctly subservient form after Christianity settled on hard Monotheism. But with the Protestant Reformation even that was banned/shunned.
@sirustalcelion #22
I read your webcomic when it shows up on Instagram. I have trouble finding it at Tapas.
Anyway, from what I’ve seen I’d describe you more as cozy fantasy. You’re not high fantasy and you’re sure not romantasy.
Omegaverse is icky and wants to have it both ways: dominant men but the submissive partners — able to bear children! — must be male, too. It’s nuts.
Northwind Grandma,
You’ll get no argument from me with regards to Hecate. She is not one to be messed with. I think the sunshine and lollipops sparkle witch crowd should be a little more cautious.
JMG, dear sir it never ceases to amaze me how that brain of yours works.
I did listen to that podcast, and noticed the comment about sacrificial offerings to the great golden golem of greatness. I however did not think so much about it. It is nice to have the whole thinking process explained.
But;
Well it happened. The long emersion in occultism and ethics has mellowed my heart to the point, that I feel deep sympathy for all those “frackless” PMC Karens.
I might have a solution:
It seems to me, that we have a situation of unequal consequences for the partaking parties. A man’s reputation and livelihood can be ruined by mear mention of having supposedly unapproved sex, but a woman suffers no such consequences.
Being an avid reader of this blog, it strikes me that t’was a predicament of sorts in the olden days. Me thinks.
Yes I am suggesting that a modern spin on the sex cult might solve a lot of pent up polarity.
Simply find something that can ruin a woman’s reputation and livelihood as assuredly as a false rape accusation can do for a man and spin a cult around it. Now there is a problem with this. Being a modern empowered witch, or member of a cooky religious sect will not cut it in this day and age… hmm what to do…
(Now i know my suggestion is extreme and unpopular, but in the hay days of the sex cult so would the mention of occultism be. So please, by all means do suggest alternatives.)
Maybe the Clan could send some of its strapping young male members on some recruiting runs to university and corporate watering holes. Offering very private, but well documented, initiations where one can discharge one’s pent up “opinions”.
Maybe also pay for some very chick web advertising.
Best regards,
V
Hey JMG
I thought I’d give my own “two cents” on the subject of how oddly sexual a lot of protests by women seem to get. While I’ve never seen anti-trump protests in Australia, I once did see a small protest against the Ukrainian war which consisted of 3 women wearing nothing but bikinis who covered themselves in “blood” while holding the usual placards.
Apart from that, I recall some discussion on the blog about “pussy hats” that anti-trump protesters started wearing, though they looked more like pink beanies rather than genitalia. I could go on, but I think that’s enough examples. The point is that yesterday I had a theory about why these women try and be provocative like this.
I know that sometimes mothers will punish their children by intentionally embarrassing them in front of their classmates, or just have some pretend tantrum, in order to correct them by using the discomfort of “cringe”. I wonder if some of the motivations women have for acting rather childishly and inappropriately during a protest is an attempt to apply the same method to the public? Maybe they think that if they act embarrassing enough people will do what they are told in order to make the cringe stop?
@ Northwind 93 & 94: Thank you for your “confession.” You’ve got me picturing you as a sort of R. Crumb drawing. And, no, I would never mention the unmentionable except as obliquely as I can manage.
“men stop insisting that we continue to cripple ourselves with high heeled shoes. ”
That’s you ladies doing it to yourselves for some mysterious reason. Everywhere I’ve worked they were forbidden. OSHA has rules. They are also forbidden where my daughter works.
That said, I did catch an image from a talk show where four women were sitting on two couches across from each other. What I noticed even with their heels their thighs were level to the floor. Is the customary seat height too high? I know from experience (I’m relatively short legged) that if the seat edge cuts into the back of the knee it gets uncomfortable fast. Heels would prevent sitting with your feet dangling just off the floor. Is that the mysterious reason?
Mr. Greer .. someone above mentioned those ‘pink pussy hats’ of yesterday … I think, rather than place a phalanx of dildos surrounding my voluptuous and swollen plot, perhaps I should take a cue from that Internet meme whereby that east Indian guy?? has 2 bananas over each ear … affixed with several courses of saranwrap, to keep thing stable. Just sub out the fruit for 2 day-glow ‘protuberances’ .. and WALA! .. I could traipes throughout said garden, relishing the ‘OMG’s vs the ‘Come Here Big Boy’ retorts! ‘;]
Yes I must admit many of the things I read online are strange to me. I live in a rural area surrounded by extended family, long established communities with blood connections (and feuds) and young people still marrying up and having plenty of kids. Although we are definitely suffering the malaise and issues everyone in the west is (stagflation, migration etc) my lived experience is just so different than the typical urban middle class it seems like a bizarre fever dream.
Is it the urban conditions causing this? I have noticed that urban women who move here for work (teachers, nurses) marry local and stay, tend to quickly jettison their youthful ideals. Also children seem important, as childless women who don’t have some passion project to pour all that etheric energy into tend to go quite mad, staying trapped in the maiden archetype rather than mother or aunty, and then going full witch in later years.
Dear JMG and commentariat:
Wow. Just when you think it can’t get any weirder!
The left seems to have completely forgotten how to persuade, influence, inform, or convince people who do not parrot their ideas, beyond screaming insults, calling them stupid, swearing at them (unimaginatively, I might add), calling people fascists, racists, etc. etc., and acting “weird”. I am beginning to wonder if the point is just to be seen and heard, without worrying about how they will be perceived. After all, they are the good, intelligent, etc., people, and are absolutely right! Or maybe its just playtime; hang out with your friends, make a lot of noise, do some harmless mischief, get some fresh air.
If anyone thinks of Operation Dildo Blitz as a success, their definition of success is pretty strange. I would hazard a guess that they have not changed one mind, with the exception of anyone who was drifting toward agreement saying, “These people aren’t serious!” (at best – at worst – How bizarre, get me away!
I do think the subconscious explanations are on track.
But an idea has just occurred to me. Maybe President Trump, in seeking an end to the current Iran war that can be passed off as a success, is thinking deep, Clauswitzian thoughts:
“Pete, buy up all of the dildos you can get your hands on! We are going to launch them on Iran! Operation Dildo Blitz II!
Cugel
Hi John Michael,
It’s a pretty funny thought, and almost as absurd as – and this essay of yours has brought to mind – Monty Python’s Castle Anthrax scene. If I may add, there is a subtle distinction here, my gut feeling suggests that the ladies in the protest, are probably not your type, and are very much in the minority. They are however noisy.
Many years ago when living in the trendy inner burbs, once described as the whitest suburb on the planet by the blogger, ‘stuff white people like’, I encountered a young man and his dog squatting outside of the local supermarket. The business was one of those locals-only independent chains, and was popular because you could walk to it. The guy was hunkered down low wearing a hoodie pulled up over his head. And with the dark sunglasses, it was hard to t see his face. What stood out, was that he was holding, clutched to the chest, a brightly coloured sex toy. It was hardly anatomically correct due to the size. And amusingly, the well behaved dog’s lead was anchored to the err, monster. I knew what he was doing, so I looked into the sunglasses and gave my very best: “You’re an idiot!” look number five. If you know what he was up to, well, you know. Not my bag…
There is a moral here though, the young gentleman was actively working towards getting into a relationship, any relationship. I’m not of course suggesting that his path is advisable, mostly because the cops could come along and charge him with public indecency, or some other thing nobody wants.
I asked my lady to read your essay, and independently, without prompting, she said all of the things I’d been thinking. She also said some other cheeky thing about INFJ males making up only 1 in 200 dudes, because the rest were burnt at the stake long ago, although I’ve no idea what that means… 😉
Evidence, huh? You wouldn’t want to see the world from my perspective, it may shock you. OK. So, I’m guessing that long ago Sara intruded upon your awareness. You have asperger’s so probably don’t, or can’t see, what is known as an ‘indication of interest’ from a female. Absolutely she would have known that, women know such things, and, Sara made life easy for you to end up in a relationship with her. The symbolism on the book cover of Venetia, is a dead giveaway to me, sorry. Does this situation happen? Absolutely! Does it happen for a while after female child rearing age has passed, probably not. And sorry to be blunt, if you want a lady to take the first steps because pursuing her is not within your skill set, as my gut feeling suggests that being the case, economic disadvantage is probably tilted in your favour. However, will you end up with what suits you?
Dude, if you hang out where dudes are, you’ll meet dudes. My advice would be go and join a book club, or twenty of them. You’re a voracious reader, and author. You’ll meet women there, and get to charm them with your conversation – but know when to shut the suitcase in those forums. Limit your speaking to half a minute, then let other people speak. People love to talk, if you listen to them, they’ll think you’re a brilliant conversationalist, and you haven’t done anything at all, but are 60% of the way to charming their pants off. The rest is up to you, and you’ve got the goods. Nothing is more marriageable than a widower, there’s no messy divorce to explain and you’ve got a decent track record. Women note such things.
Now, whilst I’m in dad mode number five, your lot are INFP, INTJ, or the INFJ. The IN’s are wonderful readers, who inhabit book clubs, need some alone time and probably already lead quirky lives. The INFP’s in particular have a drop of fairy blood in their veins, and they are your number one match. They are your people, get thee forth and get off the couch. Nobody has set the world on fire from their settee.
Man, you asked for evidence…
Cheers and I’ve spent hours thinking about this… 🙂 I should send you a bill for the time! Hehe!
Chris
JMG I was checking to see if you replied to my comments, but then read Calliope’s take on it You said “fair enough! I’d be interested in hearing the take of other women on this.”
I’m another woman and here is my take, besides my first reaction of eww, gross, put your fetishes back in the closet out of respect for the rest of us.
You could interpret this behavior as a hostile act by the AFWL’s against “toxic masculinity”.. What is more emasculating than dismemberment of the male member? Maybe the women feel “empowered” by throwing a symbol of severed manhood in men’s faces. Do you think it made the men uncomfortable? Based on my life long experience with men, i would say no, it probably aroused some of them. What else is the transvestite movement, but to cut off masculinity both literally and figuratively, or for the man to live out autogynophilic impulses? The only way you could ever accurately interpret this is to ask all of them why they are doing it, and I’m sure there would be lots of different reasons and feelings. Maybe they are just simply chimping out and this is their version of flinging chimp poo.
Also, I don’t know about your “bad boy” trope. There are lots of women who prefer romantic, wholesome stories and vibes. My female calculus in picking the man to be the father of my children didn’t include picking a man who can’t control his temper, or who is in jail instead of sharing in family life.
Finally, I just want to put it out there: I despise Freud. His Oedipus and Elektra BS put the blame of an adult sexually abusing a small child to be the fault of the child because they subconsciously want sex with their parents. Children aren’t interested in sex until they get to puberty. I have never had penis envy either, although I do appreciate and like who is attached to them probably more than the dildo chucking AWFLs.
JMG, if you liked that book title, (and if you’re already planning out your next career as a romance writer) you’ll probably be interested to check out the author’s other major work, ‘My Antifa Lover’. Anyone who wants a series of deep belly laughs can just scroll through the reviews on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55026957-my-antifa-lover.
As for the Geburah/Chesed political cycle from The Mystical Qabalah, it may also correspond to the Fourth Turning theory: the winter and spring phases of the saeculum are Geburah/Mars, and the summer and autumn phases are Chesed/Jupiter. And if each alternation between the two pillars in the life of a nation also corresponded to one of Yeats’ phases of the moon, then we’d really be cooking with fire. No one map actually *is* the territory, but I think by triangulating multiple maps you can uncover some pretty interesting deep stuff.
Jennifer Kobernick and Northwind Grandma have described the ends of the spectrum of women’s opinions about sex, and their own participation in it (thanks!). I want to add the middle ground, my cousins as examples– several married couples who treat each other like human beings, and they must be happy having sex because they have multiple children each.
The wildcard in relations between men and women is rape.
Stats from:
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
Between May 2021 and now, there were about 625,000 rapes in the US.
Nearly 1/3 of all rape victims were teenagers, another 1/5 were in their 20s, and 1/6 were children under 10. In total, about 2/3 of all rape victims were under 30.
Meanwhile most rapists were pretty evenly distributed from teenaged to 40 years old.
5/6 of rapists were male, 5/6 of victims were female.
Then we have our beloved social media. Vittorio on X:
[https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2012220254504530043]
noticed a correlation between young women’s political leanings and the number of people on social media rising over the years. He hypothesized that two factors in the rise of social media combined to drive younger women into today’s vortex of terror and rage: 1) the algorithms that amplify whatever you click on, and 2) peer pressure and conformity pressures being stronger among women. I would add that young women being disproportionately targeted by rapists feeds into factor (1). Women will tend to click on items in their feed that are alarming, such as rape, then the algorithm amplifies as they continue clicking on things until in short order, their feed is a horror show telling them that the world is out to get them.
I suspect that women psychologically divide up into two main groups– those who have been raped, and those who have not. For those who have been raped, male assertiveness/aggressiveness, and male “cucumbers” (thanks, NWG) can represent a threat of a repeat of that traumatic experience. For those who have not been raped, male assertiveness and “cucumbers” are intriguing. How many far-left-liberal women, I wonder, are in the not-raped category, but are held in political place by peer pressure from their girlfriends (factor 2 in Vittorio’s tweet)? If it’s a lot of them, then as many here predict, at some point “intriguing” will overpower peer pressure and we’ll see a lot of women break towards ‘strong’ men. (We’re already seeing it in that book cover, LOL.)
But meanwhile those who *have* been sexually traumatized are less likely to move, and may be left behind screaming at their “treasonous” sisters.
The rape rate (number per 1,000 people) has actually drastically dropped since the 1970’s :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_in_the_United_States#Shift_in_the_form_of_crime]
It would really be a help if the social media sites would ditch the algorithms and just let people’s feeds better reflect reality.
Antony, I’m familiar with Amish romances, and I’ve watched women who were anything but Amish checking them out at libraries, so I think you’re right.
Northwind, a wonderful song!
Geronimo, doesn’t it, though?
Mary, I’m delighted that you know the better sort of church ladies.
Northwind, no, the “Dark Moon Lilith” isn’t the real thing. Hecate is a great power. The Dark Moon is the cerebral flatulence of a 19th century German astronomer.
Christophe, few people can handle carrying an archetype for long; they burn out. I think that’s a lot of what’s happened in the present case.
Clay, granted. I don’t even think many of them believe in the agenda — what matters is raw power.
Sister Crow, I suppose that’s true! If the Left can insist that the meaning of a thing is whatever they say it is, why, sauce for the goose…
Simon, interesting. Yes, I can see that.
Agnes, ha! Thank you for this.
Anon, another very good example.
Scotlyn, I’ll have to look into how organized that group is; still, it’s worth a look.
Charlie, okay, that makes sense. No, “swallow” is exactly the right word. 😉
Anon, doubtless it’s a factor, though trying to figure out what’s cause and what’s effect is rather difficult in such situations!
Vitranc, hmm! It could work. As for the balancing factor for women, I know a very simple way to do that. The women just have to vote Republican. If that gets out, they’ll face social destruction.
J.L.Mc12, you know, you may have a point there.
Polecat, by all means!
PumpkinScone, that’s very good to hear.
Cugel, this is why I’ve begun to wonder if, just maybe, they actually want to lose. It would explain so much. As for Iran, I liked the claim that he was going to have Yoko Ono sing for them if they don’t surrender…
Chris, Sara was as autistic as I am. It was one of the strengths of our relationship; we agreed early on that if either one of us wanted to communicate something we would say it in so many words. It worked really well. As for your advice, well, why do you think I’ve been traveling to so many speaking gigs and occult events, where I can meet (and listen to) people who share my interests and are as weird as I am? Quite a remarkable number of the occultists I know met their spouse at an event of that kind…
Candy, thanks for this. The bad boy trope seems to be very popular among one particular age and social class of women these days; since that group has unusual influence just now, it may have gotten more attention than it deserves — but the fact remains that romance novels have gone that way, and so do the women you can see any Friday night you like at your local singles bar.
Dylan, that’s a really intriguing idea!
Dear JMG,
This reminds me of a post on X that went viral last week. A woman posted a pic of a fit, young Ice agent, in full uniform, with his mask on, that had a We The People tattoo on his forearm, and an expensive Rolex watch on his wrist.
Her comment was “He can handcuff me to my bedpost anytime.” The post got millions of views and thousands of likes, with the comments overwhelmingly agreeing with her. I’d put money that most of these women are lefty progressives that outwardly hate ICE, but in the privacy of their bedroom, it’s a different story. Bad boys, bad boys, want ya gonna do…
Siliconguy #147:
re sadistic shoes– I wonder how many times it’s women telling each other, or mothers telling their daughters, that men want them to wear them? I had a coworker show up one day dressed in torture pumps. When I commented that they looked painful, she airily replied, “beauty is pain!” That sounds like something a Dolores Umbridge would teach her daughter.
High heels and height– I’ve noticed that most chairs, especially office chairs, seem to be made for people 6 feet tall. This is a problem for a lot of guys in my workplace as well. One especially small woman of my acquaintance once told me that she wears heels to give herself some height. I suspect there isn’t really a one-answer-fits-all answer to this question.
I think your interpretation is good, but I also have an alternative interpretation.
Another personality trait that our culture promotes is perpetual adolescence – the idea that the perfect age for any given person is 18 or so. In that context, an 18 year old in our culture is likely to be obsessed with consumerism and sexual expression . A dildo is the perfect symbol of consumerism and sexual expression rolled into one.
The way Trump enters this picture is that anyone who tries to make the 35-year old stop acting like an 18-year old and to embrace roles more suitable to older people (e.g. being a normal family person, being less obsessed about sex for the sake of self-pleasuring) is a cruel oppressor – a person simultaneously trying to destroy one’s youth and one’s delusion of perfection (which in his mind is rolled up with self-pleasuring and sex i.e. dildo). It can be debated whether the right&Trump really is effectively challenging anything, but what matters is that the Millenial self-pleasurer thinks this.
The rub comes in the fact that like all delusional children, the Millenial self-pleasurer thinks that his identity is ironclad. Trump can run the country, have billions of dollars and control the Supreme Court, but somehow, what the self-pleasurer feels still is totally dominant over Trump. The self-pleasurer thinks this fact so obvious that all he has to do is defiantly express his identity in public. Hence throwing dildos at the Trump effigy.
It’s true this ritual never works, but that is also part of the game. More important than winning is to keep the game going. In this game, Trump (or whoever “the Man” is in 10 or 20 years) is always the evil oppressor who doesn’t get it. The Millenial onanist is always (in their mind) the supremely moral and insightful one-woman revolutionary, always fully deserving of victory, but never winning, because the world is just evil and doesn’t appreciate her. The self-righteousness afforded by this dynamic is much important to the onanist than winning.
—
On this score, I think JMG’s analysis also is compelling. My only criticism is that the type of person that shows up in the protest is less likely to be an office lady, and more of the “perennial faildaughter” (female NEET) variety. She might work in the retail or Onlyfans industry.
Then again if someone went to the protest and saw most of the people there were stereotypically middle class, that would be a good rebuke to mine.
Not surprised you’re only get irate comments from men. From women, on the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if this post got you a date.
Cugel #150:
“Or maybe its just playtime; hang out with your friends, make a lot of noise, do some harmless mischief, get some fresh air.”
Maybe the dildo-throwing protests are an angry older woman’s version of a bachelorette party: giggle at raunchy jokes, play some silly games like “pin the penis on the groom,” invite a male stripper. With the added benefit of feeling morally superior and convincing themselves that they’re also being social justice warriors and standing up for the downtrodden.
Sarhaddon, I think you could be mistaken about working class female participation in the Dildorama. I have gone to two No Kings protests now, and I could well have been the only non professional (or wanna be professional) female present. A lady who is employed in retail will not be signing on for any dildofest; she has to work that day, and her miniscule salary slides through her hands on its way to landlords, babysitters, and utility companies. An outing for her is likely to be watching her son play little league, and listening to the middle class moms squabbling about who is doing the concessions stand.
Karl, thank you for this. That’s a great example.
Sarhaddon, hmm! That could certainly also be involved.
Dennis, I won’t object if that happens. Still, my hope is that once the yelling stops (and the date has been enjoyed), the post reminds everyone that they don’t get to decide what kind of an impression they make on other people. A stupid stunt doesn’t stop being a stupid stunt just because the people who did it decided that it was powerful and successful! (Mind you, I know the chance that that’ll break through the weird solipsism of our present political culture is next to nil. I well recall the fist-pounding denunciations I fielded when I pointed out that you can’t make a poorly designed and sloppily executed ceremony with none of the technical methods that give magic its strength into a powerful ritual just by calling it one.)
John Michael Greer #155
Respect your response to Cristofer about the inability of most people for to embody during long time an archetype, could be applied to Hitler?
JMG,
I am not sure if you have heard but at present there is a bill sitting on the New York Governors desk that would replace Mother and Father with Gestating Parent and Non-Gestating Parent in all dealings of the New York State family court. How does this relate to the dildo-blitz in your mind.
Dildo blitz, dildoathon, dildorama, dildofest, what have I missed? Dildopalooza? Dildogate? Dildostampede? Dildo insurrection?
I have a question about how the language policy applies to one particular word. This word is often used by auto mechanics as a shortened form of “transmission”, and I’m sure that usage would be fine, but this same word is also used to describe people – people like myself. I am fine with this and I prefer this word to “trans woman”, which is cumbersome and a misnomer. Some people consider it a slur, however, and I have been reported and censured for using it to describe myself.
What about here? What if I described myself as that in a comment here? Would you put that comment through, assuming it passed muster otherwise? What if I called other so-called “trans women” that?
In my imagination the initiation ritual is already taking shape;
High officer: “Please state your name and the reason for being here.”
Karen: “Mag. Karen Priscilla Michaela Cook. I am here to join The Orange Sign.”
HO: “Have you video evidence of your last vote for either state or federal election.”
K: “Yes. It shows clearly I voted republican.”
HO: “And why have you decided to vote this way.”
K: “Of my own volition, uninfluenced. After reading the scripture cover to cover. ”
HO: “Do you solely swear henceforth to cast your vote for no one else but the GOP.”
K: “I do solemnly swear henceforth to only voter republican.”
HO: “May the blessings of the Orange one be with you sister. May his virility and light penetrate you. And you may keep the copy of The King in Orange for your personal library.”
K: “F*** Trump!”
(The following is barely connected with Operation Dildo Blitz but I hope it’s still on-topic enough to not need to be moderated away.)
I hear an alternative explanation of why these kinds of liberal women so obviously want to be dominated from certain parts of the right tolerably often these days (that is, the explanation comes from the right, not the domination): they’re just hardwired to do so. That is perhaps too glibly summarised; the more intelligent explanations typically say that, really, what women are after is a strong partner who is always in charge, aka traditional gender norms, and the modern-day obsession with dominance is just the degenerate form they settle for because the real deal is not an option due to a variety of factors including, among others, feminists punishing assertive men and women being given a leg up in the workplace in the name of equality, meaning men don’t have the finances to be providers. Usually, they present this in evolutionary terms: as a woman, you want a man who will defend and feed your children.
Enough self-professed feminists complain about “dating down” financially that I assume there’s some truth to this but on the whole, it strikes me as too simplistic compared to your analysis¹. Even from a purely evolutionary perspective, it runs into the awkward fact that the earliest human societies may have had clear gender roles but both hunters and gatherers are involved in obtaining food (and both necessary; man does not live by mammoth alone due to scurvy). Evidently, the rightists who profess this idea are looking at the revealed preferences of modern liberal women and assume these apply to all women throughout the ages.
Curiously enough, one of the main criticism the same people generally have about modern immigration policy is that it posits there is no essential difference between different peoples (and therefore all adverse outcomes must just be the results of racism). One commentator glibly sums this up as “the liberal [as in classical, not just present-day] assumption that people everywhere are exactly the same.” One might say that the same commentator holds the dissident right assumption that groups of people are exactly the same over time.
On another note, I don’t typically read romance but I would absolutely go for “classic, squeaky-clean Regency romance plots with genuine occultism”.
—David P.
[1] For which, both here and in the previous post (posts?) on the subject, I am very grateful. As a young man who doesn’t have much experience in such matters, it’s genuinely helpful to hear the occasional reminder that there are options beyond life-long celibacy, denigrating myself to fit into the left’s mold, or denigrating my hypothetical partner to fit into the right’s mold, especially from somebody for whom a fourth option seems to have worked out brilliantly.
@ Yavanna #160
“…version of a bachelorette party: giggle at raunchy jokes, play some silly games like “pin the penis on the groom,” invite a male stripper…”
Actually this comparison is what has been uppermost in my mind throughout this post… especially since I was leaving our local town around 4pm last Saturday when a busload of dressed to the nines young women, obviously out on a Hen Night*, pulled up, ready for traditional mischief and fun. 🙂
* In Ireland, before a wedding, the bride’s friends treat her to the Hen Night, while the groom’s friends treat him to a Stag’s Do. Both are full of silly stunts… not infrequently involving dildoes and other “single intender” ** type symbols.
** Nanny Og, a character in some of Terry Pratchett’s novels, famously has no time for “double intenders” and likes to get straight to the point. 😉
PumpkinScone 149
> then going full witch in later years
Yep. I would qualify that a bit rougher:
“then going full [Komodo dragon*] in later years.”
* Lizard brain, where, over years (so gradual where the change is not noticeable), they jettison everything they learned over a lifetime about being mammal and/or human, leaving only lizard. Komodo dragons ‘tear’ bodies apart, and are large enough to devour even a 7foot human.
Given the chance, several Komodo dragons would be able to devour an elephant. Komodo dragons are the epitome of “devouring mother,” with a capital D and capital M. In later life (elder years), human females who have not developed a spirituality (or inherited one) (they are secular) when they were young, (figuratively) eat their children (because they can’t let go).
💨🦎🐐🦌💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Cugel 150
> The left seems to have completely forgotten how to persuade, influence, inform, or convince people
This had me cracking up😂.
“How to Win Friends and Influence People (Dale Carnegie Books)”…
ought to be updated yet again,— to include:
* the color pink,
* middle-aged frumpy women in bikinis, and
* dildos rather than pens.
Picture this: Pink, frumpy females trying to ‘write’ with dildos but no ink ‘comes’ out.
Yes, Western Civilization is declining.
💨👙🍆✒️😫💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG,
Among the corporate class, very little is ever admitted as a failure, and everything is spun as a success even if that spin receives guffaws from its intended audience. I remember watching speeches from the leader of the “Smart Mobility” division at Ford (a female executive, not that the male executives were any different) give a speech about shutting down one of their major acquisitions, a shuttle bus company purchased for $65 million, due to low ridership, and how it was still a success because she learned a lot and she was pivoting Ford into electric scooters.
Apparently, not much was learned, because Ford purchased an electric scooter company for $100 and then promptly shut down that venture too after a few failed years.
It goes back to what you were discussing in that that class has lost the ability to recognize failures, in large part because failures on your resume do not get you promotions.
A few stray comments.
With regard to more or less aggressive display of (primary or secondary) sex organs, it’s a fairly widespread” matter. And the more complex the society, the more complicated it gets, and the more subject to multiple readings (and misreadings). Mooning and flashing, for example, can by jocular, assaultive, insulting, or disruptive — and people might perform such acts with one meaning, while the acts themselves may be received very differently.
“No pun, originally, intended.
There is, or was, a Russian women’s group which for the sake of decorum I will call Kitty Kerfuffle, which used to register their objections to one thing or another by exposing their breasts. In general, the idea seems to be that the objects of derision or contempt are so puritanical that they cannot but be affronted (though there is a difference between being embarrassed by something and being embarrassed for the people doing it.) There is also the ancient tradition of pudendal* display, for example, the figure of Baubo. There is also the well-known “sheila-na-gig” image, which has been “explained” in any number of ways; the fact that it appears as a carving in churches is a complicating factor. The dance of Uzume before Amaterasu is also probably relevant here.
*I use “pudendal” to highlight the inversion by which what is generally shameful and concealed becomes a way of shaming the person who beholds it, rather than the one who displays it.
As for the f-word and its derivatives, David Mamet points out that the participle has become somewhat like the Hebrew particle “ath” which marks the following noun as an object, or object of discussion. There are people in whose speech almost every noun or substantive is preceded by this marker, as though they were being paid by the word.
The word “coit”, by the way, is an older form of “coition”, which I first encountered in the works of some German scholar writing in English (who referred to “the coit”). This permanently affected my response to the San Francisco structure Coit Tower, which was only amplified by Fritz Leiber’s eldritch novel about San Francisco.
I think I have some more serious observations, but they will have to come later.
At the risk of repeating myself, sexual charisma in men, something which most bad boys seem to have, is like great beauty in women. It just is. Like a hurricane. Men can resent these guy’s success with women, and we women also resent it when Miss Major Babe gets the job, the raise or the promotion for which she is just barely qualified. Does it not occur to some of you guys that the capable lady who was overlooked might feel a tad bit disrespected?
I don’t know if my meditations here shed any light on the Dildo Blitz protests, but here you go:
In the South, when I was growing up (’60s, mostly), many women in my community were fully aware of their entirely female power and equality to men. They were also aware that this power did not include physical force. As an especially shy, undiagnosed autistic and sexually confused and insecure young man, such women were very frightening to me.
In my “I’m doing gay now” phase, living in San Francisco, I had one very aggressive female co-worker put the make on me in a big way. “No,” apparently, didn’t mean “no” to her. She wore a lot of purple, for some reason, and was “spiritual,” whatever that means. I remember her name, though not what I did to be freed from her attentions. Seems my big mistake was liking her.
My one long-term relationship was with an amazing Buddhist woman who would periodically manifest “I’m the Zen master, and you are an idiotic meathead” attitudes. Aside from that, we got along at least as well as can be hoped for, and I indeed learned a lot from her. I have no doubt I was occasionally an idiotic meathead!
The PMC women I’ve met after my time in San Francisco, who have been my bosses and coworkers, have been relatively easy to deal with since I learned to be as invisible as possible long years before. What the whole contemporary PMC female culture implies for the future of the species in the so-called “developed” world, I cannot properly imagine, but it’s not wonderful–at least as long as PMC-hood remains a thing. JMG reminds us: “This too shall pass.”
Pop culture has a lot of female song stylists I can’t bear to look at, even when they’re talented, as sometimes happens. The woman who draped herself in raw meat onstage is a particularly compelling example. I note she’s presenting herself less stridently now, and is showing her real face. I suspect she’s still crazy, though, as her stage name warns us. I’m very glad to be mostly out of the fray, aside from the ability to make friends.
“Developed” is such a relative term. I am often remined that it is said that Mr. Gandhi, on being asked about what he thought of Western civilization, replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” I still howl at that one.
Tangentially connected, but I think some people, including some women, simply like performing politically in public and don’t care too much what side they are on. The best example I know is of the Brazilian Sara Winter (a political nom de guerre). She got famous as part of Femen including Femen’s typical nudity campaigning for typical left-wing positions like legalization of abortion, then did a 180 degree turnaround and became ultra-right, joining Jair Bolsonaro’s government. However, she didn’t lose her flair for publicity stunts, e.g. marching with torches and camping with her band of “300” (more like 30) male supporters in front of the Supreme Court to frighten the judge they love to hate.
Hi Mary,
It’s true what you say. Women who are a deemed more beautiful, have an easier time of life, and get advantages. I can’t remember where I read it, but there was a study done on how that impacts upon the legal system. The outcome was, I believe, that the more attractive ladies received lesser sentencing, with one major exception – if they’d used their looks for advantage, such as in fraud cases etc. Then they received on average a more harsh outcome. Weird huh? Unexpected, probably not. People are people, don’t believe them when they make claims about being rational – the folks who do that, are often the worst, for they refuse to see.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
You know, I believe that there are as many females as there are males, whom share your wiring. My gut feeling tells me that the ladies were drilled in the gentle art of socialisation when younger and have what is politely known as ‘coping mechanisms’. It’s a weird habit of western culture to indulge the boys, which does them no good.
Apologies for the previous bluntness with my use of language. My natural tendency is towards mysticism and subtlety, and in this particular instance, that was dropped like a hot potato due to your wiring! There being little point communicating an intention, if it were to be lost in translation, which was what I was correcting at no small cost. And on that note, nature magic is a wild unpredictable ride. The circle is now complete. 😉
With my blessings…
Chris
Mr. Greer: Why You No like Tucker Carlson!! ALT-RIGHT?? Surely you’re joking..
@JMG re: Occult Regency Romances by an alter-ego
If I may, I really hope you end up finding the time for this, and that if you do, you’ll find a way to let your existing readers know without letting the cat too much out of the bag. I adore Jane Austen and have thoroughly enjoyed the occult fiction you’ve pointed me to (just finished The Golem), so the combination sounds mighty tempting.
Cheers,
Jeff
Am I being too raunchy here?
Phutatorius 165
> Dildo insurrection
I like this one best. One can do a WHOLE lot with it:
dildo
in
sir
’rection (or action)
“Please sir, I want some more.”
💨🥒💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
A thought: Women who are into bad boys may have had their time in the sun – for a while, a single woman could actually earn enough to support a family. This might have changed a lot about mate selection! These days are ending, as the average single woman (or man) cannot earn enough money to support themselves in “advanced” economies.
Cynthia Christie 166
If you are talking about “trans,” I see that word in newspaper columns and magazine articles all the time.
“Trans woman” makes no sense because “is ‘woman’ before or after?” Also, trans woman implies that trans men exist. Whether trans woman or trans man, I don’t know what either means, because in each there is a before and after.
I get all balled by things transgender, and that is where it will stand.
If you are talking about “tranny,” that word appears to have been decided upon as pejorative. In the 1970s, I remember my car mechanic referring to a transmission of a vehicle as a “tranny,” so I figure the vehicle-usage should be allowed to continue.
If you are talking about none of these words, your question(s) went whizzing over my head.
I am old enough to say, “This is no longer my world. We elders have absolutely no say in what youngsters do because we won’t be around; therefore, my opinion doesn’t matter,” and I am okay with that. It doesn’t matter (to me) that my opinion doesn’t matter. It just ‘is.’ I often don’t understand this (USA) world, and that also doesn’t matter. I am not going to strangle myself trying to understand. One might say I have good boundaries. I know when to let go.
In some respects, I *WOULD* like to be a teenager again, now, because I would choose a working-class vocation; if female, dressmaker/seamstress, or cook, or bookkeeper. All these are fascinating. If male, probably not electrician because I could probably electrocute myself within a week. Probably not plumber because I get freaked out by slime. Possibly a woodworker, whitesmith/tinsmith, or blacksmith. By age 13, I would apprentice in one of these. It takes five years to become proficient, and cannot be hurried.
But I am okay with being 73. Not everyone reaches this age. One person I went to high school with, tall and thin guy, son of the principal, basketball star, died in the 1990s about 43, as did my own father, cause of death cardiovascular disease. By the way, I will be ‘at work’ until the day I die; no retirement for me. Sometimes I feel this has been a ‘pretty sh_tty’ D-incarnation; other times, merely okay (C). Never an A or B because, early on, I was abandoned to figure life out alone. At age 18, for a few months, I should have sought out clergy to talk things over with, to get the big picture, and figure out how to use my meager resources to better advantage.
In other respects, I do want to leave this world due to aging out. There are clearly too many bodies on this planet, and population needs to be winnowed down by two-thirds. So I will do my bit and keel over.
It seems so sad that, for example, British white men died by the millions in World War I, and again in World War II, and yet whites are no longer welcome in Britain due to coloreds overwhelming the white populace by immigration. Same with the USA. Same with Western Europe. I would inform all those men who died in a war, “Don’t bother enlisting in the armed services; your deaths will be for nothing.” Law and order are on the wane.
Same as now: Don’t enlist in the armed services; your deaths will have been for nothing.
I got off the subject of trans. Oops.
💨😬💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Anselmo, Hitler’s a classic example. By the time he shot himself he was a burnt-out cinder of what he’d once been.
Clay, I’m not sure it does. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that either side in the current political squabbles has a coherent political philosophy any more.
Cynthia, please don’t use it here. Some trans people do consider it an insult, and since there are perfectly clear and equally convenient synonyms, I’d prefer you to use those.
Vitranc, the one thing I would add is that they should be wearing funny hats and not a stitch else.
David, exactly. Sex roles aren’t stable enough across cultural and historical differences to be hardwired, so other explanations are called for. I’ll keep your comment about romances in mind!
Dennis, when nobody ever has to pay the price for their failures, nobody works hard enough to succeed.
LeGrand, there’s a fine photo of Vladimir Putin being confronted by topless female protesters. To judge by his expression, he enjoyed the view; I don’t imagine the protest led him to do less of what inspired it…
Mary, I tend to avoid gorgeous women on principle because so many of them have put so much time into learning to manipulate men with their charms that they know nothing else, and so are dull and inept. I also think that competence is hot.
Clarke, thanks for this personal reflection.
Aldarion, of course! Some people just crave attention.
Chris, no worries. I appreciated your frankness.
Polecat, I’m not joking, and don’t call me Shirley.
Jeff, so noted.
Justin, that’s an excellent point.
I wonder if we as individuals in our modern culture would be better off not using people and characters from the culture as role models and instead turn to archetypal figures. I have been thinking about the gods and also the Gnostic Aeons a lot recently. The Aeons all have a counter part of the opposite gender which could serve as a template for the flow between masculine and feminine. Maybe we should be choosing an Aeon or figuring out which one best represents us, and use that as a template for behavior. I know the teachings say all of us are doing this anyway, but pretty much no one is conscious of it.
Cicada Grove #157 – High heels
Cicada, I read someplace that high heeled shoes throw off a woman’s balance so that she has to push her tush out behind, and throw her chest in front, so high heels are essentially a device to force a sexual display.
Besides the constant pain, high heels do horrible things to the feet, particularly the toes, over time.
I’m an old man now ladies, but at least for me, (from puberty to present day) the wearing of high heels was never a factor of attraction–I beg you all to start wearing comfortable shoes!
A question– Has a man ever said to any woman here, “I wish you’d wear high heels more often”?
or, “It was your high heels that first caught my eye,” hmm?
I’d bet “no,” but feel free to correct me if I am wrong on this…
@ Northwind G.: This week’s topic invites raunchy jokes. So I might as well explain the name “Phutatorius” which is said to be raunchy. It comes from a raunchy chapter in a raunchy novel. In the novel “Phutatorius” is attending a fancy dinner around the year 1750, but he has neglected to button his fly. A bowl of hot roasted chestnuts is brought out for desert and, most unfortunately, one of the hot chestnuts rolls off the table and drops into the opening. Snicker, snicker. For a while I thought the character was based on Ben Franklin, but probably I was wrong.
JMG: Very well. Will comply under protest, since it’s either that or don’t participate. Perhaps you can enlighten me. Please tell me what those synonyms are. Except for “trans woman”, I don’t know any, except some which arise from the world of porn and gross me right out. One will do, actually, I don’t need a whole list. Is there one word or short phrase, that refers to us, is not an insult or otherwise gross, and does not include the word “woman”?
I’m asking you because if I try to look it up, I’ll get the approved woke lexicon. Honestly, I’d rather use the porn words.
Not that trans is exactly my favourite conversation topic, but it’s what I happen to be, and as far as what things about me make an impression on other people, it completely overshadows everything else. I suppose I could have dealt with that here by just not telling anyone, but that would have been dishonest. And it would have came out when I posted video of myself anyway.
Sorry. I swear to God (any and all that you got) that I’m not wanting to make every darn thing about trans. This is too much airtime for that business already! But please? One word.
Or, if this is too controversial a topic for you and this blog, just say that and I’ll drop it at once. Or withhold this comment, same result. I am not looking to make trouble. In that event, I would use “trans woman”, along with scare quotes or other indicators that I consider that a misnomer.
@Mary Bennet – yes, exactly re sexual charisma. It’s like a force of nature because, well, it is a force of nature, genetically hardcoded in our reproductive drives (with the usual variances – gay people, different levels of sexual drive etc).
The phrase we used in the old pickup community was “attraction is not a choice”. You certainly can and do choose what action you take (or none) based on the attraction – but you don’t control whether you are attracted to someone or not – it just IS.
The difference of course, between men and women is that male sexual charisma is primarily based on character traits and personality and social skills (good looks help but are far from the most important factor), so a committed man willing to do a lot of internal work and rewire his identity can develop massive amounts of sexual charisma he never had before…but for women (whose sexual charisma is primarily physical – not entirely, but looks are the most important factor), there is far less scope for improvement on what they’re born with (of course you can optimize what you have, with personality and makeup and being in good shape etc – but the ceiling for improvement is far far lower compared to men who start off at a much lower level – compare the average 20 year old man and average 20 year old woman and see who has more dating options – but who can keep improving almost indefinitely, compared to women who tend to face a sharp cliff and a decline – which can be fast or slow depending on the person in question).
(When I had this discussion with a close female friend – she said “So you’re basically saying that men age like wine and women like milk..[in the dating marketplace]”..
Well anyway. As may be the other thing, there is one thing about trans I remember that might be of interest here. Some years ago, an old woman who believed in reincarnation which I yet did not, said to me that I *chose* to be this in the.. Interim? She said that between lives I had chosen to be a trans femme next (yes I know, that’s an example of what I asked for. I hate it. Very wokestinky.) I respected this woman, though of course I filed it under woo woo at the time, but since I respected her I put that aside and considered the idea without a limiting materialist framework. I decided: no way had I done such a thing: shot myself not in one foot but two, and then dangled them in a piranha tank.
As I consider that idea today, I feel… well, kind of angry with myself if I did that. It really is a total own goal and not necessary at all. I can’t imagine a good reason for this. If I could have been the rest of what I am, but NOT THAT. The idea makes me cry. When I get back there’s gonna be some words for whoever gave me the information brochure about this.
@ Clay Dennis #164
Let it henceforth be known that I am the One and Only Gesticulating Parent in this household. 😉
/sarcasm
in re your theme, though… Oh, my!
@ David P
“…it’s genuinely helpful to hear the occasional reminder that there are options beyond life-long celibacy, denigrating myself to fit into the left’s mold, or denigrating my hypothetical partner to fit into the right’s mold, especially from somebody for whom a fourth option seems to have worked out brilliantly.”
My blessings, if you will have them, and may your own “fourth option” become manifest in its proper time. 🙂
I can’t help feeling that the name William F. Buckley is fairly unfortunate when used in an article with sexual undertones.
@JMG
“I tend to avoid gorgeous women on principle because so many of them have put so much time into learning to manipulate men with their charms that they know nothing else, and so are dull and inept.”
I wanted to echo this. Any man or woman who immediately gives off a lot of sexual charisma actually makes me a bit suspicious of them, because I’m aware of the way they are likely treated by other people and they ways that might shape their personality. That’s not to say I write them off completely, but I put my antennae up for any manipulative or entitled behavior and filter for that pretty aggressively. Often I’m pleasantly surprised, and in that case I treat them as I would anyone else, but on several occasions that policy has served me pretty well.
JMG et.al. on the subject of feminine pulchritude: guys, this isn’t about sex, or who gets the richest husband or the best prom date. It is about who gets hired and promoted, and that isn’t about sex either but about status rankings. It is about limited life choices. About whether the high school guidance counselor reads your transcript and says Oh, looks like you have a talent for poetry or math or whatever it might be. Here are some colleges you might want to look at. Mine couldn’t be bothered, but she had plenty of time to drag me into her office for rants about being unfashionable and unfeminine (by mid 60s standards).
Do you want to be the town tramp or the town prude, pickled in your resentment and envy? I didn’t want either and became what I call crazy lady. Pop culture calls it sigma female, and the claims made for that are just a bit exaggerated. What I call crazy lady is someone who has learned, taught herself, to think and plan strategically. So that, by a combination of effort, extreme frugality and self-reliance, she can get herself into a position where the (unmentionable word here) can’t hurt her. Company closes, crazy lady has rent paid, car she owns outright and keeps maintained, food in the cupboard and a sewing machine she knows how to use in case the wardrobe needs an upgrade.
BTW guys, no, I don’t hate or envy my beautiful sisters. Beauty fades, and I hope they all can get the best deal possible for themselves and progeny. Whom I did despise back in the day, were the guys with Pygmalian complexes who did not like girls like me, but would not leave us alone either. In time, I figured out ways to make them go elsewhere.
This is one of the more amusing things I’ve heard about. I wonder if flinging their sex toys at a president and administration that is a secret (or not so secret, really) object of their desire might have the effect of transferring some of their sexual energy to the president? If so, the irony of that is too rich for me not to laugh over for quite some time to come.
It is made all the more ironic since that would presumably give more strength to the man that they presumably want to both aggressively copulate with and see the demise of.
I have seen videos on X where the AWFLs and ICE agents kind of felt attracted to each other and those are funny.
Bad boy trope: I always thought Friday night bars are where people are looking for alcohol and sex, not scoping out a prospective mate to bring home to mother. I thought it’s bad girls looking for bad boys quick hook up. Is there a high percentage of bar hook ups that end in a serious relationship or marriage?
The much bigger dating pools are through dating apps that narrow down who you are are interested in with specific questions and ability to filter with the swipe of a screen. I think some of these dating apps are religiously oriented. Plus I have married into Mormon family and live in Mormon country for 20 years. There is a heavy emphasis on wholesome and family. Women at BYU look for RM’s, that’s Returning Missionary’s and they would certainly never marry anyone they met in a bar because they frown on drinking. So maybe I am biased in what I see around me and what other women are attracted to? Or maybe I’m an anomaly? All of the men I have dated/fell in love with and picked one to marry are all theoretical physicists with engineering talents.
What say any other women on this thread? Do women in general go for the bad boy types?
Are your readers mostly men or women, or is it hard to know?
Amusing side note: a while back, my daughter asked if I’d been interested in finding a partner. Quite some time before then, I’d noticed being attracted to a good many passers-by, all of whom were young, and laughed at the dead end that was, and now, truthfully say I was quite happy as I am.
Also – when out in the world, I’d has all sorts of issues with “men” as a class, and was edgy around them. Here, they come across as individuals with whom I have no more issues than I do with the women around me – based on personality. Well, except to laugh at how much the men can eat at one sitting. It’s like having so many brothers and sisters, and it’s a very comfortable feeling to have.
On the trans issue – back when we had a politically correct manager, the snack bar seemed to be staffed by several who used men’s names, and came across as eunuchs, and what was wrong with just being a butch lesbian like the ones I’d known back home who were what they were and nothing else? But that was in another time and place.
Just my $0.02.
@ Candy D
I’m hardly the person to ask on general questions about woman (I’m not neurotypical) but I tend to think some woman are initially attracted to bad boys but the roots behind it are possibly messy and it could be a combination of things like seeking strength in a partner or need to rebel against things in her life that might be quietly trapping her.
“From the 1930’s through the 1970’s Supreme Court decisions tended to come down on the side of protecting and thereby increasing civil rights.”
Why is that true? Why didn’t it reduce Civil Rights? What is a Civil Right? I’m not really presenting an argument, just provoking discussion. Why is that? Well I read that the modern system’s collapse rests entirely on these rulings and beliefs just as you suggest. But that means all these rulings were entirely wrong, or it would have led to a improved practical results rather than self-contradiction, dissent and functional collapse! I don’t know what might have been the right rulings, but these were clearly wrong or they would have worked.
Similarly, that has no bearing on the new rulings which may be (or may not be) also entirely flawed and will lead to a collapse of a different kind.
Nor were they of measurable benefit: Black families and communities were categorically destroyed over that time period, and female happiness went straight down every single day of that whole time. That’s not a good indicator the rulings and the rights were a good idea. There are other numbers: Incomes stagnated starting immediately after 1971, and income disparity has never been greater, not even during the Gilded Age. I struggle to think of any advantages whatsoever, since men and women were having gay sex since people had sex organs, and that’s hardly much of a benefit to anyone, even if you put the population at 3%.
So the magic period of 1960-2000 or even -2010 was one non-stop straight down period by every measure. For every group, Blacks especially. Yet this is considered the good period we should hold on to or go back to. This is not an indicator if today’s changes are better or worse, but Think about these assumptions and what they mean.
I was less free, less prosperous, and got less real rights under this whole period. Every. Day. From 1970-2026. …That didn’t start in 2025, or 2016 if you like.
“I find myself wondering if this event was staged in order to discredit real protests. The kind which have serious intention and don’t rely on staged stunts.”
I actually don’t think I know any of those. There hasn’t been a successful protest in my lifetime, which is why they keep doing them. They can cosplay the status quo. No change = no risk = no cost. You know this because like, changing jobs and living in a smaller house, buying less from billionaires is extremely profitable and attainable by every class, with a simple scale of how much you wish to do them, yet essentially no one does. They are not Resisting, they are Signaling. If they were Resisting, someone would care and stop them. Pro Tip: the Resisting would not be backed by Nike, Amazon, and Google.
“We ladies stop insisting on the masks, and you men stop insisting that we continue to cripple ourselves with high heeled shoes”
Again after another lifetime, men have no interest in your shoes. If you wore flats or none, he would neither notice nor care. If you wore Converse he might be mildly interested in your sport. Nothing women wear is now, or ever has been, for men; It is for other women. Yet that’s another lifetime I’ve heard this repeated while every man I’ve ever met begs them not to. –I want to say, if you want to prove my point show up with nothing on at all, but I’m not sure the joke would hit in the tone that its intended.
Try it: wear clothes that are merely practical for you, traditional maybe (these things have reasons): you will find more and a far better quality of men interested in you.
“Do you happen to have any suggested reading or other resources you could recommend for someone interested in exploring a healthier version of feminine power?”
It’s fascinating that nothing comes to mind any longer. I’d have to ponder long and deep to see the last time I saw a healthy woman, or what media it was derived from. Certainly not since 1979.
JMG:
“Anselmo, the notion of hunter-gatherers living in a promiscuous horde was scrapped by anthropologists most of a century on the basis of fieldwork among actual hunter-gatherers. It still hovers in the imagination of the Western world, though; not sure why. ”
My hypothesis is Rousseau glorified the uncivilized lifestyle as one of harmonious existence and kindness, that people are born naturally good and decent (he never actually had anything to do with any uncivilized hunter-gatherers) and civilization was the cause of greed, violence, oppression, hierarchy, misery, poverty, &c. He was writing in opposition to Hobbes who said it is through civilization and its constraints that we become great. Rousseau’s romantic view of primitive tribal life was taken up by later philosophers of that tendency such as Godwin and Condorcet and has become an idee fixe of the “left” or as Sowell described it, the ‘unconstrained’ worldview.
Hence, just as Tacitus did, hunter-gatherer tribes become a concept onto which we pile every romantic fantasy about how our culture would be so much better “if only we were like that”.
So, for most leftists in our time, they are sweet, loving, sexually free, sexually respectful, gender-fluid, in harmony with nature, live in idyllic egalitarian pleasure, &c. &c. &c.
(This unspoken background idea underlies ideas such as UNDRIP and “reconciliation” and is a major political issue for Canada right now).
@SNSMan #189: Even assuming you are 100% correct in your affirmations, do you find it elegant to rub those statements in women’s faces? I think all women and men above 30 know the facts about differentially fading charms, but gentlemen won’t say that out loud.
I do agree that attraction isn’t choice. I married the most beautiful woman I had ever met, which sounds like a very stupid idea. Fortunately, she has other qualities, some of which she wouldn’t even have suspected herself of having when we met. And she must have seen something in me even though I am surely among the worst flirters on the planet.
JMG, Mat Auryn has picked up your post on Operation Dildo. His followers are aghast at your view that they have the hots for Trump. One said, “Sounds like he needs a big hard dildo right in the face” and “Respectfully, frack JMG”. I guess if they ever do a dildo protest on you, it means you’re a bad boy now, right? 😀
What do you think was motivating the men that got involved in this?
The idea of the return of the repressed and psychological urges as reaction to the titanic sea change in gender relations of the past century is in my opinion a major driver of the rise on transgenderism (specifically mtf) amongst both combat veterans and AWMLs.
Much like as in nature, it’s a reaction to environmental stressors. Of course, in this case the stressors are anything but natural– they are the product of the massive upheaval between the genders as related in the article, in this case being life as a male in a society that increasingly both emasculates men and yet expects them to fulfill many of the relationship roles they once did without any of the upsides of the relationship they once had, with an unhealthy dose of PTSD and/or fetishization in the mix as an option.
Renaissance Man#201
The details about hunter gatherers wich we know are corresponding to the latter stages of the Paleolitic Period ; 17 000 years ago. But this period is a hundred of times more extense; 1,6 million years.
SNSMan #189:
> for women (whose sexual charisma is primarily physical – not entirely, but looks are the most important factor)
That so? Maybe I’m an outlier but looking back at everybody I ever felt any lasting attraction towards, there’s only one example where I can definitely point to looks as the most important factor.
Scotlyn #192:
Thank you.
—David P.
Aldarion#202 Is evident that sex appeal declines with the pass of time for men and women. More sharply for women, but too for men. If a woman of thirty years claims to be atracted for a man of man of sixtyn is probably that she will be not sincere. And this probably is because genetic patterns of our specie shaped during Paleolitic are playing.
@ Untitled – 1 #133
“Do you happen to have any suggested reading or other resources you could recommend for someone interested in exploring a healthier version of feminine power?”
I have been thinking about this one for many years, and I think it is worth staying away from written resources for a while (since so many have a drum to bang), unless you are reading fiction and studying what characters do and say, and how it works out for them. But in real life there is quite a bit to see for the observant.
What I want to contribute is my own discovery, early in my thirties or so, that my kitchen and my garden did not symbolise my “assigned role” so much as they symbolised my “domain”. These became my spaces where I took ownership of, exercised and improved my powers. Not only cooking and growing food, but also, more subtly, what I have come to see as the “feminine superpowers”*, which might be grouped under the heading of “logistics”. Because it is not just the ability to cook, clean and shop, but to be able to plan, organise and bring everything together in a timed way so that a meal appears *just as* everyone in the house is hungry for it. It is not just the ability to wash, mend and shop, but to be able to plan, organise and bring everything together in a timed way so that the necessary clothes appear *just as* everyone else is thinking about what to wear that day.
These powers may be exercised at home, but also at work. Being the personal assistant who makes the life of the CEO smooth, by attending to every detail in advance and ensuring everything needed by everyone will come together at any given time to make meetings flow harmoniously, and deals get struck, and so on.
It is a set of mental habits, above all, a mind that can fill itself with virtual diaries, to do lists, and “about that” files, and fill in or amend them on the go. It is a mother whose adult daughter briefly mentions a job interview the following week, and immediately sets about mentally reviewing the contents of the daughter’s wardrobe, the state of her shoes, etc, and list any tasks (shopping, washing, polishing) that will have to be done so that *on the day* her daughter will be able to be properly scrubbed up and competent looking at her interview.
I suggest looking around and finding the women who are most confident in their skin, and (incidentally) surrounded by happy, well fed, well dressed people who accomplish things competently, whether that is in a family, a club, a sports team, a workplace. These women will be superb organisers, and are often so good at it, that no one realises what they actually DO, until they fall sick or break a leg.
Please notice, though, that women who are good at organising need to be around people who want or need to be organised – it is no fun at all to be the target of an organising effort that you do not want or need. This is where “mothering” can turn into “smothering” and a quiet background power can become the channel for “passive aggression”.
Like all powers, these ones need appropriate outlets for expression. However, if you know someone like this who is competently doing what she does for people who appreciate having it done for them, you will see a woman expressing her feminine powers in a happy and healthy way.
* like all powers, these can be used for good or for ill, and can become toxic and corrupt under certain circumstances. But they are still powers and should be recognised as such.
Bridge: I am a big fan of this coinage: “AWFLs”. Well done!
Jennifer K: I too wish the AWFLs would just shut up. The backlash isn’t entirely on them though. If we trans women (I dislike that term but lack a substitute) had in general taken the attitude that “trans women are women” is strictly honorary, not factual, and even that only for *some* purposes, then it wouldn’t have been so bad. But more than a few got pushy and aggressive about it, and also prioritized their own feelings over everyone else’s, so here we are.
@Aldarion – it’s never rubbed in anyone’s face – the conversation I described was with a close female friend (almost like a sister) when discussing the aftermath of her divorce and I pointed out that she was going to be entering a dating market much tougher (for her) than the one she left in her mid twenties, which is a fact that won’t go away just because we don’t mention it. And she made the wine and milk comparison, not me.
I wouldn’t be unpleasant or nasty to anyone but there’s a thin line between that and denying realities.
@Anselmo in my experience, it is entirely possible and more common than most people think for 30 year old women to be genuinely attracted to 60 year old men. It’s just not very socially acceptable these days. I mentioned the example of my friend above, and the first thing people usually assume is that his 30 years younger wife married him for his money, and then they tend to go quiet when I point out he’s a manual labourer who recently became bankrupt and she is a successful professional. Age is a factor, it’s not irrelevant (just like good looks are a factor) but far less important than most people think.
Scotlyn 208
> What I want to contribute is my own discovery, early in my thirties or so, that my kitchen and my garden did not symbolise my “assigned role” so much as they symbolised my “domain”.
Your several paragraphs here make a lot of sense. I will term what you are talking about as “homemaking.”
I woke feeling sad today, so maybe I am reading ‘sad’ in general and am applying it here.
I feel sad that my biological mother was an awful homemaker. She was alright until I was about age 9 (1961). Up until then, she tried. After my age 9 (her age 35), her spirit said, “I don’t care. I will do the minimum until these two brats are 18, at which time I can legally throw them out of the house, and I can be alone.” In college (during World War I), she had decided God was Dead; she was secular, materialist, and had no spiritual practice whatsoever, although she religiously “Abused Her Children.”
I feel sad because in the mid-1960s, boys’ shop classes (car mechanics; woodworking; metalworking) and girls’ cooking and dressmaking classes were being dismantled (making disappear on-the-sly)—by 1970, those classes were gone from the school system.
Also, bookkeeping classes had never been available at anyone, which now, I see as absolutely crucial for the well-being of a young working-person starting up a micro-businesses. One will need Bookkeeping 101 in ANY business one starts.
Henceforth, I feel sad that I never learn vital skills from my then school system. There were things I needed to do during my late teens and twenties that I was ignorant of because of my lack of schooling—college was too late and didn’t teach the right classes; in other words, college was useless.
I finally learned bookkeeping,—in 1975 (age 23) but only incidentally as Accounting 101 at a college as part of an accounting degree, a degree program I was forced to halt due to not knowing how to manage Cash Flow (part of bookkeeping). In other words, I would have learned Cash Flow bookkeeping too late to save me from dropping out the very class that taught Cash Flow.
As a youngster, I had no assistance. I had gotten four things right, but didn’t know that the fifth thing was a killer, and finally ‘got’ me. It is almost as if my high school’s school system wanted me to fail in life💧.
I feel sad because my failure needn’t have happened. Where were vocational counselors for working-class young-adults in their early 20s?
Although time-consuming, I eventually recovered and found my way but by then, I was 30, and others considered me old. Time had passed me by.
Anyway, I think I woke feeling sad,— because of this.
Scotlyn, you tell a cautionary tale. Basically the tale says, to me, “Youngsters, find your vocation early.” That means educational systems need to return to supporting 80% of kids heading for working-class ‘careers’ early, like age 13, continuing to age 23. (Call them ‘careers’ or ‘vocations’ because ‘jobs’ sounds downscale.) Vocation, NOT NOT NOT college. We need zillions of apprenticeships. Kids, go for a working-class career that earns money by age 18.
College is useless. It teaches nothing practical and leaves a person owing $200K afterwards. THAT is not a good start in life.❗️Blame it on K-12 school systems❗️My school system harmed me by depriving me of training in a working-class vocation. I hope to encourage people administering K-12 that they need to get “with the program,” literally.‼️Apprenticeships.‼️Apprenticeships.‼️Apprenticeships.‼️It is not hard; it is simply an about-face, a U-turn in philosophy.
High school, first class everyone must take as part of a vocation:
Life Skills 101: How to Mother (aka “Organize”).
Thanks for writing your blurb 208. I appreciated it a lot. It needed saying. Youngsters (13 to 23) need to hear it. Adults concerned with the well-being of the youngsters around them need to hear it.
💨🧮📝📋🏦💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
born 1952
am enjoying this. Most people don’t realize how dramatically the social mores around sex and relationships between men and women have changed in the last century or so, and how out of the ordinary they are compared to how it was for most of recorded history. When all this interacts with the natural biological imperatives to grow up, find mates, reproduce and raise children, the result is a lot of incoherent mess like this.
I also note the increasing trend of mostly young and middle aged women posting pictures and videos of themselves online, wearing little or no attire – called “thirst traps” – in a way that almost seems desperate. On the other hand, more and more men are getting desensitized to the non-stop “look, don’t touch” parading and deciding to take matters into their own (ahem) hands or just direct their energies into various forms of asceticism.
I bet Camille Paglia would have something interesting to say about this mess.
I want to learn more about what you said here: “It’s the same syndrome that drove so many men of the same class to heart attacks and nervous breakdowns in the middle years of the 20th century.”. Are there any sources I can read to learn more about this? Any posts you wrote on this topic that I could have forgotten about.
@David P
Yes it is, with two caveats:
1) My statement is a general one – of course, the human race has huge variance around the baseline and there are many men for whom female looks may not be the primary driver of attraction. But it is generally true. It’s like saying “men are stronger than women”. Of course there are plenty of strong women and weak men – but in general it is clearly true that men are stronger than women. It’s also possible that Ecosophia attracts a quirky group who self-select to be far from the baseline. Like going to a powerlifting competition – there will be lots of women there who are stronger than most men, but they self-select to be there and does not say anything about society as a whole.
2) Second caveat – what I am talking about is sheer sexual desire – the drive to take someone’s clothes off and get naked with them- that kind of primal, visceral attraction. I am NOT talking about whether you enjoy spending time with them or whether they will make good spouses or long term partners – that is much more varied and more intellectually driven. But you don’t even have to like a person you *desire*.
3) Actually yhere is a third caveat when I think about it now – when I say “looks”, I mean physical-ish characteristics more broadly, which includes things like etheric energy or chemistry or connection for reasons you can’t explain (and may well happen with someone who is not classically beautiful) but it certainly has nothing to do with their personality or mind or status or how good company they are. Although some physical characteristics are (almost) universally sexually attractive in women – youth in particular and visible displays of youthful characteristics, but also things like a healthy feminine shape that displays reproductive fertility and so on.
Heh! Well, as someone writing a novel tangentially related to the topics of this essay, I guess I am contractually obliged to comment 🙂 I wouldn’t say I’m riding the wave of the zeitgeist or anything, but the POV character is an academia blue-hair type whose own character flaws get her kicked out of her rarified bubble, and the first thing she does after her banishment is jump into bed with a MAGA-type. At my current point in the rough draft, the MAGA dude has moved himself into her apartment and is demanding a formal relationship, which was very much *not* what she was intending to get out of that hookup – whoops! I’m still having a lot of fun with this project 🙂
But so that this isn’t just me talking to myself: I was quite burned out earlier this year, so I spent about a month doing “market research” instead of writing anything. I visited a lot of romance-novel specific subreddits and Discords. Some things that floored me: writing a lesbian sleeping with a man is less socially acceptable than writing father-daughter incest, per Reddit at least (!!!). I base this conclusion on the fact that no recommendations were even offered for the first one when requested in the romance novel subreddit, but several were provided for the second. Amazing! And maybe not in a good way!
Another one: Readers are, without question, searching in fairly large numbers for what is euphemistically called “dubious consent”. However, the current largest publisher of romance novels on Earth – Amazon – categorically removes all novels with this content from its site and cancels the publisher’s account. As my novel contains a few scenes that properly fall under this category, this locks me out from most paying customers. Not a huge deal to me personally but the difference between what readers are looking for and what Amazon will accept money for was striking. It’s rare to see any form of capitalism denied in modern America.
Another one: All places where romance novelists congregate and talk to each other are full of church ladies, so to speak – people who have STRONG opinions on what is and is not appropriate in their genre and/or niche and who police boundaries viciously. The F/F writers are the loudest online, but apparently their sales aren’t very good, which they also complain about, loudly. Hilariously, even male novelists writing for male viewers (“Romance for Men”) swooped in on my own questions like vultures, and were eager to tell me exactly how I was completely wrong and not anything that they would ever read – sure, there were some other readers other places who might like that sort of trashy drek but they weren’t REAL appreciators of the TRUE genre, natch. I appreciated the advice, and told them so, but I admit I was laughing as I typed.
Final point of interest: A perennial topic of the romance novelists was AI being used to write them – and of course the tone was absolute horror and condemnation. I agree with them, and have no intention of ever spending so much as a dime on anything AI has touched, but I also think that the writing is on the wall for the entire profession, sadly. AI isn’t good for much on a practical level but I think it will be able to spit out a passable romance novel – there’s so many on Amazon already that it can steal content from, and the genre is extremely formulaic. Most readers, too, read mainly for escapism and do not ask much from their tools to do so. Existing novelists with established customer bases shouldn’t have much to worry about, but I think over the next decade or so romance noveling will go the way of horseback riding – done by enthusiasts only, losing more money than making it. It’s felt at times like I am among the last hand-held loom user, so to speak, watching the machines move in around me. I will write on anyway 🙂 And on that note – back to it!
What [da f—k] is AWFL?
[dis hear DESERBS a “da f—k”]
Due I hafta remond writters here to spel out agronyms da frst time u use it ina post/pargraph? I gess I due heft ta remunt youz. Each post. Assumm ignrentz. Spelinct out agronyms iz amng da top 5 ruules on hw to be a effctv wrter. Udderwize, yr writteng scks.
Anther top rule is spel thungs corectly. R U hvng dffacultly reeding dis ?
Two pot it blintly, nut spelig out a agromint mins da writter is LAZY, witch is speldeded L-A-Z-Y, end duznt cure abt da reeder.
Mebbe I shlll perpuzly post me cmmentz mizspeled likke dis.
💨✎💨Nuthwud 7th-Grate Grandpa
Dune County, Wizcuntzin, USA
Luke, that strikes me as a very good idea. One of the great advantages of myth and legend is that they present vivid images of human possibility to us, without the muddying factors inherent in real people.
Cynthia, why not just use “trans person” or “trans people” if you don’t want the gender label?
Untitled-1, bingo. In my case, there’s also the simple fact that I’m not conventionally attractive or fashionable myself, and so conventionally attractive and fashion-conscious people generally aren’t interested in me for honest reasons.
Mary, duly noted, and yes, I was thinking of that.
Brenainn, why, yes, that would follow, wouldn’t it?
Candy, that’s why I specifically spoke of urban liberal middle class females. They aren’t looking for someone to bring home to mother. As for this blog’s readership, it’s about 2/3 male, 1/3 female.
Patricia M, delighted to hear it.
Renaissance, that’s quite precisely correct. I don’t have my library handy at the moment — I’m at an event — but you’ve described a process that’s been well documented.
Bridge, I’m glad to hear it! That they’re furious and threatening, instead of passive-aggressively shocked and sad, suggests that they haven’t entirely mortgaged their testicles to the women in their lives. As for the motivations of dildo-flinging men, why, keep in mind that white straight men have been told at top volume for decades that the only way they can atone for the guilt they inherited with their genitals and skin color is to go trotting along enthusiastically in the wake of whatever protest women and people of color have decided is good and right and just. It’s not surprising that some have fallen for that. I recall Jewish writers of an earlier generation who discussed at some length the role of Jewish self-hate in setting the stage for the Holocaust; straight white male self-hate probably won’t end quite so horrifically, but it’s not even remotely healthy.
JoeSchmoe, that seems very plausible to me.
Anonymuz, I somehow hadn’t encountered “thirst traps.” As for the health consequences of too much assertiveness, you might start by looking up the origins of the term “Type A personality” — originally it was a diagnostic category associated with drastically increased risks of coronary illness.
Shinjuki, it sounds like a potentially interesting novel! The gatekeeping doesn’t surprise me a bit, though it’s good to know that my planned strategy of avoiding the online romance-fiction scene and using other ways to build an audience for my proposed series is a sensible approach.
Nuthwud, “Affluent White Female Liberal.” I had no difficulty reading your comment, btw.
Hi John Michael,
Thanks, and between you and I, the people I’ve met face to face who’ve had Asperger’s, get gently nudged and guided when in conversation. Generally the worst emotion expressed is frustration, which is understandable. Usually I don’t offer unsolicited assistance, mostly because it’s unsolicited 🙂 , but if the consequences / blow back is minor, then why not take the chance for a friend? Gifts are spread unevenly, and you’ve had a rough time of it.
Back to this week’s essay. How is it that people have the time to attend these protests? It’s the King’s birthday public holiday today, but I’ve gotta work. It’s not a story I really comprehend – all that street spectacle, and to be honest, the elites are probably considering this economic factor as well, and may take action. Wiping out the resources of the middle class would certainly put an end to all this sort of mischief.
After all, if you have to work for a living, or properly run a household on a tight budget, the last thing you’d be thinking about is throwing sex toys at public buildings, no matter what opinions you hold. It’s downright weird all this protesting, and it seems all very pointless. There are better ways to direct those limited resources and from my perspective, I’m annoyed at the thought my tax dollars are being spent for other peoples entertainment. It’s wasteful. Oh well. The protests are having the opposite effect on the centre.
Cheers
Chris
JMG: I feel like I’ve reached the limit for how much bandwidth I’m allowed to consume over this, so sure, it’ll either be that or some other workaround that respects your rules and the spirit of them. There’s some stuff involved that I feel is important, but it kind of boils down to a portion of “not your problem”, so that’s it and thank you for your patience.
In particular, there will be no tests performed to see how closely I can spell the word I asked about and get away with it, nor any other such stunts. I don’t know if that’s a thing you ever get here: testing of the profanity policy.
@JMG # 184 re: Occult Regency Romance
I realized I should have been more explicit (hur, given the subject matter) in expressing what I meant. I’ve been thrilled with everything you’ve put out (not least your non-“romance” occult mysteries, such as the Ariel Moravec series, though, obviously, there’s some simmering romance potentially coming to the surface there). That said, the thing I “adore” about Jane Austen is the way she treats attraction and courting as simultaneously something worth taking seriously, but also not the end-all, be-all of human relations. Her characters tend to want to marry (genuinely, and deeply), for actual love. But, while acknowledging that “love” is not some transcendent, beautiful thing only found once in a lifetime between beautiful people at the height of romantic sentiment, it acknowledges that, yeah, just being young and hot and eligible is not necessarily enough to build a relationship on (while, sometimes, acknowledging that for this man and woman, it sure is).
Anyway, all of which is to say, I’m sure that any occult regency romance fiction you chose to write would approach the subject with a similar degree of stand-off, which would, paradoxically, make them land all that much harder, which is part of why I’d be so thrilled to see them.
Sorry if I’ve fanboyed out too hard here, but the prospect of more regency “romance” that takes the strengths of Jane Austen seriously is too rich to ignore (and if it’s serious occult fiction too, whoo, be still my beating heart!), so I’m on the sidelines hooting and hollering to get more of that, if it at all makes sense.
Cheers,
Jeff
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 6/8). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused.
May Kallianeira come to understand or face the entity or issue that seems to have trapped them, causing problems in her material circumstances, causing expensive troubles that threaten to force them out of home and mind, and leaving her burnt out and overwhelmed despite every attempt to find real help. May she quickly find out what to do and how to act to overcome these hardships.
May Patricia Ormsby’s journey to Shikoku for a religious retreat and training course on June 12-17 go successfully and safely.
May Geoff G’s sister Lindsay, who suffered a stroke at the end of May, recover to the fullest extent possible, and be blessed and supported in her mental wellbeing throughout.
May Mathew Damon Gallowglass, who has been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, be treated successfully for his condition and make a full recovery.
May Lisa C be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from breast cancer.
May 6 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
JMG, the two quotes I gave were from women not men. The women are more furious than the men lol. Here’s another female “I hope this idiot is pelted with dildos. Opposition to Trump is not weirdly sexualized at all: that guy is like a melting pumpkin six weeks after Halloween. If this fella is sexualizing it, he should recognize that and stop projecting.” Do you have the hots for Trump JMG? No judgement. 😀
Only one person stood up for you, a man, “Always weird when “magic folk* ape Christians and try and destroy their own, especially Visconti who always seems to have never met a human he liked.” However, the men generally don’t approve of you either, but are less furious about it, eg, “I do think the Peak Oil Libertarian thing sent him over.”
Here’s another female commenting on you “I’m constantly having to tell people how crappy he is because he comes up in the druid subreddit all the time. Sigh.” As they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so you might get new readers now that you’re the bad boy of the occult scene.
@ Mary Bennet #145,
This is in reference to Mr. Greer’s observation on hard vs. soft power in July 2025. I’m sure HR has lots of people who genuinely want to make the workplace better, kinder, more polite but the net result is they make it stressful instead, since there is a constant need to self-censor, lest one inadvertently give ‘offense’ and lose a job.
@ Anselmo #205,
The actual behaviour of primitive tribes is irrelevant. It’s the way ‘civilized’ people use them as an ink-blot to project idealized values and fantasize about idyllic lifestyles. Think James Cameron’s “Avatar”.
It’s very rewarding to spend a week camping out, making fire without matches &c., but I am very glad to get home at that temporary vacation.
@bridge,
I would surmise that the dildo flinging crowd along with most of the AWFLs have a very poor knack for introspection and self reflection. It is very unlikely they admit their true subconscious motivations. If they did their entire movement would collapse overnight.
Renaissance Man @ 122, I didn’t post comment # 145, nor is its subject human resource departments. Such are the perils of morning, pre coffee posting.
Chris @ 217, greetings. About the dildo bunnies, I suspect they were mostly lowest rung PMC gals, the flack catchers, frantically signaling their allegiance to PMC values in (vain) hope of keeping their precarious jobs and social statuses and were likely given leave from their offices for participation. Now, if someone seriously wants to do something to help and support the Epstein survivors, may I suggest you write, call or email your representatives in Congress–I have done so–and demand their votes for release of all relevant documents.
About Regency and similar romances, I also am a fan of Jane Austen, but my all time favorite in the same genre is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte. Alas, if only Anne had lived, I feel sure she would have become a very great writer indeed. In Bronte’s telling, Our Heroine, a widow in recovery from a marriage of youthful folly, goes down a step on the social ladder to find herself a good, decent, capable Christian man, and it is she who proposes.
About high heels – I noticed that women in high places, like the former Executive Director of The Village, tend to wear the 5″ stilettoes; those in lesser positions wear flats, often comfortable ones. I got the impression long ago that the high heels were mandated as Upscale Business Garb. I have never worn them – can’t; they’re too painful.
These demonstrations, whatever form they take, are all about as meaningful as the circus coming to town, except that in the circus, the clowns are for real.
Renaissance Man #222: Indeed, but we are determined by things like the discovery of fire.. Do you have seen the movie : “Quest for Fire” ?
@JMG
Honestly, there are times I thank my lucky stars I’m “just average looking”. It means most people leave me more or less alone, which I’m just fine with. I hear stories from my more attractive friends (male and female) about the unsolicited attention they get, and even the stuff that’s generally on the side of “not creepy but needlessly nice” would be too much for me. I’d rather not deal with it 🙂
@Scotlyn #208
Thanks so much for sharing your experience, I found it helpful. A strength expressed improperly can become a weakness. Just as the “bad boy” perhaps expresses masculinity in an unhealthy way, “mothers” without a proper outlet become “smotherers”, it would seem. I’ll keep that in mind as I observe the people and the wider patterns around me.
You also bring up an excellent point, which is that storytellers tend to outdo the theorists when it comes to these kinds of topics. It’s all too easy to fall into one or another political or intellectual agenda when talking about these things in the abstract, whereas fiction gives people more room to be honest, and not to make such a big deal of it. “Show, don’t tell” and all that.
shinjuki 214
> I also think that the writing is on the wall for the entire profession, sadly.
I think of arti-fishul ill-telligence (AI) as temporary — a fad. Because of its nothingness, it will burn out . The clods pushing it are,— zombies. AI has nothing behind it — it is thin-air 🌬️. It is a classic get-rich scheme.
Worry not.
As for the south amurican big river, they do infinite inexplicable things. They go according to the God-of-Money💰: whatever nets them more money, they go for. Money is vacuous. AI is empty-headed. Those lizard-brains are dragons in their lairs counting heaps of gold coins,—they are golem. Where they have a trillion coins, that is never enough. They need to win their pretend MORE-WARS. They don’t realize that they (and their descendants, if they dare have any) will die in More-Wars within two generations.
However, I don’t know the timeline of the demise of arti-fishul ill-telligence.
Sidebar: What can magic do to arti-fishul ill-telligence? I know nothing.
💨🌬️💰💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Bridge 221
> Christians
The dildo-brigade is “Christian”?
Now THAT would be interesting.
Do the dildo-rioters worship a 3-foot dildo, standing up, on a sacred altar? Do they special-order dildo-shaped wafers? Do the women wear dildo pendants and earrings? Do they wear dildo buckles on their belts? Do they ride a Dildo-mobile? On their houses, do they have weather-dildos to tell which way the wind is blowing? Do they wear dildo-knitted hats? Do they wear dildo-patterned clothes? Do they ride bicycles with dildo bells on them? Do they hang dildos from their rear-view mirrors? Are their lawnmowers the shape of dildos? Do they decorate weddings with white dildos? Do they hang dildos in their houses’ windows? Do they have a secret dildo-handshake? Can I buy a dildo fountain? Is there a “hard”-rock band called, “The Dildos”? Do they close the eyes, and “dildo-ate”? Do they lobby arti-facial un-telligence (AI) agencies to perform dildo-fetishes rather than AI-fetishes? Is there a Federal Bureau of Dildoes (FBD)? Does a person need a license to buy/use a dildo? Is there a radio station called WDIL or KDIL? Is there a podcast called, “Everything Dildos”? Are there dildo-hoops that kids play with? Do kids kick around a dildo for fun? Do people have dildo-parties and dildo-shaped balloons? (a dildo orgy?) Do they think dildos grow on trees? Are there cookbooks using dildos in recipes? Is there a Dildo Festival? Do eclairs come in the shape of a dildo? Is there a dildo dance? Can one have an ice cream cone covered with tiny sugary dildos? Do teachers hand out dildo-shaped pencils? Do they edge their gardens with dildos? Are there yard dildo-gnomes? Do people play “Pin the Tail on the Dildo”? Are there dildo-shaped boats? Can I buy a dildo-dog (on a bun)? Can I buy ground-dildo at the grocery store? Does Munsinto now market dildo-eggplant-specific seeds that cost a heck of a lot? If a person walks along a beach, are their dildos just lying there to collect? Who in the world has the biggest dildo collection? (are they new or used?) Are there dildo-shaped backpacks for kids? For “Just Married” cars, do they attach dildos instead of tin cans? Are there cargo containers the shape of dildos?
When does a person stop seeking dildo-memorabilia and dildo-themed objects?
Just wonderin’ here.
💨🥒🍆🌶️🥕💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
JMG
Since it’s sort of on topic. A new video game was announced, a sequel to a game called Stellar Blade which features a female protagonist. It’s sparked controversy online due to the protagonist being designed in a promiscuous way to say the least. However the controversy has actually been people (mostly older women and younger men) accusing the game of promoting pedophilia due to the character’s appearance. For context she looks like a late teens/early twenties East Asian woman whose features are exaggerated for sex appeal.
However I think this is part of a wider pattern. I’ve noticed that there is a general trend in the online discourse (again among older women and younger men) which infantilizes younger women. They basically argue that any woman under 30 is basically still a child. This is especially the case when it comes to couples with a large age gap in their relationships (8-10 years difference or more).
What I find interesting is that large age gaps in relationships were the norm throughout most of human history. And it’s only recently that has changed. I’m wondering if the vitriolic reaction is another instance in people realizing that progress is failing and refusing to accept it? Culturally we’re heading in the opposite direction because the era of being financially secure in your late teens or early twenties is over. Therefore the men who could potentially support a wife and family are older (having had more time to earn/save money) and younger women naturally have more fertility. Because this leaves older women and younger men behind, they lash out the most vocally. But that’s just my current speculation.
Oops! I’ve been some days offline, so now I’ve missed too many comments to read. I’m going to choose carefully a few of them worth to be answered, methink, after reading them…
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Cugel # 150:
“If anyone thinks of Operation Dildo Blitz as a success, their definition of success is pretty strange”
In a very bizarre sense, O.D.B. promoters and performers may think it’s been a success, because their “mental masturbation” was complete (I can guess in their mind they imagined they raped Trump, ahem, with their dildos, so they were very pleased). Real world outside their minds is another different thing…
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Aldarion # 176:
“the Brazilian Sara Winter (a political nom de guerre). She got famous as part of Femen including Femen’s typical nudity campaigning for typical left-wing positions like legalization of abortion, then did a 180 degree turnaround and became ultra-right, joining Jair Bolsonaro’s government.”
Personally I think everybody has the right to change its mind in political views and another personal preferences; but of course, he/she has also the ethical duty, IMHO, to explain in public why he/she has changed his/her ideas, especially when he/she is a celebrity. I don’t know if that woman did that honest explanation…
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Anonymuz # 212:
“Most people don’t realize how dramatically the social mores around sex and relationships between men and women have changed in the last century or so, and how out of the ordinary they are compared to how it was for most of recorded history.”
Societies nowadays are very different from old societies a century or more ago, but I think our brains work mainly in the same way as our ancestors brains worked. It’s interesting, I’ve just read a novel written by George Sand (who was an early feminist and progressive woman, in her time context), titled “Tamaris”, and if you don’t pay attention to the folkloric things and a few outdated behaviors (like some men tendence to fight in a duel each other), you can easily understand attitudes and behaviors in human relations between straight men and women in that realistic fiction, during the XIXI century. So I think I can clarify your idea, to some extent.
I read more than a month ago, a book written by a Spanish psychologist, who’s an expert in couple therapy, giving some advices to find and keep a relationship with a likely partner. He wrote, first, you need to like yourself, to be your “first and main” own friend. It seems so evident, but I’ve seen too many people crazy to find a woman or a man, but indeed they hated themselves…so they failed to date because they didn’t trust in themselves, and people usually notices it.
Another chapter in his book was about how to find a mate online, without taking any risks, or at least, the less possible risks. I remember he also wrote that, at least in my country, near half of straight men and women, and more than the half of “homo”(gay and lesbian) people, dated using internet sites; especially the youngest people.
It’s interesting I’ve never met my partners online, because like I’ve told you before, I’ve got a mysterious appeal to some women, though I can also say I’m not a young man, so I arrived too late to online dating. I can’t mourn this lack of online dating skills until today, methink.
“I noticed that women in high places, like the former Executive Director of The Village, tend to wear the 5″ stilettoes; ”
Height projects authority at least at the current time. That alone could explain it.
I looked up the current OHSA rules and they are unusually vague, in non-bureaucratic speech “don’t wear stupid shoes.” The EU does have a rule, 60 mm, about a 2 3/8″ heel. The heel on a cowboy boot is 1.5 to 2″ to have a balance between able to walk and keeping the foot in the stirrup.
The Navy apparently does allow moderately high heels.
“b. Females.
(1) Dress Pumps will be plain black, brown or white, made of smooth or synthetic leather, with closed heels and toes. The heels will be 5/8 inch to 3 inches in height (measured from the bottom and back of the heel to where it connects to the shoe), and no wider than 1-3/4 inches at the base. The sole will be no thicker than 1/4 inch. Wedge heels are not authorized. The outsole and heel will be black for black and brown shoes. White pumps will have white heels with black or neutral outsoles.”
Oh, dear, my apologies. That was in response to comment #125
@Anselmo #226
Indeed, I did see it. I have actually been to the cave and area it was filmed. I enjoyed the story.
Northwind @ 229: “Do they ride a Dildo-mobile?” Really! You live in Dane County, the same county as Madison, and you have not seen a wiener-mobile? The Pope of hot-dogs rides around in it. You won’t get much closer to a dildo-mobile than that.
Well it goes with out saying, that the official regalia of The Orange Sign is a pussy hat. 😉
@Chuaquin #97 RE : Kaczynski
The funny thing with ‘Mail Bomb Ted’ was that being locked up for 27 years meant he ended up writing much more and attempted to clarify some of his ideas. Alas, he was working on a three part book but only ended up with the first part of it being published as by his own admission, he was getting to old to finish it so just published what he could get done.
He went on to be an equal critic both the left and the right. One regret he had was that his manifesto was focused on the left even though he felt the ideas also applied the the right. But also the more he wrote and thought through the issues the more he came to the conclusion that there was no power system that could bring about the change he wanted. That people would have to walk away from both left vs right thinking and focus thinking that involved starving of the system. At first individually and then larger scale.
The thinking was that even dictators are ultimately beholden to the people. Go to far against the peoples will and you end up running just to keep your head on. If the people are not ready for change, it won’t happen at least not long term.
I do hope that some of the more persuadable people do end up reading some of his later works because it might throw some much needed cold water on those that want to emulate him. I wrote an essay when he died all about this, it is unpublished because the website I did it for ended up not wanting to touch it. I said the biggest fear of the future is ‘The children of Ted’, those that try to emulate him without thinking about the broader context of everything. To that degree JMG said it best, the writing that people see of TK are reductionist, the broader works not so much.
Things like Frugal Friday are a great example of how real long term change can happen and it doesn’t mean playing the ‘Kaczynski gambit; with your mail chess partner. 😉
Phutatorius 235
Yeah, I was thinking of the weiner-mobile. A pecker-mobile would be some color of human flesh, and look like a pecker and not a hotdog.
Such a vehicle, however, would be a waste of material and energy. Males don’t need gimmicks.
The whole dildo-situation-tragedy was mentally-ill bizarro. Participants ought to pack up their bags, head home with heads’ hung low and re-think their lives’ trajectories, for they have already been consigned to oblivion. They need to promise their families that they will never indulge themselves in such visitations again. Their publicity stunt was deemed a dud.
Now is the time I decamp-from-dildos🤐. There is only so much one can say “a-round” a pecker. I will wait until Wednesday to find out what JMG’s next voilà is.
💨🌶️🤐💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Related to the original post.
I have said it for a long time now, if the protests against Trump or whoever is in power where to suddenly stop, that would be far more impactful than throwing rubber ‘Star Ships’ at him or having yet another boring slogan chanted relentlessly. Protest isn’t effective like it used to be, nowadays it seems like those being protested actively feed off the attention.
It has its time and place but it has been so thoroughly exhausted nowadays. If it is done every week, it becomes it is the boy who cried wolf or in this case the women who throw batons.
Northwind G. # 229:
“Do the women wear dildo pendants and earrings? Do they wear dildo buckles on their belts?”
Well, your ironic references to dildos “worship” has made me to remember I read in a history book that ancient Romans (Pagans) used to keep wooden or clay small phalluses to give them good luck, according their beliefs. And their god Priapus had a big penis, according Roman wall mural pictures which survived to be seen nowadays. So I wouldn’t say dildos are “Christian”, but maybe “Pagan”.
Renaissance Man #226 How look !
You seen in the movie various types of humanity . The girl was sapiens sapiens and the “man” was sapiens neandartalensis, but according with the findings of the archeology they were not so primitives. But probably discovery of how to make Fire, started the evolutive change wich I am refering..
Soon your money will incorporate Digital Identification and Location, i.e. it will be he DILdollar, known informally as DILdough.
Incidentally, note how money gets equated to grain or grain products.
This was brought home to me in Italy in the ’70s when we befriended some Italians. We asked them why they hadn’t attended a certain function and they rubbed finger and thumb together and said “No pasta.”
What’s pasta got to do with it? we asked. “Hey man, like when your hippies say no bread, we say no pasta.”
I think this is a bit of a stretch. Don’t get me wrong, I get where you’re coming form and their is definitely a bit of truth in there, but dildos are just plain funny. Throwing them on government property is kinda hilarious. Sometimes a penis is just a penis.
Minneapolis, Portland, LA & DC were the main areas for this operation. It could be the brunt of the relevant repressed influences are more localized in these hot spots.
Scotlyn #208
Thanks for your response to Untitled. It took me quite a while to sort of understand this and I had to loose my last corporate job to really start to appreciate this outlook. Without the distraction of the “corporate job” and a willingness to “earn much less” as a self-employed person doing “woman’s work”, I could start to appreciate what my native female powers were and are. You articulated it very well, thanks.
@Ecoprayer #220,
You will hopefully be pleased to hear that Monika had a successful home birth and so can be removed from the prayer list. Thank you to all who contributed goodwill and to those aspects of the divine who came to our aid!
I was going to make some further remarks about spirituality and how that relates to this or that in my life, but then I realized that at some point talking about your spirituality is just talking about yourself, even if it’s on a spirituality blog. Oops. Narcissist much?
Chuaquin: I think I know that word you’re talking about too, the “F” one. I just didn’t really have much to say about it; I only know that word from studying, I never encountered it organically. That general topic was fun though, thanks for that!
Between a long weekend in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and yesterday’s Magic Monday, I’m a little behind on my responses, but I plan on catching up today. Meanwhile the Seventies rock classic “Ballroom Blitz” has quietly rewritten itself somewhere down in my mind and the lyrics of the chorus now run:
“And the Karen in back said ‘Everyone attack’
And it turned into a dildo blitz,
And the girl in the corner said, ‘Boy, I wanna warn ya
It’ll turn into a dildo blitz.’
Dildo blitz! Dildo blitz!”
With that for musical accompaniment, let’s proceed.
Chris, one of the unmentionable things about all this supposedly radical Marxist protest scene is that a very large number of the people who participate are the children of wealthy people who are supported by trust funds. “Trust-fund tragedies” is one of the politest things I’ve heard them called. They don’t have to work, and they love to protest the system that supports them — of course they never actually do anything to endanger the system, which is doubtless another reason why they’re flinging dildos instead of doing something more useful with their time. Then there are the people who are ripping off the disability system — but that’s a discussion for some other time.
Cynthia, yes, and if the misspelling is sufficiently clever and funny I let it pass. You may have noticed that “frack” and “shale” are wholly acceptable swear words here. If you want to refer to yourself using auto parts terminology, similarly, I’ll probably chuckle and let it through.
Jeff, ah, you caught the romantic subtext in Ariel’s story! Good. The novel I’m writing right now is the one where she and her werewolf finally patch things up and start dating. The course of true love still has some lurches and jolts to go through after that, of course, but the last novel in the series, which is still quite a ways off but beginning to come into sight, will be their honeymoon.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Bridge, well, that’s mildly depressing. I’m not at all surprised that the women were having yet another dreary round of rage fits. They’ve been told so many times that anger equals power that it never occurs to them to consider the possibility that they’ve been lied to, and that blind rage simply makes them easier to manipulate and control — which of course it does. (You’d think more people would notice that “passion” and “passive” have the same root.) As for Trump, nah, I don’t swing that way — one of the reasons I’m comfortable around gay men is that I don’t find guys attractive and so don’t have the insecurities that beset potentially bisexual men.
Mary (if I may), I haven’t read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall yet — from your description, I’d like it a great deal. Thanks for the recommendation.
Untitled-1, so noted! One of the downsides of being a well-known writer in a subculture is that I get some of that same unwanted attention, and yeah, it can get creepy.
Northwind, I think it was Jung that pointed out that sometimes a penis is just another phallic symbol!
Anon, a lot of older women are very upset that men generally speaking aren’t interested in dating them. There are very good reasons for that lack of interest, but those reasons aren’t the kind of things the women in question are willing to think about. Thus we get jealous rage directed in all sorts of roundabout ways, including the absurd claim that being attracted to women under the age of 30 counts somehow as pedophilia. You’re right that the pendulum is headed back toward older men marrying younger women, for economic reasons among others, but a good many older women have made things worse for themselves than they otherwise would be by becoming egomaniacal rage junkies under the delusion that this somehow makes them liberated.
Chuaquin, that’s an excellent point. If you don’t love yourself, you can’t actually love anyone else — the self-hatred will inevitably leak out in unhelpful ways.
Vitranc, by which Trump will inevitably grab them. Yep.
Michael, that’s so obvious a point at this stage of the game that I can only assume that the people engaging in protest know perfectly well that their actions won’t succeed in changing anything, and this in turn suggests that below the surface, they don’t actually want anything to change.
Martin, ha! Thank you.
Mark, I think you’re underthinking it, especially in the light of the other issues I brought up.
Fulvous, that’s certainly a hypothesis worth considering.
Tyler, huzzah! Delighted to hear this.
Someone recently linked this essay to one of the dreamwidth site comment threads: https://kennycarmody.substack.com/p/after-the-vindication-the-psychological
The which contains a very taut, elegant and apt quote:
“The bitter resister is not a threat to any system. They are its trophy.”
Michael Gray 237
Nicknamed “Unabomber”
Some people will not have heard of “The-Ted” you refer to. I had to rack my brain to re-remember The-Ted’s whole name. During the years of his bombings, I felt ill at ease—constant anxiety is not good for one’s health. The-Ted was definitely psycho, and, after a certain point of his ‘dementia,’ way before he was caught, he should have been locked up and the key thrown away. If it weren’t for his brother ratting him out, it is likely The-Ted would have never been caught.
The-Ted was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
I hear your words, but doubt many will be willing to listen to writings of a deranged maniac who wantonly and willfully murdered multiple people,— people who never saw their deaths/maimings coming, and The-Ted did so without giving a cr_p. Some of those he maimed are still alive, he personally condemning them to lead lives in a wheelchair; or without a hand, arm, or leg; or with brain injury; or never got to marry and have kids, etc.
The-Ted may have had meaningful things to say (in there somewhere), but it is ”the way he said them” that was the clincher.
The-Ted really should have studied-up more on what the attributes of an effective writer are. Blowing someone up is definitely not one of those attributes. The-Ted’s “writing tone” was a tad extreme (sarcasm).
In 2023 he died, and I am glad. He deserved infinitely worse than dying of cancer.
Society banished him for a reason.
💨💣🏴☠️🤦🏼💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Notice how no one ever sees disgruntled feminestas hurling pleasure penises at ANY of Jeffery Bezo’s huuuge Flying Phalluses from the um .. Lunch Pad .. or even tossing back recycled *Amazon boxes for that matter. *in spite of what at first glanz appears to be a graphic of a yellow smile printed on those corrugated containers..
My interpretation of flinging a dildo at someone is it’s a message to “Go frack yourself.”
@ JMG “Protest know perfectly well that their actions won’t succeed in changing anything, and this in turn suggests that below the surface, they don’t actually want anything to change. ”
Of course not, they like that they have a target for their anger. If they lose this one they will find another in a few weeks.
@ Northwind #251 “I hear your words, but doubt many will be willing to listen to writings of a deranged maniac who wantonly and willfully murdered multiple people”
I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I see his works referenced somewhat positively in the more darker ends of the environmental movement I am not worried too much about nowadays but I suspect in a few decades time his works will be seen in a more positive light amongst a small but sizable population.. I’m not approving of this, I just see many latching onto extreme ideas on the slope of decline.
“Some of those he maimed are still alive, he personally condemning them to lead lives in a wheelchair; or without a hand, arm, or leg; or with brain injury; or never got to marry and have kids, etc. ”
Yep, he was an idiot at best in this regards. That it took having his manifesto published for anyone to know what the attacks were even about shows that he had absolutely no grasp on what he was doing other than random attacks of anger.
The wildest part of all that was this essay from Bill Joy. It is about how his best friend was injured in one of these attacks and yet he still actively agreed with some of the ideas. If you don’t know who Bill Joy is he was one of the earlier pioneers in Silicon Valley and I guarantee you we are using some of his technology to communicate right now. Well worth a read at some point.
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
“The-Ted really should have studied-up more on what the attributes of an effective writer are. Blowing someone up is definitely not one of those attributes. The-Ted’s “writing tone” was a tad extreme (sarcasm).”
He had some reasonable ideas in writing but yes, he was insane to think his techniques were a path to anywhere. I have said it before, he killed and maimed for his own gain, actively pushed back any possible discussion of those ideas and future movement for change by decades. He definitely had the chops to get his works published and wouldn’t have held back any progress but instead just decided to build infamy using explosives rather than positive reputation.
It is a deeper part of people, most people want external recognition. The easy way to get that a form of recognition is to cause a lot of pain. The hard way involves good deeds. The easy path will tarnish your name, the hard part will last a lot longer.
Late to comment, but
Yes, plenty of men do like high heels and think they are sexy, this is the same subset of men who think body hair on women is gross and while they might say they dont like makeup, they do like makeup on women. Maybe they are just aculturated by media and movies and such to think they should find such stereotypes attractive.
There is also a subset of men who want a woman to be “fit” by which they usually mean almost anerexicly skinny and/or who like to go to the gym and do hiking or athletic things of various types. So, these women are not expected to wear makeup/heels by this subset of men.
Luckily, there is also a subset of men who actually see women as people with various individual ways of being and are attracted to ..something they cant define that is that woman.
#253: Definitely, Martin. It’s also an attack on the target’s masculinity/manhood, because straight men aren’t known for using dildos, they’re something for girls and gays.
Martin Back #242 Then many people will prefer a different money. Like hapened in Soviet Unión people prefered dollars.
There is an old economic law ( Green law) wich states that when there are two coins with the same oficial valué but with different proportions of gold or silver , people will retain those moneys with more high proportions of gold or silver
@JMG #249 re: Loving Yourself
If I may, besides the Order of Spiritual Alchemy work, do you have any thoughts on “loving yourself?” I know it’s a bit late in the cycle to be posting a question, but I’ve been working with affirmations, color breathing, meditations, and other techniques, and I’m not sure I really know how to “love myself,” even though meditation and divination suggest it’s something I ought to work on. Any advice on how to actually do this would be most welcome.
Cheers,
Jeff
Oops! I’m sorry John. Maybe I’m writing my comment too late in current JMG post, but I need to answer some people here…
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Michael G. # 237:
thank you for your comment about last Mr. K, writings from prison. There are some spanish translations here from his later ideas, under the mainstream radar, published by this or that Anarchist guys. It’s interesting Mr. K. opinion about levaing the usual political traps (named left and right wing) to go beyond the system, though speaking about it is easier than to do it. Indeed, it’s an anarchist-like idea, so Mr. K, wasn’t a Fascist.
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Cynthia # 248:
You’re welcome…
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JMG # 249:
“If you don’t love yourself, you can’t actually love anyone else — the self-hatred will inevitably leak out in unhelpful ways.”
You’re welcome…It seems very evident, but not for too many people. Yes, self-hatred prevents them to love anybody, and even worse, they can become in little or big tyrants against the others.
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Northwind G. # 251:
Have you ever seen/read about the “ad hominem” fallacy? I’m afraid you’ve made one “dirty” reasoning against Mr. K. Of course, I think his criminal acts were a not clever mistake, but it seems you’ve got too much hostility against him because he was quite popular for a while within Anarchists (oh…), and of course, you don’t like everybody who disagrees with your usual right wing biases…His acts don’t invalidate his thinking, methink, especially when you read him with a healthy criticism.
JMG: Perfect! “Crankcase”, then. 🙂
Tyler,
That’s wonderful news! Congratulations. If you don’t mind, I’ll add a prayer of thanks to the list.
JMG: Also, maybe if I stick around for a while I’ll have a good enough idea what makes you laugh to risk losing a whole comment to make that happen. Currently I don’t, so the incentive is to play it safe about that. Although I sure do like to make people laugh if I can.
@ Martin Back #242
Lol! 😉